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On storm forecasts, Biden polling, and data centers in space
Current conditions: Intense storms in Europe killed at least seven people over the weekend • Nine inches of rain fell in 24 hours in Delhi, causing deadly flooding just days after blistering high temperatures • California will have “record-challenging heat” for the 4th of July.
The first hurricane of the season, Hurricane Beryl, has started lashing the southeastern islands of the Caribbean today as a category 3 storm. Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadine Islands, Grenada, and Tobago – islands that don’t normally endure storms of this magnitude – are all under hurricane warnings and bracing for catastrophic damage. The storm is forecast to push toward Jamaica before weakening slightly mid-week and then heading toward Mexico. The system strengthened from a tropical depression to a hurricane in less than 48 hours, which is unusually fast. It was at one point registering as a category 4 storm (and could do so again), the earliest ever recorded in the Atlantic, marking an ominous start to what is expected to be a very intense hurricane season. “Incredible doesn't cut it,” wrote meteorologist Jim Cantore. “This truly is something else of a hurricane.”
X/NHC_Atlantic
Meanwhile, another tropical storm, named Chris, formed in the Gulf of Mexico. Chris is the third named storm of the Atlantic season, and is also way ahead of schedule: “On average, the 3rd Atlantic named storm forms on August 3rd,” said Philip Klotzbach, a meteorologist with Colorado State University.
In case you (somehow) missed it: On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down a 40-year-old precedent that deferred to agencies’ interpretations of their own mandates where the statutory guidance was incomplete or ambiguous, otherwise known as Chevron deference. The ruling could kneecap federal agencies in their ability to regulate everything from air and water quality to cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. “The impact will be enormous,” Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, toldBloomberg. “By paralyzing federal agencies and inviting lawsuits against the rules these agencies implement, this decision will profoundly undermine bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act that are meant to protect public health.”
After a pretty dismal performance at last week’s debate, President Biden has been trying to reassure donors and voters that he remains the best person to run on the Democratic ticket in the 2024 presidential election. According toThe New York Times, his campaign has a call scheduled for today with its national finance committee to “calm nerves and take temperatures.” At least one prominent climate group, Climate Defiance, is urging Biden to step aside for the sake of the climate, E&E Newsreported. “Defeating Trump and Trumpism is existentially important for our climate and our democracy,” the group’s founder and executive director, Michael Greenberg, said Friday. “President Biden is not up for the job.” Biden’s family is reportedly urging him to stay in the race. All eyes will be on any post-debate polls that come out this week. One new CBS News/YouGov poll shows sentiment is growing among Democratic voters for Biden to step aside.
Walmart Canada has become the first major retailer in North America to get a hydrogen fuel cell-powered semi truck. The truck, a Nikola HFCEV Class 8, has a range of nearly 500 miles and will avoid about 100 metric tons of CO2 emissions annually when compared to a traditional semi truck. Reutersreported that major retailers including Walmart and Pepsi had been eyeing Tesla’s electric semi trucks, but became frustrated by delays and have started turning to Tesla’s rivals in the quest to curb emissions across their fleets.
Data centers are becoming a climate problem. As demand for artificial intelligence grows, these centers are using up huge amounts of energy and putting emissions targets at risk. But what if we put the data centers in space? That’s the suggestion that emerged from a study from a European space company and funded by the EU. The research concluded that not only would putting data centers in space be more sustainable, it could be lucrative, producing a large return on investment. The data centers would be solar powered and would not need to be cooled by water. But the study also found that, in order for these data centers to have a real emissions impact, they’d need to be launched using a yet-to-be-developed “eco-launcher” that produces less carbon dioxide. The EU’s goal is to have this launcher up and running by 2035 and start putting data center “building blocks” into space in 2036.
Last Wednesday marked the first time in 469 days that global sea surface temperatures did not set a new daily record.
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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.”