Well done videos featuring interviews from folks inside the Isabella Wind farm, not far from me in central Michigan. I’ve gotten to know folks in the area, general agreement that the turbines, installed in 2020, are performing as promised. No zombie apocalypse so far.
Above, Farmer Steve Gross. Below, School Superintendent Bill Chilman.
As wind energy expands in the United States, concerns have grown about the potential for tall turbines to be a drag on property values.
But a new nationwide study that analyzed data from 300 million home sales and 60,000 wind turbines finds turbines’ impact on home values is much lower than previously thought – about a 1% drop on average for a home with at least one wind turbine within six miles.
The study’s authors find the most impact on home prices happens if a home is less than five miles from a turbine; the further a home is from a turbine, the less of a value hit it takes. – Auffhammer said one of the study’s most interesting findings was most of the dips in housing value were driven by early wind turbine installations in the US at the end of the 1990s. Closer to 2020, “we don’t really find an effect,” Auffhammer added.
Tesla has been a pioneer in home energy storage, and it now has a new version of the flagship product, the Powerwall, which has inspired many competitors.
Above, some features and considerations if you are thinking of adding this protection. In 10 years, I suspect this will be as standard as a heating and air-conditioning system.
Our top pick for the best home battery and backup system goes to the Tesla Powerall + due to its 10-year warranty, great power distribution, and energy capacity of 13.5kWh. However, since the Tesla Powerall + is quite expensive and different systems may fit your needs better than others, we’ve included a variety of picks to fit all types of needs and budgets.
Tesla Powerwall + features: Capacity: 13.5kWh (kilowatt-hour) | Power source: Solar panels | Controls: Dedicated app | Multi-unit configurations:Yes
The Tesla Powerwall is a leading battery backup system that simplifies your switch to backup battery power. With the ability to recharge using solar PV panels, you can rely on stored solar energy during power outages.
The Powerwall + provides an energy capacity of 13.5kWh and a power rating of 7.6kW, delivering continuous power of 5.8kW in the absence of sunlight. It comes with a ten-year guarantee and can be monitored and managed through its app. However, you can only purchase a Powerwall if you also buy Tesla’s solar panels.
To ensure you have the right-sized backup batteries for your home, you can connect up to 10 Powerwalls. It’s recommended to use the Tesla Powerwall with a solar panel system for optimal results. Additionally, some states, such as WA (22%), offer a Federal Solar Investment Tax Credit to help with costs. The long-running PBS home improvement show This Old House strongly encourages customers considering the Tesla Powerwall+ to take advantage of all local, state, and federal tax incentives to help reduce the cost of installation.
One Reddit user said that it’s a “game-changer for continuous power,” and that it’s well worth it if you want backup during outages or to store excess solar energy.
The car’s most extraordinary feature, though, is its $9,698 price tag. That undercuts the average price of an American EV by more than $50,000 (and is only a little more than a high-end Vespa scooter). Such aggressive pricing by BYD, which surpassed Tesla Inc. in late 2023 to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, is indicative of how Chinese auto manufacturers will likely force US makers to pivot away from mainly producing expensive second cars for the affluent and toward more reasonably priced EVs for the Everyman.
Just as the long-feared prospect of a revolutionary EV from US tech giant Apple Inc. has receded, American carmakers now face a possibly greater challenge from Asia. China, long a manufacturing hub for Western companies’ products, is hellbent on expanding its own companies’ reach around the globe. It’s already the biggest market for EVs, and it’s using that scale and manufacturing know-how to help expand sales of competitively priced Chinese models to an increasingly climate-conscious world.
For now, the Chinese onslaught is being kept at bay in America by stiff tariffs and moves to erect even tougher trade barriers against the US’s geopolitical adversary. But the Chinese market accounts for about 70% of all EVs sold globally, so China’s push to lower prices is causing a ripple effect that can’t be ignored in the long term—even if political maneuvering by American lawmakers manages to slow the Asian giant’s automotive advance toward the US, the world’s most profitable car market.
“This threat has put everybody on alert,” says Jeff Schuster, global vice president for automotive research for consultant GlobalData. “It forces innovation in a way that might not have happened as quickly.”
Good Pro Publica piece here. Wildland Firefighters, who would seem to qualify as Essential Workers, make an hourly rate about the same as they might at McDonalds. Many are leaving the field, go figure. Go to the link for some good personal profiles.
But at exactly the time when the country needs wildland firefighters more than ever, the federal government is losing them. In the past three years, according to the Forest Service’s own assessments, it has suffered an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent employees. Many people inside and outside the fire service believe this represents one of the worst crises in its history. Last spring, as the 2023 fire season was getting started, I asked Grant Beebe, a former smokejumper who now heads the Bureau of Land Management’s fire program, if there had been an exodus of wildland firefighters. He initially hesitated. “‘Exodus’ is a pretty strong word,” he said. But then he reconsidered. “I’ll say yeah. Yeah.”
“The ship is sinking,” Abel Martinez, a Forest Service engine captain in California and the national fire chair for the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union that represents wildland firefighters, told me. (For this story, almost every wildland firefighter who agreed to use their full name has an official role with the union; the one firefighter identified by their middle name does not.)
Although nobody could provide precise numbers, leaders like Beebe are especially concerned that the attrition has been particularly acute among those with extensive experience — those like Elkind. It takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a wildland firefighter capable of overseeing the numerous resources — engines, helicopters, smokejumpers — that are deployed on large fires. As Beebe put it, “You can’t just hire some person off the street into one of our higher-level management jobs.”
The reasons for the exodus are many, but fundamentally it reflects an inattentive bureaucracy and a culture that suppresses internal criticism. Only in 2022 did the fire service acknowledge an explicit link between cancer and wildland firefighters, even though officials have long expressed concern about the connection. And it was only last year that the fire service held its first conference on mental health, even though officials have been aware for decades of the high incidence of substance abuse and divorce among wildland firefighters.
But more than anything, wildland firefighters are leaving because they’re compensated so poorly, the result of a byzantine civil service structure that makes it extremely hard to sustain a career. The federal fire service is responsible for managing blazes on nearly 730 million acres of land — an area almost the size of India. Among the five agencies, one dominates in terms of influence and size: the Forest Service, which employs more than 11,000 wildland firefighters, most of whom work from roughly April to October. The hiring system dates to the early years of the agency, when it often recruited from bars and relied on volunteers to suppress wildfires by 10 a.m.
The political coalition that has been assembled in support of advanced geothermal is bipartisan, but uni-regional: If you drew a broad strip from Las Vegas to Albuquerque and then dragged it north to the Canadian border, you would envelop Utah and Idaho (not to mention Arizona and big chunks of Wyoming and Montana). This stretch of John McPhee country includes some of biggest swaths of federal land — and some of the hottest rocks beneath it — in the country.
And so Senators Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Mike Lee of Utah, and James Risch of Idaho have found themselves crossing party lines, working together on a bill to encourage more production of geothermal energy, which the unique contours of this area make (potentially) especially abundant.
The Geothermal Energy Optimization Act, introduced last week, is a kind of test case for how a bipartisan energy policy could work. It combines deregulation with support for a non-carbon energy resource that leans heavily on expertise in the oil and gas industry while also not committing to any new spending.
But the bill isn’t just a victory for bipartisanship, it’s also a victory of geology. Thanks to tens of millions of years of plates sliding beneath each other and mountains collapsing, “you have a relatively thin crust before you get to that heat,” as Ben Serrurier, head of government affairs at Fervo, the enhanced geothermal startup, told me. (Fervo has operations in both Nevada and Utah.)
In the Arizona desert, a Danish company is building a massive solar farm that includes batteries that charge when the sun is shining and supply energy back to the electric grid when it’s not.
Combining batteries with green energy is a fast-growing climate solution.
“Solar farms only produce when the sun shines, and the turbines only produce when the wind blows,” said Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper. “For us to maximize the availability of the green power, 24-7, we have to store some of it too.”
The United States is rapidly adding batteries, mostly lithium-ion type, to store energy at large scale. Increasingly, these are getting paired with solar and wind projects, like in Arizona. The agencies that run electric grids, utility companies and developers of renewable energies say combining technologies is essential for a green energy future.
Batteries allow renewables to replace fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal, while keeping a steady flow of power when sources like wind and solar are not producing. For example, when people are sleeping and thus using less electricity, the energy produced from wind blowing through the night can be stored in batteries — and used when demand is high during the day.
Juan Mendez, a resident of Tempe, Arizona, gets power from local utility Salt River Project, which is collaborating with Ørsted on the Eleven Mile Solar Center. As a state senator, Mendez pushed SRP to move to renewable energies.
“This solar-plus-storage is a good step, but SRP needs to do more to provide clean energy and clean up our air and help address climate change,” Mendez said.
Climate change poses a particular threat to children and youth, starting before birth and potentially derailing the normal development of physiological systems, cognitive abilities and emotional skills in ways that are sometimes irreversible, according to a report released by the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica.
The impacts of climate change intersect with and compound other factors that threaten youth mental health, which is already precarious, according to the Mental Health and our Changing Climate: Children and Youth Report 2023 (PDF, 2.3MB). These factors include child development, parental health, rates of depression and suicide, anxiety, racism, poverty, housing security, adequate nutrition and access to medical care.
The acute impacts of climate change, such as weather disasters, can cause trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder in the short term, and many longer-term mental health challenges in the absence of proper interventions, the report says. Children are more vulnerable because of their dependence on parents and other caregivers for support.
“If our responsibility to ensure a safe climate and thriving future for our children and future generations was not clear enough, this report brings it into vivid relief. My hope is for anyone caring for children—especially policymakers—to join me in following its guidance,” said Meighen Speiser, executive director of ecoAmerica and a coauthor of the report.
Research shows that the effect of extreme weather events resulting from climate change can interrupt normal fetal development and lead to a greater risk of anxiety or depressive disorder, ADHD, educational deficits, and lower levels of self-control, as well as psychiatric disorders later in life. The list of possible climate change-related mental health struggles expands as children get older, according to the report. And certain populations of children are even more vulnerable due to poverty, racism, gender, disability and other factors.
