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On the president’s last speech, the Climate Corps, and disappearing cloud cover
Current conditions: Cooler temperatures and calmer winds are helping firefighters make progress against ongoing blazes in Los Angeles • Argentina is bracing for an extreme heat wave • A blast of Arctic air called a “Siberian express” will send temperatures plummeting across central and eastern states this weekend.
A new scientific analysis out of the University of California, Los Angeles, concludes that climate change intensified the city’s devastating wildfires. The UCLA researchers estimated that intense heat caused by climate change may be linked to about 25% of the fuel that fed the fires. “We believe that the fires would still have been extreme without the climate change components,” the authors wrote, “but would have been somewhat smaller and less intense.” This analysis is not peer reviewed, and the scientists call for further research. But they add that future wildfire mitigation should focus on “factors we can control,” like stopping people from lighting fires, making homes fire-resistant, and thinking more carefully about where we build.
President Biden gave a televised farewell speech yesterday from the Oval Office, in which he said that “the existential threat of climate change has never been clearer,” pointing to recent natural disasters like flooding in North Carolina and wildfires in California. He touted his Inflation Reduction Act as “the most significant climate and clean energy law ever, ever in the history of the world,” and said we don’t have to choose between planet and prosperity. But Biden had a warning. Without naming names, he said that “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis to serve their own interests for power and profit.” He added: “We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future.”
This morning a handful of Democratic House Representatives will host a press conference in which they urge their colleagues in Congress to oppose “efforts to roll back policies helping to build a clean energy economy, lower costs, protect public health, and cut climate pollution.”
The Biden administration has been “quietly winding down” the Climate Corps green jobs program before President-elect Trump takes office, according toGrist. “The people who were responsible for coordinating it have left office or are leaving office,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has been researching climate service projects for AmeriCorps. “Before they go, they are shutting it all down.” But the good news is that because the roles created through the program were scattered across a diverse mix of local and state governments and nonprofits, as well as federal agencies, many of them already have funding locked in and will therefore be able to stick around for a few years. “The jobs survive, even if the branding doesn’t,” wrote Kate Yoder at Grist.
Yesterday’s confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, a fracking executive and Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, proved to be relatively low-key and collegial. Wright repeatedly avowed that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons, although he demurred that it was a “global” problem and turned his responses repeatedly to energy innovation and developing energy resources in the United States. He lamented that fossil fuels had “fallen out of fashion and out of favor,” but also expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal and nuclear power. “Wright’s relatively easy reception reflects the fact that there actually are wide areas of bipartisan agreement on the kind of energy research and technology development work the Department of Energy does,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.
Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, also had his confirmation hearing yesterday. He said that drivers of electric vehicles should have to pay to use roads because they don’t pay taxes on fuel.
Other nominees, including Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior and Lee Zeldin for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, may endure more contentious hearings today.
Warmer temperatures caused by climate change are reducing low-cloud cover in some parts of the world, and ironically, this may be helping to keep Earth a little bit cooler, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Researchers from McGill University measured the heat energy that Earth reflects into the atmosphere, and noticed that lower cloud cover means more of his heat energy gets released. “Without these cloud changes, the surface would warm even faster,” said Lei Liu, a graduate student in McGill’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and an author on the study. “This work offers observational truth about how clouds affect warming, which can be used to improve climate models and guide environmental policies.” Of course, clouds also help reflect heat before it even reaches Earth’s surface, and a separate piece of research published last month suggested that the decreasing cloud cover is actually making global warming worse. In other words, it’s complicated.
Natural disasters have been linked to rent hikes between 4% and 6% in affected cities, and in many cases, these elevated prices never fully come down.
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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.”