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They look like a weapon. They work like a weapon. But they could save countless lives.
I confess that when I first heard about flamethrowing drones, I did not think they sounded like a good idea.
Being an American sometimes means learning that flamethrowers can get marked down for Black Friday (25% off! Bitcoin accepted!) and that a device that shoots literal fire is “not considered a firearm” in the United States. These discoveries did not leave me with the best first impression; drones struck me as untrustworthy enough before I learned they were being rigged to ignite things.
But for all that they sounds like they belong in a supervillain’s arsenal, fire-starting drones could also save countless lives. That’s because unmanned vehicles — especially ones that fly — just might be the next frontier in wildland firefighting.
“It’s still pretty new technology and there’s a long way to go before it’s being used everywhere,” Carrick Detweiler, the CEO and co-founder of Drone Amplified, stressed to me. He and his team of computer science and engineering professors and alums from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are focused on supplying major fire agencies with devices that can be used to safely conduct backburns and prescribed burns. They already have “hundreds” of such drones out in the field, with clients including the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, as well as comparable fire agencies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Rather than mount a whole flamethrower to a drone, the Drone Amplified device works by dropping small potassium permanganate shells that had been injected with anti-freeze, causing the shells to ignite, over a landscape. (The shells are known as “dragon eggs.”) This allows fire agencies to conduct controlled low-intensity burns in hard-to-reach locations to limit the available fuel for future wildfires. It also allows firefighters to start what are known as backburns, defensive “counter-fires” of last resort that block an advancing wildfire from moving into a new landscape, and that are traditionally started by hand with dip torches.
IGNIS 2.0 Introductionyoutu.be
Most important of all, though, Drone Amplified’s invention keeps the skies above wildfires in the domain of unmanned aircraft. Already this month in Australia, where wildfire season is just beginning, a fire-mapping plane crashed, killing all three people on board, including a 22-year-old New Yorker. In the U.S. this summer, a helicopter collision in California killed an additional three who’d been attending to a grass fire. By the CDC’s measure, about a quarter of all firefighting deaths are aviation-related; according to High Country News, 37 firefighters died in aerial accidents between 2005 and 2015, meaning “more than 200 ground firefighters would die every year” if earthbound casualty rates were the same.
“A bushfire creates its own weather system, right?” Adrian Hollis of the Perth-based digital technology company Remsense, which is developing an aerial ignition system to rival Drone Amplified’s in Australia, explained to me. The heat from a wildfire creates an updraft, which in addition to natural weather conditions, can result in “a lot of wind shear,” Hollis went on. “And because you are fighting a fire, you’re so low [in a plane or helicopter] that you’ve got no recovery altitude. So if you go into a stall or something happens, you’ve got no height to get out of trouble. That’s why it’s so dangerous.”
With wildfires being so unpredictable and deadly, you’d think there would have already been more advances in firefighting drones and robotics. But what makes fires so complicated for humans to fight also makes them difficult for the equipment. “The environment of fighting fires is probably one of the most challenging environments for any technology,” Carlos Viegas, a mechanical engineer at Portugal’s University of Coimbra and the head of the school’s Field Tech Lab, told me.
Viegas’ specialty when it comes to drone payload isn’t fire; it’s water. In Portugal, where backburning is less common, he’s helped to invent a drone that will drag a fire hose to douse hard-to-reach or dangerous fires, the design of which required overcoming the same obstacles of high heat, low visibility, ashy air, and unpredictable weather conditions that a fire-dropping drone might encounter. “This is why we are still fighting fires the way we used to fight for the last 50 or 100 years, almost,” he said of the tough conditions engineers have to overcome in drone design. “The progress, in this case, it’s very slow.”
Beyond safety concerns, there are, of course, financial and logistical considerations compelling the advancements, too. Wildfires aren’t always cooperative, for one thing; they often start in areas where it’s hard — or expensive — to shuttle people to the site. In Hollis’ line of work, in Australia, responding to a wildfire might require transporting fuel, a helicopter, and staff hundreds of miles into remote or roadless terrain, all of which makes a drone that weighs only about as much as a small golden retriever when fully loaded far more appealing.
A drone is also cheaper. One of Drone Amplified’s Alta X’s, outfitted with the Ignis fire-starting system, runs around $80,000, which might sound expensive if you’re an, um, home flame-throwing enthusiast, but for a fire agency, “the alternative is a helicopter that costs $10,000 to $20,000 a day to operate,” Detweiler said. “And then the added risk of the people who are up in helicopters.” The price tag has the further benefit of deterring pyromaniacs; though anyone can technically buy one of Drone Amplified’s products, which the FAA has carved out a dangerous weapon exemption for, Detweiler reassuringly pointed out that “few people have $80,000 just to spend” and “we do have pretty in-depth discussions, and we do trainings, with users.”
Besides, the people the drone really needs to win over are the firefighters, who are understandably distrustful of newfangled gadgets that could quit on them in a life-or-death situation. But according to Detweiler, they are coming around: “It’s been really exciting to see just how the fire community has started to embrace these new technologies because historically, they’re putting their lives on the line and they trust their shovel and their chainsaw,” he said. “New technology really needs to work to get them to start adopting it.”
It might also, one day, make them obsolete. Already, drones are being used for fire surveillance and mapping, and Viegas, the Portuguese mechanical engineer, showed me videos of other autonomous systems the Field Tech Lab is pioneering, including a mini bulldozer that can dig a fireline and drones equipped with remote sensors that can tell when a landscape is becoming overgrown, and thus more fire-prone, long before people on the ground can.
On the one hand, it’s incredible to be on the cusp of this moment, where a technology shift could save hundreds of firefighters’ lives by taking them out of difficult, dangerous landscapes in the decades to come. On the other — and as the existence of an online flamethrower retailer perhaps implies — these are powerful tools in the wrong hands, too. Armchair drone enthusiasts have already scuttled wildfire suppression efforts by flying cameras over burns, grounding official aerial fire missions in the process, not to mention that some 89% of wildfires are started by people. I don’t have an enormous amount of trust that someone, somewhere, won’t do something dumb with an expensive toy.
But the upsides certainly outweigh any edge cases my overactive imagination can dream up. Viegas, for one, sees only upsides: “I firmly believe that we are working towards a solution where we won’t need any firefighters in the terrain — we will just fight fires with unmanned means,” he said.
And while the “dangerous weapon” parallel is never too far away from something like a fire-starting drone, he suggested the embrace of the technology requires a simple reframe of the enemy. “In the war, you are seeing already everything is done by drones,” Viegas said. “I believe that in the war against fires, it’s going to be the same as well.”
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A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.
A conservation with George Povall of All Our Energy
Today’s chat is with George Povall, director of the All Our Energy pro-offshore wind environmental group. Povall – who told me he was inspired to be an environmentalist by the film Avatar – has for more than a decade been a key organizer on the ground in the Long Island area for supporting offshore wind development. But these days he spends a lot more time fighting renewables disinformation, going so far as to travel the community trying to re-educate people about this technology in light of the loud activism against it.
After the news dropped that states are suing to undo the Trump executive order against offshore wind, I wanted to chat with Povell about what environmentalists should do to combat the anti-renewables movement and whether there’s still any path forward for the industry he’s spent nearly a decade working to build as an activist.
The following conversation transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Okay so first of all, what made you become a pro-wind environmental activist?
This all goes back to maybe 15 years ago. I’ve always been environmentally minded. I’m 55 years old and not from the nonprofit sector. I like everybody else was living my normal life and maybe with some naivete thought that if things were good and economical and made sense and worked better than what we were doing in the past, we’d move on from that. But time kept creeping along and we went through the 1990s and 2000s and then I began to become more aware. I just thought people who knew more than I did would do something about this.
Surprisingly I look back and a movie that really motivated me to do what I’m doing is Avatar. They’re destroying the planet for the materials – exactly what we’re seeing now. We’re seeing it more than ever, with someone who is almost like a comic book villain now wanting to strip-mine the sea bed. I wonder what the anti-offshore wind people have to say about that.
It’s been surprising to me. We had always known there was going to be opposition to offshore wind, and disinformation coming. We had always tried to get out ahead of it but we were always unsuccessful in getting funding to deal with that.
Did the developers get ahead of it?
No. I think the developers got a lot of bad advice from the public relations firms they were using.
We kept telling them, please just tell the people what’s going on. I can see how they got into that position because people were asking questions about things that weren’t decided yet. But instead of saying they didn’t know and it wasn’t decided yet, they refused to admit they didn’t know something, even if that was the case. It engendered a lot of distrust in the communities that opponents were able to seize on quite easily.
I know from someone who has done campaigns of community organizing before, you just tell people what it is and what you know. It engenders trust. Unfortunately it didn’t go that way and I think a big part of that is they should’ve been more ready for people who were not willing to accept any answer as acceptable.
It feels to me like offshore wind has now become a wedge issue. A culture war issue. And they got people who frankly should’ve known better to listen to some of the least reliable people in the community throwing out claims that were ridiculous. And they overwhelmed a lot of people with half truths, misinformation. People couldn’t keep up.
What is the environmental movement actually doing now to address what is not just a policy problem but a cultural problem?
Well, that’s a great question and we have been trying to turn it around for a while. Though we have some resources, it is really hard to deprogram people. It’s very hard. I have spoken to people who came to me and said, I haven’t made up my mind. I am just looking for the right information. And when I gave it to them, they told me I was a “climate cult zealot.” That’s what everybody in the environmental movement is to them.
We need to really just bring in the people who support this stuff. It’s a basic concept but unfortunately we’ve never had the capacity to do that kind of thing. It’s something bigger organizations were doing, but they don’t have capacity for it now either. So it’s on us to just find the things that aren’t being done and do them. It’s about building coalitions.
It’s about starting from zero. Having offshore wind 101 information sessions and getting other organizations involved and getting their people educated. It can’t be a single process doing that. If the general public knew how a wind turbine works, if the average person on the street knew how it works, they’d laugh at people when they throw disinformation at them – but they don’t know it’s nonsense yet.