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Approximately 32,000 people drink the tap water in Moses Lake, Washington, an agricultural town in the Columbia River basin approximately 175 miles to the east of Seattle. If you were to sip that water over the course of a lifetime, you’d consume 7,457 times the recommended limit of perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid — two chemicals that fall under the umbrella of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.”
Moses Lake’s contaminated groundwater dates back to when the town was the site of the Larson Air Force Base, which was also used for years as a dump site for toxic waste. But its story is not unique: the city’s water utility is one of 563 in the Environmental Working Group’s newly updated tap water database to report unsafe levels of PFOA and PFOS. That’s not even to mention all the other possible PFAS contaminants that can be found in drinking water or the utilities that haven’t tested for PFAS at all.
Though the Environmental Protection Agency is required by a 1996 amendment to the Safe Water Drinking Act to report drinking water data, it’s never released a comprehensive database, and information can be hard to come by. EWG, a nonprofit that focuses on contaminants and toxins, synthesized reports from 50,000 individual water systems across the country, looking at more than 300 contaminants beyond PFAS. It also offers fairly conservative exposure recommendations for each, often based on California’s public health goals. “EWG is filling this need for people to have a national clearinghouse where they can easily access their drinking water data,” Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist with EWG, told me.
The United States Geological Survey estimates that as much as 20% of Americans drink, bathe, and brush their teeth with PFAS-contaminated water. But unless you know where to look — or bother to — you could be drinking the chemicals entirely unawares. “The first step is to find out about what’s in your drinking water,” Stoiber added. “Depending on where you are, the quality of your drinking water can vary.”
The obvious safeguard here is federal regulations. But despite PFAS being linked to a whole host of poor health outcomes, including kidney and testicular cancer, decreased fertility, and thyroid disease, the Environmental Protection Agency only announced legally enforceable limits for six PFAS chemicals in drinking water last year, under President Joe Biden. (The EPA has estimated that the quantifiable health benefits of those six regulations alone reach $1.5 billion annually.) At the same time, a Biden-era effort to limit PFAS discharged into industrial wastewater — which can subsequently spread to drinking water — stalled out in 2024, and never advanced past the notice phase of the rulemaking process. President Trump promptly scrapped the draft guidelines after taking office.
The future of PFAS regulation now hangs in a strange limbo. Though EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin previously voted for regulating some PFAS in drinking water while serving as a New York congressman, the deregulatory influences in the Trump administration seem poised to win out over the voices in the Make America Healthy Again camp epitomized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s often conspiratorial emphasis on “wellness.” (While some concerns, like microplastics and PFAS, are backed by ample research, the right-wing health movement also expresses skepticism about long-proven health measures like pasteurization and vaccines.)
But as Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, the co-authors of the forthcoming book Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, chorused to me, RFK Jr. “isn’t in charge of the EPA.” In fact, the Project 2025 blueprint for the Trump presidency — over a third of which has already been implemented — explicitly singles out a need to “revisit” a Biden-era designation of PFAS as hazardous.
In filling out his environmental team, Trump reappointed Nancy Beck, who has a history of opposing PFAS regulations, as a senior adviser to the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety. Lynn Ann Dekleva — who spent three decades at DuPont, the chemical manufacturer accused of concealing the dangers of PFAS by Ohio attorney Rob Bilott of Dark Waters fame — is also now the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator. In Congress, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is chaired by Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who has argued that the dangers of PFAS have been overblown, and that the chemicals are too expensive to regulate. Widespread federal layoffs by Elon Musk’s efficiency team will also stymie efforts to curb PFAS, the regulation of which would require “scaling up — not scaling down — government bodies such as the EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and so on,” the International Chemical Secretariat, an environmental organization, has noted.
Though some states have begun implementing their own PFAS restrictions, “the more that we test for PFAS, the more places that we’re finding it,” Stoiber, the EWG scientist, told me. “It’s being addressed in a patchwork way.”
EWG recommends investing in a good water filtration system if you live in a place with PFAS contamination. But “we recognize that filtering water isn’t the solution to water contamination,” Sydney Evans, an EWG senior science analyst, added to me. “The burden should not be on the individual.”
Still, with clean water regulations in jeopardy, the onus nevertheless falls on individuals to assess their own risks. That’s long been the case with PFAS in particular, according to Udasin, the author. “It’s been like that from the beginning,” she told me. “Regulatory agencies kicked the can down the line; it was really the grassroots activists and scientists working together who raised awareness about this issue in terms of home filtration systems, which now some states have provided for people.”
Perhaps most alarming of all, though, is the fact that drinking water is only a part of the picture when it comes to PFAS exposure. “The water issue with PFAS is one that we often hear about because that’s the one that impacts a lot of people very acutely,” Frazin, Udasin’s co-author, told me. But people are also exposed to PFAS “in their personal care products, waterproof cosmetics, nonstick pans, and waterproof clothing. They’re also in a lot of stain-resistant sprays.” By the EPAs estimate, just 20% of PFAS exposure probably comes from contaminated drinking water.
The nasty truth about forever chemicals is contained in their name — they aren’t going away. The Larson Air Force Base in Lake Moses, Washington, closed in 1966, but the legacy of PFAS lingers in the groundwater to this day. Until a government steps up to regulate not just PFAS in drinking water, but production at the source, lives will be in danger. “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if PFAS wasn’t in the water to begin with,” Evans of EWG reminded me. “There is progress being made, but it’s looking upstream where we can solve a lot of these issues.”
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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.”