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:
It’s flawed, but not worthless. Here’s how you should think about it.
Starting this month, the tens of millions of Americans who browse the real-estate listings website Zillow will encounter a new type of information.
In addition to disclosing a home’s square footage, school district, and walkability score, Zillow will begin to tell users about its climate risk — the chance that a major weather or climate event will strike in the next 30 years. It will focus on the risk from five types of dangers: floods, wildfires, high winds, heat, and air quality.
The data has the potential to transform how Americans think about buying a home, especially because climate change will likely worsen many of those dangers. About 70% of Americans look at Zillow at some point during the process of buying a home, according to the company.
“Climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, said in a statement. “Healthy markets are ones where buyers and sellers have access to all relevant data for their decisions.”
That’s true — if the information is accurate. But can homebuyers actually trust Zillow’s climate risk data? When climate experts have looked closely at the underlying data Zillow uses to assess climate risk, they have walked away unconvinced.
Zillow’s climate risk data comes from First Street Technology, a New York-based company that uses computer models to estimate the risk that weather and climate change pose to homes and buildings. It is far and away the most prominent company focused on modeling the physical risks of climate change. (Although it was initially established as a nonprofit foundation, First Street reorganized as a for-profit company and accepted $46 million in investment earlier this year.)
But few experts believe that tools like First Street’s are capable of actually modeling the dangers of climate change at a property-by-property level. A report from a team of White House scientific advisors concluded last year that these models are of “questionable quality,” and a Bloomberg investigation found that different climate risk models could return wildly different catastrophe estimates for the same property.
Courtesy of Zillow
Not all of First Street’s data is seen as equally suspect. Its estimates of heat and air pollution risk have generally attracted less criticism from experts. But its estimates of flooding and wildfire risk — which are the most catastrophic events for homeowners — are generally thought to be inadequate at best.
So while Zillow will soon tell you with seeming precision that a certain home has a 1.1% chance of facing a wildfire in the next 30 years, potential homebuyers should take that kind of estimate with “a lot of grains of salt,” Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, told me.
Here’s a short guide for how to think through Zillow’s estimates of climate risk.
Neither First Street nor Zillow immediately responded to requests for comment.
Zillow has said that, when the data is available, it will tell users whether a given home has flooded or burned in a wildfire recently. (It will also say whether a home is near a source of air pollution.)
Homebuyers should take that information seriously, Madison Condon, a Boston University School of Law professor who studies climate change and financial markets, told me.
“If the house flooded in the recent past, then that should be a major red flag to you,” she said. Houses that have flooded recently are very likely to flood again, she said. Only 10 states require a home seller to disclose a flood to a potential buyer.
First Street claims that its physics-based models can identify the risk that any individual property will flood. But the ability to determine whether a given house will flood depends on having an intricate knowledge of local infrastructure, including stormwater drains and what exists on other properties, and that data does not seem to exist in anyone’s model at the moment, Condon said.
When Bloombergcompared the output of three different flooding models, including First Street’s, they agreed on results for only 5% of properties.
If you’re worried about a home’s flood risk, then contact the local government and see if you can look at a flood map or even talk to a flood manager, Condon said. Many towns and cities keep flood maps in their records or on their website that are more granular than what First Street is capable of, she said.
“The local flood manager who has walked the property will almost always have a better grasp of flood risk than the big, top-down national model,” she said.
In some cases, Zillow will recommend that a home buyer purchase federal flood insurance. That’s generally not a bad idea, Condon said, even if Zillow reaches that conclusion using national model data that has errors or mistakes.
“It simply is true that way more people should be buying flood insurance than generally think they should,” she said. “So a general overcorrection on that would be good.”
If you’re looking at buying a home in a wildfire-prone area, especially in the American West, then you should generally assume that Zillow is underestimating its wildfire risk, Wara, the Stanford researcher, told me.
That’s because computer models that estimate wildfire risk are in a fairly early stage of development and improving rapidly. Even the best academic simulations lack the kind of granular, structure-level data that would allow them to predict a property’s forward-looking wildfire risk.
That is actually a bigger problem for homebuyers than for insurance companies, he said. A home insurance company gets to decide whether to insure a property every year. If it looks at new science and concludes that a given town or structure is too risky, then it can raise its premiums or even simply decline to cover a property at all. (State Farm stopped selling home insurance policies in California last year, partly because of wildfire risk.)
But when homeowners buy a house, their lives and their wealth get locked into that property for 30 years. “Maybe your kids are going to the school district,” he said. It’s much harder to sell a home when you can’t get it covered. “You have an illiquid asset, and it’s a lot harder to move.”
That means First Street’s wildfire risk data should be taken as “absolute minimum estimate,” Wara said. In a wildfire-prone area, “the real risk is most likely much higher” than its models say.
Over the past several years, runaway wildland fires have killed dozens of people or destroyed tens of thousands of homes in Lahaina, Hawaii; Paradise, California; and Marshall, Colorado.
But in those cases, once the fire began incinerating homes, it ceased to be a wildland fire and became a structure-to-structure fire. The fire began to leap from house to house like a book of matches, condemning entire neighborhoods to burn within minutes.
Modern computer models do an especially poor job of simulating that transition — the moment when a wildland fire becomes an urban conflagration, Wara said. Although it only happens in perhaps 0.5% of the most intense fires, those fires are responsible for destroying the most homes.
But “how that happens and how to prevent that is not well understood yet,” he said. “And if they’re not well understood yet from a scientific perspective, that means it’s not in the [First Street] model.”
Nor do the best university wildfire models have good data on every individual property’s structural-level details — such as what material its walls or roof are made of — that would make it susceptible to fire.
When assessing whether your home faces wildfire risk, its structure is very important. But “you have to know what your neighbor’s houses look like, too, within about a 250-yard radius. So that’s your whole neighborhood,” Wara said. “I don’t think anyone has that data.”
A similar principle goes for thinking about flood risk, Condon said. Your home might not flood, she said, but it also matters whether the roads to your house are still driveable or whether the power lines fail. “It’s not particularly useful to have a flood-resilient home if your whole neighborhood gets washed out,” she said.
Experts agree that the most important interventions to discourage wildfire — or, for that matter, floods — have to happen at the community level. Although few communities are doing prescribed burns or fuel reduction programs right now, some are, Wara said.
But because nobody is collecting data about those programs, national risk models like First Street’s would not factor those programs into an area’s wildfire risk, he said. (In the rare case that a government isclearing fuel or doing a prescribed burn around a town, wildfire risk there might actually be lower than Zillow says, Wara added.)
Going forward, figuring out a property’s climate risk — much like pushing for community-level resilience investment — shouldn’t be left up to individuals, Condon said.
The state of California is investing in a public wildfire catastrophe model so that it can figure out which homes and towns face the highest risk. She said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal entities that buy home mortgages, could invest in their own internal climate-risk assessments to build the public’s capacity to understand climate risk.
“I would advocate for this not to be an every-man-for-himself, every-consumer-has-to-make-a-decision situation,” Condon said.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.
A conversation with Stephanie Loucas, chief development officer for Renewable Properties
This week I got the chance to speak with Stephanie Loucas of Renewable Properties, one of the fantastic subject matter experts who joined me this week for a panel on local renewables conflicts at Intersolar. After revealing herself to me as someone in the development space who clearly cares about community engagement, I asked if I could bring her on the record to chat about her approach to getting buy-in on projects. She’s not someone who often works in utility scale – all her projects are under 10 megawatts – but the conflicts she deals with are the same.
Here’s an edited version of our chat outside the conference as we overlooked the San Diego bay:
I guess to start, what’s the approach you’d like to see the renewables development sector adopt when it comes to community engagement?
I would like to see developers collaborate a little bit more so messaging is similar and we can have more engagement sooner. I don’t think that some of this is some sort of secret sauce. We could be a little bit more together.
Okay, but what’s your approach?
Our approach is early and often, listen empathetically and try to answer the questions clearly and try to build trust.”
If there is no secret sauce, what’s the best way to build trust?
I think the best way to build trust is to listen, to address the issues, to understand what the community is really asking. I think it’s easy for a person to sit behind a computer and write a long letter or email with 25 concerns but actually talking to the person, which is something that I think the younger people in the industry – more junior folks – aren’t as accustomed to talking to people. They’re more used to communicating in written form.
You’re able to suss out what’s actually important by talking to them. They’ll hit their one-to-five most important topics, as opposed to the 25 things they’ll write in their letter.
What does ‘early and often’ look like for you?
Early is… as soon as you talk to the authority with jurisdiction, talk to them about who in the community is actually important. Who should we be talking to? Do you think we’ll have opposition? Do you think we’ll have supporters? And it’s getting the planning department’s perspective. Then you start from there, to build who you’re going to be talking to and when.
Okay. So what’s often then? Do you have to be there every day? Is it about having an office in the community?
I think it depends on the comments you get and what’s going on specifically in the community. Sometimes you have to be in it for a while to really root out what’s going on. It might feel like you’re starting to talk for a year, a certain amount of time before you submit your permit, but you don’t get to the root cause of what’s really bugging people until you’ve had more conversations and they’re trusting you’ll show back up. Answer those questions.
Let’s say you provided a report from a third party consultant addressing “X” and then they bring up “Y.” Then you address “Y” and they bring up another thing. It’s about listening and responding. That’s how you build trust.
So I’m often told I tell too many negative stories of conflict in this newsletter. Do you have any examples in your work where you really feel like you got community buy-in?
To be honest, one of the best is a recent case study. It’s a project coming online in New York where we were in the community for a long time, a lot of public meetings and there was a ton of opposition. Part of the opposition was confusing our project size. There was a huge project – a several hundred megawatt project – going on too. They kept using the same opposition talking points. And we said, we’re not that. We heard the community and talked them through it. We wanted to make sure they were evaluating the project for the appropriate level of impact it was having.
We had opposition and we overcame it in that town. And then really flipping the mayor, having him come around. We did a ribbon cutting ceremony. We made sure we had the right number of local people benefiting from a community solar program – we ended up with a 20% number [of local subscribers].
Does having local use of power – using power from the solar project near their backyard – help with getting buy in?
Absolutely. I think so. The electrons aren’t just in their viewpoint getting on the grid and they’re never knowing where they’re going.