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On EV sales, rural clean energy, and a union vote
Current conditions: Thunderstorms brought widespread flooding to Tampa Bay, Florida • The famous Constantine Arch in Rome was damaged by lightning • Super Typhoon Yagi is now the second-most powerful storm of 2024 and is expected to hit China on Friday.
The Biden administration today is expected to announce $7.3 billion in grants for rural electric cooperatives to finance clean energy projects aimed at bringing reliable, affordable energy to rural Americans. The infusion, which comes from the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program of the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the largest investment in rural electrification since FDR’s administration,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian. The 16 cooperatives will have projects dotted across 23 states. The projects are expected to create 4,500 permanent jobs and prevent more than 43 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution each year. Biden will announce the news at the Dairyland Power Cooperative in Wisconsin. Dairyland will receive $573 million for solar and wind installations across Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois. “One in five rural Americans will benefit from these clean energy investments, thanks to partnerships with rural electric cooperatives like Dairyland,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a statement. “Put simply, this is rural power, for rural America.”
Volvo is watering down its commitment to sell only electric vehicles by 2030, aiming instead to have at least 90% of its sales be electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles by that year. CEO Jim Rowan blamed market forces, lack of EV charging infrastructure, and lower-than-expected customer demand for the change. The company said it will invest in plug-in hybrids for growth. “We are resolute in our belief that our future is electric,” Rowan said. “However, it is clear that the transition to electrification will not be linear, and customers and markets are moving at different speeds.” The walk-back follows similar moves from other carmakers including Ford. Volvo was one of the first legacy automakers to commit to a fully-electric future, and as the Financial Timesnoted, it “remains the most bullish about the transition.”
The intense heat wave positioned over the West Coast is bringing dangerously hot temperatures to Southern California. In some areas, temperatures will be 20 degrees above normal for this time of year. Los Angeles will see triple-digit highs through the end of the week. Palm Springs will hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit today. The Woodland Hills neighborhood of L.A. could reach 118 degrees by Friday. “In terms of this summer, it’s going to be the hottest we’ve seen or close to it,” Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told the Los Angeles Times. Cooling centers are open across the state and are listed here. According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, average annual temperatures in the state have risen by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895. Seven of the past eight years have been the warmest on record.
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The Ultium electric vehicle battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, has joined the United Auto Workers union. The plant, which employs 1,000 people, is a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution. The UAW said in a statement that “the workers organized without facing threats or intimidation and won their union once a majority of workers signed cards.” This is the second Ultium plant to unionize, but the first in the South. The other, in Ohio, joined the UAW in 2022. “It could be a big deal,” wrote Jameson Dow at Electrek, “given the developing ‘battery belt’ in the U.S. South, where many companies have decided to build battery plants, with hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs on the docket. If other factories see the success at GM, they might start getting their own ideas and unionization could spread through the industry.”
The results of a new YouGov survey show that drivers are terribly misinformed about the costs, safety, and functionality of electric vehicles. In the survey, 1,000 people who currently drive gas-powered cars were asked to read 10 statements about EVs and identify whether they were true or false. The majority (90%) of participants answered just five or fewer questions correctly, and more than half (57%) of participants scored no higher than two out of 10. In other words, if this test had been scored on an A-F grading scale, nearly everyone would have failed. Sixty-two percent of them said EVs are more expensive to run than internal combustion engine cars (they’re not), 41% thought EVs are more likely to catch fire (they’re not), and 35% believed EVs emit about the same CO2 over their lifetime as ICE vehicles (they don’t).
“This is affecting drivers’ car choices, with people displaying a poor understanding of EVs being less likely to want their next car to be an EV,” concluded the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, the nonprofit that commissioned the survey. “Drivers who scored two or less out of 10 were 11 times less likely to want their next car to be an EV than those who scored eight or more out of 10.”
The survey was conducted in the U.K., but many of these myths are common among U.S. drivers, too.
🙌 The Fight, a new Heatmap Plus weekly newsletter from senior reporter Jael Holzman, just launched. It will deliver must-read exclusive scoops and analysis on the local battles and national trends shaping the future of climate action. Check it out. 🙌
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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.”