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At a New York Mets game this weekend, I saw something I’m not used to seeing until late summer. No, not the inexplicable late-season implosion of a beloved local franchise — a neon-red setting sun.
West Coasters know this sun well. I call it the “Eye of Sauron” sun; others say it’s “blood-red.” In reality, the color is harder to describe, more like the red-orange-pink insides of a halved grapefruit. It feels unnatural and eerie, and is the effect of shorter wavelengths of light being filtered out of a sunrise or sunset by particles in the air caused by pollution, including wildfire smoke.
I immediately grabbed my phone to find the source of the haze, but a quick Google search of “Where is this smoke coming from?” didn’t turn up any immediate results. In fact, it can be frustratingly difficult to figure out the origin of wildfire smoke when you see or smell it. This only gets more difficult as fire season wears on; is the smoke you’re inhaling from a small nearby fire, or part of a bigger burn blowing in from somewhere else?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a handy app yet that will simply tell you “the smoke overhead is from the Canadian fires” — which, in the case of the pollution I was experiencing in Flushing Meadows, it actually was. But you can cobble together an answer about where smoke is coming from by using a few different methods.
When you climb a mountain, an inaccurate forecast can be the difference between life and death. I learned about the MyRadar app from an experienced mountaineering guide who swears it is the most accurate weather app on the market. It’s also become my go-to app for figuring out where the wildfire smoke I’m inhaling is coming from.
The app pulls data from the United States Geological Survey, InciWeb, and the United States Forest Service’s Risk Incident Information Management System to build its smoke and fire maps (it also received a wildfire detection grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last year). Hovering over my house at around 2 p.m. on Monday, the app clearly told me I was experiencing “moderate air quality” and “heavy smoke hazard.” Zooming out, it’s easy to guess based on the shape of the “heavy smoke hazard” cloud that the pollution is wrapping down from the massive fires burning in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. You can also overlay wind patterns on the app for further confirmation.
The three shades of gray in the center of the continent shows the path of smoke from the Canadian fires.MyRadar
MyRadar’s visuals can get a little cluttered, though, and parsing this information still leaves you with an informed guess. But it’s one that can be easily cross-checked against the EPA’s AirNow app.
The EPA app is a little more straightforward: It gives users an upfront measurement of their air quality index, or AQI, which, with a click, can be broken down into “primary pollutants.” In the case of New York City on Monday, it was PM2.5, the expected particle from wildfire smoke (and also “the bad one” when it comes to your health). The app also shows a “forecast” of how the AQI is expected to develop over the coming hours; in New York’s case, it was going to get worse before it got better.
The AirNow app additionally has a “smoke” tab that shows a similar smoke plume overlay as MyRadar’s. By clicking on the globe in the upper left-hand corner, you can view additional fire information, including how far away the nearest burn is, and confirm if you’re under a smoke plume. Using these two pieces of information together, you can further deduce if the smoke you’re experiencing is blowing in from somewhere far away or nearby (some of New York’s smoke may be from the Cannon Ball 2 Fire to our northwest, in Passaic County, New Jersey, but the app shows me that fire is fairly small — 107 total acres — and so in this case, it is not the main culprit).
Information under the smoke tab on the AirNow app.AirNow
The BlueSky Canada Smoke Forecasting System (FireSmoke Canada) is run by the University of British Columbia, and while it has an emphasis on Canadian air quality, it is run in partnership with the United States Forest Service and includes U.S. data too. The FireSmoke Canada website specifically tracks PM2.5 smoke particles at ground level from wildfires across North America (“ground level” is an important distinction because sometimes smoke plumes will be too high in the atmosphere to actually affect your health). The FireSmoke Canada map throws in a time-lapse animation and for my purposes, it clearly showed that the smoke in New York was coming down from the Canadian fires.
The FireSmoke Canada map is also a great way to figure out the origin of local fire smoke too since it often shows plumes from even small blazes (though it has technical limitations too, which it details in its FAQ). Unfortunately, the service doesn’t allow users to click on a fire to learn more information about it, which means toggling back and forth between the AirNow or MyRadar app, or the FIRMS U.S./Canada website, to get a fuller picture of what is going on.
The FireSmoke Canada website tracks PM2.5 with a handy animation but does not offer information about individual fires like MyRadar and AirNow do.FireSmoke Canada
Other discrepancies between the apps can be frustrating; AirNow, for example, still shows the Great Lakes Wildfire as burning in North Carolina, though it’s not appearing on FireSmoke Canada’s tracker; MyRadar provides the most context, showing the containment at 90% and labeling its status as “minimal.” On the other hand, MyRadar and AirNow don’t show a fire near Hanford, Washington, while MySmoke Canada does.
Short of doing your own detective work with various wildfire tracking services, local media otherwise remain the best option for figuring out where smoke is coming from. The Hanford blaze that eluded MyRadar and AirNow, for example, is easily confirmed by the regional press; started by lightning, the fire reportedly burned around 1,000 acres and is now 100% contained.
Turns out, Googling “Why is it smoky outside” — while it might feel archaic — still might be one of the best options.
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And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.
What I’m hearing from developers and CEOs about the renewable energy industry after the Inflation Reduction Act
As the Senate deliberates gutting the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits, renewable energy developers and industry insiders are split about how bad things might get for the sector. But the consensus is that things will undoubtedly get worse.
Almost everyone I talked to insisted that solar and wind projects further along in construction would be insulated from an IRA repeal. Some even argued that spiking energy demand and other macro tailwinds might buffer the wind and solar industries from the demolition of the law.
But between the lines, and beneath the talking points and hopium, executives are fretting that lots of future investments are in jeopardy. And the most pessimistic take: almost all projects will have their balance sheets and time-tables impacted in some way that’ll at minimum increase their budget costs.
“It’s hard to imagine, if the legislation passes in its current form, that it wouldn’t impact all projects,” said Rob Collier, CEO of renewable energy transaction platform LevelTen.
Even industry analysts with the gloomiest views of the repeal say there’s plenty of projects that will keep chugging along and might even become more valuable to investors if they’re close enough to construction or operation. This aligns with recent analysis from BloombergNEF, which found the House bill would diminish our nation’s renewables build-out – but not entirely end its pace.
“The more useful way to break down which project may be hit the hardest is where the projects are going to fall in their development life-cycle,” Collier said. “Projects that have either started construction or have the ability to start construction … are going to very likely rise in terms of their appeal and attractiveness and those projects will be at a premium, if they’re able to skate through the legislative risk and qualify for tax credits.”
There is a more optimistic industry view that believes increased project costs will just be passed along to consumers via higher electricity prices. The American people will in essence have to pick up the tab where the federal tax code left it. Optimists also cite the increased use of power purchase agreements, or PPAs, between renewables developers and entities who need a lot of electricity, like big tech companies. By signing these PPAs, buyers are subsidizing the construction of projects but also insulating themselves from the risk of rising electricity prices.
The most bullish perspective I heard was from Nick Cohen, the CEO of Doral Renewables, who told me deals like these combined with rising premiums for quick energy on the grid may obviate lost credits in a “zero-incentive environment.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” Cohen told me. “If you’re in construction or you’re going to be in construction very soon, you’re fine.”
But Collier called Cohen’s prediction an “experiment” in customers’ willingness to pay for new energy: “If we’re talking about 40%, 50%, 60% of a project’s capital stack now being at risk because of tax credits, those are pretty large price increases.”
I spoke to multiple companies that have been inking massive deals as this legislation has progressed — although many were not nearly as sanguine about the industry’s future prospects as Doral. Like rPlus Energies, which disclosed last week that it closed a commitment for more than $500 million in tax equity investments for a solar and storage project in Utah. rPlus CEO Luigi Resta told me that the legislation “certainly has posed concern from our investors and from the organization” but the project was so far along that the tax equity investment market wasn’t phased by the bill.
“Many people in my company, myself included, have been doing this for more than 20 years. We’ve seen the starts and stops related to ITC and PTC in solar and wind, in multiple cycles, and this feels like another cycle,” Resta told me. “When the IRA passed, everybody was exuberant. And now the runway looks like it may have a cliff. But for us, our mantra since the beginning of the year has been ‘proceed with caution, preserve and protect.’”
However, crucially, it is important to focus on how that caution looks: Resta told me the company has completely paused new contracting while the company is completing the projects it is currently developing.
One government affairs representative for a large and prominent U.S. renewables developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships, told me that “whatever rollback occurs will just result in higher electricity prices over time.” In the near term, the only language that would truly gut projects in progress today would be “foreign entity of concern” restrictions that would broadly impact any component even remotely connected to Chinese industries. Similar language all but kneecapped the entire IRA electric vehicle consumer credit.
“It included definitions of what it means to be a foreign company that were really vague,” the government affairs representative said. “Anyone who does any business with China essentially can’t benefit from the credit. That was a really challenging outcome from the House that hopefully the Senate is going to fix.” If this definition became law, this source said, it would be the final straw that “freezes investment” in renewable energy projects.
Ultimately, after speaking to CEO after CEO this week, I’ve been left with an impression that business activity in renewables hasn’t really subsided after the House bill passed, and that it’ll be the Senate bill that undoubtedly defines the future of renewable energy for years to come.
Whether that chamber remains the “cooling saucer” it once was will be the decider.