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On rooftop solar, Tim Walz’s climate record, and paint that can cool cars
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Debby will make landfall again somewhere between Myrtle Beach and Charleston, South Carolina, tonight • Torrential rain brought severe flooding to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, where extreme heat killed more than 1,000 pilgrims in June • Non-essential outdoor lighting has been banned in China’s megacity of Hangzhou to conserve energy amid a scorching heat wave.
Vice President Kamala Harris yesterday tapped Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate in the 2024 presidential election, delighting the climate left. Of all the finalists reportedly in contention, Walz had the most impressive clean energy and environmental accomplishments:
In a statement, Evergreen Action Executive Director Lena Moffitt applauded Walz’s “masterclass in how to govern in a way that meaningfully improves people’s lives and sets the state up for a thriving future.” Cassidy DiPaola, the communications director at Fossil Free Media and a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, likewise acknowledged Walz’s progress on green issues, nodding to his “evolution into a climate champion.” She added that Walz has more than proven himself at the state level and that “his ability to connect climate policy to the everyday concerns of Midwestern and rural voters could prove invaluable in building broader support for climate action.”
The Treasury Department today released new data that offers the most significant insight yet into how Americans are actually using the Inflation Reduction Act. The numbers show more than 3 million households used the IRA’s subsidies for homeowners last year, collectively saving more than $8 billion on things like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, insulation, and other clean energy technologies and efficiency upgrades. A closer look at the data reveals the rooftop solar tax credit was especially popular, and particularly in sun belt states (no big surprises there perhaps). Northeastern states leapt at the energy efficiency tax credit, which encourages Americans to make energy efficient changes to their home, e.g. installing a heat pump or a more efficient water heater. But “not all of the data flatters the Biden administration’s goals,” wrote Emily Pontecorvo and Robinson Meyer for Heatmap. “The tax credits — especially those that reward energy-efficient home upgrades — are used in large part by richer households who have the money and wherewithal to pay for costly upgrades to their homes in the first place.” Read their full analysis of the data here.
SunPower, one of the largest installers of residential rooftop solar in the U.S., has filed for bankruptcy. High interest rates and inflation have hurt demand for residential solar, “leaving companies with too much inventory on hand,” CNBC reported. But SunPower faced internal issues in recent months, too. The company breached a credit agreement, and was notified by Nasdaq that it was out of compliance with financial reporting requirements by not filing on time. “SunPower’s travails are emphatically a company-specific issue and should not be seen as a comment on the underlying demand for U.S. residential solar,” Pavel Molchanov, an analyst with Raymond James, toldBloomberg. “It has been a difficult six months for SunPower.”
Rivian beat Wall Street’s expectations for revenue in its second-quarter earnings report yesterday. The EV startup reported $1.16 billion in revenue, just above analysts’ projections. But its net losses didn’t budge much compared to Q1, coming in at about $1.46 billion thanks in part to a planned shut down at an Illinois factory that reduced production. And the company is still losing money on every vehicle it builds, but it lost less per vehicle in Q2 ($32,705) than in Q1 ($38,784). Rivian has been working to cut costs through more efficient manufacturing, and still expects to record a gross profit by the end of the year. Looking ahead, pre-orders for the R2, set for launch in 2026, have surpassed 100,000, according to the company’s vice president of manufacturing Tim Fallon.
Nissan is testing a new kind of car paint that it claims can reflect the sun’s near-infrared rays and redirect the energy back into the atmosphere, thus keeping vehicles cooler on hot days. It’s been trialing the paint on a Nissan NV100 service vehicle as it drives around on the scorching tarmac at Tokyo International Air Terminal. Early results have been “impressive,” the company said in a news release. The paint seems capable of reducing the car’s internal temperatures by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and cutting exterior surface temperatures by about 21 degrees. “A cooler cabin is not only more pleasant to enter, but also requires less air-conditioning run-time to cool the cabin to a comfortable temperature,” Nissan said. “This helps reduce load to the engine, or in the case of an electric vehicle, draw on the battery. In both powertrains, an improvement in efficiency is expected, as well as occupant comfort.”
Nissan
“Removing political and cultural barriers to EVs as a whole is certainly something to celebrate, even while the exact motivations remain suspect.” –Heatmap’s Jeva Lange on MAGA’s somewhat puzzling obsession with the Cybertruck.
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If Hurricane Helene were the only memorable storm to make landfall in the U.S. in 2024, this would still be remembered as an historically tragic season. Since its arrival as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region, Helene has killed more than 100 people and caused more than $160 billion across six states. Recovery efforts are expected to last years, if not decades, in the hardest-hit regions of Western North Carolina, some 300 miles inland and 2,000 feet above the nearest coastline. “Helene is going to go down as one of the most impactful hurricanes in U.S. history,” AccuWeather’s senior director of forecasting operations, Dan DePodwin, told me when we spoke on Friday.
As of Monday morning, the National Hurricane Center is tracking five additional systems in the Atlantic basin. Two of those storms reached named status on Friday — Joyce and Isaac — though their paths appear to keep them safely in the middle of the Atlantic. A third storm, Kirk, reached tropical storm strength on Monday and is expected to strengthen into a major hurricane, but is likewise likely to turn north and stay out at sea.
But the two other systems could potentially make U.S. landfall. The first and most concerning is an area of low pressure in the Caribbean “similar to where Helene developed,” DePodwin told me. “We’re going to be monitoring that from the middle to end of [this] week. All options are open with where it could go — anywhere along the Gulf Coast, from Mexico to Florida.”
Directly behind Kirk, in the eastern Tropical Atlantic and out toward the Cape Verde islands, another tropical depression is likely forming. “Anytime you get a tropical wave coming off of Africa this time of year, in late September or early October,” you want to keep an eye on it, DePodwin went on. Sometimes, depending on the weather patterns, those storms stay far out at sea, like Joyce or Kirk. “But the next one probably has a better chance of making it farther west across the Atlantic” because of the prevailing weather patterns, DePodwin said. “So we’ll keep an eye on that one” — though forecasters are still days away from knowing if it could make it as far west as the East Coast.
Let this be a lesson in speaking too soon. Although the 2024 hurricane season went through a long lull at the end of the summer, it’s about to definitively silence any talk of it being a “quiet” year. “We’re predicting at least [five] more named storms to get to that 16 to 20 named storm range that we have for the season,” DePodwin told me. Many of those would likely come in October, which “can be a pretty active month,” but due to the “La Niña pattern we’re moving into and the very warm waters of the [Atlantic] Basin, we think we could get a couple of named storms in November, which is not always the case.”
Finishing the season with 16 to 20 named storms would put 2024 well above the 1991-2020 average of 14 named storms per year. But as hurricane forecasters are always quick to point out, all it takes is one destructive storm making landfall for it to be a “bad” hurricane year. In that case, there’s no debate: 2024 is already bad. Now we must wait, prepare, and hope it doesn’t get any worse.
Ever since Elon Musk “persuaded” Donald Trump to take it easy on his electric vehicle-bashing, the former president’s EV riffs have gotten pretty boring. Thank goodness, then, that there’s a new boogeyman in town: hydrogen cars.
Never mind that there are only about 18,000 hydrogen cars on the roads in the U.S. and so few refueling stations that one of the two manufacturers of them, Toyota, is getting sued. According to Trump, hydrogen cars are “the new thing,” as he warned his supporters last week during a stop in Savannah, Georgia (roughly 1,900 miles from the nearest hydrogen refueling station):
“They say the new thing is hydrogen cars, but they’re having a problem. If it explodes, you end up about seven blocks away. And you’re dead. So personally, I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna take a pass. But maybe they’ll figure it out. But right now, I wouldn’t recommend it.” [via RawStory]
This is, admittedly, a pretty funny bit — even if it’s totally inaccurate, according to Bill Elrick, the executive director of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership, a nonprofit group of auto manufacturers, energy providers, and government agencies that promote hydrogen vehicles in California. “I get where it comes from, and it is one of our biggest challenges in the industry — helping people understand what hydrogen is without diving into the depths of how a vehicle operates,” he told me.
As Elrick pointed out, when most people hear “hydrogen,” they think either of water (“which is fine”), the Hindenburg disaster (“we don’t do anything 100 years later the same way that we used to”), or, most problematically, the hydrogen bomb. “That’s something that is a completely different chemical reaction and, I think, where some of the safety scare comes from,” Elrick told me.
But hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (or HFCVs) are no more a bomb than gas-powered vehicles — perhaps less so, because they must meet the same rigorous safety codes and standards as any other car or truck on the road in addition to extra precautions to ensure the fuel cells won’t be punctured in a bad accident or potentially leak.
In a HFCV, hydrogen stored in a high-pressure tank is mixed in a fuel cell with oxygen from the air to induce a chemical reaction that produces electricity, which powers an electric motor that drives the car, just as it would in an EV. While batteries and electricity are familiar concepts, however, and therefore less scary as automotive power sources, current popular uses of hydrogen, such as refining oil and producing fertilizers, are not as visible to most people going about their daily lives as, say, their cell phones.
That’s not to say hydrogen is 100% safe. “Anything that moves a vehicle that weighs two tons or more — if it’s electricity, gasoline, or hydrogen — clearly has dangers and risks associated with it,” Elrick said. “If we could power our cars with peanut butter, it would have that energy potential.” But car manufacturers (just like electric boat manufacturers) have considered the possibility of their vehicles being involved in crashes and designed them accordingly.
The Center for Hydrogen Safety maintains a database of hydrogen-related accidents to serve as “lessons learned” as the technology continues to develop. Though there are still relatively few HFCVs on the roads, as of this spring there had been no recorded automotive fatalities credited specifically to hydrogen fuel cells. (In other words, no one has ended up “about seven blocks away” dead from an explosion.) One researcher even found that “in a collision in open spaces,” an HFCV should actually have “less potential hazard” than a gas car due to the extensive precautions taken when building their tanks (“their hardware would likely survive even if the rest of the car were destroyed in a crash,” per Car and Driver).
But Trump’s HFCV-phobia probably isn’t the biggest takeaway here. Some sectors of the hydrogen industry are potentially on the chopping block if Trump returns to the White House — since, as my colleague Katie Brigham writes, “green hydrogen made from renewable-powered electrolyzers is expensive and the proposed strict rules that would allow it to qualify for the most generous tax credit [would likely be] goners” under a Republican administration. Trump’s suspicion of new uses for hydrogen certainly doesn’t bode well.
As for any lingering fears about exploding hydrogen cars that Trump might have planted — hey, at least it’d be a quicker end than death-by-shark.
On extreme flooding in North Carolina, another nuclear revival, and the U.K.’s last coal plant
Current conditions: Flooding and landslides in Nepal over the weekend killed almost 200 people • Storm John dumped more than three feet of rain on southern Mexico • An autumn heat wave is settling over the California coast.
The remnants of Hurricane Helene swept northeast over the weekend, bringing intense rainfall and catastrophic flooding to Central Appalachian states. Western North Carolina has been particularly hard hit. Asheville recorded about 18 inches of rain over three days, which is far more than the city typically sees in an entire month, and the resulting flooding is nothing short of devastating. At least 91 deaths have been recorded as a result of the storm but the death toll is expected to rise as the water recedes and the search for missing people continues.
Flooding in AshevilleMelissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
Storm damage in AshevilleSean Rayford/Getty Images
While the worst of Helene has passed, more rain is still on the way for the region. More than 2 million customers are without power across the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, and Florida. Hundreds of roads are closed and some towns are completely isolated. “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in western portions of our area,” reported a weather service in western North Carolina. Vice President Kamala Harris has paused her 2024 presidential campaign to return to Washington and be briefed on the federal response to the storm. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will visit Georgia to survey the damage.
FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said global warming made the damage from Helene worse. E&E Newsnoted that Asheville had previously been described as a “climate haven,” and said the storm serves as a reminder that “no regions are immune to the dangers of climate-fueled disasters.” AccuWeather estimated that the total damage and economic loss from Helene will be between $145 billion and $160 billion. Many of the homes that have been inundated lack flood insurance, Bloombergreported.
The Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture announced Monday that they are together putting forward billions of dollars to support the re-opening of the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan — the first in U.S. history.
The plant was shuttered in 2022, and since 2023, state and federal officials have been working to reopen the plant — as have the plant’s owner, Holtec, and Wolverine Power, a power company that purchases power on behalf of its member utilities. Those efforts received a boost Monday morning with the closing of a $1.52 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, announced provisionally in March, and more than $1.3 billion in funds from the Department of Agriculture, split up between Wolverine Power and Hoosier Energy, a cooperative serving rural utilities in Indiana and Illinois. The USDA funds will defray a quarter of the cost of the power purchase agreement between the cooperatives and Palisades, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Xochitl Torres Small told reporters.
The restarted plant would have some 800 megawatts of capacity, and the project will employ some 600 people, said Deputy Secretary of Energy Dave Turk on a call with reporters. The plant could be up and running in “a couple of years,” an administration official said. “The funds from this closed loan from the DOE announced today will be utilized in the necessary inspections, testing, restoration, rebuilding, and replacement of existing equipment,” the official said. Holtec is currently working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on reauthorizing its license to operate the plant.
The U.S. Forest Service is now working with the well-funded carbon removal startup Charm Industrial in a two-for-one endeavor to reduce wildfire risk and permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported. The federal agency and its official nonprofit partner, the National Forest Foundation, have partnered with the San Francisco-based company on a pilot program to turn leftover trees and other debris from forest-thinning operations into bio-oil, a liquid made from organic matter, to be injected underground. The project is a part of a larger Cal Fire grant, to implement forest health measures as well as seek out innovative biomass utilization solutions. If the pilot scales up, Charm can generate carbon removal credits by permanently locking away the CO2 from biomass, while the Forest Service will finally find a use for the piles of leftover trees that are too small for the sawmill’s taste. The pilot is taking place in Inyo National Forest in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, and comprises 538 acres of forest. Charm is processing just 60 tons of biomass over six weeks of operation in Inyo. The pilot is already more than halfway over.
The United Kingdom was home to the world’s first coal-fired power plant, which opened in 1882. Today, it became the first G7 country to phase out coal as a source of electricity with the closure of its last coal-fired plant. As recently as 2012, nearly 40% of the country’s electricity came from coal. But since then, coal has seen a rapid decline. Fifteen coal power plants have shut down or switched fuels, and wind and solar power generation have soared. As a result, carbon emissions from the U.K.’s power sector have fallen by 74%, according to a report from energy think tank Ember. “U.K. policies have incentivised the rapid deployment of renewable energy over the last decade, while simultaneously tightening restrictions on high polluting coal power plants,” the report said. Wind power in particular grew by 315% from 2012 to 2023. What’s more, the move away from coal has happened even without a big shift to natural gas:
Ember
A gardener in Washington state has discovered a new flower that looks like a mashup between a daffodil and a dahlia. They’re calling it the Daffodahlia: