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:
“This is Sky Valley Fire. Evacuation alert for Bolt Creek Fire. GO! No time for delay. Load up your family and pets and LEAVE NOW.”
Imagine getting an alert like this on your phone. Your heart immediately starts pounding; your hands shake. Is it real? Could this actually be happening? All the while, as your head spins, you’re losing precious minutes of time.
Luckily for many of the people who received this actual message last year in the Seattle suburbs, the “go now” alert was a mistake. But if you live in an area with anything greater than a “low” risk of wildfire, you should have a plan in place for what to do if that alert does come. It’s far better to “overreact” and leave immediately than to risk your life — and the lives of first responders.
The good news is, wildfire evacuation plans can begin long before your phone ever buzzes with that dreaded alert. Preparing for fire season ahead of time takes, cumulatively, as little as 90 minutes — but when a fire is encroaching, the math becomes far more urgent.
Importantly: Do not wait for an evacuation notice if you feel like a fire is approaching or like you could be in danger. Trust your gut and leave immediately. Though agencies do their best to protect people with advanced notices, fire is fast and unpredictable. In fact, many survivors of the deadly fire in Lahaina, Hawaii, say they did not receive evacuation orders before the flames had closed in on them.
Here’s what to do if there’s a fire in your area:
If you are experiencing smoke from a wildfire at your home, you should be paying attention to its development — the hazards of wildfires, after all, start with the smoke. If the fire is within 20 miles of you, you should definitely start paying attention; and if it is within 10 miles of you, it’s a threat. This threat increases if you are downwind or uphill.
Do not underestimate how fast a fire can move: 6 miles per hour in forests and up to 14 miles per hour in grasslands, depending on conditions. Embers, which can ignite homes, can also travel several miles, and wind direction can also quickly shift. If a nearby wildfire is approaching the 10-mile range of your home but you haven’t received a voluntary evacuation notice or don’t feel directly endangered yet, still review this evacuation checklist from the U.S. Forest Service. If you do receive a pre-evacuation alert or notice of some kind or want to take further steps to prepare, also:
Make sure you are signed up for emergency alerts or have another way of receiving updates, such as an agency website or Twitter account or a radio tuned into the correct station. Turn the sound on and up on your phone so you’ll hear the alarm or it will wake you up if you’re asleep.
Keep your car charged or filled to half a tank of gas or more. Scope out potential evacuation routes ahead of time, planning alternative routes in case roads are blocked or closed. Authorities say you should memorize at least two ways out of your neighborhood and avoid sketchy shortcuts that might be dangerous or blocked. Otherwise, take the quickest route to the main road, highway, or freeway out of the area.
Make a plan of where you’ll go if you need to leave your home for an extended period of time. A family or friend’s house? A hotel? A community emergency shelter? Open Red Cross shelters can be found here.
Open your garage door so you’re easily able to leave if you lose power.
Round up pets and secure them so they’re easy to put into carriers and transport to the car if you need to evacuate, and so you don’t waste precious time trying to chase them down when they’re scared. As the U.S. Forest Service notes, “this is especially important with cats.”
Prepare livestock and horses, if applicable, by reviewing this checklist.
Load up your car so you are prepared to leave on short notice. Remember to pack your go-bag (here is a version of the list in Spanish); suitcases of clothes and medicine (enough for at least a few days); pet supplies like collars, food, and water bowls; important files and back-up disks; insurance and bank papers; special or sentimental items; valuable jewelry or heirlooms (or store them in a fireproof safe); photo albums; and household items like keys and purses.
Too much to remember? Washington State suggests running through the Five P’s of evacuation: People, Prescriptions, Papers, Personal Needs, and Priceless Items.
Strongly consider leaving immediately. Roads can get congested after a mandatory evacuation order is issued, potentially creating dangerous situations where you’re trapped in your car near the fire. It will also get more difficult to see as the fire gets closer and the smoke gets thicker (always evacuate with your headlights turned on). Evacuating early also gives you time to calmly prepare a plan and collect essential items. If you’re on the fence, keep in mind it’s always better to leave too early than too late.
If you have time to prepare your house ahead of your evacuation, here is a checklist from the Western Fire Chiefs Association that you can use to get ready. Keep in mind that “the accepted sequence for safe evacuation is people first, then pets, livestock, and finally property,” Idaho Firewise writes. Major steps include:
Close all windows and interior doors to prevent the spread of fire indoors if the flames reach your home, and remove any curtains from windows. Close shutters and blinds. Leave your exterior doors unlocked so firefighters can get inside if need be.
Turn on all the main lights in your house as well as outdoor lights. This will allow firefighters to be able to see and navigate around your home in smoky conditions.
Push flammable furniture away from walls and windows and to the center of the room.
Shut off gas and turn off pilot lights. Don’t forget about pilot lights in gas fireplaces.
Attach hoses to outdoor water sources — firefighters will potentially use these to defend your home. The Western Fire Chiefs Association also recommends turning the nozzle to “spray” and propping a non-flammable ladder against your house to provide roof access. Fill buckets or garbage cans with water and leave them around your property if you’re able. However, you should not leave any water running, KQED notes, since that decreases the flow available to firefighters.
Prepare yourself for evacuation. California’s ReadyForWildfire.org recommends wearing “long pants, [a] long sleeve shirt, heavy shoes/boots, [a] cap, [a] dry bandanna for face cover [or a leftover COVID mask], goggles, or glasses,” and notes that “100% cotton is preferable.”
Finally, check on, text, or call neighbors and make sure they’re aware of the fire and also prepared to leave. Let them know you are choosing to evacuate. Also email, text, or call family who live outside the area and might be worried about you to let them know of your plans.
There is only one thing to do: Leave as fast as you can.
If you get an evacuation notice (or hear the high-low siren that also signals an evacuation order in California), do not waste time checking to see if the alert is real, gathering up items around your house, or making efforts to prepare your home. Your only focus at this point should be on getting to safety as quickly as you can.
Grab your go-bag and pets and get in your car; drive with the headlights on and follow the directions of any fire or emergency officials. If you need to evacuate on foot, quickly change into long pants, a long shirt, a cap, and heavy boots, and take essential items in a backpack or easily carried duffel bag. Know what to do if you get trapped near a wildfire. Be careful of downed powerlines or other hazards. And stay out of the area until officials say it is safe to return.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On the worsening transformer shortage, China’s patent boom, and New York’s nuclear embrace
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Erin is still intensifying as it approaches the Caribbean • Rare August rainstorms are deluging the Pacific Northwest with a month’s worth of precipitation in 24 hours, threatening floods • Hong Kong has issued its highest-level “black” rainstorm warning multiple times this month as Tropical Storm Podul lashes southern China.
President Donald Trump’s order to keep large fossil-fueled power stations scheduled to retire between now and 2028 operating indefinitely will cost ratepayers across the United States $3.1 billion per year, according to new research from the consultancy Grid Strategies on behalf of four large environmental groups. If the Department of Energy expands the order to cover all 54 fossil fuel plants slated for closure in the next three years, the price tag for Americans whose rates fund the subsidies to keep the stations running would rise to $6 billion per year.
The problem may only grow. The agency’s existing mandates “perversely incentivize plant owners to claim they plan to retire so they can receive a ratepayer subsidy to remain open,” the report points out.
With electricity consumption hitting new records in the U.S., demand for transformers is surging. The years-long supply shortage for power and distribution transformers is now set to hit a deficit below demand of 30% and 10%, respectively, in 2025, according to a new report from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Complicating matters further for manufacturers scrambling to ramp up supply, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is throwing clean-energy projects into jeopardy and sending mixed signals to factories on what kinds of transformers to produce. At the same time, tariffs are raising the price of materials needed to make more transformers.
“The U.S. transformer market stands at a critical juncture, with supply constraints threatening to undermine the nation's energy transition and grid reliability goals,” Ben Boucher, a senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “The convergence of accelerating electricity demand, aging infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities has created constraints that will persist well into the 2030s.”
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
For years, China was known for ripping off the West’s technology and patenting cheaper but more easily manufactured copies. Not anymore. China applied for twice as many high-quality clean energy patents as the U.S. in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of the most recently available public data. The European Patent Office, which supplied data to the Times, defines a “high quality” patent as one that has been filed in two or more countries, indicating that the company or individual involved has a strong competitive interest in protecting its idea.
The growth in China’s intellectual property ambitions is a sign that Beijing’s strategic push to ramp up academic research and industrial innovation is maturing. “It is the opposite of an accident,” said Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which created a database of global research on technologies that are critical to nations’ economic and military security, including clean energy.
In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, to support the construction of the state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s. Albany has plenty to sort out between now and the 15-year deadline for completing the project, including selecting a site, picking from one of the many new reactor designs, and finding a private partner. But one thing isn’t a problem, at least for now: Public support.
New Siena polling I covered in my Substack newsletter yesterday shows that 49% of registered voters in New York support the effort, with just 26% opposed. Both sides of the political spectrum are largely in lockstep, with Republican support outpacing that of Democrats by a margin of 55% to 49%. That’s lucky for Hochul, who will need support from the more politically conservative upper reaches of the state where the facility is likely to be built. For more on the technical and political considerations in play, here’s Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the plan.
It seems like everyone is abandoning their net zero goals. But not insurer Aviva. The company’s chief executive, Amanda Blanc, said the British giant remained committed to its carbon-cutting goals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported. With rising profits propelling shares in the company to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, Blanc said, “extreme weather conditions, climate change, and the impact that that has on our insurance business that actually insures properties” meant Aviva needed to “remain committed to our ambition.”
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.