Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

A pot of unspent federal money could have prevented Jackson’s water crisis

News Feed
Thursday, May 23, 2024

Late in the summer of 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency sent the Mississippi state government a routine report assessing its use of federal funding for water infrastructure. The agency concluded with the words: “no findings” — that is, the EPA found no issue with how Mississippi was spending its money. The very next day, on August 29, as many as 180,000 residents in the Jackson area lost access to clean drinking water and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba both declared a state of emergency.  More than twelve inches of rain had fallen across the region, causing the Pearl River, which begins about 75 miles northeast of Jackson and flows south to the Gulf Coast, to flood. Jackson’s main water treatment plant was overrun. Water pressure throughout the system plunged, leaving residents — along with hospitals and fire stations — without safe drinking water. Many homes had no water at all. Images of the National Guard distributing cases of bottled water to residents in miles-long queues flashed across headlines. Contrary to the EPA’s conclusion, now available in a new report by researchers at the Project for Government Oversight, or POGO, the state’s capital was one heavy rainfall away from a public health crisis that captured the attention of the nation.  Nearly two years later, thousands of residents across Jackson are still contending with low pressure and brown water. While blame for the crisis has largely fallen on the state and local governments, POGO’s report spotlights the EPA’s role. The researchers obtained hundreds of documents that reveal a “troubling trend”: EPA officials knew that federal funding was not being dispersed by the state to Jackson for infrastructure improvements, and they failed to make note of these practices in their assessments.  “EPA oversight is very important,” said Nick Schwellenbach, one of the researchers on POGO’s report. “The agency can’t force states to spend money in a certain way, but its oversight can nudge and prod states towards best practices.” The investigation highlights a breakdown in communication between different arms of the EPA: While the agency has been diligent about flagging drinking water issues in Jackson — suing the city in 2020 for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act — its supervision of the state’s use of federal dollars for water infrastructure updates has been limited.  “There’s a lot that EPA oversight can do to head off disaster,” Schwellenbach said. “EPA was saying [to Jackson], ‘You’re out of compliance with federal law’ but wasn’t going to the state and saying, ‘What are you doing to help?’” A Mississippi National Guard member directs traffic at a water distribution site in Jackson, Mississippi in September, 2022. Rory Doyle for The Washington Post via Getty Images Long before the heavy rains that set off Jackson’s water crisis, the city’s infrastructure had been crumbling due to decades of neglect. Like many other mid-sized cities across the country — Memphis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh — Jackson experienced a decline in the late twentieth century after its white, middle-class residents moved to the suburbs, severely limiting tax dollars available for infrastructure improvements. Today, Jackson is more than 80 percent Black, up from 50 percent in the 1980s, and a quarter of its residents live in poverty. As a result of the shifting demographics, the city council became majority-Black and Democrat, and by the 1980s friction with the mostly white Republican state government had developed.  When Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, it established a program whereby municipalities could use federal funding to update their beleaguered water infrastructure. The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund is administered by state environment departments, which review applications by local governments and distribute funding in the form of loans each year. In accordance with the Fund, the EPA is responsible for making annual reports on where the money is going. According to the agency, its audits are parts of a “circle of accountability,” and are meant to “guide funding decisions and program management policies.” But in the case of Jackson, the reports seem to have functioned as a “rubber stamp” of Mississippi’s management of the fund, POGO researchers wrote.  Multiple arms of the EPA flagged issues with the agency’s oversight of the fund over the past decade. The Office of Inspector General, the agency’s internal watchdog, found issues with the reports stretching back to 2011 and as recently as last year. In a 2014 document, the OIG noted that the EPA’s audits often do little to ensure that federal dollars from the fund go to communities with the greatest public health need or to disadvantaged communities — which, as POGO researchers pointed out, are often one and the same. Then, in a 2017 internal memo that the POGO report surfaced, EPA officials cited an unspent pool of money in Mississippi that represented “unrealized potential to protect public health.” That year, the agency’s regional office sent Mississippi a gleaming audit.   While Mississippi has historically enjoyed generous allocations from the Fund, with more than $260 million allotted between 2017 and 2021 alone, the city of Jackson has not reaped the benefits. In a civil rights complaint filed with the EPA in 2022, the NAACP noted that Jackson has received loans just three times in the program’s 25-year history. The Bear Creek Water Authority in the largely rural and white Madison County, by comparison, received funds nine out of the past 25 years. (The EPA dismissed the NAACP complaint earlier this month.)  The Mississippi state government has denied that Jackson received less funding than other parts of the state, with Governor Tate Reeves writing in 2022 that there is “no factual basis whatsoever to suggest that there has been an ‘underinvestment’ in the City.” His account, the POGO researchers noted, does not acknowledge the state’s historically unforgiving loan program and the city’s wariness of taking on debt.  Part of the problem, Schwellenbach noted, is that the EPA does not proactively make its oversight reports public. To complete its investigation, Schwellenbach’s team had to request hundreds of records through a freedom of information request and pay a fee to have them processed. In addition to reviewing the EPA’s program assessments for dozens of states, which they compared to Mississippi, the researchers read through internal EPA memos and inspector general reports and interviewed EPA staffers to develop a comprehensive picture of the agency’s knowledge of conditions in Jackson.  “The EPA’s reviews of state programs are something of a black hole,” Janet Pritchard, the director of water infrastructure policy for the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, told POGO. “While some states have recently revised how they define ‘disadvantaged communities’ and other policies that govern the distribution of state revolving fund awards … the extent or impact of EPA engagement remains unclear.” Johnnie Purify, an EPA staffer in the Region 4 office, which oversees Mississippi, told POGO that he “has no concerns with making EPA oversight reports public, and said they would be helpful to external parties and the public at large.” The EPA’s failure to alert Mississippi about its uneven distribution of federal funds has had severe consequences for the people of Jackson, where brown-tinged water continues to flow out of taps across the city. These days, as little as a powerful thunderstorm can upset the fragile water infrastructure and upend residents’ lives for weeks. The ongoing crisis has also contributed to further population decline: Last year, the Clarion Ledger reported that Jackson is the fastest shrinking city in the nation. The City of Jackson’s O.B. Curtis Water Plant in September, 2022 AP Photo/Steve Helber In November 2022, a federal judge appointed Ted Henifin, an engineer by training, to manage the city’s water system. Local advocates initially felt hopeful that Henifin’s expertise would go far towards improving conditions in the water system, but over time, they became frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of transparency in his decision-making.  In December 2022, the Biden Administration announced a $600 million allocation in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for Jackson to repair its water system, a historic sum that Henifin has the authority to use as he chooses. In early 2023, Henifin established JXN Water, a private company, to update the city’s water system, prompting fears from the public that the system itself may soon be privatized, and fueling concerns about transparency, as corporations are not subject to public disclosure laws. Repeated requests by local advocates for data on water sampling efforts have gone unanswered. Local advocates also became frustrated after Henifin inexplicably fired Tariq Abdul-Tawwab, a long-time community advocate and the only Black employee at JXN Water. Last summer, Henifin told a federal judge that there was “no health risk” in the drinking water that he was aware of, despite reports that some residents’ tap water was still the color of tea. After his firing, Abdul-Tawwab began managing the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s ground support team, a group of emergency responders that work on “anything that the community needs help with that the state is not helping them with, and that the city may not have the resources to help with,” he told Grist. Residents call in to request assistance on a range of issues — leaky roofs, burst sewage pipes — but the most common complaint is the drinking water. Members of Abdul-Tawwab’s team spend much of their time delivering bottled water and filters and testing residents’ taps for heavy metals like lead or bacteria like E-Coli. The results often come back positive.  While he was careful not to get into the details of his firing, Abdul-Tawwab was open about his frustrations with Henifin’s management of Jackson’s financial resources. Journalists occasionally visit Jackson to report on the decrepit infrastructure, he said, but hardly ask questions about where the federal money meant to help residents is actually going.  “Anyone in the United States of America reading this story needs to understand that the state of Mississippi is taking steps to make sure that Jackson doesn’t get what it needs,” Abdul-Tawwab said. In an email, Henifin told Grist  that he stood by his statement that Jackson’s water is clean, noting that JXN Water conducts regular tests in accordance with federal permitting requirements. He also stated that brown water complaints are investigated as soon as they are received through the company’s call center, and that they don’t occur often.  “JXN Water posts all Quarterly Reports on our website, hosts quarterly public meetings to address questions, and regularly speaks to community groups when invited to participate in their meetings,” he wrote. “Transparency is not an issue.” However, the many Jackson residents that Grist has interviewed point out that while the water coming out of the city’s treatment plants may be clean, after it has traveled through the thousands of miles of pipes, the water comes out of their faucets in a vastly different condition. Requests for extensive testing of the network of pipes have sometimes gone unanswered, said Brooke Floyd, a director at the People’s Advocacy Institute, the organization that launched the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She said she found it hard to believe that, as Henifin told Grist, residents were not reporting contaminated water to JXN Water’s call center, since the ground team gets frequent reports of water “with stuff floating in it.”  Floyd acknowledged that JXN Water is proactive about posting its reports on its Facebook page, but said that advocates’ concerns about transparency go beyond the quarterly paperwork — they want to be involved in making decisions. Last month, a federal judge granted advocates at the Mississippi Poor Peoples’ Campaign and the Peoples’ Advocacy Institute their request to become parties to the EPA’s lawsuit against the city of Jackson. A seat at the table of the legal proceedings, they hope, will allow them to have a say in how federal funds are spent and ward off threats of privatization. “When Henifin leaves, and the DOJ and the EPA leave, because they will, whatever is done — we will have to live with that,” Floyd said. She pointed to Flint, Michigan, where more than a decade after that city’s lead water crisis began, the system is still not fixed. Schwellenbach, the POGO researcher, pointed out that the situation in Jackson is emblematic of a systemic problem, and could be a harbinger of worse things to come if the EPA does not step up its oversight. He pointed to Memphis, where the aging water system is coming under stress from climate-related impacts and years of disinvestment. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law represented a massive infusion of federal dollars to help cities update their water infrastructure, but to make sure the funds are used to actually help communities, the EPA needs to step up its involvement.  “The EPA could have raised red flags earlier and more aggressively to push the states to do the right thing,” he said. “I think the most important thing here is to learn lessons from what went wrong so we don’t have these kinds of crises in the future.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A pot of unspent federal money could have prevented Jackson’s water crisis on May 23, 2024.

A new report surfaces a trail of red flags that the EPA didn’t raise.

Late in the summer of 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency sent the Mississippi state government a routine report assessing its use of federal funding for water infrastructure. The agency concluded with the words: “no findings” — that is, the EPA found no issue with how Mississippi was spending its money.

The very next day, on August 29, as many as 180,000 residents in the Jackson area lost access to clean drinking water and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba both declared a state of emergency. 

More than twelve inches of rain had fallen across the region, causing the Pearl River, which begins about 75 miles northeast of Jackson and flows south to the Gulf Coast, to flood. Jackson’s main water treatment plant was overrun. Water pressure throughout the system plunged, leaving residents — along with hospitals and fire stations — without safe drinking water. Many homes had no water at all. Images of the National Guard distributing cases of bottled water to residents in miles-long queues flashed across headlines. Contrary to the EPA’s conclusion, now available in a new report by researchers at the Project for Government Oversight, or POGO, the state’s capital was one heavy rainfall away from a public health crisis that captured the attention of the nation. 

Nearly two years later, thousands of residents across Jackson are still contending with low pressure and brown water. While blame for the crisis has largely fallen on the state and local governments, POGO’s report spotlights the EPA’s role. The researchers obtained hundreds of documents that reveal a “troubling trend”: EPA officials knew that federal funding was not being dispersed by the state to Jackson for infrastructure improvements, and they failed to make note of these practices in their assessments. 

“EPA oversight is very important,” said Nick Schwellenbach, one of the researchers on POGO’s report. “The agency can’t force states to spend money in a certain way, but its oversight can nudge and prod states towards best practices.” The investigation highlights a breakdown in communication between different arms of the EPA: While the agency has been diligent about flagging drinking water issues in Jackson — suing the city in 2020 for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act — its supervision of the state’s use of federal dollars for water infrastructure updates has been limited. 

“There’s a lot that EPA oversight can do to head off disaster,” Schwellenbach said. “EPA was saying [to Jackson], ‘You’re out of compliance with federal law’ but wasn’t going to the state and saying, ‘What are you doing to help?’”

A Mississippi National Guard member directs traffic at a water distribution site at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds in Jackson, Mississippi on September, 1, 2022.
A Mississippi National Guard member directs traffic at a water distribution site in Jackson, Mississippi in September, 2022. Rory Doyle for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Long before the heavy rains that set off Jackson’s water crisis, the city’s infrastructure had been crumbling due to decades of neglect. Like many other mid-sized cities across the country — Memphis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh — Jackson experienced a decline in the late twentieth century after its white, middle-class residents moved to the suburbs, severely limiting tax dollars available for infrastructure improvements. Today, Jackson is more than 80 percent Black, up from 50 percent in the 1980s, and a quarter of its residents live in poverty. As a result of the shifting demographics, the city council became majority-Black and Democrat, and by the 1980s friction with the mostly white Republican state government had developed. 

When Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1996, it established a program whereby municipalities could use federal funding to update their beleaguered water infrastructure. The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund is administered by state environment departments, which review applications by local governments and distribute funding in the form of loans each year. In accordance with the Fund, the EPA is responsible for making annual reports on where the money is going. According to the agency, its audits are parts of a “circle of accountability,” and are meant to “guide funding decisions and program management policies.” But in the case of Jackson, the reports seem to have functioned as a “rubber stamp” of Mississippi’s management of the fund, POGO researchers wrote. 

Multiple arms of the EPA flagged issues with the agency’s oversight of the fund over the past decade. The Office of Inspector General, the agency’s internal watchdog, found issues with the reports stretching back to 2011 and as recently as last year. In a 2014 document, the OIG noted that the EPA’s audits often do little to ensure that federal dollars from the fund go to communities with the greatest public health need or to disadvantaged communities — which, as POGO researchers pointed out, are often one and the same. Then, in a 2017 internal memo that the POGO report surfaced, EPA officials cited an unspent pool of money in Mississippi that represented “unrealized potential to protect public health.” That year, the agency’s regional office sent Mississippi a gleaming audit.  

While Mississippi has historically enjoyed generous allocations from the Fund, with more than $260 million allotted between 2017 and 2021 alone, the city of Jackson has not reaped the benefits. In a civil rights complaint filed with the EPA in 2022, the NAACP noted that Jackson has received loans just three times in the program’s 25-year history. The Bear Creek Water Authority in the largely rural and white Madison County, by comparison, received funds nine out of the past 25 years. (The EPA dismissed the NAACP complaint earlier this month.) 

The Mississippi state government has denied that Jackson received less funding than other parts of the state, with Governor Tate Reeves writing in 2022 that there is “no factual basis whatsoever to suggest that there has been an ‘underinvestment’ in the City.” His account, the POGO researchers noted, does not acknowledge the state’s historically unforgiving loan program and the city’s wariness of taking on debt. 

Part of the problem, Schwellenbach noted, is that the EPA does not proactively make its oversight reports public. To complete its investigation, Schwellenbach’s team had to request hundreds of records through a freedom of information request and pay a fee to have them processed. In addition to reviewing the EPA’s program assessments for dozens of states, which they compared to Mississippi, the researchers read through internal EPA memos and inspector general reports and interviewed EPA staffers to develop a comprehensive picture of the agency’s knowledge of conditions in Jackson. 

“The EPA’s reviews of state programs are something of a black hole,” Janet Pritchard, the director of water infrastructure policy for the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, told POGO. “While some states have recently revised how they define ‘disadvantaged communities’ and other policies that govern the distribution of state revolving fund awards … the extent or impact of EPA engagement remains unclear.” Johnnie Purify, an EPA staffer in the Region 4 office, which oversees Mississippi, told POGO that he “has no concerns with making EPA oversight reports public, and said they would be helpful to external parties and the public at large.”


The EPA’s failure to alert Mississippi about its uneven distribution of federal funds has had severe consequences for the people of Jackson, where brown-tinged water continues to flow out of taps across the city. These days, as little as a powerful thunderstorm can upset the fragile water infrastructure and upend residents’ lives for weeks. The ongoing crisis has also contributed to further population decline: Last year, the Clarion Ledger reported that Jackson is the fastest shrinking city in the nation.

The City of Jackson’s O.B. Curtis Water Plant in September, 2022 AP Photo/Steve Helber

In November 2022, a federal judge appointed Ted Henifin, an engineer by training, to manage the city’s water system. Local advocates initially felt hopeful that Henifin’s expertise would go far towards improving conditions in the water system, but over time, they became frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of transparency in his decision-making. 

In December 2022, the Biden Administration announced a $600 million allocation in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for Jackson to repair its water system, a historic sum that Henifin has the authority to use as he chooses. In early 2023, Henifin established JXN Water, a private company, to update the city’s water system, prompting fears from the public that the system itself may soon be privatized, and fueling concerns about transparency, as corporations are not subject to public disclosure laws. Repeated requests by local advocates for data on water sampling efforts have gone unanswered. Local advocates also became frustrated after Henifin inexplicably fired Tariq Abdul-Tawwab, a long-time community advocate and the only Black employee at JXN Water. Last summer, Henifin told a federal judge that there was “no health risk” in the drinking water that he was aware of, despite reports that some residents’ tap water was still the color of tea.

After his firing, Abdul-Tawwab began managing the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s ground support team, a group of emergency responders that work on “anything that the community needs help with that the state is not helping them with, and that the city may not have the resources to help with,” he told Grist. Residents call in to request assistance on a range of issues — leaky roofs, burst sewage pipes — but the most common complaint is the drinking water. Members of Abdul-Tawwab’s team spend much of their time delivering bottled water and filters and testing residents’ taps for heavy metals like lead or bacteria like E-Coli. The results often come back positive. 

While he was careful not to get into the details of his firing, Abdul-Tawwab was open about his frustrations with Henifin’s management of Jackson’s financial resources. Journalists occasionally visit Jackson to report on the decrepit infrastructure, he said, but hardly ask questions about where the federal money meant to help residents is actually going. 

“Anyone in the United States of America reading this story needs to understand that the state of Mississippi is taking steps to make sure that Jackson doesn’t get what it needs,” Abdul-Tawwab said.

In an email, Henifin told Grist  that he stood by his statement that Jackson’s water is clean, noting that JXN Water conducts regular tests in accordance with federal permitting requirements. He also stated that brown water complaints are investigated as soon as they are received through the company’s call center, and that they don’t occur often. 

“JXN Water posts all Quarterly Reports on our website, hosts quarterly public meetings to address questions, and regularly speaks to community groups when invited to participate in their meetings,” he wrote. “Transparency is not an issue.”

However, the many Jackson residents that Grist has interviewed point out that while the water coming out of the city’s treatment plants may be clean, after it has traveled through the thousands of miles of pipes, the water comes out of their faucets in a vastly different condition. Requests for extensive testing of the network of pipes have sometimes gone unanswered, said Brooke Floyd, a director at the People’s Advocacy Institute, the organization that launched the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She said she found it hard to believe that, as Henifin told Grist, residents were not reporting contaminated water to JXN Water’s call center, since the ground team gets frequent reports of water “with stuff floating in it.” 

Floyd acknowledged that JXN Water is proactive about posting its reports on its Facebook page, but said that advocates’ concerns about transparency go beyond the quarterly paperwork — they want to be involved in making decisions. Last month, a federal judge granted advocates at the Mississippi Poor Peoples’ Campaign and the Peoples’ Advocacy Institute their request to become parties to the EPA’s lawsuit against the city of Jackson. A seat at the table of the legal proceedings, they hope, will allow them to have a say in how federal funds are spent and ward off threats of privatization.

“When Henifin leaves, and the DOJ and the EPA leave, because they will, whatever is done — we will have to live with that,” Floyd said. She pointed to Flint, Michigan, where more than a decade after that city’s lead water crisis began, the system is still not fixed.

Schwellenbach, the POGO researcher, pointed out that the situation in Jackson is emblematic of a systemic problem, and could be a harbinger of worse things to come if the EPA does not step up its oversight. He pointed to Memphis, where the aging water system is coming under stress from climate-related impacts and years of disinvestment. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law represented a massive infusion of federal dollars to help cities update their water infrastructure, but to make sure the funds are used to actually help communities, the EPA needs to step up its involvement. 

“The EPA could have raised red flags earlier and more aggressively to push the states to do the right thing,” he said. “I think the most important thing here is to learn lessons from what went wrong so we don’t have these kinds of crises in the future.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A pot of unspent federal money could have prevented Jackson’s water crisis on May 23, 2024.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Why won’t PJM let batteries and clean power bolster a stressed-out grid?

PJM, the largest electric grid operator in the U.S., has a major problem — old, dirty power plants are closing down faster than new clean energy resources can replace them. This mounting grid crisis is already driving up electricity costs for the 65 million people living in PJM’s territory, which stretches from the…

PJM, the largest electric grid operator in the U.S., has a major problem — old, dirty power plants are closing down faster than new clean energy resources can replace them. This mounting grid crisis is already driving up electricity costs for the 65 million people living in PJM’s territory, which stretches from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes. By the end of the decade, the situation could become so dire that it threatens the reliability of PJM’s grid. The blame falls in large part on PJM’s worst-in-the-nation grid-interconnection backlog. New energy projects looking to come online in its region face yearslong wait times before they’re even considered. To make matters worse, energy companies and climate advocates say PJM is dragging its feet on one straightforward way to work around this logjam. Existing wind and solar farms and fossil-fired power plants often have more grid capacity than they actually need during many hours of the day or seasons of the year. Developers could add batteries or other new energy capacity next to these power plants and make use of that surplus grid space. It wouldn’t eliminate the trouble altogether, but it would make a serious dent, clean energy developers say. Federal regulators have repeatedly directed grid operators to allow power plant owners to pursue such additions under what’s called ​“surplus interconnection service” (SIS) rules. But PJM has made it next to impossible for power suppliers to do so, even as most other U.S. grid operators have abided. Critics say PJM’s refusal to follow suit is particularly frustrating: By barring this faster approach, PJM is making its bad grid situation worse. That’s why those critics are asking for federal intervention. This summer, clean energy industry groups and environmental advocates asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to deny the interconnection reform plan submitted by PJM, which was required by last year’s FERC Order 2023. Among their objections to PJM’s plan is its refusal to change the rules it now uses to deny these fast-track additions. In July, renewable energy and battery developer EDP Renewables (EDPR) filed a complaint with FERC asking it to overturn PJM’s denial of its plan to add solar to a wind farm in Indiana. It’s just one of the failed surplus interconnection proposals the developer has brought to the grid operator. Trade groups Advanced Energy United, the American Clean Power Association, and the Solar Energy Industries Association; the environmental group Sierra Club; and fellow clean energy developers Invenergy Solar Development North America and EDF Renewables added their support to EDRP’s complaint. “We go to PJM and say, ​‘Look at this amazing deal. We already have the capacity. Our transmission system is underutilized during the periods we need it. Let’s connect this,’” David Mindham, EDPR’s director of regulatory and market affairs, said during a September webinar. ​“And they say no.” Getting more round-the-clock use out of the grid Mindham’s comments came during a presentation of a report from Gabel Associates, commissioned by the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and other clean energy industry groups, detailing the potential for using this technique to help PJM meet its growing shortage of electricity generation. The focus of the presentation was on surplus interconnection service, the technical term for what is a fairly simple concept: Let energy projects use the grid interconnection capacity they already possess to its fullest potential. Many energy projects don’t use their maximum capacity all 8,760 hours of the year. So-called ​“peaker” plants — fossil-gas-fired power plants that are turned on only during times of high electricity demand — may run just 250 to 1,500 hours per year, for example. And wind and solar farms generate their full capacity only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That leaves plenty of hours when these projects aren’t using their maximum allowed grid capacity — their ​“interconnection service,” in FERC parlance. Surplus interconnection service can fill in those gaps. Mike Borgatti, Gabel Associates’ senior vice president of wholesale power and markets services and co-author of the report, offered the example of a 100-megawatt solar farm that could add batteries to store power during the day and send to the grid after the sun goes down. “At the end of the day, you would end up with 100 megawatts of energy that could be supplied by any combination of solar and storage,” he said. ​“It could be 100 percent storage at some points in time; it could be 100 percent solar at others. It could be, say, 50 megawatts of solar and 50 megawatts of storage. As long as whatever combination of outputs never exceeds 100 megawatts, we’re good to go.” FERC made clear in 2018’s Order 845 and in last year’s Order 2023 that grid operators must enable surplus interconnection service, Borgatti added. And PJM needs to ​“accelerate new entry from high-capacity-value resources, and we need to do it very quickly.” PJM has about 180 gigawatts of total generation capacity. Of that, 43 to 58 gigawatts are expected to shut down by 2030, according to a March report from its independent market monitor. Meanwhile, electricity demand is forecast to rise at a rapid rate, with an estimated 40 gigawatts of new load expected by 2030. Despite these pressures, new power plant construction has stalled. About 160 gigawatts’ worth of projects that are trying to connect to the grid — almost all of them wind, solar, or batteries — are stuck in the interconnection queue. Borgatti estimated that without changes, only about 6.3 gigawatts of ​“stuff we need” can be built by 2030. That’s not enough to make up for PJM’s growing electricity demand and shrinking power plant fleet. The upshot, he said, is that PJM faces an impending ​“resource adequacy shortfall” — a gap between forecasted energy supply and peak demand — of nearly 4 gigawatts by 2029, he said. The underlying barrier is that PJM hasn’t expanded its transmission grid quickly enough to accommodate more energy resources, Borgatti said. That’s a problem bedeviling grid operators across the country, and one FERC has ordered them to solve. But building new transmission lines still takes years to up to a decade. In the face of this grid-capacity challenge, SIS projects are a neat workaround, Borgatti said. Because they make use of previously approved grid capacity, they can undergo an expedited study process that circumvents the standard interconnection queue. That accelerated timeline takes only 270 days, meaning that these projects could go from proposal to construction ​“within less than a year, theoretically.” What’s more, batteries added to solar and wind farms can store power when the grid doesn’t need it and discharge it when it’s in short supply — something that’s already happening regularly in California and Texas. Batteries can also help meet fast-rising demand from corporate energy buyers like data center developers for clean energy that matches up with their power usage on an hour-by-hour basis, EDPR’s Mindham said.

Exxon Mobil says advanced recycling is the answer to plastic waste. But is it really?

Exxon Mobil has touted 'advanced recycling' as a groundbreaking technology that will turn the tide in our plastic crisis. California says it's a lie.

When California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed suit against Exxon Mobil and accused the oil giant of misleading the public about the effectiveness of plastic recycling, many of the allegations surrounded the company’s marketing of a process called “advanced recycling.”In recent years — as longstanding efforts to recycle plastics have faltered — Exxon Mobil has touted advanced recycling as a groundbreaking technology that will turn the tide on the plastic crisis. Company officials and petrochemical trade organizations have used the phrase in radio spots, TV interviews and a variety of marketing material online. In a 2021 blog post, Exxon Mobil president of product solutions Karen McKee painted a particularly promising picture. “Imagine your discarded yogurt containers being transformed into medical equipment for your next doctor’s appointment, and then into the dashboard of your next fuel-efficient car.”But despite its seemingly eco-friendly name, the attorney general’s lawsuit denounced advanced recycling as a “public relations stunt” that largely involves superheating plastics to convert them into fuel. At Exxon Mobil’s only “advanced recycling” facility in Baytown, Texas, only 8% of plastic is remade into new material, while the remaining 92% is processed into fuel that is later burned. Bonta’s lawsuit seeks a court order to prohibit the company from describing the practice as “advanced recycling,” arguing the vast majority of plastic is destroyed. Many environmental advocates and policy experts lauded the legal action as a major step toward ending greenwashing by Exxon Mobil — the world’s largest producer of single-use plastic polymer.“There’s nothing ‘advanced’ about it,” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. “It’s a deception. It’s been a deception for half a century. If they were going to be able to recycle plastic polymer back into virgin resin, they would have done it already. But they are using the same technology we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution. It’s a coke oven, a blast furnace.”As more research has emerged on the limitations of plastics recycling, the revelations have shaken the public’s confidence about what to put in their blue, curbside recycling bins. “The public perception of what’s recyclable with respect to plastic doesn’t match reality,” said Daniel Coffee, a UCLA researcher who studied plastic waste in Los Angeles County. “Recycling, for so long, was thought of as this perfectly crafted solution to single-use plastics. And the clearest answer as to why, is that the public was told so. They were told so, in large part, by an industry-backed misinformation campaign.”Advanced recycling, which is also called chemical recycling, is an umbrella term that typically involves heating or dissolving plastic waste to create fuel, chemicals and waxes — a fraction of which can be used to remake plastic. The most common techniques yield only 1% to 14% of the plastic waste, according to a 2023 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Exxon Mobil has largely used reclaimed plastic for fuel production while ramping up its virgin plastic production, according to Bonta.“You’re essentially drawing oil up, turning it into plastic, and then having to burn more oil to turn that plastic back into oil, which you then burn,” Coffee said.Bonta alleges Exxon Mobil has had a patent for this technology since 1978, and the company is falsely rebranding it as “new” and “advanced.” The practice was tested in the 1990s, but did not continue beyond the trial phase. It recently reemerged after the company learned that the term “advanced recycling” resonated with members of the public at a time of increasing concern over increasing amounts of plastic waste. In December 2022, it announced the start of an advanced recycling program. In a 2023 interview with a Houston television station, an Exxon Mobil representative touted the Baytown facility.“When [customers] buy a plastic product off the shelf, they want to know that it’s sustainable,” the Exxon Mobil employee said. “This is a huge game change for the industry — but I would say society in general.”In response to Bonta’s lawsuit, Exxon Mobil said its Baytown facility has processed 60 million pounds of plastic into “usable raw materials” that otherwise would go to landfills. Experts say that figure pales in comparison with the company’s 31.9 billion-pound annual production capacity.Nationwide, the Baytown plant is one of about five facilities that break plastics down by exposing them to high heat, according to the Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit working on plastic pollution. California has adopted some of the nation’s most strict laws to reduce single-use plastics. Perhaps the most consequential, SB 54, requires the state to sell 25% less single-use plastic packaging and foodware. It also prohibits waste incineration and similar practices from being counted as recycling. Because most plastics cannot be recycled, state officials have struggled to figure out how to dispose of this material. California had previously exported much of its plastic waste to China. But China has banned the import of most foreign plastics, nearly eliminating the market for used plastic.In 2021, about 5.4 million tons of plastic waste was taken to California landfills, according to the latest state disposal data. That same year, more than 625,000 tons of trash was sent to so-called “transformation” facilities, where waste is incinerated, or burned in the absence of oxygen (a process called pyrolysis). California does not track data on how much of this incinerated waste was plastic, according to CalRecycle, the state agency that oversees waste management. The state also doesn’t keep detailed information on how much plastic waste is exported to other states and how they process it.“California’s vision for a waste-free future is focused on reducing waste, reuse, and intentionally designing products that flow back into the system for efficient collection and remanufacturing into new products,” said Maria West, a spokesperson for CalRecycle.If the state is earnest in its pledge to eliminate waste, environmental advocates say the state needs to phase out single-use plastics.“You can’t do anything with plastic but landfill it or burn it,” said Williams. “You can try to repurpose it, but you’ll never compete with virgin stock. And even then, you have to shred it, make it into pellets and feed it into a blast furnace. How is that good for the climate? How is that better than coal?” Newsletter Toward a more sustainable California Get Boiling Point, our newsletter exploring climate change, energy and the environment, and become part of the conversation — and the solution. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Some in this California beach town insist the Tijuana River is poisoning them. Officials disagree

The Tijuana River has been polluted for decades, but in recent years, south San Diego residents say the smell — and their respiratory illnesses — has gotten worse.

IMPERIAL BEACH, Calif. —  The Tijuana River should not be flowing this time of year. But throughout the dry season, it has — delivering millions of gallons a day of an unnatural mix of water, neon green sewage and industrial waste from Tijuana through the city of Imperial Beach to the Pacific Ocean. This 4.4-square-mile beach town of 27,000 largely working-class and Latino residents, sitting just south of San Diego, is appealingly affordable. But it also bears the brunt of Tijuana’s population boom.Its beaches just reopened last weekend, after having been closed for more than 1,000 days because of ocean bacteria levels that are a hundred times higher than safe amounts. The stench of rotting eggs after dark is overwhelming for south San Diego residents, keeping some awake all night. A family with a small child sits on the sand next to the Imperial Beach Pier. In the distance a yellow sign warns beachgoers to stay out of the water. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) Pollution in the river has been an entrenched environmental crisis for decades, with all sides pointing fingers at one another. Residents blame politicians for failing to find a solution. Local politicians blame Congress for not funding improvements in the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processes raw sewage from Tijuana. The federal government blames Mexico for lax sewage regulations. The International Boundary and Water Commission says it’s not its job to collect the wastewater from unknown sources that flows into the Tijuana River. Complicating matters further: Researchers and county officials are sharply split on whether the stench is simply a nuisance or a danger to public health. Some help is on the way, potentially. Mexico’s new wastewater treatment plant is set to open this month, and there are plans to double the capacity of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, although that project will take five years. Ángel Granados points at the pollution in the Tijuana River under Hollister Street. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) Meanwhile, residents and the mayor of Imperial Beach say they are plagued with unexplained and more acute illnesses. A persistent cough that wouldn’t disappear. Wheezing in the chest. Migraines and headaches. Stuffy sinuses with an acidic burn in the eyes. Nausea. Diarrhea. And they worry about worse effects on their children. Jeffrey Jackson, who’s lived along the ocean in Imperial Beach for 25 years, said the air “is getting me sick ... it’s stuff in my lungs.” He’s had to clear his lungs in the middle of the night constantly, and his daughter caught pneumonia twice this summer. “I have toilet paper underneath my pillow so I can spit.”Drs. Matt and Kimberly Dickson knew something was awry as well. As residents of Imperial Beach, they were used to treating surfers at the South Bay Urgent Care Center sickened by E. coli and other bacteria after defying beach advisories to stay out of the water. But after Hurricane Hillary and the atmospheric rivers of February, they noticed more patients arriving at their doors with similar symptoms — diarrhea, viral infections, vomiting, stomachaches — who hadn’t touched the contaminated water. Ramon Chairez crouches above a pipe channeling fluids from the Tijuana River, which should be dry during this time of year. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) The Dicksons tried to raise alarms to San Diego County’s public health officials, but ultimately the county decided there was no direct correlation between the flood of sewage that poured into the river and the ailments that residents developed.Frustrated, the Dicksons contend that the public health response has been slow because people are just becoming violently ill, not dying. “I feel like the patients down here are being treated like the canary in the coal mine,” Matt Dickson said. County health officials didn’t respond to a request for comment about health concerns in the Tijuana River Valley. Kimberly Prather, the director of the Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Geography, was not so quick to dismiss the doctors’ concerns. Her previous research had shown that bacterial microbes could become airborne pathogens in sea spray. Now she wanted to prove that the polluted water was also polluting the air. David Jarma, a field researcher from the University of Texas at Austin, takes dust samples from a patio in Imperial Beach. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) In August, Prather joined forces with other researchers, including San Diego State University’s Paula Granados, an expert in cross-border pollution, to perform one of the largest studies ever jointly conducted on the Tijuana River Valley. The researchers started pulling samples from the air, river mouth, groundwater, soil and even the green beans grown in a local community garden to check for pollutants after they found concerning levels of hydrogen sulfide — upward of 30 parts per million — and hydrogen cyanide near the Tijuana River. (The Occupational Safety and Health Administration limits exposure for industrial workers to 20 parts per million.)But the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District conducted its own studies, which found less pollution — 0 to 16 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide in Imperial Beach, along with safe levels of hydrogen cyanide. Supervisor Nora Vargas’ office said in an email that “there is no imminent threat to public health from hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfide.” Nevertheless, her office also passed out 400 free air purifiers to community members in the South Bay to help alleviate the smell.The EPA, the California Department of Public Health and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office have all said that the hydrogen sulfide is a nuisance but doesn’t pose any immediate risk for residents. “It’s not a situation where you’re accumulating a bunch of the toxin into your body and it’s causing damages to your organs,” said Dr. Cyrus Rangan, a medical toxicologist with the California Department of Public Health, though he did concede that even temporary symptoms over long periods of time could degrade a resident’s quality of life. “These problems generally are not permanent problems. They can become persistent problems if you continue to experience the odors.” Eric Biggs walks his horse on Saturn Boulevard where it passes over the Tijuana River, a spot frequently traversed by local residents. “Look, take a deep breath” is written in chalk on the asphalt, with an arrow pointing to the riverbed. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) Prather argued that county and state officials fail to understand the severity of the situation, saying, “Just based on gases alone, this is a toxic pit.”Her research still needs to be peer reviewed, but Prather said she’s confident her work is on the verge of finding proof that bacteria in the water are becoming aerosolized and making people sick. The results should also confirm a direct correlation between the increase in sewage flow in the Tijuana River and higher rates of airborne hydrogen sulfide and health complaints, she said. There have been very few studies on the long-term effects of hydrogen sulfide exposure in human populations because testing on people would be unethical. Rangan said that there aren’t data yet on whether pathogens in the Tijuana River can be aerosolized and affect residents but that the state health department is working with doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to do more research. Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre wears a mask while standing on Hollister Street, where the sewage underneath the bridge has turned the water black. Aguirre went to the emergency room fearing she was having a heart attack and was told she had lung inflammation. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) Meanwhile, the Dicksons have been joined by other doctors who are concerned as well. Prather’s work has identified a hot spot around Saturn Boulevard where more than half a dozen schools are located in a 1.5-mile radius around the river. San Diego Pediatricians for Clean Air has called on public officials to take precautionary measures to protect children, who breathe more rapidly, have a larger lung-to-body-mass ratio and would be more vulnerable to hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Hydrogen sulfide exposure has neurological effects as well, including memory loss, fatigue and loss of balance. More than half a dozen schools are within 1.5 miles of a hotspot for noxious odors emanating from the Tijuana River. (Courtesy of Kimberly Prather) Perla Rosales, an Imperial Beach resident who works as an executive assistant for California Quality Drywall Services, has two children, 11 and 4 years old, in the South Bay Union School District. Her younger child, Azariel, has been suffering from a persistent cough at school. “The school called me to ask if he had asthma because he was coughing a lot,” Rosales said. During last week’s heat wave, SBUSD informed parents that all outdoor activities were canceled, physical education classes and recess were moved indoors, and air scrubbers were on all day. “[His] teacher told me she had a lot of students sick in the last weeks,” she added. Rosales lived in Tijuana three years ago with her family but had never smelled the river like this before. Knowing that her son has been exposed to hydrogen sulfide has her worried about his cough “because he usually is a healthy boy.”Over the years, residents have seen the ecosystem change into an unrecognizable landscape — once clear ponds stocked with fish are now gray cesspools filled with white foam that is visible even in Google’s satellite images. Surfers have seen dead birds and occasionally dead dolphins washed ashore. Residents still fish every day off the Imperial Beach pier for food, unaware that heavy metals have been found in the ocean. A satellite image from Google shows white foam next to Saturn Boulevard where it passes over the Tijuana River. (Google) Marvel Harrison, who sits on Imperial Beach’s Tijuana River Pollution Task Force, lives on the beach next to the Imperial Beach Pier with her husband. She has become the reluctant lead plaintiff of a new class-action lawsuit against Veolia Water North America, the private company running the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant. Filed on Jan. 6, the lawsuit claims that Veolia’s failure to address pollution at the beach depreciated the value of residents’ properties and prevented them from enjoying the ocean. The suit seeks $300 million in damages, but Harrison said the goal is to bring attention to the environmental crisis, not to collect a huge check. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) Harrison — who saved up enough money with her husband, a former pediatrician, to build a $3-million home — understands she’s part of a wealthy minority in her town. “The people of privilege are the ones that are using their voice in a respectful way to give voice to people who haven’t had it,” the 67-year-old former counseling psychologist said. “It’s not like anybody can just get up and move to a different part of town or buy a house or buy themselves an AC unit,” Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre said. “These are working families. There’s many of them, paycheck to paycheck, so that’s why we need help.”In 2021, thousands of Los Angeles County residents living near the Dominguez Channel received vouchers to relocate after a warehouse fire caused a hydrogen sulfide stink. Assemblymember David Alvarez (D-San Diego) is one of the local representatives who’s written to Newsom twice, asking for a state of emergency. He believe it could help with short-term solutions, like temporarily relocating his constituents.“You never recover if this happens every single day,” Alvarez said of the smell that he said has become progressively worse since his time as a San Diego City Council member. But he said the federal government has its role to play as well in cleaning up the riverbed. “This is going to require a tremendous amount of remediation, and something like a Superfund [site designation], I believe, is appropriate.” Paula Granados tests the groundwater at Gabriel Uribe’s property, where Uribe’s dogs have been throwing up and his horses have been losing weight. (Jireh Deng / Los Angeles Times) Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Reps. Juan Vargas (D-San Diego) and Scott Peters (D-San Diego) just announced a renewed effort to pass the Border Water Quality Restoration and Protection Act, which Vargas and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein also introduced in the last two Congresses. As for the state agencies that continue to say the air is safe for residents to breathe, the Dicksons encourage public officials to stay overnight and experience what the people in Imperial Beach experience.“It’s not just a nuisance smell. It’s not just an odor. Your eyes burn, hurts to breathe, you get a sore throat. You’re vomiting,” Kimberly Dickson said. “If [Newsom] were to come down here and spend one night at the home of one of our residents that lived by the river that’s exposed to hydrogen sulfide for 24 hours, he probably would declare a state of emergency.”

Suggested Viewing

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.