Energy majors BP and Equinor have terminated their power agreement with the US state of New York for a 1.3 gigawatt (GW) wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean, reports Bloomberg. The companies have blamed changing economic circumstances, which made the Empire Wind 2 project unviable, it adds. The deal was signed in 2022, and would have seen BP and Equinor develop the wind complex about 15 miles south of New York’s Long Island, with 147 turbines spread over 80,000 acres of open sea, the Financial Times reports. The deal had a strike price of $107.50 per megawatt-hour (MWh), but the companies had already petitioned the state utilities regulator to renegotiate the price of the credits, the article notes, requesting relief that would have seen the price increase by two-thirds to $177.84/MWh. BP and Equinor have pointed to the “unforeseeable economic forces” – including inflation stemming from the war in Ukraine and Covid-19, supply chain bottlenecks and interest rate increases, along with permitting delays – which affected the “financial attractiveness” of the project, the FT adds. New York’s climate law calls for the state to get 70% of its electricity from renewables by 2030, including a target to install 9GW of offshore wind capacity by 2035, the article states. The offshore wind industry is expected to play a major role in helping US president Joe Biden and several states meet their goals to decarbonise the power grid and combat climate change, but progress has slowed in 2023, notes Reuters. Offshore wind developers have cancelled contracts to sell power in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey, as well as threatening to cancel agreements in other states, as project costs rise, it adds. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the first US large-scale offshore wind project has produced power for the first time, reports the Guardian. The first turbine in the Vineyard Wind development “started to whirr ” on Tuesday, delivering around 5MW of power to the New England grid, it continues. The project is expected to have five turbines operational in the early part of 2024, before eventually having 62 turbines in total, enough to power 400,000 homes, the article adds.

Britain’s nuclear power output has its lowest level since 1982, in a “major setback for the UK’s net-zero goals” and amid warnings of a cold snap, reports the Daily Telegraph in an article that was trailed on its frontpage. Prolonged outages at several nuclear sites as well as the permanent closure of Hinkley Point B power station has caused nuclear power output to fall from 48 to 41 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2023, according to data published by the government and EDF, the article continues. This marks a 15% decline compared with a year ago, meaning nuclear supplied just 13% of the UK’s electricity last year, compared with 30% in the 1990s, it adds. (For more on the UK’s electricity mix, see Carbon Brief’s recent in-depth analysis.) The UK’s current nuclear fleet of five nuclear power plants is scheduled to diminish further with two more set to close by the end of 2026, reports Bloomberg. The UK has a target to build as much as 24GW of new nuclear capacity by 2050, with the government due to publish a roadmap on how to hit this “ambitious” goal, it adds. To reach this goal, developers would need to add 16GW in the next decade at a cost of more than £150bn according to estimates from Aurora Energy Research, the article notes. Currently, the only new nuclear power plants to have been approved are the 3.2GW Hinkley Point C power plant, which is set for completion in 2028, and a proposed, near-identical Sizewell C project, which is awaiting a final investment decision, notes City AM. 

Oil prices have risen sharply amid fears that mounting tensions in the Middle East could disrupt global supplies, reports the Times. Global benchmark price Brent crude has climbed by more than 3.4% to $78.50 a barrel, the article continues, reversing five days of losses as disruption at a key oilfield in Libya added to “fears that the widening Israel-Gaza conflict could affect crucial transport routes in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf”. Protests in Libya – a member of the Opec cartel of oil-producing nations – forced the shutdown of production at the 300,000 barrel a day Sharara oilfield, it notes. 

Elsewhere, Russian energy giant Gazprom has announced a new daily record for the amount of gas supplied to China, as Russian president Vladimir Putin “seeks to prop up his war economy”, reports the Daily Telegraph. While the state-owned company did not put a figure on the daily amount supplied, it said total exports for 2023 via the Power of Siberia pipeline amounted to 22.7bn cubic metres, the article continues. This was itself a record, at about 50% more than the 15.4bcm supplied in 2022, the article notes. In 2023, the US as a whole extracted more oil and gas than ever before and global fossil fuel companies invested “twice as much in oil and gas as they should, it they wanted to avert catastrophic levels of heating”, notes an article in the Guardian, which looks at how big oil “fully owned the villain role” in 2023. Meanwhile a piece in the Economist explores who the “shrewdest operators” in today’s oil market are.  

Planning rules in the UK are to be relaxed to allow heat pumps and solar panels to be more easily installed on listed buildings, ministers have announced, reports the Daily Telegraph in a frontpage story. Owners of the just-under three million listed properties in England will no longer need to apply for permission from the housing department in order to install green technologies, it continues. Under the current system, people whose homes are listed or located in a conservation area must apply for individual building consent to make upgrades, under rules designed to ensure that “inappropriate and unsightly additions” cannot be made to historic buildings, the article notes. Ministers are now “revamping” the system so that councils can give blanket permission to whole areas to install net-zero technology, it adds. 

In other UK news, the Guardian reports that several of the world’s biggest carmakers lobbied the government to try to weaken or delay rules to accelerate electric car sales and cut the UK’s carbon emissions. Toyota, Jaguar Land Rover and Nissan are among the companies that asked for delays in enforcement of the zero-emission vehicle mandate, which obliges them to sell an increasing number of electric cars or face heavy fines, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Volkswagen, Ford and Tesla conversely argued the ZEV mandate should be tougher, the article notes. The lobbying took place within responses to a government consultation, which was shared with the Guardian by Tom Riley, author of the Fast Charge newsletter.

The world’s largest green hydrogen project, run by the state-owned Sinopec in Xinjiang province, will “only reach its full annual capacity of 20,000 tonnes in the fourth quarter of 2025” due to technological challenges in cutting emissions, reports Bloomberg. This is despite the company previously saying it expected to reach full capacity “upon completion”, the newspaper adds. Elsewhere, the state broadcaster CGTN reports that the Baotang energy storage station in Guangdong Province, “the largest facility of its kind” in the Greater Bay Area – which encompasses Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macau – was “officially put into operation” on Wednesday, with an installed capacity of 300 megawatts which is used to store energy generated from renewable sources. 

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that temperature records were broken in cities across China in 2023, “echoing the global heatwave phenomena that also engulfed most of the world”. CGTN announces that China’s average temperature in 2023 was the “highest since records began in 1961”, according to China’s national climate centre. It adds that the temperature across most of the country was “higher by 0.5-1C”, with “127 national weather stations breaking records for daily high temperatures” in 2023. The Communist Party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily runs an article outlining the various measures different provinces have taken to “ensure that the disaster-affected population can spend a warm winter” in the run-up to the Chinese new year. 

Elsewhere, Chinese financial outlet Yicai carries a commentary by Lin Boqiang, director of the China energy policy institute at Xiamen University, who argues that “mandatory requirements to store a certain proportion of energy would help address the cost issues of the grid stemming from the instability of wind power”. State-supporting outlet Guancha carries a comment piece by Zhu Dajian, director of the institute for sustainable development and management at Tongji University, who writes: “China opposes developed countries’ failure to address their historical cumulative emissions while accusing China of having the highest current emissions globally…We will take a position that accounts for both China’s interests and global considerations, advancing the dual carbon goals at our own pace.”

The climate benefits of hydrogen “evaporate” if it is made with fossil fuels, states an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, which welcomes the Biden administration’s “unexpectedly stringent rules” last month. It is much cheaper to produce hydrogen using methane than with electricity, the article notes, but subsidies that fall under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and offer generous tax credits of $3 per kilogram could help upend these economics. The article laments that the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, the California-led public-private consortium behind California’s hydrogen hub plan, pushed back against stricter requirements. It argues that “being strict about what counts as clean and green is the right thing to do for the climate”, and with clean hydrogen still in its infancy, state and federal leaders should monitor how incentives are helping to grow a sustainable industry. “We can’t afford to squander tens of billions of federal climate funding on projects with questionable environmental effects,” the article concludes.

A new study estimates that phasing down hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – a potent greenhouse gas – in line with the Kigali Amendment could provide US$37tn in economic benefits in the US (in 2020 prices). Using the latest climate science and economics as represented by integrated assessment models, the researchers calculate the “social cost” of HFCs, which is the damage one unit of the gas imposes over its time in the atmosphere. They find that commonly used approximations based on the Global Warming Potential metric are a “poor proxy” for the true social cost, and that if HFCs were phased down faster than the Kigali Amendment agreed, the climate benefits could rise to US$41tn.

The fear that attention on solar radiation management (SRM) or carbon dioxide removal (CDR) might crowd out the desire to cut emissions is frequently cited as a risk of climate “geoengineering”. However, a new paper finds “little to no support” for this “moral hazard” argument among 320,000 Facebook users. The paper says: “For the most part, talking about SRM or CDR does not motivate our study population to support a large US environmental non-profit’s mission, nor does it turn them off relative to baseline climate messaging, except when using extreme messengers and framings.” The study points to the “importance of actors and reasoned narratives to help guide public discourse”, the authors conclude.