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On the president’s environmental legacy, NYC congestion pricing, and winter weather
Current conditions: Extreme heat in southeastern Australia triggered fire bans • More than 260 flood alerts are in place across England and Wales • A snow emergency is in effect in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are set to gather today to certify President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 victory.
More than 60 million people across 30 states are under weather warnings as a winter storm bears down. At least seven states have declared emergencies: Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, and New Jersey. One of the hardest-hit cities is Kansas City, Missouri, which got about a foot of snow. The system – dubbed Winter Storm Blair by the Weather Channel – is moving east now and will bring six to 12 inches of snow, as well as icy conditions, to the mid-Atlantic. The National Weather Service warned that “travelers should anticipate significant disruptions.” After this storm passes, temperatures will continue to plunge well below normal throughout much of the nation. “Should the cold wave evolve to its full potential, maximum temperature departures could plunge 30-40 degrees Fahrenheit below the historical average from the northern Plains and Midwest to the interior Southeast through the first two weeks of January,” said AccuWeather meteorologist Alex Duffus. The forecast prompted Jim Robb, the CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., to put out a warning via YouTube about the potential for power outages. Robb urged everyone within the power system to prepare for the worst. “The actions you take now may very well help us avoid the consequences of events such as we saw in Texas in 2021 and in the mid-Atlantic in 2022,” he said. As of this morning, about 300,000 customers were without power across Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia.
The White House today announced that President Biden will move to permanently ban new offshore oil and gas drilling across huge swathes of U.S. coastal waters. “Biden has determined that the environmental and economic risks and harms that would result from drilling in these areas outweigh their limited fossil fuel resource potential,” the administration said. The 625 million acres included in the protections will cover the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California, as well as parts of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska. As Politico noted, most of those areas are of little interest to the oil and gas industry, but “the eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico is believed to hold large untapped reservoirs of oil.” It will be difficult for the incoming Trump administration to dismantle Biden’s ban, but the fossil fuel industry is likely to challenge it. With this decision, Biden will have conserved more lands and waters than any other U.S. president, the White House added. “President Biden has been a steadfast champion for climate progress from Day One of his administration,” Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said in a statement. “His legacy of conservation and advocacy to protect our climate will leave an indelible mark on the health of our communities and our environment.”
The first congestion pricing scheme in the U.S. officially came into effect on Sunday. Drivers entering lower Manhattan during peak hours will now have to pay $9, which is down from the $15 fee originally proposed. Gov. Kathy Hochul paused the ambitious plan last summer, then hastily reinstated it at the lower rate before the incoming Trump administration could do anything to block it. The program aims to reduce traffic and pollution in New York City, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimating it will cut traffic by 10% and raise money to pay for infrastructure upgrades. Its success – or failure – could help inform other cities that might consider similar moves. A “congestion pricing tracker” is monitoring the new scheme’s effect on commutes in real-time. Here’s a snapshot of the data from the Holland Tunnel yesterday, where commute times seem to have been cut down to about 10 minutes from 30 minutes:
After being re-elected as House speaker on Friday, Mike Johnson made it clear that energy policy would be a top priority for the new Congress. “We have to stop the attacks on liquefied natural gas, pass legislation to eliminate the Green New Deal,” Johnson said. “We’re going to expedite new drilling permits, we’re going to save the jobs of our auto manufacturers, and we’re going to do that by ending the ridiculous EV mandates.” Of course, there is no actual “Green New Deal” to eliminate, nor any EV mandates to end. Those minor details aside, Johnson’s message signalled that the fight over President Biden’s landmark climate and energy policies has only just begun. “It is our duty to restore America’s energy dominance,” Johnson said, “and that’s what we’ll do.”
In case you missed it: The Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday finalized a decision to expand the boundaries of a Georgia wildlife refuge by 22,000 acres. The new boundaries for the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, the largest blackwater swamp in North America, will include some lands that mining company Twin Pines Minerals had hoped to use to mine titanium dioxide. Environmental groups (and the Biden administration) opposed the mine; Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said it “poses an unacceptable risk to the long-term hydrology” of the swamp. In its statement, the FWS called the expansion “minor,” but said it would help “strengthen protection of the hydrological integrity of the swamp, provide habitat for the gopher tortoise, mitigate impacts of wildfires, and provide opportunities for longleaf pine restoration to benefit the red-cockaded woodpecker.”
Thirteen of the world’s busiest oil ports could be badly damaged by rising sea levels as soon as 2070, according to recent scientific analysis.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.