Tropical Storm Ernesto is Headed Toward Puerto Rico

Current conditions: High wind speeds are expected to fan wildfire flames today in Athens • A scorching heat wave in South Korea won’t let up for another 10 days • The aurora borealis has been stunning viewers in the Northern Hemisphere and may be visible again tonight across northern and upper Midwest states.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Tropical Storm Ernesto takes aim at Puerto Rico

Tropical Storm Ernesto formed in the Atlantic yesterday and is moving toward the eastern Caribbean islands. Puerto Rico has activated its National Guard and canceled school in preparation for landfall on Tuesday night. The storm is expected to bring strong winds, heavy rain, flooding, and landslides to the islands before turning north toward Bermuda and possibly strengthening into a hurricane by Thursday. Forecasters don’t think Ernesto will make landfall on the U.S. mainland but said it could bring dangerous rip currents to the East Coast. This is the fifth named storm of the 2024 season and comes just a little over a week after Hurricane Debby struck Florida and swamped states along the southeast for several days.

NOAA

Hurricane season started on June 1 and usually peaks in late August or early September. A few days ago the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reiterated its warning that this season could be one of the busiest on record. “Sea surface temperatures remain abnormally high, and La Niña is still expected to emerge during the hurricane season, so the time to prepare is now,” said Matthew Rosencrans, lead hurricane season forecaster with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

2. Biden allows more tariff-free solar cell imports

President Biden yesterday gave the green light to additional tariff-free imports of solar cells, more than doubling the volume allowed – from 5 GW to 12.5 GW. The move is an effort to support production for domestic panel makers and put Americans to work manufacturing clean energy tech. Somewhat relatedly, New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced recently that Ebon Solar will build a $942 million solar cell factory in the state. The facility will create more than 900 jobs. New Mexico is also set to be home to the largest solar cell and panel factory in the country when Maxeon Solar Technologies gets its planned facility up and running. “While a huge number of solar panel factories are opening in the U.S., there’s still a dearth of domestic supply of earlier stages of the supply chain – including solar cells,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek.

3. Heatmap poll: Wildlife is top concern for Americans when it comes to renewable energy projects

In case you missed it yesterday: Exclusive Heatmap polling conducted in April found the top concern both Democrats and Republicans have with renewable energy projects in their areas is the harm those facilities could inflict on wildlife. Notably, almost half of all Democrats said consequences for wildlife from projects would elicit “strong concern” from them. Other big concerns for Republicans such as reliability during extreme weather and land use factors received nowhere near the same level of Democratic agreement. The polling result underscores a real vulnerability that energy projects labeled “clean” can face when a would-be host community is faced with information indicating they may produce pollution or harm to the environment, wrote Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. “These conflicts are real, I’m not going to say they aren’t. That’s why I say there are appropriate places to site and inappropriate places to site,” Matt Kirby, senior director of energy and landscape conservation for the National Parks Conservation Association, told Holzman. “I hope that industry understands that it needs to have social license to operate, and it will only be able to get that if they’re a good player.”

4. Analysis of heat-related deaths in Europe suggests adaptation efforts are working

Nearly 50,000 people died from extreme heat in Europe in 2023, the hottest year on record, according to a new report from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and published in the journal Nature Medicine. Europe is warming faster than any other continent. Italy had the highest overall number of heat-related deaths last year, followed by Spain and Germany.

ISGlobal

There is a sliver of good news though: Last year’s estimated death toll of 47,690 was lower than the 60,000 heat-related deaths recorded in 2022, and could have been 80% higher if it weren’t for our growing knowledge of how to protect vulnerable populations, especially the elderly. “We see that since 2000, the minimum mortality temperature – the optimum temperature with the lowest mortality risk – has been gradually warming on average over the continent, from 15ºC in 2000-2004 to 17.7ºC in 2015-2019,” said Elisa Gallo, researcher at ISGlobal and lead author of the study. “This indicates that we are less vulnerable to heat than we were at the beginning of the century, probably as a result of general socio-economic progress, improvements in individual behavior, and public health measures such as the heat prevention plans implemented after the record-breaking summer of 2003.”

5. World’s largest pumped hydro plant complete in China

Construction of the world’s largest pumped hydro plant is complete, according to Bloomberg. The Fengning Pumped Storage Power Station, located in China’s Hebei province, cost $2.6 billion to build and began operating in 2022 to help power the Beijing Winter Olympics, but it reportedly just became fully operational with the addition of the 12th and final turbine unit. Some of its units can be adjusted to match variable grid load and demand. The plant has a capacity of 3.6 gigawatts, making it larger than the Bath County plant in Virginia. But a 5GW project planned for Australia would be even bigger.

THE KICKER

The motorcycle Tom Cruise rode through Paris in the 2024 Olympics closing ceremony was a LiveWire Del Mar, an electric bike made by Harley-Davidson.

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