Study: Gas flaring causes 2 premature deaths each day

EMISSIONS: Flaring and venting of natural gas in the U.S. is causes about two premature deaths each day and costs the economy about $7.4 billion annually in lost work time and other health effects, a peer-reviewed study finds. (Inside Climate News)

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ALSO: A coalition of 20 Democratic state attorneys general sign on to defend the U.S. EPA’s methane emissions rule as it faces a lawsuit from 24 GOP-led states. (The Hill)

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MATERIALS: The U.S. aluminum industry is declining even as demand for the material grows, posing a challenge for domestic production of solar panels, wind turbines and other clean energy components. (Canary Media)

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ELECTRIC VEHICLES:

• General Motors executives say the company has largely gotten through “production hell” with its new electric vehicle lines and expects to make 200,000 to 300,000 EVs this year. (Bloomberg)
• Automaker Stellantis agrees to comply with California’s strict auto emissions standards requiring that 68% of light-duty vehicle sales be zero-emission or plug-in hybrid by 2030. (Associated Press)
• Nissan considers investing in struggling electric vehicle maker Fisker to adopt its electric pickup for construction at Nissan plants in Mississippi and Tennessee. (Reuters)

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POLITICS:

• Former President Trump and his allies look for ways to dismantle the Inflation Reduction Act if they take back the presidency, with or without both houses of Congress. (The Hill)
• Fourteen Democratic Congress members who received oil and gas industry donations have either signed letters of opposition or voted with Republicans to stop the Biden administration’s pause on permitting liquified natural gas export facilities. (The Lever)

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STORAGE:

• Adding battery storage to large clean energy projects is essential to ensuring the reliability of these intermittent resources, utilities and grid operators say. (Associated Press)
• An Arizona utility brings a 260 MW solar project and the state’s largest battery energy storage installation online to power a Phoenix-area Google data center. (Energy Storage News)

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GRID:

• New England’s power grid may still see resource adequacy problems even if it makes annual transmission investments of $1 billion through 2050 to keep up with clean power adoption, ISO New England reports. (Utility Dive)
• Utility officials say grid operator MISO’s latest plan to build up to $23 billion of new transmission is especially sparse in Minnesota and North Dakota. (Star Tribune)
• Grid operators across the country detail how the total solar eclipse in April will reduce solar resource generation. (RTO Insider, subscription)

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BUILDINGS: Vermont saw mixed success encouraging residents to install heat pumps and other upgrades after devastating floods last summer, but advocates, utilities and state agencies are revisiting those residents to work on long-term, climate-minded rebuilds. (Energy News Network)

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NUCLEAR: New York’s emissions have risen since the Indian Point nuclear plant closed in 2021, with fossil fuels, not clean energy resources, used to fill the power generation gap left behind. (The Guardian)

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CARBON CAPTURE:

• The South Dakota Supreme Court hears arguments in a case over whether a proposed carbon pipeline is a public commodity and thus eligible to survey private land and use eminent domain. (South Dakota Searchlight)
• A new report notes roughly 120,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in Louisiana pose a leakage risk to plans to store carbon dioxide underground. (Inside Climate News)
• A startup announces plans to build a direct air carbon capture facility in Wyoming using its relatively-low cost technology. (Heatmap)

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