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“It’s Confederate Disneyland, and it’s about to be SeaWorld,” says Susan Crawford, the author of a new book about the city.
In the last few years, climate change has made its impact known in violent, eye-grabbing ways. Heat waves and drought slowly roll across the planet; hurricanes and floods and wildfires bring sudden devastation to communities that were once safe. But there are also slower, more insidious impacts that we can easily forget about in the wake of those disasters, including the most classic impact of them all: sea-level rise.
The East Coast is particularly vulnerable to rising seas, and in her new book Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm (Pegasus Books, April 4, 2023), Susan Crawford, a writer and professor at Harvard Law School, explores how the historic city, the largest in South Carolina, is preparing — or failing to prepare — for what’s to come. Flooding has become increasingly commonplace in Charleston, Crawford writes, and the city’s racial history has meant that low-income communities of color are bearing the worst of the impact, with little hope for relief.
Charleston is a bellwether for what the rest of the East Coast can expect as the waters of the Atlantic creep ever higher. When we spoke, Crawford, author of the books Fiber and The Responsive City, among others, began by describing her book as a survival story rather than a climate story. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Things are pigeonholed as climate inappropriately. This is more about the question of: Can we overcome our polarization and limitations as human beings and plan ahead for a rapidly accelerating cataclysm that will, in particular, hit the East Coast at three or four times the rate of speed it goes the rest of the world? Can we plan ahead? Can we think about what anybody with a belly button needs to thrive? Because after all, isn’t that the role of government?
I came to Charleston initially on a solo vacation in December 2017. I went there for Christmas. And it’s an interesting place, but I didn’t really know what the history of it was. And I decided to go back in February 2018 to interview the man who’d recently stepped down as mayor, Joe Riley. He had been mayor for 40 years. His tagline was America’s favorite mayor. And he had transformed Charleston over his tenure into a tourist magnet, seven million tourists a year. Lots of development. It became a food and arts destination. And I was just curious about Mayor Riley. So I contacted a local journalist named Jack Hitt, and he suggested that I ask the mayor about the water.
So, when I interviewed Riley, I asked him about flooding. And he’s a very charming guy, little bowtie, little khaki suit. And he clammed up. All he said was that it was going to be very expensive. That was it.
And I said, “huh, maybe there’s a story here.” And this became a quest to try to figure out what the Charleston story was. At first, I thought it was going to be a story of local government heroism. And in a sense, it still is. I think the city is, in a sense, doing what it can. But then I was lucky enough to be introduced to several Black resident leaders at Charleston who were very generous to me and explained what it’s like to be Black in Charleston, and the ongoing lack of a Black professional class in Charleston. There’s sort of the idea that the civil war never ended in Charleston: There’s a lack of Black advisors near the mayor, although there are Black members of city council.
Charleston’s successes and failures are just harbingers of what we will be seeing up and down the East Coast. They’re more visible in Charleston, and Charleston lives in the dreams of millions of people who want to visit. The failures of the structures around Charleston and inside Charleston are fractal in nature. They are replicated across the globe. It’s Confederate Disneyland, and it’s about to be SeaWorld.
Courtesy of Pegasus Books
Charleston is extremely low in terms of its topography. The peninsula itself was built on fill, like much of Boston. Enslaved people filled in the perimeter of what is now today’s peninsula. So about a third of that peninsula — the lower part where these gorgeous historical houses are — is five feet or less above sea level. And then these outlying suburbs, many of which were annexed into Charleston’s property tax base by Mayor Riley over the course of his mayoralty, were historically marshy wetlands. There’s very little high land in the entire city of Charleston. A lot of the area outside off the peninsula is about 10 feet or less above sea level. So Charleston’s topography sets it up for the threat of rising waters.
It’s actually more exposed than the Netherlands, because it’s not as if there are defined waterways that lead inland — it’s actually a gazillion interconnected tiny watersheds across a flat area. So water can just roll over the place unimpeded when it rises.
Charlestonians have almost gotten used to ongoing flooding, there’s a sort of complacency that sets in. And there’s also, I think, a sense in Charleston, that they’ve missed a lot of big storms recently, and maybe they believe it’s not going to happen to them. But they’re just one storm away from being flattened, basically.
Right now the city has a single planning horizon in mind, which is 2050, and a single level of sea level rise, which is 18 inches. That might be fine up until 2050. But after that we’re going to see very rapidly accelerating sea level rise — scientists are predicting more like three feet by 2070. And then at least five by the end of the century.
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Charleston was the place where 40% of the enslaved people forcibly brought to America first step foot. It’s the place where, after the slave trade was outlawed in 1808, a great deal of the domestic slave trade was carried out. Its entire economy, initially, was based on extractive labor from enslaved people.
After the Civil War, a lot of free Black people moved onto the peninsula seeking work. Charleston in the 1970s was a majority Black peninsula, with 75% Black residents. Today, it’s at most 12 percent on the peninsula: That whole population has been displaced and moved to North Charleston, which has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, or off in far flung suburban areas where it’s cheaper. There are still some concentrated areas of Black residents on the peninsula on the east side, which floods all the time and has been a lower income area for all of Charleston’s history. And then there are public housing areas, mostly inhabited by Black residents.
Well, for a long time, Charleston, simply lived with flooding and let its sewage go right into the water. But in the late 19th century, a brilliant and energetic engineer figured out how to install tunnels underneath the streets of the peninsula that would drain sewage away from the houses and also take water out of the streets. It’s a gravity driven tunnel system, and a lot of that system is still in place.
But gravity isn’t going to help as the seas rise. The peninsula will be at the same level as the sea, so the gravity-based system won’t function. The city’s hard working stormwater manager is working on upgrading that system substantially, furnishing them with pumps, so they don’t have to rely just on gravity. But they’re going to need a lot of pumping to get the water off the streets in order to make life possible on the peninsula.
Mayor Riley, to his credit, developed a stormwater plan in 1984. But it was all very expensive, and many of the projects have not yet been completed, in particular on the west side of the peninsula. And all of that planning is premised on the idea that you’re supposed to pump the water off the peninsula, that no matter how much water there is, you’re going to take it away. That kind of money has not been invested in the outlying suburbs. When water comes there it just sits.
The other factor is that the groundwater in Charleston is very close to the surface. So as seas rise, the groundwater is also going to be rising and it will have nowhere to go. You know, they’re doing their best to think of ways to get that water away. But as rainwater gets heavier and seas rise, groundwater rises, and you’ll have a situation of chronic inundation.
A historical map of Charleston, as seen in the book.
This is gradually shifting, but at the state level, certainly, you’re better off not talking about the human causes of climate change. There’s no point. Because then you look as if you’re Al Gore, bringing the heavy hand of government everywhere, and that’s not a good look. And the state government makes it impossible for cities to include the idea of retreating in their comprehensive plans.
When I first interviewed current Mayor Tecklenburg about this whole subject, he said, “do you want to talk about climate change or sea level rise?” And at first I was befuddled, but then I understood what he was saying: Let’s not talk about why it’s happening. But we can talk about the fact that it is happening, because we see it every day.
And so that that’s the approach: Don’t talk about the causes, talk about what’s going on. And in fact, that is, for me, the entire approach of this book. I, of course, fully accept that humans are causing the forcing of temperatures to their stratospheric heights these days, and we need to lower emissions and do whatever we can to decarbonize our economy. But I’m concerned that even if we do that, the changes in the climate that are already baked in are going to have disastrous effects on human beings’ lives. So we need to be planning in both directions at once, both planning to reduce missions and planning to help people survive.
One of the leading characters here is Reverend Joseph Darby, who is a senior AME minister, and also the co chair of the local NAACP branch in Charleston. He’s in his 70s, very wise, and he has, of course, personally experienced flooding, and in particular, flooding that makes his church inaccessible since he’s a preacher on the peninsula.
He told me he learned early in his career that it was important never to be surprised by anything he heard in Charleston. He could be shocked, he could be astonished, but he couldn’t be surprised. He continues to feel that way in the absence of powerful Black voices advising the mayor.
His two boys moved away from Charleston, as much as he might have hoped that they would stay. The Black professional class doesn’t stay in Charleston because it’s just too hard. It’s just not worth it. He feels that there’s a sort of a benevolent paternalism from political leaders, a sense of “we know what’s best for you folks.”
The Black leaders I talked to pointed out that nobody is talking about how we’re going to help low income and Black residents of the region who have nowhere to go when the flooding hits in a big way. Nobody’s talking about the kind of holistic support services that are going to be needed, and this will just further entrench and amplify the inequality and unfairness. They also point out that this is a regional problem and national problem. And they just don’t see that kind of coordination happening.
Yeah, the big plan in Charleston is to work with the Army Corps of Engineers on building a 12-foot-tall wall around the peninsula with gates in it, that would, in theory, protect the peninsula from storm surges. The wall wouldn’t be designed to protect the 90% of people who don’t live on the peninsula. Nor would it be designed to do anything about the heavy rain or the constant high tides. It’s just for storm surges.
It’s a plan to protect the high property values on the peninsula, and in particular the areas that are good for tourism. You know, pillars of the Charleston economy. It’s fair to say that that if it’s ever built, that wall will be outmoded by the time it’s finished, because it’s built to a very low standard — 18 inches of sea level rise by 2050. The reason it’s built to such a low standard is that if it was any higher the wall would mess with the freeways that come onto the peninsula from the airport. And the Army Corps of Engineers representative was pretty frank about that. He said that just wouldn’t pencil out, that wouldn’t make sense economically to build anything higher.
So I mean, Charleston is stuck, because the only vessel for money right now is coming through these armoring projects being built by the Army Corps. And the plan is for that wall to be built in very slow sections, gradually protecting parts of the peninsula. As planned, it would take 30 years to build. So the underlying plan is for Charleston to be hit by a disaster that then causes enormous concern and empathy for Charleston, and a huge congressional appropriation bill. That’s what happened after Katrina. And then that wall would be finished quickly,
The wall as designed would not protect a couple of Black settlements farther up the peninsula, because the cost benefit analysis doesn’t work out. But it’s not Charleston’s fault that it’s planning on a disaster, because our entire approach to this survival question is premising on disaster recovery, not on proactive planning. There are 30 federal agencies that have all these scattershot programs that are aimed at disaster recovery, and there is very little advanced planning going on.
Well, in our country, we’ve had decades of exclusion through segregation and redlining and soft processes not quite understood by a lot of people that have pushed Black citizens into lower, more rapidly-flooding areas. And that history then plays out into what we decide to value. If our history has put Black Americans into more flood-prone, lower value housing over time, then it’s a garbage-in, garbage-out algorithm. If we then decide to only protect the places that are high property value, we will inevitably, yet again, exclude Black residents from the benefit of federal planning.
So it’s a pattern that was set a long time ago and did not arise by accident, playing out in the way we make decisions today.
And to its credit, the Biden administration just issued a terrific Economic Report of the President that said inequality and property values and ownership in the U.S. reflects decades of exclusion of racial minorities from home ownership and public investment, and we need different criteria to capture the differential vulnerability of these populations. So yeah, they’re on it. They understand.
No, Congress has already voted on the Charleston project. They say they’ve got this great benefit-cost ratio, one of the best in the nation, they’re really trumpeting it. It feels strange that we would pump billions of dollars into short sighted armoring of coastline that doesn’t protect against the daily harms we know are going to happen.
Well, people’s attachment to their homes is very deep. Not just for Black residents who can’t afford to leave, but for white residents and rich people as well. It’s likely it will take a series of disasters separated by very few months to convince everybody that this place really isn’t going to be livable. For decades, we already know that you can show maps to city planners, you can talk about the data to people until you’re blue in the face. This is especially true when it comes to coastal properties. It’s not rational. People are highly reluctant to leave.
It also could be a sudden cliff in property valuation, which is likely to happen in the next few years as there are actors in the financial system who fully understand this. Private flood insurers walked away from selling insurance there, leaving the federal government providing 95% or more of the flood insurance in Charleston. At some point, the fact that coastal real estate is now overvalued in the United States to the tune of $200 billion will be reflected in residential property markets up and down, and people will be unable to sell their houses. And then we might see a change in behavior.
The only country in the world that is actively talking about relocation is the Netherlands. They are planning or at least talking about needing to keep options open to move large populations away from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, towards Germany. But for everybody else, it is extremely difficult to talk about it. And you would hope that we wouldn’t have to have a global economic crisis to force planning, because that’s what this would amount to. It would be worse than 2008 if this overvaluation is suddenly corrected, because the loss of property value is permanent, and it’s not coming back. And it would be too bad if it took that kind of market crash to force planning in this direction.
If we had a president who was able to engage in long term planning, we could, with dignity and respect, change the financial drivers and levers and incentives to encourage people to understand this risk and move away from it without having to lose all their wealth. And without having to be cast into the role of migrants.
We absolutely can do this. We built the Hoover Dam, and we built the Interstate Highway System. We can afford what we care about. And if this was a priority, we could do this. But for me, the moment of redemption, the first moment of redemption will be when it’s somebody’s job in the White House to speak publicly about this constantly in league with the best scientists in the world.
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On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.
From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.