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On sticky accelerators, Alaskan oil, and sinking cities
Current conditions: Unseasonably heavy rainfall killed at least 130 people across Pakistan and Afghanistan • Temperatures will soar to 111 degrees Fahrenheit today in Mali • It will be cool and cloudy in NYC, where thousands of high school students are expected to leave class to join a climate strike.
Tesla is recalling 3,878 Cybertrucks due to potentially faulty accelerator pedals. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “the accelerator pedal pad may dislodge and become trapped by the interior trim,” causing the vehicle to accelerate unintentionally. Or, as Rob Stumpf at Inside EVs put it, this issue “could potentially turn the stainless steel trapezoid into a 6,800-pound land missile.” The recall affects every single Cybertruck that has shipped so far,according toTechCrunch. Owners will be notified by mail, and Tesla will replace or repair the accelerator pedal at no charge. The news caps off a rough week for the embattled EV maker that started with mass layoffs.
The Interior Department today moved to wall off huge swathes of the Alaskan wilderness to new drilling and mining activities. The plan will limit oil leasing and development across 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, and block new leasing completely across 10.6 million acres, plus the entire U.S. Arctic Ocean. “The move puts nearly half of the NPR-A’s 23 million acres off limits to oil drilling,” Politicoreported. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) also recommended against the construction of a 211-mile mining route known as the Ambler Road that would have allowed for copper and zinc mining. The move would protect undeveloped land but has the downside of limiting access to critical minerals essential for the clean energy transition. Local Native tribes cheered the decisions; fossil fuel and mining groups condemned them.
In a separate decision, the BLM yesterday finalized a rule to help protect and restore public lands by recognizing and prioritizing conservation as an essential part of land management. The rule puts conservation “on equal footing” with other activities like grazing and energy development, and will help BLM “improve the health and resilience of public lands in the face of a changing climate,” the bureau said. Mining groups slammed the rule, while House Republicans called it “a classic example of overreach” and vowed to fight to have it rescinded.
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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to announce the recipients of about $2 billion in clean energy tax credits today during a visit to a Siemens Energy facility in Raleigh, North Carolina. Among the grant winners are Siemens Energy Inc. and Danish electrolyzer manufacturer Topsoe A/S, according to Bloomberg. The Biden administration restarted the tax credit program last year thanks to injection of funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. The “Advanced Energy Project Credit,” as it’s called, provides a 30% tax credit for clean energy projects that “expand domestic manufacturing, reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions, or help create a domestic supply chain for critical minerals.” The first round of funding will total $4 billion in credits for more than 100 projects. One source told Bloomberg that Topsoe will receive $136 million to put toward building a green hydrogen electrolyzer plant in Virginia.
Nearly 120,000 heat-related visits to U.S. emergency departments were recorded last year, a substantial increase compared with previous years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Men under the age of 65 were the most likely demographic to show up in the ER with a heat-related health concern. The report notes that last year’s warm season (May through September) was the hottest ever recorded in the U.S. It calls for continued monitoring of health implications to help inform prevention measures as heat waves worsen. “Heat-related illness will continue to be a significant public health concern as climate change results in longer, hotter, and more frequent episodes of extreme heat,” the CDC said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are shrinking due to a combination of climate change and land subsidence, according to a study published in the journal Science. The researchers analyzed nationwide satellite data and found that 45% of urban lands are sinking at more than 3 millimeters per year. In total, one in 10 coastal residents in China could be living below sea level within a century. The subsidence is caused by water extraction and “the sheer weight of the built environment,” Reuterssaid. It’s exacerbated by rising sea levels due to climate change, a trend reflected across the world’s coastal regions. “By 2040, almost one-fifth of the world’s population is projected to be living on sinking land,” according toNature.
Investment in renewable energy reached a record $88 billion in the U.S. last year.
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …