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The Boston Marathon is in three days. The weather forecast this year has been notably chaotic.
The second Saturday of April is the most important weather-related day on New England’s calendar, if not America’s.
The reason? It’s when Boston Marathon Monday finally appears in the 10-day forecast.
Running a marathon is one of the most difficult and grueling challenges in sports; athletes spend months logging hundreds of cumulative miles and dodging injuries in preparation for the big event. And for amateur runners who don’t have an Olympic Games in their cards, Boston is the race — with a tightly competitive field of 30,000 participants, it’s the oldest and most iconic marathon in the world.
Which is why one bad window of weather can ruin everything.
Take 2018, when torrential rain and temperatures in the 30s led more than half of the professional field to drop out. Or 2012, when 4,000 entrants opted to defer their race rather than run in the blazing 89-degree heat. Or 2007, when runners had to face 30-mile-per-hour headwinds and sleet on a course abandoned by no-show volunteers.
So what’s it going to be this year? When the forecast was first announced on Saturday, it was all of the above.
The weather reports leading up to the 2023 marathon, which takes place this coming Monday, have induced a lot of whiplash. Depending on the timing of a weekend storm, runners have been told they will either face “the challenge of rain and gusty winds” on Monday — or, “if the storm front slows down … a very warm and humid day,” Time Out writes. Those would be two very different races and in addition to complicating packing, the uncertainty added another level of anxiety for runners who have nothing better to do than refresh the forecast during tapering. (The latest forecasts have since calmed down a bit.)
Boston is already one of the most meteorologically unpredictable cities in the country and climate change is making reliable forecasts even harder. Future marathon forecasts in particular will be prone to more of the will-it-be-hot-or-cold? back and forth as the warm jet stream and cold Canadian air flip influence over New England in the spring. “Some evidence indicates that the atmosphere may become more ‘wavy’” as the climate continues to warm “and thus these sorts of temperature swings could occur more often,” Adam Schlosser, a senior research scientist at the MIT Center for Global Change Science, told The Boston Globe last year.
The ideal forecast for a marathon is overcast with a temperature of 43.2 degrees Fahrenheit (or slightly colder for elites). But Boston, which has had an average start temperature of 56 degrees over the past 22 years, is getting hotter. In a 2017 Climate.gov study of the Massachusetts Climate Division (which includes Boston), the average maximum temperature was observed to have risen at a rate of 0.3 degrees per decade since 1897, the year of the first race — “more than double the temperature rise recorded for the contiguous United States as a whole (0.12 degrees per decade).” In the last 30 years, that warming has more than tripled, “ranging from 1.0 degree to 1.3 degrees per decade in the Boston area, depending on the exact start and end year you use to calculate the trend.”
Marathon Mondays are tracking warmer in Boston.Climate.gov
Similarly, a 2012 study published in PLOS One found that Boston proper is now “about 4 degrees warmer on average in the spring than it was in the 1890s … due to a combination of global warming and the urban heat island effect associated with large cities.” With the caveat that Beantown’s spring weather can be all over the map in any given year, the researchers further found that if “Boston temperatures were to continue to warm by 4.5 degrees by the end of the century (a mid-range estimate for global warming), there will be a 64% chance that winning times will be slowed” due to the effects of heat on strenuous physical performance.
Race organizers have already taken measures to make conditions safer for athletes; in 2007, the marathon start time was bumped back from noon to 10 a.m., in part to limit exposure to the highest midday temperatures. Still, “the next few decades will tell whether morning start times and heat warnings will be enough to keep winning marathon runners from slowing in a steadily warming world,” Boston University biology professor Dr. Richard B. Primack, who led the study, wrote.
This year, at least, runners can probably relax a little: The latest forecast shows the high topping out at 60 degrees on Monday, with a start temperature of 45 degrees in Hopkinton at 9 a.m. Though there’s a chance of light showers, there is also the possibility of a “helpful” wind on runners’ backs.
You might even call it a perfect spring day. Phew.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.