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“Unbelievable. This looks like Baghdad or something.”
The shocked voice in the viral flyover video of Lahaina, Hawaii, belongs to helicopter tour pilot Richard Olsten, who attempted on Wednesday to find the words to describe the devastating transformation of the land below. Grass fires that burned on the fringes of the western Maui town early Tuesday, and were initially believed to be contained, have been fanned by powerful winds toward populated areas, fueling a fast-moving conflagration that took both residents and rescue workers by surprise.
Aerial video shows wildfire devastation in Lahaina, Mauiwww.youtube.com
The fires have killed at least 93 people, although authorities caution that the toll could rise as search-and-rescue efforts are ongoing. Here’s what you need to know about the Maui fires.
The cause of the fires is not known, although they appear to have originated as brush fires that did not draw much initial alarm. But high winds that NOAA and the National Weather Service attribute to Hurricane Dora, some 600 miles to the south, knocked out power on the island, grounded firefighting helicopters, and fanned deadly flare-ups that took residents by surprise.
The location of the Maui fires.
NASA/FIRMS
The location of the fires as of August 10 at 12:30 PM ET are above. You can follow the location of the fires using NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) here. There are also a number of small fires burning on Hawaii’s Big Island.
More than 271 structures have been impacted, according to the Maui County website, and “thousands” of acres have burned. More than 11,000 tourists have been evacuated from Maui and some 2,100 residents are reportedly being housed in emergency shelters.
“Local people have lost everything,” Jimmy Tokioka, the director of Hawaii’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, told the press. “They’ve lost their house. They’ve lost their animals. It’s devastating.”
Lahaina, the former capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii and a place of historic and cultural importance to Native Hawaiians, has been “wiped off the map,” witnesses say. A 150-year-old banyan tree, thought to be the oldest in the state, has been scorched by the fire but appears to still be standing.
With 93 dead, the fires are one of the deadliest natural disasters in Hawaii’s recorded history and one of the deadliest modern U.S. wildfires. Authorities have warned that the death toll could rise.
As of Thursday, helicopters have resumed water drops and at least 100 Maui firefighters are working around the clock to stop the fire.
Horrifying. Survivors said they had little warning before the fire was upon them, with some being so taken by surprise that they had to jump into the ocean to escape the flames.
“While driving through the neighborhood, it looked like a war zone,” one Lahaina resident told USA Today of his escape. “Houses throughout that neighborhood were already on fire. I’m driving through the thickest black smoke, and I don’t know what’s on the other side or what’s in front of me.”
Another evacuee told Maui News she had no time to think through what to pack. “I grabbed some stuff, I put some clothes on, got some dog food. I have a giant tortoise. I couldn’t move him so I opened his gate so he could get out if he needed to,” she said.
“I was the last one off the dock when the firestorm came through the banyan tree and took everything with it,” another survivor recounted to the BBC. “And I just ran out to the beach and I ran south and I just helped everybody I could along the way.”
Hawaii’s brush fires tend to be smaller than the forest fires in the Western United States, but the proliferation of non-native vegetation, which dries out and is particularly fire-prone, has fueled a rise in recent blazes, The Washington Post reports.
There has been a 400% increase in wildfires “over the past several decades” in Hawaii, according to a 2022 report by Hawaii Business Magazine. “From 1904 through the 1980s, [University of Hawaii at Mānoa botanist and fire scientist Clay Trauernicht] estimates that 5,000 acres on average burned each year in Hawaii. In the decades that followed, that number jumped to 20,000 acres burned.”
Though Hawaii is imagined to be lush, wet, and tropical, Maui is experiencing moderate to severe drought, which has dried out the non-native grasses that make particularly good wildfire fuel. And while it is tricky to link Hawaii’s current drought directly to climate change, drought conditions in the Pacific Islands are expected to continue to increase along with warming.
Stronger hurricanes are also more likely due to climate change, and it was the strong winds buffeting Maui that made the fires this week so destructive and fast-moving. “These kinds of climate change-related disasters are really beyond the scope of things that we’re used to dealing with,” University of British Columbia researcher Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz told The Associated Press. “It’s these kind of multiple, interactive challenges that really lead to a disaster.”
The Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority has asked that “visitors who are on non-essential travel … leave Maui, and non-essential travel to Maui is strongly discouraged at this time.” If you have plans to travel to West Maui in the coming weeks, you are “encouraged to consider rescheduling [your] travel plans for a later time.”
This article was last updated on August 13 at 8:32 AM ET.
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And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.
What I’m hearing from developers and CEOs about the renewable energy industry after the Inflation Reduction Act
As the Senate deliberates gutting the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits, renewable energy developers and industry insiders are split about how bad things might get for the sector. But the consensus is that things will undoubtedly get worse.
Almost everyone I talked to insisted that solar and wind projects further along in construction would be insulated from an IRA repeal. Some even argued that spiking energy demand and other macro tailwinds might buffer the wind and solar industries from the demolition of the law.
But between the lines, and beneath the talking points and hopium, executives are fretting that lots of future investments are in jeopardy. And the most pessimistic take: almost all projects will have their balance sheets and time-tables impacted in some way that’ll at minimum increase their budget costs.
“It’s hard to imagine, if the legislation passes in its current form, that it wouldn’t impact all projects,” said Rob Collier, CEO of renewable energy transaction platform LevelTen.
Even industry analysts with the gloomiest views of the repeal say there’s plenty of projects that will keep chugging along and might even become more valuable to investors if they’re close enough to construction or operation. This aligns with recent analysis from BloombergNEF, which found the House bill would diminish our nation’s renewables build-out – but not entirely end its pace.
“The more useful way to break down which project may be hit the hardest is where the projects are going to fall in their development life-cycle,” Collier said. “Projects that have either started construction or have the ability to start construction … are going to very likely rise in terms of their appeal and attractiveness and those projects will be at a premium, if they’re able to skate through the legislative risk and qualify for tax credits.”
There is a more optimistic industry view that believes increased project costs will just be passed along to consumers via higher electricity prices. The American people will in essence have to pick up the tab where the federal tax code left it. Optimists also cite the increased use of power purchase agreements, or PPAs, between renewables developers and entities who need a lot of electricity, like big tech companies. By signing these PPAs, buyers are subsidizing the construction of projects but also insulating themselves from the risk of rising electricity prices.
The most bullish perspective I heard was from Nick Cohen, the CEO of Doral Renewables, who told me deals like these combined with rising premiums for quick energy on the grid may obviate lost credits in a “zero-incentive environment.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” Cohen told me. “If you’re in construction or you’re going to be in construction very soon, you’re fine.”
But Collier called Cohen’s prediction an “experiment” in customers’ willingness to pay for new energy: “If we’re talking about 40%, 50%, 60% of a project’s capital stack now being at risk because of tax credits, those are pretty large price increases.”
I spoke to multiple companies that have been inking massive deals as this legislation has progressed — although many were not nearly as sanguine about the industry’s future prospects as Doral. Like rPlus Energies, which disclosed last week that it closed a commitment for more than $500 million in tax equity investments for a solar and storage project in Utah. rPlus CEO Luigi Resta told me that the legislation “certainly has posed concern from our investors and from the organization” but the project was so far along that the tax equity investment market wasn’t phased by the bill.
“Many people in my company, myself included, have been doing this for more than 20 years. We’ve seen the starts and stops related to ITC and PTC in solar and wind, in multiple cycles, and this feels like another cycle,” Resta told me. “When the IRA passed, everybody was exuberant. And now the runway looks like it may have a cliff. But for us, our mantra since the beginning of the year has been ‘proceed with caution, preserve and protect.’”
However, crucially, it is important to focus on how that caution looks: Resta told me the company has completely paused new contracting while the company is completing the projects it is currently developing.
One government affairs representative for a large and prominent U.S. renewables developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships, told me that “whatever rollback occurs will just result in higher electricity prices over time.” In the near term, the only language that would truly gut projects in progress today would be “foreign entity of concern” restrictions that would broadly impact any component even remotely connected to Chinese industries. Similar language all but kneecapped the entire IRA electric vehicle consumer credit.
“It included definitions of what it means to be a foreign company that were really vague,” the government affairs representative said. “Anyone who does any business with China essentially can’t benefit from the credit. That was a really challenging outcome from the House that hopefully the Senate is going to fix.” If this definition became law, this source said, it would be the final straw that “freezes investment” in renewable energy projects.
Ultimately, after speaking to CEO after CEO this week, I’ve been left with an impression that business activity in renewables hasn’t really subsided after the House bill passed, and that it’ll be the Senate bill that undoubtedly defines the future of renewable energy for years to come.
Whether that chamber remains the “cooling saucer” it once was will be the decider.