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Climate impacts are starting to collide.
The wildfires that devastated Maui on Wednesday were exacerbated by strong winds intensified by a hurricane hundreds of miles offshore, according to meteorologists. While the precise relationship between the fires, the hurricane, and climate change has yet to be determined, these kinds of “compound” events are likely to increase in a warming world, with consequences that are hard to predict.
Hurricane Dora, which formed in the Pacific last week, did not cause the fires, nor did it directly “fan the flames.” The hurricane had become a Category 4 storm by Tuesday night when the fires in Maui ignited, but the storm remained hundreds of miles offshore and its associated rain and wind never reached the island.
As Ginger Zee, chief meteorologist and managing editor of the climate unit at ABC News, explains it, when the hurricane’s low-pressure system ground up against a high-pressure weather system just north of Hawaii, it created a force that amplified existing downslope tradewinds to 40 to 60 miles per hour.
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While the initial cause of the fires is still unknown, the unusually strong, dry winds helped them spread quickly. “It is fair to say that, at least indirectly, these hurricanes south of Hawaii may have contributed to what will probably be the worst wildfire disaster, and potentially one of the worst disasters, period, in the history of the state of Hawaii,” said the University of California, Los Angeles, climate scientist Daniel Swain during a livestream on Youtube Wednesday night.
There are many other factors that contributed to the severity of the fires, including a drought that turned non-native grasses into a tinderbox and the expansion of the urban footprint into fire-prone areas. Swain noted that this wasn’t even that large of a fire in the scheme of things; it just occurred in a highly populated area.
But this isn’t the first time that a hurricane has exacerbated fire conditions in the Aloha State. In August 2018, Hurricanes Hector and Lane brought high winds directly to the islands that fanned a series of major wildfires — some of the largest on record — according to the Pacific Fire Exchange, a wildfire science research group based in Hawaii.
In both 2018 and this week, the confluence of events made emergency response challenging. Helicopters that could have been deployed to put out the fires were grounded due to the winds. The wind also knocked out the power to 13,000 households in Maui on Tuesday night, complicating evacuations.
Scientists call this a “compound event,” when multiple weather or climate-driven factors come together, causing more dangerous disasters than they would individually. The most common example is a drought co-occurring with a heatwave, which can exacerbate fire risk, threaten agriculture, and make water scarce. Hurricanes, by themselves, are another form of compound event, as they can produce both wind-driven impacts like coastal storm surge as well as precipitation-driven flooding.
“Compound event research has blossomed in recent years,” Flavio Lehner, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University, told me, “because we recognize that some of the most impactful extreme events are because of certain factors coming together at the right time, or at the wrong time.”
Lehner said it’s extremely challenging to predict what’s going to happen in the future with compound events because there’s basically double the uncertainty. Take droughts and heatwaves, for example. Different climate models might disagree about how much warmer it’s going to get in the future and how much it will rain. So it’s very hard to draw conclusions about how much more frequent or severe the chance of simultaneous high temperatures and low rainfall will be in any given region.
That being said, scientists do know the direction these events are trending in. Hurricanes will drop more rain and their winds are likely to intensify. Drought conditions will increase.
“Some of these extreme events, they just bring to the forefront vulnerabilities that have existed that might have been exposed even without climate change,” said Lehner. “So confronting our infrastructure or our plans to adapt in case of an emergency, that's really what I think we have to take away from these kinds of events.”
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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.”