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The whales will be fine.
Donald Trump loves eagles and whales and therefore he wants to protect them — from clean energy development.
Trump may, however, be relieved to hear that many of his concerns about wind and solar energy are unfounded. Here’s what he gets right and wrong.
Pointing out the window to the Atlantic Ocean at one point, one attendee said, the former president claimed that offshore wind turbines break down when they are exposed to saltwater … [April 17, 2024]
Fact check: Let’s just get this out of the way: offshore wind turbines are designed to withstand saltwater exposure. People have been building things in saltwater for a long, long time. From the oldest known ships constructed 6,000 years ago out of papyrus reeds to Norway’s Troll A platform — a reinforced concrete offshore natural gas platform and the tallest structure ever moved by humankind — we’ve learned a few things about resisting salt corrosion.
This scene occurred during a fundraising dinner with oil and gas executives at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort reported on by The Washington Post, which also pointed out this obvious fact. That said, to the former president’s credit, “the ocean is indeed a difficult environment” for construction and engineering, Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering professor and the director of the offshore wind energy graduate program at Tufts University, told me. But the lifespan of offshore structures can range from a few years to more than a century.
According to Hines, most offshore wind farms today are built to have “approximately 25-year service lives,” but the design is always evolving. His department, for example, is working on developing advanced underwater foundations that are built to last more than a century and double as artificial reefs.
“I like the concept of solar, but it’s not powerful like what we need to fire up our factories.” [Dec. 16, 2023]
Fact check: “That question is actually a little bit tricky,” Baker, the assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado, told me, when I asked him whether solar alone could power a factory — but it’s also not really what we should be asking. “One thing I’ve noticed people do a lot is they’ll just compare efficiency of power generation,” Baker explained. But “it’s not just about the efficiency — it’s about other things, too, like solar’s ability to be distributed. You can’t put a nuclear fission power plant in your house — you know, not yet — but you can put solar panels, so that’s a huge benefit. It offers some resiliency that other sources just can’t offer.”
It’s true that solar power is less efficient than other sources of energy, including wind, and that it requires a lot of surface area, which could be an undue burden for a manufacturer. But at the same time, “I don’t know if anybody is proposing to power an entire factory based off of solar,” Baker said.“Their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up on shore. I saw it this weekend: Three of them came up! You wouldn’t see it once a year; now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.” [Sept. 25, 2023]
Fact check: If you ever want to feel ridiculous, try asking a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration if windmills are making whales “a little batty.”
NOAA actively studies how “sound, vessel, and other human activities” impact marine life, Lauren Gaches, the director of NOAA Fisheries Public Affairs, told me over email. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales,” she said.
An ongoing “unusual mortality event” for humpback whales has resulted in 200 whale deaths between 2016 and June 2023 along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida — that much is true. But “there are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys,” Gaches told me. NOAA’s fact page on whales and offshore wind explains that of “roughly 90 whales examined, about 40% had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement.”
There has been some chatter about underwater surveying work disrupting whales, which may be true in the case of oil and gas surveys, which use seismic air guns to penetrate deep into the ocean floor. The surveying equipment used for offshore wind is, by contrast, used in 15-second bursts and limited to a specific area, “so the likelihood of an animal encountering and coming right into that sound beam is quite low,” Erica Staaterman, the deputy director for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Center for Marine Acoustics, said on a NOAA-hosted call with the press early last year.
As Ben Laws, the deputy chief of NOAA’s Permits and Conservation Division in the Office of Protected Resources, said on the same call, “There is no information that would support any suggestion that any of the equipment that’s being used in support of wind development for these site characterization surveys could directly lead to the death of a whale.”
“If you go out hunting and you happen to shoot a bald eagle, they put you in jail, like, for five years, right? They kill thousands of them with these windmills; nothing happens.” [Jan. 28, 2023]
“If you want to see a bird cemetery, go under a windmill sometime. You’ll see birds like you never saw. If you love birds, you’ll start to weep.” [Dec. 16, 2023]
Fact check: Trump has had a vendetta against wind turbines since long before he ever ran for president. “Wind farms are killing many thousands of birds,” reads one illustrative tweet from 2012. “They make hunters look like nice people!”
Lewis Grove is the director of wind and energy policy at the American Bird Conservancy, and he told me that while it’s “not necessarily as simple as Mr. Trump painted it out to be, wind turbines absolutely kill birds.”
But the context here is extremely important. Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for the American Clean Power Association, a leading renewable energy trade group, pointed me to research from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that shows wind farms “represent just 0.03% of all human-related bird deaths in the U.S.” Grove likewise told me that, for the most part, bird deaths due to wind turbines do “not have population-level impacts.”
There are exceptions, such as an infamous wind farm in California’s Altamont Pass built in 1981 that “just happened to be in a place that was really heavily used by golden eagles,” Grove told me. Because golden eagle populations were already very low, having 100 or so killed a year by turbines was “unsustainable.” Even in a case like this, though, it behooves one to look at the whole picture: “They found it was a few individual turbines that were causing the damage,” Grove said. These days, around 60 golden eagles a year are killed in Alameda County, the Alameda Post reports, and the operating company must pay steep penalties for eagle deaths.
What’s more, “climate change is one of the greatest threats birds face, with two-thirds of North American species at risk of extinction due to our warming planet,” Jon Belak, senior manager of science and data analysis at The National Audubon Society, told me in a statement. “We need to build more wind and solar facilities to help slow the rise in global temperatures and protect birds and their habitats from a changing climate.”
Wind farms may not have population-level impacts on birds, but fracking does — “the onset of shale oil and gas production reduces subsequent bird population counts by 15%,” even after accounting for factors like weather and other land-use changes, according to one just-published, peer-reviewed study.
“Remember the windmills? ‘Darling, darling, I want to watch the president, I love him so much. I want to watch him on television tonight.’ ‘I’m sorry, but the wind isn’t blowing, you’ll have to wait ‘til another time.’ Windmills.” [March 26, 2022]
Fact check: “I mean, it’s possible with any mix of generation that if supply and demand aren’t equal, your TV will go out. That’s just physics,” Kyri Baker, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado, told me when I asked her if Trump’s scenario had any merit. In other words, a power outage could happen whether your electricity is coming from coal or natural gas or anything else. The difference, she said, is that “wind is by nature variable, intermittent. But it’s also not reliant on fuel like natural gas or coal plants or even nuclear plants are.”
What happens on days when there is no wind? “Grids are extremely regulated,” Baker explained to me. “There’s so many layers of redundancy that aim specifically to not have [an outage] happen.” A grid is made up of diverse electricity sources (for my visual learners, Canary imagines what a net-zero grid could look like here), as well as measures like offline backup generators, which can kick in if need be, so service isn’t disrupted.
Battery storage is another huge part of this equation. While they’re still fairly cutting-edge as climate technology goes, high-capacity batteries that can manage grid-scale energy needs are getting better and more plentiful.
“Stop with all of the windmills all over the place that are ruining the atmosphere.” [Jan. 20, 2022]
Fact check: Wind turbines do not damage the literal atmosphere.
But maybe Trump meant atmosphere as in “sense of place”? Most Americans don’t seem to think windmills are “ruining” anything. In a recent Heatmap poll, nearly eight in 10 Americans said they want the government to make it easier to build new wind farms. The Washington Postsimilarly found last year that about 70% of Americans said they wouldn’t mind living near a wind farm.
As my colleague Robinson Meyer has written, “American laws today give even a small, well-resourced minority plenty of tools to block a project” like a wind farm, and “what’s more, once that small group starts campaigning against a project, the public’s broad but shallow support for, say, a general technology can crater. That’s what happened recently in New Jersey, where a once broadly pro-wind public has turned against four proposed offshore wind farms.”
“It’s a very expensive form — probably the most expensive form of energy.” [Jan. 20, 2022]
Fact check: Wind in general is not the most expensive form of energy, but offshore wind is very expensive — for now.
Of the energy sources we’re currently used to, nuclear is usually cited as having the highest levelized cost of electricity — that is, it has the highest average cost per unit of electricity generated after construction, maintenance, and operation have been taken into account. Peaker plants — gas-powered plants that run just during times of peak demand — usually come in second.
Offshore wind is costly, with the levelized cost of electricity from a subsidized U.S. offshore wind project increasing “to $114.20 per megawatt-hour in 2023, up almost 50% from 2021 levels in nominal terms,” BloombergNEF reports. Many of the factors making offshore wind so expensive — including permitting delays, high interest rates, and supply chain issues — will abate with time. Meanwhile, onshore wind is one of the cheapest forms of electricity available and has boasted a “lower LCOE than gas plants since 2015,” Sustainable Energy in America reports.
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From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.