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On skirting pollution rules, Arctic sea ice, and Empire Wind
Current conditions: Between 10 and 15 inches of rain fell across parts of South Texas, triggering severe flooding • Firefighters made progress containing some of the large wildfires burning in South Korea • It’s -7 degrees Fahrenheit at Greenland’s Pituffik Space Base, which Vice President JD Vance will visit today.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set up an email address that power plants and other industrial facilities can use to request a temporary exemption from President Trump on EPA air pollution rules. Firms can write to “airaction@epa.gov” and make a case for why their facilities should not have to abide by some nine Clean Air Act emissions rules, and for how long they’d like to be exempt. The president — yes, the president himself — will review the request and “make a decision on the merits.” The EPA argues that the Clean Air Act contains a section that allows the president to exempt industrial facilities from new rules for up to two years “if the technology to implement the standard is not available and it is in the national security interests of the United States to do so.”
The environmental protection community is not happy. “The new Trump EPA website invites hundreds of industrial sources of cancer-causing pollution and other toxics to evade science-based clean air standards that are designed to keep our families safe — all with a single email,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund. “This puts the health of all Americans on the line.”
Sea ice in the Arctic is at its lowest winter level ever recorded. March is usually when the ice is at its peak, but this year’s ice cover of 5.53 million square miles is about 30,000 square miles smaller than the previous lowest March peak recorded in 2017. “Warming temperatures are what’s causing the ice to decline,” ice data scientist Walt Meier told The Associated Press. The Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the world, and less winter sea ice means more melt in the summer. Researchers warn that current warming trends mean the Arctic could see its first completely ice-free summer months as soon as 2035. “We’re going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with,” said Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It doesn’t bode well for the future.”
Activists from the anti-wind movement are circling Empire Wind and asking President Donald Trump to rescind the EPA air permit to the Equinor offshore project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. Two prominent anti-offshore wind organizations — Save the East Coast and Protect our Coast-Long Island — announced this week in a press release posted to Facebook that they were petitioning the EPA to take the permit away, just like it did earlier this month with the Atlantic Shores project off the coast of New Jersey. Activists have also asked EPA to get rid of air permits for New England Wind and Vineyard Wind.
Earnings call mentions of “climate change” and other terms related to environmental issues and clean energy have plummeted by 76% over the past three years, according to a new Bloomberg analysis. “Green chatter” on S&P 500 companies’ quarterly calls peaked in 2022, just before the Inflation Reduction Act passed, and has been falling ever since. Anti-climate sentiment in the Trump administration has hastened the so-called greenhushing. At the same time, most corporate finance bosses say they aim to increase their green investments, and more companies are making climate commitments. So some progress is still being made, even if nobody wants to make a big deal out of it.
The Internal Revenue Service this week reopened the online portal for car dealerships to retroactively register electric vehicle sales to the tax agency, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported. The change will make it easier for buyers to claim the EV tax credit on their returns after a major change to the EV tax credit program last year left many in the lurch. Before the change, all dealers had to do was give the buyer a “time of sale” report that they could submit to the IRS come tax season. But as of 2024, dealerships were expected to register every EV sale that was eligible for the tax credit through this new online portal. Not only that, they had to do so within three days of the sale. The portal would not allow entries dated more than three days post-sale. Many dealerships were unaware of the new requirements, and customers trying to claim the credit on their taxes have been getting error messages saying that their EVs were not registered with the IRS. In a notice to dealerships this week, first reported by NPR, the trade group said the IRS planned to roll out an update to the portal on Wednesday to allow for sales made in 2024 to be submitted.
“If any of this has made you nervous about getting an EV this year, remember that you have another, safer option for claiming the tax credit,” Pontecorvo explains. “Instead of claiming it on your taxes in 2026, you can transfer it to your dealer, who can take it off the sale price of the car on the spot. Just make sure they know about the online portal!”
“Perfectly executed, Mr. Trump! … You have pulled off the rare rope-a-dope: Your political action groups raised more than $75 million from the oil industry to help get you elected. But now that you’re in office, you’re shutting them in. And the best part is that voters have no idea: Americans continue to think that you support U.S. oil and gas drilling — and they like it.”
–Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer in an open letter to President Trump, aka Degrowth Donald
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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.”