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If you want to decarbonize concrete, it helps to understand the incredible scale of the problem.
To say that concrete poses a decarbonization challenge would be an understatement. Cement production alone is responsible for somewhere between 5 and 10% of global CO2 emissions [0], roughly two to four times more than aviation, a fact that even the construction industry is finally coming to grips with.
And yet the real problem with decarbonizing concrete isn’t the scale of its emissions, it’s the scale of concrete itself. There is simply a preposterous amount of the stuff. Contemplating concrete is like contemplating the universe — awesome, in the old God-fearing definition of the word.
Before we get into the jaw-dropping amount of concrete we produce every year, it’s worth briefly discussing how the stuff is made, and thus where its emissions come from.
Concrete is formed by mixing together cement (mostly calcium silicates), aggregates (such as sand and gravel), and water into a liquid slurry. The cement reacts with the water, forming a paste that binds the mixture into a single solid mass. Beyond concrete’s high strength and low cost, it’s these liquid beginnings that make concrete so useful. It can easily be formed into any shape and leveled with the help of gravity so you can walk on it or park a car 10 stories up on it. Essentially all modern concrete is also reinforced with steel bars, which provide tensile strength and arrest cracks.
So what about the emissions? Roughly 70-90% of the embodied carbon in concrete comes from manufacturing just the cement [1]. Partly this is because making cement is an energy-intensive process — limestone and clay are put into a kiln and heated around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s also because the chemical reaction that turns the limestone into cement (known as calcination) releases CO₂ as a byproduct. Roughly 50-60% of cement’s carbon emissions are due to calcination [2], and thus wouldn’t be addressed by moving to less carbon-intensive electricity sources, like green hydrogen.
Now for the good stuff. Again, the most important thing to understand about concrete is the scale of its production. The world produces somewhere around 4.25 billion metric tons of cement annually (though estimates vary) [3], which works out to about 30 billion tons of concrete produced each year [4].
How much are 30 billion tons?
One way of looking at it is we produce around 4 metric tons, or just under 60 cubic feet (roughly a cube 4 feet on a side), of concrete for each person on the planet each year.
Another way of looking at it is to consider the total amount of mass, full stop, that civilization ingests each year. Estimates here vary quite a bit, but it seems to be in the neighborhood of 100 billion tons [5]. So of the total volume of material that gets extracted and used each year — including all mining, all oil drilling, all agriculture and tree harvesting — around 30% of it by mass goes toward making concrete. The amount of concrete produced each year exceeds the weight of all the biomass we use annually, and all the fossil fuels we use annually.
Total civilization annual material extraction, via Krausmann et al 2018. This is up to 2015, and has now exceeded over 90 Gt/year, with another ~8 Gt/year of recycled material.
Another way of looking at it is that the total mass of all plants on Earth is around 900 billion metric tons. So at current rates of production, it would take about 30 years to produce enough concrete to exceed all the Earth’s plant (dry) biomass.
Because humans have been producing concrete for a while, and because concrete tends to last a long time, we seem to be on the cusp of this happening. Elhacham et al 2020 estimate that total human-created mass (roughly half of which is concrete) reached the total weight of all Earth’s biomass sometime in 2020. Eyeballing their graph, concrete alone will exceed the total weight of all biomass sometime around 2040.
Anthropogenic mass vs biomass during the 20th century, via Elhacham et al 2020
In a pure mass-flow sense, human civilization is basically a machine for producing concrete and gravel (and to a lesser extent bricks and asphalt).
So civilization uses a lot of concrete. Where is it all going?
China, mostly. In recent history, China has been responsible for roughly half the world’s cement production, and by implication, concrete use [6]. The U.S., by comparison, only uses 2%, with Europe using another 5%.
Cement production by region, via Sanjuan et al 2020. Since cement production roughly tracks consumption (see here and here), we can also use this as a rough guide toward where concrete is used. Note that this gives yet another value for total global cement production of 4.65 Gt
Here’s another view from around 2010, showing what this has looked like over time (data after 2010 is a projection).
Cement consumption by region, via Altwair 2010
This gets summarized in the oft-repeated statistic that China used more cement in three years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
But since China has a much larger population than the U.S., we can get a more intuitive understanding of this by looking at cement consumption per capita. Here’s per capita consumption sometime around 2015:
Per capita cement consumption by country, via Globbulk
We see that the official numbers from China make it a huge outlier in cement consumption, using around eight times as much per capita as the U.S. However, in per capita terms, some Middle Eastern countries exceed it. Saudi Arabia is higher, and Qatar, which is somewhere over 2,000 kg/capita, is so high it doesn’t even show up on the graph. It’s the combination of China’s huge population and its huge per-capita consumption that make it such an outlier in concrete production.
The official Chinese numbers are so huge, in fact, that some analysts suspect that they’re inflated, either by manipulating the data or by producing construction projects that don’t have actual demand (or both). The graph above also includes a more “realistic” estimate (which is still 3x as high as U.S. per-capita use).
What does all this concrete construction mean in practical terms? Well, China has somewhere around 50-60% of the floor space per capita as the U.S. does, or roughly as much living space per capita as most European countries [7]. This is the result of a massive trend toward urbanization over the last quarter century. Urbanization rates went from around 25% in 1990 to 60% in 2017, a period in which China’s population also increased by 250 million. In other words, in less than 30 years over 550 million moved into Chinese cities, and they all needed somewhere to live. By building enormous numbers of concrete high rises, in under 20 years China quintupled its urban residential floor space and doubled its residential floor space overall.
Residential floor space in China over time, via Pan 2020
Beyond China, we see high per capita rates of cement use in the rest of Southeast Asia, as well as the Middle East [8].
One reason you see this volume of concrete use in lower-income, urbanizing countries is that concrete construction is comparatively labor-intensive to produce. The materials for concrete are extremely cheap, and much of its cost in high-cost labor countries (such as the U.S.) is from the labor to produce it — building and setting up the formwork, laying out the reinforcing, placing the embeds, etc. If you’re a country with a lot of low-cost labor, this is a pretty good trade-off.
In addition to the current largest users of concrete, one trend to keep an eye on long-term is India’s concrete use. If India ever proceeds on a path of mass urbanization similar to China (as some folks speculate it will), we could see a massive uptick in global concrete output — India’s urbanization rate of 34% is around where China was in the late 1990s. A shift in India toward a per capita cement consumption more consistent with the rest of Southeast Asia (say around 600 kg/capita) would increase worldwide cement consumption by about 13%, and it does seem as if India’s cement use is trending upward.
By contrast, one thing clear from this data is that the U.S. actually uses an unusually low amount of concrete. Per capita, it uses as little as any other Western country, and far, far less than some — like, surprisingly, Belgium.
So we’ve seen where it gets used in the world. Can we go deeper and look at specifically what concrete is being used for?
This will vary significantly depending on the region and the local construction tradition. In the U.S., we have roughly the following breakdown (via the Portland Cement Association):
Overall, roughly half of our concrete gets used in buildings — about 26% goes into residential buildings, 2% in public buildings, and 16% into commercial buildings. The other half gets used for infrastructure — streets and highways, water conveyance and treatment tanks, etc. Because most construction in the U.S. is just one- or two-story buildings (mostly wood for residential buildings and steel for commercial ones), concrete in buildings is probably mostly going into foundations, slabs on grade, and concrete over metal deck, though there’s probably a substantial amount going into concrete masonry units as well.
But the U.S. has a somewhat unusual construction tradition, where the vast majority of our residential construction, both single-family homes and multifamily apartments, is built from light-framed wood. In other places, it's much more common to use concrete. For instance, the U.K. uses closer to 80% of its concrete for buildings, with most of that going toward the superstructure, the concrete frame that holds the building up. China, which has urbanized on the back of huge numbers of concrete residential high rises, probably devotes an even larger share of its concrete to residential construction.
Understanding how much concrete the world uses, and where it’s being used, is important if you want to use less of it.
The scale of the industry is particularly important to keep in mind. For instance, you often see enthusiasm for the idea of replacing concrete buildings with mass timber ones. But assuming you could substitute all the world’s concrete for an equal volume of wood [9], you’d need to more than triple the total annual volume of global wood harvested [10], which puts a somewhat different spin on the issue.
Most other materials would have emissions as bad or worse than concrete if they were used on the same scale.
Consider, for instance, railway ties. In the U.S., these are still largely made out of wood, but in many places they have been replaced with concrete ties. And some places are considering changing from concrete ties to plastic composite rail ties instead. It’s hard to know the exact embodied emissions without a lot of specific details about the materials and supply chains used, but can we ballpark how much a plastic tie uses compared to a concrete one?
Per the Inventory of Carbon and Energy database, concrete varies between 150 and 400 kg of embodied CO2 per cubic meter, depending on the properties of the mix, with an “average” value of about 250. Plastics mostly have embodied emissions of about 3-4 kg of CO2 per kg of plastic, or about 3,500 kg per cubic meter (assuming a density of about 1,000 kg per cubic meter). So per unit volume, plastic has somewhere around 10 times the embodied emissions of concrete.
We can also do a more direct comparison. Consider a beam spanning around 20 feet and supporting a vertical load of 21,000 pounds per linear foot. The lightest U.S. standard steel section that will span this distance is a W16x26, which weighs about 236 kg and will have embodied carbon emissions of around 354 kg.
A concrete beam of the same depth, supporting the same load and spanning the same distance, will be 10.5 inches wide by 16 inches deep, with three #10 steel bars running along the bottom. This beam will have about 190 kg of embodied emissions from the concrete, and about another 230 kg of embodied emissions from the steel rebar. This is about 20% more than the steel beam, but in the same ballpark — and over half the “concrete” emissions are actually due to the embedded reinforcing steel.
This is arguably a nonrepresentative example (most concrete, such as in columns or slabs, will have a much lower ratio of steel), but the basic logic holds: Concrete is unusual in its total volume of use, not how emissions-heavy it is as a material. Most material substitutes that aren’t wood, recycled materials, or industrial byproducts that can be had for “free” won’t necessarily be much better when used at the same scale. In some ways, it’s surprising that the carbon emissions from concrete are as low as they are.
Of course, this calculus is likely to change over time — as electricity sources change over to lower carbon ones, you’re likely to see the embodied emissions of materials drop along with it. And since cement releases CO2 as part of the chemical process of producing it, concrete will look increasingly worse compared to other materials over time.
One potential option is to find ways of changing the cement production process to be less carbon-intensive. The easiest option is to just replace manufactured Portland Cement with some other cementitious material. Industrial byproducts such as blast furnace slag, silica fume, and fly ash, often have cementitious properties and don’t have a “carbon penalty” (since they’d be produced regardless.) Materials like these can potentially eliminate large volumes of cement in a concrete mix, and they’re a key part of current low-carbon concrete strategies — even “normal” concrete mixes tend to utilize these to some degree. But the total volume of these materials is limited by the extent of various industrial processes. And for things like fly ash (which is a byproduct from coal plants) and slag (which is a byproduct from CO2-emitting blast furnaces), we can expect production to decline over time.
Another option is to take advantage of the fact that concrete will naturally absorb CO2 over time, a process known as carbonation. Even normal concrete will absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 emitted during the production process over the course of its life. Companies like Carbicrete, Carboncure, Carbonbuilt, and Solida all offer methods of concrete production that allow the concrete to absorb CO₂ during the production process, substantially reducing embodied emissions. Interestingly, these producers mostly claim that their concrete is actually cheaper than conventional concretes, which would obviously be a massive tailwind for the technology’s adoption.
It’s not obvious what the best path forward is for addressing concrete carbon emissions (like with most things, I suspect it’ll end up being a mix of different solutions), but understanding the parameters of the problem is necessary for solving it.
Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, Construction Physics, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.
[0] - This figure varies depending on the source. Chatham House provides a frequently cited estimate of 8%. We can also ballpark it — roughly 0.93 pounds of CO₂ gets emitted for each pound of cement produced, around 4.25 billion tons of cement are produced annually, which gets ~3.95 billion tons of CO₂, and total annual CO₂ emissions are in the neighborhood of 46 billion tons, getting us a bit less than 9%.
[1] - Per Circular Ecology, ~70-90% of emissions are from the cement production process, depending on the type of concrete and what the rest of the supply chain looks like.
[2] - This seems to vary depending on where the cement is being made — in Myanmar, for instance, it’s around 46%.
[3] - Another number where the sources often don’t agree with each other, see here, here, and here for estimates on annual cement production.
[4] - Concrete is roughly 10-15% cement by weight, depending on the strength of the mix, what other cementitious materials are being used, etc. An average value of 12.5% yields 34 billion tons, which we’ll knock down to account for other uses of cement (masonry mortar, grout, gypsum overlay, etc.) This roughly tracks with estimates from PCA (“4 tons of concrete produced each year for every person on Earth”), and from the now-defunct Cement Sustainability Initiative, which estimated 25 billion tons of concrete against 3.125 billion tons of cement in 2015.
[5] - See here, here, and here for an estimate of total civilization mass flow. This doesn’t (I believe) include waste byproducts, which can be substantial — for instance, it doesn’t include the ~46 billion tons of CO₂ emitted each year, or the 16 billion tons of mine tailings, or the 140 billion tons of agriculture byproducts (though this last number is difficult to verify and seems high).
[6] - We see something similar with cement as we do with other bulky, low-value materials, in that it's made in lots of distributed manufacturing facilities relatively close to where it’s used. See here for a map of cement plants in the U.S. around 2001, for instance.
[7] - For China’s total floor space, see here (most sources seem to agree with these numbers). For U.S. floor space, see my Every Building In America article. For per-capita living space in Europe, see here.
[8] - The often high rates of cement use by middle-income countries have led some folks to develop a U-shaped cement consumption theory of industrial development — that countries start out using a small amount of cement, use more as they get richer and build up their physical infrastructure, and then eventually transition to using lower volumes of cement again. The Globbulk paper spends considerable time debunking this.
[9] - It’s not actually obvious to me what the substitution ratio would be. In strength-governed cases, you’d need proportionally more timber than concrete, but in other cases (such as replacing concrete walls with light-framed stud walls), you’d probably use less. Obviously, you can’t substitute all concrete for wood, but you can probably switch out more than you think — there’s no reason you couldn’t use wood foundations instead of concrete ones in many cases, for instance.
[10] - 30 billion tons of concrete is roughly 12.5 billion cubic meters, and total annual wood products produced is currently around 5.5 billion cubic meters.
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On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.
From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.