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The bugs are already out in New York and the West is in for ”a very bad spring.” Here’s what experts say is in store for the U.S. this year.
It got me in March.
Maybe it happened while I was on a run, enjoying one of the first warm days of spring. Maybe I’d been waiting unsuspectingly for the train on an open-air platform. Maybe it happened in my own apartment. Regardless, at some point last month, I hesitated too long before brushing away a soft, fleeting sensation on my cheek. In the ongoing, 10,000-year-long game of tag between mosquitoes and humans, I’d taken another L.
Though it’s only early April, many New Yorkers have already gotten their first bites of the year: interviewer Isaac Fitzgerald and interviewee James Hannaham were driven out of a backyard by the bugs in Brooklyn; the city’s Department of Health has officially declared “it’s mosquito season in NYC!” and started tweeting out standing-water advisories; and CBS’ local affiliate recently ran a segment about how “it’s going to be a bad summer” for biting insects. Other metropolitan areas are also bracing for a buggy season ahead: “It’s looking like it’s going to be worse than it has [been in] the past two years,” Minnesota’s MPR News reports. “Epic rains expected to take one more swat at California, with masses of mosquitoes,” adds the Los Angeles Times. “We could possibly see more mosquitoes than we wanted to see,” a biologist warned the Ohio area.
Predicting the severity of mosquito season is a bit of an imprecise science, like trying to nail down a long-range weather forecast. Actually, it’s a lot like trying to nail down a long-range weather forecast, since mosquito populations fluctuate based on immediate and unreliable conditions, like spring rainfall and small changes in temperature. Generally speaking, more rain tends to precede “a greater prevalence of mosquitoes within the same month,” while “hotter temperatures [are] associated with increases in mosquitoes one to two months later,” reports one study, which focused on Dengue-carrying Aedes mosquitoes in Sri Lanka. (Invasive Aedes mosquitoes are also found on both U.S. coasts and throughout the South, with their habitats shifting north toward Chicago due to climate change.)
Mosquitos require standing water and temperatures steadily above 50 degrees Fahrenheit in order to start their breeding cycles. In the western United States, in addition to spring rainfall, natural occurrences of standing water are created by snowmelt, which causes floods that dry into perfect mosquito-breeding pools. Snowpack in the West, then, is one of the best early determinants of the coming mosquito season — unfortunate news for Californians, since their state broke a 40-year snowfall record over the winter. “Many places out west where they’ve received record rainfall and snowfall, they’re likely to have a very bad spring,” Daniel Markowski, the technical director of the American Mosquito Control Association, told Heatmap.
Snowmelt can also be a determining factor in the Midwest and East, where fears of spring flooding are already high. That said, their spring mosquito seasons are “less dependent upon the snow” than the West since they “always get at least some snow in many of the same areas,” Markowski went on. The bigger variable for the region is spring rainfall and how early it gets warm.
Mixed news on that front: NOAA expects the East Coast to be warmer than usual from April through June, with above-average precipitation concentrated around the Great Lakes region and potentially stretching south and seaward, through Pennsylvania, New York City, and the D.C.-area. Though the severity of the coming mosquito season is thus still a bit of an unknown, the stakes are high: Last year saw the largest number of ever recorded West Nile virus-positive mosquito pools in New York City, resulting in four deaths. There’s every indication that could happen again in 2023: “We expect mosquito and tick activity in NYC to be at similarly high levels,” M&M Pest Control, a Long Island City-based exterminator, writes on their website.
Warmer temperatures in the south and east could mean earlier emergences of mosquitoes.NOAA
Rainfall in most of the United States is expected to be normal this spring, but potential damp conditions around the Great Lakes and southern Acela Corridor could increase mosquito populations.NOAA
In the South, mosquito populations are “almost all rainfall- and temperature-driven” because snow is not the primary cause of standing water in the region, according to Markowski. While temperatures might not yet be high enough in the region for a major larvae boom, recent storms have authorities “concerned right now in southeast Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee about mosquito populations,” Markowski said. Not to mention another reason for the South to be on high alert: Culex lactator, a species of mosquito native to South and Central America, has been discovered spreading throughout southwest Florida. Though it hasn’t been extensively studied, we do know Culex is a potential vector for West Nile and St. Louis Encephalitis.
Of especially high concern for infectious disease experts this year will be a place not usually thought of for its mosquitoes: Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Back in 2021, the region experienced the largest single outbreak of West Nile virus in U.S. history, likely due to a wetter-than-average monsoonal season; statewide, 127 people died. This year, winter snowmelt and spring rains have pulled the region out of its drought, but once the floodwaters start to recede, they’ll create major mosquito breeding grounds, NBC’s 12 News reports. The wetter desert environment will also attract more birds — the natural hosts of West Nile virus.
So while there is no guarantee that 2023 is going to be another “monster mosquito season” for the U.S. like 2021, there is no guarantee it won’t be, either. We know the West is unusually wet, which will almost certainly mean more bugs, while the Midwest and East are likewise tracking warm and damp. In the South, where storms are one of the biggest causes of standing water, there are fears that this year’s record number of early-season tornadoes is only a “prelude” of what’s to come.
That makes it all the more important to minimize mosquitoes where we do have some control: “What I try to get people to understand is, just as nature — rainfall, snowfall amounts; temperatures — impact mosquito problems, we have a lot of control over what bites us in our backyards,” Markowski said. “If we’re over-watering our property, or we’re allowing water to stand on our property, you’re making mosquitoes right there that bite you.”
Meanwhile, in New York City, the warmest days of the year so far are expected this week. Short-sleeved, sun-starved urbanites will be out in droves.
As will be mosquitoes.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”