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On an incoming winter storm, nanoplastics, and a new kind of tire
Current conditions: A tornado struck the Florida panhandle • Two towns in Australia’s state of Victoria have been forced to evacuate due to severe flooding • It’s 69 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Tel Aviv, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken is meeting with Israeli officials to try to smooth relations in the region.
After a weekend of winter weather, vast swathes of the U.S. are bracing for another storm system. It will cover nearly 2,000 miles in 72 hours, bringing blizzard conditions to the central and southern Plains, and lashing the South and East Coast with high winds and heavy rain. Meanwhile the Pacific Northwest is enduring a powerful cold front that could bring several feet of snow across the Cascade mountain range. Forecast maps show a kaleidoscope of colors and a chaotic converging of weather events:
NOAA
More than 90% of the nation’s school buses run on diesel, but the Biden administration is trying to change that. Yesterday the administration announced 67 new recipients of nearly $1 billion in grant funding to transition to low- and zero-emission school buses. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean School Bus Program, which gets funding from Biden’s 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, has $5 billion to spend over five years on helping schools swap old buses for cleaner ones. So far it has allocated about $2 billion across 652 school districts, and this new round of funding will buy more than 2,700 clean buses. Most of the grant recipients are located in low-income, rural, and tribal communities, according toThe Washington Post. “Zero-emission school buses can and one day will be the American standard,” EPA administrator Michael Regan told reporters.
A new study finds that one liter of bottled water contains hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces of plastic, up to 100 times more than the amount initially estimated. Most of these particles are nanoplastics measuring just billionths of a meter – small enough to make their way into human cells and cross the blood-brain barrier, reports the Los Angeles Times. The authors of the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say these particles can carry pollutants and pathogens and interfere with cells and tissues inside the human body. Research on animals has connected microplastics with reproductive problems, hormone issues, poor heart health, and many other ailments. The team tested samples from three popular bottled water brands, but won’t divulge which ones.
Natural disasters cost the world $250 billion in losses last year, according to a new report from reinsurer Munich Re. Less than half of those losses were insured. The tally includes the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, but the analysis also points to climate change as a main driver of severe storms that plagued North America and Europe, resulting in unprecedented losses. “The warming of the Earth that has been accelerating for some years is intensifying the extreme weather in many regions, leading to increasing loss potentials,” says Munich Re's chief climate scientist Ernst Rauch. He added: “Society and industry need to adapt to the changing risks – otherwise loss burdens will inevitably increase.” There's a map that shows the most expensive natural disasters. It is too big to feature in one go, so here it is split in two:
Major natural disasters in 2023Munich Re
Major natural disasters in 2023Munich Re
Wind has overtaken coal as a source of electricity in Europe for the first time, “marking a key milestone for regional energy transition efforts,” Reutersreports, citing analysis from think tank Ember. In the final quarter of 2023, 184 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity was generated by coal plants. Comparatively, 193 TWh of electricity came from wind, which is about 20% more than the amount generated in the same quarter of 2022.
Goodyear is developing a new, more durable tire that is meant specifically for electric vehicles. It could extend an EV’s tire mileage by up to 30,000 miles.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.