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Two things are true:
1. Levees are critical flood-control infrastructure.
2. We don’t really know what shape they’re in.
A glance at the website for the National Levee Database — which was developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of the National Levee Safety Program in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and does what it says on the can — shows nearly 25,000 miles of levees across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam, hemming waterways on the edges of communities that 17 million Americans call home. Look a little further out and you’ll find that almost two-thirds of all Americans live in counties with levees in them, even if their homes aren’t directly protected by those levees.
But the database is full of gaps. Despite the ubiquity of levees, there’s still much we don’t know about them, starting with where they all are. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 Infrastructure Report Card (which, incidentally, gives America’s levees a D grade), the conditions of more than half of the levees in the database are unknown, while there are an additional 10,000 miles or so of levees that simply aren’t in the database at all — though most of them have very few, if any, people living behind them.
That latter number is up for debate, too: The 2017 Infrastructure Report Card estimated there are about 100,000 total miles of levees in the country, a number backed up by a 2022 study that used machine learning to map about 113,000 miles of potential levees, which would suggest the database is only about a quarter complete. That's a huge disparity, to put it mildly. The data gap could be something more like a breach.
“You have to know what you have in your pocket,” said Farshid Vahedifard, a professor of civil engineering at Mississippi State University who studies levees. “The first step to risk governance is awareness.”
In an email to Heatmap, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmed the number of levees in the National Levee Database, saying, “We think that these are the majority of functioning levees across the country with some gaps. We will continue to add to the National Levee Database as levees are built or stakeholders provide any new information.”
For many Americans, levees are the margins between the built and natural worlds. They’re the first line of defense against flooding, directing water away from communities and containing rivers and lakes when they threaten to spill over their banks. Many of them were originally built decades ago by farmers or landowners looking to protect their land, Vahedifard said, and went on to become the de facto flood control measures of the communities that happened to spring up behind them.
Climate change is going to affect levees in numerous ways. There is, to begin with, the obvious problem of more frequent and severe storms, which could lead to more chances of floods overtopping or even breaking through levees, as happened in Pajaro, California in March, leaving the majority of the town underwater.
But climate change can also undermine the infrastructure itself. Just 3% of the levees in the country are engineered floodwalls made of concrete, rock, or steel; the vast majority — 97%, according to the infrastructure report card — are earthen embankments, or what regular folks might call giant mounds of soil. Prolonged droughts can weaken the soil in those embankments, leaving them brittle and unable to stand up to intense flooding. Droughts also lead to more demand for groundwater, and removing that groundwater causes the earth under levees to subside, weakening their foundations and making them more vulnerable to breaches.
In an ideal world, every levee in the country would be upgraded and maintained according to rigorous engineering standards. But that takes time and immense amounts of money — the Army Corps of Engineers would need $21 billion to fix the high-risk levees in its portfolio alone, and those make up just 15 percent of the known levees in the country; the vast majority of the levees in the country are maintained by local governments and water management districts. That means making the levee database complete is even more crucial.
“Once we know the status, we can use some sort of a screening process to identify more vulnerable locations, like the hotspots,” Vahedifard said. “Then we can allocate existing resources and prioritize those areas.”
The National Levee Database and the National Levee Safety Program were created as part of the National Levee Safety Act, which Congress first authorized in 2007. But they have been consistently underfunded: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), appropriators provided just $5 million of the $79 million per year that the National Levee Safety Program is authorized to receive. Fully funding the program would at least help close the data gap.
Education is also crucial. Many people who live behind levees don’t know about the potential risk to their communities, said Vahedifard, and educating them on how their lives can be affected by the boundaries of the waterways near them is just as important a resiliency tool as physically shoring up the levees themselves.
“No levee is flood-proof,” declares the second page of So, You Live Behind a Levee!, a jauntily-named handbook for residents created by the ASCE, Army Corps of Engineers, and a conglomeration of partners. “Flooding will happen. Actions taken now will save lives and property.”
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PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
The nation’s largest electricity market expects to be delivering a lot more power through the end of the next decade — even more than it expected last year.
PJM Interconnection, which covers some or all of 13 states (and Washington, D.C.) between Maryland and Illinois, released its latest long-term forecast last week, projecting that its summer peak demand would climb by almost half, from 155,000 megawatts in 2025 to around 230,000 in 2039.
The electricity market attributed the increased demand to “the proliferation of data centers, electrification of buildings and vehicles, and manufacturing,” and noted (not for the first time) that the demand surge comes at the same time many fossil fuel power plants are scheduled to close, especially coal plants. Already, some natural gas and even some coal plants in PJM andelsewhere that were scheduled to close have seen their retirement dates pushed out in order to handle forecast electricity demand.
This is just the latest eye-popping projection of forthcoming electricity demand from PJM and others — last year, PJM forecast summer peak demand of about 180,000 megawatts in 2035, a figure that jumped to around 220,000 megawatts in this year’s forecast.
While summer is typically when grids are most taxed due to heavy demand from air conditioning, as more of daily life gets electrified — especially home heating — winter demand is forecast to rise, too. PJM forecast that its winter peak demand would go from 139,000 megawatts in 2025, or 88% of the summer peak, to 210,000 megawatts in 2039, or 95% of its summer peak demand forecast for that year.
Systems are designed to accommodate their peak, but winter poses special challenges for grids. Namely, the electric grid can freeze, with natural gas plants and pipelines posing a special risk in cold weather — not to mention that it’s typically not a great time for solar production, either.
Aftab Khan, PJM’s executive vice president for operations, planning, and security, said in a statement Thursday that much of the recent demand increase was due to data centers growing “exponentially” in PJM’s territory.
The disparity between future demand and foreseeable available supply in the short term has already led to a colossal increase in “capacity” payments within PJM, where generators are paid to guarantee they’ll be able to deliver power in a crunch. These payments tend to favor coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, which can produce power (hopefully) in all weather conditions whenever it’s needed, in a way that variable energy generation such as wind and solar — even when backed up by batteries — cannot as yet.
Prices at the latest capacity auction were high enough to induce Calpine, the independent power company that operates dozens of natural gas power plants and recently announced a merger with Constellation, the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, to say it would look at building new power plants in the territory.
The expected relentless increase in power demand, power capacity, and presumably, profits for power companies, was thrown into doubt, however, when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released a large language model that appears to require far less power than state of the art models developed by American companies such as OpenAI. While the biggest stock market victim has been the chip designer Nvidia, which has shed hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization this week, a number of power companies including Constellation and Vistra are down around 10%, after being some of the best stock market performers in 2024.
A conversation with Carl Fleming of McDermott Will & Emory
This week we’re talking to Carl Fleming, a renewables attorney with McDermott Will & Emory who was an advisor to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo under the Biden administration. We chatted the morning after the Trump administration attempted to freeze large swathes of federal spending. My goal? To understand whether this chaos and uncertainty was trickling down into the transition as we spoke. But Fleming had a sober perspective and an important piece of wisdom: stay calm and remain on course.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How are you seeing the private sector respond to all of this news?
My view is, you can read a lot into what people publish in the EOs and what’s written and what’s issued and you can sometimes read a good deal into what hasn’t been issued and what hasn’t been said. In the executive orders that got first issued in a flurry we saw a few that got pointed directly at onshore wind, some on offshore wind, but solar and standalone storage – as predicted – remained pretty much intact.
We were under the impression and we stood by it that we had the guidance in hand, bankable guidance, from the IRS prior to the change in administration and prior to any look-back window that people had been transacting on over the past year at kind of a record pace. Standalone storage has just had a breakout year. Solar continues to go, to continue to be put on the grid. And we also have manufacturing of solar panels, the domestic supply chain. This year we stood up is nowhere near what we need to fulfill our requirements to get everything we need to do domestically to fill our generation requirements [but] its a pretty great step in the right direction. And those credits have been pretty good to the economy and Republican states.
The way I’ve seen people react is, I’ve probably been busier than ever the past two weeks, not only fielding questions like that but also for tax credit transfers, all of the corporates we work with. We work in both the buy and the sell side of all these credit transfers. We’re working with a lot of solar module manufacturers to sell the credits under the IRA. We’re working with a lot of buyers to purchase those credits. And we’re working with the buyers and sellers under the generation of these projects.
All of the buyers have come out and continued with their 2025 strategy to buy more of these credits, if not more so. And all of the developers we represent continue to produce more of these credits. So I haven’t seen a hiccup or slowdown in actual transactions. If anything, I’ve seen stuff pick up in the solar space and in the manufacturing space. I continue to be very optimistic about those two fundamental parts of the energy transition, because if you need to go be an energy superpower, you wouldn’t want to turn off solar, turn off storage –
Is that argument that if you were trying to deal with “energy security,” you wouldn’t turn off solar and storage – is that enough to assuage uncertainty in the investor space?
I think it’s helpful. If you’re a private equity investor or you’re any sort of lender or a developer, you’re probably not going to base your whole model on the hopes that our energy security strategy syncs up with what most people think it should look like. But when you layer it on top of some of the fundamentals… I want to say that solar did not go away eight years ago. When Trump first came in, we saw more renewables deployed in his administration. At times, we saw more beneficial guidance, issuance of tax guidance under that administration, than we would hope for from some more favorable administrations.
The fact that the IRA has disproportionately benefited red states is just a fact that can’t be overlooked. I met with a group of about two dozen lawmakers a few weeks ago to talk about the IRA and there’s quite a few of those folks in the room that say, “Whatever we do, we can’t dismantle the IRA.”
But how has the chaos in the last week and a half impacted investment in renewable energy, though?
I think the renewable energy industry is used to a lack of predictability. It’s kind of a lawyer’s job, our team’s job, to help folks mitigate risk [and] to see what potential pitfalls there may be and to structure and draft around those.
You might see as things get more unpredictable, as folks go out to investors to raise capital, you might see a little bit of tightening around different portfolios or different types of companies based on their pipelines or how they’re put together. But I think one investor’s look on a project or pipeline may vary widely from another investor who’s got a different project or pipeline. There’s a lot of capital out there to be deployed. I think people are looking to invest.
I think you just need to partner the right developers with the right investors.
Are you seeing any slowdown in solar investment though?
I don’t see folks taking a hardline approach or stopping any time soon.
This is not an existential crisis while the ITC [investment tax credit] and PTC [production tax credit] exist. It’s not even, could you go back in time to unwind these credits. It’s moreso, going forward, what will the IRA look like? Will there be additional technologies added to the IRA? That’s possible to help stand up other technologies. Will the runway for the credit, instead of it being unlimited for at least 10 years, will [it] be pared back a bit? There’s potential, but it’s unlikely.
Okay last question and it’s a fun one: what was the last song you listened to?
I’m not going to lie, I’m an Eagles fan. And I’m from Philly and a huge Meek Mill fan. So “Uptown Vibes” by Meek Mill is in the car.
1. Freeze, don’t move – The Trump administration this week attempted to freeze essentially all discretionary grant programs in the federal government. A list we obtained showed this would halt major energy programs and somehow also involve targeting work on IRA tax credits.
2. Sorry, California – The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management canceled public meetings on the environmental impact statement for offshore wind lease areas in California, indicating the Trump wind lease pause will also affect pre-approval activities.
3. Idaho we go – Idaho Gov. Brad Little this week signed an executive order dubbed the SPEED Act aimed at expediting all energy projects, including potentially renewables, transmission, and mining projects.