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If you’re going to have a giant hole of water in your backyard, put it to good use.
In the grand ranking of Fun Things You Should Feel Bad About, swimming pools are up there with Oreos and road trips. After all, when the U.N. says two-thirds of the world could face water-stressed conditions by 2025, it tends to put a damper on the guilt-free enjoyment of the giant hole of clean water in your backyard.
A new study published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability more or less confirmed that yes, swimming pool ownership is bad. Looking at water usage in Cape Town, South Africa, the researchers found that the richest residents, who make up 14% of the population, consume 51% of the city’s water by doing things like “garden watering, car washing, and filling swimming pools,” while the city’s poorest residents, who make up 62% of the population, consume just 27% of the water resources doing things like “maintaining basic hygiene” and “hydrating themselves.” As the researchers concluded, “Urban water crises can be triggered by the unsustainable consumption patterns of privileged social groups.”
One takeaway from this study, though, is that the problem isn’t so much the swimming pools — which have many positive benefits — but the fact that the pools are in the hands of “privileged social groups,” where they go heavily underutilized. Private pools are often only used by one family, the homeowner’s, and only for a few months a year, if that. To make the tremendous energy and water costs of swimming pools actually worth it, we need to get a lot more people into them.
America used to be covered in these sorts of community pools, some of which could fit a thousand swimmers or more. During the 1880s and early 1890s, municipal swimming pools were places “where Blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together,” though people of mixed classes and sexes did not, author Jeff Wiltse writes in Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. As Wiltse explains, “During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the difference between people with ‘black’ skin and those with ‘white’ skin was a less significant social distinction than class … That changed during the 1920s, when race emerged as the most salient and divisive social distinction.”
Municipal pools were frequently segregated after World War I, but they were also “extraordinarily popular" from the 1920s to the 1940s, with swimming as much a part of the average American’s life as going to the movies. Tens of millions of Americans visited community pools each year, with sometimes “hundreds and even thousands of people at a time” taking a dip. But after desegregation in the 1950s opened public pools to everyone, some bigoted communities “found a loophole,” The New York Times writes. They could also close the pools for everyone.
So-called “drained-pool politics,” the attitude that “if ‘they’ can also have it, then no one can … helps explain why America still doesn’t have a truly universal health care system, a child care system, [or] a decent social safety net,” the Times postulates. For our immediate purposes, it also explains the rise of private pools across the country: “After racial desegregation, millions of Americans chose to stop swimming at municipal pools and chose instead to organize and join private swim clubs,” Wiltse writes. Those discriminatory choices still reverberate today: There were fewer than 15,000 pools at private homes before 1952; now there are more than 10.4 million. By comparison, there are only about 300,000 municipal pools in the U.S. and many are closing because they’re too expensive to maintain.
But as the world continues to warm, community pools are becoming vital pieces of infrastructure again. We know that small bodies of manmade water can actually somewhat help to cool down urban areas; we also know that having access to water like beaches and pools saves lives when cooling centers are in short supply. They also offer an outlet for physical recreation when others become dangerous or deeply unpleasant due to high temperatures. Additionally, part of the original popularity of community pools had been as relief from the heat before air conditioning; from an energy-saving standpoint, it still makes sense today to turn off your a/c whenever possible and cool down in water instead.
Despite all the net good of public pools, there hasn’t been a lot of movement to actually build more: only 198 of 3,310 commercial pools built in the U.S. in 2020 went into parks, Bloomberg reports (most of the rest “went to hotels and multi-family developments”). And while we shouldn’t take our foot off the gas in advocating for more swimming facilities, particularly in lower-income areas, private pool owners can also do themselves, the planet, and the rest of us a solid — and share. Pool party, anyone?
Okay, so no, pool parties obviously won’t fix over a century of racially motivated infrastructure decisions. Nor are they very likely to fix the “atomized recreation and diminished public discourse” that Wiltse says resulted from “private-pool owners [fencing] themselves into their own backyards,” since said private-pool owners would presumably be inviting attendees from their own homogenous social groups.
But sometimes pool ownership happens to good people, and it is in those cases that wringing as much use out of a pool as possible — and in doing so, minimizing the per-person costs of maintenance, energy expenditure, and water usage — actually start to make sense. Gristfound that “the average pool uses about 20,000 gallons of water a year,” which is “a little less than a lawn” — lawns, of course, being another item up there on the Fun Things You Should Feel Bad About list. But if 50 people share one lawn, it starts to look a little less wasteful, particularly if that “lawn” also serves as a cornerstone of the community and local social life. (Introverted pool owners, meanwhile, can list theirs cheaply on Swimply, the “Airbnb for swimming pools,” so others can enjoy them when they’d otherwise be sitting empty).
Pool parties won’t save the world; to be honest, they won’t even entirely redeem private pools. But they could start to make swimming more broadly social again and nudge us back toward a culture where taking a dip with acquaintances, neighbors, and strangers is a value rather than a source of disgust and suspicion. It may be a drop in the bucket, but it’s one that’s worth it.
Just remember to invite me.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”