News

China-based businesses have been sinking money into various automotive operations—from glass and tire makers to technology developers and car makers—for several years, reflecting Beijing’s goal of eventually dominating the world’s car business. That effort accelerated during the first half of 2017, with eight overseas deals totaling more than $5.5 billion in Chinese investments, compared with nine investments for all of last year. The list includes the takeover of troubled Japanese air-bag maker Takata Corp. , the purchase of a U.S. flying-car developer and the acquisition of a sizable stake in Silicon Valley’s Tesla Inc. TSLA 1.43% by games and social-media company Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Lithium is currently extracted from brines beneath the deserts of South America and evaporated using the energy of the sun. But an increasing proportion is coming from crushing rock in Australia and processing the mineral in China, which is more energy intensive. Goldman Sachs expects capacity addition by hard rock to be equal to brine by 2020 in order to meet demand from electric vehicles. In addition, most of the new supply is coming from smaller mining companies rather than established players, according to Francis Condon, an energy and mining analyst at fund manager RobecoSAM. “We’re starting to see new sources being found and smaller mining companies and also nonmining companies getting involved,” says Mr Condon. “Some of these opportunities are arising where environmental codes are not as strong and social settings not as protective or inclusive. It’s a combination of risks.”

Tesla Inc.’s sales in Hong Kong came to a standstill after authorities slashed a tax break for electric vehicles on April 1, demonstrating how sensitive the company’s performance can be to government incentive programs. Not a single newly purchased Tesla model was registered in Hong Kong in April, according to official data from the city’s Transportation Department analyzed by The Wall Street Journal. In March, shortly after the tax change was announced and ahead of the April 1 deadline, 2,939 Tesla vehicles were registered there—almost twice as many as in the last six months of 2016.

Wall Street investors have gone cold on one of the main mechanisms banks invented to fund the green-energy revolution. The business structure, known as the yieldco, feeds dividends from operating solar and wind farms to investors. Yieldcos raised $7.9 billion in public equity in 2014 and 2015 but only $1 billion since then, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The shift is further fallout from the collapse of yieldco promoter SunEdison Inc. and has changed the way clean-energy developers finance themselves. In years past, they started yieldcos to buy projects once they were operating, recycling the capital into new installations. Now, they’re turning to a large and deepening pool of buyers — insurance companies and pension funds — to provide funding and sometimes take control of income-producing assets.

Solar- and wind-generated power, being much more expensive than conventional fossil-fuel-generated electricity, would only be used sparingly if it weren’t for government support. And while fossil-fuel producers and users pay billions of dollars of taxes and fees to the government, renewable-energy sources are net tax sinks, even when the billions of dollars given through various state governments to the wind and solar industries are ignored.

In a state that prides itself as a global leader in protecting the environment, recycling rates for beverage containers have dropped to their lowest point in almost a decade amid the continued closure of centers that pay for bottles and cans and the fallout from changes to California’s recycling program. Beyond the environmental concerns, the financial effects are also growing — pinching large supermarket chains and low-income residents. . . . RePlanet, a recycling collection network that partners with grocery chains to provide nearby recycling centers, announced in January 2016 that it would be closing 191 of its recycling centers in California. Scientists make water bottles the old-fashioned way to see if they were toxic to early Californians The company said it was shutting the locations in part because of a reduction in state fees and declines in the commodity pricing of aluminum and PET plastic. It also cited rising operating costs, such as increases in the minimum wage and requirements for health insurance and workers compensation insurance.

Last November, Japan’s Environment Ministry issued a stark warning: the amount of solar panel waste Japan produces every year will rise from 10,000 to 800,000 tons by 2040, and the nation has no plan for safely disposing of it. Neither does California, a world leader in deploying solar panels. Only Europe requires solar panel makers to collect and dispose of solar waste at the end of their lives. All of which begs the question: just how big of a problem is solar waste?

Residential solar has seen brighter days.

As detailed in the most recent U.S. Solar Market Insight report, national residential PV installations fell both year-over-year (17 percent) and quarter-over-quarter (11 percent) for the first time since GTM Research began tracking the market on a quarterly basis in 2010. That’s a big deal.

When one takes a closer look at the data, it’s clear that much of this downturn can be pegged to the fortunes of California, which is still the largest state market for residential PV. But the state’s standing is diminishing.

In Q1, California accounted for its smallest share of the national market at 35 percent — down from 42 percent in Q1 2016 — while falling over 30 percent year-over-year.

Expanding mass-transit systems is a pillar of green and “new urbanist” thinking, but with few exceptions, the idea of ever-larger numbers of people commuting into an urban core ignores a major shift in the labor economy: More people are working from home. True, in a handful of large metropolitan regions — what we might call “legacy cities” — trains and buses remain essential. This is particularly true of New York, which accounts for a remarkable 43% of the nation’s mass-transit commuters, and of other venerable cities, such as San Francisco, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. Together, these metros account for 56% of all mass-transit commuting. But for most of the rest of the country, transit use — despite often-massive infrastructure investment — has either stagnated or declined. Among the 21 metropolitan areas that have opened substantially new urban-rail systems since 1970, mass transit’s share of work trips has declined, on average, from 5.3% to 5%. During the same period, the drive-alone share of work trips, notes demographer Wendell Cox, has gone up from 71.9% to 76.1%. Meantime, the proportion of the labor force working from home continues to grow. In 1980, 2.3% of workers performed their duties primarily at home; by 2015, this figure had doubled to 4.6%, only slightly behind the proportion of people who commute via mass transit. In legacy core-metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), the number of people working from home is not quite half that of those commuting by transit. In the 47 MSAs without legacy cores, according to the American Community Survey, the number of people working from home was nearly 250% higher than people going to work on trains or buses.

On Monday, a team of prominent researchers sharply critiqued an influential paper arguing that wind, solar, and hydroelectric power could affordably meet most of the nation’s energy needs by 2055, saying it contained modeling errors and implausible assumptions that could distort public policy and spending decisions (see “Fifty-States Plan Charts a Path Away from Fossil Fuels”). The rebuttal appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same journal that ran the original 2015 paper. Several of the nearly two dozen researchers say they were driven to act because the original authors declined to publish what they viewed as necessary corrections, and the findings were influencing state and federal policy proposals. The fear is that legislation will mandate goals that can’t be achieved with available technologies at reasonable prices, leading to “wildly unrealistic expectations” and “massive misallocation of resources,” says David Victor, an energy policy researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and coauthor of the critique. “That is both harmful to the economy, and creates the seeds of a backlash.”

The Democratic governor gave his usual rally cry in this coastal Chinese city, imploring the packed ballroom to help reinforce a global commitment to climate change. But a more specific theme also emerged, an undercurrent in his five-night trip that he’s echoed in several meetings with officials: Brown is looking to China for the future of California’s electric vehicles. The state aims to put 4 million to 5 million electric cars on roads by 2030, he said at the event, “and we aren’t going to get there until Chinese business people, Chinese government leaders make it a priority to develop batteries and electric cars. And we will too.”

At that volume, California’s three-decade-old consumer-recycling program should be considered a smashing success. But the CalRecycle system is in trouble and most agree it needs to be, well, recycled. . . • Hundreds of recycling centers across the state have shuttered since last year, stung by plummeting scrap rates on the global market over the past four years. • Declining oil and natural gas prices — used to remanufacture plastic bottles from recycled mulch — have made regeneration more expensive.

IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute was commissioned by the Transport Department and the Swedish Energy Agency investigated the lithium-ion battery climate impact seen from a life cycle perspective. It’s the batteries intended for electric cars that were included in the study. The two authors Lisbeth Dahllöf and Mia Roman has done a meta-study, that is to say, gone through and compiled existing studies. The report shows that battery production leads to high emissions. For every kilowatt hour of storage capacity in the battery creates emissions of 150 to 200 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents, already at the factory. The scientists have not studied the individual car brands of batteries, how these particular produced or what electricity they use. But if we to an understanding of the importance of battery size takes an example: two common electric cars on the market, the Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S, have batteries in about 30 kWh and 100 kWh.

For solar jobs, Hoffman references data reported by the solar power industry. I looked up and found the Solar Foundation paper Hoffman references. What Hoffman defines as “workers” who are “employed” by the U.S. solar industry are actually defined by the Solar Foundation as jobs which the solar industry “supports.” The Solar Foundation liberally defines jobs “supported” by the solar power industry as to include every component on the solar industry chain, plus additional jobs like lawyers, lobbyists, public relations professionals, government employees overseeing the solar power industry, permitting officers, plumbers, electricians, salesmen, land acquisition specialists, and financiers.