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Here’s a grim fact: The most destructive fires in recent American history swept over a state with the country’s strictest wildfire-specific building code, including in some of the neighborhoods that are now largely smoldering rubble.
California’s wildfire building code, Chapter 7A, went into effect in 2008, and it mandates fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, vegetation management, and vents for attics and crawlspaces designed to resist embers and flames. The code is the “most robust” in the nation, Lisa Dale, a lecturer at the Columbia Climate School and a former environmental policy advisor for the State of Colorado, told me. It applies to nearly any newly built structure in one of the zones mapped out by state and local officials as especially prone to fire hazard.
The adoption of 7A followed years of code development and mapping of hazardous areas, largely in response to devastating urban wildfires such as the Tunnel Fire, which claimed more than 3,000 structures and 25 lives in Oakland and Berkeley in 1991, and kicked off renewed efforts to harden Californian homes.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s report on the 1991 fire makes for familiar reading as the Palisades and Eaton fires still smolder. The wildland-urban interface, it says, was put at extreme risk by a combination of dry air, little rainfall, hot winds blowing east to west, built-up vegetation that was too close to homes, steep hills, and limited access to municipal water. The report also castigates the “unregulated use of wood shingles as roof and siding material.”
This was not the first time a destructive fire on the wildland-urban interface had been partially attributed to ignitable building materials. The 1961 Bel-Air fire, for instance, which claimed almost 200 homes, including that of Burt Lancaster, and the 1959 Laurel Canyon fire were both, FEMA said, evidence of “the wood roof and separation from natural fuels problems,” as were fires in 1970 and 1980 near where the Tunnel Fire eventually struck in 1970 and 1980.
But it was the sheer scale of the Tunnel Fire that prompted action by California lawmakers.
Throughout the 1990s, fire-resilient roofing requirements were ramped up, designating which materials were allowed in fire hazard areas and throughout the state. By all accounts, the building code works — but only when and where it’s in force. Dale told me that compliant homes were five times as likely to survive a wildfire. Research by economists Judson Boomhower and Patrick Baylis found that the code “reduced average structure loss risk during a wildfire by 16 percentage points, or about a 40% reduction.”
“The challenge from the perspective of wildfire vulnerability is that those codes are relatively recent, and the housing stock turns over really slowly, so we have this enormous stock of already built homes in dangerous places that are going to be out there for decades,” Boomhower told me.
The 7A building code applies only to new buildings, however. In long-settled areas of California like Pacific Palisades, which has little new housing construction or even existing home turnover due to high costs and permitting complications, especially in areas under the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission, many houses are not just failing to comply with Chapter 7A, but also with any housing code at all.
Looking at which homes had survived past fires, Steve Quarles, who helped advise the California State Fire Marshal on developing 7A, told me, “What really mattered was if it was built under any building code.” Many homes destroyed by the fires in Los Angeles likely were not. In Pacific Palisades, fire management is a frequent topic of concern and discussion. But as late as 2018, local media in Pacific Palisades noted that the area still had some homes with wood shingle roofs.
While a complete inventory of homes lost in the Palisades and Eaton fires has yet to be taken, the neighborhoods were full of older homes. According to CalFire incident reports, of the almost 47,000 structures in the zone of the Palisades Fire, more than 8,000 were built before 1939, and 44,560 were built before 2009. For the Eaton Fire area, of the around 41,000 structures, almost 14,000 were built before 1939, and only around 1,000 were built since 2010.
A Pacific Palisades home designed by architect Greg Chasen and built in 2024, however, survived the fire and went viral on X after he posted a photo of it still standing after the flames had moved through. The home embodied some of the best practices for fire-safe building, according to Bloomberg, including keeping vegetation away from the building, a metal roof, tempered glass, and fire-resistant siding.
When Michael Wara, the director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, spoke with firefighters and insurance industry officials in the process of drafting a 2021 report for the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment on strategies for mitigating wildfire risk, they told him that, from their perspective, wildfires are often a matter of “home ignition,” meaning that while building near forested areas puts any home at risk, the risk of a home itself igniting varies based on how it’s built and the vegetation clearance around it. “Existing homes in high fire threat areas” built before the implementation of California’s wildfire building codes, Wara wrote, “are a massive problem.” At the time he published the paper, there were somewhere between 700,000 and 1.3 million pre-building code homes still standing in “high or very high threat areas.”
The flipside of focusing on “home ignition” and the building code is that the building code works better over time, as more and more homes comply with it thanks to normal turnover, people extensively renovating, or even tearing down old homes — or rebuilding after fires. Homes that are close to homes that don’t ignite in a fire are more likely to survive.
One study that looked at the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed more than 18,000 structures and claimed more than 80 lives in the Northern California town of Paradise, sampled homes built before 1997, between 1997 and 2018, and from 2018 onwards, and found that only 11.5% of pre-1997 homes survived, compared to 38.5% from 1997 and after. The researchers also found that building survivability had a kind of magnifying effect, with distance from the nearest destroyed structure and the number structures destroyed in the immediate area among “the strongest predictors of survival.”
“The more homes that comply, the less chance you get those structural ignitions and the less chance you get those huge disasters like this,” Doug Green, who manages Headwaters Economics’ Community Assistance for Wildfire Program, told me. “It takes people doing the right thing to their own home — dealing with vegetation, making sure roofs are clean, having right roofing. It’s really a community-wide strategy to stop fires that happen like this.”
But just as any home hardening — or just building to code — is more effective the more the homes around you do it as well, it’s just as true in reverse. “If your next door neighbors don’t do that work, the effectiveness of your efforts will be less,” Dale said. “Building codes ultimately work best when we get an entire landscape or neighborhood to adopt them.”
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And it only gets worse from here.
Hot and humid weather stretching from Maine to Missouri is causing havoc for grid operators: blackouts, brownouts, emergency authorizations to exceed environmental restrictions, and high prices.
But in terms of what is on the grid and what is demanded of it, this may be the easiest summer for a long time.
That’s because demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing. Between broad-based electrification, manufacturing additions, and especially data center construction, electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.
For the previous 20 years, load growth has been relatively steady, Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins, explained to me. “What’s different is that load is trending up,” he said. “When you’re buying and making arrangements for the summer, you have to aim a bit higher.”
Nowhere is the combined and uneven development of the grid’s supply and demand more evident than in PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest electricity market, spanning from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. The grid now has to serve new load in Virginia’s “data center alley,” while aggressive public policy promoting renewables in states such as Maryland and New Jersey has made planning more complicated thanks to the different energy generation and economic profiles of wind, solar, and batteries compared to gas and coal.
PJM hit peak load on Monday of just over 161,000 megawatts, within kissing distance of its all-time record of 165,500 megawatts and far north of last year’s high demand of 152,700, with load hitting at least 158,000 megawatts on Tuesday. Forecast high load this year was around 154,000 megawatts. Earlier this spring, PJM warned that for the first time, “available generation capacity may fall short of required reserves in an extreme planning scenario that would result in an all-time PJM peak load of more than 166,000 megawatts.”
While that extreme demand has not been seen on the grid during this present heat wave, we’re still early in the year. Typically, PJM’s demand peaks in July or even August; according to the consulting firm ICF, the last June peak was in 2014, while demand last year peaked in July. On Monday, real time prices got just over $3,000 a megawatt, and reached just over $1,800 on Tuesday.
“This is a big test. A lot of capacity has retired since 2006 and the resource mix has changed some,” Connor Waldoch, head of strategy at GridStatus, told me. While exact data on the resource mix over the past 20 years isn’t available, Waldoch said that many of the fossil fuel plants on the grid — including those that help set the price of electricity — are quite old.
PJM’s operators have issued a “maximum generation alert” that will extend to Wednesday, warning generators and transmission owners to defer or cancel maintenance so that “units stay online and continue to produce energy that is needed.”
PJM also issued a load management alert, a warning that PJM may call upon some 8,000 megawatts of electricity users who have been paid in advance to reduce demand when the grid calls for it. Already, some large users of electricity in Virginia have reduced their power demand as part of the program. There are historically around one or two uses of demand response per year in each of the electricity market’s 21 zones.
“Demand response is a real hero,” Silverman said.
Elsewhere in the hot zone, thousands of customers of the New York Independent Systems Operator lost or saw reduced power on Monday, along with over 100,000 customers affected by voltage reductions. On Tuesday, NYISO issued an “energy watch” meaning that “operating reserves are expected to be lower than normal,” and asking customers to reduce their power consumption.
Further north, oil and coal made up 10% of the fuel mix in ISO New England by Monday night, according to GridStatus data. The region has greatly expanded behind-the-meter solar generation since 2010, which as of 2 p.m. Monday was generating over 21% of the region’s power. But the grid as a whole hasn’t been able to keep up, thanks to a nationally anomalous shortage of gas capacity and still-insufficient battery storage. As the sun faded, so too did New England’s renewable generation.
“You don’t see coal very often in the New England fuel mix,” Waldoch told me. In fact, there is only one remaining coal plant in New England, which can typically power around 440,000 homes — though that’s based on normal electricity usage. On days like the past few, it may power far fewer.
Moving into Tuesday, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright invoked emergency authorities to allow Duke Energy in the Carolinas to run certain of its units “at their maximum generation output levels due to ongoing extreme weather conditions and to preserve the reliability of bulk electric power system.”
The strained grid and high prices come as grid operators question how effectively their current and planned generation capacity can meet future demand. These questions have become especially pressing in PJM, which last year shelled out billions of dollars in payments to largely fossil fuel generators in what’s known as a capacity auction. That’s already translating to higher costs for consumers — in some cases as high as 20%. But even that could be nothing compared to what’s coming.
“If you take the current conditions that PJM is dealing with right now and you add tens of gigawatts of data to center demand, they would be in trouble,” Pieter Mul, an energy and infrastructure advisor at PA Consulting, told me.
Right now, Mul said, PJM can muddle through. “It is all hands on deck. Our prices are quite high. They’ve invoked some various emergency conditions.” But that’s before all those data centers are even online. “It’s a 2026, ’27, and beyond question,” Mul said.
Today, however, “it’s mostly just very hot weather.”
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.
The new Nissan Leaf is joining a whole crop of new electric cars in the $30,000 range.
Here is an odd sentence to write in the year 2025: One of the most interesting electric vehicles on the horizon is the Nissan Leaf.
The Japanese automaker last week revealed new images and specs of the redesign it had teased a few months ago. The new Leaf, which will arrive in 2026, is a small crossover that’s sleeker than, say, a Tesla Model Y, but more spacious than the previous hatchback versions of the car. Nissan promises it will have a max range above 300 miles, while industry experts expect the company to target a starting price not too far above $30,000.
The updated Leaf won’t be one of those EVs that smokes a gas-powered sports car in a drag race, not with the 214 horsepower from that debut version and certainly not with the 174 horsepower from the cheaper version that will arrive later on. Its 150-kilowatt max charging speed lags far behind the blazing fast 350-kilowatt charging capability Hyundai is building into its Ioniq electric vehicles. But because it lacks some of these refinements, the new Nissan may arrive as one of the most compelling of the “affordable” EVs that are, finally, coming to drivers.
Not bad for a car that had become an electric afterthought.
The original Nissan Leaf was a revelation merely for its existence. Never mind that it was a lumpy potato derived from the uninspired Nissan Versa — here was the first mass-market electric car, heralding the age of the EV and welcomed with plenty of “car of the year” laurels at the dawn of the 2010s. Its luster would not last, however, as the arrival of the Tesla Model S a couple of years later stole the world’s attention. The second-generation Leaf that arrived in 2017 was an aesthetic and technological leap forward from its predecessor, with a range that topped 200 miles in its most advanced form. It was, for the time, a pretty good EV. Almost immediately, it was overshadowed by the introduction of Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y, which catapulted Elon Musk’s company into complete dominance of the global EV market.
It took nearly a decade for Nissan (which fell into corporate mismanagement and outright crisis in the meantime) to update the stale and outdated Leaf. As a result, you might think the new version of the OG EV will arrive just in time to be outshone again. Yet the peculiar nature of the evolving electric car market has created an opportunity for the Leaf to finally grow and thrive.
There was a time when the mythical affordable Tesla could have taken the brand into the entry-level car market, and perhaps below the magic starting price of $30,000. But that has turned out to be a distraction dangled in front of fanboys and investors. In reality, Musk effectively killed the idea as he instead rolled out the Cybertruck and pivoted the company toward the dream of total vehicle autonomy.
Thanks to Tesla’s refusal to act like a normal car company, the affordable EV market is still there for the taking. Some are already in the game: Hyundai’s little Kona Electric starts at $33,000, and I’ve lauded Chevrolet for building a base version of the Equinox EV that starts around $35,000. In the next year or so, an influx of EVs in the $30,000 to $35,000 range might really change the game for electric-curious buyers.
The new Leaf is suddenly a big part of that mix. No, it won’t compete on price with a comparable combustion Nissan like the Kicks crossover that starts in the low $20,000s (not without the $7,500 tax credit, which would have made the new crop of affordable EVs directly cost-competitive with entry-level gas cars). The Leaf is likely to start just above $30,000, with the price creeping higher for buyers who opt for better performance or more range (and as I’ve noted numerous times, you ought to buy all the range you can afford if an EV is going to be your main car).
Arriving next year to compete with the Leaf is the new Chevy Bolt, another revival of an early EV icon. Experts expect a similar price range there. The anticipated Kia EV3 should come to America eventually with a starting cost around $35,000. The Jeff Bezos-backed Slate electric truck shocked the world with its promise of a bare-bones EV in the $20,000s — but, by the time the average buyer adds enough amenities to make it liveable, most Slate trucks will probably top $30,000.
Elon Musk may have abdicated his role as the Leaf’s antagonist via his refusal to build an affordable car, but erstwhile ally Donald Trump is poised to assume the role. Since the Leaf is slated to be built in Japan, the EV would be subject to whatever tariffs might be in place by the time it goes on sale next year. A 25% tariff, plus the federal government’s flip to punishing EVs with penalties instead of rewarding them with incentives, would kill the car’s value proposition in the U.S. Perhaps, then, it will become the next great affordable EV — for everybody else.