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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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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.