You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
On weather trends, China’s climate envoy, and fixing the world's farming sector
Current conditions: Tornadoes terrorized Oklahoma overnight • Flash floods killed two people in China’s Guangxi region • It is 75 degrees Fahrenheit and clear in Rafah, where Israeli troops have seized the Gaza side of the border crossing with Egypt.
Temperature data for last month is rolling in, and the takeaway is that it was the hottest April on record for planet Earth. That marks 11 straight months of record heat, and researchers are starting to do some informed analysis on whether 2024 will displace 2023 as the hottest year. El Niño’s retreat could bring slightly cooler temperatures, and the data suggests that, while temperature records are still being broken, they’re not being absolutely shattered, which I suppose is good news? For example, September last year was 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the previest hottest September. Last month was only 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous hottest April. “If 2024 continues to follow its expected trajectory, global temperatures will fall out of record territory in the next month or two,” wrote climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Still, he puts the chances that this year will be hotter than last at about 66%. “If the latter half of 2024 ends up similar to 2023, we may end up closer to 1.6C for the year as a whole.”
Coming up this week: Climate envoys for China and the U.S. will meet in Washington Wednesday and Thursday to discuss solutions for “accelerating concrete climate actions this decade,” the State Department announced. Liu Zhenmin and John Podesta will discuss topics like the energy transition, methane emissions, resource efficiency, and deforestation. The U.S. and China are the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters, and the sit-down marks the envoys’ “first formal face-to-face summit before global negotiations in Azerbaijan this November,” Bloombergreported. China’s dominance in cheap green technology manufacturing will no doubt loom large over the talks, as well. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has criticized the country’s excessive output of products like solar panels, and recently called for “constructive” discussions to encourage China to reduce its manufacturing subsidies.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
The World Bank published a new report this week examining how countries can cut emissions from their food sectors. “Simply changing how middle-income countries use land, such as forests and ecosystems, for food production can cut agrifood emissions by a third by 2030,” said World Bank Senior Managing Director Axel van Trotsenburg. One recommendation, spotted byBloomberg, is that high-income countries stop subsidizing livestock farming and shift that financial support over to more environmentally friendly foods like fruits, vegetables, and poultry. “Globally, one-third of agricultural subsidies were directed toward meat and milk products in 2016,” the report said. But subsidies mask the true costs (environmental or otherwise) of these products. Cutting them could “lead to significant changes in consumption patterns and large emissions reductions.”
World Bank/Recipe for a Livable Planet report
Investment in overhauling agrifood will need to rise by $260 billion annually to halve emissions by 2030, the World Bank report said. But the cost benefits in terms of health, economic, and environmental outcomes are projected to surpass $4 trillion in 2030, which the report noted is a 16-to-1 return on investment costs.
The flooding in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state has prompted President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to call for a national plan to be put into place for preventing and dealing with climate disasters, The Washington Postreported. He instructed top environmental lieutenant Marina Silva to start putting together a strategy. “We have to stop just running after disaster,” Lula told the Post. “We have to start preparing for what can happen from disasters. … We and the world need to prepare every day with more plans and resources to deal with extreme climate occurrences.” At least 83 people are known to have died in the floods but the death toll is likely to climb. More than 20,000 people have lost their homes. Hospitals are without power. Inmates have been released from flooded prisons. Looting has begun. “This is war; that is the word,” said journalist Kelly Matos. “It’s hopelessness, civil unrest. … The tsunami is here.”
A flooded hospital entrance in Porto Alegre Max Peixoto/Getty Images
A large solar farm capable of powering 41,600 homes has been completed in Texas. The Zier facility in Brackettville, developed by Cypress Creek Renewables, has 208-megawatts of solar capacity and 80 megawatt hours of storage, and it’s already connected to and being used by the Texas grid “to ease supply strain in a time of increased demand,” Cypress Creek said in a news release. The company has 24 projects in construction or development in the state, one of which is a 100 megawatt hour battery storage facility that should be up and running next month.
Cypress Creek Renewables
“The worst thing for the energy transition is that it is perceived as being done by and for the elites.” –Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”