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Close your eyes and think of the American West. What do you see? The sandstone towers of Monument Valley. The dusty ruts of a wagon trail leading through a clapboard town. A cowboy on horseback.
Remove the horse and the mythic image of the American frontier collapses. But across the desert states — and in particular, in Arizona, the cinematic ideal of the West — extreme heat is making the land practically uninhabitable for horses. In 2018, nearly 200 mustangs were found dead near a dried-up water hole on the west side of the Navajo Nation, and now, with 18 consecutive 110-plus degree days in Phoenix and counting, longtime equestrians in the state are considering hitching up the trailer and moving to cooler climes.
“Tonight I think it gets down to 87, just for an hour, and then it goes back up,” Quincy Roxburgh, who moved to the region from the Sacramento area and owns four horses, told me late last week. “We don’t get that break from the heat [like you do in California]. I feel so bad for the horses. I’ve never dealt with anything like this.”
With an estimated $1.3 billion local equestrian industry, Phoenix has been described as a “horse mecca,” particularly when it comes to Arabians. Every year the city hosts the biggest Arabian horse gathering in the world, drawing more than 2,400 horses with some $3 million in prize money on the line. WestWorld, the fifth most-popular equestrian facility in the country, is located in nearby Scottsdale — “the West’s Most Western Town” — and has undergone a $56-million renovation that included the addition of climate-controlled stalls. Its outdoor arenas, though, still bake in the heat. You begin to understand why equestrian events don’t typically get scheduled for the Arizona summers.
But that doesn’t mean much for the horses that spend the year in corrals nearby. Like most mammals, horses pant; unlike most mammals, when panting becomes ineffective around 94 degrees, they’ll sweat, similar to humans. And horses are enthusiastic sweaters: A horse can produce a quarter of a liter of sweat per minute in order to cool itself down, Equus reports — that is, about the capacity of one large Nalgene water bottle in the time it takes you to pop a bag of popcorn.
This means horses face the same risk as people when the air is humid and the efficiency of evaporation slows down. “The thing that saves us [in Arizona] is the low humidity, typically,” Roxburgh said.
In addition to being champion sweaters, though, horses are four-legged space heaters. Because they’re so muscular (and muscles produce heat), horses warm up three to 10 times faster than people do, Michael Lindinger, an animal and exercise physiologist at the University of Guelph, has found. According to his research, just 17 minutes of “moderate intensity exercise in hot, humid weather” can put a horse in the danger zone.
Even eating and digesting can warm a horse up. “Arabians, your Spanish-bred horses — heavy, big-boned warmbloods — we call those ‘easy keepers,’” Catherine Enright of Sorum Veterinary Services, in Scottsdale, Arizona, explained to me. “Those have a propensity to have more risk of foundering in this heat than other equine breeds.”
Founder — a heat-related hoof condition that can require euthanasia in extreme cases and that Roxburgh said she’s “scared to death” of — can be induced by something as ordinary and horsey as eating grass. As Enright explained, “if you have grass pastures, which are very hard to come by in Arizona, we recommend that you only graze [your horses] at night or very, very early in the morning, and they come in before noon,” when the sugar in the grass is highest. Because of the way a horse’s metabolism works, “sugar, starch, carbs — those three ingredients are a death sentence to easy keepers in this heat.”
Enright additionally suggested not letting horses out during the day — and indeed many horsemen and women across the Valley of the Sun have been rising pre-dawn to exercise and feed their animals. She also suggestedputting up misters to help keep the horses cool. Roxburgh herself has invested in a large, SUV-sized swamp cooler for her horses, which she pointed out has the additional advantage of keeping her cool during barn chores.
But what about horses that don’t have access to tubs of water, misters, and even their own ACs?
The Phoenix area is home to some 430 wild horses that live along a river in the Tonto National Forest, on the northeastern outskirts of the city, beyond Scottsdale. That “wild” moniker is a bit of a contentious issue: The U.S. Forest Service claims the horses are “descended from … trespassing livestock” and thus they are not federally protected as “wild horses,” and the herd is instead overseen by a nonprofit, the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, which contends the lineage goes back to the 18th century.
When I spoke to Simone Netherlands, the founder and president of the volunteer management group, I braced myself for the worst: horses without access to state-of-the-art barn misters dropping from the heat.
“I would say that the Salt River wild horses are the only ones not affected by the heat,” she told me instead.
In fact, her group is far more worried about keeping the rescue horses at its facilities cool. That’s because the Salt River herd “will stand in the middle of the river to cool off,” giving them enviable relief when the temperatures climb into the triple digits — “and so they’re the lucky ones.”
The way Netherlands tells it, it makes sense; the herd “evolved and learned to deal with the heat,” just like other desert animals do. The horses that can’t take Arizona’s seasonal extremes — like, say, the memorable 120-degree day last year that Netherlands, Roxburgh, and Enright all mentioned to me — are in theory weeded out, although Netherlands says they haven’t had a horse die from the heat since the monitoring group was established in 2015. Any culling was likely done generations ago: “That’s why we actually don’t have black horses in the Salt River herd, because they would not survive the heat,” she said.
Of course, not all horses are lucky enough to have a river flowing through their turf. Netherlands also told me that Arizona doesn’t have a law that specifically requires domestic horses be provided shade.
The heat is part of the myth of the West, too: The heat wave frying Phoneix has been called an endurance test, and it’s one many locals proudly embrace. “National media describe metro Phoenix’s string of 110-degree-plus days as if it were an apocalypse,” one recent editorial in the Arizona Republic boasted. “But we learned long ago how to adapt.” But unlike the wild horses, that adaptation involves easy access to AC, something that isn’t at the disposal of everyone, including outdoor domestic animals and the people who diligently labor — or were hired to labor — to take care of them.
And so, until the heat breaks, there will be more pre-dawn mornings, more calls to the overloaded vets, more barn misters to be installed. When saying farewell to Enright, I wished her, optimistically, cool days ahead. “Yeah,” she replied dryly. “There won’t be.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.