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A conversation with Zeke Hausfather, the climate scientist and lead researcher at Frontier, on why last month was so appallingly warm.
Congrats! You just lived through the hottest September ever recorded.
“This month was — in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” said Zeke Hausfather, who leads research at the carbon-removal initiative Frontier.
In many parts of the world, last month saw temperatures that would not have been out of place in July. It smashed the previous record for hottest September ever by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit (or half a degree Celsius). And it was a gobsmacking 3 degrees Fahrenheit — that is, 1.8 degrees Celsius — warmer than what would have been historically normal.
Earlier today, I called up Zeke to ask him why September saw such appalling warmth. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The chart looks crazy. Does it seem as crazy to you as it would seem to us?
It feels kind of crazy. I mean, people are going to write dissertations about 2023, and just how unusual this year has been for the climate.
Where has this year been worse?
The North Atlantic is the place that really stands out. It’s just so far above anything we’ve seen in that region — it’s hard to know what’s going on there. But we’ve also seen the warmest year to date over China. We’ve seen South America be exceptionally warm. We’ve seen some winter temperatures in Brazil that rival the hottest summer temperatures ever seen there — although it’s in the tropics, so there’s less seasonal variability there, generally. Australia’s been unusually warm.
Why has this year, in particular, been so hot?
Part of the reason that these summer charts look so crazy is that the most recent big El Niño events that we’ve had have primarily boosted winter temperatures. 1998 and 2016 both had really high December, January, and February temperatures. And we’re probably on track for that as well this year — El Nino is still growing.
But this year, we saw a very dramatic shift from a moderate La Niña — a very unusually long, “triple dip” moderate La Niña that lasted from late 2020 to the start of this year — to strong El Niño conditions over the course of a few months. And so it’s not just the transition from neutral to El Niño that affects temperatures, it’s the swap from La Niña to El Niño. And that’s been part of the story this year, and one of the reasons why you’ve seen such high temperatures this summer.
There’s a bunch of other contributing factors that we’re still in the early stages of precisely quantifying. Those include an uptick in the solar cycle that happens every 11 years — that has a small effect, 0.05 degrees Celsius maybe. There’s the phase-out of sulfate shipping fuels by 2020, which shouldn’t suddenly affect the summer of this year but which certainly has contributed to more recent warming. And that’s on top of the broad decline in forcing from aerosols — and sulfur dioxide, in particular, that’s fallen about 30% since the year 2000.
And then there’s a bit of a wild card with this Tonga volcano that erupted last year that put a huge amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Again, most of the early modeling of that shows somewhere in the range of an increase of 0.05 to 0.08 C — a boost to warming, but not the main cause. But I think if you combine the rapid switch from La Niña to El Niño and all these smaller contributors on top of the 1.3 degrees Celsius or so of human-driven warming that we’ve had to date, you can get temperatures this extreme.
So if I understand correctly, the last big El Niño that we had — in 2016, I think — developed during the big Northern Hemisphere summer. Is that right?
It developed a little later than this one developed. But more importantly, it switched more gradually from neutral conditions to El Niño conditions. What is a bit unusual this year is just how rapidly we’ve transitioned from La Niña to El Niño.
Why would making the leap from La Niña to El Niño make the temperature leap worse than switching from neutral to El Niño?
The last three years have been slightly cooler than we would normally expect because of La Niña conditions. And so the jump we see this year is somewhat relative to what we’ve seen in previous years — if the previous summers had been much warmer, than this summer’s jump on the chart would seem less extraordinary.
I see. So part of what we’re seeing is the past three years of warming sort of getting unmasked, so to speak?
Yeah, on top of a big El Niño and those other factors.
I assume August sealed it, but 2023 will definitely be the hottest year on record, right?
It would be extremely unlikely to not be the hottest year on record. Barring an asteroid hitting the planet or maybe a Pinatubo-sized volcano erupting tomorrow, 2023 is definitely going to be the hottest year on record.
Do we have any sense of how this compares to baselines after this El Niño ends? Is this a new normal?
I think that 2024 will probably be fairly similar. The El Niño that’s evolving now will — should, actually — have its bigger effects next year. But this year has been so weird, it’s hard to say what’s going on. We do expect temperatures to fall down below 2023-2024 levels in 2025 or 2026.
One way I like to think about this is we have this long-term human-driven warming. And then on top of that, there’s plus or minus two tenths of a degree Celsius in any given year due to internal climate variability, primarily due to La Niña or El Niño. So when we have all the stars align, as we do this year, we get a peek of what the new normal is going to be a decade from now.
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A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.