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Here’s how workers feel about the elimination of mandatory water breaks amid unrelenting summer heat.
Jerry Margoitta is all too familiar with heat stroke.
“I’ll never forget it,” Margoitta told me. He was working as a water meter reader in Waco, Texas, back when meter readers still walked to each house, and he’d finished a few blocks worth of houses when he saw a coworker nearby. “He was coming towards me, and I went to turn around, and I just passed out.”
He came to in a hospital bed, with his mother and then-wife standing over him. “I was down for four days,” Margoitta said. “If it weren’t for my coworker I would have been dead in a ditch.”
That was over three decades ago, when he was 26 years old. He’s now 59, and in the time since Margoitta has worked a variety of jobs outdoors, primarily in construction. Heat has backgrounded practically his entire working life: The Texas summer is long and hot, the ground reflects the heat to intensify the effects of the sun, and heavy machinery boils the air around it.
In that kind of environment, it’s easy to miss the warning signs of heat-related illnesses. On particularly hot days, Margoitta avoids eating outside of his lunch break — a full stomach, he says, would make the heat even worse. Dehydration can also set in quickly, and the best way to deal with it is active prevention, or drinking more water than feels necessary; if someone waits until they feel thirsty, they may already be dehydrated.
So when Margoitta heard that Texas governor Greg Abbott had approved a law that would eliminate mandatory water breaks, he was flabbergasted.
“When I first read it, I was like, no, that can't be. I wouldn't know why they would make something so vital go away,” he told me. “I would hope that no employer would honor it. A lot of companies already take advantage of their employees, but now they’re going to make it even worse. They can get away with it now. They're going to close out the one thing that probably keeps people alive.”
Supporters of the bill, which will eliminate ordinances in Dallas and Austin that mandated 10-minute water breaks every four hours when it goes into effect in September, say guidelines set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are enough to ensure worker safety, and that the local laws are bad for business. But OSHA still hasn’t issued guidelines for workplace heat — though they’re expected later this year — and the Texas Observer reports that at least three people have died on the job since the bill passed. Opponents call the bill the “Death Star” law.
“All it does is simply demonstrate the lack of value on a human life,” Matt Gonzales, business manager for Local 1095, an affiliate of the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA) and the union that represents Margoitta. “An employee earning $18 an hour will produce $3 of production in 10 minutes. This is the dollar amount that the governor places on the lives of the workers who may die as a result of this disastrous legislation.”
Labor unions like LiUNA have breaks built into the contracts they negotiate with employers, so union members like Margoitta are protected regardless of the “Death Star” bill. But job sites tend to have a mixture of union and non-union labor, and the non-unionized laborers don’t get those benefits. Many of the non-unionized workers, Margoitta told me, are low-income or unhoused, which makes them easier to exploit and also means they have little respite from the heat.
“You step outside right now, and the heat will take your breath away,” Margoitta said. “There’s no place to hide.”
As I wrote last week, unions are increasingly factoring climate change into their plans, both for the job potential and to safeguard their workers from climate impacts. In Texas, a coalition of unions, including LiUNA, have come together under the banner of the Texas Climate Jobs Project to ensure good clean-energy jobs for their members. Now, they’re trying to figure out how workers — union and non-union alike — can be protected in the wake of the “Death Star” bill. In San Antonio, for example, they’re trying to build rest breaks into contracts for city projects and create a scoring mechanism that would tell workers which employers willfully provide rest breaks.
“We’re just trying to be creative and find ways that through policy and procedure we can get some of these things addressed,” Gonzales said. “Until there is a change in our elected officials and who's representing the citizens of Texas, we're not going to be able to effect drastic change. But in the meantime, it's up to organized labor and our community partners to band together and find ways that we can work around the anti worker legislation and bills.”
Until then, Margoitta is going to have to continue finding ways to live with the heat. He just wrapped up one job and is about to start another, helping to build a highway extension near Austin. At first, the supervisor asked if he could work on pouring concrete — a job that would require being out under the sun all day long.
“I was like, you get a bunch of 19-year-olds to do that, because I’m not about to,” Margoitta told me.
Instead, he’ll be operating a drilling machine. He wishes he had more experience operating equipment of that sort, but it comes with one big perk: An air conditioned cab.
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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.