Big Wind rejected by the bridges of Madison County; Three new podcasts.

The backlash against wind in Iowa; A trio of podcasts 
Lorin and I had a chilly adventure at Big Bend Ranch State Park. On New Year's Eve morning, it was 17F and snowing sideways. But as you can see in the photo above, few things are as beautiful as snow in the West Texas desert. In any case, we are back at work and glad to be sleeping in a warm house instead of a snow-laden tent.

Four items in today's blast: 

• Madison County rejects Big Wind 

• Three episodes of the Power Hungry Podcast: 

  • Brad Rockwell explains how renewables work at the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative

  • Coilín ÓhAiseadha and Ronan Connolly on why we should be spending more on climate adaptation

  • Jennifer Hernandez on California's "fundamentally racist" climate policies

Back in 2014, Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and one of the world's richest people,  famously said “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them.” However, Buffett's quest for more wind-energy tax credits is reaching its land-use limit. On Wednesday, I published a piece in Forbes that explained how one of Berkshire's companies, MidAmerican Energy, expects to collect a whopping $10 billion in tax credits for spending $12.9 billion on wind projects. I wrote:  

Buffett’s company’s push to add even more turbines in Iowa is being derailed by the bridges of Madison County. 

On December 22, the province that has become renowned for its picturesque wood-covered bridges became the second Iowa county to ban wind projects. By a 2-1 margin, the Madison County Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that prohibits installation of wind projects within 1.5 miles of non-participating landowners, limits the height of turbines to less than 500 feet, imposes strict noise limits, and eliminates property-tax breaks. 

The significance of Madison County’s rejection of Big Wind, I wrote, "goes beyond Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway, and Iowa. Since 2015, by my count, 291 government entities from California to Maine have rejected or restricted wind-energy projects." Indeed, land-use conflicts over renewables are increasing at the same time that the incoming "Biden Administration, climate activists, academics, and powerful Washington lobby groups are pushing for massive increases in the deployment of renewables. Last summer, the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force released called for installing half a billion solar panels and “60,000 made-in-America wind turbines” and doing so “within five years.” 

I've been tracking the land-use conflicts over renewables for more than a decade. The Madison County ordinance is just the latest example. They are happening all across the U.S. and in Europe. Please give the piece a read. (Note: Mary Bryce did the photo illustration above. The Roseman Bridge is the most famous span in Madison County and was featured in the 1995 film, The Bridges of Madison County.)

Brad Rockwell explains why renewables dominate Kauai's grid
There's plenty of talk about the surge in renewable energy, but Brad Rockwell, the executive manager of operations at the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, may know more about how to operate a grid with lots of renewables than anyone. His coop is getting about 65 percent of its electricity from renewables, including solar, biomass, and small hydro. Solar provides about 80 percent of the renewable electricity and backs it up with about 230 megawatt-hours of battery storage.  

Brad explained that renewables make sense on Kauai because the coop used to rely heavily on oil-fired generation, which meant that electricity prices soared during 2008 when oil prices went up. By reducing the role of the oil-fired generators, he said, the island has been able to reduce the volatility of its electricity prices. 

We also talked about power density and the land-use issues around renewable-energy siting. We discussed the widespread protests against wind energy on the island of Oahu in which some 200 people were arrested -- I wrote about those protests in 2019 for The Hill -- and why Hawaii, which has many endemic bird and base species, won't be able to build much wind energy capacity. Brad said "I think solar is probably the most palatable because it doesn't mess up your viewshed, it doesn't make noise, it's not rotating," and it won't have significant impacts on the island's wildlife.

But he also said that his first job is "to make sure we deliver safe and reliable power at an affordable price." It was a great conversation. Please check it out.

Coilín ÓhAiseadha and Ronan Connolly talk about their recent paper on energy and climate
Thus far on the podcast, I've interviewed people who are in Britain, Thailand, and Denmark. Now I can add Ireland to the list. On January 5, we released a podcast with Coilín ÓhAiseadha and Ronan Connolly, two independent researchers who published an interesting paper last year that quantified the amount of global climate-related spending that occurred between 2011 and 2018. They found that between 2011 and 2018, some $3.6 trillion was spent, and of that about $2 trillion was spent on wind and solar. "Despite all of this spending," they wrote, "wind and solar energy still produced only 3% of world energy consumption in the year 2018, while the fossil fuels (oil, coal, and gas) produced 85% between them. This raises pressing questions about what it would cost to make the transition to 100% renewable energies." 

The essential point of their paper is that the countries of the world are spending too much on mitigation (trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) and too little on adaptation. They found that only 5% of the $3.6 trillion in climate-related spending was allocated to adaptation.

As Ronan explained on the podcast, the countries of the world spent $2 trillion on wind and solar "over the space of eight years, to increase the share of energy consumption they provide by 2.5 percentage points. So if you wanted to increase that to 50%, you need to spend a bit on the order of 20 times that." He continued, saying "If you spend that money on wind and solar, or even on the other renewables, hydro, geothermal and so on, then you can't spend... it on building energy-adapted homes, you know, on homes that are well-insulated against cold and heat." 

It was an interesting conversation. Please give it a listen. Be forewarned: it's the longest podcast we've done.

Jennifer Hernandez, a lawyer for The 200, on why Latino leaders are suing California over its energy and climate policies 
On Tuesday, we released my interview with Jennifer Hernandez, a partner at Holland & Knight, and a lead attorney for The 200, a coalition of California’s Latino leaders who are suing the state over its energy and housing policies.

Jennifer's life story is remarkable. Last year, she was named one of the top 100 lawyers in California by Daily Journal. She grew up in Pittsburg, California, where her dad worked in the local factory. "I grew up in a polluted factory town, and I'm pretty passionate about pollution," she explained. "And I was zoomed out, like on a magic carpet ride, in high school, having never been east of Lake Tahoe and Nevada, to Harvard, where I received a full-ride scholarship, which was astonishing, and it included even winter clothes." She then attended Stanford Law School, "with a similarly generous financial aid package." Jennifer told me she is fighting California's energy and climate policies because they 

have a totally racist cast; because they hit working families the hardest. There's no progressivism built into this. If we were being progressive about it. We would take drafty uninsulated Beverly Hills mansions, and say, make those greenhouse gas efficient."

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, but her key point was that the state's environmental policies are increasing  the cost of housing, which is making homeownership impossible for low- and middle-income Californians. She said the state is trying to change:

...how Californians are supposed to live. And in particular, as you mentioned, homeownership, which has been the absolute most successful route to middle class of any experiment any civilization has tried in history to our knowledge. Homeownership had a number of systematically racist government programs in place that prevented mortgage-insured mortgages, or redlining, and did this other stuff when we think about oh, that's the old days. But actually, we're more segregated by race today than we were before...and that segregation has to do with price, with housing prices."

My discussion with Jennifer was among the most compelling of the interviews I've done on the podcast. I believe you will find it compelling as well. You can find it here. 

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