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Ocean-based storms are increasingly affecting areas hundreds of miles from the coasts.
After a hurricane makes landfall comes the eerie wait for bad news. For Hurricane Helene — now a tropical storm as it barrels toward Nashville — that news came swiftly on Friday morning: at least 4 million are without power after the storm’s Thursday night arrival near Florida’s Big Bend region; more than 20 are dead in three states; and damage estimates are already in the billions of dollars.
But that’s just the news from the coasts.
As Helene is set to illustrate yet again, hurricanes are not just coastal events — especially in the era of our warming climate. The National Weather Service warned towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina and Georgia that Helene will be “one of the most significant weather events” in the region in “the modern era,” while the Appalachians are in store for a “catastrophic, historic flooding disaster” according to AccuWeather’s Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter during a briefing with reporters Friday morning. He added for good measure: “This is not the kind of language we use very often.”
Helene’s dangerous inland impacts are precisely what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sounded the alarm over earlier this year. Ninety percent of hurricane fatalities result from water, and almost 60% of those are freshwater deaths caused by heavy rainfall. Such fatalities often occur hundreds of miles from the shore in flash floods fueled by the warmer atmosphere, which can hold and dispense far more moisture in a short period than would have been possible in the pre-industrial era.
With Helene specifically, “there are going to be communities that are cut off” as bridges are compromised and roadways wash out, Porter said. Especially in mountain communities that might have only one or two ways in and out of town, that kind of rain raises the level of difficulty for any sort of emergency response and can make evacuation impossible. There have already been reports of 12 to 15 inches of rain in some parts of North Carolina.
“This is steep terrain,” Porter said. “When you get rain rates of 2 to 4 inches per hour, that is going to result in very significant flash flooding that can go from a dangerous situation to a life-threatening emergency over the matter of just a few minutes.” Rivers could exceed record levels by tonight, with more than 2 million under flash flood warnings around Raleigh and Fayetteville. Landslides are also a possibility in the mountains, where just 5 inches of rain from a single storm can be enough to trigger a disaster, the National Hurricane Center warned; two interstates near Asheville, North Carolina, are already closed due to slides.
It’s certainly not unheard of for the remnants of tropical storms to pass over the Carolinas and Appalachian Mountains — hurricanes such as Katrina in 2005 and Lee in 2011 were deadly billion-dollar disasters even as far inland as Tennessee. But as storms get bigger and wetter like Helene, “even people who have lived in a community for decades may see water flowing fast and rising rapidly in areas that they’ve never seen flood before,” Porter said.
It’s time to adjust expectations — and preparedness plans — accordingly. Louisiana, Texas, and Florida still stand for “Hurricane Country” in the popular imagination, but the mountain states of the southeast are rapidly joining that list. The National Hurricane Center is already monitoring a new low-pressure area in the Gulf of Mexico — in nearly the exact same spot that birthed Helene.
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A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.
Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.
The EPA is drafting termination letters to all 60 grantees, the Times reported. An EPA spokesperson equivocated in response to emailed questions from Heatmap about the fate of the program. “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law,” the person said.
Although Solar for All was one of the programs affected by the Trump administration’s initial freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funding, EPA had resumed processing payments for recipients after a federal judge placed an injunction on the pause. But in mid-March, the EPA Office of the Inspector General announced its intent to audit Solar for All. The results of that audit have not yet been published.
The Solar for All grants are a subset of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, most of which had been designated to set up a series of green lending programs. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the program of fraud, waste, and abuse — the so-called “gold bar” scandal — and attempted to claw back all $20 billion. Recipients of that funding are fighting the termination in an ongoing court case.
State attorneys generals are likely to challenge the Solar for All terminations in court, should they go through, a source familiar with the state programs told me.
All $7 billion under the program has been obligated to grantees, but the money is not yet fully out the door, as recipients must request reimbursements from the EPA as they spend down their grants. Very little has been spent so far, as many grantees opted to use the first year of the five-year program as a planning period.
Along with Senator John Curtis of Utah, the Iowa senator is aiming to preserve the definition of “begin construction” as it applies to tax credits.
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley wants “begin construction” to mean what it means.
To that end, Grassley has placed a “hold” on three nominees to the Treasury Department, the agency tasked with writing the rules and guidance for implementing the tax provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, many of which depend on that all-important definition.
Grassley and other Republican senators had negotiated a “glidepath for the orderly phaseout” of tax credits for renewables, the senator in a statement announcing the hold, giving developers until July 2026 to start construction on projects (or complete the projects and have them operating by the end of 2027) to qualify for tax credits.
Days after signing the law, however, President Trump signed an executive order calling for new guidance on what exactly starting construction means. The title of that order, “Ending Market Distorting Subsidies for Unreliable, Foreign Controlled Energy Sources,” has generated understandable concern within the renewables industry that, as part of a deal to get conservative House members to support the bill, the Treasury Department will write new guidance making it much more difficult for wind and solar projects to qualify for tax credits.
“What it means for a project to ‘begin construction'’ has been well established by Treasury guidance for more than a decade,” Grassley said. Under these longstanding definitions, “beginning construction” can mean undertaking “physical work of a significant nature,” which can include or buying certain long-lead equipment or components like transformers. Another way to qualify for the credits is to spend 5% of the total cost of the project.
A more restrictive interpretation of “begin construction,” however, could turn the tax credit language into a dead letter, especially when combined with the rest of the administration’s full-spectrum legal assault on renewable energy.
Grassley said that new guidance is expected within two weeks, and that “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent, I intend to continue to object to the consideration of these Treasury nominees.”Grassley has a long history with production tax credits for wind energy, playing a pivotal role in their extension in 2015. “As the father of the first wind energy tax credit in 1992, I can say that the tax credit was never meant to be permanent,” Grassley said at the time. “The five-year extension for wind energy brings about the best possible long-term outcome that provides certainty, predictability and a responsible phase-down of a tax incentive for a renewable energy source.”
Almost 60% of Iowa’s electricity is generated by wind turbines, the highest proportion of any state, according to Energy Information Administration data.
Utah Senator John Curtis has joined Grassley in placing a hold on nominees, delaying their vote before the whole Senate, according to Politico’s Joshua Siegel. Grassley and Curtis, alongside Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, were unable to get a meeting with the Treasury Department to discuss the guidance, Siegel reported.