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A new study found that majority Black neighborhoods faced higher solar costs.
Higher-income people are more likely to have solar panels on their roofs. This fact has underlined the nature of home solar adoption and is responsible for any number of state, local, and now federal programs to give lower-income people access to solar power, either through subsidizing their own solar panels or letting them “subscribe” to solar power generated elsewhere.
While this seems like an obviously sensible solution — the upfront cost of solar can be around $15,000 to $20,000, and you typically need to own a single family home to get it — it’s not quite as simple as those with more money are more likely to get solar. When the University of Texas economist Jackson Dorsey and Derek Wolfson looked at data provide by the solar marketplace EnergySage, they found that, yes, those with higher incomes are more likely to buy solar — but also that what solar installers offered them and what they paid for it varied depending on the demographics of the surrounding area.
“Econ 101, there’s usually two possible reasons why you might have lower quantities in a market. One would be demand is lower, and the other would be supply is lower,” Dorsey told me when I asked what had motivated his research. While the data about high-income demand for energy transition products like solar panels or electric vehicles is plentiful, there had been less attention paid to supply-side reasons for the disparities.
Dorsey and Wolfson looked at hundreds of thousands of bids for solar installation placed in EnergySage’s 15 largest markets, including much of urban California, New York City, Washington, D.C. and metro areas in Florida, where prospective solar buyers are able to pick among bids from installers. Unsurprisingly, lower-income buyers were less likely to purchase home solar, received fewer bids overall, and, because they were likely seeking smaller systems, paid more per watt than wealthier buyers. (The researchers were able to match data from EnergySage with census data to extract demographic information about potential customers along with their location.)
What did stand out, however, is that Black households in particular got fewer bids and paid notably higher prices, a disparity that could not be explained entirely by differences in income. Low-income households were more likely to be in an area with a lower cost of living, and therefore didn’t necessarily face higher overall project costs because prices for everything tended to be lower.
Black households, on the other hand, received fewer bids and then face higher prices. “If you look at Black vs. white households, Black households get about 8% higher prices,” Dorsey told me. “On a $20,000 system, that would be $1,600.”
The reason, he determined, is not so much that installers don’t want to serve people they know are Black. It’s that they don’t want to serve neighborhoods they know are majority Black.
Dorsey put the difference down to “some kind of perceived higher cost of doing business.” Part of it could be explained by installers setting up shop in areas where they think they’ll find higher demand for their services — high-income ones — and so Black neighborhoods, which are more likely to be low-income, may be literally farther away and more expensive to serve. According to the data Dorsey and Wolfson collected, there are three installers within 10 miles of white households on average, compared to two installers on average for Black households.
There could also, Dorsey said, “be some implicit preference that they don’t want to go to those neighborhoods.” In the paper, Dorsey and Wolfson write that “some sellers may prefer to serve certain households or neighborhoods either because of intolerant views, crime rates, or other variables correlated with household demographic characteristics.”
While the study didn’t get into remediation, fixing the income side of things should be fairly straightforward, Dorsey told me. “Just making prices lower or financing terms more comparable [to high income households] should be fairly effective,” he said.
The sociogeographic side of things will be trickier to address. “That might suggest a supply side policy might be effective,” Dorsey said, “like giving installers incentives to locate in or serve communities that are getting fewer bids and facing higher prices.”
Policymakers and solar advocates are very aware of the income and race disparities in solar adoptions and have come up with a slew of policies to try and narrow them. California, which has long been the epicenter of rooftop solar (with the most attendant controversy over how its incentives are designed), has a program that subsidizes low-income households that want to install solar and incentives for affordable multifamily buildings to install solar.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s $7 billion Solar For All program also supports states, tribes, and non-profits with programs to reach low-income households. “The program will help unlock new markets for residential solar in areas that have never seen this kind of investment before,” an EPA spokesperson told Heatmap in an emailed statement. “Much of the program will fund solar projects to benefit multi-family and affordable housing, as well as community solar projects, bringing the benefits of clean energy to households that may not have had access to it before.”
Another favored solution for getting solar access to those who wouldn’t otherwise have it is community solar, where households “subscribe” to small-scale solar installations and then get credits on their utility bill as if they had physically installed solar in their homes.
The share of community solar capacity that serves low-to-moderate income consumers has grown from 2% in 2022 to 12% this year, according to data from Wood Mackenzie and the Coalition for Community Solar Access, and they project it will continue to grow to 25% in 2025.
The Inflation Reduction Act also includes an “adder” for community solar projects that serve lower income consumers that boosts existing subsidies by 10 to 20 percentage points. These community solar projects are “already seeing impact and projects on the ground,” Molly Knoll, vice president of policy for CCSA, told me.
EnergySage’s chief executive, Charlie Hadlow, said in a statement that the company is “working diligently to ensure every eligible shopper gets three to seven quotes on our platform,” and that “we welcome more installers to sign up on our platform and are actively seeking them out, with a deliberate focus on underserved areas.” He said consumers typically save 20% using EnergySage compared to what they might get on their own, and that the company also has a marketplace for community solar.
All that said, Dorsey is skeptical that “installing panels at individual rooftop” is even the best way to decarbonize. "If you want to cost-effectively reduce emissions, it’s not clear to me rooftop solar is the way to do it as opposed to utility-scale or community solar,” he said.
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The outdoorsy retailer’s new facility in Lebanon, Tennessee features skylights, solar panels, and some quirky design choices.
Almost by definition, warehouses are boring — spaces of pure industry and function with no aesthetic value.
Boring, though, is not very efficient. The Department of Energy keeps national statistics on warehouses (instead of the more obvious Department of Commerce), largely because it’s the purview of the U.S. Energy Information Administration to keep track of the energy consumption of buildings, and warehouses consume a lot. The transportation sector makes up about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a number that jumps to 11% when you factor in warehousing-related activities. There is an estimated 4.7 billion square feet of warehouse space in the country already — enough to cover Maine’s Acadia National Park more than twice over — and it’s growing rapidly.
Almost all the $1.1 trillion of U.S. e-commerce sales filters through warehouses at some point in the journey from clicking “purchase” on your screen to a package arriving at your front door. The trucks coming and going with goods from distribution centers spew nitrogen dioxide, which is linked to asthma and is 20% more prevalent on average in the air near industrial parks. Concrete monstrosities that they are, warehouses can even mess with local stormwater drainage due to the acres of ground cover, roads, and loading docks they require. And about a third of the ones in the United States are more than half a century old, meaning they’re not exactly at the state of the art of energy efficiency.
Until very recently, this was mostly an accepted fact. Customers never see the inside of warehouses, meaning there isn’t a lot of external pressure for companies to make them nicer. (Being out of sight and out of mind has also historically allowed them to become sites of rampant exploitation and safety violations.) As Andrew Dempsey, director of climate at outdoor recreation retailer REI Co-op, put it to me, “Folks are not thinking about their warehouses and distribution centers as opportunities for leadership.”
Late last year, REI opened the 10th warehouse in the country to earn a LEED v4 Platinum certification, a designation the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council reserves for projects that go above and beyond sustainability considerations. (Levi Strauss & Co. has one in Nevada, and the National Institute of Health has another in North Carolina, among others.) Located in Lebanon, Tennessee, near important transportation corridors for the business, the new REI warehouse still looks, at least from the outside, a little like the boring designs of the past: At some 400,000 square feet, it’s certainly blocky and large.
“With most of these types of projects, there is always going to be a tension between some of the impact goals you’re looking to achieve and some of the business objectives,” Dempsey added — that is to say, a warehouse still needs to house wares. But, he added, “Under certain constraints, you can get very creative.”
According to the DOE, lighting is one of the biggest energy-sucks in a warehouse. For the Lebanon project, REI partnered with Al. Neyer, a commercial real estate developer with experience designing and constructing LEED-certified buildings, and zeroed in on “design decisions that aren’t overly complex or necessarily bleeding edge,” Dempsey explained. For example, to light the space, the team simply installed 90 skylights, which not only allows in more sun (and thus, reduces the need for lightbulbs), it also helps workers keep an “understanding of the rhythms of the day.” Sensors that turn off lights and conveyor belts when not in use allow the warehouse to run on 30% less energy than code requires.
Solar panels are another common way for warehouses to go greener, and the Lebanon facility has them, too. However, REI also wanted to bring more zero-emission energy to the surrounding community, so it teamed up with Clearloop, a local start-up, to build a supplementary solar project nearby. In addition to keeping the warehouse at its 100% renewable energy goal, the solar facility will also help power several hundred surrounding homes.
Perhaps the biggest challenge REI took on is making the construction process — another traditionally high-emissions part of a building’s lifecycle — zero-waste, which occasionally led to some delightfully woo-woo material decisions. Trees cut down in preparation for construction at the site were recycled for interior design accents like stair barristers. An old barn on the property was likewise deconstructed and its wood repurposed for the warehouse’s atrium space. (The lobby and lounge have the same Restoration Hardware-chic style as many REI retail spaces.)
Many other materials came from “right outside the windows of the building,” Dempsey told me, “which I think is really important to give the folks working there a connection to the history of that land.” Even interior wayfinding elements were made more whimsical: Though there is no way to avoid pouring vast emissions-intensive concrete floors in a warehouse, a polished path on their surface mimics the nearby Cumberland River, and is meant to further blend the indoors with the outdoors.
Stefanie Young, the vice president of technical solutions at the U.S. Green Building Council, who has worked on a number of warehouse projects, told me environmental sustainability is not necessarily the only motivator for companies pursuing LEED certificates. “It’s also about the health and wellness for the occupants: ventilation, access to amenities, the ability to travel to and from the site,” she said, adding, “It might be minimal, but every person that comes into that building is important.”
And while the REI facility is still an oddball in the warehouse space, the advantages of a climate-friendly design are attracting interest from more and more developers. The attention is not necessarily all altruistic: “Clearly, the more efficient the facility is, the less their utility bills will be,” Young pointed out. Owners and developers are also looking for places to meet their ESG or carbon reduction goals, and warehouse upgrades help boost those bona fides. (REI, for example, aims to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.)
Warehouses will probably never actually be sexy. But it also doesn’t take groundbreaking innovations to make them a little more pleasant — at the end of the day, we’re still just talking about adding some skylights, drought-resistant landscaping, and a few electric forklifts to make them better for both the planet and workers. But these little things matter: “Customers won’t come into this space, but several hundred of our employees will,” Dempsey said. “And that alone merits us to create the best space possible.”
DAC startup Holocene has a novel chemistry and backing from Breakthrough Energy and Frontier Climate.
Direct air capture companies are in a race to prove they can reduce the cost of removing carbon from the atmosphere down below $100 per ton. Now, one is closing in on the prize with a first-of-its-kind deal.
On Tuesday, Google announced it will pay the startup Holocene $10 million to remove 100,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere, to be delivered “by the early 2030s.” The tech giant said the price point was made possible by the federal tax credit for carbon sequestration, and its own willingness to cough up the bulk of the funds upfront.
There’s no question the deal is risky on both sides. Today, most estimates place the cost of direct air capture at upwards of $600 per ton. Bringing the cost down is essential if the tech is ever going to play a meaningful role in tackling climate change. But even the companies that are farthest along, like the Swiss pioneer Climeworks, aren’t sure they will be able to offer a price of $100 per ton by 2030. Holocene has yet to build a commercial plant, so its ability to remove carbon for $100 per ton is pure projection at this point.
But for Google, the goal is more to catalyze a potentially important climate solution than to clean up its carbon footprint.
“The point of our program is to help Google reach net zero in whatever way most helps the world reach net zero,” Randy Spock, the company’s carbon credits and removals lead, told me in an email. “So this deal is an example of us identifying what the planet needs (long-term cost reduction for Direct Air Capture) and then doing what we can to help it take a step in that direction.”
Though Holocene is relatively new to the direct air capture market, it was started by veterans. Co-founders Anca Timofte and Tobias Rüesh spent roughly six years working in research and development at Climeworks back in its early days, when the company was building its first prototypes. Timofte left in 2020 to get an MBA at Stanford, and while there, came across some exciting research out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory that described a new approach to removing carbon from the ambient air — one that seemed to have distinct advantages. Seeing the potential, Timofte decided to start Holocene with Rüesh and another Stanford classmate and, in 2023, licensed the Oak Ridge technology.
“The chemistry from Oak Ridge is special,” Timofte told me. “It's different than all other chemistries, we think, in direct air capture.”
Most direct air capture systems fall into one of two categories, liquid or solid, and each approach has trade-offs. Liquid systems typically have simpler engineering and can capture CO2 continuously, but require more heat, and therefore more energy. Solid systems have lower heat requirements, but work sort of like cartridges that get “charged” with CO2 and have to be “discharged,” and therefore capture CO2 in batches rather than in perpetuity.
Timofte described Holocene’s process as the “best of both worlds.” It captures CO2 in water and operates in a continuous loop, but requires relatively low heat — between 70 to 100 degrees Celsius (158 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit) — which could potentially come from a source of waste heat like a data center. The enabling discovery was the use of two chemicals — an amino acid and a compound called guanidine — that attract CO2 and then further concentrate it within the water, making it easier and less energy-intensive to isolate so that it can be stored securely underground.
After licensing the tech, Holocene moved quickly. Within a year, the team had built a small pilot plant in Knoxville, Tennessee that’s capable of capturing about 10 tons of CO2 annually. That’s, of course, a totally insignificant amount, but it’s enough for the team to demonstrate its approach to potential funders and to keep testing variations on the basic chemistry to refine the system, Timofte told me.
Timofte said the company has made it this far with just over $6 million in grants and prizes from the Department of Energy, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, and Frontier Climate, a coalition of carbon removal buyers that includes Google in addition to other tech companies. The $500,000 that Holocene got from Frontier was technically a pre-purchase of 332 tons of removal, which would put the current cost per ton at roughly $1,500.
Frontier’s pre-purchases are not a precise indicator of price as they are meant to “pressure-test the viability of novel CDR solutions,” and are granted with the expectation that some ventures will fail. Still, even with a fresh influx of cash from Google and the prospect of a $180 per ton tax credit from the federal government, the company has a steep climb ahead. Timofte told me the team is beginning to fundraise to build their next project — a 2,000- to 5,000-ton per year demonstration plant. When asked about how it reached the $100 per ton deal with Google, she stressed that having a delivery date past 2030 was crucial to the deal.
The industry’s fixation on achieving $100 per ton is somewhat arbitrary. A 2019 National Academies of Sciences report found that estimates of the cost of capturing CO2 via direct air capture spanned “an order of magnitude, from $100 to $1,000” per ton. In 2021, the Biden administration’s Department of Energy set a goal to bring the cost of all kinds of carbon removal below $100 per ton, which seemed to solidify the goal across the field. In 2022, the nonprofit CarbonPlan surveyed carbon removal buyers, suppliers, and brokers, and found that $100 per ton was a common benchmark. “If cost were $100/ton, demand would be practically unlimited,” one supplier said. “Bringing down cost to $100/ton for CDR would be the sweet spot,” said a buyer. CarbonPlan pointed out, however, that the responses weren’t consistent on whether $100 per ton was the desired break-even point for carbon removal companies or the desired price for buyers.
“I think we focus too much on the cost of DAC,” Erin Burns, the executive director of the nonprofit Carbon180 told me when I asked her if $100 per ton was a meaningful goal. “Sure, DAC should and will get cheaper. But we need to also be thinking, right now, about things like renewable energy availability, infrastructure, and reducing emissions as quickly as possible.”
Finding clean sources of power for direct air capture is becoming more of an issue as companies try to scale. At the end of August, a startup called CarbonCapture Inc. announced it would try to relocate a commercial-scale project it had planned to build in Wyoming because it was struggling to procure enough clean energy to power the plant due to competition with data centers and cryptocurrency miners.
Timofte agreed that “clean electrons are hard to come by,” but added that Holocene’s potential to use waste heat might make it a little easier for the company.
“I don't want to dismiss the challenge. I think this is the challenge that everyone faces. We each have to solve it, and the solutions are going to be individual.”
On weather in the Gulf, Fervo’s big news, and rainy cities
Current conditions: A year’s worth of rain fell in just two days in southern Morocco • A single dropped Cheetos bag disrupted the delicate ecosystem of a large cave at New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park • It will be about 75 degrees Fahrenheit and clear this evening in Philadelphia, where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will take the stage for the first 2024 presidential debate.
A hurricane warning is in effect for parts of the Louisiana coast as Tropical Storm Francine approaches. The storm is expected to strengthen into a Category 2 hurricane today and make landfall in Louisiana tomorrow. It could bring 10 feet of storm surge and up to 12 inches of rain, triggering flash floods in the state, as well as in Texas and Mississippi. Several towns along the Louisiana coast have issued evacuation orders. Oil and gas producers in the Gulf of Mexico are evacuating their staff from offshore platforms. The storm follows a similar path to that of Hurricane Beryl, which knocked out power to millions of Texans for days. The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which peaks today, has been less active in recent weeks than forecasters had expected despite incredibly warm ocean temperatures. Some meteorologists worry climate change is making it harder to make long-term hurricane predictions.
NOAA
The enhanced geothermal startup Fervo said today that it had “achieved record-breaking commercial flow rates,” a measure of how much water can move through an enhanced geothermal system, at its Utah site, Cape Station. According to Fervo’s announcement, the project generated 10 megawatts over a 30-day test, which substantially outpaces targets set for enhanced geothermal energy as far out as 2035. The Cape Station site is scheduled to have 400 megawatts of capacity by 2028, with power beginning to flow to customers – including Southern California Edison, which this summer contracted with Fervo for 320 megawatts over 15 years – in 2026. Fervo also announced that it had raised $100 million from X-Caliber Rural Capital for the project.
Enhanced geothermal borrows fracking techniques from oil and gas drilling, pumping fluid underground to create or expand fissures in hot rocks, thus creating the hot fluid necessary for geothermal energy production. This process could vastly expand the potential for generating geothermal energy beyond existing pools of underground hot water and steam. In February, the company announced it had reduced its drilling time by 70% in the past year, a key step to making the process more economical.
A group of Democratic lawmakers said oil and gas companies have not been cooperating with a congressional investigation into an alleged “quid pro quo” offer from former President Donald Trump, according to Bloomberg. The probe is looking into an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly offered to roll back environmental rules as a favor to fossil fuel companies in exchange for $1 billion in donations to his 2024 presidential campaign. In letters made public today, leaders of the Senate budget and finance panels and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability said companies including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, and others had given “woefully inadequate” responses to inquiries in the investigation.
Since 2022, more than 400 million students across the globe have missed school because of extreme weather linked to the climate crisis, according to a report from the World Bank. The problem is especially acute in low-income countries, where children miss 18 school days each year on average because of events like drought, floods, and extreme heat. That’s compared to 2.4 days lost each year in wealthier nations. The report points to the link between education and overall awareness of the climate crisis and its causes. It finds that education makes people more climate aware, more adaptive, more likely to engage in pro-climate behavior, and more likely to change mindsets in their communities with conversations around climate change. And of course, it says education is essential for training people in the skills needed for the green transition. The analysis calls for governments to invest in helping schools adapt, and says such efforts could cost as little as $18.51 per student.
The built-up environments of cities affect the local weather, according to a new study. Specifically, the research found that urban areas receive more rain in a year than surrounding rural landscapes, and this effect is stronger in cities that are hotter, more populated, and more polluted. “Cities can make a storm on steroids,” Dev Niyogi, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study’s authors, toldBloomberg. About 70% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. The new findings can help inform urban planners as they look for ways to upgrade infrastructure in a changing climate.
A 10-year-old in 2024 will experience 36 times more heat waves over the span of their life compared to a 10-year-old in 1970.