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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.
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A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.