You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.