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Some interiors are quite protected from air pollution. Others aren’t.
As the Northeast endures one of the worst wildfire days in recent history, the advice has been pretty simple: stay indoors, filter your air. And chances are, people who can follow this advice are getting it.
Marshall Burke, an economist at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability who has been remarkably helpful to this publication, has looked at past examples of severe smoke events and found there isn’t any big demographic gaps in who is seeking out information about what’s going on and how to respond. “On days like this, we actually see evidence that most folks are seeking out information,” Burke told me, “We can look at Google searches in English, we can look at Spanish, we can look in different zip codes. And we see pretty similar searches. Folks notice that things are bad, and they search for information.”
What people can do with that information is where the disparities start to show up.
There are essentially two levels of response to the kind of smoke New York is experiencing now or California has experienced in the past few years: whether you’re inside or outside, and what’s happening to the air inside your home or another building.
Burke’s research has shown that even indoor air quality can still be quite bad during a wildfire — something that is at least anecdotally confirmed today (I am writing this from my bedroom. My office and living room have older, leakier windows and have been abandoned to the smoke).
“Indoors, especially at the levels that New York City is seeing today, you'll see substantial infiltration of smoke into indoor environments. And so you need active mechanical filtration to get the rest of that smoke out,” Burke said.
Citing data from indoor air monitors sold by Purple, which then creates maps of air quality, Burke warned that “right now in New York, I was just looking, they're quite high,” referring to particulate concentration, “so I think that should make us pretty worried about how much of this stuff gets inside and for those who can to really double down on filtration.”
That’s typically achieved by buying air filters, which can run up to hundreds of dollars per device and may require multiple devices in a single home. There can also be runs on these devices during smoke events. My local hardware store, for example, was out of them and Amazon wasn’t delivering several recommended brands until Friday.
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When Burke and a team of researchers analyzed air quality data in the Bay Area in 2020, they found that concentrations of particulate matter inside homes were not related to how smokey it was outside. The homes they looked at "experienced nearly identical daily outdoor concentrations" on bad smoke days, but indoor pollution was "starkly different." Some homes saw concentrations of particulates more than five times the World Health Organization recommended limit while others were able to keep the concentration levels at one third the WHO limit.
Burke and the researchers found that wealthier households “can more easily stay home, are more likely to seek information on protective technology, and are more likely to own indoor pollution monitors.” In short, the public health advice you’re hearing now from elected officials is more likely to be followed — and easier to follow — for the wealthy.
Burke pointed to programs in California that provide air filters to low-income households as well as to ways people could construct their own filters. All you need is a fan and some MERV filters. “it works surprisingly well,” Burke said.
He also pointed to the need to outfit schools and homeless shelters with filtration. “We're going to need to make those investments. Of course, we can't do that today. But this will happen again, and we could be more prepared.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
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.