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On rapid weather analysis, BlocPower, and free EV chargers
Current conditions: A wildfire in Greece prompted the evacuation of three villages • Taiwan is bracing for Super Typhoon Krathon • Northern California’s heat wave will peak today, but temperatures will still be higher than normal all week.
The Treasury Department will finalize the long-awaited rules governing the new clean hydrogen tax credit before the end of the year, Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo told Heatmap in an exclusive interview. It will also publish the final guidance for the advanced manufacturing and technology-neutral clean power tax credits by that time, he said. That means that the Treasury Department will have finished the rules governing most — but not all — of the 18 tax credits created or remade by the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate package, by the end of his term. More than two years after that law’s passage, many of the potential beneficiaries — including electric utilities, battery manufacturers, and more — are still waiting to find out exactly how to collect its incentives.
The uncertainty has been especially paralyzing for the nascent clean hydrogen industry, as the final guidance for the hydrogen tax credit, section 45V of the tax code, could determine which multimillion dollar projects ultimately get developed. Chief among the Treasury Department’s concerns: It must decide how hydrogen producers who use electrolysis — sending electricity through water to split its molecules — should deal with the indirect carbon emissions associated with drawing power from the grid. The Treasury received more than 30,000 comments on the initial draft of the hydrogen rules.
Though Adeyemo did not comment on the final rules’ substance, he called those comments “quite helpful” and asserted multiple times during the interview that the Treasury has found middle ground between the scheme favored by climate advocates and a proposal more favored by the industry. “Congress has provided a strong enough incentive here that allows us to do two things at once, which is one, make sure that we’re watching for significant indirect missions, but at the same time creating pathways to do exactly what industry is talking about, which is accelerating the development of the industry here,” he said.
The death toll from Hurricane Helene has risen to 130 and hundreds of people remain missing in cut-off mountain areas in western North Carolina, where flooding and landslides swept away homes. Nearly one-third of those missing are from areas surrounding Asheville. “The devastation was beyond belief,” said the state’s governor, Roy Cooper. “This is something that’s never happened before in western North Carolina.” More than 1.5 million customers across six states remain without electricity and many in Asheville do not have running water. President Biden is expected to visit the state on Wednesday.
Researchers at the Berkeley Lab put together a provisional attribution report on the storm. “Our best estimate is that climate change caused over 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas,” the report said. “Furthermore, we estimate that the observed rainfall was made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming.” The rapid extreme weather analysis platform Climameter said that “climate change made the heavy rainfall from Hurricane Helene up to 20% more intense and the strong winds up to 7% stronger than they were at the end of the century.”
Following an “unusual” midseason lull, hurricane activity is expected to pick up again in October and potentially continue into November, with the National Hurricane Center monitoring five separate areas in the Atlantic in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Two of those storms — Isaac and Joyce — have already weakened and remain far out at sea, while a third, Kirk, is expected to strengthen into a Category 3 in the coming days but turn northward long before it ever threatens the eastern seaboard.
The two other systems could potentially make U.S. landfall: One is an area of low pressure in the Caribbean that is “similar to where Helene developed,” AccuWeather’s senior director of forecasting operations, Dan DePodwin, told Heatmap, and which could develop over the next few days. The other is behind Kirk, near the Cape Verde islands, and while it is still extremely early, “anytime you get a tropical wave coming off of Africa this time of year, in late September or early October,” you want to keep an eye on it, DePodwin added. AccuWeather’s forecasters anticipate at least five more named storms before the season is over, with Leslie likely to be the name given to the system off Africa if it develops, followed by Milton in the Gulf.
The CEO of climate startup BlocPower, Donnel Baird, has stepped down from the company. BlocPower focuses on “greening America’s buildings” by swapping out old fossil fuel equipment for clean-energy upgrades. It has received significant financial backing from the likes of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, and Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, and was particularly attractive for cities hoping to meet ambitious climate goals. But BlocPower “faced ongoing issues with rolling out its electrification and jobs programs in the cities it partnered with,” Bloombergreported. In 2022, the firm set out to electrify 6,000 buildings in the city of Ithaca, New York, by 2030, as part of Ithaca’s Green New Deal. But progress proved painfully slow. This week Ithaca’s director of sustainability Rebecca Evans announced she had decided to scrap the city’s climate action plan and focus instead on adaptation. “We’re not abandoning our 2030 goals, but we are determined to meet residents where they are,” Evans wrote on LinkedIn. “Our community doesn’t necessarily want net-zero and I’ve settled my feelings with that.”
Ford is launching a new incentive program today that will offer complimentary home chargers and installation to people who buy or lease a Ford Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning, or E-Transit. The “Ford Power Promise” program will go through the end of the year and is a bid to win over people who may be curious about EVs but are hesitant to commit. The upfront cost of an EV charger is around $500, and installation can cost up to $1,200. People who take advantage of Ford’s offer will get the company’s Ford Charge Station Pro, which normally has a sticker price of $1,310.
Ford
“If it explodes, you end up about seven blocks away. And you’re dead.” –Donald Trump, warning his supporters about “the new thing”: hydrogen cars. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, Trump’s suggestion that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are more dangerous than gas-powered vehicles is inaccurate. She noted that as of this spring there had been no recorded automotive fatalities credited specifically to hydrogen fuel cells.
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The more Hurricanes Helene and Milton we get, the harder it is to ignore the need.
As the southeastern U.S. recovers from hurricanes Helene and Milton, the destruction the storms have left behind serves to underline the obvious: The need for technologies that support climate change adaptation and resilience is both real and urgent. And while nearly all the money in climate finance still flows into mitigation tech, which seeks to lower emissions to alleviate tomorrow’s harm, at long last, there are signs that interest and funding for the adaptation space is picking up.
The emergence and success of climate resilience advisory and investment firms such as Tailwind Climate and The Lightsmith Group are two signs of this shift. Founded just last year, Tailwind recently published a taxonomy of activities and financing across the various sectors of adaptation and resilience solutions to help clients understand opportunity areas in the space. Next year, the firm’s co-founder Katie MacDonald told me, Tailwind will likely begin raising its first fund. It’s already invested in one company, UK-based Cryogenx, which makes a portable cooling vest to rapidly reduce the temperature of patients experiencing heatstroke.
As for Lightsmith, the firm held the final close of its $186 million growth equity fund for climate adaptation solutions in 2022, which co-founder and managing director Jay Koh told me is one of the first, if not the first fund with a climate resilience focus. As Koh sees it, the evolution of climate adaptation and resilience technologies can be broken up into three stages, the first being “reactive and incremental.” That’s largely where we’re at right now, he said — think rebuilding a dam higher after it’s been breached in a flood, or making a firebreak broader after a destructive wildfire. Where he’s seeing interesting companies emerge, though, is in the more proactive second stage, which often involves anticipating and preparing for extreme weather events. “Let’s do a lot more data and analytics ahead of time. Let’s deploy more weather satellites. Let’s look at deploying artificial intelligence and other technologies to do better forecasting,” Koh explained to me.
The third and final stage, he said, could be categorized as “systemic or transcendent adaptation,” which involves systems-level changes as opposed to incremental improvements. Source Global, one of Lightsmith’s portfolio companies which makes solar-powered hydropanels that produce affordable drinking water, is an example of this. As Koh told me, “It’s not simply improving the efficiency of desalination filters by 5% or 10%. It’s saying, listen, we’re going to pull water out of the air in a way that we have never done before.”
But while the activity and interest around adaptation tech may be growing, the money just isn’t there yet. “We’re easily $50 [billion] to $60 billion below where we need to be today,” MacDonald told me. “And you know, we’re on the order of around $150 [billion] to $160 billion below where we need to be by 2030.” Everyone else I spoke with echoed the sentiment. “The latest statistics are that less than 5% of total climate finance tracked on planet Earth is attributable to adaptation and climate resilience,” Koh said. “Of that, less than 2% is private investment.”
There’s a few reasons why early-stage investors especially may be hesitant to throw their weight behind adaptation tech despite the clear need in the market. Amy Francetic, co-founder and managing general partner at Buoyant Ventures, which focuses on early-stage digital solutions for climate risk, told me that the main customer for adaptation solutions is often a government entity. “Municipalities and other government contracts, they’re hard to win, they’re slow to win, and they don’t pay that much, either, which is the problem.” Francetic told me. “So it’s not a great customer to have.”
One of Buoyant’s portfolio companies, the now defunct StormSensor, reinforced this lesson for Francetic. The company used sensors to track water flow within storm and sewage systems to prevent flooding and was able to arrange pilot projects with plenty of water agencies — but few of them converted into paying contracts. “The municipalities were willing to spend money on an experiment, but not so many of them had a larger budget.” Francetic told me. The same dynamic, she said, is also at play in the utility industry, where you often hear about new tech succumbing to “death by pilot.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, though, when it comes to working with larger, risk-averse agencies. AiDash, another of Lightsmith’s portfolio companies that uses artificial intelligence to help utilities assess and address wildfire risk, has five utility partnerships, and earlier this year raised $58.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C round. Francetic and MacDonald both told me they’re seeing the conversation around climate adaptation evolve to include more industry stakeholders. In the past, Francetic said, discussing resilience and adaptation was almost seen as a form of climate doomerism. “They said, oh, why are you doing that? It shows that you’re giving up.” But now, MacDonald told me that her experience at this year’s climate week in New York was defined by productive conversations with representatives from the insurance industry, banking sector, and venture capital arena about injecting more capital into the space.
Bill Clerico, the founder and managing partner of the venture firm Convective Capital, is also deeply familiar with the tricky dynamics of climate adaptation funding. Convective, founded in 2022, is solely dedicated to wildfire tech solutions. The firm’s portfolio companies span a range of technologies that address suppression, early identification, prevention, and insurance against damages, and are mainly looking to work with utilities, governments, and insurance companies. When I talked to Clerico back in August, he (understatedly) categorized these establishments as “not necessarily the most fast-moving or innovative.” But the bleak silver lining, he told me, is that extreme weather is forcing them to up their tempo. “There is so much destruction happening so frequently that it’s forcing a lot of these institutions to think about it totally differently and to embrace newer, more novel solutions — and to do it quickly.”
People, it seems, are starting to get real. But investors and startups alike are also just beginning to define exactly what adaptation tech encompasses and what metrics for success look like when they’re less measurable than, say, the tons of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere via direct air capture, or the amount of energy produced by a fusion reactor.
“Nobody wakes up in the morning and buys a loaf of adaptation. You don’t drive around in an adaptation or live in an adaptation,” Koh noted. “What you want is food, transport, shelter, water that is resilient and adapted to the effects of climate change.” What Koh and the team at Lightsmith have found is that many of the companies working on these solutions are hiding in plain sight. “They call themselves business continuity or water efficiency or agricultural precision technologies or supply chain management in the face of weather volatility,” Koh explained.
In this way, the scope of adaptation technology balloons far beyond what is traditionally climate-coded. Lightsmith recently invested in a Brazil-based digital health company called Beep Saude, which enables patients to get rapid, in-home diagnostics, vaccination services, and infusion therapies. It falls under the umbrella of climate adaptation tech, Koh told me, because rising temperatures, increased rainfall, and deforestation in the country have led to a rapid increase in mosquitoes spreading diseases such as dengue fever and the Zika virus.
Naturally, measuring the efficacy of solutions that span such a vast problem space means a lot of customization. “Your metric might be, how many people have asked for water in a drought-prone area?” MacDonald told me. “And with health, it might be, how many children are safe from wildfire smoke during fire season? And for ecosystems, it might be, how many hectares of ecosystem have been saved as a means to reduce storm surge?” Insurance also brings up a host of additional metrics. As Francetic told me, “we measure things like lives and livelihoods covered or addressed. We measure things like losses covered or underwriting dollars spent on this.”
No matter how you categorize it or measure it, the need for these technologies is not going away. “The drivers of adaptation and climate resilience demand are physics and time,” Koh told me. “Whoever develops climate resilience and adaptation technology will have a competitive advantage over any other company, any other society, and the faster that we can scale it up, and the smarter and more equitable we are about deploying it, the better off we will all be.”
On the Cybercab rollout, methane leaks, and Taylor Swift
Current conditions: England just had its one of its worst crop harvests ever due to extreme rainfall last winter • Nevada and Arizona could see record-breaking heat today, while freeze warnings are in effect in four northeastern states • The death toll from Hurricane Milton has climbed to 16.
Tesla unveiled a prototype of its “Cybercab” self-driving robotaxi last night at an investor event in California. The 2-seater vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals, and will feature wireless induction charging. CEO Elon Musk said the vehicle will cost less than $30,000, with the goal of starting production by 2027, depending on regulatory approvals. At the same event, Musk unveiled the autonomous “Robovan,” which can carry 20 people.
Tesla
A UN expert group agreed this week on some key rules around carbon markets and carbon crediting. This will be a major topic at COP29 next month, where negotiators will be tasked with deciding how countries can use international carbon markets. As the Financial Timesexplained, a carbon market “would allow governments to claim other countries’ emission cuts towards their own climate targets by trading instruments that represent one tonne of carbon dioxide removed or saved from the atmosphere.” The experts this week said projects seeking carbon credits will have to carry out an extensive risk assessment process aimed at flagging and preventing human rights abuses and environmental harm. The assessment will be reviewed by external auditors.
The first detections from Carbon Mapper’s Tanager-1 satellite are in, just two months after the satellite launched. It spotted a 2.5-mile-long methane plume spewing from a landfill in Pakistan, which Carbon Mapper estimates could be releasing 2,600 pounds of methane per hour. It also identified a methane plume in the oilfields of the Permian Basin in Texas, estimated to be releasing 900 pounds of methane hourly. And it found a carbon dioxide plume over a coal-fired power plant in South Africa releasing roughly 1.3 million pounds of CO2 per hour.
A Permian Basin methane plume.Carbon Mapper
In a press release, the company said the observations were “a preview of what’s to come as Carbon Mapper will leverage Tanager-1 to scale-up emissions observations at unprecedented sensitivity across large areas.”
As the cleanup efforts continue in the southeast after back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated the region, pop star Taylor Swift announced she is donating $5 million to relief efforts. Specifically she has given money to a national food bank organization called Feeding America. The charity’s CEO said the funds “will help communities rebuild and recover, providing essential food, clean water, and supplies to people affected by these devastating storms.” Last week country music legend Dolly Parton said she personally donated $1 million to the Mountain Ways Foundation, and then another $1 million through her Dollywood foundation.
AccuWeather estimated that Milton caused up to $180 billion in economic losses, and Helene caused up to $250 billion in losses. Two rapid attribution studies out of Imperial College London found that human-caused climate change could be credited for roughly half the economic damages from the storms. “This analysis clearly shows that our failure to stop burning fossil fuels is already resulting in incredible economic losses,” said Dr. Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution.
In Rhode Island, the Providence City Council passed an amendment this week that bans the construction of new gas stations “while prioritizing the development and installation of electric vehicle charging stations.” That would make Providence the first city on the East Coast to enact such a ban. Mayor Brett Smiley could veto it, but the city council could override a veto with a two-thirds majority, The Boston Globereported. Several towns in California have already banned new gas pumps.
Chiquita has developed a new hybrid banana variety it says is resistant to some fungal diseases that have threatened the future of America’s most popular fruit. The variety is called Yelloway 1.
Chiquita Brands International
It’s known as the 50% rule, and Southwest Florida hates it.
After the storm, we rebuild. That’s the mantra repeated by residents, businesses and elected officials after any big storm. Hurricane Milton may have avoided the worst case scenario of a direct hit on the Tampa Bay area, but communities south of Tampa experienced heavy flooding just a couple weeks after being hit by Hurricane Helene.
While the damage is still being assessed in Sarasota County’s barrier islands, homes that require extensive renovations will almost certainly run up against what is known as the 50% rule — or, in Southwest Florida, the “dreaded 50% rule.”
In flood zone-situated communities eligible to receive insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program, any renovations to repair “substantial damage” — defined as repairs whose cost exceeds 50% of the value of the structure (not the land, which can often be quite valuable due to its proximity to the water) — must bring the entire structure “into compliance with current local floodplain management standards.” In practice, this typically means elevating the home above what FEMA defines as the area’s “base flood elevation,” which is the level that a “100-year-flood” would reach, plus some amount determined by the building code.
The rule almost invites conflict. Because just as much as local communities and homeowners want to restore things to the way they were, the federal government doesn’t want to insure structures that are simply going to get destroyed. On Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall, the base flood elevation ranges from 7 feet to 9 feet, meaning that elevating a home to comply with flood codes could be beyond the means — or at least the insurance payouts — of some homeowners.
“You got a 1952 house that’s 1,400 square feet, and you get 4 feet of water,” Jeff Brandes, a former state legislator and president of the Florida Policy Project, told me on Wednesday, explaining how the rule could have played out in Tampa. “That means new kitchens and new bathrooms, all new flooring and baseboards and drywall to 4 or 5 feet.” That kind of claim could easily run to $150,000, which might well surpass the FEMA threshold. “Now all of the sudden you get into the 50% rule that you have the entire house up to current code levels. But then you have to do another half-a-million above what [insurance] paid you.”
Simple probability calculations show that a 100-year flood (which is really a flood elevation that has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring every year) has a more than 25% chance of occurring during the lifetime of a mortgage. If you browse Siesta Key real estate on Zillow, much of it is given a 100% chance of flooding sometime over the course of a 30-year mortgage, according to data analysis by First Street.
Sarasota County as a whole has around 62,000 NFIP policies with some $16.6 billion in total coverage (although more than 80% percent of households have no flood insurance at all). Considering that flood insurance is required in high-risk areas for federally-backed mortgages and for new homeowners insurance policies written by Florida’s state backed property insurer of last resort, Citizens, FEMA is likely to take a close interest in whether communities affected by Milton and Helene are complying with its rules.
If 2022’s Hurricane Ian is any indication, squabbles over the 50% rule are almost certain to emerge — and soon.
Earlier this year, FEMA told Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Cape Coral, that it was rescinding the discount its residents and a handful of towns within it receive on flood insurance because, the agency claimed, more than 600 homeowners had violated the 50% rule after Hurricane Ian. Following an outcry from local officials and congressional representatives, FEMA restored the discount.
In their efforts to avoid triggering the rule, homeowners are hardly rogue actors. Local governments often actively assist them.
FEMA had initiated a similar procedure in Lee County the year before, threatening to drop homeowners from the flood insurance program for using possibly inaccurate appraisals to avoid the 50% rule before eventually relenting. The Fort Myers News Press reported that the appraisals were provided by the county, which was deliberately “lowering the amount that residents could use to calculate their repairs or rebuilds” to avoid triggering the rule.
Less than a month after Ian swept through Southwest Florida, Cape Coral advised residents to delay and slow down repairs for the same reason, as the rule there applied to money spent on repairs over the course of a year. Some highly exposed coastal communities in Pinellas County have been adjusting their “lookback rules” — the period over which repairs are totaled to see if they hit the 50% rule — to make them shorter so homeowners are less likely to have to make the substantive repairs required.
This followed similar actions by local governments in Charlotte County. As the Punta Gordon Sun put it, “City Council members learned the federal regulation impacts its homeowners — and they decided to do something about it.” In the Sarasota County community of North Port, local officials scrapped a rule that added up repair costs over a five-year period to make it possible for homeowners to rebuild without triggering elevation requirements.
When the 50% rule “works,” it can lead to the communities most affected by big storms being fundamentally changed, both in terms of the structures that are built and who occupies them. The end result of the rebuilding following Helene and Milton — or the next big storm to hit Florida’s Gulf Coast — or the one after that, and so on — may be wealthier homeowners in more resilient homes essentially serving as a flood barrier for everyone else, and picking up more of the bill if the waters rise too high again.
Florida’s Gulf Coast has long been seen as a place where the middle class can afford beachfront property. Elected officials’ resistance to the FEMA rule only goes to show just how important keeping a lid on the cost of living — quite literally, the cost of legally inhabiting a structure — is to the voters and residents they represent.
Still, said Brandes, “There’s the right way to come out of this thing. The wrong way is to build exactly back what you built before.”