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Climate

AM Briefing: 'Bigger Than the Hoover Dam'

On a major clean energy infrastructure project, mapping ocean activity, and liquid hot magma

AM Briefing: 'Bigger Than the Hoover Dam'
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: The western U.S. is in the midst of a severe “snow drought” • The Great Lakes began 2024 with their smallest amount of ice cover in 50 years • Finland’s Enontekiö airport recorded the country’s coldest January temperature since 2006: -44 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Offshore wind sees a turbulent start to 2024

“The rollercoaster that is the U.S. offshore wind industry is already racing in 2024,” says Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci. Indeed, after missing an end-of-year deadline to start sending energy to the U.S. grid, the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm came online at 11:52 p.m. on Tuesday, delivering five megawatts of power to the New England grid. The Vineyard Wind 1 project, located near Martha’s Vineyard, will eventually consist of 62 turbines capable of powering 400,000 homes in Massachusetts.

“The arrival of Vineyard Wind is a welcome tonic to a nascent offshore wind industry that has struggled in the US in recent months,” writes Oliver Milman at The Guardian. But on Wednesday, BP and Equinor abandoned a contract to sell offshore wind energy to the state of New York, citing the familiar headwinds of rising costs, interest rates, and supply chain problems. Last October the companies tried to negotiate with the state for higher rates for selling renewable energy credits. Their request was turned down, only for the state to open the floor to new project proposals, including from BP and Equinor. “The agreement is the latest evidence of the malaise engulfing the fledgling offshore US wind industry,” writes Myles McCormick at the Financial Times, “but also illustrates the willingness of state authorities to provide flexibility to prevent projects from being abandoned.”

2. Construction goes ahead on SunZia clean energy transmission line

Some important renewable energy news went under the radar this week: Pattern Energy’s SunZia Transmission line secured $11 billion in financing, which means construction can continue on the “largest clean energy infrastructure project in U.S. history.” The 550-mile high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line will run between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona, delivering power to western states from the SunZia Wind facility being built in New Mexico. “The size and scale of both the SunZia project and this multifaceted financing show that the renewable energy space can secure attractive capital at levels previously only seen in traditional generation,” says Daniel Elkort, executive vice president at Pattern Energy.

Upgrading transmission systems will be key to meeting the Biden administration’s goal of eliminating carbon emissions from the power sector by 2035: By one estimate, transmission systems will need to expand by 60% by 2030. The SunZia Transmission line will be able to move 3,000 megawatts of wind power to 3 million people and has been called “bigger than the Hoover Dam.” But its progress has been rocky: Indigenous groups have expressed concerns about the line’s impact on religious and cultural sites, and environmentalists worried it could harm wildlife habitat.

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  • 3. New maps show hidden extent of industrial activity at sea

    Incredible new maps published in the journal Nature expose the great extent to which human activity has pervaded the world’s oceans. For the project, researchers led by Google-backed nonprofit Global Fishing Watch used artificial intelligence to analyze huge amounts of offshore data from satellite imagery. They found that many industrial vessels aren’t publicly tracked, exposing a potential blindspot for conservation efforts. The data also showed that offshore wind turbines now outnumber oil structures:

    Nature

    Nature

    4. GOP climate advocate John Curtis launches Senate bid

    Utah Rep. John Curtis announced this week he is running for the Senate seat left vacant by retiring Sen. Mitt Romney. The primary field is likely to be crowded, but Curtis’s entry is interesting because he is “one of the GOP’s leading voices on fighting climate change,” says E&E News. He launched and chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus, has supported some of the Biden administration’s policies on solar, and attended COP28 to push for permitting reform. But it will be interesting to see whether climate change features prominently in his campaign: Curtis didn’t mention environmental issues in his first campaign video but pledged to “work to make America not just energy independent, but energy dominant.”

    5. Researchers hope volcanic magma could provide ‘quantum leap’ in geothermal energy

    Researchers in Iceland have plans to drill into a magma chamber beneath a volcano in an attempt to better understand the hot molten rock and eventually even “make a quantum leap in geothermal energy production,” reports New Scientist. The Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) project will start drilling in 2026, focusing on a volcano called Krafla in north-east Iceland. The researchers hope to develop near-magma geothermal energy technology that would allow wells to trap hot, pressurized water to drive turbines and produce cheap, clean electricity. “There are endless opportunities,” says Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson at the Geothermal Research Cluster (GEORG) in Reykjavík. “The only thing we need to do is to learn how to tame this monster.”

    THE KICKER

    A company called Moolec Science has been inserting pig genes into soy plants to produce beans that are pink and taste meaty.

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    Spotlight

    The Moss Landing Battery Backlash Has Spread Nationwide

    New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.

    Moss Landing.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

    It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.

    As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.

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    Hotspots

    The Race to Qualify for Renewable Tax Credits Is on in Wisconsin

    And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.

    The United States.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.

    • Xcel’s Ten Mile Creek solar project doesn’t appear to have begun construction yet, and like many facilities it must begin that process by about this time next year or it will lose out on the renewable energy tax credits cut short by the new law. Ten Mile Creek has essentially become a proxy for the larger fight to build before time runs out to get these credits.
    • Xcel told county regulators last month that it hoped to file an application to the Wisconsin Public Services Commission by the end of this year. But critics of the project are now telling their allies they anticipate action sooner in order to make the new deadline for the tax credit — and are campaigning for the county to intervene if that occurs.
    • “Be on the lookout for Xcel to accelerate the PSC submittal,” Ryan Sherley, a member of the St. Croix Board of Supervisors, wrote on Facebook. “St. Croix County needs to legally intervene in the process to ensure the PSC properly hears the citizens and does not rush this along in order to obtain tax credits.”

    2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.

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    Q&A

    All the Renewables Restrictions Fit to Print

    Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.

    The Q&A subject.
    Heatmap Illustration

    This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.

    The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.

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