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Current conditions: Typhoon Yinxing is expected to bring heavy rain to the Philippines this week • India is considering cloud seeding to trigger artificial rain to combat dangerous air pollution • It will be 59 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy in Washington, D.C., where security fences have been put in place ahead of potential Election Day unrest.
Voters head to the polls today to decide whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange writes, Americans will either elect a leader who continues the build-out of renewable energy and prioritizes a healthy, clean environment, or a leader who embraces the fossil fuel industry. In some places, climate will be on the ballot directly. In South Dakota, for example, the debate over carbon capture and CO2 pipelines is being put in the hands of voters; in Berkeley, California, voters will decide if they want to incentivize the decarbonization of large buildings with a natural gas tax; and Washingtonians will have two different climate-related policies to defend, with repeal initiatives on the ballot thanks to a determined Republican millionaire.
Harris and Trump made their final pitches yesterday in separate Pennsylvania rallies. In Pittsburg, Trump made the odd confession that he’s a big fan of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. “I love the Green Party,” he said. “Jill Stein just may be one of my ... I've never met her but she may be one of my favorite politicians.” Third party candidates like Stein could influence the election outcome by siphoning votes from Trump or Harris. “The vote right now is so close that a small amount of tipping in one direction or another could swing it,” Bernard Tamas, a professor of political science at Valdosta State University, toldThe Guardian.
The Spanish city of Barcelona was inundated with extreme rainfall yesterday, just days after devastating floods killed more than 200 people in Valencia. Rescue crews are still searching for survivors and angry residents are beginning to point fingers at authorities for not sounding the alarm about the floodwaters early enough. The Valencian government is asking for a €31.4 billion ($34.2 billion) rescue package to rebuild. The flooding was one of the worst natural disasters in Spain’s modern history, wrote the Financial Times editorial board. It’s “a particular reminder to politicians in Europe that climate preparedness is a pressing issue on the continent … not just in hotter areas closer to the equator.”
Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images
Canada yesterday unveiled a proposal for capping greenhouse gas emissions from the high-polluting oil and gas sector. The plan would cap emissions at 35% below 2019 levels by 2030, with producers required to report emissions starting in 2026. Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson toldReuters that most of the emissions cuts would likely come from curbing methane, as well as from carbon capture projects. The oil and gas industry opposes the proposal. Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world.
Recent data from automotive marketing research firm AutoPacific suggests political affiliation is becoming a smaller factor in Americans’ decision making process around whether to buy an electric vehicle. So far, most EV adopters lean Democratic. But as EVs become more common, AutoPacific’s survey suggests the political gap is shrinking. Among people who identify as “future EV acceptors” – those who say they’ll consider buying an EV in the future – 46% are Democrat, 28% are Republican, and 24% are independent or third party. That’s a narrower gap than exists among current EV owners (54% of whom are Democrats and 30% are Republicans). “When it comes to EV rejection, politics do play a small role, albeit a declining one,” said Deborah Grieb, AutoPacific’s director of marketing and consumer insights. “But rejection of EVs is much more likely to be due to charging and cost concerns.”
The world’s first wooden satellite was launched into space today. Japanese scientists created the satellite – called LingoSat – to prove that wood can be a space-grade material, and a sustainable one at that. Existing satellites are made mostly out of aluminum. When they reach the end of their lives, they burn up in the atmosphere, leaving behind particles that can damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Wooden satellites, though, wouldn’t do this. And wood could be surprisingly suitable for space flight: Without exposure to oxygen, wood isn’t vulnerable to things like rot or fire. The LingoSat will be monitored throughout its time in orbit for signs of strain and to help researchers better understand how wooden satellites might perform in space.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to build a nuclear-powered AI data center have reportedly been canceled after a rare bee species was discovered near the proposed build site.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”