Global warming updates: Reconductoring the grid; Financial fizzle

A NYT article reports about the need to update the electrical grid (not paywalled off for 30 days):

A rarely used technique to upgrade old power lines could play a big role in fixing one of the largest obstacles facing clean energy, two reports found.

Replacing existing power lines with cables made from state-of-the-art materials could roughly double the capacity of the electric grid in many parts of the country, making room for much more wind and solar power.

This technique, known as “advanced reconductoring,” is widely used in other countries. But many U.S. utilities have been slow to embrace it because of their unfamiliarity with the technology as well as regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles, researchers found.

“We were pretty astonished by how big of an increase in capacity you can get by reconductoring,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to one of the reports released Tuesday. Working with GridLab, a consulting firm, researchers from Berkeley looked at what would happen if advanced reconductoring were broadly adopted. 

Today, most power lines consist of steel cores surrounded by strands of aluminum, a design that’s been around for a century. In the 2000s, several companies developed cables that used smaller, lighter cores such as carbon fiber and that could hold more aluminum. These advanced cables can carry up to twice as much current as older models.

Experts broadly agree that the sluggish build-out of the electric grid is the Achilles’ heel of the transition to cleaner energy. The Energy Department estimates that the nation’s network of transmission lines may need to expand by two-thirds or more by 2035 to meet President Biden’s goals to power the country with clean energy.

But building transmission lines has become a brutal slog, and it can take a decade or more for developers to site a new line through multiple counties, receive permission from a patchwork of different agencies and address lawsuits about spoiled views or damage to ecosystems. Last year, the United States added just 251 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, a number that has been declining for a decade.  

Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have been widely deploying advanced conductors in order to integrate more wind and solar power, said Emilia Chojkiewicz, one of the authors of the Berkeley report.

“We talked with the transmission system planners over there and they all said this is a no-brainer,” Ms. Chojkiewicz said. “It’s often difficult to get new rights of way for lines, and reconductoring is much faster.”

One can rationally consider this to be (1) another major failure of American governments to act, and (2) how the private sector does things. We leave most everything to brass knuckles capitalist markets running wild, free, butt naked and unaccountable. Meanwhile, neutered governments dither, blither and slither their way under rocks for protection from accountability. Everyone with power is asleep at the switch.

Another NYT article reports about how banks are not doing much to deal with global warming despite pledges to do something in 2021 (not paywalled):

Banks Made Big Climate Promises. A New Study Doubts They Work.

Using European Central Bank lending data, researchers said there was not evidence that voluntary commitments were effective in reducing emissions.

Hundreds of banks, insurers and asset managers vowed to plow $130 trillion in capital into reducing carbon emissions and financing the energy transition as they introduced the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. But a recent study, published by the European Central Bank, disputed the effectiveness of those promises.

“Our results cast doubt on the efficacy of voluntary climate commitments for reducing financed emissions, whether through divestment or engagement,” wrote economists from the central bank, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia Business School who analyzed lending by European banks that had signed on to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, the banking group of the Glasgow initiative.

The researchers found that since 2018 the banks had reduced lending 20 percent to sectors they had targeted in their climate goals, such as oil and gas and transport. That seems like progress, but the researchers argued it was not sufficient because the decline was the same for banks that had not made the same commitment.

“It’s not OK for the net-zero bank to act exactly like the non-net-zero bank, because we need that to scale up financing,” said Parinitha Sastry, an assistant professor of finance at Columbia Business School and one of the paper’s authors. “We want there to be a behavioral change.”

Expectations for banks from policymakers and climate activists are high. Every year trillions of dollars need to be invested in clean energy if the world is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Most of that cost will need to be financed privately, and banks are the key facilitators in those deals.

Many banks clamored to make net-zero pledges around the summit in Glasgow, known as COP26. But as pressure builds to lower emissions, climate activists are concerned about waning commitments from banks because of mounting political pressure, demand for cheap energy and shifting geopolitical alliances.  

GLS, a German bank, pulled out as a founding member of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance last year after a report by European nonprofit groups said the largest banks in the alliance had funneled $270 billion into fossil fuel expansions since they joined.

“What sense does it make to be in an alliance like that?” said Antje Tönnis, a spokeswoman for GLS. “Plus, it is a fair bit of work. Reporting is involved but doesn’t have any consequences.”

Climate science deniers deny the science