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Wind and solar power are having a remarkable heat wave.
The past few days have shown that, at least so far, Texas’s deregulated, renewable-and-gas heavy electric grid can stand up to the extreme summer heat.
Late Thursday afternoon, wind and solar were providing 40 percent of the power on operator ERCOT’s grid — around 30,000 megawatts, about even with the amount of power coming from natural gas. At the same time, prices in Texas stayed relatively low. This impressive production from solar and wind comes amid a heat wave that, earlier this week, caused record-breaking demand on the Texas grid. While Texas has a unique combination of systemic electricity reliability issues and high renewables usage, the question of if and how renewables can shoulder the load of spiking electricity demand is one being asked across the country as the grid begins to decarbonize.
Despite its fossil-fuel-friendly reputation, Texas is one of the leading states for renewable energy. Last year, renewables accounted for about a quarter of Texas’ electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Around 15 percent of all the United States’ renewable generation comes from Texas.
Since Winter Storm Uri knocked out power in much of the state, grid reliability has been a concern in America’s most deregulated and isolated electricity market. For conservatives, the issue was clear: There was not enough dispatchable, fossil-fuel generation on the grid. For those who favored renewable energy, the need was for more storage and resiliency investments, given the demonstrated risk of coal and gas going offline during extreme weather — and some power plants indeed went offline during the heat wave.
The Texas legislature ended up rejecting some proposals that would have kneecapped Texas’ further renewable generation, but did set up a program to provide low-cost loans to fossil plants that provided dispatchable electricity.
But right now, wind and solar is doing much of the work to keep the air conditioning on and prices low. “They are really cranking,” Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas, told me. They were also holding costs down for consumers, especially compared to last week when prices spiked to above $4,400 per megawatt-hour last week. "Wind and solar have saved tens of billions over the past decade when it comes to electricity prices," Rhodes said.
“Last week was a financial disaster for consumers and a windfall for generators,” explained Ed Hirs, a consultant and lecturer at the University of Houston.
“Wind is doing quite well, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good,” Hirs said. “This high pressure that’s sitting on top of the state right now has good circulation on West Texas wind farms. That has played to our advantage. Without wind and solar they don’t have enough power on the grid. Thankfully, on the hot days we have peak production of solar.”
Texas has by far the most installed wind capacity of any state and more solar capacity than any state save California. Taking advantage of federal tax credits and Texas’s famously permissive regulatory environment, developers have found a welcoming environment for putting “steel in the ground,” whether it’s wind farms in North Texas or utility-scale solar in sunbeaten South and West Texas. While California far outpaces the rest of the country in energy storage, Texas is number two, with 14 percent of the country’s installed storage capacity.
Texas’s experience of high demand and high performance from its renewables may be a preview of what the rest of the country will face this summer and in the coming years. Due to a combination of fossil power plants being shut down and the rise of wind and solar across the country, the electric grid can no longer rely entirely on fossil fuels to keep the lights on when demand is high, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Across the Southwest and Midwest, NERC projects that wind will be a “key factor” in keeping the grid up this summer.
But while Texas’s grid is performing well now, it may get tighter farther into the summer.
“The real test for the ERCOT system is probably going to be late July through August,” Rhodes said.
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The island is home to one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world.
A top aide to incoming President Donald Trump is claiming the president-elect wants the U.S. to acquire Greenland to acquire more rare minerals.
“This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources,” Trump’s soon-to-be national security advisor Michael Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters Thursday night, adding: “You can call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0, but it’s all part of the America First agenda.”
Greenland is rich in “rare earths,” a class of unique and uncommon hardrock resources used for advanced weaponry, electronics, energy and transportation technologies, including electric vehicles. It is home to the Kvanefjeld deposit, believed to be one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world. Kvanefjeld is also stuffed with uranium, crucial for anything and everything nuclear.
Experts in security policy have advocated for years for Western nations to band together to ensure that China, which controls the vast majority of the world’s rare earth minerals, does not obtain a foothold in Greenland. U.S. and Danish officials have reportedly urged the developer of the island’s Tanbreez deposit — rich in the rare earths-containing mineral eudialyte — not to sell its project to any company linked to China. Eudialyte also contains high amounts of neodymium, an exceedingly rare metal used in magnets coveted by the tech sector.
If the U.S. somehow took control of Greenland, it could possibly seize these resources from Denmark, a NATO ally, and the Greenlandic home-rule government. So too could it lead to Greenlanders losing control of their homeland. The country’s minerals have been a major source of domestic debate, as politicians critical of mining have won recent elections and regulators have since fought with mining companies over their plans.
Waltz didn’t go into that much detail on Fox. But he made it clear how the incoming administration sees the situation around control of the island.
“Denmark can be a great ally, but you can’t treat Greenland, which they have operational control over, as some kind of backwater,” Waltz told Waters. “The people of Greenland, all 56,000 of them, are excited about the prospect of making the Western Hemisphere great again.”
Exhausted firefighters are unlikely to catch a break just yet.
On Friday, Angelenos awoke to their first good news in three days: that the battle against the city’s unprecedented fires had finally turned in firefighters’ favor. Though the two biggest blazes — the Palisades and the Eaton — were still only single-digit contained, at 8% and 3%, respectively, it was the first sign of progress since the fires ignited and roared out of control on Tuesday.
The days ahead, though, won’t be easy. Though the Santa Ana winds dipped enough on Thursday and Friday for firefighters to establish a foothold, two upcoming wind events have forecasters and emergency management officials worried. The first will be shorter-lived, beginning on Saturday afternoon and continuing through Sunday, but “it does look significant enough where we might need additional red flag warnings,” Ryan Kittel, an L.A.-based meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. NOAA is anticipating gusts of between 35 and 50 miles per hour during that event, and at those speeds, aerial firefighting support will likely be grounded again.
A second wind event will follow that one, which is tracking to hit Monday night into Tuesday. “We’re still figuring out the exact details as far as the strength, but we’re very confident that it won’t be nearly as strong as the winds we saw on Tuesday this week,” Kittel said. “But it could be number two in the ranks of wind events that we’ve had over the last seven days.”
The associated concerns are twofold. The first is that the return of strong wind gusts will fan the blazes that firefighters are only now getting a handle on, potentially pushing the fires into new areas. But there’s another concern, too: that new fires will start.
“What we’re trying to communicate is that the environment is favorable for a fire to get really big, really fast, if one starts. We just don’t know if or where,” Kittel said.
Though the L.A. fires flared up as big as they have because of the Santa Anas, the wind’s cessation creates new risks. The Santa Anas “blow the fires towards the ocean,” Dan Reese, a veteran firefighter and the founder and president of the International Wildfire Consulting Group, told me. But when the Santa Anas subside and L.A.’s normal west-to-east winds return, they’ll push the fires back in the other direction and potentially into neighborhoods that haven’t burned yet.
“Right now, [firefighters’] challenge is what we call closing the back door, making sure that what was once the heel of the fire, or the back side of the fire, does not get up and all of a sudden become a running head the other direction,” Reese explained.
The weather is one problem, and it’s a big one. But there are other challenges, too. Firefighters are only human, and many are completely exhausted after working double shifts and doing the grueling work of defending people and structures for days on end.
There are also logistics-related challenges. Aerial firefighting is exceedingly complex and dangerous, and pilots are only allowed to fly a certain number of hours, which varies depending on whether operations are conducted during the day or at night. “Rotating those crews and keeping those crew hours balanced becomes critical, especially when you’ve got ongoing, continuous fires,” Reese pointed out.
There’s one more bit of bad news. Putting out the fires is only the first challenge. A second will come close on its heels: the mop-up.
“Maybe the fire went through a community but the houses were left standing,” Reese said. “Now all those structures and properties are at the mercy of mudslides and rain, because all of the holding capacity keeping the soil in place has now been burned off.” Soil can even become hydrophobic after exposure to intense heat, repelling water instead of absorbing it, making runoff even more severe.
But there is no rain in the forecast, and the fight against the L.A. County fires — while it’s taken a turn for the better — is far from over. Firefighters “have to deal with the disaster they’ve got right now,” Reese said. “And then they’ll deal with the secondary disasters when those occur.”
They can be an effective wildfire prevention tool — but not always.
Once the fires stop burning in Los Angeles and the city picks itself up from the rubble, the chorus of voices asking how such a disaster could have been prevented will rise. In California, the answer to that desperate query is so often “better forestry management practices,” and in particular “more controlled burns.” But that’s not always the full story, and in the case of the historically destructive L.A. fires, many experts doubt that prescribed burns and better vegetation management would have mattered much at all.
Controlled burns are intentionally set and supervised by land managers to clear out excess fuels such as shrubs, trees, and logs to reduce wildfire risk. Many habitats also require fire to thrive, and so ensuring they burn in a controlled manner is a win-win for natural ecosystems and the man-made environment. But controlled burns also pose a series of challenges. For one, complex permitting processes and restrictions around when and where burns are allowed can deter agencies from attempting them. Community backlash is also an issue, as residents are often concerned about air quality as well as the possibility of the prescribed fires spiraling out of control. Land management agencies also worry about the liability risks of a controlled burn getting out of hand.
Many of the state’s largest and most destructive fires — including the Camp Fire in 2018, lightning complex fires in 2020, and Dixie Fire in 2021 — started in forests, and would therefore have likely been severely curtailed had the state done more controlled burns. According to ProPublica, anywhere between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres used to burn annually in prehistoric California. By 2017, overzealous fire suppression efforts driven by regulatory barriers and short-term risk aversion had caused that number to drop to 13,000 acres. While the state has increased the amount of prescribed fire in recent years, the backlog of fuel is enormous.
But the L.A. fires didn’t start or spread in a forest. The largest blaze, in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, ignited in a chaparral environment full of shrubs that have been growing for about 50 years. Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, said that’s not enough time for this particular environment to build up an “unnatural accumulation of fuels.”
“That’s well within the historical fire frequency for that landscape,” Keeley told my colleague, Emily Pontecorvo, for her reporting on what started the fires. Generally, he said, these chaparral environments should burn every 30 to 130 years, with coastal areas like Pacific Palisades falling on the longer end of that spectrum. “Fuels are not really the issue in these big fires — it’s the extreme winds. You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.”
We still don’t know what ignited the L.A. fires, and thus whether a human, utility, or other mysterious source is to blame. But the combination of factors that led to the blazes — wet periods that allowed for abundant vegetation growth followed by drought and intensely powerful winds — are simply a perilously bad combination. Firebreaks, strips of land where vegetation is reduced or removed, can often prove helpful, and they do exist in the L.A. hillsides. But as Matthew Hurteau, a professor at the University of New Mexico and director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society, told me bluntly, “When you have 100-mile-an-hour winds pushing fire, there’s not a hell of a lot that’s going to stop it.”
Hurteau told me that he thinks of the primary drivers of destructive fires as a triangle, with fuels, climate, and the built environment representing the three points. “We’re definitely on the built environment, climate side of that triangle for these particular fires around Los Angeles,” Hurteau explained, meaning that the wildland-urban interface combined with drought and winds are the primary culprits. But in more heavily forested, mountainous areas of Northern California, “you get the climate and fuels side of the triangle,” Hurteau said.
Embers can travel impressive distances in the wind, as evidenced by footage of past fires jumping expansive freeways in Southern California. So, as Hurteau put it, “short of mowing whole hillsides down to nothing and keeping them that way,” there’s little vegetation management work to be done at the wildland-urban interface, where houses bump up against undeveloped lands.
Not everyone agrees, though. When I spoke to Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist and research scientist at the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, she told me that while prescribed burns close to suburban areas can be contentious and challenging, citizens can do a lot on their own to manage fuel risk. “Neighborhoods can come together and do the appropriate fuel reduction in and around their homes, and that makes a huge difference in wildfires,” she told me. “Landscaping in and around homes matters, even if you have 100-mile-an-hour winds with a lot of embers.”
Prichard recommends residents work with their neighbors to remove burnable vegetation and organic waste, and to get rid of so-called “ember traps” such as double fencing that can route fires straight to homes. Prichard pointed to research by Crystal Kolden, a “pyrogeographer” and associate professor at the University of California Merced, whose work focuses on understanding wildfire intersections with the human environment. Kolden has argued that proper vegetation management could have greatly lessened the impact of the L.A. fires. As she recently wrote on Bluesky, “These places will see fire again. I have no doubt. But I also know that you can rebuild and manage the land so that next time the houses won’t burn down. I’ve seen it work.”
Keeley pointed to the 2017 Thomas Fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, however, as an example of the futility of firebreaks and prescribed burns in extreme situations. That fire also ignited outside of what’s normally considered fire season, in December. “There were thousands of acres that had been prescribed burned near the eastern edge of that fire perimeter in the decade prior to ignition,” Keeley explained to Emily. “Once that fire was ignited, the winds were so powerful it just blew the embers right across the prescribed burn area and resulted in one of the largest wildfires that we’ve had in Southern California.”
Kolden, however, reads the Thomas Fire as a more optimistic story. As she wrote in a case report on the fire published in 2019, “Despite the extreme wind conditions and interviewee estimates of potentially hundreds of homes being consumed, only seven primary residences were destroyed by the Thomas Fire, and firefighters indicated that pre-fire mitigation activities played a clear, central role in the outcomes observed.” While the paper didn’t focus on controlled burns, mitigation activities discussed include reducing vegetation around homes and roads, as well as common-sense actions such as increasing community planning and preparedness, public education around fire safety, and arguably most importantly, adopting and enforcing fire-resistant building codes.
So while blaming decades of forestry mismanagement for major fires is frequently accurate, in Southern California the villains in this narrative can be trickier to pin down. Is it the fault of the winds? The droughts? The humans who want to live in beautiful but acutely fire-prone areas? The planning agencies that allow people to fulfill those risky dreams?
Prichard still maintains that counties and the state government can be doing a whole lot more to encourage fuel reduction. “That might not be prescribed burning, that might actually be ongoing mastication of some of the really big chaparral, so that it’s not possible for really tall, developed, even senescent vegetation — meaning having a lot of dead material in it — to burn that big right next to homes.”
From Hurteau’s perspective though, far and away the most effective solution would be simply building structures to be much more fire-resilient than they are today. “Society has chosen to build into a very flammable environment,” Hurteau put it. California’s population has increased over 160% since the 1950’s, far outpacing the country overall and pushing development further and further out into areas that border forests, chaparral, and grasslands. “As people rebuild after what’s going to be great tragedy, how do you re-envision the built environment so that this becomes less likely to occur in the future?”