#cepp

[rjzimmerman]

Meet the CEPP, the biggest federal climate policy you've never heard of

It’s convoluted, but it still may be the best shot at a major climate law this decade.

This post and all the keyboarding I’m doing here about this proposed clean energy program will become irrelevant if the so-called “progressive wing” of the dems and the two corporate shill dem senators insist on pursuing their ego trips and/or campaign contribution donors and refuse to put something together that will let us move forward with a climate package. Forget the republicans.....they are giggling away at this nightmare, but that’s about all they can do because they do nothing else.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

President Joe Biden ran on a platform that promised climate action on a scale never seen before in American politics. One of the supporting beams of that plan is something called a clean energy standard — a mandate for utilities to generate a certain amount of clean electricity by a set date. Biden’s proposed standard targeted a carbon-free electricity sector — the second-most polluting slice of the emissions pie in the U.S. behind transportation — by 2035.

Congressional Democrats sought to put that clean energy standard into Biden’s first major legislative priority — a $2 trillion infrastructure package aimed at improving the nation’s infrastructure and simultaneously reducing emissions. But a handful of centrist Republicans and Democrats succeeded in whittling down the package by about a trillion dollars and removing the standard from the bill, which has already passed the Senate and is poised for a vote in the House this week. Biden and progressives promised to get their clean energy standard done another way. That’s how something called the Clean Electricity Performance Program, a wonky and complicated climate policy that nobody had ever heard of before this month, made its way into Democrat’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill.

The CEPP, as it’s called, could be Democrats’ last best chance to pass climate policy this decade. And if it passes, it will become the nation’s first-ever federal policy aimed at significantly reducing emissions from the power sector. A year ago, the CEPP didn’t even exist as a concept. Its invention is an acrobatic feat and a calculated effort to get past arcane Senate rules.

Here’s how the CEPP works as both a clean energy standard and a reconciliation-friendly piece of policy.

A clean energy standard is built on a foundational assumption: If utilities produce more clean power, they’ll become greener over time, and emissions will go down. But forcing utilities to get clean isn’t a budgetary matter, it’s a policy change. The CEPP gets around that by using federal dollars — which, of course, pertain to the budget — to reward utilities for going green.

More specifically, any type of company that retails electricity that increases its share of clean energy by 4 percent each year can tap into a $150 billion grant program created by the CEPP. Clean energy is defined as power sources that emit no more than 0.1 metric tons of emissions per megawatt-hour, which include wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and hydropower.

So if you’re a company that sells power to customers and you manage to increase the amount of clean electricity you provide to customers by 4 percent in a year-long period, you would get $150 for every megawatt-hour of clean energy you sell over 1.5 percent of the previous year’s target. And if you don’t meet that 4 percent goal, you get penalized $40 for every megawatt-hour of clean electricity you failed to come up with. Plus, you have to make up the deficit the following year. This concept, applied to utilities across the U.S., would ultimately lead to emissions reductions of about 82 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, when the program would end.  

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Climate crisis: Who’s pulling strings of budget negotiations?

The consequences of a century’s worth of industrial capitalist destruction of the atmosphere continued lashing out at the earth in late October.

By Scott Scheffer 

The most important international conference on climate change since the Paris Climate Accords were reached in 2015 began in Glasgow, Scotland, on Oct. 31. The White House was counting on getting an assortment of climate change proposals included in a broader spending bill through Congress before Glasgow – to avoid international embarrassment. The U.S. is the worst per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and hasn’t moved forward in its commitments. Biden has to present a puffed-up picture of progress. Negotiations with a handful of right-wing members of his own party sent Biden and other U.S. representatives to Glasgow empty-handed.

[climatecalling]

The Bar for Climate Ambition is Set by Science, Not Congressional Politics

Without the Clean Electricity Performance Program, it will be harder to meet the nation's climate targets, but it can be done.

No matter what happens with the Build Back Better Act, to reach the 2030 climate targets set by President Biden, the country will need to bring every lever to bear, from states, localities, and businesses to the federal government, Congress and the administration both, and the country will need to look to every economic sector for gains, and the country will need to sustain these efforts throughout the years to come. Any less in one area means more required by the rest.

Recent modeling by Rhodium Group supports this finding, making clear that a forward path exists even if the CEPP falls out. But it would require even more progress by leading states, and rapid action by the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies across multiple sectors, from standards limiting new, unmitigated gas-fired power plants to near-term coverage of refineries and other major emitters.

Much as fossil fuel interests might wish it, undermining one major tool for climate action doesn’t make the problem go away—it just forces taking other, often more difficult, ways.

[nbaoracle]

[rjzimmerman]

Inside Clean Energy: Here’s Why Some Utilities Support, and Others Are Wary of, the Federal Clean Energy Proposal - Inside Climate News

One of the sticking points in the $3.5 trillion spending bill in Congress is a clean energy policy that would use financial incentives and penalties to get utilities to accelerate their shift to carbon-free electricity. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), has criticized the provision because he says it would pay utilities to do what many of them are already doing and harm the coal industry.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

With tensions on Capitol Hill high, I set out this week to understand what’s driving the differing ways utilities view the clean energy proposal, which could turn on a spigot of federal money. Despite the opportunity to pad their earnings, some companies, like AEP, are urging caution about the clean energy proposal, while others, like PSEG in New Jersey, are embracing the plan.

The differences come down to variations in companies’ comfort levels with making big investments in carbon-free energy, plus local issues like the availability of wind and solar power within a utility’s territory and the politics of state legislatures and utility commissions.

The Clean Electricity Performance Program, or CEPP, as the proposal is called, would send subsidy payments to electric utilities that increase their share of electricity generated from clean sources by at least 4 percentage points per year from 2023 to 2030. Utilities that fall short of that target would pay a penalty.

If most utilities meet the goals, the U.S. electricity sector would leap from its 2020 level of about 40 percent carbon-free sources (including renewable energy and nuclear), to about 80 percent in 2030. The program would cost about $150 billion, Democrats have said.

PSEG is in the process of selling off all its fossil fuel power plants and is investing in several offshore wind farms, which helps to explain why its CEO is saying nice things about the federal proposal. Exelon of Illinois, which already gets nearly all its electricity from carbon-free sources, also supports the plan’s main concepts.

But most utilities, including Ohio-based AEP, have not said they support or oppose the policy. Instead, they are commenting in general terms about the bill as a whole, and focusing on the parts they would like to change.

The company has raised concerns with lawmakers that the policy could lead to a rush to develop renewable energy that would exceed what the market can handle, with a corresponding surge in costs. AEP has previously said its goal is to build 16 gigawatts of renewable energy projects by 2030. It is not clear how that plan would work in terms of meeting the targets in the legislation.

[butasformeblog]

'The Harm Men Do Lives After Them...'

Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet

The senator won’t quit fossil fuels and is going to neuter the reconciliation bill — and we’re all going to pay the price

"West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin just cooked the planet. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. I mean that literally. Unless Manchin changes his negotiating position dramatically in the near future, he will be remembered as the man who, when the moment of decision came, chose to condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death.

Quite a legacy. But he has earned it.

The 3.5 trillion reconciliation bill includes a long list of programs and tax reforms that will help reduce poverty and improve the social safety net, such as universal child tax credit, universal pre-K, free community college, and an expansion of Medicare. But it is also the primary vehicle for President Biden’s ambitious climate action agenda, including cuts in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and, most importantly, the Clean Energy Performance Package (CEPP), which is a clean energy standard that incentivizes power companies to shift away from fossil fuels...

From a climate point of view, the importance of these climate policy measures is impossible to overstate. In order to have a decent chance at maintaining a habitable planet, scientists agree that the world needs to zero out carbon pollution by 2050. And to have any shot at that, we have to start moving now. Every year, every month, every hour of delay makes that goal more difficult to achieve, and increases the risks of accelerated climate chaos that will make this past summer of hellish wildfires, storms, and droughts look like the good old days.

The zero carbon by 2050 goal is not a political slogan or environmentalist’s dream. It is what the best scientists in the world are telling us we need to do to avert climate catastrophe. It is also the basis for Biden’s goal of a 100 percent clean energy grid by 2035, and a 50 percent reduction in CO2 pollution by 2030. For Biden, taking strong action on climate is not just important in itself. It is also key to giving the U.S. climate negotiators something to bring to the table at the upcoming Glasgow climate talks, which begin on October 31st."

[laivinduroriginal]

Centrul de Excelenţă Prelucrarea Polimerilor a fabricat și donat până acum 2000 de viziere Centrul de Excelenţă Prelucrarea Polimerilor (CE-PP) din cadrul Universităţii „Dunărea de Jos” din Galaţi a fabricat, in perioada 16 martie – 13 mai 2020, 2000 de viziere de protecţie împotriva răspândirii virusului SARS-CoV-2.

[nanyjohann]

Sobre estudos na quarentena... sim, seguimos, cada dia num local diferente da casa 😂🤭 #CEPP #estudandoemcasa #quarentena (em Ajuricaba) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-Mxvi8hyMR/?igshid=kxg1wabvh2mg