DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 16 (Reuters) – Big oil firms came under pressure at the start of the World Economic Forum (WEF) from activists who accused them of hijacking the climate debate, while a Greta Thunberg-sponsored “cease and desist” campaign gained support on social media.
Major energy firms including BP (BP.L), Chevron (CVX.N) and Saudi Aramco (2222.SE) are among the 1,500 business leaders gathering for the annual meeting in the Swiss resort of Davos, where global threats including climate change are on the agenda.
“We are demanding concrete and real climate action,” said Nicolas Siegrist, the 26-year-old organiser of the protest who also heads the Young Socialists party in Switzerland.
The annual meeting of global business and political leaders opens in Davos on Monday.
“They will be in the same room with state leaders and they will push for their interests,” Siegrist said of the involvement of energy companies during a demonstration attended by several hundred people on Sunday.
The oil and gas industry has said that it needs to be part of the energy transition as fossil fuels will continue to play a major role in the world’s energy mix as countries shift to low carbon economies.
[1/5] Climate activists display a banner during a protest ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2023 in the Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland, January 15, 2023. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
On Monday, a social media campaign added to the pressure on oil and gas companies, by promoting a “cease and desist” notice sponsored by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, through the non-profit website Avaaz.
It demands energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need”, and threatens legal action and more protests if they fail to comply.
The campaign, which had been signed by more than 660,000 people, had almost 200,000 shares on Monday morning.
Sumant Sinha, who heads one of India’s largest renewable energy firms, said it would be good to include big oil companies in the transition debate as they have a vital role to play.
“If oil people are part of these conversations to the extent that they are also committing to change then by all means. It is better to get them inside the tent than to have them outside the tent,” Sinha, chairman and CEO of ReNew Power, told Reuters, saying that inclusion should not lead to “sabotage”.
Rising interest rates have made it harder for renewable energy developments to attract financing, giving traditional players with deep pockets a competitive advantage.
As delegates began to arrive in Davos, Debt for Climate activists protested at a private airport in eastern Switzerland, which they said would be used by some WEF attendees, and issued a statement calling for foreign debts of poorer countries to be cancelled in order to accelerate the global energy transition.
Additional reporting by Kathryn Lurie; Editing by Alexander Smith and Alex Richardson
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Jan 15 (Reuters) – One year on from the massive eruption of an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, the island nation of Tonga is still dealing with the damage to its coastal waters.
When Hunga-Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai went off, it sent a shockwave around the world, produced a plume of water and ash that soared higher into the atmosphere than any other on record, and triggered tsunami waves that ricocheted across the region – slamming into the archipelago which lies southeast of Fiji.
Coral reefs were turned to rubble and many fish perished or migrated away.
The result has Tongans struggling, with more than 80% of Tongan families relying on subsistence reef fishing, according 2019 data from the World Bank. Following the eruption, the Tongan government said it would seek $240 million for recovery, including improving food security. In the immediate aftermath, the World Bank provided $8 million.
“In terms of recovery plan … we are awaiting for funds to cover expenditure associated with small-scale fisheries along coastal communities,” said Poasi Ngaluafe, head of the science division of Tonga’s Ministry of Fisheries.
SILENT REEFS
The vast majority of Tongan territory is ocean, with its exclusive economic zone extending across nearly 700,000 square kilometres (270,271 square miles) of water. While commercial fisheries contribute only 2.3% to the national economy, subsistence fishing is considered crucial in making up a staple of the Tongan diet.
The U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization estimated in a November report that the eruption cost the country’s fisheries and aquaculture sector some $7.4 million – a significant number for Tonga’s roughly $500 million economy. The losses were largely due to damaged fishing vessels, with nearly half of that damage in the small-scale fisheries sector, though some commercial vessels were also affected.
Because the Tongan government does not closely track subsistence fishing, it is difficult to estimate the eruption’s impact on fish harvests.
But scientists say that, apart from some fish stocks likely being depleted, there are other troubling signs that suggest it could take a long time for fisheries to recover.
Young corals are failing to mature in the coastal waters around the eruption site, and many areas once home to healthy and abundant reefs are now barren, according to the government’s August survey.
It is likely volcanic ash smothered many reefs, depriving fish of feeding areas and spawning beds. The survey found that no marine life had survived near the volcano.
Meanwhile, the tsunami that swelled in the waters around the archipelago knocked over large boulder corals, creating fields of coral rubble. And while some reefs survived, the crackling, snapping and popping noises of foraging shrimp and fish, a sign of a healthy environment, were gone.
“The reefs in Tonga were silent,” the survey report found.
FARMING REPRIEVE
Agriculture has proved a lifeline to Tongans facing empty waters and damaged boats. Despite concerns that the volcanic ash, which blanketed 99% of the country, would make soils too toxic to grow crops, “food production has resumed with little impacts,” said Siosiua Halavatu, a soil scientist speaking on behalf of the Tongan government.
Soil tests revealed that the fallen ash was not harmful for humans. And while yam and sweet potato plants perished during the eruption, and fruit trees were burned by falling ash, they began to recover once the ash was washed away.
“We have supported recovery works through land preparation, and planting backyard gardening and roots crops in the farms, as well as export crops like watermelon and squash,” Halavatu told Reuters.
But long-term monitoring will be critical, he said, and Tonga hopes to develop a national soil strategy and upgrade their soil testing laboratory to help farmers.
SKY WATER
Scientists are also now taking stock of the eruption’s impact on the atmosphere. While volcanic eruptions on land eject mostly ash and sulfur dioxide, underwater volcanos jettison far more water.
Tonga’s eruption was no different, with the blast’s white-grayish plume reaching 57 kilometers (35.4 miles) and injecting 146 million tonnes of water into the atmosphere.
Water vapor can linger in the atmosphere for up to a decade, trapping heat on Earth’s surface and leading to more overall warming. More atmospheric water vapor can also help deplete ozone, which shields the planet from harmful UV radiation.
“That one volcano increased the total amount of global water in the stratosphere by 10 percent,” said Paul Newman, chief scientist for earth sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We’re only now beginning to see the impact of that.”
Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London; Additional reporting by Kirsty Needham; Editing by Katy Daigle and Tomasz Janowski
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KYIV, Jan 14 (Reuters) – Russian missile attacks hit critical infrastructure in Kyiv and the eastern city of Kharkiv on Saturday morning, and the governor of another region warned that a massive missile strike could follow in the coming hours.
Reuters journalists heard a series of blasts in Kyiv before the air raid siren even sounded, which is highly unusual. No one was reported hurt, but missile debris caused a fire in one place and houses were damaged outside the capital, officials said.
“Explosions in the (eastern) Dniprovskiy district. All agencies heading to the site. Stay in your shelters!” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Russia, which invaded last February, has been pounding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with missiles and drones since October, causing sweeping blackouts and disruptions to central heating and running water as winter bites.
“An infrastructure facility was hit. No critical damage or fire. All emergency services are working at the site. No one is wounded,” Kyiv’s military administration said in a statement.
Ukrenergo, which runs the power grid, said its workers were racing to fix the damage and that the network was grappling with a power deficit caused by earlier attacks even though it was -2 Celsius (28 Fahrenheit) in Kyiv, only mildly cold.
Kyiv’s mayor said the debris of a missile came down on a non-residential area in the Holosiivskiy district in the west of Kyiv, causing a fire but hurting no one.
Residential infrastructure was also hit in the village of Kopyliv in the region just outside the capital. The windows and roofs of 18 privately owned houses were shattered or damaged by the blast, Oleksiy Kuleba, the regional governor, said.
Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said Russia’s missiles had likely been fired along a high, looping ballistic trajectory from the north, which would explain why the air raid siren did not sound.
Ukraine is not able to identify and shoot down ballistic missiles, he told the Ukrainska Pravda online outlet.
MISSILES STRIKE KHARKIV
In Ukraine’s northeast, Oleg Synehubov, Kharkiv’s regional governor, said two S-300 missiles struck the city near the Russian border early on Saturday.
The attacks hit critical energy infrastructure and industrial facilities in the Kharkiv and Chuhuev district of the region, he said.
“Our emergency services units and energy workers are working to liquidate the consequences and stabilise the situation with energy supplies,” he said.
The governor of the central Cherkasy region warned that a massive Russian missile strike could follow later on Saturday, while the governor of Mykolaiv to the south said that 17 Russian Tupolev warplanes had taken off from their air bases.
But after their statements the air raid alarm in Kyiv and the surrounding region was lifted.
The strikes on Saturday came as Ukrainian and Russian forces battled for control of Soledar, a small salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine that for days has been the focus of a relentless Russian assault.
Russia said on Friday that its forces had taken control of Soledar, in what would be a rare success for Moscow after months of battlefield reverses, but Kyiv said its troops were still fighting in the town.
Reuters could not immediately verify the situation in Soledar.
Writing by Tom Balmforth
Editing by Angus MacSwan, Mark Heinrich and Frances Kerry
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LUETZERATH, Germany, Jan 11 (Reuters) – Hundreds of police began clearing climate protesters out of an abandoned village on Wednesday in a showdown over the expansion of an opencast lignite mine that has highlighted tensions around Germany’s climate policy during an energy crisis.
The protesters formed human chains, made a makeshift barricade out of old containers and chanted “we are here, we are loud, because you are stealing our future” as police in helmets moved in. Some threw rocks, bottles and pyrotechnics. Police also reported protesters were lobbing petrol bombs.
The demonstrators, wearing masks, balaclavas or biosuits, have been protesting against the Garzweiler mine, run by energy firm RWE (RWEG.DE) in the village of Luetzerath in the brown-coal district of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg plans to join the demonstration on Saturday, a spokesperson for Luetzerathlebt environmentalist group told Reuters.
Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens called for no further violence after police and protesters scuffled.
“Leave it at that – from both sides,” he told reporters.
Police say the standoff could take weeks to resolve.
As the officers moved in, some activists perched on the roofs or the windows of the abandoned buildings, chanting and shouting slogans.
Others hung suspended from wires and wooden frames, or were holed up in treehouses to make it harder for police to dislodge them after a court ruling allowed for the demolition of the village now otherwise empty of residents and owned by RWE.
Julia Riedel, who said she has been camping in the village for two-and-a-half years, said the demonstrators had taken up their positions “because the issue here is whether the climate will cross the tipping point or not.”
Police, who had water cannon trucks on standby, led away and carried some protesters from the site.
The project has underscored Germany’s dilemma over climate policy, which environmentalists say has taken a back seat during the energy crisis that has hit Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, forcing a return to dirtier fuels.
It is particularly sensitive for the Greens party, now back in power as part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government after 16 years in opposition. Many Greens oppose the mine’s expansion, but Habeck has been the face of the government’s decision.
[1/14] Police officers keep guard as activists stage a sit-in protest against the expansion of the Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine of Germany’s utility RWE, in Luetzerath, Germany, January 11, 2023 that has highlighted tensions over Germany’s climate policy during an energy crisis. REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen
“The empty settlement of Luetzerath, where no one lives any more, is the wrong symbol in my view,” Habeck said with reference to the demonstration.
HEAVY MACHINERY
Birte, a 51-year-old midwife who joined the protest on Sunday, was in tears as police led her away.
She said it was important for politically moderate citizens to attend the protest, to show “that these are not just young, crazy, violent people, but that there are people who care”.
Police have urged the protesters to leave the area and remain peaceful.
“It’s a big challenge for the police and we need a lot of special forces here to deal with the situation. We have aerial rescue specialists,” said police spokesperson Andreas Mueller.
“These are all factors that make it difficult to tell how long this will last. We expect it to continue for a least several weeks.”
A Reuters eyewitness saw police using heavy machinery to start dismantling high barricades.
RWE said earlier on Wednesday it would start to dismantle Luetzerath, and had begun building a fence around the area.
“RWE is appealing to the squatters to observe the rule of law and to end the illegal occupation of buildings, plants and sites belonging to RWE peacefully,” RWE said.
The fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted Scholz’s government to change course on previous policies.
Those include firing up mothballed coal power plants and extending the lifespan of nuclear power stations after Russia cut gas deliveries to Europe in an energy standoff that sent prices soaring.
The government has, however, brought forward the date when all brown coal power plants will be shut down in North Rhine-Westphalia, to 2030 from 2038, acceding to a campaign promise from the Greens.
Writing by Paul Carrel and Matthias Williams; Editing by Tom Hogue, Christopher Cushing, Conor Humphries and Alison Williams
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Jan 11 (Reuters) – U.S. clean energy companies are offering better wages and benefits, flying in trainers from overseas, and contemplating ideas like buying roofing and electric repair shops just to hire their workers as firms try to overcome a labor shortage that threatens to derail President Joe Biden’s climate change agenda.
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law last year, provides for an estimated $370 billion in solar, wind and electric vehicle subsidies, according to the White House. Starting Jan. 1, American consumers can take advantage of those tax credits to upgrade home heating systems or put solar panels on their roofs. Those investments will create nearly 537,000 jobs a year for a decade, according to an analysis by BW Research commissioned by The Nature Conservancy.
Reuters Graphics Reuters Graphics
But with the U.S. unemployment rate at an historic low of 3.5%, companies say they fear they will struggle to fill those jobs, and that plans to transition away from fossil fuels could stall out. Despite layoff announcements and signs of a slowdown elsewhere in the economy, the labor market for clean energy jobs remains tight.
“It feels like a big risk for this expansion. Where are we going to find all the people?” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association trade group.
The shortage is anticipated to hit especially hard in electric vehicle and battery production and solar panel and home efficiency installations, forcing some of the companies into bold new approaches to find workers.
Korea’s SK Innovation Co Ltd, which makes batteries for Ford Motor Co’s (F.N) F-150 Lightning all-electric pickup truck in Commerce, Georgia, has pumped up pay and benefits as it ramps up its U.S. workforce to 20,000 people by 2025 from 4,000 today.
The battery maker is advertising pay between $20 and $34 an hour, above Georgia’s median hourly wage of $18.43, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is also covering 100% life insurance costs and matching retirement plan contributions up to 6.5%, above the national average of 5.6%, according to the Plan Sponsor Council of America. And the company is providing free food on the job.
“Georgia’s talent pool is not really massive. But we are trying to improve some of our policies to better source and retain workers,” said an SK official who declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.
Georgia state officials said SK’s hiring has been a success considering how quickly production had to ramp up to meet the company’s obligations to automakers.
While national residential solar installer SunPower Corp (SPWR.O) is recruiting aggressively, Chief Executive Peter Faricy said the company is also looking at what he called “crazy ideas” to secure labor – including buying up companies just for their workers.
“I’m not suggesting we will do this, but I want to give you an order of magnitude of what we’re considering. Like, should we acquire a roofing company and make them all solar installers? Do we go buy an electrical company and acquire 100 electricians?” he said.
SunPower also held talks within the last year with panel manufacturer First Solar Inc (FSLR.O) about developing a solar panel that would be easier to install, enabling crews to outfit two homes a day instead of just one, Faricy said.
SunPower’s competitor, Sunrun Inc (RUN.O), is deploying drones to survey roofs ahead of installation, reducing the number of workers required to scale roofs. It is also rewarding top crews with office parties.
“As best you can game-ify the experience for the employee… it just makes the industry more fun, more attractive,” Chris McClellan, Sunrun’s senior vice president of operations, said in an interview.
Offshore wind developer Orsted (ORSTED.CO), a Danish company that is planning to build projects off the East Coast, hopes to fly in employees from projects in the United Kingdom and Asia to help train staff. State reports have indicated that New York and Massachusetts face large offshore wind workforce gaps.
“We’re creating sort of an ecosystem where we don’t just have an offshore wind academy, but really train the trainers of the future,” said Mads Nipper, Orsted’s CEO, told Reuters.
The Biden Administration has repeatedly promised that new green energy jobs would be well-paying union jobs.
But many of those jobs have lagged the fossil fuel industry in pay, according to a 2021 study by BW Research, as clean energy companies have sought to contain costs to compete with entrenched industries. The IRA seeks to address that by tying prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements to the subsidies.
Those provisions — and the hiring challenges — have put pressure on some employers to use unionized labor.
Learning from its earlier hiring challenges in Europe and Asia, Orsted signed an agreement with North America’s Building Trades Unions to secure workers.
Even Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), a company that has been embroiled in disputes with workers trying to organize, has used union labor to build the electric charging infrastructure for its fleet of electric delivery vehicles in Maspeth, Queens, NY.
Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
Corrine Case, an electrician represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said she was paid $43 an hour to install the charging system at Amazon.
A single mother, Case said she was excited about the job security offered by the rising demand for electricians to install charging stations.
“Our field is constantly changing because of new energy sources and to be a part of that is amazing,” she said.
FREE WORKER TRAINING
In their hunt for workers, solar, wind and electric vehicle companies have expanded programs offering free and subsidized training to military veterans, women and the formerly incarcerated.
SK told Reuters that it has been recruiting at military job fairs and American Legion chapters and collaborating with programs like the Georgia National Guard’s Work for Warriors and the Manufacturing Institute’s Heroes MAKE America.
Some solar companies have tried to recruit veterans, saying the skills learned in military life translate well to the industry.
Utility scale solar developer SOLV Energy, SunPower and Nextracker last year teamed up with nonprofit Solar Energy International to fund a women-only training program for solar installers. More than 30 women attended the week-long course in Colorado.
In October, the nonprofit Solar Hands-On Instructional Network of Excellence (SHINE) teamed up with the Virginia Department of Corrections on a pilot program to train 30 prison inmates and recently incarcerated people in solar panel installation. SHINE’s director David Peterson said the group is discussing expanding the program.
In California, the nonprofit Grid Alternatives has trained 150 inmates at the Madera County jail in solar installation since 2017 and is expanding its program this year to other facilities in the state. Potential employers are more open to hiring the formerly incarcerated once they see they have received some training, Tom Esqueda, the nonprofit’s outreach manager, said.
In Los Angeles, nonprofit Homeboy Industries, which works to rehabilitate former gang members, is using the potential job opportunities for solar panel installers to help recruits for its state-funded jobs program. Homeboy trains 50-60 people a year as solar panel installers.
More than 80% of the people who have gone through the training in the last year have found jobs in solar, according to Jackie Harper, who oversees the program.
“I’m going to be sticking with this,” said Marco Reyes, 28, who went through the program after his release from prison in February and earns $23 an hour as an installer in Valencia, California.
He now plans to train in the electrical end of solar installation, which would bump up his pay.
“Everyone has a chance to move up the ladder into a better position,” he said. “This job to me is a life changer.”
Read more:
Korea’s Hanwha Qcells to invest $2.5 bln in U.S. solar supply chain
U.S. solar installations to fall 23% this year due to China goods ban -report
Reporting by Nichola Groom and Valerie Volcovici; Edited by Richard Valdmanis and Suzanne Goldenberg
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Dec 25 (Reuters) – A lethal blizzard paralyzed Buffalo, New York, on Christmas Day, trapping motorists and rescue workers in their vehicles, leaving thousands of homes without power and raising the death toll from storms that have chilled much of the United States for days.
At least 30 people have died in U.S. weather-related incidents, according to an NBC News tally, since a deep freeze gripped most of the nation, coupled with snow, ice and howling winds from a sprawling storm that roared out of the Great Lakes region on Friday.
CNN has reported a total of 26 weather fatalities.
Much of the loss of life has centered in and around Buffalo at the edge of Lake Erie in western New York, as numbing cold and heavy “lake-effect” snow – the result of frigid air moving over warmer lake waters – persisted through the holiday weekend.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the storm’s confirmed death toll climbed to 13 on Sunday, up from three reported overnight in the Buffalo region. The latest victims included some found in cars and some in snow banks, Poloncarz said, adding that the death tally would likely rise further.
“This is not the Christmas any of us hoped for nor expected,” Poloncarz said on Twitter on Sunday. “My deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster that ranked as the fiercest winter storm to hit the greater Buffalo area since a crippling 1977 blizzard that killed nearly 30 people.
“We have now surpassed the scale of that storm, in its intensity, the longevity, the ferocity of its winds,” Hochul told an evening news conference, adding that the current storm would likely to go down in history as “the blizzard of ’22.”
RESCUING THE RESCUERS
The latest blizzard came nearly six weeks after a record-setting but shorter-lived lake-effect storm struck western New York.
Despite a ban on road travel imposed since Friday, hundreds of Erie County motorists were stranded in their vehicles over the weekend, with National Guard troops called in to help with rescues hindered by white-out conditions and drifting snow, Poloncarz said.
Many snow plows and other equipment sent on Saturday and Sunday became stuck in the snow, “and we had to send rescue missions to rescue the rescuers,” he told reporters.
The Buffalo police department posted an online plea to the public for assistance in search-and-recovery efforts, asking those who “have a snow mobile and are willing to help” to call a hotline for instructions.
The severity of the storm was notable even for a region accustomed to harsh winter weather.
Christina Klaffka, 39, a North Buffalo resident, watched the shingles blow off her neighbor’s home and listened to her windows rattle from “hurricane-like winds.” She lost power along with her whole neighborhood on Saturday evening, and was still without electricity on Sunday morning.
[1/9] A snow plow is left stranded on the road following a winter storm that hit the Buffalo region on Main St. in Amherst, New York, U.S., December 25, 2022. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
“My TV kept flickering while I was trying to watch the Buffalo Bills and Chicago Bears game. I lost power shortly after the 3rd quarter,” she said.
John Burns, 58, a retiree in North Buffalo, said he and his family were trapped in their house for 36 hours by the storm and extreme cold that he called “mean and nasty.”
“Nobody was out. Nobody was even walking their dogs,” he said. “Nothing was going on for two days.”
Snowfall totals were hard to gauge, he added, because of fierce winds that reduced accumulation between houses, but piled up a 5-foot (1.5-meter) drift “in front of my garage.”
Hochul told reporters on Sunday that the Biden administration had agreed to support her request for a federal disaster declaration.
About 200 National Guard troops were mobilized in western New York to help police and fire crews, conduct wellness checks and bring supplies to shelters, Hochul said.
ELECTRICITY HIT HARD
The larger storm system was moving east on Sunday, after knocking out power to as many as 1.5 million customers at the height of outages late last week and forcing thousands of commercial flight cancellations during the busy holiday travel period.
More than 150,000 U.S. homes and businesses were without power on Sunday, down sharply from the 1.8 million without power as of early Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us. In Buffalo, 15,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening, Poloncarz said.
He said one electrical substation knocked offline was sealed off by an 18-foot-tall mound of snow, and utility crews found the entire facility frozen inside.
Christmas Day temperatures, while beginning to rebound from near-zero readings that were widespread on Saturday, remained well below average across the central and eastern United States, and below freezing even as far south as the Gulf Coast, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Rich Otto said.
Nearly 4 feet of snow was measured at Buffalo airport by Sunday, according to the latest NWS tally, with white-out conditions lingering south of Buffalo into the afternoon as continuing squalls dumped 2-3 inches of snow an hour.
In Kentucky, officials confirmed three storm-related deaths since Friday, while at least four people were dead and several injured in auto-related accidents in Ohio, where a 50-vehicle pileup shut down the Ohio Turnpike during a blizzard on Friday.
Other deaths related to extreme cold or weather-induced vehicle accidents were reported in Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas and Colorado, according to news reports.
(The story has been refiled to remove extraneous word in headline)
Reporting by Gabriella Borter and Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington; Additional reporting by Lucia Mutikani, Idrees Ali, Ismail Shakil, Rick Cowan and ; Writing by Steve Gorman; editing by Ross Colvin, Diane Craft, Nick Zieminski, Leslie Adler, Gerry Doyle and Bradley Perrett
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Ahmed Aboulenein
Thomson Reuters
Washington-based correspondent covering U.S. healthcare and pharmaceutical policy with a focus on the Department of Health and Human Services and the agencies it oversees such as the Food and Drug Administration, previously based in Iraq and Egypt.
Dec 25 (Reuters) – Thousands of residents were without power near Tacoma, Washington, after three electrical substations were vandalized, local authorities said on Sunday, adding that it was not yet clear if the Christmas Day incidents were linked.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department said robberies were reported at two substations belonging to Tacoma Public Utilities and another belonging to Puget Sound Energy. Deputies cited forced entry into the fenced-in area, with equipment vandalized but nothing taken from the sites, it said. More than 14,000 customers were affected.
“At this time deputies are conducting the initial investigation. We do not have any suspects in custody. It is unknown if there are any motives or if this was a coordinated attack on the power systems,” the department said in a statement on its website.
Earlier this month, a utility in North Carolina reported outages from what local authorities said were orchestrated shootings now being investigated by federal law enforcement.
The FBI has also been investigating shots fired near a power facility in South Carolina days later, and whether those two incidents could be related, NBC News and other local media have reported.
Utilities nationwide have been strained by a severe cold weather system that swept across the country this week, leaving more than 300,000 without power from the winter storm.
In east Piece County, about 2,700 people serviced by Tacoma Public Utilities remained affected midday on Sunday after an initial 7,300 residents lost power in the area, about 45 miles (72 km) south of Seattle, Tacoma Public Utilities said in a post on Twitter.
“We are working as quickly and safely as possible to restore power,” it said, noting that its substations “were attacked” earlier on Sunday morning and that the incidents were reported to police.
Representatives for Puget Sound Energy could not be immediately reached for comment.
Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Leslie Adler
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Dec 24 (Reuters) – An arctic blast gripped much of the United States on Saturday driving power outages, flight cancellations and car wrecks, as plummeting temperatures were predicted to bring the coldest Christmas Eve on record to several cities from Pennsylvania to Georgia.
Temperatures are forecast to top out on Saturday at just 7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 13 Celsius) in Pittsburgh, surpassing its previous all-time coldest Christmas Eve high of 13 F, set in 1983, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
Cities in Georgia and South Carolina – Athens and Charleston – were likewise expected to record their coldest daytime Christmas Eve high temperatures, while Washington, D.C., was forecast to experience its chilliest Dec. 24 since 1989.
The flurry of yuletide temperature records were predicted as a U.S. deep freeze sharpened by perilous wind chills continued to envelope much of the eastern two-thirds of the nation into the holiday weekend.
The freeze already produced fatal car collisions around the country with CNN reporting at least 14 dead from weather-related accidents.
The arctic cold combined with a “cyclone bomb” of heavy snow and howling winds roaring out of the Great Lakes region on Friday and into the Upper Mississippi and Ohio valleys wreaked havoc on power systems, roadways and commercial air traffic.
Extreme winter weather was blamed for at least five deaths on Friday.
Two motorists were killed, and numerous others injured, in a 50-vehicle pileup that shut down the Ohio Turnpike in both directions during a blizzard near Toledo, forcing an evacuation of stranded motorists by bus to keep them from freezing in their cars, officials said.
Three more weather-related fatalities were confirmed in neighboring Kentucky – two from car accidents and one a homeless person who died of exposure.
Freezing rain and ice from a separate storm in the Pacific Northwest made travel treacherous there as well on Friday.
[1/7] A view of an area after heavy snowfall in Regent, North Dakota, U.S. December 23, 2022, in this picture obtained from social media. Blake Rafferty/Twitter@BlakeRafferty1/via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES
BORDER TO BORDER
From the Canadian to the Mexican border and coast to coast, some 240 million people in all were under winter weather warnings and advisories of some sort on Friday, according to the weather service.
The NWS said its map of existing or impending meteorological hazards “depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever.”
With energy systems across the country strained by rising demand for heat and storm-related damage to transmission lines, as many as 1.8 million U.S. homes and businesses were left without power as of early Saturday morning, according to tracking site Poweroutage.us.
The disruptions upended daily routines and holiday plans for millions of Americans during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.
The American Automobile Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to venture 50 miles (80 km) or more from home between Friday and Jan. 2. But stormy weather heading into the weekend likely ended up keeping many of them at home.
At least 3,741 U.S. flights were canceled on Saturday, with total delays tallying 10,297, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. More than 5,000 flights were cancelled on Friday, the flight tracking said.
The city of Buffalo and its surrounding county on the edge of Lake Erie in western New York imposed a driving ban, and all three Buffalo-area border crossing bridges were closed to inbound traffic from Canada due to the weather.
The severe weather prompted authorities across the country to open warming centers in libraries and police stations while scrambling to expand temporary shelter for the homeless. The challenge was compounded by the influx of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border by the thousands in recent weeks.
Bitter cold intensified by high winds extended through the Deep South to the U.S.-Mexico border, plunging wind chill factors to single digits Fahrenheit (minus 18 to minus 13 Celsius) in El Paso, Texas. Exposure to such conditions can cause frostbite within minutes.
Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Additional reporting by Joel Schectman, Gabriella Borter, Tim Reid, Lisa Baertlein, Erwin Seba, Susan Heavey, Laila Kearney, Alyson McClaren, Aleksandra Michalska, and Scott DiSavino; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Aurora Ellis, William Mallard and Diane Craft
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Dec 23 (Reuters) – Frigid cold and blowing winds on Friday knocked out power and cut energy production across the United States, driving up heating and electricity prices as people prepared for holiday celebrations.
Winter Storm Elliott brought sub-freezing temperatures and extreme weather alerts to about two-thirds of the United States, with cold and snow in some areas to linger through the Christmas holiday.
More than 1.5 million homes and businesses lost power, oil refineries in Texas cut gasoline and diesel production on equipment failures, and heating and power prices surged on the losses. Oil and gas output from North Dakota to Texas suffered freeze-ins, cutting supplies.
Some 1.5 million barrels of daily refining capacity along the U.S. Gulf Coast was shut due to the bitterly cold temperatures. The production losses are not expected to last, but they have lifted fuel prices.
Knocked out were TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA), Motiva Enterprises (MOTIV.UL) and Marathon Petroleum (MPC.N) facilities outside Houston. Cold weather also disrupted Exxon Mobil (XOM.N), LyondellBasell (LYB.N) and Valero Energy (VLO.N) plants in Texas that produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
Sempra Infrastructure’s Cameron LNG plant in Louisiana said weather disrupted its production of liquefied natural gas without providing details. Crews at the 12 million tonne-per-year facility were trying to restore output, it said.
Freeze-ins – in which ice crystals halt oil and gas production – this week trimmed production in North Dakota’s oilfields by 300,000 to 350,000 barrels per day, or a third of normal. In Texas’s Permian oilfield, the freeze led to more gas being withdrawn than was injected, said El Paso Natural Gas operator Kinder Morgan Inc. (KMI.N).
U.S. benchmark oil prices on Friday jumped 2.4% to $79.56, and next-day gas in west Texas jumped 22% to around $9 per million British thermal units , the highest since the state’s 2021 deep freeze.
Power prices on Texas’s grid also spiked to $3,700 per megawatt hour, prompting generators to add more power to the grid before prices fell back as thermal and solar supplies came online.
New England’s bulk power supplier said it expected to have enough to supply demand, but elsewhere strong winds led to outages largely in the Southeast and Midwest; North Carolina counted more than 187,000 without power.
“Crews are restoring power but high winds are making repairs challenging at most of the 4,600 outage locations,” Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks wrote on Twitter.
Heating oil and natural gas futures rose sharply in response to the cold. U.S. heating oil futures gained 4.3% while natural gas futures rose 2.5%.
In New England, gas for Friday at the Algonquin hub soared 361% to a near 11-month high of $30 mmBtu.
About half of the power generated in New England comes from gas-fired plants, but on the coldest days, power generators shift to burn more oil. According to grid operator New England ISO, power companies’ generation mix was at 17% from oil-fired plants as of midday Friday.
Gas output dropped about 6.5 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) over the past four days to a preliminary nine-month low of 92.4 bcfd on Friday as wells froze in Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
That is the biggest drop in output since the February 2021 freeze knocked out power for millions in Texas.
One billion cubic feet is enough gas to supply about 5 million U.S. homes for a day.
Reporting by Erwin Seba and Scott DiSavino; additional reporting by Arathy Somasekhar and Laila Kearney; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Kirsten Donovan, Aurora Ellis and Leslie Adler
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Scott Disavino
Thomson Reuters
Covers the North American power and natural gas markets.
RIO DELL, Calif., Dec 20 (Reuters) – A powerful magnitude 6.4 earthquake jolted the extreme northern coast of California before dawn on Tuesday, damaging homes, roads and water systems and leaving tens of thousands of people without electricity.
At least 11 people were reported injured, and two others died from “medical emergencies” that occurred during or just after the quake, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
The tremor, which struck at 2:30 a.m. PST and was followed by about 80 aftershocks, was centered 215 miles (350 km) north of San Francisco offshore of Humboldt County, a largely rural area known for its redwood forests, local seafood, lumber industry and dairy farms.
The region also is known for relatively frequent seismic activity, although the latest quake appeared to cause more disruption than others in recent years.
Tuesday’s temblor set off one structure fire, which was quickly extinguished, and caused two other buildings to collapse, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire).
The department said its dispatchers fielded 70 emergency calls after the quake, including one report of a person left trapped who needed rescuing, spokesperson Tran Beyea said.
Details on quake-related casualties was sketchy, but one surviving victim was a child with a head injury and the other an older person with a broken hip, according to local media reports citing the sheriff’s office.
‘REALLY INTENSE’
Police closed a bridge crossing the Eel River into Ferndale, a picturesque town notable for its gingerbread-style Victorian storefronts and homes, after four large cracks were discovered in the span. The California Highway Patrol also said the roadway foundation there was at risk of sliding.
Authorities reported at least four other roads in Humboldt County closed due to earthquake damage, and a possible gas line rupture under investigation. One section of a roadway was reportedly sinking, the Highway Patrol said.
Ferndale and the adjacent towns of Fortuna and Rio Dell appeared hardest hit, with damage including water main breaks and about two dozen homes “red-tagged” because they were too unstable to be safely inhabited, state emergency services officials said.
[1/7] The collapsed second story porch of a house is seen after a strong 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northern California, in Rio Dell, California, U.S. December 20, 2022. REUTERS/Fred Greaves
“The shaking was really intense,” said Daniel Holsapple, 33, a resident of nearby Arcata, who recounted grabbing his pet cat and running outside after he was jostled awake in pitch darkness by the motion of the house and an emergency alert from his cellphone.
“There was no seeing what was going on. It was just the sensation and that general low rumbling sound of the foundation of the whole house vibrating,” he said.
Janet Calderon, 32, who lives in the adjacent town of Eureka, said she was already awake and noticed her two cats seemed agitated moments before the quake struck, shaking her second-flood bedroom “really hard.”
“Everything on my desk fell over,” she said.
California’s earthquake early warning system appeared to have worked, sending electronic alerts to the mobile devices of some 3 million northern California residents 10 seconds before the first rumbles were felt, said state emergency chief Mark Ghilarducci.
While earthquakes producing noticeable shaking are routine in California, tremors at a magnitude 6.4 are less common and potentially dangerous, capable of causing partial building collapses or shifting structures off their foundations.
Tuesday’s temblor struck in a seismically active area where several tectonic plates converge on the sea floor about 2 miles offshore, an area that has produced about 40 quakes in the 6.0-7.0 range over the past century, said Cynthia Pridmore, a senior geologist for the California Geological Survey.
“So it is not unusual to have earthquakes of this size in this region,” she told a news conference.
Shaking from Tuesday’s quake, which occurred at the relatively shallow depth of 11.1 miles (17.9 km) was felt as far away as the San Francisco Bay area, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The biggest aftershock registered a magnitude 4.6.
Some 79,000 homes and businesses were without power in Ferndale and surrounding Humboldt County shortly after the quake, according to the electric grid tracking website PowerOutage.us.
PG&E crews were out assessing the utility’s gas and electric system for any damage and hazards, which could take several days, company spokesperson Karly Hernandez said.
Reporting by Nathan Frandino in Rio Dell, Calif.; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta in Calsbad, Calif; Rich McKay in Atlanta, Brendan O’Brien in Chicago, Laila Kearney in New York City and Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Mark Porter, Lisa Shumaker and Richard Chang
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.