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Marvel at America’s green transition on your next vacation.
Scroll past San Jacinto Mountain, Brandini Toffee, a bicycle-powered bar crawl, and 13 other attractions on Tripadvisor’s list of “Things to Do in Palm Springs” and you’ll come to “Palm Springs Windmill Tours.” Its user-generated blurb tells would-be visitors to expect “a tour in the middle of wind turbine generators,” lest the name suggests something slightly more romantic and Dutch. In the accompanying photo, a black convertible noses toward the white gyrating towers that have become synonymous with the north entrance to the Coachella Valley.
If you leave your uncannily verdant gated community and drive up Highway 10 — away from the Mod Squad architectural tour and the horseback rides at Smoke Tree Stables, past signs advertising breast augmentations and the Air Force Reserve to homebound Angelenos — you’ll eventually reach a frontage road where a WINDMILL TOURS PARKING sign directs visitors toward an unassuming green trailer for check-in. All around the parking lot, and on both sides of the highway, you can already see the main attractions: wind turbines, many of them taller than the Statue of Liberty, though perspective is difficult here since there are hardly any normal-sized reference points, like palm trees, around for orientation.
One thing is immediately clear: This is “not Disneyland,” as Tom Spiglanin, Palm Springs Windmill Tours’ enthusiastic education director, will be the first to admit. “We’re not fun and games,” Spiglanin adds on a video call, about a week after I take a tour for myself. “Here, we are education.”
Once wind tour visitors have their curiosity piqued, “then we force the history down their throat, and it all turns out to be this great experience at the end,” says Tom Spiglanin.Heatmap/Jeva Lange
Visiting a wind farm on vacation admittedly might not be at the top of most people’s to-do lists. They still have a reputation as eye-sores: “Palm Springs, California, has been destroyed — absolutely destroyed — by the world’s ugliest wind farm at the Gateway on Interstate 10,” one future president tweeted in 2012. Even today, wind naysayers will leave fake one-star reviews that Spiglanin and his team have to dutifully remove.
But while it might not be much to look at from the parking lot, Palm Springs Windmill Tours sits at the intersection of two rich niches of the modern travel industry: eco-tourism and industrial tourism. The former is considered to be the fastest-growing segment within the global tourism industry; the latter is why I spent many a family car trip being shuttled to places like Grand Coulee Dam and Hoover Dam to marvel at the wonders of human engineering and hydroelectric power.
Though commercial wind farms are younger than Depression-era public works projects (Palm Spring’s just turned 40) and less scenic than a carbon-neutral eco-lodge in Costa Rica, they might have a place in the travel plans of the future: For one thing, as Spiglanin said, they’re educational. But they’re also an experience of history in real-time, almost like watching the Hoover Dam being built, something Palm Springs Windmill Tours impresses upon you with its first stop, an exhibit of obsolete and phased-out designs, the newest of which, the massive Zond Z-50, was removed from operation as recently as August 2022. Visiting a wind farm might still mostly be the dominion of nerds, but perhaps not for much longer; to tour one is to witness the unfolding story of America’s green transition.
The day I talk to Spiglanin, the wind is buffeting the tour trailer at 35 to 50 miles per hour — he shows me an app on his phone that caught one gust clocking in at 63 mph. April to June is windy season on the farm, when the phenomenon that makes the region so desirable for the renewable energy sector — hot air in the Valley rising, allowing cold air from the coast to funnel, with gusto, through San Gorgonio Pass — is at its most forceful. Across the highway from the trailer, a cluster of turbines have stopped turning, which sometimes happens to protect the machinery when the wind speeds are too high, though Spiglanin doesn’t think that’s the issue today. Maybe a circuit got shut off?
The Windmill Tours operate on Wintec Energy-owned land, but there is little communication between the tour company and the businesses that run the turbines, Spiglanin says. Though the tours initially began as a promotional arm of Wintec in the 1990s, intended to dispel negative local perceptions about the turbines, those ended after 9/11, when it seemed like it might not be such a good idea to have strangers tromping around on a piece of the local power grid. In 2014, Palm Springs Windmill Tours started anew as an LLC; though it’s still located on Wintec-owned land, its purposes are no longer strictly promotional — which is great for visitors, but leaves Spiglanin to wonder about things like why Brookfield Renewables, a Canadian power company that leases public land in the nearby hills, recently removed over 450 older turbines but hasn’t yet replaced them with its planned nine newer machines.
The tours are actually a bit of a joke among the techs who work on the turbines. “They laugh at the word ‘windmill’ because they're like, ‘dude, it’s not a windmill, it doesn’t have a grist stone,’” Spiglanin says. “And I'm like, ‘well, windmills don’t just have grist stones. They also pumped water, they started with grinding grain, but then—.’ And so we get into this whole thing, and it turns out I know a lot more about their business than they do.”
Spiglanin has a PhD in chemical physics and retired to the Coachella Valley after working as an educator at the Aerospace Corporation, in Los Angeles, for years. Driving past the windmills, he used to wonder if they had a tour; “lo and behold,” they did, and he ended up marrying the woman who ran their marketing. When it comes to wind, he’s thus a bit of a self-taught enthusiast, doing his own research for the exhibits and joining wind energy Facebook groups to geek out over, and glean more information about, the archival photos he uploads. He has also independently published a book of his research, Backstories of the Palm Springs Windmills, which is available in the gift shop along with stickers that read “I’m a big FAN of renewable energy.” (Wind nerds love puns; when I was checking in for my tour, I was asked what a turbine’s favorite music genre is. Heavy metal).
A view of a turbine out the sun roof during a recent self-driving tour.Heatmap/Jeva Lange
Recently, Palm Springs Windmill Tours learned they’re not the only land-based wind tour in the nation. Another wind farm in Washington State offers tours from a sparkling new visitor’s center that has vistas of the Cascades, as well as a hard-hat experience that allows visitors to actually look inside a turbine (in Palm Springs, guests have to stay 100 yards back from the operating machinery, something my dad, who was with me, eagerly pressed by counting out his strides). But the Washington tour is run by Puget Sound Energy, the regional energy supplier; Palm Springs Windmill Tours is uniquely independent and history-focused, taking what Spiglanin — with a nod to the Alcatraz Island tours — calls the National Park approach: “We have something here. We’re interpreting it. We’re helping people and our guests who come through here understand it.”
Other nations have also caught onto the draw wind farms have for visitors. In Scotland, England, and Denmark, wind farm tours have taken off with an added dash of adventure — boats bring visitors beneath the blades of offshore farms, while others offer mountain biking or hiking trails around the turbines. “While there’s no data to indicate the size of this nascent slice of the hospitality sector,” writes Bloomberg, “there is ample research to suggest that travelers are not only unfazed by wind farms, but find them objects of fascination.” As a boat captain who runs tours at a wind farm off of Rhode Island told the publication, “I thought, ‘This is definitely going to be a moneymaker.’”
It’s not necessarily a heightened interest in renewable energy, though, that is bringing visitors. Spiglanin says many of the guests who come to Palm Springs are actually interested in robotics. That is particularly true this year, since the world’s major high school robotics competition is focused this season on the future of sustainable energy and power: “As a result of that, we had a family fly down in a private jet from San Jose so that these kids could learn about wind energy, and they flew back the same day,” Spiglanin tells me.
Palm Springs Windmill Tours doesn’t mind shifting to fit the interests of its visitors, whether they’re engineers or curious passing travelers to whom “325 megawatts” — the storage capacity of an enormous new battery facility being built on the grounds — is just a number. The tour adapted to COVID-19 with a self-driving tour (the one I took, facilitated by an app) as well as an open-air golf cart tour. They’re bringing back bus tours this summer, too, both so tourists can stay air-conditioned as the temperatures begin to crest 100 degrees, but also because — as I increasingly realized speaking with Spiglanin — you can’t beat the experience of having a live, personal wind “fan” lead your way.
You won’t get views like you do from taking “the tram up to the top [of San Jacinto Mountain]” — the 8th-ranked attraction — “and we don’t give you good food. We actually don’t serve any food,” Spiglanin says. People still mostly come to Palm Springs for the music and the golf courses, the casinos and the Elvis honeymoon house, the sun and the stargazing. But maybe one day, they’ll come for the wind, too.
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The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.
When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.
But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.
But, he told me, “Don’t let this headline conclude that battery manufacturing in the United States will never work, or that sodium-ion itself is uncompetitive. I think both those statements are naive and lack technological nuance.”
Opinions differ on the primary advantages of sodium-ion compared to lithium-ion, but one frequently cited benefit is the potential to build a U.S.-based supply chain. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant than lithium, and China hasn’t yet secured dominance in this emerging market, though it has taken an early lead. Sodium-ion batteries also perform better at lower temperatures, have the potential to be less flammable, and — under the right market conditions — could eventually become more cost-effective than lithium-ion, which is subject to more price volatility because it’s expensive to extract and concentrated in just a few places.
Yao’s paper didn’t examine Natron’s specific technology, which relied on a cathode material known as “Prussian Blue Analogue,” as the material’s chemical structure resembles that of the pigment Prussian Blue. This formula enabled the company’s batteries to discharge large bursts of power extremely quickly while maintaining a long cycle life, making it promising for a niche — but crucial — domestic market: data center backup power.
Natron’s batteries were designed to bridge the brief gap between a power outage and a generator coming online. Today, that role is often served by lead-acid batteries, which are cheap but bulky, with a lower energy density and shorter cycle life than sodium-ion. Thus, Yao saw this market — though far smaller than that of grid-scale energy storage — as a “technologically pragmatic” opportunity for the company.
“It’s almost like a supercapacitor, not a battery,” one executive in the sodium-ion battery space who wished to remain anonymous told me of Natron’s battery. Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that — like Natron’s tech — can release large amounts of power practically immediately, but store far less total energy than batteries.
“The thing that has been disappointing about the whole story is that people talk about Natron and their products and their journey as if it’s relevant at all to the sodium-ion grid scale storage space,” the executive told me. The grid-scale market, they said, is where most companies are looking to deploy sodium-ion batteries today. “What happened to Natron, I think, is very specific to Natron.”
But what exactly did happen to the once-promising startup, which raised over $363 million in private investment from big name backers such as Khosla Ventures and Prelude Ventures? What we know for sure is that it ran out of money, canceling plans to build a $1.4 billion battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The company was waiting on certification from an independent safety body, which would have unleashed $25 million in booked orders, but was forced to fold before that approval came through.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Natron’s founder, Colin Wessells, stepped down as CEO last December and left the company altogether in June.
“I got bored,” Wessels told The Information of his initial decision to relinquish the CEO role. “I found as I was spending all my time on fundraising and stockholder and board management that it wasn’t all that much fun.”
It’s also worth noting, however, that according to publicly available data, the investor makeup of Natron appears to have changed significantly between the company’s $35 million funding round in 2020 and its subsequent $58 million raise in 2021, which could indicate qualms among early backers about the direction of the company going back years. That said, not all information about who invested and when is publicly known. I reached out to both Wessels and Natron’s PR team for comment but did not receive a reply.
The company submitted a WARN notice — a requirement from employers prior to mass layoffs or plant closures — to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity on August 28. It explained that while Natron had explored various funding avenues including follow-on investment from existing shareholders, a Series B equity round, and debt financing, none of these materialized, leaving the company unable “to cover the required additional working capital and operational expenses of the business.”
Yao told me that the startup could have simply been a victim of bad timing. “While in some ways I think the AI boom was perfect timing for Natron, I also think it might have been a couple years too early — not because it’s not needed, but because of bandwidth,” he explained. “My guess is that the biggest thing on hyperscalers’ minds are currently still just getting connected to the grid, keeping up with continuous improvements to power efficiency, and how to actually operate in an energy efficient manner.” Perhaps in this environment, hyperscalers simply viewed deploying new battery tech for a niche application as too risky, Yao hypothesized, though he doesn’t have personal knowledge of the company’s partnerships or commercial activity.
The sodium-ion executive also thought timing might have been part of the problem. “He had a good team, and the circumstances were just really tough because he was so early,” they said. Wessells founded Natron in 2012, based on his PhD research at Stanford. “Maybe they were too early, and five years from now would have been a better fit,” the executive said. “But, you know, who’s to say?”
The executive also considers it telling that Natron only had $25 million in contracts, calling this “a drop in the bucket” relative to the potential they see for sodium-ion technology in the grid-scale market. While Natron wasn’t chasing the big bucks associated with this larger market opportunity, other domestic sodium-based battery companies such as Inlyte Energy and Peak Energy are looking to deploy grid-scale systems, as are Chinese battery companies such as BYD and HiNa Battery.
But it’s certainly true that manufacturing this tech in the U.S. won’t be easy. While Chinese companies benefit from state support that can prop up the emergent sodium-ion storage industry whether it’s cost-competitive or not, sodium-ion storage companies in the U.S. will need to go head-to-head with LFP batteries on price if they want to gain significant market share. And while a few years ago experts were predicting a lithium shortage, these days, the price of lithium is about 90% off its record high, making it a struggle for sodium-ion systems to match the cost of lithium-ion.
Sodium-ion chemistry still offers certain advantages that could make it a good option in particular geographies, however. It performs better in low-temperature conditions, where lithium-ion suffers notable performance degradation. And — at least in Natron’s case — it offers superior thermal stability, meaning it’s less likely to catch fire.
Some even argue that sodium-ion can still be a cost-effective option once manufacturing ramps up due to the ubiquity of sodium, plus additional savings throughout the batteries’ useful life. Peak Energy, for example, expects its battery systems to be more expensive upfront but cheaper over their entire lifetime, having designed a passive cooling system that eliminates the need for traditional temperature control components such as pumps and fans.
Ultimately, though, Yao thinks U.S. companies should be considering sodium-ion as a “low-temperature, high-power counterpart” — not a replacement — for LFP batteries. That’s how the Chinese battery giants are approaching it, he said, whereas he thinks the U.S. market remains fixated on framing the two technologies as competitors.
“I think the safe assumption is that China will come to dominate sodium-ion battery production,” Yao told me. “They already are far ahead of us.” But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build out a domestic supply chain — or at least that it’s not worth trying. “We need to execute with technologically pragmatic solutions and target beachhead markets capable of tolerating cost premiums before we can play in the big leagues of EVs or [battery energy storage systems],” he said.
And that, he affirmed, is exactly what Natron was trying to do. RIP.
They may not refuel as quickly as gas cars, but it’s getting faster all the time to recharge an electric car.
A family of four pulls their Hyundai Ioniq 5 into a roadside stop, plugs in, and sits down to order some food. By the time it arrives, they realize their EV has added enough charge that they can continue their journey. Instead of eating a leisurely meal, they get their grub to go and jump back in the car.
The message of this ad, which ran incessantly on some of my streaming services this summer, is a telling evolution in how EVs are marketed. The game-changing feature is not power or range, but rather charging speed, which gets the EV driver back on the road quickly rather than forcing them to find new and creative ways to kill time until the battery is ready. Marketing now frequently highlights an electric car’s ability to add a whole lot of miles in just 15 to 20 minutes of charge time.
Charging speed might be a particularly effective selling point for convincing a wary public. EVs are superior to gasoline vehicles in a host of ways, from instantaneous torque to lower fuel costs to energy efficiency. The one thing they can’t match is the pump-and-go pace of petroleum — the way combustion cars can add enough fuel in a minute or two to carry them for hundreds of miles. But as more EVs on the market can charge at faster speeds, even this distinction is beginning to disappear.
In the first years of the EV race, the focus tended to fall on battery range, and for good reason. A decade ago, many models could travel just 125 or 150 miles on a charge. Between the sparseness of early charging infrastructure and the way some EVs underperform their stated range numbers at highway speeds, those models were not useful for anything other than short hauls.
By the time I got my Tesla in 2019, things were better, but still not ideal. My Model 3’s 240 miles of max range, along with the expansion of the brand’s Supercharger network, made it possible to road-trip in the EV. Still, I pushed the battery to its limits as we crossed worryingly long gaps between charging stations in the wide open expanses of the American West. Close calls burned into my mind a hyper-awareness of range, which is why I encourage EV shoppers to pay extra for a bigger battery with additional range if they can afford it. You just had to make it there; how fast the car charged once you arrived was a secondary concern. But these days, we may be reaching a point at which how fast your EV charges is more important than how far it goes on a charge.
For one thing, the charging map is filling up. Even with an anti-EV American government, more chargers are being built all the time. This growth is beginning to eliminate charging deserts in urban areas and cut the number of very long gaps between stations out on the highway. The more of them come online, the less range anxiety EV drivers have about reaching the next plug.
Super-fast charging is a huge lifestyle convenience for people who cannot charge at home, a group that could represent the next big segment of Americans to electrify. Speed was no big deal for the prototypical early adopter who charged in their driveway or garage; the battery recharged slowly overnight to be ready to go in the morning. But for apartment-dwellers who rely on public infrastructure, speed can be the difference between getting a week’s worth of miles in 15 to 20 minutes and sitting around a charging station for the better part of an hour.
Crucially, an improvement in charging speed makes a long EV journey feel more like the driving rhythm of old. No, battery-powered vehicles still can’t get back on the road in five minutes or less. But many of the newer models can travel, say, three hours before needing to charge for a reasonable amount of time — which is about as long as most people would want to drive without a break, anyway.
An impressive burst of technological improvement is making all this possible. Early EVs like the original Chevy Bolt could accept a maximum of around 50 kilowatts of charge, and so that was how much many of the early DC fast charging stations would dispense. By comparison, Tesla in the past few years pushed Supercharger speed to 250 kilowatts, then 325. Third-party charging companies like Electrify America and EVgo have reached 350 kilowatts with some plugs. The result is that lots of current EVs can take on 10 or more miles of driving range per minute under ideal conditions.
It helps, too, that the ranges of EVs have been steadily improving. What those car commercials don’t mention is that the charging rate falls off dramatically after the battery is half full; you might add miles at lightning speed up to 50% of charge, but as it approaches capacity it begins to crawl. If you have a car with 350 miles of range, then, you probably can put on 175 miles in a heartbeat. (Efficiency counts for a lot, too. The more miles per kilowatt-hour your car can get, the farther it can go on 15 minutes of charge.)
Yet here again is an area where the West is falling behind China’s disruptive EV industry. That country has rolled out “megawatt” charging that would fill up half the battery in just four minutes, a pace that would make the difference between a gasoline pit stop and a charging stop feel negligible. This level of innovation isn’t coming to America anytime soon. But with automakers and charging companies focused on getting faster, the gap between electric and gas will continue to close.
On the need for geoengineering, Britain’s retreat, and Biden’s energy chief
Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.
The White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to reduce personnel during a potential government shutdown, targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue, Politico reported Wednesday, citing a memo from the agency.
As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange warned in May, the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal civil service mean “it may never be the same again,” which could have serious consequences for the government’s response to an unpredictable disaster such as a tsunami. Already the administration has hollowed out entire teams, such as the one in charge of carbon removal policy, as our colleague Katie Brigham wrote in February, shortly after the president took office. And Latitude Media reported on Wednesday, the Department of Energy has issued a $50 million request for proposals from outside counsel to help with the day-to-day work of the agency.
At the Heatmap House event at New York Climate Week on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer kicked things off by calling out President Donald Trump’s efforts to “kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth.” The born and raised Brooklynite praised his home state. “New York remains the climate leader,” he said, but warned that the current administration was pushing to roll back the progress the state had made.
Yet as Heatmap’s Charu Sinha wrote in her recap of the event, “many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S.” Climate tech investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert charted a path forward for decarbonization technology even in an antagonistic political environment, while PG&E’s Carla Peterman made a case for how data centers could eventually lower energy costs. You can read about all these talks and more here.
Nearly 100 scientists, including President Joe Biden’s chief climate science adviser, signed onto a letter Wednesday endorsing more federal research into geoengineering, the broad category of technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change that includes the controversial proposal to inject sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. In an open letter, the researchers said “it is very unlikely that current” climate goals “will keep the global mean temperature below the Paris Agreement target” of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. The world has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius.
Earlier this month, a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers argued against even researching technologies that could temporarily cool the planet while humanity worked to cut planet-heating emissions. But Phil Duffy, Biden’s former climate adviser, said in a statement to Heatmap that the paper “opposes research … that might help protect or restore the polar regions.” He went on via email, “As the climate crisis accelerates, we all agree that we need to rapidly scale up mitigation efforts. But the stakes are too high not to also investigate other possible solutions.”
President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Leon Neal/Getty Images
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to skip the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil in November, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. He will do so despite criticizing his predecessor Rishi Sunak a few years ago for a “failure of leadership” after the conservative leader declined to attend the annual confab. One leader in the ruling Labour party said there was a “big fight inside the government” between officials pushing Starmer to attend the event those “wanting him to focus on domestic issues.”
Polls show approval for Starmer among the lowest of any leaders in the West. But he has recently pushed for more clean energy, including signing onto a series of nuclear power deals with the U.S.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has assumed the role of the nation’s testbed for new nuclear fission technologies, agreeing to build what are likely to be the nation’s first small modular reactors, including the debut fourth-generation units that use a coolant other than water. Now the federally-owned utility is getting into fusion. On Wednesday, the TVA inked a deal with fusion startup Type One Energy to develop a 350-megawatt plant “using the company’s stellarator fusion technology.” The deal, first brokered last week but reported Tuesday in World Nuclear News, promises to deploy the technology “once it is commercially ready.” It also follows the announcement just a few days ago of a major offtake agreement for fusion leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which will sell $1 billion of electricity to oil giant Eni.
Climate change is good news for foreign fish. A new study in Nature found that warming rivers have brought about the introduction of new invasive species. This, the researchers wrote, shows “an increase in biodiversity associated with improvement of water in many European rivers since the late twentieth century.”