It’s time to change the laws of war to punish and hopefully deter the insane and inhumane destruction of power grids. So argues my guest essay for The New York Times opinion pages.
For two years, it has pained me to observe and occasionally cover Russia’s increasingly destructive pummelling of Ukraine’s power grid. As a longtime student of power systems, I intimately know the engineering and operational sophistication that keeps power grids — the world’s largest machines — running at close to the speed of light. I know how entrenched power systems have become in modern life, assuring everything from home oxygen generators to sewage treatment. And I know that plugging in more is our best hope for stopping climate change.
Since Russia’s whole-scale grid attacks began in late 2022 I have questioned the legality of such wanton destruction. In my debut contribution to The Times I lay bare the holes in international law that legalize most attacks on power systems, and argue that the international community should draw brighter lines to protect them.
Climate activist Howard Breen turned to his daughter in the gallery, saying, ‘I need to be able to look at that sweet face over there and feel like I’ve done what I should have done for her and for future generations.’ Courtroom sketch: Bari Precious
The climate clock ticks toward midnight, yet US fossil fuel output keeps setting records and Canada goes on chopping Old Growth forests. Under such circumstances it’s hardly surprising that many climate activists have turned to civil disobedience, blocking highways and attacking masterworks to amplify their message. What is surprising is that courts seem to be listening.
My latest for Vancouver’s premier public-interest news outlet, The Tyee, explores one case where precedent-setting judicial compassion could embolden activists across Canada to ratchet up pressure on governments.
In this courtroom drama a pair of climate activists deploy the ‘defence of necessity’, arguing that they should be excused for blockading highways, airports, banks and ports because the dire threat posed by climate change left them no legal alternative. My exposé explores the moral and practical considerations that go into determining when such premeditated lawbreaking should be legally tolerated — and whether it might actually strengthen the rule of law.
The result is “powerfully informative” according to one informed reviewer. “You give readers a deep and clear look at all the moving parts of this defence of necessity and the profound issues it raises – but you do that as a master storyteller, so it is gripping, easygoing, and compelling.”
Power line congestion is forcing “dramatic drops” in wind power production, yet we need far more wind power and even more solar. As one renewable energy developer put it last week: “We are sprinting towards a brick wall.” My latest grid feature profiles the Made-in-the-Midwest fix that could vault North America’s power grids over the hurdles, forging a truly continental network to reliably deliver clean power for homes, highways and industries.
It’s a story of innovative policy and technology, advanced by a pragmatic yet tenacious band of environmental activists and industry planners who are determined to push the power grid to green greatness. And it’s my first for an explicitly ecologically-focused publication like Sierra Magazine, whose readership is more likely to view power lines as an ecosystem disruptor.
In the 70s, Minnesota farmers were severing power lines with high-powered rifles and toppling transmission towers to block grid expansion. But 20 years ago they joined enviro activists, wind developers & utilities to back grid growth that fuelled a wind power boom, inspiring innovative planners at the Midcontinent Independent System Operator or MISO (the nonprofit entity that runs the Midwest’s grid).
Dale Osborn: Talking power grids over Swedish meatballs at the #MSP Ikea
MISO’s grid guru Dale Osborn took their winning policy formula and ran, showing how advanced transmission technology could extend MISO’s approach to deliver massive renewables and shutter coal nationwide.
MISO’s transmission train stalled when Gulf states’ utility Entergy joined the club, then used its monopoly muscle to gum up MISO’s grid planning. Trump’s fossil-friendly Energy Department killed action in Washington, DC, burying the evidence that Osborn’s ‘macrogrid’ scheme benefitted both consumers and the environment — political interference that I exposed for The Atlantic and InvestigateWest.
But MISO planners and Osborn’s macrogrid vision are making a comeback. Northern states recently broke Entergy’s filibuster, yielding a historic plan to more than double Midwestern solar & wind energy. And Osborn’s macrogrid plan has gone mainstream in Washington, D.C.
The question now: Can grid operators like MISO, political leaders and conservationists forge bipartisan consensus to build a truly national grid. Without which, it will be far harder to endure the ravages of climate change, and may be impossible to freeze it.
Power and gas utilities—especially when pushing their own internal energy projects and products—often cloak their proposals for transmission lines, power plants and pipelines in proprietary data and models. And such scrutiny-averting tactics can lead to more costly infrastructure, squander opportunities for cleaner energy, and reduce public acceptance of system upgrades. “Companies get away with bad planning, hiding their cherry-picked assumptions in models nobody can see. This erodes confidence and costs consumers dearly,” says Tom Brown, an energy modeling expert at the Technical University of Berlin.
Such concerns are gaining traction within Europe’s official bodies, where greater transparency is seen as the only way to plan a robust and sustainable grid for tomorrow that taxpayers and communities will get behind today. Pressure is mounting project proponents and the organizations that coordinate the continent’s electricity and gas networks to switch to open-source models.
This week a European Commission-funded study concluded that open source codes can—and should—underpin official 10-year plans prepared for Europe’s gas and power networks. And its findings affirm a forceful endorsement of open modeling by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change. “Transparency of market and network models and calculations is key to ensuring public scrutiny of political investment decisions,” the independent council told the European Commission. As a result, it stated, the “traditionally closed and proprietary nature of energy system planning … is no longer fit for purpose.”
In 2011, I scrutinized a gathering wave of biofuels for Nature, and that deep dive on making fuels from woody rather than sugary plant material remains one of my most-cited works. Perhaps because we nailed what emerged as the technology’s as-yet-insurmountable hurdle: making the conversion processes work consistently at industrial scale.
A little over a decade later Nature take another look at the sustainability of biofuels. The picture isn’t pretty, thanks in part to the failure of those cellulosic fuels.
Biofuels continue to grow in ways that overlap with food crops, contributing to agricultural expansion at the expense of carbon-storing forests and grasslands. And poorly conceived and regulated mechanisms for tracking and rewarding carbon storage by farms threaten to exacerbate the trouble.
It will take a “ground-up revamp” for agriculture to get biofuels right, both for the environment and for farm communities. As we conclude, it looks like déja vu all over again: “If the sustainability of biofuels depends on such fundamental changes, one has to wonder whether another next-generation biofuels failure isn’t the more likely outcome.”
After plumbing Ukraine’s lightning fast leap to unplug from Russia’s power grid and a pair of exposés exposing Russian moles within its nuclear energy utility, my latest reporting on the #EnergyFront refocused coverage of the warfare threatening Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. While domestic and international reporting focused on the terrifying explosions rocking Zaporizhzhia — a perilous game of nuclear roulette — my stories spotlighted efforts by Ukrainian nuclear experts to cancel the game, and thus slash the risk of devastating reactor meltdowns.
Few stories questioned why Zaporizhzhia was still producing power in the middle of a war zone. U.S. reactors proactively shut down when, for example, a hurricane is barreling in. Why was Ukraine’s nuclear utility and energy ministry and nuclear regulator ordering Zaporizhzhia’s operators to do otherwise, and why was its nuclear regulator allowing it? The answer: Ukraine wanted to maximize its power supply to bolster electricity exports to Europe in a bid for political support and badly-needed revenue.
But nuclear experts I spoke to, such as former Chernobyl chief engineer and IAEA board member Nikolai Steinberg, called maintaining nuclear chain reactions at Zaporizhzhia “a crime.” Shutting down, Steinberg and others argued, would cool Zaporizhzhia’s reactors, thus slashing the risk of an accident akin to (or potentially worse than) Japan’s Fukushima disaster.
My first story laid out the experts’ case for a proactive shutdown. For example, I cited an unpublished assessment by Ukraine’s state nuclear-safety center reviewing the risk of a station-wide blackout that would zap the plant’s ability to cool its reactors and pools of spent nuclear fuel (as occurred at Fukushima in 2011). Moving Zaporizhzhia’s reactors to a ‘cold stop’, they found, would reduce accident risk by extending the time between station blackout and reactor core damage from 3 hours to 27 hours, buying crucial time for operators to find workarounds and restart cooling.
Shutting down proactively would also cease the production of short-lived fission products, reducing the harm caused by any reactor breach.
Repeated damage to Zaporizhzhia’s transmission lines — the electrical umbilical cords linking it to Ukraine’s grid — caused the plant’s reactors to blink on and off the grid.
The near misses bolstered calls for an orderly shutdown, even if diesel generators and other emergency systems had averted radiological accidents; and
Ukrainian officials continued to restart reactors and power generation rather than heed the warnings.
My story also noted, however, that nuclear experts had scored one win. Ukraine’s nuclear regulator took a symbolic baby step by ordering two reactor units already in cold shutdown to remain offline.
There’s a cloak-and-dagger struggle on for control of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, pitting activist nuclear professionals against alleged Russian agents. I began tracking this opaque battle early in Russia’s invasion when Ukraine’s state security bureau detained the nuclear power utility’s director of personnel. That cast a dark cloud over officials he’d appointed at Energoatom’s headquarters and at the four nuclear power plants that supply over half of Ukraine’s electricity.
Now this spy-vs-spy battle for Ukraine’s nuclear power has leapt from the shadows.
Last month Ukrainian counterintelligence pierced an “extensive agent network” led by the suspect official’s longtime patron: U.S.-sanctioned Russian spy Andriy Derkach, who gained global notoriety passing kompromat on Biden to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in 2019. Then utility CEO Petro Kotin fanned the flames this month in a disastrous appearance before a parliamentary panel. Kotin did not win deputies’ confidence when, for example, he explained that his deputy failed to show for the hearing because he had the day off.
The spectacle prompted Kyiv-based media outlet Glavcom to report that Ukraine’s “Nuclear energy is in danger,” and that a “search for collaborators” was on.
Fears of infiltration add to the instability created by Russia’s unprecedented military assaults on Ukraine’s nuclear reactors. And both threats raise the spectre of accidents that could spread radiation across Europe, and undercutting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. If the power grid collapses, the country will be in chaos.
Peter Fairley 