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On firefighting, clean energy tax credits, and the Olympics.
Current conditions:A heat dome is bringing scorching temperatures to parts of the Great Plains and the American Southwest • Typhoon Gaemi triggered a mudslide in southeast China, killing at least 15 • It’s 70 degrees and humid in Caracas, where both Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his rivals have claimed victory in Sunday’s heavily disputed election.
The Park Fire has burned 360,000 acres since Wednesday, making it the largest active fire in the country and the seventh-largest in California’s history. Evacuation orders have now been issued for four nearby counties, with heavy smoke rolling into Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. Windy conditions and steep slopes allowed the blaze to expand rapidly, but cooler, wetter air on Sunday aided firefighters’ efforts. As of Sunday evening, the fire was only 12% contained.
Firefighters work to contain the Park Fire’s eastern front in Chico, California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.
Climate change has made California’s summers hotter and dryer, increasing the frequency of large wildfires by an estimated 25%. Case in point: extreme heat this summer provided the Park Fire with lots of dry vegetation to consume.
When the Inflation Reduction Act made clean energy tax credits transferable, it set the conditions for a whole new market for those who earn the tax credits (clean energy developers and investors) and those who want them (anyone who wants relief from a large tax bill). In its mid-year market intelligence report, Crux, one of the leading platforms for tax credit transfers, projected that 2024 would see $20 billion to $25 billion such transactions in total, up from $7 billion to $9 billion last year.
Before the IRA, clean energy tax credits were restricted to the companies that earned them. That limited their usefulness, as some developers and investors didn’t pay enough taxes to claim the full benefit. Transferability has drawn a wider range of participants into the market, writes Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin. And expect much more in the years to come — investment bank Evercore is projecting that the market for tax credit trading could hit $100 billion by 2030.
The surfing competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics has been dogged by concerns over its impact on the environment and the local population of Tahiti, a French overseas territory known for its pristine beaches and vibrant coral reefs. Plans to construct new housing and a large observational tower aroused opposition, with locals voicing concern over how the new developments would disrupt the marine and terrestrial ecosystems.
The competition is now underway, though with a smaller footprint. Nearly 100% of on-land housing needs will be met by renting out existing structures, and the observational tower has been scaled down. And the athletes? They aresleeping on a 413-foot cruise ship anchored off the shore of the island. The changes have quieted some criticism, but concerns remain over the impact of the tower. As for the cruise ship solution, said French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson, “It’s unusual, but they seem to like it.”
An image of French athlete Joan Duru surfing at Teahupo'o, projected on a wall in Paris’ Montmartre. Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images.
United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen flew to Brazil this weekend for a meeting of G20 finance ministers. On Saturday, she delivered a speech touting a new partnership with the Brazilian Ministry of Finance to combat climate change and urging more global cooperation. The transition to a low-carbon economy is, she said, “the single greatest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.” Yellen urged G20 leaders to invest in this transition, to the tune of $3 trillion in new capital — annually — between now and 2050.
The Department of the Treasury has been central to the Biden-Harris administration’s climate strategy, providing key guidance on the many tax provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. In Brazil, Yellen encouraged her counterparts to “harness the power of markets” to speed up the energy transition.
A year ago, London Mayor Sadiq Khan expanded the Ultra Low Emission Zone, a bounded area that uses fees to strictly limit vehicle traffic, to the entire city. According to newly released data, air pollutants like nitrogen oxide and particulate matter dropped dramatically in the six months that followed. Khan said the decision to expand the zone was “a difficult one, but the right one.” It’s a new piece of evidence about the effectiveness of congestion pricing, less than two months after New York Governor Hochul paused a similar policy in New York City.
“We will be creating so much electricity that you’ll be saying, ‘Please, please, President, we don’t want any more electricity. We can’t stand it.’ You’ll be begging me, ‘No more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough.’” — Donald Trump, in a keynote speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference, perhaps obliquely referring to the need for new energy transmission and storage infrastructure.
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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.”