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CLIMATE: Norfolk, Virginia, works through the design stage of a hotly debated $400 million project to reimagine a poor, majority Black community that includes a linear “Blue Greenway” to capture stormwater and reduce flooding that regularly saturates the neighborhood. (Energy News Network)
ALSO: Documents reveal Alabama officials have long been aware of Black residents’ flooding concerns, but have used restrictive land covenants to block their ability to file flooding-related claims. (Inside Climate News)
PIPELINES:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama begin voting whether to join the United Auto Workers, just weeks after a Tennessee Volkswagen plant opted to unionize. (AL.com)
STORAGE: Texas’ rapidly growing battery sector has already bailed out the state power grid once this year, injecting 2 GW of power on a warm April night as a large number of gas and coal plants were offline for maintenance. (Canary Media)
SOLAR:
WIND:
OIL & GAS: Workers building a $21 billion liquified natural gas plant in Louisiana are beset by dangerous, silica-laden dust blown around at the construction site. (Sierra)
GRID: A Georgia water group releases a report showing how state economic incentives have resulted in a rash of new data centers that strain the power grid and use large amounts of water for cooling. (Georgia Recorder)
EMISSIONS:
NORFOLK, Va. — Rainstorms at Tidewater Gardens public housing complex were anxiety-inducing enough. That dread among parents was only amplified when the skies opened up on schooldays.
Fast-pooling water would convert the low-lying community along the Elizabeth River floodplain into a soupy mess that trapped cars and made flippers a more fitting footwear choice than rubber boots.
“If it rained for just 10 minutes straight, it was flooded and you were stuck,” said Zenobia Wilson, a mother of three and resident of the public housing complex for 12 years. “We had to carry our children on our backs to get them to and from school.
“It was beyond boots because the water was up to our knees, every time.”
Norfolk is on the cusp of acting to tame the torrents that regularly saturated a marginalized neighborhood as climate change-induced rainfall intensifies.
Their proposed remedy is a massive endeavor to reshape both land use and water flow as the city of 233,000 plugs away at its ambitious St. Paul’s Transformation Project.
What’s called the Blue Greenway is the environmental centerpiece of the first phase of a hotly debated, $400 million undertaking to reinvent the housing, layout and vibe of a poor, majority Black community along the city’s neglected east-side waterfront.
Ideally, the linear park still in the design stage will blend the practical with the pretty to fabricate a linear 23-acre resource to capture storm water runoff, welcome back a slice of the natural world and appeal to picnickers and outdoor exercisers deprived of green spaces for decades.
Construction likely won’t begin until next spring, but landscape architect Tim Stromberg has been huddling with a team of engineers, environmental scientists, architects and other specialists for several years. They’re striving to turn a liability — stormwater runoff — into an asset.
“This area is a park desert,” said the 45-year-old principal with Norfolk-based Stromberg/Garrigan & Associates. “We see this as a health and wellness project.”
Most of the Blue Greenway will flow through the broad footprint of what was Tidewater Gardens, built in the early 1950s atop a tidal creek and a radiating network of wetlands.
The last of the red brick, barracks style apartments — where residents tangled regularly with leaks and mold infestations — was demolished in August 2023. The nearby Tidewater Park Elementary School, where parents dropped off their children, is shuttered and set to be torn down.
Just feet from the school, along bustling East Brambleton Avenue, crews will eventually “daylight” Newton’s Creek, constricted to an underground culvert for decades. That liquid spine of the Blue Greenway will wind its way south to the center of a pillar of east Norfolk’s Black community, the Basilica of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception.
Roughly three acres of newly constructed wetlands and the primary water channel — about the length of four football fields and up to 130 feet wide — will be the workhorses of the engineered project. They will play a gigantic role in filtering pollutants from absorbed runoff before it empties into the Elizabeth River and then the Chesapeake Bay.
Its price tag of up to $60 million will be covered with city dollars and federal grants.
Basically, it will resemble an elongated bathtub that is 8 to 9 feet deep. Its wide, encircling rim is designed as a necklace of green space dotted with amenities.
Norfolk, part of Virginia’s expansive Tidewater region, is trying to address warming of the planet on multiple fronts because of the well-documented double-whammy effect of climate change.
Not only are deluges more intense, but sea levels are rising faster here than anywhere else on the East Coast. The latter is exacerbated by a phenomenon called subsidence. Simply put, coastal lands are sinking because communities are withdrawing — and not replenishing — enormous quantities of groundwater.
On a separate but complementary climate front, the city is in the midst of advancing a gargantuan floodwall endeavor made up of tide gates, levees, pump stations and natural features such as oyster reefs and native vegetation along the shoreline. The federal government is covering 65% of the $2.6 billion project specifically designed to protect Norfolk from catastrophic storms. State and local funds are supposed to cover the remainder.
Preventing flooding is just one of the Greenway’s climate and health benefits. It also can clean the air and mitigate the urban heat island effect, which is especially harsh in congested cities where concentrations of asphalt and concrete raise temperatures to dangerous highs.
“Climate change is about adaptation,” Stromberg said about incorporating the Blue Greenway into a reimagined neighborhood. “That made us think about the scenarios of today and of the future.”
Once it’s built, “maintaining this will require five or six city departments,” Stromberg said. “This could serve as a model for how to repurpose a piece of land for a higher and better use.”
Landscape architects, he explained, tie the built and urban environments to natural systems.
“Creating something like this is a landscape architect’s dream,” Stromberg said about SGA’s largest project to date. “The reward when it’s built will be to see people using the space.”
After all, the handprints of former Tidewater Gardens residents are all over the Greenway’s blueprints.
While Stromberg’s team is handling the park’s technical infrastructure elements, they relied on input about amenities from Tidewater Gardens residents who called the 618-unit complex home until they were relocated two years ago.
“Listening is so crucial,” Stromberg said, about the joint brainstorming sessions that began in 2019. “We wanted to make sure we were extremely sensitive to the community’s needs.”
Preserving and protecting the canopy of thirsty and mature oaks, magnolias and other trees that once shaded the apartments was paramount for residents. They also wanted pavilions added for reunions, parties and cookouts.
Yet another request centered on access to walking paths, fitness equipment, a splash park, playgrounds, basketball courts, and lessons about birds, butterflies and native plants.
“These are simple requests and we want to honor them,” Stromberg said. “This is about giving people access to something they cherish.”
Greenway plans call for planting at least 300 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 200,000 grasses and flowers.
Balancing man-made and natural systems serves as a welcome mat for inclusivity, said Mike Fox, Stromberg’s colleague.
“With the wetlands come the butterflies and frogs and crickets,” Fox said. “That whole experience, being part of nature is what’s therapeutic and adds to visitors’ serenity.”
Stromberg is counting on the unique oasis to be a neighborhood magnet. He noted that it can be extended north of East Brambleton Avenue, near the former elementary school.
That expansion idea remains in the mix as Norfolk plans to eventually raze and reinvent two other nearby public housing complexes shortchanged on parks — Young Terrace and Calvert Square — in the next phases of the St. Paul’s transformation.
Also, the Blue Greenway will be at the centerpiece of a related city scheme to link the St. Paul’s neighborhood to the previously inaccessible Elizabeth River Trail, the expansive downtown waterfront and Norfolk’s more affluent west side.
For 60-plus years, the community has been isolated by loud, pedestrian-unfriendly, heavily trafficked roads and a tangle of on- and off-ramps, cloverleaf interchanges and overpasses feeding Interstate 264.
City officials are studying how to tackle a large-scale roadway makeover courtesy of a federal grant designed to heal past injustices inflicted on Black communities nationwide.
Tensions have festered about who will actually benefit from such wholesale changes.
For instance, activists with the New Virginia Majority accused the city of “saving the trees, not the people” with its Blue Greenway project. In tandem, they claim wealthier newcomers, not displaced former residents, will eventually become the majority in mixed-use housing being built near the site of Tidewater Gardens. To help prevent flooding, the new housing is being built on ground that has been elevated with at least seven feet of soil.
Stromberg is tuned in to how complicated and difficult these transitions are for cities. As the planet warms, they’re an even trickier balancing act for leaders trying to meet the needs of residents while also accounting for racist policies of the past.
“The jury is still out on what the success rate will be for the return of former Tidewater Gardens’ residents,” he said, adding he’s hoping the Blue Greenway will serve as a lure.
“As some start to move back, I can see a second wave of former residents reconnecting to their neighborhood,” he said. “The key is that they have a sense of ownership.”
Susan Perry, director of the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development since 2021, has focused on resilience and alleviating poverty in her decade-plus career with local government.
Norfolk would have been remiss with this redevelopment project, she said, if it had stopped at simply replacing deteriorating housing and re-establishing a street grid to tether the neighborhood to downtown amenities.
The impact of soaring emissions of heat-trapping gases couldn’t be ignored.
“What we always say is that the Blue Greenway is our resilience strategy writ large,” Perry said. “It really will be a crown jewel of the neighborhood.”
This story was reported via participation in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 National Fellowship. The Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Journalism provided training, mentoring and funding.
OIL & GAS: Oil and gas producers are installing “enclosed combustors” that hide flaring of unwanted natural gas, making it harder for scientists to detect greenhouse gas emissions and hold major emitters accountable. (Guardian)
ALSO:
COAL: Experts predict the U.S. EPA’s new power plant emissions rules will further drive coal power’s rapid decline, and maybe even kill the industry completely. (Guardian)
CLEAN ENERGY:
GRID:
SOLAR: A solar material manufacturing facility in Washington state reopens after sitting idle since 2019, sparking hopes of establishing a complete domestic photovoltaic panel supply chain. (New York Times)
CLIMATE: A federal appeals court rejects a lawsuit filed by young Oregon climate advocates arguing the government’s fossil fuel-friendly policies violate their constitutional rights. (Associated Press)
BIOFUELS: New Treasury Department rules governing sustainable aviation fuel tax credits don’t go far enough to incentivize newer, cleaner types of fuel, some agriculture and environmental advocates say. (E&E News)
CLIMATE: A federal appeals court rejects a lawsuit filed by young Oregon climate advocates arguing the government’s fossil fuel-friendly policies violate their constitutional rights. (Associated Press)
ALSO: Montana regulators extend the public input period on a proposal to require utility commissioners to consider greenhouse gas emissions’ environmental and health impacts in decisions. (Daily Montanan)
OIL & GAS:
RESEARCH: Stanford University plans to investigate its long-running energy program funded by fossil fuel companies after its impartiality is questioned. (E&E News, subscription)
UTILITIES: Oregon utilities step up wildfire hazard mitigation efforts as forecasters predict an unusually hot and dry summer in the Northwest. (KGW)
COAL: Federal lawmakers from Montana push back against new U.S. EPA regulations on coal plant pollution, saying they will harm the state’s fossil fuel industry. (Daily Montanan)
CLEAN ENERGY: The Biden administration awards $43 million to 11 projects in Western states to expand rural and tribal communities’ access to small-scale clean energy. (news release)
SOLAR:
HYDROGEN: A U.S. military base in Hawaii plans to integrate hydrogen production, storage and utilization technology into an existing solar-powered microgrid. (H2 View)
GRID: Officials say attacks on Western power grid infrastructure by white supremacists and other extremists is on the rise. (High Country News)
MINING: The U.S. Senate and House pass legislation that would ban low-enriched uranium imports from Russia and boost efforts to revive idled mines in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. (World Nuclear News)
UTILITIES: PacifiCorp’s parent company plans to sell off some assets if states do not limit utilities’ wildfire-related liabilities, saying it will not “throw good money after bad” as it faces a flurry of blaze-related lawsuits. (E&E News)
ALSO:
OIL & GAS:
STORAGE: Observers expect the nation’s grid-scale battery storage capacity to double this year, with California, Arizona and Texas seeing the largest growth. (New York Times)
SOLAR: The SunPower solar company lays off another 71 workers at one of its southern California facilities. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
WIND: The federal Bureau of Land Management nears a decision on a proposed wind facility in southern Idaho that would be visible from a World War II-era incarceration camp and national historic site. (E&E News, subscription)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The nation’s first solar-powered electric big-rig charging depot opens in southern California. (KBAK)
GRID: Unusually strong winds batter utility equipment in Colorado, leaving at least 10,000 customers without power. (CPR)
TRANSPORTATION:
COMMENTARY:
OIL & GAS: The U.S. EPA announces new methane reporting rules for oil and gas facilities, which studies show have long underreported emissions. (news release; E&E News, subscription)
ALSO:
NUCLEAR: The U.S. Senate passes a bill to ban imports of Russian uranium, unlocking $2.7 billion in federal funding for domestic nuclear fuel production. (Utility Dive)
GRID:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
SOLAR:
UTILITIES: PacifiCorp’s parent company plans to sell off some assets if states do not limit utilities’ wildfire-related liabilities, saying it will not “throw good money after bad” as it faces a flurry of fire-related lawsuits. (E&E News)
CLEAN ENERGY: Illinois lawmakers are working on a clean energy and transit bill package that could be a follow up to a 2021 climate law and target gas-sector emissions, battery storage and electric fleet vehicles. (Capitol News Illinois)
EFFICIENCY: Experienced contractors suggest important questions to ask when hiring someone to install electric appliances and make other efficient home improvements. (Washington Post)
Environmental advocates say new rules announced Thursday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should close a loophole that has helped power plant operators skirt responsibility for toxic coal ash pollution at scores of sites nationwide.
Two rules — part of a suite of new regulations on fossil fuel power plants that also include the first-ever carbon emissions limits — may offer the broadest tools yet for forcing cleanup of hundreds of ponds, landfills, and impoundments known to be holding coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal.
Coal ash has been piling up for more than a century wherever coal has been burned as an energy source. Some has wound up in landfills. Some has been repurposed as construction fill. Some still sits in unlined ponds or piles next to power plants. It was mostly unregulated until recent years as its danger to public health became better known.
The initial attempts to regulate coal ash were incomplete. The U.S. EPA’s 2015 coal ash rules covered only active repositories — exempting about half of all known dump sites including landfills, ponds closed before 2015, and sites where ash was scattered or dumped. Advocates have fought to expand the rules ever since.
The new, finalized Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) rule essentially prohibits any pollution of groundwater or water bodies by coal plant sites, regardless of the exact source.
Meanwhile the new Effluent Limitation Guidelines (ELGs) address wastewater released from power plants, including water used to clean bottom ash out of boilers. The effluent rules, proposed last spring, represent the first-ever regulations on coal plant wastewater, which includes contaminated water that has seeped through coal ash, and water drained from coal ash impoundments in preparation for closing.
Companies have been able to avoid cleaning up even regulated coal ash ponds that were leaking, by blaming groundwater contamination on nearby unregulated coal ash sources, environmental attorneys have long argued.
“So there’s a huge loophole that we will hopefully be closing,” said Environmental Integrity Project senior attorney Abel Russ during one of two online press conferences held by environmental attorneys and advocates before the rules’ release. “What EPA proposed would require basically sitewide corrective action and cleanup, whatever the source is, and owners will no longer be able to point to an unregulated unit and avoid a cleanup. This will also lead to clean up plans that are actually going to do what they’re supposed to do, which is restore groundwater quality.”
“We’ll finally eliminate the shell game of ‘Oh contamination came from that pile, not this pile,’” added Frank Holleman, coordinator of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s regional coal ash initiative. “The utilities will finally step up to the plate and be law-abiding citizens, and clean up this historic mess that the utilities are well capable of cleaning up and which should have been cleaned up years and years ago.”
The new rule will also for the first time regulate “historic” coal ash that has been scattered and dumped around coal plant sites and even in surrounding communities, often without records even being kept.
“It may be underlying buildings, it may be underlying playgrounds, it’s basically everywhere,” said Sierra Club staff attorney Megan Wachspress. “The first step under the rule is for coal plant operators to actually figure out and delineate where this stuff is. When we talk about implementation, that’s making sure all of this dumped ash actually becomes accounted for.”
Earthjustice senior attorney Lisa Evans praised the new rules, but noted that change depends on meaningful enforcement. Indeed, the 2015 federal rules were barely enforced until 2022, when the Biden administration’s EPA began issuing denials of cleanup extension requests and violation notices to coal ash site operators.
Attorneys said the coal ash and ELG rules work in tandem, with the coal ash rules covering groundwater near coal ash impoundments, and the ELG rules addressing surface water near power plants — both coal and new gas plants.
“The two rules are necessary and complementary to each other and point in the same direction, which is that they are contaminating groundwater, they’re contaminating the surface waters that run alongside them,” said Earthjustice attorney Thom Cmar. “Both standards work in complementary ways to set a high bar that points toward cleanup and environmental protection to make sure these dangerous sites are fully cleaned up.”
Holleman said that for decades, the powerful coal industry has avoided taking seemingly obvious precautionary measures.
“If you have solid waste with toxic substances in it, you can’t dump it in an unlined pit below the water table sitting next to a river, you’ve got to put it in a modern landfill,” said Holleman. “That’s true even with kitchen garbage in America. And secondly, if you discharge water containing toxic substances like arsenic, mercury, you’ve got to treat it before you discharge it in the river. That is the sum total, in many ways, of these two rules. That is not cutting edge. That’s just the basic, environmentally responsible — and I’d say humanely moral — thing to do.”
While advocates said they are pleased with the attention the Biden administration and specifically EPA Administrator Michael Regan have paid to coal ash, they worry gains could be precarious.
“If the next administration [has] no interest in enforcement, the public interest community will carry a very heavy burden,” said Evans, citing various measures taken by the Trump administration to weaken the federal coal ash rules and other coal-related protections. If Trump is elected in 2024, she said, “I have no doubt that the administration will either try the same thing again or not enforce the rule, which would be disastrous.”
While the coal ash rule would force the cleanup of coal plant sites even after the plants close, the wastewater rules could force companies to implement expensive pollution controls, or decide to close rather than making the investment.
“It makes a lot of sense for coal plant operators to really take a hard look at the economics of retiring rather than expending additional funds, oftentimes captive ratepayer funds, retrofitting these units,” said Sierra Club senior attorney Joshua Smith.
Activist Dulce Ortiz said the new coal ash rules could help reverse the “painful history” of industrial pollution in her home of Waukegan in northern Illinois, the site of five of Illinois’s 11 Superfund sites. Ortiz and others have been demanding the cleanup of coal ash at a shuttered NRG coal plant on the Lake Michigan shore, with little response.
“Waukegan has dreamed for years and still does dream of revitalizing our lakefront. We have aspirational lakefront plans that have seen little to no success in coming to fruition in part because of the amount of contamination that remains at many of these sites… When we allow companies to pollute our communities and not force them to clean up, we deter future investment in these sites and our communities at large.”
Ortiz, founder of Clean Power Lake County and a Waukegan Township trustee, continued that, “My vision for my family and my community is that I can take my children swimming in Lake Michigan without worrying about toxic pollution, groundwater pollution…A lakefront with open space that respects our environment, where corporate profit does not override the health needs of our families… I want to see a clean energy future for Waukegan and all communities that have borne the brunt of coal ash pollution for decades.”
BUILDINGS: The U.S. Department of Energy rolls out a blueprint for slashing new building emissions, saying the optional standards aimed at cutting construction emissions and power use could save consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs. (Courthouse News)
CLIMATE:
GRID:
CLEAN ENERGY:
NUCLEAR: Federal nuclear regulators need to more fully consider climate impacts when renewing nuclear plants’ licenses and considering a new wave of small reactors, a government watchdog says. (Utility Dive)
OIL & GAS:
CARBON CAPTURE:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Tesla sales slumped in the first quarter of 2024, suggesting the company’s long-held dominance in the U.S. electric vehicle market may be plateauing. (Axios)
CLIMATE: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission pauses implementation of its rule requiring companies to disclose their climate-related risks, though it’ll keep defending the regulation from legal challenges. (The Hill)
ALSO:
SOLAR:
EFFICIENCY:
OIL & GAS:
COAL: The U.S. Interior Department moves to reverse a Trump administration policy, making it easier for coal communities to bring environmental claims about mining companies to the federal government. (E&E News)
WIND: Texas’ wind energy industry is having to develop its own workforce recruitment and training programs as political backing for wind wanes and state lawmakers focus instead on propping up the oil and gas industry. (Texas Tribune)
GEOTHERMAL: Minnesota lawmakers introduce legislation to support the development of networked geothermal systems, a technology that is already taking off in the state to reduce buildings’ emissions. (Energy News Network)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A Minnesota logistics company is piloting a program to determine whether electric semi-trucks can be a viable alternative to diesel-powered trucks. (WCCO)
NUCLEAR: The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t adequately account for climate risks in its reactor licensing and oversight processes, a government watchdog finds. (Utility Dive)
COMMENTARY: Legal and energy scholars write that the biggest threat to U.S. grid reliability is not a growing portfolio of renewable energy, but rather an outdated and parochial oversight system. (Utility Dive)
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