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BFD Expert Voices - Climate Deals

BFD Expert Voices

☕️ Sip of the week: A Bushmills Irish Coffee from Twin Peaks Tavern in the heart of Castro in San Francisco.

About 40 miles east of San Francisco, a $110 million plant is turning waste from a landfill into renewable natural gas, capable of powering everything from trucks to data centers.

Why it matters: The first-of-its-kind facility will play a role in bringing down the cost of factories to make the clean fuel.

Driving the news: Climate tech developer Ameresco, utility PG&E, and waste company Republic Services combined to build the plant, dubbed the Keller Canyon RNG facility.

The companies held an official ribbon cutting yesterday in Pittsburg, Calif.

Officials and project developers gathered under a blazing hot sun, in front of snaking metal pipes and tanks taller than a street light, to celebrate the opening of a plant that took several years to develop.

During remarks, the head of the California Air Resources Board, Liane Randolph, said the project is "an important contribution to advancing the climate strategies that California has to meet our net zero target by 2045."

Behind the press conference, a sprawling valley of covered landfill waste was silently decaying and Class 8 trucks filled with trash rumbled by every few minutes.

Zoom in: The facility can inject 1 billion cubic feet of RNG per year into PG&E's pipeline, one-quarter of what the company expects to deliver by 2025.

Part of the landfill biogas is being used to run a power plant nearby that is powering the facility.

How it works: Republic Services sends trucks of waste from the community to the landfill.

The waste is covered and connected to a vacuum system. When it decays, methane is tapped and piped down to the RNG plant.

The plant cleans up the biogas, making it "pipeline ready," and sends it 3 miles to PG&E's testing site. The clean RNG is then injected into the utility's pipeline.

PG&E customers, like trucking fleets and industrial processing facilities, can buy the gas from the utility.

The big picture: RNG from landfills don't just create power, they're a solution for dealing with the pesky problem of waste emissions.

Landfills are the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the U.S. and the second largest in California, said CARB's Randolph at the event.

What's next: PG&E is planning other landfill-to-gas projects, and the utility says the Keller RNG plant will help lower costs and speed up future deployments.

The Keller plant is the 434th RNG project in North America, and there are another 450 under construction or in development, according to the nonprofit RNG Coalition.

Trash power

The Keller Canyon RNG facility, which cleans up methane produced by landfill waste to be used in PG&E's natural gas pipeline.

The Keller Canyon RNG facility cleans up methane produced by landfill waste to be used in PG&E's natural gas pipeline. Photo: Katie Fehrenbacher/Axios

The Department of Energy is investing $1.5 billion in transmission projects to support grids across the West, the South and the East Coast. 

Why it's the BFD: A lack of transmission is a key barrier to adding more clean electricity to the power grid. 

Zoom in: The DOE unveiled the new selections for its $2.5 billion revolving fund, created under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, that lets it directly contract for power capacity.

The selected projects will help unlock over 7 gigawatts of new power-generating capacity in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The big picture: Demand for clean electricity is soaring for the first time in decades, and transmission lines are a crucial way to enable that added capacity.

The BFD: Grid upgrade

Illustration of an electrical power tower in the shape of a lightning bolt.

☢️ Three Mile Island owner seeks government backing: The Department of Energy is weighing a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for a plan to reopen the nuclear plant as part of Constellation Energy's agreement with Microsoft. 

💰 EVgo's $1.05B loan: Charging company EVgo has secured a conditional commitment for a $1.05 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office.

The loan will be provided by the Federal Financing Bank, and the DOE says EVgo will not need to raise any third-party equity to close the loan and begin drawing it down.

The funding will enable the development of 7,500 fast-charging stations across the U.S.

🚗 Tesla sales up, but misses estimate: Electric automaker Tesla announced that sales of its EVs rose 6.4 percent in the third quarter, the first quarterly increase this year and potentially a sign that demand for EVs may be recovering, reports the New York Times.

But the earnings figures came in slightly under expectations, and Tesla's stock dropped this morning.

🏭 New factory for better steel: Startup Allium, which makes longer-lasting steel, opened up its first factory this morning in Billerica, Mass.

The company, which coats customer steel with a stainless steel layer, is backed by Propeller, Aera VC, Greatwave Ventures, and Anthropocene Ventures.

Temperature check

Illustration of an ice cream cone with a melted puddle of ice cream that looks like the earth.

• Fidelity raised $250m for its first dedicated VC fund. Go deeper

• Mstack, a Houston-based manufacturing chemicals sourcing platform, raised $40m in Series A equity and debt funding co-led by Lightspeed and Alpha Wave. Go deeper

• Sepion Technologies, a batteries materials company based in Alameda, Calif., secured a $17.5m grant from CALSTART and the California Energy Commission to build a lithium-ion battery separator manufacturing facility in Sacramento, Calif. Go deeper

• Powin, a battery project developer based in Portland, Ore., has secured a revolving credit facility of up to $200m primarily from insurance accounts managed by KKR. Go deeper

• Insight Partners invested in Sysdyne Technologies, a Stamford, Conn., provider of tech solutions for ready-mix concrete operations. Go deeper

• Ithaca Energy completed its £754m purchase of most of Eni's oil and gas producing assets in the U.K. North Sea. Go deeper

• Better Earth, a compostable food packaging producer based in Atlanta, has acquired SaaS platform Betterbin, reports Axios Pro Retail Deals. Go deeper

• Nickel Road, a portfolio company of Vortus Investment Advisors, sold its DJ Basin assets to Prairie Operating Co. for $84.5m. Go deeper

Hot deals

• Roger Tambay and Roger Kempa have been appointed chief growth officer and chief financial officer, respectively, of NatureWorks. Tambay was previously vice president of business development and sustainable packaging for St. Johns Packaging in Canada. Kempa was previously the interim chief financial officer at NatureWorks. Go deeper

• Kian Capital Partners promoted Carter Fields to VP and Thomas Bullock and Doyle Silvia to senior associates. Go deeper

• Gurbir Grewal is stepping down as the SEC's top enforcement officer. Go deeper

It's personnel

😎 Katie is looking forward to the cooler temperatures in San Francisco today.

Thank you to Michael Flaherty and Chris Speckhard for today's edits.

And thank you for reading Climate Deals! Please share with your friends, family and landfill users.

October 03, 2024

1 big thing: Trash power