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Every year after the snow melts and before the spring rains rejuvenate the landscape, Alberta burns.
It’s a natural cycle; May is “classic wildfire season in Canada” thanks to the dead winter grasses that, once uncovered, turn the landscape into a tinderbox. This year, though, there have already been 395 wildfires recorded in Alberta — over 100 are active, with 36 classified as out of control as of Saturday. Those blazes represent “significantly more wildfire activity, for this time of year, than we’ve certainly seen anytime in the recent past,” according to Christie Tucker, a spokeswoman for the province’s fire agency. She added, “People have called this season certainly unprecedented in recent memory because we have so many fires so spread out.”
So far, nearly 30,000 people have been evacuated from north and central Alberta, while local oil and gas producers have temporarily shut down about 2% of the nation’s production, which is concentrated in the area, as a precaution. According to Courtney Theriault, a reporter for CityNews Edmonton, 2023 is already on the verge of becoming one of the province’s biggest fire years on record. Separately, Tucker confirmed that as of Saturday, some 350,000 hectares (864,870 acres) have burned in total in Alberta since Jan. 1, when usually at this time of year, that number is closer to 800 (1,980 acres).
\u201cHere's a graph from AB Wildfire, which would seem to show that the 2023 wildfire burn season will likely enter the ten biggest fire years on record in the next day or two. #yeg #yyc #ableg #abwildfire\u201d— Courtney Theriault (@Courtney Theriault) 1683511768
The “unprecedented crisis” in Alberta is owed in part to a heat wave that broke 34 temperature records in the province last week. Combined with the region’s ongoing drought — the severity of which has been attributed to climate change — the Canadian fires are the latest example of 2023 heat exacerbating an already robust wildfire season.
Earlier this spring in Spain, a period of prolonged drought combined with spiking temperatures similarly resulted in unseasonably devastating fires. While a number of those blazes, which began in March, were attributed to arsonists, the fires have burned more aggressively and expansively than they otherwise would have due to how dry everything has been.
“I was expecting a fire like the ones we normally see in March, which can consume 100, 200 hectares, not the more than 4,300 hectares (11,600 acres) that this one has burned,” one firefighter told The Associated Press. “We are dealing with weather conditions appropriate for the summer and have a fire that is behaving like a summertime fire.” As a Spanish fire ecologist added to the publication, “We are in climatic conditions that favor big fires.”
Fires are also burning in northern Laos, started by slash-and-burn farming but “fanned by drier-than-usual weather in Luang Prabang, Xayabury, and Oudomxay provinces,” Radio Free Asia reports. Over the weekend, Luang Prabang hit 110.3 degrees, beating the previous all-time record of 108.9 degrees set just last month. As The Washington Post explains, “It’s a rather typical heat wave [for the region], characteristic of this time of year, but pushed into record territory when added to the background of a warming world.”
Due to poor firefighting infrastructure in Laos, though, the manmade fires are difficult to contain, spreading rapidly and creating high levels of smog in the process. In late March and early April, the Air Quality Index in Luang Prabang was often over 500, driving away tourists — a major source of business for the region.
Recent heat in California has also raised concerns about fires, although the unusually wet winter in the state has offered at least some reprieve. By late April 2022, for example, there’d already been more than a dozen major wildfires in California, the Los Angeles Times reports, while at the same point this year, there was only one, the Nob fire in the San Bernardino National Forest. But any future heat this spring could begin to melt the snow as well as dry out the state’s super bloom, turning the vegetation into kindling.
In the southern hemisphere, where it is currently fall, Chile’s longest drought in at least 1,000 years combined with a record-breaking heat wave and high winds resulted in a summer conflagration that killed at least two dozen people and left hundreds more homeless. The country’s interior minister blamed the tragedy directly on warming global conditions, pointing out that “Chile is one of the countries with the highest vulnerability to climate change,” Al Jazeera reports.
Though it is tricky to tie any one fire to being “caused” by climate change, what is certain is that periods of heat and drought are becoming more extreme due to greenhouse gases, and the resulting weather patterns create conditions conducive to bigger, more severe, faster, and more destructive fires. And more heat is likely on the way; forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization said recently that they expect an El Niño to develop by the end of summer, meaning “a new spike in global heating and increase [in] the chance of breaking temperature records.”
Our hot, fiery spring might only be a sign of things to come.
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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.”