Oregon Needs Battery Storage Now. Climate Costs Are Too Great

By Casey Bage, Law and Policy Clerk

By Alyson McPhee

The writing is on the wall. Climate change is here, now, and the extreme weather events this past year are only a sampling of what is undoubtedly going to get worse. The Oregon wildfires and smoke events of Aug.-Sept. 2020 destroyed towns and choked out our air, leading to evacuations and heavy reliance on indoor air filters. The 2020 fire season was the most expensive in Oregon’s history costing $514 million in firefighting efforts as well as billions of dollars in healthcare costs for Oregon. The winter ice storm of Feb. 2021 cut power to over 330,000 Oregonians leaving residents without heat during the freeze. The record breaking Oregon heatwave this last June 2021 left over 6,000 PGE customers without power to cool themselves and at least 94 Oregonians dead from the heat. These events will increase with frequency and intensity. We need swift action to stave off the worst changes to come and to adapt our communities for a more resilient future.  

One of the key pivots Oregon must make quickly is toward full electrification of our society with renewable energy, and batteries are key to that shift. Some will say, batteries are too expensive to roll out broadly and immediately. I’m of the opinion that those people blacked out during this historic last decade of climate-change disasters. The cost of delay is catastrophic and far beyond the costs of moving fast to install batteries. Half measures involving burning more fossil fuels, natural gas in particular, only speed us toward more firestorms, mega-droughts, massive ice-storm power outages, and furnace-like heatwaves.

The question is where do we install the batteries within our communities to be as cost-effective as possible, equitable to all Oregonians, and address issues on both the supply and demand side of the equation. Right now, we see a few options. One that an Oregonian home-owner could adopt is an in-home battery pack like the Tesla Powerwall. Battery packs like this provide you with power to heat and cool your home when the next ice storm or heatwave creates a power outage. But these batteries don’t address the large-scale storage of industrial-size wind and solar electricity, which is needed in order to electrify all of Oregon. Homes adopting battery storage and solar are wonderful and somewhat of a status symbol, but leave large swathes of low-income communities behind. Placing energy storage on the other side of the chain in conjunction with utility scale wind and solar farms has the opposite set of benefits. We can see these projects in Oregon already like PGE's Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility and the Swan Lake Energy Storage Project near Klamath Falls. These projects will help us eliminate natural gas-fired power plants and fight against climate change by providing on-demand power for peak power demands. But this clean electricity still travels through our grid, just like any industrial electricity source, which means our homes and businesses are still without power when the next ice storm or heatwave comes.

There is potentially a third solution: meet in the middle. This concept is being discussed among many smart people including Saul Griffith with Rewiring America. Placing batteries in substations or other sites across Oregon could be the answer. We would effectively have mini-grids throughout Oregon, so a downed powerline wouldn’t necessarily lead to a power outage for neighborhoods thanks to a community battery back-up. On top of that, those batteries could be regularly used to supply peak power demands when everyone turns on their air conditioners at the same time. The heroic effort of utility linesmen during the past ice storm, restoring power for hundreds of thousands of Oregonians, affirms also that our electric utilities and their logistics are a reliable location for regular monitoring and maintenance of these battery stations. This placement also provides equity benefits, since you no longer need an in-home battery to keep the lights on and stay warm during an ice storm.

There’s no doubt that this battery transformation will be expensive, but nowhere close to the costs we will experience if we abstain from battery adoption. By placing the batteries within our electricity infrastructure, we open up a combination of funding sources, including state, county, city, and utility funding, to subsidize investments and ensure resiliency for all Oregonians, while combating climate catastrophe. 

The blogs posted on Charged Debate reflect the writers' opinions in their individual capacities, and do not necessarily reflect the perspective of the Green Energy Institute, Lewis & Clark Law School, Lewis & Clark College, or the writers’ past, present or future employers or other associations. Any information in any blog on Charged Debate is meant purely for general educational purposes, does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon for any purpose. No representations or warranties, express or implied, are made with respect to any content in any blog posted on Charged Debate.

NFTs: Creating Artificial Value at a Very Real Cost

By Sedi Caine, Law and Policy Clerk

What are NFTs?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a relatively new type of collectible on the market, one that’s entirely digital. They can be anything from drawings to music and even tweets, but the current craze centers around the sale of digital art. The idea of an NFT is to create a unique identifier for digital art that creates scarcity and value in the original product. Even if others have access to copies of the digital file, only one person owns “the original.”

NFTs are primarily minted on the Ethereum blockchain (you may be more familiar with “Bitcoin,” which uses a similar process). Blockchains are database systems which allow for secure transactions over the internet through a very long and complex series of transactions. A wide network of computers is constantly at work, checking to make sure the chain stays the same and that only authorized additions occur. These transactions are used to verify that the digital item in question is the true, unique work. Think of it as a non-transferable “sticky note,” or a “certificate of authenticity” attached to a digital item which marks it as the “one true” version.

Take, for example, the popular internet meme, Nyancat. Follow that link and you’ll find yourself at a website where you can watch a continuous GIF of Nyancat as he runs across the night sky. The website, maintained by the owner of the meme, is completely legal and accessible by anyone. But a GIF of Nyancat sold in early 2021 for $660,000. So why can we still view it? Selling an NFT only gives the owner exclusive right to the sticky note, not the use of the digital piece. It’s a market centered around the inherent value of owning an original piece, for whatever that’s worth ($69 million for this collection, apparently).

The Environmental Impact of NFTs

The concern around the NFT market is the large and detrimental environmental impact associated with the process of creating, buying, and selling NFTs. This impact is essentially undisputed, with even Ethereum itself acknowledging the system is bad for the environment. The Ethereum blockchain uses an intentionally inefficient process called, Proof of Work, to verify transactions occurring within the network. The proof-of-work protocol requires “miners” (computers running software) to go through an intense race of trial and error to generate a new block to add to a chain. The block contains a record of these transactions, and only one block will be considered a canonical edition to the chain. The process is entirely random which makes the system very secure and ensures the legitimacy of transactions taking place within it. The lucky owner of the machine that generates the canonical block is due to make a hefty profit, while everyone else who competed gets nothing despite the energy consumption of their efforts.

Because the payoff functions this way, the process encourages people to utilize as many computers as possible when mining. Think of it like playing the lottery. Every lottery ticket purchased has the same statistical chance of winning, but a person with 1,000 tickets is more likely to be a winner than a person with one. The way the system functions encourages people to increase their activity within the system, which in turn increases the overall carbon footprint by Ethereum. Currently, a single Ethereum transaction is estimated to use the same amount of energy consumed by an average US household over 4.19 days. Multiply this by the thousands of transactions that occur daily and the energy consumption becomes a lot more worrisome.

NFTs come into the picture because their value is connected to the authenticity assured by use of the Ethereum blockchain. It is not actually the NFT itself which causes the emissions, but the transactions and verification occurring through the system. However, as the NFT market grows, the incentive for additional miners grows as well, and this is where the problem lies. A lucrative market will encourage new entrants, and with record-breaking heatwaves across the Pacific Northwest and an unprecedented snow storm in the South last February, we’re not in a position to encourage such energy-intensive, climate-altering endeavors.

What Next for NFTs?

Despite the negative impacts of NFTs, there is an appeal to the market, particularly for artists. Art has an inherent value and artists deserve to be compensated for their work. NFTs create a new model of ownership for artists which can greatly benefit them in terms of profit. Unfortunately, society is not prepared to handle the costly environmental impacts of the crypto-currency market, and encouraging the production and sale of NFTs will only make the issue worse.

There are technical difficulties to addressing this problem politically. On the one hand, a ban on mining or a tax on the activity may help local governments meet their climate initiatives and encourage more efficient technologies. At the same time, this may encourage miners to outsource their activities, giving foreign markets an advantage over domestic market growth while continuing to harm the environment.

There may be a time when things like Bitcoin, NFTs, and other crypto-based items can be freely exchanged with little to no environmental impact, but we’re not there yet. At a time when we are trying so hard to combat climate change and keep our planet hospitable, engaging in activities with such a large carbon footprint is not in our best interest. Ethereum and Bitcoin have proposed switching to a different mechanism or using renewables to reduce their impact, but as long as NFTs and crypto-currencies continue to operate at their current energy consumption levels and carbon emissions, things aren’t looking great for our climate initiatives. Continuing to produce and encourage the production and sale of NFTs, with the current system in place, is simply unethical and harmful to us and the planet.

The blogs posted on Charged Debate reflect the writers' opinions in their individual capacities, and do not necessarily reflect the perspective of the Green Energy Institute, Lewis & Clark Law School, Lewis & Clark College, or the writers’ past, present or future employers or other associations. Any information in any blog on Charged Debate is meant purely for general educational purposes, does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon for any purpose. No representations or warranties, express or implied, are made with respect to any content in any blog posted on Charged Debate.

 

Solar Canals

By Casey Bage, Law and Policy Clerk

 Photograph by Triddle, 2005

Solar canals address multiple problems at once. The impacts of climate change are so far-reaching and so grave that any multifaceted solution able to combat two or three problems at once cannot be overlooked if we want to live in a world of abundance. The realization of plentiful clean drinking water, clean air, and clean reliable electricity requires big ideas and a willingness of siloed entities to look outside their own specified expertise. Water agencies across the west have just such an opportunity. An article written by Staff Writer Sammy Roth of the Los Angeles Times recently highlighted the option of covering open-air water canals with photovoltaic solar panels. The article was inspired by a 2021 study released by the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at University of California Merced in collaboration with the Environmental Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz that solar installs over aqueduct canals have a 20-50% higher net present value than ground mounted solar farms.

We do not have the amount of water we need and our crisis will only worsen if we do nothing. California is once again experiencing extreme drought, along with the rest of the entire Western United States.  Lake Mead, providing water for over 24 million people, is at its lowest levels ever. Placing solar panels over open-air canals combats future clean water shortages in multiple ways according to the UC Merced study and I tend to agree with their assessments. 

The first conclusion of the study is that covering open-air canals with a roof of solar panels reduces evaporation, saving massive amounts of water as it makes its journey to thirsty rural and urban communities alike. The projects could also reduce aquatic weed growth in canals and, most importantly, add additional renewable energy projects to aid us in the ultimate goal of combating climate change and reining in mega-droughts. That’s three separate benefits for increasing abundant clean water.

On top of water savings, the placement of solar over water creates multifaceted victories for solar energy as well. Solar panels work more efficiently in a cooler environment, like a water-cooled canal, leading to more kilowatts of electricity generated from each panel. On top of that, many states are finding push-back against solar farm development, including the desire to preserve natural spaces and arable farmland producing our food.  Placing panels on already developed land assuages those concerns as well. Interestingly, the study finds that solar installed over canals could have a 20% - 50% greater net present value than standard ground mounted solar farms, due to the multi-pronged list of water and energy benefits, including the opportunity for California farmers to utilize that solar power instead of polluting diesel generators to pump water to their farms.

Now for the rub. Development costs money. Complex stuff, right? California’s Department of Water Resources gets their electricity from hydro-electric dams at very cheap prices. But, since water levels continue to shrink, the dams will most likely have less water to churn out that cheap power. On top of that, the Department of Water Resources has a new goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 75% below 1990 levels by 2030 and 100% by 2040. Solar-panel-covered canals are a major opportunity for the department, considering it is the State’s single largest electricity user. Water experts in the agency have expressed challenges that need to be addressed in order for this concept to take flight, namely: the need for new transmission lines from the aqueducts, accessing the canals to conduct maintenance, and paying for the investment. While some might view this list of difficulties as a reason to kill this idea, I view it as the project already getting off the ground especially with Roth reporting that  department head Karla Nemeth is “‘all ears” and ‘glad this is getting another look.’” The marketing firm that inspired the UC Merced study is named Citizen Group and has now started the company called Solar AquaGrid LLC. They are interested in developing pilot projects with “smaller water agencies that operate their own canals.” 

Having been born and raised in California and made my adult home in Oregon, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this as a great opportunity for Oregonians as well. Central Oregon could be a ripe testing ground for this concept. The Central Oregon Irrigation District alone has 700 miles of canals, much of which is open air including the two major canals (Central Oregon Canal and Pilot Butte Canal). Oregonians, including Deschutes County commissioners, are acknowledging that water conservation efforts are critically needed as extreme drought take hold.

The blogs posted on Charged Debate reflect the writers' opinions in their individual capacities, and do not necessarily reflect the perspective of the Green Energy Institute, Lewis & Clark Law School, Lewis & Clark College, or the writers’ past, present or future employers or other associations. Any information in any blog on Charged Debate is meant purely for general educational purposes, does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon for any purpose. No representations or warranties, express or implied, are made with respect to any content in any blog posted on Charged Debate.