Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

Fires, Floods, and Federal Court

On a Minnesota dam, a California utility, and a Utah railway.

Fires, Floods, and Federal Court
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Deadly flooding in parts of the Midwest is forecast to worsen Tuesday before rivers crest midweek • Northern China remains in drought as the southern province of Guangdong suffers flooding, landslides, and mudslides • Western India braces for heavy rains.

THE TOP FIVE

1. SCOTUS takes on NEPA

The U.S. Supreme Court is due to close out its latest session this week (although decisions could stretch into July), and court- and climate-watchers are expecting it to issue a death blow to a legal precedent called the Chevron deference, which gave federal agencies wide latitude to interpret their mandates where the law was vague. More than 19,000 federal court decisions rest on Chevron as a binding precedent, according to the Center for American Progress, and ending it would add to the already hefty legal burden of defending climate regulations.

But wait, there’s more! On Monday, the court agreed to take up a case that could determine whether federal agencies can consider a project’s indirect emissions when evaluating its environmental impacts. The case concerns a proposed railway that would transport oil in northeast Utah, which had its approval from the Surface Transportation Board thrown out by a federal appeals court last year. The appeals court ruled that the agency’s environmental review failed to assess how the railway would affect future oil development, along with several other environmental considerations. A group of Utah counties say those impacts are beyond the agency’s obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act.

A decision by the Supreme Court, which is expected to hear arguments in the fall, has the potential to apply not only to railways but also to many other projects regulated by the federal government, including pipelines and shipping ports.

2. Midwest floods leave path of destruction

A railroad bridge connecting Sioux City, Iowa, and North Sioux City, South Dakota, collapsed late Sunday amid flooding in the Midwest that also put a Minnesota dam in “imminent failure condition,” officials said.

The bridge, owned by BNSF Railway, spanned the Big Sioux River, where the water was about 45 feet high as of Monday morning — surpassing the previous record by more than 7 feet.

Minnesota’s Rapidan Dam on the Blue Earth River suffered a “partial failure” on Monday after water breached the west side of the dam and washed away an Xcel Energy substation. The Blue Earth County Sheriff's Office said on Facebook that it doesn’t know whether the dam will hold but that “there are no current plans for a mass evacuation.”

3. A California utility bets big on enhanced geothermal

The enhanced geothermal startup Fervo, which uses techniques borrowed from fracking oil and gas to access heat below the earth's surface to generate electricity, said today that it had signed the “world’s largest” geothermal power purchase agreements. The two deals with Southern California Edison, a California utility, add up to 320 megawatts from the company's Utah site. California utilities are mandated by the state energy regulator to buy 1,000 megawatts of non-weather-dependent power with no greenhouse gas emissions, for which geothermal fits the bill. The power will start flowing, Fervo said, by 2026 and will be fully up and running by 2028.

4. Study: Extreme wildfires are multiplying

Extreme wildfires have doubled in intensity and frequency over the past two decades due to climate change, according to a new study. The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, used satellite data to measure the occurrence of particularly powerful wildfires between 2003 and 2023. It found that such extreme events increased 2.2-fold during that period, with six of the past seven years ranking among the worst.

The changes aren’t uniform across biomes: Temperate conifer forests and boreal forests, both of which are prevalent in North America, are among the hardest hit. A report released last fall by Democrats on the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee showed the staggering cost of the fires to the United States. Accounting for damage to timber stocks and watersheds, smoke damage, lost income, and diminished real estate value on top of the property and insurance costs, the report found that fires cost the U.S. as much as $893 billion per year.

Chart showing cost of fire damage.Senate Joint Economic Committee Democrats

5. Coal plants’ reliability is diminishing

Coal plants are becoming less dependable as they age, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said in its 2024 State of Reliability report. Coal plants’ weighted equivalent forced outage rate — defined as as “the probability that a group of units will not meet their generating requirements because of forced outages or forced derates,” with more weight given to larger generating units — was about 12% in 2023, compared with an average of 10% between 2014 and 2022, Jack Norris, a performance analysis engineer with NERC, told reporters. Norris said most other generation sources “have remained within a percentile over the same period,” while coal’s outage rates have been on the rise, Utility Dive reported. Rising maintenance needs and pressure to accommodate variable energy sources are also “having a negative impact on these units’ reliability,” Norris said.

THE KICKER

Germany will likely stop using coal before 2038 “just due to the economic viability,” the country’s climate envoy said Monday.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate Tech

If Natron Couldn’t Make Batteries in the U.S., Can Anyone?

The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.

An out of business battery pack.
Heatmap Illustration/Natron, Getty Images

When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.

But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Electric Vehicles

For EVs, Charging Speed Is the New Range

They may not refuel as quickly as gas cars, but it’s getting faster all the time to recharge an electric car.

A clock with lightning hands.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A family of four pulls their Hyundai Ioniq 5 into a roadside stop, plugs in, and sits down to order some food. By the time it arrives, they realize their EV has added enough charge that they can continue their journey. Instead of eating a leisurely meal, they get their grub to go and jump back in the car.

The message of this ad, which ran incessantly on some of my streaming services this summer, is a telling evolution in how EVs are marketed. The game-changing feature is not power or range, but rather charging speed, which gets the EV driver back on the road quickly rather than forcing them to find new and creative ways to kill time until the battery is ready. Marketing now frequently highlights an electric car’s ability to add a whole lot of miles in just 15 to 20 minutes of charge time.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
AM Briefing

Mass Firings

On the need for geoengineering, Britain’s retreat, and Biden’s energy chief

The White House.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.

THE TOP FIVE

1. White House orders agencies to prepare for mass firings

The White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to reduce personnel during a potential government shutdown, targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue, Politico reported Wednesday, citing a memo from the agency.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue