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Nearly 80% of U.S. adults believe conservation is more important than a speedy renewable energy rollout, our poll finds. That spells trouble for Biden’s climate agenda.
In Virginia, environmentalists fought a utility-scale solar farm that would rank among the largest on the East Coast.
In New Jersey, an ocean-conservation group is battling an offshore wind farm that could power half a million homes.
In Utah, Nevada, and even the San Francisco Bay area, green groups are threatening renewable projects that officials say are crucial to meeting local zero-carbon goals.
Around the country, self-described environmentalists are trying to stop some of the same solar and wind projects that experts say are crucial to solving climate change. They are sometimes dismissed as NIMBYs or accused of being stooges for the fossil-fuel industry, and some groups literally are funded by oil interests.
But a new poll shows that their views — at least at the surface level — resonate with nearly four out of every five Americans.
An overwhelming majority of Americans say that conserving local land and wildlife is more important than building new sources of renewable electricity, even if that slows down the world’s response to climate change, according to the inaugural Heatmap Climate Poll, a scientific survey conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group last month.
The poll finds that even though Americans love renewables in the abstract — with 94% endorsing the benefits of rooftop solar and 88% embracing large-scale solar farms — they are skittish about their potential trade-offs. Some 79% of Americans said that new renewable energy should be rolled out “slowly” rather than “quickly” and that the conservation of land and wild animals should be prioritized above rapid greenhouse-gas reductions
In contrast, only 21% of Americans agreed with the statement that “we should roll out renewable energy quickly to lower emissions as fast as possible, even if it means harming natural land or wild animals.”
In other words, you don’t necessarily need recourse to astroturfing schemes or secret fossil-fuel connections to explain why so many Americans oppose new renewable projects. The Heatmap poll surveyed 1,000 adult Americans in all 50 states during a five-day period in February.
The results offer a warning to the Biden administration — and for that matter, anyone who seeks to decarbonize the American economy before the world sails past the 1.5-degree mark. In order for the United States to meet its goal of eliminating carbon pollution from the power system by 2035, the country’s physical infrastructure must transform at a pace and scale that has no peacetime precedent. Solar and wind capacity must quadruple nationwide, according to one estimate from the National Renewable Electricity Laboratory; up to 10,100 miles of new power lines might be required to hook those renewables into the grid. That build-out will be extremely difficult if Americans are susceptible to arguments that renewables are harming local flora and fauna.
“When you think about renewables you’re talking about an impact on the landscape that is beyond the scale of anything this country has ever seen before,” Larry Selzer, the president and chief executive of the Conservation Fund, one of the country’s largest buyers of conserved land, told me. “The IRA explicitly contemplates up to a million miles of new transmission lines and 65,000 miles of new pipelines.”
In contrast, the country’s last major infrastructure project — the Interstate Highway System — is about 48,000 miles long, he said. And much of it was built half a century ago.
“People intuitively understand the scale of investment [in the Inflation Reduction Act], even though it’s going to help save them and their communities” and ultimately protect wildlife, he said. “For most Americans, the idea of climate change is relatively amorphous and distant from their lives, yet they feel the loss of wildlife in a proximate way.”
Although the Inflation Reduction Act contains at least $25 billion to support conservation programs on agricultural and forestry land, this has not attracted as much attention as its clean-energy programs.
For climate advocates, the most upbeat finding in the poll might be that most Americans would be happy to add renewable energy near where they live, even if they want those facilities to have few trade-offs. More than 70% of Americans said that they would welcome the construction of wind turbines or large-scale solar farms in their community; more than 60% expressed comfort with a local geothermal power plant.
The only energy technology that most Americans did not want to live near is, ironically, the same technology that virtually guarantees local conservation. About one-third of respondents said that they would not welcome a new nuclear plant in their community, the poll found. Many nuclear facilities — such as the Calvert Cliffs power plant in Maryland — are surrounded by acres of protected parkland in order to ease local concerns. They also need far less space than other clean energy sources, like solar panels or wind turbines, to generate the same amount of power.
But perhaps that’s not so surprising: Americans’ view of the clean-energy future differs significantly from experts in several areas. Recent reports from a Princeton University team and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have projected that the IRA will reduce the cost of producing electricity nationwide. Yet nearly half of Americans said that they expect the move to renewables will raise their costs. Only about a third expect lower costs in the future.
This story was updated at 2:36 p.m. ET on Thursday.
The Heatmap Climate Poll of 1,000 American adults was conducted via online panels by Benenson Strategy Group from Feb. 15 to 20, 2023. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.02 percentage points. You can read more about the topline results here.
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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.”