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For more than four years, California has had a law on the books meant to protect homes and buildings during an urban firestorm like the Palisade and Eaton fires. But it’s never gone into effect.
In theory, the policy was simple. It directed state officials to develop new rules for buildings in areas with high fire risk, which would govern what people were allowed to put within the five-foot perimeter immediately surrounding their homes. A large body of evidence shows that clearing this area, known in the fire mitigation world as “zone zero,” of combustible materials can be the difference between a building that alights during a wildfire and one that can weather the blaze.
The new rules — essentially just a list of items allowed in that five-foot zone — were due two years ago, by January 1, 2023. But the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has yet to begin a formal rulemaking process. Ask anyone who’s been following this thread what’s taking so long, and they’ll almost certainly point to one thing: politics.
“There’s a ton of science about what to do, but the science has run into challenges with social acceptance, and therefore political acceptance,” Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, told me. People do not want to be told how they can or can’t landscape or furnish or otherwise adorn the outside of their homes. Inevitably, when the rules do come out, you’ll hear about Gavin Newsom coming to take away people’s decks and policing gardens.
No one thinks that zone zero rules, if enacted and adhered to, could have prevented fires in the Pacific Palisades or Altadena or saved every structure in the recent fires’ path. But alongside other fire mitigation strategies, zone zero design can significantly lower the chances of a given building burning, and therefore the chances that a fire will spread to neighboring buildings, and ultimately reduce the risk of fires becoming compounding, devastating disasters. Wara likened it to car safety rules like seatbelts and airbags — people still die in car accidents, but far fewer than would otherwise.
The question now is whether the record-breaking destruction in Los Angeles will be enough to convince people that zone zero rules are effective and worthwhile. Past experience shows the answer is not an obvious yes.
Why homes burn
There are three ways buildings ignite during a wildfire, Yana Valachovic, a forest scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network who specializes in community resilience and the built environment, told me. They are either exposed to burning embers, direct flames, or radiant heat, though most often a combination.
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Embers — hot, hard debris of burned material from a fire — can be carried miles away from their origin by the wind and create new spot fires next to homes. “What happens with those embers is they get thrown at the building, they hit the walls, the siding, and then drop to the base and collect at the base,” Valachovic said, “so you can have not just one, but thousands of embers at the base of our structures.”
Embers can also penetrate buildings through open windows and ventilation systems. If radiant heat from nearby burning structures causes windows to shatter or fall out, that can also create new vectors for embers to enter the home. “Embers find their way,” Valachovic said.
Fire mitigation experts promote two strategies for reducing vulnerability, and they go hand in hand. The first is
home hardening, which could mean building with fire-resistant materials but also includes smaller but effective actions like covering air vents with fine mesh screens and sealing gaps to try to block embers. The second is creating so-called “defensible space,” or a buffer around the building, where any vegetation is carefully selected and managed to slow the spread of fire to and from the building. California divides defensible space into three different zones: Zone one extends from 5 feet away from the structure to 30 feet, and zone two goes out to 100 feet away. Then, of course, there’s zone zero.
The state has had regulations on the books to require at least 30 feet of defensible space in high-risk areas since 1965, and it updated the standards to establish a two-zone system in 2006. In both cases, the rules were “really framed around, how do you interrupt flames running at the building?” said Valachovic. The regulations included thinning trees and removing lower branches, clearing some trees that were closer to homes, clearing dead wood and litter, and pruning branches that hang over buildings. But they still allowed for vegetation right up against the house.
Since then, wildfire post-mortems have found that this scenario of flames burning a path to a building is not a primary driver of structure loss. “It was missing the point,” Valachovic told me of the previous rule structure. “What we’ve seen now for the last decade is that embers are really driving our home loss issue, and so we’re basically allowing all this vegetation and combustible material to be present in the zone that is really very vulnerable.”
In August 2020, after Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in California due to an explosion of wildfires, the state legislature passed AB 3074, which finally sought to bridge the gap by creating a new, “ember-resistant zone” — zone zero. Had the rules been implemented under the timeline mandated by the law, new homes would have had to comply beginning in 2023, and existing homes would have had to comply beginning in 2024. Like the earlier defensible space rules, they would have applied to homes located in parts of the state designated as Fire Hazard Severity Zones. These are generally areas that you might think of as the “wildland-urban interface,” where homes abut wildland vegetation like forests or scrublands, but others extend into more urban areas. Almost all of the burned area in the Pacific Palisades, for instance, would have been
subject to the rules, while only a small portion of the homes in Altadena are in the zone.
Why “zone zero” is political
When I reached out to the California Natural Resources Agency, the umbrella group for both the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection and CalFire, to ask if there was an updated timeline for the regulations, one of the first things that Tony Andersen, the Deputy Secretary for Communications, told me, was not about the timeline but about the ultimate cost of compliance.
“We recognize there are costs associated with doing this work around homes and structures,” Andersen told me via email, “and we are focused on identifying options for financial assistance as well as education and outreach to help owners prepare and prioritize mitigations.” He then noted that the rulemaking was a “complex process” that the agency wanted to get right, and said it aimed to present a draft proposal to the Board “as soon as is feasible, most likely in the coming months.”
Andersen’s response illustrates one of several tensions that have made it difficult to write the zone zero rules — and will ultimately make them difficult to implement. If the rules say you can’t have a wooden deck, for example, or you can’t have a fence that touches the building, homeowners could face costly retrofits. And despite witnessing the horror of destructive wildfires, many homeowners don’t want to switch their wooden fence for a metal one, or replace their bushes with gravel.
Five feet might sound like a negligible amount of space, but people are attached to the aesthetics of this zone. Homeowners have become used to “softening” the line where the walls meet the ground by filling it in with vegetation, Valachovic told me. “We really developed this idea that we don’t visually want to see our foundations,” she said. “From a fire defense perspective, this idea that we have combustible material basically ringing our houses and our structures, that is problematic.”
Several people I interviewed for this story asked if I had seen a documentary about the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California called
Bring Your Own Brigade. The film captures a series of city council meetings in 2019, when officials were considering updating local building standards. They weigh a number of ideas that would reduce the risk of embers collecting on top of, inside, or next to homes, including eliminating gutters and requiring roof overhangs and a five-foot setback for any combustible material.
At the time, the Camp Fire was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history, killing 85 people, displacing more than 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 structures. But during a public hearing, community members lashed out at the potential cost, warned that new standards would prevent displaced residents from moving back, and decried the aesthetic implications.
“Paradise is an individualistic town,” one person says. “That’s part of the charm and the quirkiness. We don’t need consistency and uniformity.”
In another scene, a city councilmember asks Paradise Fire Chief John Messina to narrow down the list to just one rule that would make the community more fire resistant. “That five-foot barrier around your house is extremely important,” he replies. “That would be the No. 1 thing out of all of this that I would say would defend your home the best and have the most impact.” Shortly after, the council votes down the measure.
Michael Wara, who recalled the scene to me over the phone, said a similar thing happened when the fire chief in his community in Mill Valley tried to get the city council to adopt zone zero rules. “The word got out in the community that this crazy fire chief was going to make us rip up our front yards,” he said. When the council convened for a vote, more than a thousand people showed up to oppose it. The council ended up passing it as a voluntary measure.
To Wara, part of the problem is the language used to communicate these ideas with the public. “Zone zero” and “hardening” conjure a bunker mentality, he said. “I do not want my family to live in a bunker that is hardened to attack. I want my family to live in a home that is welcoming.”
He also thinks the state can reach a compromise, like allowing succulents and other fire-resistant greenery in zone zero. The rules don’t have to turn these areas into gravel and concrete wastelands to be effective.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
The Los Angeles County Fire Department recently included photos in a
notice to homeowners about defensible space rules and the upcoming zone zero regulations that illustrate how landscapes might strike that balance. The images feature stone walkways immediately next to homes, followed by raised beds made of metal and concrete containing attractive landscaping. Not quite “quirky” and “charming,” but far from a barren dystopia.
Where insurance fits in
Despite the delay in implementing zone zero, California has tried to pitch it as part of a strategy to solve the state’s
insurance crisis. In 2022, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara enacted new rules requiring insurance companies to provide discounts to homeowners who do home hardening retrofits and create defensible space.
“That’s terrific,” Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lara’s predecessor as insurance commissioner, told me. “But you don’t get the discount if they won’t write you the insurance.”
Jones said the bigger issue is that the models insurance companies use to decide whether or not to write a policy do not account for fire mitigation efforts. A homeowner could take every action on the list for home hardening, create a zone zero, live in a community that’s investing in aggressive fuels reduction, and so on, and insurance companies could still deny them coverage. Last year, Jones wrote a bill that would have required companies to change the models they use to determine coverage to account for mitigation. Several insurance industry trade groups opposed the bill,
arguing that it was “premature and impossible to implement given the real-world data constraints,” and that it was “inconsistent” with the state’s efforts to “restore a healthy and competitive insurance market.” It didn’t pass.
If following zone zero guidelines meant having a shot at getting insurance, maybe people would be more open to doing it, Jones argued to me. But as things stand, that’s not the case. “I don’t think the failure is so much in the state developing the standards as it is in the lack of political courage to stand up to the insurance industry and say, hey, look, enough is enough. We’re going to pass a law to require your models to account for this.”
This past year, the California legislature passed a law giving existing homes three years, instead of just one, to comply with zone zero rules once they are finalized, whenever that is. And if the regulations are finalized this year, it’s possible that some of the rebuilt structures in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena will have to meet them.
Ultimately, Valachovic sees hope in fire mitigation work. The narrative that climate change is driving these destructive wildfires can make people feel helpless. But there are so many low-cost, simple things people can do to reduce their exposure. “I just feel like we have a moral imperative to share practical, reasonable actions that people can take to make a difference, and to know that with that, the odds improve substantially.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the role of the California Natural Resources Agency in the rulemaking process.
What does an industry do when it’s lost 80% of its annual demand?
The carbon removal business is trying to figure that out.
For the past few years, Microsoft has been the buyer of first and last resort for any company that sought to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In order to achieve an aggressive internal climate goal, the software company purchased more than 70 million metric tons of carbon removal credits, 40 times more than anyone else.
Now, it’s pulling back. Microsoft has informed suppliers and partners that it is pausing carbon removal buying, Heatmap reported last week.Bloomberg andCarbon Herald soon followed. The news has rippled through the nascent industry, convincing executives and investors that lean years may be on the way after a period of rapid growth.
“For a lot of these companies, their business model was, ‘And then Microsoft buys,’” said Julio Friedmann, the chief scientist at Carbon Direct, a company that advises and consults with companies — including, yes, Microsoft — on their carbon management projects, in an interview. “It changes their business model significantly if Microsoft does not buy.”
Microsoft told me this week that it has not ended the purchasing program. It still aims to become carbon negative by 2030, meaning that it must remove more climate pollution from the atmosphere than it produces in that year, according to its website. Its ultimate goal is to eliminate all 45 years of its historic carbon emissions from electricity use by 2050.
“At times, we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals,” Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, said in a statement. “Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach — not a change in ambition.”
Yet even a partial pullback will alter the industry. Over the past five years, carbon removal companies have raised more than $3.6 billion, according to the independent data tracker CDR.fyi. Startups have invested that money into research and equipment, expecting that voluntary corporate buyers — and, eventually, governments — will pay to clean up carbon dioxide in the air.
Although many companies have implicitly promised to buy carbon removal credits — they’re all but implied in any commitment to “net zero” — nobody bought more than Microsoft. The software company purchased 45 million tons of carbon removal last year alone, according to its own data.
The next biggest buyer of carbon removal credits — Frontier, a coalition of large companies led by the payments processing firm Stripe — has bought 1.8 million tons total since launching in 2022.
With such an outsize footprint, Microsoft’s carbon removal team became the de facto regulator for the early industry — setting prices, analyzing projects, and publishing in-house standards for public consumption.
It bought from virtually every kind of carbon removal company, purchasing from large-scale, factory-style facilities that use industrial equipment to suck carbon from the air, as well as smaller and more natural solutions that rely on photosynthesis. One of its largest deals was with the city-owned utility for Stockholm, Sweden, which is building a facility to capture the carbon released when plant matter is burned for energy.
That it would some day stop buying shouldn’t be seen as a surprise, Hannah Bebbington, the head of deployment at the carbon-removal purchasing coalition Frontier, told me. “It will be inevitable for any corporate buyer in the space,” she said. “Corporate budgets are finite.”
Frontier’s members include Google, McKinsey, and Shopify. The coalition remains “open for business,” she said. “We are always open to new buyers joining Frontier.”
But Frontier — and, certainly, Microsoft — understands that the real point of voluntary purchasing programs is to prime the pump for government policy. That’s both because governments play a central role in spurring along new technologies — and because, when you get down to it, governments already handle disposal for a number of different kinds of waste, and carbon dioxide in the air is just another kind of waste. (On a per ton basis, carbon removal may already be price-competitive with municipal trash pickup.)
“The end game here is government support in the long-term period,” Bebbington said. “We will need a robust set of policies around the world that provide permanent demand for high-quality, durable CDR funds.”
“The voluntary market plays a critical role right now, but it won’t scale, and we don’t expect it will scale to the size of the problem,” she added.
Only a handful of companies had the size and scale to sell carbon credits to Microsoft, which tended to place orders in the millions of tons, Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a researcher at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me on a recent episode of Heatmap’s podcast, Shift Key. Those companies will now be competing with fledgling firms for a market that’s 80% smaller than it used to be.
“Fundamentally, what it will mean is just an acceleration of something that was going to happen anyway, which is consolidation and bankruptcies or dissolutions,” Cavanaugh told me. “This was always going to happen at this moment because we don’t have supportive policy.”
Friedmann agreed with the dour outlook. “We will see the best companies and the best projects make it. But a lot of companies will fail, and a lot of projects will fail,” he told me.
To some degree, Microsoft planned for that eventuality in its purchase scheme. The company signed long-term offtake contracts with companies to “pay on delivery,” meaning that it will only pay once tons are actually shown to be durably dealt with. That arrangement will protect Microsoft’s shareholders if companies or technologies fail, but means that it could conceivably keep paying out carbon removal firms for the next 10 years, Noah Deich, a former Biden administration energy official, told me.
The pause, in other words, spells an end to new dealmaking, but it does not stop the flow of revenue to carbon removal companies that have already signed contracts with Microsoft. “The big question now is not who will the next buyer be in 2026,”’ Deich said. “It is who is actually going to deliver credits and do so at scale, at cost, and on time.”
Deich, who ran the Energy Department’s carbon management programs, added that Microsoft has been as important to building the carbon removal industry as Germany was to creating the modern solar industry. That country’s feed-in tariff, which started in 2000, is credited with driving so much demand for solar panels that it spurred a worldwide wave of factory construction and manufacturing innovation.
“The idea that a software company could single-handedly make the market for a climate technology makes about as much sense as the country of Germany — with the same annual solar insolation as Alaska — making the market for solar photovoltaic panels,” Deich said, referencing the comparatively low amount of sunlight that it receives. “But they did it. Climate policy seems to defy Occam’s razor a lot, and this is a great example of that.”
History also shows what could happen if the government fails to step up. In the 1980s, the U.S. government — which had up to that point been the world’s No. 1 developer of solar panel technology — ended its advance purchase program. Many American solar firms sold their patents and intellectual property to Japanese companies.
Those sales led to something of a lost decade for solar research worldwide and ultimately paved the way for East Asian manufacturing companies — first in Japan, and then in China — to dominate the solar trade, Deich said. If the U.S. government doesn’t step up soon, then the same thing could happen to carbon removal.
The climate math still relied upon by global governments to guide their national emissions targets assumes that carbon removal technology will exist and be able to scale rapidly in the future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that many outcomes where the world holds global temperatures to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century will involve some degree of “overshoot,” where carbon removal is used to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.
By one estimate, the world will need to remove 7 billion to 9 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere by the middle of the century in order to hold to Paris Agreement goals. You could argue that any scenario where the world meets “net zero” will require some amount of carbon removal because the word “net” implies humanity will be cleaning up residual emissions with technology. (Climate analysts sometimes distinguish “net zero” pathways from the even-more-difficult “real zero” pathway for this reason.)
Whether humanity has the technologies that it needs to eliminate emissions then will depend on what governments do now, Deich said. After all, the 2050s are closer to today than the 1980s are.
“It’s up to policymakers whether they want to make the relatively tiny investments in technology that make sure we can have net-zero 2050 and not net-zero 2080,” Deich said.
Congress has historically supported carbon removal more than other climate-critical technologies. The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2022 funded a new network of industrial hubs specializing in direct air capture technology, and previous budget bills created new first-of-a-kind purchasing programs for carbon removal credits. Even the Republican-authored One Big Beautiful Bill Act preserved tax incentives for some carbon removal technologies.
But the Trump administration has been far more equivocal about those programs. The Department of Energy initially declined to spend some funds authorized for carbon removal schemes, and in some cases redirected the funds — potentially illegally — to other purposes. (Carbon removal advocates got good news on Wednesday when the Energy Department reinstated $1.2 billion in grants to the direct air capture hubs.)
Those freezes and reallocations fit into the Trump administration’s broader war on federal climate policy. In part, Trump officials have seemed reluctant to signal that carbon might be a public problem — or something that needs to be “removed” or “managed” — in the first place.
Other countries have started preliminary carbon management programs — Norway, the United Kingdom, and Canada — have launched pilots in recent years. The European carbon market will also soon publish rules guiding how carbon removal credits can be used to offset pollution.
But in the absence of a large-scale federal program in the U.S., lean years are likely coming, observers said.
“I am optimistic that [carbon removal] will continue to scale, but not like it was,” Friedmann said. “Microsoft is a symptom of something that was coming.”
“The need for carbon removal has not changed,” he added.
Often the biggest impediment to building renewable energy projects or data center infrastructure isn’t getting government approvals, it’s overcoming local opposition. When it comes to the transmission that connects energy to the grid, however, companies and politicians of all stripes are used to being most concerned about those at the top – the politicians and regulators at every level who can’t seem to get their acts together.
What will happen when the fiery fights on each end of the wire meet the broken, unplanned spaghetti monster of grid development our country struggles with today? Nothing great.
The transmission fights of the data center boom have only just begun. Utilities will have to spend lots of money on getting energy from Point A to Point B – at least $500 billion over the next five years, to be precise. That’s according to a survey of earnings information published by think tank Power Lines on Tuesday, which found roughly half of all utility infrastructure spending will go toward the grid.
But big wires aren’t very popular. When Heatmap polled various types of energy projects last September, we found that self-identified Democrats and Republicans were mostly neutral on large-scale power lines. Independent voters, though? Transmission was their second least preferred technology, ranking below only coal power.
Making matters far more complex, grid planning is spread out across decision-makers. At the regional level, governance is split into 10 areas overseen by regional transmission organizations, known as RTOs, or independent system operators, known as ISOs. RTOs and ISOs plan transmission projects, often proposing infrastructure to keep the grid resilient and functional. These bodies are also tasked with planning the future of their own grids, or at least they are supposed to – many observers have decried RTOs and ISOs as outmoded and slow to respond. Utilities and electricity co-ops also do this planning at various scales. And each of these bodies must navigate federal regulators and permitting processes, utility commissions for each state they touch, on top of the usual raft of local authorities.
The mid-Atlantic region is overseen by PJM Interconnection, a body now under pressure from state governors in the territory to ensure the data center boom doesn’t unnecessarily drive up costs for consumers. The irony, though, is that these governors are going to be under incredible pressure to have their states act against individual transmission projects in ways that will eventually undercut affordability.
Virginia, for instance – known now as Data Center Alley – is flanked by states that are politically diverse. West Virginia is now a Republican stronghold, but was long a Democratic bastion. Maryland had a Republican governor only a few years ago. Virginia and Pennsylvania regularly change party control. These dynamics are among the many drivers behind the opposition against the Piedmont Reliability Project, which would run from a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to northern Virginia, cutting across spans of Maryland farmland ripe for land use conflict. The timeline for this project is currently unclear due to administrative delays.
Another major fight is brewing with NextEra’s Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link, or MARL project. Spanning four states – and therefore four utility commissions – the MARL was approved by PJM Interconnection to meet rising electricity demand across West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. It still requires approval from each state utility commission, however. Potentially affected residents in West Virginia are hopping mad about the project, and state Democratic lawmakers are urging the utility commission to reject it.
In West Virginia, as well as Virginia and Maryland, NextEra has applied for a certificate of public convenience and necessity to build the MARL project, a permit that opponents have claimed would grant it the authority to exercise eminent domain. (NextEra has said it will do what it can to work well with landowners. The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
“The biggest problem facing transmission is that there’s so many problems facing transmission,” said Liza Reed, director of climate and energy at the Niskanen Center, a policy think tank. “You have multiple layers of approval you have to go through for a line that is going to provide broader benefits in reliability and resilience across the system.”
Hyperlocal fracases certainly do matter. Reed explained to me that “often folks who are approving the line at the state or local level are looking at the benefits they’re receiving – and that’s one of the barriers transmission can have.” That is, when one state utility commission looks at a power line project, they’re essentially forced to evaluate the costs and benefits from just a portion of it.
She pointed to the example of a Transource line proposed by PJM almost 10 years ago to send excess capacity from Pennsylvania to Maryland. It wasn’t delayed by protests over the line itself – the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission opposed the project because it thought the result would be net higher electricity bills for folks in the Keystone State. That’s despite whatever benefits would come from selling the electricity to Maryland and consumer benefits for their southern neighbors. The lesson: Whoever feels they’re getting the raw end of the line will likely try to stop it, and there’s little to nothing anyone else can do to stop them.
These hyperlocal fears about projects with broader regional benefits can be easy targets for conservation-focused environmental advocates. Not only could they take your land, the argument goes, they’re also branching out to states with dirtier forms of energy that could pollute your air.
“We do need more energy infrastructure to move renewable energy,” said Julie Bolthouse, director of land use for the Virginia conservation group Piedmont Environmental Council, after I asked her why she’s opposing lots of the transmission in Virginia. “This is pulling away from that investment. This is eating up all of our utility funding. All of our money is going to these massive transmission lines to give this incredible amount of power to data centers in Virginia when it could be used to invest in solar, to invest in transmission for renewables we can use. Instead it’s delivering gas and coal from West Virginia and the Ohio River Valley.”
Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures, who previously worked on major pieces of transmission reform legislation in the U.S. Senate, said when asked if local opposition was a bigger problem than macro permitting issues: “I do not think local opposition is the main thing holding up transmission.”
But then he texted me to clarify. “What’s unique about transmission is that in order for local opposition to even matter, there has to be a functional planning process that gets transmission lines to the starting line. And right now, only about half the country has functional regional planning, and none of the country has functional interregional planning.”
It’s challenging to fathom a solution to such a fragmented, nauseating puzzle. One solution could be in Congress, where climate hawks and transmission reform champions want to empower the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to have primacy over transmission line approvals, as it has over gas pipelines. This would at the very least contain any conflicts over transmission lines to one deciding body.
“It’s an old saw: Depending on the issue, I’ll tell you that I’m supportive of states’ rights,” Representative Sean Casten told me last December. “[I]t makes no sense that if you want to build a gas pipeline across multiple states in the U.S., you go to FERC and they are the sole permitting authority and they decide whether or not you get a permit. If you go to the same corridor and build an electric transmission that has less to worry about because there’s no chance of leaks, you have a different permitting body every time you cross a state line.”
Another solution could come from the tech sector thinking fast on its feet. Google for example is investing in “advanced” transmission projects like reconductoring, which the company says will allow it to increase the capacity of existing power lines. Microsoft is also experimenting with smaller superconductor lines they claim deliver the same amount of power than traditional wires.
But this space is evolving and in its infancy. “Getting into the business of transmission development is very complicated and takes a lot of time. That’s why we’ve seen data centers trying a lot of different tactics,” Reed said. “I think there’s a lot of interest, but turning that into specific projects and solutions is still to come. I think it’s also made harder by how highly local these decisions are.”
1. Franklin County, Maine – The fate of the first statewide data center ban hinges on whether a governor running for a Democratic Senate nomination is willing to veto over a single town’s project.
On Wednesday, the Maine legislature passed a total ban on new data center projects through the end of 2027, making it the first legislative body to send such a bill to a governor’s desk. Governor Janet Mills, who is running for Democrats’ nomination to the Senate, opposed the bill prior to the vote on the grounds that it would halt a single data center project in a small town. Between $10 million and $12 million has already been sunk into renovating the site of a former paper mill in Jay, population 4,600, into a future data center. Mills implored lawmakers to put an exemption into the bill for that site specifically, stating it would otherwise cost too many jobs.
It’s unclear whether Mills will sign or veto the bill. Her office has not said whether she would sign the bill without the Jay exemption and did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did the campaign for Graham Platner, an Iraq War veteran and political novice running competitively against Mills for the Senate nomination. Platner has said little about data centers so far on the campaign trail.
It’s safe to say that the course of Democratic policy may shift if Mills – seen as the more moderate candidate of the two running for this nomination – signs the first state-wide data center ban. Should she do so and embrace that tack, it will send a signal to other Democratic politicians and likely accelerate a further shift into supporting wide-scale moratoria.
2. Jerome County, Idaho – The county home to the now-defunct Lava Ridge wind farm just restricted solar energy, too.
Jerome County Commissioners this week adopted an ordinance banning solar on agricultural lands in addition to wind. The ordinance also bans large- and medium-scale battery storage from farmland too. These projects will only be allowed in areas designated for heavy industrial uses.
I learned about this in an impromptu email from Dan Sakura, a consultant and descendant of detainees at Camp Minidoka, the WWII Japanese internment camp that is now a historic site. Sakura was the tip of the spear representing descendants who fought against Lava Ridge over sightline impacts. “Lava Ridge poisoned the well for renewable energy in southern Idaho,” he wrote.
I’m not so sure Lava Ridge is solely to blame here, though. Heatmap Pro modeling clearly shows most people in this county are primed to hate anything labeled “clean energy.” On top of that, the sheer magnitude of protected lands in this area made it exceedingly likely that someone would raise concerns about development.
3. Shelby County, Tennessee - The NAACP has joined with environmentalists to sue one of Elon Musk’s data centers in Memphis, claiming it is illegally operating more than two dozen gas turbines.
The NAACP lawsuit argues that xAI and a subsidiary operating the data center have been operating the turbines without federal air permits. The suit requests that operations cease until a permit is obtained and that the companies pay financial penalties for every day they were unlawfully operating. It was brought alongside Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center.
It’s exceedingly likely that after this case, Musk becomes a new favorite villain of the environmental justice movement. This situation has it all: clear racial inequity, fossil fuel pollution, data centers, and allegations of negligence against an ally of the president.
4. Richland County, Ohio - This Ohio county is going to vote in a few weeks on a ballot initiative that would overturn its solar and wind ban. I am less optimistic about it than many other energy nerds I’ve seen chattering the past week.
It’s a story fit to tug at any renewable developer’s heartstrings: A small group of rural residents banded together to put a measure on the state primary ballot, which will be voted on May 8, unbanning utility-scale solar and wind power. The intrepid volunteers were supported by Ohio Citizen Action, a statewide activist group that’s been canvassing door to door since the 1970s.
This ballot initiative got a lot of attention this week thanks to a story in Canary Media. But it is also kind of confusing. Yes, it was a shock to see the ballot initiative win the signatures needed to be put up for a vote. But it presents a yes or no vote on the existence of the ban and not solar or wind energy itself, so I assume voters will require some sort of education to know how to vote. Opponents of the ballot initiative certainly have seized on that opportunity, embracing an affirmative message filled with big “YES!” illustrations.
Richland County voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in the 2024 election by a more than 45-point margin. If the Trump vote is any predictor of how this vote will go, I suspect this ballot question will be defeated. But who knows, crazier things have happened in the backlash to Trump 2.0.
5. Racine County, Wisconsin – I close this week’s Hotspots with a bonus request: Please listen to this data center noise.
If you don’t want to watch, it’s a local news segment about Microsoft’s data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, in which you can hear incredibly loud humming and buzzing. It’s so loud you can hear a faint hum during the clip even under pouring rain. One nearby resident says she’s running box fans all over her home to avoid hearing the data center hum.
Mount Pleasant is far from the only community to deal with this. You can hear it on this local news segment in Virginia and this local news social media post in Michigan. All of this in only the last month.
Noise concerns are not an issue for renewable energy or battery storage. It’s safe to say data centers have them big time – and it’s a space I plan to investigate soon.
Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Fire Department
