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It’s okay if rural America doesn’t want EVs.
Where I am from, people worry about making good time. Nebraska small talk regresses not to what route you took — the California concern — but how fast you got there. Rather than get on a plane, people from the Great Plains will undertake a 10-hour drive to Cousin Rob’s in Dallas and rue that they could’ve done it in nine and a half if not for all the construction. Dads refuse to stop on long drives for this very reason.
Electric cars aren’t great for making great time. Even though charging speeds are getting faster, the leisurely pace of the EV break can’t compare to the Cannonball Run pit stop: pump gas, use the restroom, and get back on the road within five minutes. EVs are not (yet) ideal for other, more practical rural concerns. The punishing winter temperatures of North Dakota can sap a battery’s driving range. So does towing the boat to the lake. Flyover country is full of state highways where there is nary a fast-charger in sight.
Those are among the reasons the residents of rural America hesitate to embrace the EV. There is a tribal impetus, too: Rural areas are heavily Republican and more likely to reject electric cars on the basis of political identity. This fact may spell trouble for the Detroit auto giants trying to sell EV pickup trucks to die-hard combustion loyalists and for goals of making America an all-EV nation anytime soon. But when it comes to climate, maybe it’s not a crisis.
Like any environmental issue, the EV question is about scale. To reduce the carbon pollution of the transportation sector, it’s not enough for a few people to trade in their gas-guzzling Ford Expeditions for Mustang Mach-Es. Most people need to do it to take a chunk out of emissions.
Fortunately, electric vehicles work best where people are concentrated. City dwellers generally drive shorter distances than rural residents during errands and commutes, meaning an EV with decent range can cover their everyday needs. Even those at the exurban extents of major metropolitan areas are generally close enough to city centers to make a round trip without charging in the middle.
Charging infrastructure follows the population maps, too. As the country scales up its supply of level 3 fast chargers, it still makes the most sense to put the vast majority of those plugs in cities and along the Interstate System where those urbanites do most of their driving. This drives a feedback loop that will continue to make electric driving more enticing to city people than country people.
For those rooting for mass adoption of EVs, this is good news. According to sustainability researchers at the University of Michigan, 83% of Americans now live in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950. That number could approach 90% by mid-century. The United States, despite its small town self-mythologizing, is an urban country that grows more urban by the day, and that means most people live in a location where an EV could meet their daily driving needs.
(Also, urban areas should embrace EVs to reduce the health-damaging air pollution from ICE tailpipes, which concentrates in places with lots of people, and therefore cars. In rural places where people are spread out and dozens of cars don’t sit idling as a herd during freeway traffic, this is a less pressing concern.)
The fact that electric driving would prove more challenging for rural America sounds like grim news for climate change, since according to one study, they have a 20% larger carbon footprint compared to their urban counterparts, a difference largely attributed to home heating and to driving longer distances. But, again, the question is about scale. Even though living in the boonies necessitates emitting more carbon, there are just so many more metropolitan Americans. The best way to make a big dent in transportation emissions is to get metro residents — the 83% — to embrace the life electric.
Eventually, the EV revolution will reach the countryside, but those who prefer combustion driving will be able to keep doing so for a long time to come. Even if the nation followed the California goal of making the light-duty vehicle market 100% electric by 2035, that’s only new cars. (California banned the sale of gas-powered lawn equipment, but I still hear plenty of small-engine leaf blowers at work around Los Angeles every afternoon.) Vehicles are better-built than they’ve even been and last on the road for more than a decade, meaning there’ll be plenty of gas-burners on the highway deep into the 2040s. It will just become more expensive to fuel and to service them as the country’s infrastructure and mechanic shops finally move away from combustion.
Just like America’s presidential elections, the country’s EV battle may be won or lost in the suburbs.
Consider one recent research project, which found that while rural residents emit more carbon than city-dwellers, it’s suburbanites who are the very worst. They drive more than those who live in the center city and might have access to decent public transportation. And, on average, they earn more than truly rural residents, which is correlated with a higher carbon footprint. That project studied Austria, but the Brookings Institute found the same thing in the United States: “In metropolitan regions, suburbs emit up to four times the household emissions of their urban cores. While households located in more densely populated neighborhoods have a carbon footprint 50% below the national average, those in the suburbs emit up to twice the average.”
To put it another way: It’s suburbanites who could potentially do the most climate good by switching to EVs. Plus, they are potentially affluent enough to afford electric vehicles. They’re also likely to have garages and driveways to make charging at home a simpler affair compared to the apartment-dweller who has little control over whether their landlord puts plugs in the parking lot. (Mine didn’t.)
Certainly suburbia has its share of MAGA rank-and-file who dismiss EVs as the choice of the woke, as well as Towing Dads who’ll hold out until electric pickup range can match that of gas. Yet the politically purple ‘burbs may be ruled by the pragmatists, or people who’ll happily buy an EV — just as soon as they’re convinced it’s the right economic choice for their families, or, perhaps, as soon as everybody else at their kids’ school starts getting one.
Sources like David Rapson of the University of California, Davis have told me these buyers are the tipping point for the mass adoption of the electric vehicle. It makes sense: EVs may never convince their entrenched opponents to ditch internal combustion, but they don’t have to. If the bulk of Americans make the jump and begin driving the kids to practice on battery power, that’s an enormous chunk of carbon that’s simply not emitted.
Transportation is about the right technology for the right situation. EVs are a just-okay choice for dense urban centers — they’re better than gas cars, but thoughtful city planning could help people choose greener and better solutions such as cycling and mass transit. For car-reliant suburbs and exurbs, EVs hold the key to drastically reducing carbon emissions. In truly rural America, the best choice for years to come might be burning gasoline. And maybe that’s fine — as long as the country’s population centers get with the program.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”