You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The world’s greatest auto race is pushing the limits of cleaner combustion.
The irony of it wasn’t lost on me.
Last Wednesday morning, I found myself trudging through the noxious wildfire smoke that had blanketed all of New York City, my eyes burning under a dark orange sky as I struggled to breathe through an old KN95 mask I dug out of a kitchen drawer. Twelve hours later, I would be on a plane to Paris and on my way to witness the 100th anniversary of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Let’s just say leaving your city during an ecological crisis to go to a car race will give you some mixed feelings.
On one hand, I had wanted to see this race since I was a car-crazed kid, and I was there to write a feature I had been planning for months. On the other hand, it is never lost on me that the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. is transportation, including cars. In recent years, I have found it hard to get excited about horsepower when the world is literally on fire. That was doubly true when my clothes stank of torched Canadian forest.
What I got instead was a pleasant surprise at the famed Circuit de la Sarthe: a lot of people, including those who put on this race, agree with me. And making the event more sustainable is now a key part of its future.
Its past is the stuff of motorsports legend. Since 1923 — minus the better part of the 1940s, for obvious reasons — Le Mans has represented the pinnacle of racing, an event where teams of drivers in different types of vehicles compete for a solid day of racing.
It’s called endurance racing for a reason. Le Mans is won by not just outrunning and outmaneuvering your opponents, but by being able to outlast them as well.
Naturally, fewer pit stops to refuel means more time on the track, so you could say sustainability (not to mention the robustness of the car itself) has always been a part of Le Mans even before that word was put into wider use. What began as a race on a dirt-gravel mix in primitive early automobiles has evolved into a competition between different classes of high-tech, highly advanced race cars that often feature experimental technologies, different types of fuels, and hybrid-electric power. Every team may have a completely different approach to taking the checkered flag.
That’s what I’ve always loved about Le Mans: It pushes the boundaries of automotive technology. The stuff you see one year may vary wildly just a couple of years later. Ten years ago, the most unbeatable cars were diesel Audis; the cars from this year’s top Hypercar class are all hybrids now, as they are in Formula One.
Could those cars get even cleaner someday? Potentially. That’s the series’ goal, in fact; recently its governing body announced plans to make all of the top-class cars run on zero-emission hydrogen by 2030. That’s the same year the Le Mans race aims to be fully carbon-neutral.
And Toyota, whose hybrids had been dominant in recent years (but lost on Sunday to Ferrari after an unforgettable war of attrition that took up most of the day) showed off a hydrogen-powered car it hopes to run at Le Mans in 2026 — the first year a new hydrogen racing category will be open.
Toyota is sticking to its big plans for hydrogen, even as the slow rollout of hydrogen cars and fueling infrastructure has meant battery-electric passenger cars are being purchased at an astronomically higher rate. But that fuel source could have also great potential for heavy-duty trucking, aviation, and car markets with little access to electricity. Or in motorsports, where internal-combustion cars that run on liquid fuel create no CO2 emissions but still make the explosive sounds that make racing so exciting. (The all-day nature of the race makes it ill-suited for electric cars and their charging times, for now, anyway.)
Besides that, and to my delight, sustainability was everywhere at Le Mans this year. None of the race cars in competition ran on gasoline. Instead, they used a fuel made from local wine residue biomass that creates significantly fewer emissions. It’s called Excellium Racing 100 and it’s made by French company TotalEnergies (which is, yes, a petroleum company but I’ll give points for effort here.) Le Mans started doing this just last year, and the fuel made from agricultural waste uses no oil and emits 65% less CO2 over its lifecycle. As the company says, this new fuel “no longer contains a single drop of petrol.” At this race, that’s an impressive feat.
Attendees — and there were almost 300,000 of them — got discounted tickets if they came to the race in hybrid cars or EVs, carpooled or took public transit. (Most of the CO2 emissions from the race come from the traffic jam outside, race organizers said.) And the race cars’ Michelin-supplied tires were made from recycled materials.
Now, you yourself may not be in the market anytime soon for the Ferrari 499P LMH race car that won this year — and it’s not street-legal, anyway. So why do you care? Because motorsports, and Le Mans in particular, has a way of serving as a testing lab for new technologies that trickle down to the passenger cars you can buy. Things like fog lights, disc brakes, halogen headlights, better hybrid technology, techniques for reducing fuel consumption, and better tires have all seen introductions or advancements at this race. Here, car tech gets tested in the most extreme conditions; better and cleaner consumer cars can often follow. It’s part of why car manufacturers even do this.
I like to imagine what good things could emerge here in the years to come. More efficient headlights that are safer for pedestrians, for example. Or new lightweight materials so cars can finally go on a diet. Or ways to make hybrid and EV batteries have better range and durability. Or more advanced applications for hydrogen or e-fuels, which could be a useful tool in reducing emissions alongside battery EVs. Or, selfishly, ways to make cars that are fun and fast, but not destructive to the climate.
After all, automakers are looking for a future here where they can exist at all. Regulations around fuel economy and eventually phasing out internal combustion are closing in on them, especially in Europe. And consumers care more than ever about not just efficiency but emissions. Car companies have to step up or go home; I sometimes thought the #WeRaceForChange hashtag I saw everywhere should’ve been #WeRaceToKeepMakingMoneySomeday.
But good things can come from what we see at Le Mans. It has a chance to be a leader in making cars, for as long as we depend on them, better and cleaner and safer. If advancements in tires, efficiency, and even new fuel types can win races, maybe they can pave the way for the rest of us. “Being passionate about cars does not mean being irresponsible,” the racing series says. I say amen to that.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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.”