Grid Magazine February 2024 [#177]

THE TECH AND CONSEQUENCES ISSUE

FEBRUARY 2024 / ISSUE 177 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

T O W A R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

BLINDED by the light

Energy efficient streetlights save money and carbon emissions, but residents and conservationists complain of light pollution. Is there a compromise?

Staving off sturgeon extinction Can the cherished chestnut make a comeback?

The magic of induction cooking

A community market passionate about sustainable agriculture and supporting the next generation of farmers.

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EDI TOR ’S NOTES

by bernard brown

Desperately Hopeful publisher Alex Mulcahy managing editor Bernard Brown associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com deputy editor Katherine Rapin art director Michael Wohlberg writers Kyle Bagenstose Bernard Brown Jessie Buckner Constance Garcia-Barrio Emily Kovach Meg McGuire Alex Mulcahy Katherine Rapin Bryan Satalino Ben Seal photographers Chris Baker Evens Bernard Brown Jared Gruenwald Albert Yee illustrator Bryan Satalino published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

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am desperate for American chestnut trees to make a comeback, even though I know that it’s not happening anytime soon. I long to see our woods as they were 150 years ago. The forager in me misses the chestnuts I never got to gather from the forest floor. As Jessie Buckner writes in her piece on restoration efforts for the tree — essentially wiped out by an invasive fungal blight in the early 1900s — we’re making progress, but it’s slow.

The restoration effort, led by the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), has been working on multiple tracks, including traditional plant breeding and developing viruses to attack the pathogenic fungus.

But perhaps the fastest progress has been in genetically engineering blight-resistant trees. As the researchers supported by the foundation sought USDA approval for the planting of genetically engineered trees, specifically the strain named Darling 58, environmentalists took positions for and against the high-tech trees.

Some, like me, have seen potential risks as acceptable given the ecological disaster we could correct. Others, though, have opposed approval of the genetically engineered trees. Some of their reasons have to do with the basic uncertainty about how an organism developed in a lab will grow in real forests; others seem to be shaped by a general anti-GMO bias. The anti-approval rationale I have found most compelling is a wariness of paper and lumber companies that are also genetically engineering trees. Their pines and poplars are being designed to grow super fast and themselves could become ecological problems if their seeds escape to sprout in the wild. As concerned environmentalists see it, the chestnuts would be the proverbial “camel’s nose under the tent,” with the other species poised to rush in after.

But in recent years, it has become apparent that the agriculture industry doesn’t

need genetically engineered chestnuts to proceed. They’re already inside the tent.

Genetically engineered hybrid poplars are already being planted outdoors in Georgia

by Living Carbon, a startup selling carbon credits for the trees they claim grow and store carbon faster than ordinary hybrid poplars. The reality of the trees might not live up to the hype, since what grows well in a greenhouse might not perform well outside, but that hasn’t stopped Living Carbon from promoting the credits to polluting companies and the trees to landowners. The startup needs to keep the money flowing, whatever the actual environmental impact — climate and otherwise — of the trees.

Where does that leave the chestnuts? A few months ago news broke that Darling 58 is a bust. It turns out scientists developing it had accidentally mixed up pollen with another strain, and those trees haven’t been growing very fast or tall. TACF quickly pulled its support. The foundation also suspects that the real Darling 58 trees might themselves have problems growing, so it is moving on to support researchers exploring other ways to introduce blight-resistant genes to American chestnuts. It might be another decade or two before anyone plants genetically modified chestnut trees in the wild.

As heartbreaking as this snafu has been, I am comforted by TACF’s tolerance for delay. Their patience is a refreshing contrast to a tech startup that needs to keep the good news rolling to survive. The foundation, and the entire community of chestnut stakeholders, have invested a lot of resources and time into Darling 58, but if it doesn’t work, it’s worse to pretend it does than to face reality and try something else. So for the greater good, I’ll remain desperate.

b e r na r d b r ow n , Managing Editor

COV E R P HOTO BY JARE D G RUENWA LD

sponsored content The Weavers Way Vendor Diversity Initiative provides assistance, support and shelf space for makers and artisans who are people of color.

Josh Johnson cites his Auntie Desi as an inspiration for his custard.

Decadent Delight

Family business brings high-end custard to Weavers Way

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f you met Josh Johnson four years ago, you might not have guessed that the corporate consultant and industrial engineer would someday be cooking pots of gourmet custard, tabling at events and delivering jars to food co-ops and markets. But then COVID-19 happened, taking his aunt.

“She got diagnosed on a Monday and she was dead by Friday. Ladesia was her name, my Auntie Desi,” Johnson says. He had long discussed with his wife, an executive at an education nonprofit, and his sister, a pastry chef in New York, about going into business together. A little later, when his mother passed, he took stock of his life. He had a successful corporate career, but had doubts. “Was I fulfilled? Was I happy? Is that something that I really wanted to do?” he asked. “If there’s a time to put the chips on the table and roll the dice, like now’s about then, right?”

Auntie Desi was the family member who cooked for everybody, made her own hot sauces and crocheted blankets for grandnieces and nephews, Johnson says. Her role as a maker inspired the idea for the business. As for the custard, Johnson traces it

back to when he was dating his now-wife, and his sister gave him a recipe for a dish that would impress his future in-laws. That dish evolved into Poppa’s Custard Company’s Vanilla Bliss.

“It’s like if the pudding cup that you had as a kid grew up and is now a billionaire and it has a tux on it at a dinner party,” Johnson says. Today, Poppa’s Custard retails for between seven and eight dollars. That might sound like a lot for what may look like a simple, 4.5 ounce jar of pudding, but Johnson compares it to a dessert you might order in a high-end restaurant. “This is the same level of quality that you’re going to get there. And there you’re paying 12, 15 bucks for it, easy, and not even flinching,” he says.

The new company has branched out far beyond its vanilla origins, Johnson says.

“Our spring seasonal is a [vegan] hibiscus dragon fruit custard,” crafted by his sister, who develops the recipes. “We don’t want to just put out pink lemonade.” Customers can still get good ol’ vanilla and chocolate, and the team puts extra work into making those common flavors taste exceptional, Johnson says.

“Our chocolate is one of the best chocolates that you’ve ever had.”

Last year, Johnson quit his job to work full time on making Poppa’s Custard a success. The desserts are now available at 20 retail stores, including all Weavers Way Co-op locations.

“We were living in Chestnut Hill when we first thought up the business, so it’s kind of a full-circle moment seeing my products on the shelf at Weavers Way in Chestnut Hill,” Johnson says. “It’s been a really great relationship. It’s been a really awesome beachhead for us to prove that we could serve a multi-store grocery cooperative.”

Wherever they buy it, Johnson wants customers to know that it doesn’t come out of a factory owned by a faceless corporation; it is produced by a small family operation.

“It is literally the work of my hands,” he says. “I hope that people taste it and love it.

I hope that people buy a bunch of it. And I hope that people recognize that it is a labor of love and a gift from our family.” ◆

It’s like if the pudding cup that you had as a kid grew up and is now a billionaire and it has a tux on it at a dinner party.”

— josh johns on, Poppa’s Custard Company F EFBERUARY B RUARY 2020 2424 GGRRI DP I DPHIHLLY.COM ILLY.COM 3

urban naturalist

Don’t Call It a Comeback … Yet Hybridized American chestnut saplings bring hope for the once-ubiquitous species by jessie buckner

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estled into the vast urban sprawl of Northeast Philadelphia sits the 1,600-acre historic green oasis known as Pennypack Park.

Take a walk through the komorebi — the Japanese word for the dappled light created by sunshine filtering through trees — and you will find a hillside nook enclosed by deer fencing and tall tulip poplar trees.

Here, a variety of saplings grow chest-high, surrounded by orange surveyor tape and identified with plant tags.

Welcome: you’ve stumbled upon a special forest restoration study site designed, implemented and monitored by a group of scien4 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M F EB RUARY 20 24

tists and land managers from Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), the U.S. Forest Service and elsewhere. The team hopes to learn more about urban forests and their responses to climate change and other stressors in order to better manage these spaces.

Among the diverse sapling species planted within the restoration site, the small American chestnuts (or Woapeemeen’shee in the local Lenape language) are of particular interest to the scientists. These hybrids were developed by TACF to be resistant to the infamous chestnut blight that wiped the species from the American landscape more than 80 years

ago. How they fare at Pennypack will help answer the question of whether these once prolific trees can make a comeback.

For now, the answer is a resounding … maybe. Regardless of the outcome of restoration efforts, scientists are learning valuable adaptive management strategies that can be used to improve resilience in other species facing disease and climate change.

Historically, American chestnuts comprised nearly one quarter of Eastern hardwood forests. They grew to a majestic 100 feet in height and 10 feet in diameter with characteristic toothy leaves about six inches long. They produced spiky fruits containing the nuts that we still sing songs about (even if roasting them over an open fire is largely a thing of the past). These nuts, or “mast,” provided a nutrient-dense food source for humans and animals alike. The straightgrained and rot-resistant wood proved a valuable building material.

Sara Fitzsimmons, chief conservation officer for TACF, describes chestnuts as the

P H OTO S C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A M E R I C A N C H E S T N U T F O U N DAT I O N ( L E F T A N D R I G H T ) A N D B E R N A R D B R O W N ( C E N T E R ) .

Left to right: A wild chestnut tree hangs on in the Blue Ridge Mountains; a newlyplanted hybridized chestnut grows in Pennypack Park; Sara Fitzsimmons of The American Chestnut Foundation explains that it will take generations of trees to gauge success in restoration efforts.

“Jack or Jane of all trades of tree species.”

“They aren’t the tallest tree, or the biggest, or the fastest growing, or most prolific producer, but the amount of mast they produce, their rot resistance and fast growth — you would be hard pressed to find another species that can do all of that,” she says.

Unfortunately, it’s likely that you’ve never seen a mature American chestnut tree.

In the late 1800s, a fungal disease called Cryphonectria parasitica, more commonly known as chestnut blight, arrived in the Northeastern United States via importation of Japanese chestnuts. In 1904, Hermann W. Merkel identified the blight in the American chestnuts at the Bronx Zoo. By the 1940s nearly every American chestnut was infected and around 4 billion trees had died. As a City of Philadelphia spokesperson told Grid: “Losing the American chestnut fundamentally altered the landscape.”

American chestnuts are not extinct (like the wooly mammoth) or endangered (like the giant panda), but they are “functionally extinct,” Fitzsimmons explains. Around 430 million American chestnuts currently grow in the Northeast, including Philadelphia, but most of these are resprout populations, meaning they grow from still-living roots as opposed to mast. About 86% of these trees are small, with trunks less than one inch in diameter, and are unable to provide the crucial ecosystem services that make chestnuts an integral part of our cultural and ecological legacy.

Many institutions have researched ways to protect and restore the chestnut, and

TACF picked up the torch in 1983. In 1989 the organization began breeding blightresistant chestnuts by “backcross,” a type of traditional crossbreeding where two species are bred back and forth to encourage specific traits. In this case, American chestnuts are bred with their naturally blight-resistant Chinese cousin. The trees are bred again and again to produce an American chestnut that retains no Chinese characteristics other than blight resistance.

Today TACF is at the forefront of chestnut research, restoration and education. They aim to develop trees with blight resistance through backcrossing and newer genetic modification techniques; characterize, preserve and utilize existing genetic diversity; and promote restoration by planting genetically diverse and blight-resistant chestnuts with a variety of stakeholders and volunteers.

In the fall of 2022, restoration efforts were brought to Philadelphia through the Pennypack planting. Hybridized, backcrossed chestnuts from TACF were planted alongside several species of oaks, poplars and willows as part of a larger network of sites across cities including Baltimore, MD; New Haven, CT; and Springfield, MA. Through the Urban Silviculture Network, as it’s called, ecologists are developing practices to help urban forests survive and thrive in the face of climate change, invasive species and constantly changing conditions.

At the Pennypack site, researchers see the American chestnut as a native species potentially able to outcompete invasive species. Richard Hallett of the Forest Service,

one of the scientists integral to this effort, explains how chestnuts could play this crucial role.

“Chestnuts, along with early successionals like poplar and willow, can grow above exotic plants and shade them out,” he says.

Even if the trees don’t survive to maturity, the fast-growing chestnuts also provide shade, shelter and protection for slower growing native species without challenging them for resources.

The site is a little more than a year old and the team is currently focused on the growth and survival of the saplings. While creating a diverse urban forest with blight-resistant chestnuts reaching maturity and providing ecosystem services would be an ideal outcome, the scientists frame success by the number of lessons learned. As TACF’s Fitzsimmons puts it: “Restoration is a process not a product.”

Researching American chestnuts provides opportunities to understand adaptive management of forests as a growing number of native species face threat from pests, diseases and climate change.

Fitzsimmons hopes that other species such as hemlock and ash can build on the successes and failures of the chestnut and see success more quickly, but points out the challenges of working with a tree’s time-scale on a human time-scale. “It takes a generation of chestnuts 7 to 15 years to mature. When the often-cited idiom is ‘fail quickly,’ it’s a long time for people to think about the implications and can take many generations to realize something isn’t working. A lot of decisions are made for short-term gains versus long-term risks that are difficult to predict.”

While we are unlikely to walk through a full-grown American chestnut forest any time soon, we can rest assured that they are still here. With efforts like those at Pennypack, we have a shot at preserving the heritage of the American chestnut and restoring its ecological functionality — even if it takes a few generations. ◆ F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 5

water

How clean does the Delaware River need to be for Atlantic sturgeon to reproduce?

A Breath of Fresh Water The EPA has proposed making the Delaware River cleaner for endangered sturgeon, but getting there won’t be easy, or cheap by meg m c guire and katherine rapin

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n december 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a bold move for the Delaware River, proposing to raise the water quality standards in the estuary for the first time since the Clean Water Act of 1972. This upgrade would increase requirements for dissolved oxygen levels among the foundational requirements for survival of aquatic ecosystems and thus a key determiner of river health.

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The EPA’s action came in part as a result of pressure from environmental groups that have for years rallied to demand higher dissolved oxygen (DO) standards in the estuary, largely to protect the endangered Atlantic sturgeon. This genetically unique population of fish, of which there are an estimated 250 breeding adults left, rely on the spawning and nursery habitats of the tidal Delaware River.

The increased standards are expected to

dramatically improve the sturgeon’s likelihood of making a comeback — and support the recovery of the ecosystem in the urban stretch of the river roughly between Trenton, NJ, and Wilmington, DE. But the tricky part will be actually implementing solutions to increase dissolved oxygen levels.

Among the main culprits of low oxygen in the river is sewage. Human waste contains compounds like ammonia; bacteria and microorganisms in the water oxidize the ammonia, consuming (and therefore depleting) dissolved oxygen in the process.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of raw sewage — nearly one billion gallons each year, shows a recent PennEnvironment report — flowing into the Delaware.

In many cities, including Philadelphia, combined sewer overflow (CSO) systems allow stormwater to be funneled into sewer lines and carried to wastewater treatment

This opens the door for next steps. It’s aspirational: What do we want our river to be in 50, 75 years?”

R I V E R I M AG E BY C H R I S B A K E R E V E N S , S T U R G E O N I M AG E P H OTO C O U R T E S Y O F M AU R O O R L A N D O V I A F L I C K R

— john jacks on, Stroud Water Research Center facilities. If the storm is great enough, those treatment facilities get overwhelmed and untreated or partially-treated waste — including human waste as well as the universe of “stuff” we flush down our drains — pours into the river.

Upgrading these systems is necessary to improve dissolved oxygen levels and the health of our river as a whole. But the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD), whose wastewater treatments plants combined have the greatest impact on the estuary, isn’t supporting the EPA’s proposed standards. In a statement issued January 12, PWD wrote: “Simply setting DO criteria to the highest levels possibly attainable will impose burdensome costs on ratepayers with highly uncertain additional benefits to fish populations.”

Some environmental advocates, on the other hand, hope the EPA will go even further, and they’re making their voices heard before the EPA’s public comment period closes February 20.

How we got here In the pre-Industrial Revolution era, when the population in the watershed was much smaller, our rivers could “treat” waste with the activity of hungry microbes. But when the load of that waste got too heavy, microbe activity was overwhelmed; back in the 1940s, the Delaware was basically an open sewer.

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), a compact among the four basin states and the federal government that has regulatory powers over the river’s water quality and quantity, worked with states and municipalities to develop wastewater treatment facilities to change that. In 1967, the DRBC promulgated new dissolved oxygen criteria for the river, but the urban stretch had less stringent criteria — reflecting the reality that, at the time, higher criteria weren’t achievable.

The most important problem to get solved in those days was the “poo” problem — all the carbon elements in the water. The wastewater treatment facilities the DRBC had supported across the watershed, funded by either grants from the federal government or low-interest loans and later boosted by the Clean Water Act in 1972, got a handle on that issue.

But the “pee” problem, which was considered secondary back then, is now front and center. Our urine contains high concentrations of ammonia, which depletes oxygen in the water and can have direct toxic effects on aquatic life.

Spotlight on the Atlantic sturgeon Enthusiasts of the river might want the Delaware to be as healthy as possible simply for people, and in fact the aim of the Clean Water Act is to get all the waters of the country

“fishable and swimmable.” What really gets the attention of the federal government, though, is when the water quality threatens an endangered species, in this case the Atlantic sturgeon.

The population of the sturgeon diminished from hundreds of thousands in the mid-1800s to just 250 breeding adults today for a variety of reasons, principally over-fishing more than a hundred years ago, continued ship strikes and oxygen depletion. The last threat affects young sturgeon in particular.

Before humans started interfering with the river, sturgeon had the run of it to spawn and the young could develop before heading to the open water of the Atlantic. Once we created that “open sewer,” there was almost a wall of less-or-no oxygen in that urban stretch.

Though maybe an adult sturgeon could hold its breath (that’s not a scientific expression) and get through it, the young could not.

That patch where the dissolved oxygen supply can be low, especially during the summer, is the target of scientific inquiry and debate — and lots of arguments.

Costly upgrades As PennFuture explains on their website, the “Clean Water Act requires that regulators determine the ‘existing use’ of a waterbody and establish a ‘designated use’ that matches or goes beyond the existing use.” The current designated use of the estuary, related to aquatic life, is defined as “maintenance of resident fish and other aquatic life” and “passage for migratory fish.” This doesn’t include protections for conditions that would ensure the ability for fish to reproduce.

Their right to be in the river is protected but not their right to have babies, even though studies have shown that fish are indeed spawning in the river.

In a resolution in 2017, the DRBC set out to determine the attainability of an upgraded designated use that included fish propagation rather than just fish maintenance in the estuary.

After investigation, in 2019 the DRBC identified 12 wastewater treatment plants that are significant contributors to the dissolved oxygen problem. They’re all municipal plants, including the Trenton, Camden and Gloucester, NJ, plants; the Wilmington, DE, plant; and three in Philadelphia.

Remember, these plants are municipal: All of them get money from customers to F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 7

Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum says Philadelphia could do more to get ammonia out of its wastewater.

treat that wastewater. To some degree, they would all need to get more money from somewhere (state or federal programs, loans, grants, or taxpayers) to make the improvements required for the river to meet improved water quality standards.

And that next level of expenditure is significant, as outlined by the DRBC’s consultant, Kleinfelder, in a report in 2021. Willingboro Municipal Utilities Authority in New Jersey, for example, gets off “cheap” at an estimated cost of $52 million. The largest cost is for the largest city, Philadelphia, at a whopping total of $3 billion.

In the EPA’s documentation of its proposed rule-making, it would cost an annual average of $137.1 million over 30 years to meet its objectives, basing its projections on the DRBC-Kleinfelder study.

The high cost is in part why PWD is opposing the EPA’s proposed increase in dissolved oxygen standards. “Proposed new wastewater processes needed to comply with strict ammonia limits would have a significant financial impact on water rates … In PWD’s view, the costs and unintended environmental harms of the proposed changes may greatly outweigh the potential benefits to sturgeon and other forms of aquatic life,” they wrote in the recent statement.

PWD also mentioned their planned $70 8 GRID P H I L LY.CO M F EB RUARY 20 24

million deammonification facility that will be built alongside the Southwest Water Pollution Control Plant starting in the summer of 2024.

Once constructed, the “facility will remove approximately 10% of the city’s load of oxygen-depleting ammonia at a reasonable cost and with a relatively small environmental footprint,” the department said.

To finance the project, the department said it was seeking a low-interest loan from the state’s PENNVEST fund and that it did “not anticipate a significant impact on user fees as a result of this project.”

But the move has its critics, namely Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum, who thinks the plan doesn’t go far enough: “PWD is the largest source of DOdestroying ammonia discharges. The City has known for decades that there is existing technology to address this issue and that if they were unwilling to do so voluntarily that at some point they would be required to legally. To, at this point, only be addressing a small percentage of their ammonia discharges demonstrates a failure of leadership and a betrayal of the public trust,” she wrote in a statement to Delaware Currents.

Pushing for protection For years, the Riverkeeper Network and

others have advocated to get standards raised ASAP, and let the municipalities figure out how to do it, rather than conducting slow-moving studies.

In April 2022, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network was joined by Clean Air Council, PennFuture, Environment New Jersey and PennEnvironment in a petition to the EPA to step into that process since they felt the DRBC was acting too slowly for the sturgeon.

And surprisingly, in December 2022, the EPA agreed.

Then in September 2023, the DRBC ceded its authority for rule-making on aquatic life uses to the EPA. In the new rules being proposed by the EPA, the required dissolved oxygen level is raised from its current 3.5 mg/L to three new sets of standards depending on the time of year — a reflection of the sturgeon’s sensitivity to oxygen depletion at different life stages.

And now, the EPA is setting up the timetable for public hearings (set for February 6 and 7) with a view to establishing these rules by the end of 2024.

Although the EPA was moved to act in part by the pleas from environmental organizations, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network has criticized the agency as not going far enough to fully protect the sturgeon. Representatives from the organization urged the EPA to consider further increases to the proposed standards.

“It is essential that over the course of the next [several weeks], during the public comment period, the EPA take full stock of the science and lift their standards to the degree necessary to ensure future generations are able to enjoy witnessing a live, healthy and free-swimming Delaware River Atlantic sturgeon,” van Rossum wrote.

But others, like John Jackson, senior research scientist at the Stroud Water Research Center, encourage celebrating this potential progress.

In 2015, there were indications that the river was host to healthier fish populations than anyone knew, he points out. “But those populations weren’t recognized, weren’t protected. This opens the door for next steps. It’s aspirational: What do we want our river to be in 50, 75 years?” ◆ This story was produced in collaboration with Delaware Currents and appeared in an earlier version on the Delaware Currents website.

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healing city

Finding A Home In the face of rejection and violence, Philadelphia’s Black transgender community helps each other with housing and employment by constance garcia-barrio

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y age 5, Philadelphia native Tatyana Woodard knew she was different. Born with a male body, she felt like a girl. She preferred girls’ clothes and loved White Diamonds, her grandmother’s perfume.

Over time, Woodard’s conviction and hidden stash of feminine outfits grew. “At 16, I was put out of my house due to my gender identity,” says Woodard, a Black transgender woman. “I couch surfed and rode trains at night [for shelter]. I turned to sex work to maintain myself.”

Today, the community affairs manager at the Mazzoni Center, a healthcare provider for LGBTQ+ Philadelphians, Woodard also co-founded Ark of Safety/Safe Haven, a North Philly shelter for Black trans women.

Woodard is one of more than 1.6 million Americans who identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. About 0.55% of Pennsylvania’s almost 13 million residents are transgender, reports wisevoter.com.

Black transfeminine people find themselves saddled with more limitations than

other women face. “White people don’t like us because we’re Black, and Black people don’t like us because we’re trans,” Woodard says.

That aversion can devolve into violence, including murder, the Williams Institute states in a March 2021 report. Black trans women in the U.S. are at four times the risk of their cisgender counterparts — people whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth — of becoming victims of violent crime.

To complicate matters, homelessness — a status 42% of Black trans people endure at some point, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality — heightens the risk.

“You’re vulnerable on the streets,” Woodard says. “I was held at gun point. I was raped.”

Having a fixed residence is important for other reasons, too. “You’ve got to have an address to get mail, keep medical appointments and practice hygiene. It’s your bedrock.”

Lack of safe housing for Black trans women is an issue across U.S. cities, and

Tatyana Woodard, of the Mazzoni Center, co-founded Ark of Safety/Safe Haven, an LGBTQ+ shelter that prioritizes transwomen of color. “The ultimate goal is stable housing and work.”

Caption tk

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P HOTO G RAP H BY AL B E RT Y E E (AB OV E ) AN D CHRIS BAKE R EV E N S ( RI GHT)

Black trans women in the U.S. are at four times the risk of their cisgender counterparts of becoming victims of violent crime. grassroots organizations are coming up with creative solutions. In New York City, Gay and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS) opened the first housing complex owned by the Black trans community in 2020. My Sistah’s House, a

shelter in Memphis, TN, is building tiny homes for Black trans women. SisTers PGH, a Black and trans-led nonprofit in Pittsburgh, provides transitional shelter for the BIPOC trans community and aids them in buying homes.

Here in Philadelphia, Ark of Safety and the Black Visioning Group (BVG), a threeyear-old collective of Black queer and trans city residents, have pioneered approaches to stable housing for Black trans women.

Ark of Safety, the city’s second shelter for Black trans women (Morris Home in West Philadelphia, founded in 2012, was the nation’s first residential recovery service for trans and gender-nonconforming persons) opened in October 2022. Ark residents, who range in age from early teens to over 60, may stay for one night or for months depending on their objective.

“Some people want to get a driver’s license or return to school or find employment,” Woodard says. “The ultimate goal is stable housing and work.” Ark accommodates up to 21 residents and is typically full.

They also have a drop-in community center with essentials such as bathrooms, showers, laundry and food storage.

About 75% of Ark residents had to leave their homes due to their gender identity, Woodard says. Others lost their jobs. Several have come from Florida because the state government banned hormones needed for gender transition last summer.

Rejection of trans youth may be especially harsh in religious communities where the family feels shamed. “I’m a preacher’s kid,” says Siren McCloud, a 20-something Ark resident. “Your mother is a pastor. They make you feel like an outcast.”

Malysia, who also lives at Ark, lost her housing when her mother died from a brain aneurysm. “I’ve been homeless for a few years,” she says. “I’ve panhandled, slept on trains, gotten a hotel room for a night or two.” With more stability at Ark, she says she hopes to find work in hotel cleaning or cosmetology. “Faith keeps me going.”

BVG, a collective of LGBTQ+ activists begun in 2020, aims to provide safety and housing for Black queer/trans Philadelphians in a way that “opposes existing systems of violence,” spokesperson Ashley Davis says.

The group offers rapid, transitional and permanent housing for the Black LGBTQ+ community. BVG’s current housing network includes two homes in Germantown, two in North Philly and one in West Philly, which vary in size and the number of occupants. The group is working to establish “a network of sanctuaries for Black queer and trans people,” says Davis.

Davis currently lives in a three-story F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 1 1

healing city

home in Germantown with five other Black trans residents and one Black child; they pay $1,650 a month in a rent-to-own arrangement. The owner, who is white, froze the purchase price at a below-market figure as a form of reparation.

BVG members sometimes tap into a larger network to help Black women who don’t have lodging. In one case, BVG housed such a woman temporarily in one of its homes, but her children were in foster care because she couldn’t provide housing for them. Todzsa English, a Black gay woman, Germantown block captain and founder of Live Decent Super Human, a nonprofit devoted to empowering underprivileged urban neighborhoods, stepped in when she learned about the woman’s dilemma. English offered to let the woman and her children live in a house — bought at a sheriff’s sale for $5,800 — if English got help renovating it.

“It was in bad shape,” English says. “Poor DIY repairs had been done. Spray foam had been used as a universal fixit.”

But help arrived. “We guerrilla-rehabbed it in six months,” Davis says. “Trans/queer people and our allies, some of them highly skilled in painting, plastering, carpentry and electrical work, helped.” The woman was able to prove that she had an appropriate dwelling for her children and regained custody.

“She’s still living there with her children,” says English, explaining that she charges below-market rent because of her tenant’s limited income. “It hasn’t been all roses and daisies, but I would do it again.”

In another case, BVG helped Jingle, a trans woman and one of its members, find housing.

The collective has an arrangement with the owner of the property to work toward purchasing it, according to Davis. “This is the first time I’ve been in stable housing,” Jingle says. “I suffer from mental health issues and I can take better care of myself now.”

BVG’s mission also includes equipping Black trans women with the knowledge to maintain a house. “It’s unsafe for us to learn in a traditional environment because the majority of licensed people in the construction trades are white cis men and it’s difficult to hire trustworthy people,” Davis says. “Helping to renovate houses provides a safe space for Black, queer, trans people to learn plumb12 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 20 24

This is the first time I’ve been in stable housing. I suffer from mental health issues and I can take better care of myself now.”

— jingle , Black Visioning Group ing, electrical work and other skills.”

The group funds much of their housing work by redistributing wealth through a lens of reparations, and advocates for guaranteed income — no strings attached — as a form of reparation for generations of exploitation of Black people. Davis mentions that the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services is considering guaranteed income for a limited time through government and private funds, and points out the momentum for reparations evident in City Council’s Reparations Task Force, begun last year, and in Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity, a group of 11 mayors who favor paying reparations to African American citizens in their cities.

Redistributing wealth through repara-

tions could mean self-determined lives for Black queer and trans people, according to BVG. “Imagine the healing possible with one’s basic needs met,” says Davis, noting that BVG would study the results of such a pilot program.

BVG can point to achievements such as good housing for Jingle and for the mother who was able to reclaim her children. Likewise, Ark of Safety has success stories. “One of our graduates secured employment at the Mazzoni Center,” Woodard says. “Another got a job in the kitchen of the Convention Center, and a third is working at SEPTA.” ◆ For details or to make a donation, visit arkofsafetyhaven.org and blackvisioninggroup.com P HOTO G RAP H BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

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TECHNO

OPTIMISM VS.

TECHNO

PESSIMISM What could possibly go wrong?

If anything defines us as modern humans it is the degree to which we apply scientific knowledge to accomplish our goals. Long gone are the days when we chipped away at flint blocks to make hand axes, and it has been a couple centuries since we wrote important documents on parchment with quill pens. Technology today amplifies the power of our hands and brains to move mountains. It helps us store knowledge in endless strings of 1s and 0s recorded on silicon wafers. ¶ Now the pressing question is: can technological advances save us from ourselves? ¶ It’s pretty clear we won’t be able to cram more than eight billion people on the planet without embracing some sustainable technology. We can’t heat billions of stoves with wood cut from forests, or with fossil fuels whose emissions cook the planet. Would rapidly oscillating magnetic fields powered by renewable energy do the trick? ¶ But some new technologies might be more hot air (or hot hydrogen) than real solutions. How much should we trust our political leaders and captains of industry as we figure out a way to survive without ruining our biosphere? ¶ In this issue, we take inspiration from Elizabeth Kolbert’s book “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future” to look at how we could solve some of our most urgent environmental challenges through technological solutions, including some that could cost more in human and ecological terms than perhaps we should pay. ¶ Luckily, reading this issue is a low risk endeavor. You can trust us.

F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 13

the TECH issue

GROW UP AND FACE THE FUTURE Grid publisher Alex Mulcahy talks with author Elizabeth Kolbert about the solutions that create more problems hat are we doing to this planet, and what are we doing about what we’re doing to this planet?

No writer’s body of work surpasses Elizabeth Kolbert’s to answer these questions. Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for 25 years, documenting climate change with an unflinching eye. Her first book on the topic, “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change,” was published in 2006. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (2014), she investigates how humans are like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs — except for their capacity to try to save the same planet they ravage.

In “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future” (2021), Kolbert tours projects trying to correct for our environmental mistakes, such as engineering efforts to save the shrinking Louisiana coastline, electric barriers to keep invasive fish from crossing between the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds and even plans to shoot reflective particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet. Grid publisher Alex Mulcahy talked to Kolbert recently about that book, and why we need to accept that, as a society, we will need to make decisions between choices that will minimize suffering, but will not eliminate it.

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Let’s begin with the ending of “Under a White Sky,” where you state your unwillingness to write “the last three pages,” the positive conclusion that environmental books all seem to have. Why? Environmental books usually try to end on some hopeful note after chronicling all of the disasters that 14 GRID P H I L LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 2024

are going on right now. I thought about that.

Can we find some redemptive message here so that at the end people will feel an upbeat message? But I felt that was not really true to the material that I had presented, which was kind of all over the place. I didn’t want to draw a clear, upbeat moral. I really wanted to let people decide for themselves.

Your opening chapter is about the reversal of the Chicago River, which was transporting human waste into Lake Michigan. I think one of the big messages of the book is that we have these intractable problems, and we try to solve them, and when we see the consequences we think we should have approached them differently. Well, I do want to push back a little bit and say these problems are not exactly intractable. The problem of sewage in Chicago, you could argue, has been solved, and that’s a big deal. It’s one of the biggest sewage treatment plants in the world.

What I’m trying to get at is that these solutions often beget problems of their own.

It’s more a question of is there a free lunch?

Can you reverse a river without other consequences down the road? And clearly the examples that I chose, there were other consequences down the road.

People have challenged me on that, like, “Oh, aren’t there any of these things that have worked out just, you know, hunky-dory?”

And I think one of the questions you have to ask is, “Hunky-dory for whom?” They may well have worked out hunky-dory for people, but I’m also interested in this book in the consequences of these sort of rearrangements for other species. And we’re often just not paying attention. We just don’t even know.

I found it interesting that the book progresses from big construction projects to altering the genes of invasive species and geoengineering. Well, I’d say that the arc of the book, it begins with projects that are very much underway. The first chapter is about this barrier system to try to prevent Asian carp from moving from the Mississippi into the Great Lakes. And that project, one of those barriers, the electric barrier that’s pulsing a lot of electricity into the water, one of those is already in place, has been in place for many years. And another one, the second one that I discussed, which is sort of that crazy disco barrier with water and lights, jet streams of bubbles, that is under construction. The Army Corps of Engineers has an appropriation and construction on that will probably begin this year.

The second project I talk about in the book is this attempt to mimic flooding south of New Orleans in an effort to protect New Orleans, which has suffered from flood control. We have the effects of flood control which are basically turning New Orleans into this sort of walled city. If you get a flood and you get water into that bowl, it’s terribly dangerous, as we saw in Katrina. So now we’re going to try to sort of mimic flooding to try to build up land around New Orleans. And that project also is getting going.

So those projects are, as you say, big engineering projects. They’re the kind of thing we know how to do pretty well.

Then the book gets into somewhat more speculative territory, gene splice, gene editing, technology known as gene drive, which is very new and then we get into sort of manipulating the atmosphere even. So we go

thinking about geoengineering.

But we don’t live in a world where the choices are good at this point. We live in a world where the choices are very difficult and potentially choices between bad alternatives. If one of the alternatives is potentially creepy to us, but preserves human lives and also ecosystems, don’t we have to consider that?

If our attitude is, wake me up when there’s a happy solution, you’re going to wake up under several feet of water.”

ELIZABETH KOLBERT from sort of the very grounded and very present to potentially more futuristic.

You quote Andy Parker (project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative) saying, “We live in a world where deliberately dimming the f****** sun might be less risky than not doing it.”

That really sums it up, doesn’t it? Yeah, that quote, which is one of my favorites from the book, really does sum it up. It’s from the chapter which is about this idea that we will counteract our carbon emissions by spraying some kind of reflective

material in the stratosphere. And this is what’s known as solar geoengineering or, or sometimes referred to as solar radiation management, because that sounds a little bit less ominous. It’s the source of the title of the book. If we did that, we would change the color of the sky.

People who advocate for geoengineering, or for experiments and researching in geoengineering, are often vilified. People say that’s a terrible thing and it will take the pressure off of us to cut our carbon emissions. And I think that’s a legitimate argument. I do think there’s something pretty creepy about even

How do you carry the knowledge with you that our future has so much uncertainty, and that even our best-case scenarios are not that great? Honestly, the answer to that question is implicit in the question itself. You’re also carrying that knowledge.

I think increasingly more and more people are. And I think this also really goes for young people who have learned about climate change and ecological degradation in school and realize that there are no easy answers here and, with climate change, that things are inevitably going to get worse before they get better. And the timescales often dwarf a single human life.

But people have carried all sorts of gloomy thoughts, people have lived through terrible times in lots of world history. We don’t sort of take on the full burden of any of the problems of the world. And not all of them are environmental right now, for sure. We’re not all paralyzed, for example, by the war in Ukraine, which is horrible and tragic and an increasingly, seemingly hopeless situation.

Apparently we’re quite capable of holding a lot of different thoughts at one time. And I think we all do that, to a certain extent.

What is your response to people who find the dire stories about climate change and other environmental problems too hopeless? I think that attitude of “I need some happy ending here or I’m not going to think about it,” that is one of the reasons we’re in the situation that we’re in. There are problems that have to be confronted by society that don’t have happy endings. And we need to grow up and acknowledge that and deal with it anyway, because this particular problem of climate change has many degrees of unhappiness associated with it.

And all we can try to do is minimize the unhappiness. We can’t eliminate it. And this past year showed us that very vividly. And if our attitude is, wake me up when there’s a happy solution, you’re going to wake up under several feet of water. ◆ F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 5

the TECH issue

A new LED streetlight shines brighter, and whiter, than the older ones in Port Richmond.

DIM ALL THE LIGHTS Philadelphia’s LED streetlight rollout is an energy win that is not without its drawbacks story by ben seal

hen he first saw workers changing out the streetlights on his block in Chestnut Hill, Timothy Breslin didn’t think much of it. He went to bed that night in the summer of 2022 without issue. In the daylight, he still didn’t register the changes.

But when night fell, his street full of modest rowhomes was lit so brightly it may as well have been the middle of the afternoon.

Where high-pressure sodium vapor lamps had once cast a warm, yellow glow from their perch 25 feet above street level, powerful new LED bulbs were now pounding the pavement with an exaggerated display of cold white light — and dispersing it in every direction.

“It looked like a landing strip,” Breslin says.

The new lighting caused an uproar in the placid Northwest Philadelphia neighborhood. Breslin, an engineer and board member of the Chestnut Hill Community Association, surveyed his neighbors and found that more than two-thirds wanted the lights dimmed and the color addressed; nearly everyone was turned off by the coldness of the LEDs. “The whole neighborhood looks like a used car lot where they were installed,” says Robert Fleming, a 77-year-old landscape architect, sustainability advocate and Chestnut Hill resident. “They’re just way too bright and way too white.”

Laura Lucas, president of the community association, says the streetlights are bright-

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16 GRID P H IL LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 2024

er than those that illuminate the neighborhood’s business corridor. She lives on a corner, which means she has three separate lights shining onto her house, casting a sideways glare because they lack any mechanism to send light directly down. City officials have told her that house-side shields are available upon request, she says, but it would take phone calls from hundreds of neighbors to address every light.

A year and a half since the new LEDs were first installed, Lucas, Breslin and others in Chestnut Hill are still anxiously awaiting a change. The City, though, now has its hands full as it works to update all of its 130,000 streetlights as part of an infrastructure project aimed at reducing energy costs and bringing Philadelphia into the modern age of public lighting. The updates in Chestnut Hill were among 10 pilots throughout the city in anticipation of the launch of the Philly Streetlight Improvement Project in August 2023.

When it’s completed, the citywide shift from sodium vapor to LED lights is expected to cut Philadelphia’s overall carbon emissions by 9%, which would make it municipal government’s largest emission reduction project to date, according to Katie Bartolotta, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at the Philadelphia Energy Authority (PEA), which issued the $90 million bond to fund the project. The overhaul will also improve the City’s ability to respond to outages and is intended to help prevent crime, officials say.

But in addition to drawing the ire of residents who feel blinded by the light, the LED conversion has also raised concerns about the way it will impact the insects, birds and other wildlife that live in or pass through Philadelphia. Breslin notes, for example, that after the installations, his cat began killing and bringing home birds at night for the first time, so confused were they by the nocturnal brightness.

“The vast majority of people in this neighborhood think this has decreased the quality of their life,” Breslin says. “That is not a good thing for the city.”

A citywide overhaul

The whole neighborhood looks like a used car lot where they were installed.

They’re just way too bright and way too white.”

ROBERT FLEMING, landscape architect and Chestnut Hill resident

PH OTO BY JA R ED GRU E N WA LD

The streetlight project is more than a decade in the making. Philadelphia has been converting about 2,000 lights per year since 2011, according to Richard Montanez, deputy commissioner of transportation for the Department of Streets. Those replacements had been paid for by capital budget allocations, but when the PEA proposed a wholesale overhaul, the bigger picture came into focus.

By structuring the financing under Philadelphia’s first sustainability bond, the energy savings created by switching to LEDs can be used to pay for the upfront cost, making

it a budget-neutral project, Bartolotta says.

Cutting the City’s street lighting energy usage in half will save approximately 37 million kilowatt-hours annually — enough to power thousands of homes — and eliminate approximately 11,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to removing 2,000some cars from the roadways each year. In its contract with Ameresco, a renewable energy company that is managing the twoyear installation process, Philadelphia has performance guarantees in place to ensure those savings are realized, Bartolotta says.

Considering that many of Philadelphia’s F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 17

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Richard Montanez of the Streets Department says the City will turn down excessively bright LED streetlights.

streetlights are 40 years old and the need for repairs can only be identified when a resident contacts Philly311, the project’s benefits make its purpose all the more apparent. The new LEDs will be part of a centralized, automated system that will move Philadelphia closer to becoming a “smart” city; their brightness can be controlled and varied by neighborhood and outages will be easily identified.

In the lead-up to the project’s launch, City officials conducted 15 live surveying events (10 on roadways, five in alleyways) to show community members the lighting options they were reviewing and listen to feedback, Bartolotta says. Despite the negative reaction to the white color of the lights installed in Chestnut Hill, she says feedback on color temperature was split down the middle.

Furthermore, the amount of light people wanted was dependent on neighborhood.

“In the tree-covered neighborhoods with more setback homes in Chestnut Hill and Northwest Philadelphia in general, they 18 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 20 24

Our job is not to light up people’s bedrooms.

Our job is to light up the roadway and the sidewalks.”

RICHARD MONTANEZ,

deputy commissioner of transportation, Department of Streets

said, ‘We want less light. We don’t want to feel the impacts of this lighting in any way,’” Bartolotta says. “We did another installation two blocks west of Broad Street near Temple [University] and they said, ‘Crank these up as high as you can go.’”

As a result, while the whole city will receive LEDs with the same color temperature, about 15,000 fixtures will be given a “boosted” designation, Bartolotta says, increasing the light output in areas with high levels of crime and vehicle crashes at night.

“While street lighting isn’t a solution to

crime in and of itself, it’s a really important community investment for perception of safety and to make communities feel invested in — to have this safe space to navigate in the evening,” Bartolotta says. “For vehicle crashes, in particular, good quality lighting is very important. So we did all of that to try to meet in the middle of what we were hearing.”

From a crime-prevention perspective, opinions differ on whether the conversions will have any tangible effect. For Fleming, in Chestnut Hill, the new lights contribute to “a feeling of unease and unsafety that’s P HOTO BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

part of our times.” Breslin sees something similar in the sharp, white lights.

“Instead of investing in communities or better policing, they’re like, ‘Well, let’s just make it a police state. Make it brighter,’” he says.

In an effort to cut down on the impact of the new lights, the City worked with its LED supplier to find a silicone injection that could help limit the glare they give off.

Staff from the PEA, Streets Department and other corners of municipal government evaluated the different lighting options in a vacant City facility with ceilings high enough to accommodate the 25-foot spacing required, so they could see how the light actually rendered at night, Bartolotta says. “You can really only evaluate glare in person,” she points out.

Installers are now charging ahead on 6,500 conversions each month. The response throughout the city hasn’t matched the experience in Chestnut Hill, in part because the lights installed during that neighborhood’s pilot were brighter and colder than those going in citywide, Montanez says. But he admits that the feedback he’s received hasn’t all been positive. Most of the complaints have been related to light trespassing into people’s homes.

“Our job is not to light up people’s bedrooms,” Montanez says. “Our job is to light up the roadway and the sidewalks.”

Environmental effects While the City has plans to shield homes from excess light and will ultimately be able to control the brightness of the LEDs through its centralized system, some Philadelphia residents may be more disturbed by

the transition than others — namely, those that aren’t human.

Kenneth D. Frank, a retired physician who has been studying and writing about urban ecology and the impact of artificial lighting on insects’ circadian rhythms since the 1960s, says warmer lighting is a better option because it contains less of the blue light waves that affect insects’ cycles. (Blue light is also troubling for humans; its presence in electronic screens disrupts our own circadian rhythms and can cause vision problems.)

The City’s preference for white lights is likely to lead insects like moths to gravitate toward the new LEDs and lose track of day and night. Considering some live for only a week, such a disruption could inhibit insects’ ability to pollinate plants, while also changing the habits of the birds and bats that prey on them. Seemingly small changes can have ecosystem-wide implications.

“The ecology is struggling to adapt to the reality of 24-hour daytime,” says Bill McGeeney, secretary of DarkSky PA, the Pennsylvania chapter of DarkSky International.

McGeeney says he’s no Luddite; in fact, he’s in favor of the streetlight conversion and sees it as a path toward improving the city’s issues with light pollution. He suggests the City adopt a model that dims lights later in the evening—an approach few residents would notice but one that would go a long way toward protecting wildlife, including birds that so often crash into buildings and other objects because of excessive lighting.

“You can be smarter with your integrative system and your LEDs than you could ever be before,” McGeeney says. “Why don’t we take an approach that takes in the big pic-

ture and improves lives for everyone?”

As the experience in Chestnut Hill underscores, the issues presented by white light are only made worse when that light isn’t sufficiently focused. McGeeney notes that Andorra Meadow in Wissahickon Valley Park is one of the few places left in the city to see a spectacular firefly display in the summer, because it’s situated in a nook protected from streetlights by a thick forest.

“It just goes to show you, our actions do affect the ecology, and stray light trespass is part of that,” McGeeney says. “We have to balance what we need with the ecology.”

A brighter future It’s worth emphasizing that the pushback in some corners of the city isn’t against the LEDs themselves, it’s about the brightness of the lights and their color temperature.

“We should not vilify LEDs,” urban ecologist Frank says. “What we need to do is decide what color light we want.”

McGeeney agrees that the priority should be making the most of the possibilities that LEDs afford. “We need to have streetlights,” he says. “We should use the minimum amount necessary so our impact isn’t as great on the environment.”

As LEDs spread throughout the city, community members in Chestnut Hill hope their experience serves as a lesson for the project’s rollout. Although many are still struggling to adapt to the bright new lights hovering overhead, Montanez indicates that the City is working toward a fix.

“We’re getting ready to come back and fix some of these issues,” Montanez says.

“You’re going to see the lights dim.” ◆

F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 9

the TECH issue

EVER READY Emerging battery technology brings sustainable, reliable energy to Chester County business story by alex mulcahy

20 GRID P H I L LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 2024

keptics of the green energy movement have always asked: What do you do when there’s no sun for the solar panels and no breeze to stir the blades of the windmill, but you still need power?

Batteries can store excess energy created when the conditions are favorable to be used for precisely those times — but the technology and the market are far from mature. There’s a promising solution, however, on the campus of West Grove-based electronics recycler Sycamore International: an iron flow battery. Housed in a 40-foot long shipping container, it’s the first of its kind on the East Coast. Powered by a 253 solar panel array, it’s a piece of the puzzle for weaning our economy from fossil fuels.

The system at Sycamore, which includes an independent microgrid, was installed by Chadds Ford-based TerraSol Energies.

Most of us are familiar with, and reliant upon, lithium-ion batteries. That’s what we’re recharging when we plug in our phones, laptops, earbuds, smart watches and EVs. Lithium-ion batteries have many advantages. They are “energy dense,” meaning a lot of energy can be stored in a small space, and they are effective at holding a charge, though they lose more energy when exposed to colder temperatures.

However, as anyone who has felt the frustration of their “old” phone constantly needing to be recharged knows, the batteries degrade.

The seeds for the project at Sycamore were sown when TerraSol was installing solar panels on the home of Steve Figgatt, Sycamore’s founder and CEO. He expressed his ambition to power his electronics recycling business entirely with renewable energy to Robert Santoleri, who leads TerraSol’s sales and business development. Robert introduced Figgatt to his father and co-worker David Santoleri, a chemical and electrical engineer who co-founded TerraSol in 2009.

The elder Santoleri didn’t think lithium would be a good fit for the project. “I wasn’t really interested in lithium because at the time there were all these stories about lithium catching fire and other negative things,” he says.

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Steve Figgatt, of Sycamore International, stands by his iron-flow battery.

It’s a great battery … You can take it to 0% charge every day for 25 years and it won’t affect [it].”

DAVID SANTOLERI, TerraSol Energies Sycamore’s Figgatt and Santoleri began discussing the possibility of an iron flow battery, which uses electrolyte solutions made up of iron, hydrochloric acid and water.

Santoleri says that, at the time they were looking, there were only four businesses offering flow batteries in the U.S., and then two of them merged, and another folded before he even talked to them. Eventually, they chose Portland, OR-based ESS Inc. “At the time they had like 40 people working for them. Now it’s over 300,” he says.

Santoleri is very happy with his decision. “It’s a great battery. It’s going to last 25 years. You can take it to 0% charge every day for 25 years and it won’t affect [it].”

Allowing a lithium battery to go down to zero is known to negatively affect its life.

Santoleri says that a lithium battery can be expected to last from seven to 10 years, making the iron flow battery more appealing as a long-term investment. It doesn’t have the

fire risks or recycling challenges that lithium batteries do either.

“At the end of the life of this battery, we can add a neutralizer, like sodium bicarbonate, and use the electrolyte solution as fertilizer,” Santoleri says. “So it’s a very safe, environmentally-friendly electrolyte solution.”

A key part of the system Santoleri installed for Figgatt is the microgrid, which allows Sycamore to power its operations directly with the electricity it produces. It’s essential for his business to have continuous power because an interruption when clearing computer hard drives can mean losing up to eight hours of work.

In addition to providing insurance against the power going out, it also saves money on a daily basis. Santoleri and Figgatt have figured out the best way to achieve “peak shaving,” which means using their own power from their microgrid (or selling it back to the grid) at times when energy prices are highest.

This hints at another big picture benefit of batteries in general and — since they are able to supply eight to twelve hours of energy compared to lithium-ion’s two- to fourhour range — flow batteries specifically.

The batteries have the potential to “even the load” and stabilize energy supplies when the grid needs it the most.

If you have a microgrid, Santoleri says, “You may become a demand-response resource and you’ll get paid for that. It’s going to be huge. It’s going to be utility scale. It’s also going to be very useful for your business to have resiliency and reliable, robust power.”

The installation at Sycamore is a proof of concept, and it’s easy to imagine other types of industries such as hospitals and data centers that would benefit from the promise of uninterrupted power.

Right now, a major hindrance to scaling this technology is equipment production.

Wait times for critical parts can range from six to nine months. Sycamore has a second battery in place that will be brought online in April when the electrical equipment finally arrives. “[This] will be one of the challenges to decarbonizing the grid at scale and to meet some of the country’s 2030 goals,” says Figgatt. “It is possible, but we really need to ramp up production across a wide swath of the renewable energy industry.” ◆ F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 21

the TECH issue

HUB OR FLUB?

The Biden administration and big business want to bring hydrogen energy production to the Delaware Valley. It may not be the green solution it’s touted to be story by kyle bagenstose

ydrogen as an element is simple. Each atom has one electron and one proton. It’s first on the periodic table — the most abundant chemical substance in the universe. ¶ But hydrogen as a potential climate-friendly energy source is anything but simple.

Hydrogen has long been used in dirty industries: cleaved from fossil fuels, it can be used to create fertilizers, petroleum and other chemical applications. Now, a rapidly growing number of private and public entities say hydrogen can instead be made into a clean fuel of the future, powering everything from homes to buses to airplanes.

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And Philadelphia is poised to be a major testing ground for whether or not that’s true.

Last October, President Joe Biden visited the city to announce the Delaware Valley as one of seven likely recipients to share in an $8 billion dollar federal investment and become a “Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub” (MACH2). The only thing standing between the region and an initial $750 million award is a successful negotiation of terms in the months ahead. If the region receives the money, it would be used to help build out hydrogen production, storage and transportation facilities at more than a dozen potential sites spread across Southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

Biden’s October surprise was applauded by a bevy of local powerbrokers, many of 22 GRID P H I L LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 20 24

whom had worked together on the region’s application. Politicians including then-Mayor Jim Kenney, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and U.S. Senator Bob Casey all issued celebratory statements, as did labor leaders.

“The [hub] represents transformative investments in our city and commonwealth, creating thousands of family-sustaining jobs and tapping into our vast talent pool,” Kenney said at the time. “Over the next decade, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see that our current energy workers are part of a just transition to the new energy economy.”

But others warn of a potential ruse.

“Hydrogen fuel is neither inherently renewable nor inherently clean because you need other energy sources — either renew-

ables or fossil fuels — to produce it,” David Masur, executive director of the nonprofit PennEnvironment, said upon the MACH2 announcement. “Federal, state and local officials should only support hydrogen energy projects that meet a set of basic, crucial criteria to ensure that they help reduce the nation’s carbon footprint, instead of potentially adding to it.”

A glance at MACH2 materials would indeed raise the eyebrows of any area environmentalist. The initiative’s website and presentations contain references to companies wrapped up in the fossil fuel industry, or with otherwise poor environmental track records: Enbridge, Monroe Energy, Air Liquide and DuPont. Potential storage or generation sites populate highly indus-

trialized areas along the I-95 corridor, from the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions site in South Philadelphia to Marcus Hook, Delaware County, and into Delaware.

Yet some in the scientific and environmental communities also express interest in hydrogen as a low-or-no-carbon fuel of the future. Michael Mann, a renowned climate scientist and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, has opined that the promise of hydrogen fuel generated using renewable energy is “worth exploring.”

And Collin O’Mara, who is straddling worlds as chairman of the board for MACH2 and also CEO of the National Wildlife Foundation, says that Philly’s proposed hydrogen hub indeed promises to be climatefriendly. Speaking to the Sierra Club’s Delaware Chapter in November, O’Mara

told members that by using renewables or low-carbon energy sources like nuclear energy to develop hydrogen, the MACH2 hub promises to be one of the greenest among those poised to receive federal dollars.

“Our hub came out as having the lowest emissions as any in the country, and also the most labor friendly,” O’Mara said.

The upsides of hydrogen Using hydrogen as a source of power is nothing new.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, humans currently produce about 120 megatons of hydrogen annually, fulfilling about 3% of global energy demand. But present hydrogen production is almost entirely dirty from a carbon pollution perspective.

About 95% of hydrogen currently comes

Hydrogen fuel is neither inherently renewable nor inherently clean because you need other energy sources — either renewables or fossil fuels — to produce it.”

DAVID MASUR, PennEnvironment P HOTO GRA P H Y BY EL IZA B ETH FLO R ES / STA R TR I BU N E V I A G ETTY IM AG ES

from natural gas, says the U.S. Department of Energy, through a process in which gases like methane are exposed to steam, hydrogen is extracted and climate-warming carbon dioxide is cast off as a byproduct. The extracted hydrogen is then primarily used to refine petroleum and produce fertilizers.

The industry is dominated by major international gas and chemical companies such as Linde and Air Liquide.

But, proponents say, hydrogen has vast potential to leave its dirty ways behind. In most cases, a newer model looks something like this: wind, solar or potentially nuclear energy would power devices called electrolyzers that split hydrogen from water. Then, as hydrogen produces no carbon emissions, it can be distributed and used to power everything from industrial processes to cars, planes, ships and even power plants. All with essentially a zero-carbon cost.

Sweetening the deal, many see hydrogen as a useful tool to help address the peaks and valleys of renewable energy generation, similar to battery storage. When robust sunlight or air currents cause renewable energy generation to outstrip demand, excess energy could be used to instead create and store hydrogen, which can then be used as an energy source at any time for a variety of applications.

“If the 1990s were the decade of wind, the F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 23

the TECH issue

2000s the decade of solar, and the 2010s the decade of batteries, the 2020s could launch us toward a next frontier of the energy transition: hydrogen,” the International Monetary Fund has declared.

Leaky plans Despite its tantalizing potential, experts caution that for a host of reasons, hydrogen’s use as a beneficial, clean fuel still comes with a raft of uncertainties. At best, many experts say, its use will likely be limited to only certain sectors. At worst, it could be used as a cover for fossil fuel companies to continue polluting.

As hydrogen’s potential as a no- or low-carbon fuel begins to ramp up, along with potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies for its production, traditional gas companies have begun to enter the space and concerns about greenwashing have arisen. Those concerns have led to an effort to label hydrogen production methods by colors: “gray hydrogen” for

perts say the fuel will have its limitations.

Wilson Ricks, a doctoral candidate and member of the Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization (ZERO) Lab at Princeton University, says that exactly which applications hydrogen will be used for is still uncertain as technologies are developed.

Key are not only questions of technical capability, but cost. Electrolyzers that produce hydrogen from water require copious amounts of energy to run. In many cases, it would make more sense to use renewable energy to power the grid directly instead of creating hydrogen. In wind and solar-rich states like Texas, it could make sense to use renewable abundance to generate hydrogen and power local industries. But the economics diminish the further hydrogen has to be transported, likely by pipe or ship.

“It really matters where you are and what the quality of the renewable resources are,” Ricks says.

For these reasons, many experts see the most potential for hydrogen not in powering

It’s not a way to attempt to decarbonize that’s efficient or acceptable. We really need to focus on direct use of renewables.”

TRACY CARLUCCIO, Delaware Riverkeeper Network traditional dirty methods, “green hydrogen” for renewable energy-based methods that generate no carbon emissions, and “pink hydrogen” created by electrolyzers powered by nuclear energy.

But muddying the waters further is also “blue hydrogen,” which uses processes similar to traditional methods but in which industry promises to “capture” the carbon byproduct of hydrogen production. Even more complicated are so-called “orange” and “white” hydrogen production methods, which involve extracting hydrogen from geologic formations using various techniques. Industry claims the methods have a lower carbon footprint, but some environmental advocates call that specious and say that some methods look a lot like fracking.

Even in the best-case scenario — creating hydrogen through 100% renewables — ex24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 20 24

homes and vehicles, but in industries like aviation, steel and cement production that are not served well by wind and solar. Mohamed Atouife, a Princeton doctoral student studying green hydrogen’s potential in heavy industry, says producing steel typically requires the use of coal-powered furnaces that create significant carbon emissions.

One potential option is to try to use carboncapture techniques to cut pollution from steelmaking, but those technologies remain largely unproven and don’t solve the problems inherent with coal mining. Hydrogen, Atouife says, is the most advanced technological alternative.

“You have the hydrogen pathway, which can really get you down to about 90% emission reduction,” Atouife says.

But the further one steps away from the theoretics of hydrogen and toward its actu-

al application, the more potential problems arise. One is the question of hydrogen leakage. As the smallest element in the universe, hydrogen is slippery and runs a high risk of leaking out of storage vessels or transportation modes like pipelines. That could become particularly problematic if companies try to cut corners by reusing pipelines that previously carried fossil fuels and were not designed for hydrogen.

And even small amounts of leakage would be self-defeating. A 2023 study by scientists at Norway’s CICERO Centre for Climate Research estimated that leaked hydrogen has a global warming effect around 12 times greater than carbon dioxide due to its amplifying effect on greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. That means that even hydrogen created entirely by wind and solar energy could exacerbate the climate crisis should it leak out during production, shipment or storage.

There are also other pollution concerns.

When hydrogen is combusted for certain applications, it can generate nitrogen oxides (NOx ), harmful air pollutants that contribute to smog and are particularly problematic for the fenceline communities near industrial areas where many hydrogen operations will likely be located. Creating green hydrogen also requires copious amounts of water to be withdrawn from the environment. Pink hydrogen created by nuclear energy comes with all of the byproducts and downsides of that technology.

The economics and ecologics Regardless of the pitfalls, hydrogen production appears primed for rapid growth across the globe, and quite possibly in the Delaware Valley.

Bridget van Dorsten, a senior research analyst studying hydrogen at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, forecasts that global demand for hydrogen will increase two- to sixfold between now and 2050. And while green hydrogen makes up less than one percent of the total hydrogen market today, the firm anticipates it will account for more than 80% of hydrogen production by 2050.

But there is still much uncertainty about how it will all play out.

“Is it too early to say which demand sector is going to win out? Yes. It’s a really embryonic market,” van Dorsten says. “We

don’t have a good feel for what the demand markets are going to be and where there is going to be a good willingness to pay.”

Enter the Biden administration, which has attempted to juice hydrogen production through offering economic incentives in its two landmark pieces of legislation, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act. Experts say the two somewhat work together. The Inflation Reduction Act offers tax incentives that provide about $3 of value for every kilogram of hydrogen produced. Ricks, of Princeton’s ZERO Lab, says that the incentive mostly closes a profit gap between gray and green hydrogen and could actually cover the entire cost of green hydrogen production as technological advances drive down costs. And while there was some question as to whether the tax incentives would potentially go toward the production of dirtier forms of hydrogen production, analysis by the ZERO lab of new Department of the Treasury rules indicates the administration is building in appropriate safeguards.

The effects of the tax credits could be huge: Ricks says that estimates of demand for the credits range into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and potentially as high as $500 billion “if the industry really takes off.”

But for that to happen, producers of hydrogen would have to be confident they could find buyers for all that product. With demand for green hydrogen currently extremely limited, that’s where the hydrogen hubs come in. With about $8 billion in potential funding from the infrastructure law in-hand, the Department of Energy has proposed seven different hydrogen hubs across the country, with MACH2 among them. Ricks says part of the idea is for each hub to test different technologies and develop working hydrogen economies — producers, transporters and users — that can then scale up as the technology and commerce progresses.

But area environmentalists like Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the environmental nonprofit Delaware Riverkeeper Network, are concerned about problems slipping through in the push for development. “We’re just getting up to speed on hydrogen,” Carluccio says. “But we have been concerned about it all along, because we’re concerned it [could] have a tremen-

dous amount of environmental impacts and community impacts in the region.”

At this point, there appears to be no central clearinghouse for potential projects and regulatory processes related to MACH2 and thus no opportunities for the public to assemble and ask questions or air concerns as they would for a major gas pipeline project.

There are whispers among area environmental groups of applications for developments potentially connected to the hub already popping up in townships across the region, leading to further concern that any problems wouldn’t be identified and addressed holistically until shovels were already in the ground.

Other proposed projects, like an Appalachian hub (ARCH2) centered around West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania, have also drawn criticism for their likely use of dirtier hydrogen production methods such as natural gas with carbon capture.

But Ricks says MACH2 might be one of the most enigmatic of all. The Delaware Valley’s energy market is dominated by natural gas, coal and nuclear. Due to its higher latitude and humid climate, wind and solar don’t provide as much juice as they do across the plains and sunbelt. Adding to the problem is the exit of Ørsted from the New Jersey off-shore wind market last year, casting further doubt about where renewable energy to create green hydrogen would even come from.

“The real challenge is going to be justifying the actual production of hydrogen in a region where the local clean energy resource base is not as high quality,” Ricks says. “The philosophy of MACH2 is, is there going to be some role for producing hydrogen even in places where it’s not physically optimal, because we think the alternative of transporting it is worse?”

Carluccio says the Riverkeeper Network remains deeply skeptical of the hub, and would prefer to see both attention and federal resources focused on the development of renewable technologies.

“It’s not a way to attempt to decarbonize that’s efficient or acceptable. We really need to focus on direct use of renewables,” Carluccio says. “Think of what we could do with $7 billion, and then billions more dollars of tax subsidies for renewables. Why aren’t we doing that?” ◆

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the TECH issue

WIRED DIFFERENTLY Electrified kitchens are safer, healthier and greener. Will Philly’s restaurants and institutions make the switch? story by emily kovach

n a scene from the PBS docuseries “NOVA: Chasing Carbon Zero,” Chef Chris Galarza removes an ice cold frying pan from a freezer and places it on an induction burner. Only a moment later, he tosses some chopped peppers in the pan, which immediately start to sizzle. This impossible-seeming trick is one that Galaraza has performed many times as one of electric kitchens’ most enthusiastic hype men.

Chef Galarza is an author, consultant and founder of Forward Dining Solutions LLC, a Pittsburgh-based firm that focuses exclusively on developing and implementing commercial electric kitchens. Galarza has consulted for companies like Microsoft, Google and the Rachel Carson EcoVillage, helping them undergo gas-to-electric conversions or all-electric build-outs. He notes that some of the most renowned restaurants in the world, like Noma in Denmark, are all-electric.

It was after experiencing the power and precision of induction cooking while working at Chatham University’s Eden Hall Campus that Galarza became a tireless proselytizer for the many benefits of electrified kitchens.

“With induction, you just operate much more efficiently: food is done faster, clean up is easier, you save money on cleaning chemicals and utilities,” he says. “For every dollar you spend on gas, you lose 75-90% of it due to inefficiency, like chefs keeping the burners on even with no food on them. If everyone electrified, you’d see restaurant profitability increase, allowing them to reinvest.”

According to the EPA-backed energy efficiency program Energy Star, induction cook-

I

26 GRID P H I L LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 2024

ing tops are about three times more efficient than gas; if all cooking tops sold in the U.S. in 2021 were induction burners, energy cost savings would add up to more than $125 million.

In addition to efficiency and cost-savings for commercial kitchens, electric cooking equipment is safer for workers. Because of the science behind induction (which creates molecular tension using electromagnetic currents), only the pan gets hot — not the handle or the air around it.

It also improves indoor air quality. The health risks and respiratory problems associated with exposure to emissions are well-documented; the EPA, American Lung Association and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have all released reports drawing damning connections between gas stoves and indoor air pollution. The emissions from gas stoves, like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, have been shown to cause or exacerbate respiratory problems.

The health concerns related to gas emissions are even more heightened in commercial or restaurant settings where the stove and oven are constantly on. Even with hoods running, employees are exposed to those emissions for eight or more hours each day.

Then there are the environmental issues.

Gas stoves and ovens burn methane gases, which produce carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change. Those emissions also cause smog and ground-level ozone.

According to a study by Stanford University, methane leaking from stoves in U.S. kitchens has the same climate impact as about half a million gasoline-powered cars.

On the residential front, 3% of the stoves in home kitchens across the U.S. are induction — compared to 1% five years ago. According to a 2022 Consumer Reports survey, nearly

Chef Chris Galarza is a true believer in all-electric kitchens and has become an evangelist for induction cooking technology.

70% of respondents would consider purchasing an induction cooktop.

As more data from these studies has entered the public debate, there has been a growing level of concern that states will ban gas-powered cooking equipment in residential and commercial spaces (New York State has already banned gas stoves and furnaces in most new construction), with no small amount of outcry from some politicians and organizations, such as the National Restaurant Association, which published a white paper in 2022 vehemently defending the use of natural gas in commercial kitchens. But Galarza insists that chefs and line cooks need to educate themselves and reimagine the future of the kitchen with a greater focus on sustainability.

Despite increased attention on restaurants, kitchen culture and sustainability in recent years, the bones of how these spaces operate have largely stayed the same. “Not since [Auguste] Escoffier [an influential French chef ] invented the brigade system in the early 1900s have we really thought about the kitchen,” Galarza notes.

In the face of pushback and skepticism, will commercial kitchens in Philly embrace the obvious benefits of electric and induc-

I used to feel like, ‘Why would you want to use anything but gas?’ but when I experienced induction, I couldn’t stop singing its praises.”

CHEF CHRIS GALARZA, Forward Dining Solutions tion kitchens?

Like so many business decisions, it will likely come down to finances. Electric kitchen equipment, specifically induction ranges, are dramatically more expensive than their gas counterparts.

“I can get a modern gas stove brand new for around $8,000. For electric, you’re talking $30K, and induction is even higher,” says Thomas Sheridan, owner of Kensington Food Company, a gourmet foods importer/wholesaler with a stall in Reading Terminal Market. Sheridan is currently building out a retail space and commissary kitchen on Kensington Avenue.

The newly appointed shared kitchen will feature electric fryers and proofing ovens, and one induction four-range stovetop. The rest of the equipment, including five other ranges, will be gas powered. In a perfect world, Sheridan says he would prefer an

all-electric kitchen.

“My biggest reasons would be health and safety; if you move to induction, the gases are gone, and there’s a much cleaner environment,” he says. “But we don’t have a million dollars to spend.”

In October 2022 through December 2023, there was a pilot program administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that was meant to help offset some of those costs. The Cooking in Healthy Electrified Commercial Kitchens (CHECK) rebate program was launched to help schools, nonprofits and restaurants modernize their kitchens through energy efficiency and electrification.

The program came about after Heidi Kunsch, environmental group manager at the DEP, and Chef Galarza met at a green building conference in 2021. Kunsch was inspired by one of Galarza’s educational demonstra-

tions about electric cooking equipment and soon after the two collaborated to launch CHECK, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s State Energy Program.

With $150,000 of funding, CHECK provided rebates up to $8,500 to commercial kitchens that install electric equipment. (The program is currently closed to new applications.)

To apply for the rebate, an applicant had to first tune into a live or pre-recorded webinar, or attend an in-person workshop led

by Chef Galarza. There were different webinars geared toward restaurants, K-12 schools, higher education institutions and nonprofits.

While there are similar rebate programs in other states, CHECK is the only one with an educational component.

“We’ve experienced considerable success in the educational segment of the program, engaging with over 500 individuals through webinars and induction cooking workshops,” says Garrett Strunk, an Energy Program specialist with DEP. “As for rebate issuance, the program has seen ten projects completed, with five more in progress and seven applications currently under review, but the program’s future is dependent on federal funding and whether there is a demonstrated need for these rebates.”

A lot of the interest in CHECK so far has come from K-12 schools, including the Pennridge, Radnor Township and Avon Grove school districts. Swarthmore College and Delaware Park Casino in Delaware are two other institutions that have gone fully electric in their kitchens, though not through the CHECK program.

Chef Galaraza encourages local restaurants who don’t have corporate or universitylevel budgets to consider starting with small equipment swaps. He also knows that there’s a stereotype that most chefs prefer cooking with gas, but believes that with continued education, the tide will turn.

“I used to feel like, ‘Why would you want to use anything but gas?’ but when I experienced induction, I couldn’t stop singing its praises,” he says. “We need more outreach, and once that happens, I think you’ll see more Philly-area chefs start to go for this in the next few years.” ◆ F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

the TECH issue

RISING UP A York County reservoir project could be part of a sustainable grid. It would also displace dozens of households story and photos by bernard brown

n winter, the two sides of Old Bridgeville Road in eastern York County, about 70 miles west of Philadelphia, don’t look all that different. Tan fields of corn and soy stubble cover the rolling hills to the east and to the west, broken up by patches of woods and dotted with houses and farm buildings.

If the proposed York Energy Storage project is built, though, the view to the east will be dominated by a 580-acre reservoir.

Up to 25,000 acre-feet of water would be held back by a 9,800 foot-long dam up to 225 feet tall as well as dikes to either side, one 700 feet long and up to 90 feet tall and

I

Left: A sign still stands from the effort to fight off a reservoir project years ago in eastern York County. Right: A proposed hydroelectric energy storage project would pull water from the Susquehanna River up to a reservoir, which would flood Jake Horton’s farm and dozens of other properties.

28 GRID P H IL LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 20 24

another 1,300 feet long and up to 35 feet tall.

York Energy Storage LLC, the company proposing the project, says that it will fill an important role in a green energy future.

The question is whether this is true, and at what cost to the people in the way.

Jake and Jen Horton live in a white

farmhouse on 70 acres of crop fields and pastures that would be underneath the surface of the proposed reservoir. Near the house stand four outbuildings including two yet-unpainted barns. A fire in March destroyed the previous barns and the Hortons rebuilt them over the summer, racing to finish before they had to put up hay for the winter. “What we’re looking at would be underwater,” Jake Horton says.

Sheep graze in a pasture that slopes down towards the treeline. A weedy crease in the field hides the beginnings of Cuffs Run, a stream that cuts a ravine through a steep hillside three quarters of a mile to the north to Lake Clark, an impoundment on the Susquehanna River behind the Safe Harbor Dam. The York Energy Storage proposal would

take advantage of the drop to the river to store energy from the regional electrical grid, pumping water uphill to the reservoir when demand is low compared to generation capacity. When demand rises, it would release the water to run back down through turbines to generate electricity, a model called pumped hydroelectric energy storage, or “pumped hydro storage.”

As the cliché goes, the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Wind and solar produce greenhouse gas-free energy, but the sunniest and windiest conditions don’t always align with the highest demand for electricity, a problem that can be solved by storage.

Batteries store energy, of course. Some of these, like Tesla’s Megapack, can be huge versions of the lithium-ion batteries

that power everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. Iron flow batteries, like the one Sycamore Electronics uses to avoid interruptions in flow as it refurbishes computers, can also play a role in the grid. But today, pumped hydro storage dominates energy storage, providing 70% of utility-scale energy storage capacity in the United States.

Pumped hydro is nothing new. About ten miles from the Hortons’ house, the Muddy Run pumped storage facility has been operating since 1966. Although pumped hydro storage is promoted today to facilitate the green energy transition, it has long served to make money by taking advantage of daily wholesale price swings in electricity, pumping water uphill when prices are low and running it back through turbines when prices are higher.

This isn’t the first time an energy company has proposed a pumped hydro storage project where the Hortons now live. Essentially the same project was proposed in 1990 and in 2011, and the reasons why those were scrapped depend on who you ask. William McMahon worked on the first proposal more than 30 years ago, called the Cuffs Run Project, which he said became financially unviable due to regulatory changes. McMahon says that the recent rise in renewable energy and the need for energy storage led him and the other York Energy Storage members to try it again. “Our project started to come back into vogue,” he says.

As of print time, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had not ruled on the company’s preliminary permit request. That permit would open a public input period and give York Energy Storage the green light to commission the studies and detailed plans it would need to apply for a final permit. For the final permit, the company would also need permission from

Brookfield, the company that operates the Safe Harbor hydroelectric plant and that owns the land immediately around Lake Clark. If it gets that permit, York Energy Storage would then have the power of eminent domain to force landowners to sell their properties.

Local environmentalists and residents of the site of the proposed project claim the credit for scuttling both of the previous proposals at the site. This time, Ted Evgeniadis, the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper, sees the stakes as higher than before. It’s not just about the impact on the 50 properties in the 1,000-acre footprint (encompassing the reservoir as well as land around it) of the proposed project. “In the last decade there have been immense investments made to preserving, protecting and conserving the landscape around the lower Susquehanna,” Evgeniadis says.

In 2019, the federal government designated the region as the Susquehanna National Heritage Area. Hikers on the 199-mile long Mason-Dixon Trail pass along the steep, wooded hillside below the proposed reservoir in an area that, based on the preliminary maps, might not be accessible to the public anymore. “You can’t relocate [the trail] and say there’s been no impact,” Evgeniadis says. In addition, land conservancies have been buying up easements to prevent development, including on properties within the footprint of the proposed project.

And where the members of York Energy Storage sees water to be used to store energy, Evgeniadis sees a river suffering from more than a century of electricity generation: dams that limit fish passage up and downstream, and miles of deep reservoirs replacing what had been shallow and rocky running water. Upstream of the proposed project, the river fuels the York Haven

This, if it were permitted to be constructed and to damage our riverlands, will be here forever.

What are the consequences for building another hydro facility when we’re over-leveraged to start?”

TED EVGENIADIS, Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper F E B RUARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

the TECH issue

hydroelectric plant and provides water to the Brunner Island coal-powered plant.

Downstream, Evgeniadis pointed to the Safe Harbor, Holtwood and Conowingo hydroelectric plants; the Muddy Run facility; and the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant that draws water from the river.

Once built, power plants endure for decades; Conowingo, located in Maryland, dates to the late 1920s and Safe Harbor to the 1930s. “This, if it were permitted to be constructed and to damage our riverlands, will be here forever,” Evgeniadis says.

“What are the consequences for building another hydro facility when we’re overleveraged to start?”

It is also unclear that the project would live up to its proponents’ green claims, at least in the foreseeable future. “We’re going to need some kind of grid storage to maximize renewable energy, but at this time there is not enough renewable energy for that to be an issue,” says Emma Bast, staff attorney at PennFuture.

The PJM grid, the network of power plants and transmission lines that covers Pennsylvania as well as all or part of 11 other states, is powered primarily by nuclear, coal and gas power plants. For the immediate future, the variability of wind and solar are easy for the grid to accommodate.

By the time that wind and solar provide a meaningful amount of the region’s power, Bast says other technologies could offer the PJM grid energy storage without taking up 1,000 acres of land and displacing dozens of households. Battery technologies continue to improve, as well as other storage methods. One is geomechanical pumped storage, developed by Texas startup Quidnet Energy, which stores energy by injecting water deep into the ground between layers of impermeable rock. The pressure below can then power turbines as it forces the water back up out of the ground, all with a small footprint at the surface. Given the local impact of building a facility like the one proposed by York Energy Storage, “It does not seem at this point in time to be worth it,” says Bast.

Even if the grid needed the storage, the Hortons and Evgeniadis question whether other locations could host a pumped hydro 30 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 20 24

Jake and Jen Horton’s freshly rebuilt barn would be underwater if the York Energy Storage project is completed.

It makes me really angry you’re not giving a crap about someone’s home and life work. We just don’t matter … We’re nobodies. We’re not a consideration.”

JEN HORTON, York County property owner storage project with less impact to the environment and to residents. Elsewhere in the U.S., pumped hydro storage projects are being built on land reclaimed from coal mining, which Pennsylvania has in spades.

When asked about the impact on the people who now live on the site of the proposed project, McMahon focused on the jobs that the project would create and what he says will be an economic boon for the region, along with his assertions that it will support a renewable grid. He says that while the immediate negative impacts are concrete, the future benefits that would outweigh them are harder for people to conceptualize. “Right now they have no idea. They

just imagine that we’re some big company destroying everything.”

The entire region, Philadelphia included, is powered by electricity that the older plants along the lower Susquehanna produce. The reservoirs that those power plants depend on submerged plenty of properties when they were built, the homes of people long forgotten.

The Hortons say they are determined not to be swept aside. For them, the cost-benefit analysis is personal. “It makes me really angry you’re not giving a crap about someone’s home and life work,” says Jen Horton. “We just don’t matter to [McMahon]. We’re nobodies. We’re not a consideration.” ◆

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A hole in the ozone Far above, such particles could weaken the ozone layer, which is now finally repairing itself after the ban of ozone-depleting chemicals.

Who gets to choose?

Who has the last word in decisions that could have such a huge impact on humanity? Will countries and peoples historically marginalized continue to be left out of the conversation?

White skies Sulfates have the potential to turn the sky white, or at least severely desaturate the natural blue that we’re familiar with. This depressing possibility could be broadly damaging on a psychological level.

SETTING THE SUN Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future sci-fi novel, “The Ministry for the Future,” starts off with a terrible heatwave in India that kills millions of people. The tragedy prompts the country’s leadership to explore doping the atmosphere with reflective sulfur dioxide particles to bounce the sun’s light back into space, thus slightly cooling the Earth and counteracting climate change. ¶ It’s called solar geoengineering (aka solar radiation management), and it’s no longer confined to the realms of sci-fi; in fact, the Biden administration commissioned research on the topic last summer. While putting a dimmer switch on the sun might seem like a great idea (desperate times, desperate measures), the unintended consequences have the potential to cause an entirely new set of problems.

Too much rain The scale of this intervention could fundamentally alter the water cycle, causing some areas to be inundated with rain beyond any normal level.

Not enough rain Conversely, some areas of the globe could see even more drought and dry seasons, exceeding even what was expected with climate change as a given.

Food destabilized The ensuing changes in temperature and precipitation patterns could affect agricultural productivity; altered growing seasons and water availability could compromise the overall stability of food production.

A breath of foul air Injecting toxic aerosols into our atmosphere could have consequences for our breathable air and cause negative health effects for humans and animals at the ground level.

Solar power problems Changing our energy mix to renewables is a critical step for humanity to combat climate change. Dimming the sun might drastically reduce the energy output of solar photovoltaic cells.

32 GRID P H IL LY.CO M F EB RUA RY 2024

A Band-Aid solution Ultimately, solar geoengineering doesn’t address the root causes of climate change and it may divert resources from efforts that do. Plus, if we start, we’ll be locked in; if we stopped, the effects of climate change would come roaring back.

IN FO G RAP HIC BY B RYAN SATA LI NO

Turn your passion for the environment into a fulfilling career Make the most of local industry connections and interdisciplinary Ivy League academics Virtual Café Join the MES program team from 12-1 p.m. on the first Tuesday of

“I got really interested in where ecology and technology intersect, so the flexibility became the program’s greatest strength for me.

I came in thinking that I was going to get out in the field and have my boots in the mud every day. And I did, but I’ve also been doing a lot of programming and coding.”

every month for an online chat about your interests and goals.

Log in with us.

Johannes Nelson, MES ‘23 www.facebook.com/UPennEES @Penn_MES_MSAG

Take the next step in your environmental career at

www.upenn.edu/grid