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On a new World Weather Attribution report, falling battery prices, and another energy milestone for California.
Current conditions: Flash floods killed at least 155 people in Tanzania • Dry conditions are spawning dust devils in western Canada • Ongoing thunderstorms are set to pummel the central U.S. with hail and possible sporadic tornadoes through the weekend.
Rising global temperatures due to carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere exacerbated the deadly flooding in Dubai earlier this month, scientists at the international research initiative World Weather Attribution concluded. Much of the United Arab Emirates lacks drainage infrastructure because rain there is so infrequent, and the unrelenting downpour that inundated the country on April 14 and 15 — toppling its 24-hour rainfall record — came on the heels of a stormy March. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that bouts of intense rainfall are likely to become more common in the Arabian Peninsula.
While the researchers evaluating April’s flood event weren’t able to determine the precise extent to which it had been influenced by climate change, they’re confident that rising temperatures in the ocean and the atmosphere played a role. “While multiple reasons could explain the absence of a trend in our model results,” they wrote, “we have no alternative explanation for a trend in observations other than the expectation of heavy rainfall increasing in a warmer climate.” Experts have challenged early reports that cloud seeding efforts in the UAE were responsible for the unprecedented amounts of rain, and the WWA researchers concluded they did not have “significant influence.”
People walk along an flooded highway on April 18, 2024 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo by Francois Nel/Getty Images
California has officially surpassed 10,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Thursday. The state, which leads the nation in installed battery storage, has added almost 4,000 megawatts of storage capacity to the grid in 2024 alone. And it set another storage record last week when batteries briefly became the state’s top source of power. Though Newsom celebrated the progress California has made in building out battery capacity, he also acknowledged that the current level of storage won’t be enough to fully prevent blackouts during heat waves. California aims to install another 42,000 megawatts of battery storage to meet its goal of 100% clean energy by 2045. “We have a lot of work to do still in moving this transition, with the kind of stability that’s required,” Newsom told reporters on Thursday.
Speaking of California, the International Energy Agency expects the cost of building battery storage to plummet in the coming years, aiding the global transition to renewable energy. In its Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions report, released Thursday, the IEA projects that the price of lithium-ion batteries will decline 40% by 2030, and will continue dropping beyond that point thanks to a combination of innovation and the adoption of cheaper grid-scale battery technologies. For the world to meet its renewable energy targets while maintaining the reliability of the grid, energy storage capacity will need to increase six-fold by 2030, according to the report. Decisions made by policymakers and regulators will also shape the rate of battery adoption worldwide.
“The combination of solar PV and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India. And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States. Batteries are changing the game before our eyes,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement.
In a move that was mostly overshadowed by its new emissions limits for coal and gas power plants, the Biden administration this week also established new standards intended to eliminate fossil fuels from federal buildings. The Department of Energy will require agencies to reduce fossil fuel use in new buildings and major renovations by 90% from fiscal years 2025 to 2029, and bar such projects from using fossil fuels at all starting in 2030. The rule is part of the administration’s push to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all federal buildings by 2045. “The Biden-Harris Administration is practicing what we preach. Just as we are helping households and businesses across the nation save money by saving energy, we are doing the same in our own federal buildings,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.
Conservation measures are successfully slowing the rate of global biodiversity loss, according to a study published in the journal Science on Thursday. The metaanalysis of previous research on the impacts of conservation found that establishing and maintaining protected areas, removing invasive species, preserving ecosystems and combatting habitat destruction led to a significant decline in biodiversity loss, and sometimes an improvement in total biodiversity, even amid the worsening effects of climate change. The study also indicated that conservation actions are frequently “highly effective.” The results suggest that ecosystems around the world could benefit from scaling up conservation efforts.
“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, an adjunct professor of biology at Arizona State University and the study’s lead author, in a news release. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.”
“We want China’s economy to grow,” but “the way China grows matters.” — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to reporters after a meeting in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday. While’s China’s support for Russia in its war with Ukraine was top of the agenda, the two also discussed what the Biden administration sees as unfair trade practices that flood the market with cheap electric vehicles and solar panels.
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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.”