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An interview with architect Marc Thorpe on building a cool house powered by the sun.
Architect and Industrial designer Marc Thorpe runs a multi-disciplinary studio in New York. His innovative approach to architecture, branding and furniture design for clients including Under Armour, Moroso and Ligne Roset is rooted in the belief in an architecture of responsibility. His original designs aim to be sustainable and affordable. He recently collaborated with Stage Six (who scale social enterprise) and affordable housing social enterprise group, Échale International on a sustainable and ecologically responsible housing development in Uganda. Each home, constructed of soil bricks, has its own water tower to collect rainwater in case of drought.
I spoke with Marc about Fremont House, he and his wife’s concept home built to showcase how off-grid living can be both stylish and affordable. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is your general architecture approach/design?
Our approach is straightforward, simple, and legible. In the case of the several homes I’ve built upstate, it’s really been more about just trying to bring some degree of taste and sophistication to the language of architecture upstate using local vernacular. But at the same time, I’m approaching it utilizing renewable technology. The short of it is to keep everything tight and local, integrate renewable tech, and push for that 100% win/win.
Marco Petrini
How did you achieve this at the Fremont House?
We wanted to test out the solar concept along with the rectilinearity of the house. How can we keep the house as passive as possible so it doesn’t lose heat and cooling?
To start, we made the entire house solar-powered. It is not tied to the grid out of the gate. So, a zero dollar energy bill. The panels are all on the roof and are designed to accommodate southern exposure. The solar powers everything — lights, internet, appliances.
We all focused on the rectilinearity of the house, which is a passive move. We used platonic forms as a square, with 90 degree angles which make for an easier opportunity to lock it up and not lose cool. It’s also naturally cross-ventilated. There is no AC in the house whatsoever.
It’s heated with a wood burning stove and an energy efficient dyson heater inside the utility room which provides heat for piping and is always maintained at 55 degrees.
In winter, we make a fire, and because it’s square, the house doesn’t lose energy. It’s easier to heat than a house with different angles. Also the house has very few windows, so we are not losing heat that way.
Marco Petrini
How did you adapt the design for different seasons? Doesn’t it get boiling hot in summer?
Summer doesn’t get boiling hot here. The house is between Roscoe and Callicoon, New York, near Lake Tana. The area stays cool and rarely gets above 80 degrees. The cross ventilation allows the heat to move through the house naturally, it rises and goes straight out the window.
It’s also possible, if you need it, to put in an electric heat pump and a mini-split would provide AC.
Your Habitable score shows … wow, you barely have any climate risk! Not even for heat! Were you aware of that when you built here?
I didn’t know this when we were building, but I always knew the climate was super moderate here. There is lots of rain, lots of sun. It’s sort of a perfect place and also gets a lot of snow.
What decisions did you take to build the Catskill House for its environment?
We mostly had to work around hot and cold.
Also the roof panels are black and the roof is black so it retains heat. And when there is snowfall on it, the black has a faster heat coefficient to warm the snow so it melts quicker. The roof also is on an angle so the snow will fall right off — a natural cleaning too.
Marco Petrini
What would you have done differently now that you are living in it?
We finished Fremont House at the end of last year. So as of December 1, it will have been one full year.
Lessons learned? Its’ a two-story. In the future, we will build a one story. There’s just an ease of access to the roof when you need to get up there. Cleaning windows on the second level is a pain.
Otherwise, everything works perfectly. In the dead of winter, the house can heat up from freezing to 70 within a few hours. It has a small footprint, only 1,000 square feet (500 up and 500 downstairs) so a fire warms the whole house.
For the next house we do in North Branch that we are building to sell, we will execute a lot of these lessons. We will use the same approach and build according to the same concepts.
What are your three top takeaways for people who want to live off grid
1. Just take the position of being autonomous. Understand that you don’t need to rely on the system, on the grid. You don’t need to rely on anything. You can take responsibility for yourself and do it on your own.
2. You don’t need to sacrifice design to have a sustainable home. There’s a stigma around some of this stuff that is unjustified. It’s possible to have a well-designed home that is fully functioning without the powers pushing fossil fuels as the only solution.
3. There are so many opportunities to get off the grid: solar, geothermal, and other technologies. It’s worth the effort.
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The administration seems to be pursuing a “some of the above” strategy with little to no internal logic.
The Department of Energy justified terminating hundreds of congressionally-mandated grants issued by the Biden administration for clean energy projects last week (including for a backup battery at a children’s hospital) by arguing that they were bad investments for the American people.
“Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” the agency’s press release said.
It’s puzzling, then, that the Trump administration is pouring vast government resources into saving aging coal plants and expediting advanced nuclear projects — two sources of energy that are famously financial black holes.
The Energy Department announced it would invest $625 million to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” in late September. Earlier this year, the agency also made $900 million available to “unlock commercial deployment of American-made small modular reactors.”
It’s hard to imagine what economic yardsticks would warrant funding to keep coal plants open. The cost of operating a coal plant in the U.S. has increased by nearly 30% since 2021 — faster than inflation — according to research by Energy Innovation. Driving that increase is the cost of coal itself, as well as the fact that the nation’s coal plants are simply getting very old and more expensive to maintain. “You can put all the money you want into a clunker, but at the end of the day, it’s really old, and it’s just going to keep getting more expensive over time, even if you have a short term fix,” Michelle Solomon, a program manager at Energy Innovation who authored the research, told me.
Keeping these plants online — even if they only operate some of the time— inevitably raises electricity bills. That’s because in many of the country’s electricity markets, the cost of power on any given day is determined by the most expensive plant running. On a hot summer day when everyone’s air conditioners are working hard and the grid operator has to tell a coal plant to switch on to meet demand, every electron delivered in the region will suddenly cost the same as coal, even if it was generated essentially for free by the sun or wind.
The Trump administration has also based its support for coal plants on the idea that they are needed for reliability. In theory, coal generation should be available around the clock. But in reality, the plants aren’t necessarily up to the task — and not just because they’re old. Sandy Creek in Texas, which began operating in 2013 and is the newest coal plant in the country, experienced a major failure this past April and is now expected to stay offline until 2027, according to the region’s grid operator. In a report last year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that outage rates for coal plants are increasing. This is in part due to wear and tear from the way these plants cycle on and off to accommodate renewable energy sources, the report said, but it’s also due to reduced maintenance as plant operators plan to retire the facilities.
“You can do the deferred maintenance. It might keep the plant operating for a bit longer, but at the end of the day, it’s still not going to be the most efficient source of energy, or the cheapest source of energy,” Solomon said.
The contradictions snowball from there. On September 30, the DOE opened a $525 million funding opportunity for coal plants titled “Restoring Reliability: Coal Recommissioning and Modernization,” inviting coal-fired power plants that are scheduled for retirement before 2032 or in rural areas to apply for grants that will help keep them open. The grant paperwork states that grid capacity challenges “are especially acute in regions with constrained transmission and sustained load growth.” Two days later, however, as part of the agency’s mass termination of grants, it canceled more than $1.3 billion in awards from the Grid Deployment Office to upgrade and install new transmission lines to ease those constraints.
The new funding opportunity may ultimately just shuffle awards around from one coal plant to another, or put previously-awarded projects through the time-and-money-intensive process of reapplying for the same funding under a new name. Up to $350 million of the total will go to as many as five coal plants, with initial funding to restart closed plants or to modernize old ones, and later phases designated for carbon capture, utilization, and storage retrofits. The agency said it will use “unobligated” money from three programs that were part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: the Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, the Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects, and the Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas Program.
In a seeming act of cognitive dissonance, however, the agency has canceled awards for two coal-fired power plants that the Biden administration made under those same programs. One, a $6.5 million grant to Navajo Transitional Energy Company, a tribal-owned entity that owns a stake in New Mexico’s Four Corners Generating Station, would have funded a study to determine whether adding carbon capture and storage to the plant was economically viable. The other, a $50 million grant to TDA Research that would have helped the company validate its CCS technology at Dry Fork Station, a coal plant in Wyoming, was terminated in May.
Two more may be out the window. A new internal agency list of grants labeled “terminate” that circulated this week included an $8 million grant for the utility Duke Energy to evaluate the feasibility of capturing carbon from its Edwardsport plant in Indiana, and $350 million for Project Tundra, a carbon capture demonstration project at the Milton R. Young Station in North Dakota.
“It’s not internally consistent,” Jack Andreason Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “You’re canceling coal grants, but then you’re giving $630 million to keep them open. You’re also investing a ton of time and money into nuclear — which is great, to be clear — but these small modular reactors haven’t been deployed in the United States, and part of the reason is that they’re currently not economically viable.”
The closest any company has come thus far to deploying a small modular reactor in the U.S. is NuScale, a company that planned to build its first-of-a-kind reactors in Idaho and had secured agreements to sell the power to a group of public utilities in Utah. But between 2015, when it was first proposed, and late 2023, when it died, the project’s budget tripled from $3 billion to more than $9 billion, while its scale was reduced from 600 megawatts to 462 megawatts. Not all of that was inevitable — costs rose dramatically in the final few years due to inflation. The reason NuScale ultimately pulled out of the project is that the cost of electricity it generated was going to be too high for the market to bear.
It’s unclear how heavily the DOE will weigh project financials in the application process for the $900 million for nuclear reactors. In its funding announcement, it specified that the awards would be made “solely based on technical merit.” The agency’s official solicitation paperwork, however, names “financial viability” as one of the key review criteria. Regardless, the Trump administration appears to recognize the value in funding first-of-a-kind, risky technologies when it comes to nuclear, but is not applying the same standards to direct air capture or hydrogen plants.
I asked the Department of Energy to share the criteria it used in the project review process to determine economic viability. In response, spokesperson Ben Dietderich encouraged me to read Wright’s memorandum describing the review process from May. The memo outlines what types of documentation the agency will evaluate to reach a decision, but not the criteria for making that decision.
Solomon agreed that advanced nuclear might one day meet the grid’s growing power needs, but not anytime soon. “Hopefully in the long term, this technology does become a part of our electricity system. But certainly relying on it in the short term has real risks to electricity costs,” she said. “And also reliability, in the sense that the projects might not materialize.”
The collateral damage from the Lava Ridge wind project might now include a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s.
The same movement that got Trump to kill the Lava Ridge wind farm Trump killed has appeared to derail a longstanding transmission project that’s supposed to connect sought-after areas for wind energy in Idaho to power-hungry places out West.
The Southwest Intertie Project-North, also known as SWIP-N, is a proposed 285-mile transmission line initially approved by federal regulators in the 1990s. If built, SWIP-N is supposed to feed power from the wind-swept plains of southern Idaho to the Southwest, while shooting electrons – at least some generated from solar power – back up north into Idaho from Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. In California, regulators have identified the line as crucial for getting cleaner wind energy into the state’s grid to meet climate goals.
But on Tuesday, SWIP-N suddenly faced a major setback: The three-person commission representing Jerome County, Idaho – directly in the path of the project – voted to revoke its special use permit, stating the company still lacked proper documentation to meet the terms and conditions of the approval. SWIP-N had the wind at its back as recently as last year, when LS Power expected it to connect to Lava Ridge and other wind farms that have been delayed by Trump’s federal permitting freeze on renewable energy. But now, the transmission line has stuttered along with this potential generation.
At a hearing Tuesday evening, county commissioners said Great Basin Transmission, a subsidiary of LS Power developing the line, would now suddenly need new input, including the blessing of the local highway district and potential feedback from the Federal Aviation Administration. Jerome County Commissioner Charles Howell explained to me Wednesday afternoon that there will still need to be formal steps remanding the permit, and the process will go back to local zoning officials. Great Basin Transmission will then at minimum need to get the sign-offs from local highway officials to satisfy his concerns, as well as those of the other commissioner who voted to rescind the permit, Ben Crouch.
The permit was many years old, and there are outstanding questions about what will happen next procedurally, including what Great Basin Transmission is actually able to do to fight this choice by the commissioners. At minimum, staff for the commission will write a formal decision explaining the reasoning and remand the permit. After that, it’ll be up to Great Basin Transmission to produce the documents that commissioners want. “Even our attorney and staff didn’t have those answers when we asked that after the vote,” Howell said, adding that he hopes the issues can be resolved. “I was on the county commission about when they decided where to site the towers, where to site the right-of-ways. That’s all been there a long time.”
This is the part where I bring up how Jerome County’s decision followed a months-long fight by aggrieved residents who opposed the SWIP-N line, including homeowners who say they didn’t know their properties were in the path of the project. There’s also a significant anti-wind undercurrent, as many who are fighting this transmission line previously fought LS Power’s Lava Ridge wind project, which was blocked by and executive order from President Donald Trump on his first day in office. Jerome County itself passed an ordinance in May requiring any renewable energy facility to get all federal, state, and local approvals before it would sign off on new projects.
Opposition to SWIP-N comes from a similar place as the “Stop Lava Ridge” campaign. Along with viewshed anxieties and property value impacts, SWIP-N, like Lava Ridge, would be within single-digit miles of the Minidoka National Historic Site, a former prison camp that held Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the eyes of its staunchest critics, constructing the wind farm would’ve completely damaged any impact of visiting the site by filling the surroundings of what is otherwise a serene, somber scene. Descendants of Minidoka detainees lobbied politicians at all levels to oppose Lava Ridge, a cause that was ultimately championed by Republican politicians in their fight against the project.
These same descendants of Japanese-American detainees have fought the transmission line, arguing that its construction would inevitably lead to new wind projects. “If approved, the SWIP-N line would enable LS Power and other renewable energy companies to build massive wind projects on federal land in and around Jerome County in future years,” wrote Dan Sakura, the son of a Minidoka prisoner, in a September 15 letter to the commission.
Sakura had been a leading voice in the fight against Lava Ridge. When I asked why he was weighing in on SWIP-N, he told me over text message, “The Lava Ridge wind project poisoned the well for renewable energy projects on federal land in Southern Idaho.”
LS Power did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s worth noting that efforts have already been made to avoid SWIP-N’s impacts to the Minidoka National Historic Site. In 2010, Congress required the Interior Secretary to re-do the review process for the transmission line, which at the time was proposed to go through the historic site. The route rejected by Jerome County would go around.
There is also no guarantee that wind energy will flock to southern Idaho any time soon. Yes, there’s a Trump permitting freeze, and federal wind energy tax credits are winding down. That’s almost certainly why the developers of small nuclear reactors have reportedly coveted the Lava Ridge site for future projects. But there’s also incredible hostility pent up against wind partially driven by the now-defunct LS Power project, for instance in Lincoln County, where officials now have an emergency moratorium banning wind energy while they develop a more permanent restrictive ordinance.
Howell made no bones about his own views on wind farms, telling me he prefers battery storage and nuclear power. “As I stand here in my backyard, if they put up windmills, that’s all I’m going to see for 40 miles,” he said
But Howell did confess to me that he thinks SWIP-N will ultimately be built – if the company is able to get these new sign-offs. What kind of energy flows through a transmission line cannot ultimately affect the decision on the special use permit because, he said, “there are rules.” On top of that, Idaho is going to ultimately need more power no matter what, and at the very least, the state will have to get electrons from elsewhere.
Howell’s “non-political” answer to the fate of SWIP-N, as he put it to me, is that “We live on power, so we gotta have more power.”
The week’s most important news around renewable project fights.
1. Western Nevada — The Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project may be no more.
2. Washoe County, Nevada – Elsewhere in Nevada, the Greenlink North transmission line has been delayed by at least another month.
3. Oconto County, Wisconsin – Solar farm town halls are now sometimes getting too scary for developers to show up at.
4. Apache County, Arizona – In brighter news, this county looks like it will give its first-ever conditional use permit for a large solar farm, EDF Renewables’ Juniper Spring project.
5. Putnam County, Indiana – After hearing about what happened here this week, I’m fearful for any solar developer trying to work in Indiana.
6. Tippecanoe County, Indiana – Two counties to the north of Putnam is a test case for the impacts a backlash on solar energy can have on data centers.