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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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Welcome to Decarbonize Your Life, Heatmap’s special report that aims to help you make decisions in your own life that are better for the climate, better for you, and better for the world we all live in. This is our attempt, in other words, to assist you in living something like a normal life while also making progress in the fight against climate change.
That means making smarter and more informed decisions about how climate change affects your life — and about how your life affects climate change. The point is not what you shouldn’t do (although there is some of that). It’s about what you should do to exert the most leverage on the global economic system and, hopefully, nudge things toward decarbonization just a little bit faster.
We certainly think we’ve hit upon a better way to think about climate action, but you don’t have to take our word for it. Keep reading here for more on how (and why) we think about decarbonizing your life — or just skip ahead to our recommendations, below.
The small hydrogen plant at the Port of Stockton illustrates a key challenge for the energy transition.
Officials at the Port of Stockton, an inland port in the Central Valley of California, were facing a problem. Under pressure from California regulators to convert all port vehicles to zero-emissions models over the next decade or so, they had made some progress, but had hit a wall.
“Right now we only have one tool, and that is to electrify everything,” Jeff Wingfield, the port’s deputy director, told me. The Port of Stockton has actually been something of a national leader in electrifying its vehicles, having converted about 40% of its cargo-handling equipment from diesel-powered to battery-electric machines to date. But there aren’t electric alternatives available for everything yet, and the electric machines they’ve purchased have come with challenges. Sensors have malfunctioned due to colder weather or moisture in the air. Maintenance can’t be done by just any mechanic; the equipment is computerized and requires knowledge of the underlying code. “We’ve had a lot of downtime with the equipment unnecessarily. And so when we’re trying to sell that culture change, you know, these things can set back the mindset and just the overall momentum,” said Wingfield.
The port also needs its tenant companies to make the switch, but according to Wingfield, they are hesitant to invest in the electric truck models available today. They’re more interested in hydrogen fuel-cell trucks, he said, which are also zero-emissions, and there’s even a vendor selling them right down the street. The problem was there was no source of hydrogen within an hour and a half of the port.
It was these conditions that got Wingfield and his colleagues excited about BayoTech, a company that wanted to build a new hydrogen plant there — even though BayoTech was going to make hydrogen from methane, the main component of natural gas, in a carbon emissions-intensive process. Hydrogen fuel-cell powered trucks don’t release any of the carbon or toxic pollutants that diesel trucks release, but the process of making the hydrogen fuel can still be dirty.
While the port was considering BayoTech’s proposal, California leadership was committing the state to building out a climate-friendly hydrogen industry. In July, the Biden administration awarded California $1.2 billion for a $12.6 billion plan to build new, zero-emissions hydrogen supply chains. “California is revolutionizing how a major world economy can clean up its biggest industries,” Governor Gavin Newsom said. “We’re going to use clean, renewable hydrogen to power our ports and public transportation – getting people and goods where they need to go, just without the local air pollution.”
Nonetheless, the port approved the fossil fuel-based hydrogen plant in August.
The case illustrates the complexities of this moment in the energy transition. At its center is a question: Should we gamble with higher emissions today on the premise that it could help lower emissions in the future? It’s a gamble that many climate advocates, guided by warnings from scientists about the consequences of continued fossil fuel use, fear will do more harm than good.
The port, which was the lead agency for the environmental review process, estimated that if all of the fuel BayoTech produced was used as a replacement for diesel, it would result in a net decrease in emissions of 4,317 metric tons of CO2 per year, which is like taking 1,000 cars off the road. Still, the plant will emit about 18 kilograms of carbon for every kilogram of hydrogen it produces — more than four times higher than the Department of Energy’s standard for “clean” hydrogen.
Climate and environmental groups in Stockton oppose the project. They’ve raised a number of concerns about it and the conditions under which it was approved, but one is the missed opportunity. “At a time when incentives are lining up for cleaner production methods,” Davis Harper, the carbon and energy program manager at the local group Restore the Delta, told me, “and at a time when the state in particular is really trying to transition away from methane, to approve a new steam methane reforming project in a community that’s already suffering from so many cumulative impacts of industrial pollution — it’s a major regression.”
Between operations at the port, highways, warehouses, and other industrial activity, Stockton ranks in the 96th percentile for pollution burden in California, and in the 100th percentile for cases of asthma. In addition to carbon dioxide, the BayoTech plant will release nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter. Harper and other local advocates want the community to have more of a say in shaping regional economic development and defining what its hydrogen future looks like. “I think it puts a stain on what the opportunity for hydrogen might be in the community,” he said.
But Wingfield told me it wasn’t an either/or scenario. “I mean, nobody was approaching us with a green hydrogen project,” he said. Even if someone was, Wingfield said green hydrogen was still too expensive and that no one would buy it. The port is supporting state-wide efforts to develop a more sustainable supply of hydrogen in the future, he said, “but it is slow, and for us, we need something now.”
There’s a chicken-and-egg challenge to getting a clean hydrogen economy going. In addition to a new supply of fuel, it will require investments in new vehicles, fueling stations, and modes of delivering the gas — and that’s just for trucking. Decarbonization experts also see potential to use hydrogen for cargo ships, steelmaking, and aviation. “I agree, you know, don’t wait around for the green projects that are being planned to come online,” Lew Fulton, the director of the energy futures research program at the U.C. Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, told me. “There’s a whole bunch of things we need to learn by doing. And so from that point of view, you could argue, well, in the first few years, it doesn’t matter that much what kind of hydrogen it is.”
When I asked Catherine Reid, BayoTech’s chief marketing officer, what brought the company to Stockton, she told me California is a key market and the San Joaquin Valley is currently a dead-zone for the fuel. The Regional Transit District recently purchased five new fuel-cell buses, but to fuel them, it will have to truck in hydrogen from other parts of the state. BayoTech’s business model is designed to address this kind of local need. The company builds small, modular plants and sites them as close to the point of consumption as possible to avoid the cost and emissions associated with transporting the fuel. The project in Stockton will produce just 2 tons of hydrogen per day, or enough to fill the tanks of about 50 trucks. By contrast, the average hydrogen plant in California, which mostly delivers the gas to oil refineries and fertilizer plants, produces closer to 200 tons per day. “We anticipate that that demand will be snapped up quickly,” said Reid.
The port approved the plant using an abbreviated environmental review process — another aspect that troubled the advocates I spoke to — which required BayoTech to mitigate some of its most significant impacts. To reduce pollution, the company will install equipment that cuts the plant’s nitrous oxide emissions. It has also committed to using zero-emissions vehicles for at least 50% of deliveries. But the biggest pollutant that will come out of the plant is carbon dioxide — just over 12,000 metric tons of it per year. That’s not much compared to the average hydrogen plant. The smallest existing hydrogen plant in California, Air Products’ Sacramento facility, has the capacity to produce more than twice as much hydrogen as BayoTech will, but emitted nearly four times as much carbon in 2021, according to state data. One of BayoTech’s selling points is its technology’s efficiency.
The company has also committed to developing a community benefits plan, which is still in the works, though BayoTech has already signed an agreement to use local union labor and committed to donate $200,000 over the next four years to the community.
Part of BayoTech’s agreement with the port is that it will lower its emissions by purchasing carbon credits from producers of so-called “renewable natural gas,” or RNG, which can mean methane captured from landfills or from cow manure pits. It’s considered low-carbon because the methane would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, where it would warm the planet far more than carbon dioxide. In theory, credit sales help finance systems to capture the gas and use it for energy instead.
I asked Reid why, when there was so much focus on and funding available for clean hydrogen, like California’s $12.6 billion initiative and lucrative new federal tax credits, the company was investing in the fossil-fueled kind. She suggested that once the federal tax credit rules are finalized, the plant may in fact be eligible for the subsidies. That’s because the guidelines might allow hydrogen plants that buy RNG credits to qualify. “It’s a well established system that’s validated,” Reid said of the credits, “and the environmental benefits are there.”
It’s true that this system of RNG credits is well-established. It’s already written into California climate policy. The state has a low carbon fuel standard designed to drive down the average carbon intensity of transportation fuels over time. When it comes to calculating the carbon intensity of hydrogen for the regulations, there’s a workaround. If the hydrogen is made from natural gas, but the supplier purchases RNG credits, they can report their hydrogen as having a very low or even negative carbon intensity.
But the environmental benefits of these credits are the subject of much debate. Notably, fuel producers can buy credits from all over the country, and they don’t have to prove that their purchase had an additional effect on emissions beyond what might have happened otherwise. Though these credits may have some environmental benefit, they are certainly not causing carbon to be removed from the atmosphere, as implied by a negative carbon intensity. In an op-ed for Heatmap, scholars Emily Grubert and Danny Cullenward urged the Treasury Department not to adopt this same carbon accounting scheme for the federal tax credit, writing that it “would undermine the tax credit’s entire purpose.” They estimate that a fossil hydrogen project could qualify as zero-emissions by offsetting just 25% of its natural gas use. This could make it much harder for truly green hydrogen — like the kind made from electricity and water — to compete.
Interestingly, California’s new $12.6 billion clean hydrogen initiative appears to renounce RNG credits. A frequently asked questions page for the plan says that it “will not include the use of plastics, dairy biogas, or fossil methane paired with biomethane credits.”
Still, the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development praised the BayoTech project in public comments, writing that it would “contribute to achieving California’s ambitious climate and pollution reduction goals.”
The letter seemed to be mistaken about what it was supporting, however, noting that the facility would “utilize woody biomass, helping to address two needs — utilization of a waste stream and production of renewable hydrogen.” When I reached out to the governor’s office, spokesperson Willie Rudman told me the reference to woody biomass was an accident, “resulting from a mix-up with another project.” Still, the office supports the project, he said, due to “commitments made by the developer to utilize renewable natural gas as the feedstock, which can be transported to the production facility via existing natural gas pipelines.”
When I noted that this, too, was a mix-up, and that BayoTech would be buying RNG credits, not using the fuel directly, Rudman responded that this was a cost-effective and perfectly acceptable practice under California’s low-carbon fuel standard.
If you view BayoTech’s plant as a bridge to get the hydrogen economy underway, Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, told me, it’s important to know how to get to the other side. “Is this just a lifeline for the oil and gas industry, to give them another product that they can sell, which those profits then go back into drilling more oil and gas?” He said he wasn’t categorically opposed to the idea of using natural gas to produce hydrogen for now, as long as there were built-in mechanisms to convert the facility to zero-emissions down the line.
Wingfield of the Port of Stockton asserted that BayoTech’s plant would become cleaner over time, but the port has no such commitment in writing, and it’s also not entirely clear how. BayoTech’s Reid was not sure whether the Stockton plant would find a local source of RNG. She said the company was looking, but that it was rare to find alignment between BayoTech’s business model — putting hydrogen production very close to demand — and RNG suppliers. The only other route to cleaner production, other than completely replacing the plant with one that runs on electricity, would be to install carbon capture equipment. But Reid said the amount of carbon the plant produces will be so small that it may not justify the expense. “We continue to talk to players in the industry and evaluate what they’re bringing out commercially to see if there’s a match with our production units,” she said.
Construction on the plant will begin in a few months, Reid told me, and won’t take long. BayoTech expects to be delivering hydrogen in 2025.
Current conditions: Severe flooding in west and central Africa has displaced nearly one million people • Brazil is choking on wildfire smoke that can be seen from space • Shanghai was struck by Typhoon Bebinca, the strongest storm to hit the city in 75 years.
Flooding across central and eastern Europe has killed at least 10 people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate. Since late last week, the slow-moving Storm Boris has dumped huge amounts of rain on the region, causing dams to burst and rivers to overflow and inundating communities in Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Parts of eastern Germany are also on alert. In the Austrian capital of Vienna, the Wien River’s water level rose from about 20 inches to more than seven feet in the course of a day. Meanwhile some mountain regions received more than three feet of snow. In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk today declared a state of natural disaster. According to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, the floods could be the worst since 2002.
Flooding in ViennaChristian Bruna/Getty Images
The European Environment Agency has warned that flooding is likely to be “one of the most serious effects from climate change in Europe over coming decades.”
Both U.S. coasts are experiencing wild weather but of very different kinds. The National Hurricane Center issued tropical storm warnings for the Carolinas as “Tropical Cyclone Eight” approaches with 50 mph winds. The system could bring up to 8 inches of rain and flash floods. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, parts of California are expecting snow. The state issued its earliest snow advisory in 20 years for the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where up to 4 inches could fall through Monday afternoon.
With COP29 now less than two months away, key players are working hard to lay the groundwork for the outcomes they’d like to see from the annual climate summit. Here are some recent developments:
A recent study finds that the risk of weather-related supply chain disruptions will rise more in the U.S. than in any other country over the next 15 years. This is because the country is starting from a pretty low baseline risk, thanks to the interconnectivity of all the states. “If a heatwave or period of extreme rainfall hits one part of the U.S., it is easily able to import goods and services from other areas,” CarbonBrief explained. But the risk won’t stay that low forever, and indeed the authors note that the U.S. “is subject to the strongest relative increases in consumption risks” through 2040 as weather shocks increase.
Tesla sold 5,175 Cybertrucks in July, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. Sales of all other EV pickups combined during that month reached 5,546. Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor and energy systems engineering expert (and co-host of Heatmap’s climate podcast Shift Key) predicted back in December that the Cybertruck would be crushed by EV pickup rivals like the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian’s R1. But now…
The U.S. Postal Service recently started rolling out its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles — most of which will be electric. The vehicles may not be beautiful, but as Paul Waldman argued for Heatmap, if you want to normalize EVs, “what better way than to have a funky-looking EV rolling down your street every day, delivering mail to your door?”