Missoula is one of Montana’s largest cities but is surrounded by rural mountain communities where cattle ranching is king. Despite the latitude and altitude, in recent years this region has experienced punishing summer heat waves.

It has been difficult for residents to adapt to the warming climate and new seasonal swings. Many don’t have air conditioning and are unprepared for the new pattern of daytime temperatures hovering in the 90s — for days or even weeks on end. Dehydration, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and abnormalities in heart rate and blood pressure are among the many health complications that can develop from excessive exposure to high temperatures.

It can happen anywhere and to anyone, said Missoula firefighter Andrew Drobeck. He remembers a recent 911 call. The temperature that day had risen to over 90 degrees and a worker at a local dollar store had fainted. “She’s sensitive to the heat. Their AC wasn’t working super good,” Drobeck said. “I guess they only get a 15-minute break.”

Drobeck said many of the heat calls his department receives are from seniors who struggle to stay cool inside their older homes. Montana’s population is among the oldest in the country. About 1 in 4 residents are over 60. Those over 65 are especially vulnerable to heat-related illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As people age, their bodies don’t acclimate to heat as well as they did when they were younger, including not producing as much sweat.

In July, a heat dome that settled over much of the western U.S. baked the region and shattered two types of temperature records: daily highs, and number of consecutive days over 90 degrees. Although the Northwest, including western Montana, is typically cooler, the region experienced record-breaking heat this summer.

Emergency responders like Drobeck have noticed. Drobeck says 911 calls during heat waves have ticked up over the last few summers. But Missoula County officials wanted to know more: They wanted better data on the residents who were calling and the communities that had been hardest hit by the heat. So the county teamed up with researchers at the University of Montana to comb through the data and create a map of 911 calls during heat waves.

The team paired call data from 2020 with census data to see who lived in the areas generating high rates of emergency calls when it was hot. The analysis found that for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase in the average daily temperature, 911 calls increased by 1 percent, according to researcher Christina Barsky, who co-authored the study.

Though that may sound like a small increase, Barsky explained that a 5-degree jump in the daily average temperature can prompt hundreds of additional calls to 911 over the course of a month. Those call loads can be taxing on ambulance crews and local hospitals.

The Missoula study also found that some of the highest rates of emergency calls during extreme heat events came from rural areas, outside Missoula’s urban core. That shows that rural communities are struggling with heat, even if they get less media attention, Barsky said. “What about those people, right? What about those places that are experiencing heat at a rate that we’ve never been prepared for?” she said.

Barsky’s work showed that communities with more residents over 65 tend to generate more 911 calls during heat waves. That could be one reason so many 911 calls are coming from rural residents in Missoula County: Barsky said people living in Montana’s countryside and its small towns tend to be older and more vulnerable to serious heat-related illness.

And aging in rural communities can pose extra problems during heat waves. Even if it cools off at night, an older person living without air conditioning might not be able to cope with hours of high temperatures inside their home during the day. It’s not uncommon for rural residents to have to drive an hour or more to reach a library that might have air conditioning, a community center with a cooling-off room, or medical care. Such isolation and scattered resources are not unique to Montana. “I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Barsky said. “There are no air-conditioned spaces in at least 50 miles. The hospital is 100 miles away.”

Heat research like the Missoula study has focused mostly on large cities, which are often hotter than outlying areas, due to the “heat island” effect. This phenomenon explains why cities tend to get hotter during the day and cool off less at night: It’s because pavement, buildings, and other structures absorb and retain heat. Urban residents may experience higher temperatures during the day and get less relief at night.

By contrast, researchers are only just beginning to investigate and understand the impacts of heat waves in rural areas. The impacts of extreme heat on rural communities have largely been ignored, said Elizabeth Doran, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Vermont. Doran is leading an ongoing study in Vermont that is revealing that towns as small as 5,000 people can stay hotter at night than surrounding rural areas due to heat radiating off hot pavement. “If we as a society are only focused on large urban centers, we’re missing a huge portion of the population and our strategies are going to be limiting in how effective they can be,” Doran said.

Brock Slabach, with the National Rural Health Association, agrees that rural residents desperately need help adapting to extreme heat. They need support installing air conditioning or getting to air-conditioned places to cool off during the day. Many rural residents have mobility issues or don’t drive much due to age or disability. And because they often have to travel farther to access health care services, extra delays in care during a heat-related emergency could lead to more severe health outcomes. “It’s not unreasonable at all to suggest that people will be harmed from not having access to those kinds of services,” he said.

Helping rural populations adapt will be a challenge. People in rural places need help where they live, inside their homes, said Adriane Beck, director of Missoula County’s Office of Emergency Management. Starting a cooling center in a small community may help people living in town, but it’s unrealistic to expect people to drive an hour or more to cool off. Beck said the Missoula County Disaster and Emergency Services Department plans to use data from the 911 study to better understand why people are calling in the first place.

In the coming years, the department plans to talk directly with people living in rural communities about what they need to adapt to rising temperatures. “It might be as simple as knocking on their door and saying, ‘Would you benefit from an air conditioner? How can we connect you with resources to make that happen?’” Beck said.

But that won’t be possible for every rural household because there simply isn’t enough money at the county and state level to pay for that many air-conditioning units, Missoula County officials said. That’s why the county wants to plan ahead for heat waves and have specific protocols for contacting and assisting vulnerable rural residents.

“Ideally, we’d be in a situation where maybe we have community paramedics that can be deployed into those areas when we know that these events are going to happen so they can check on them and avoid that hospital admission,” Beck explained. She added that preventing heat-related hospitalizations among rural residents can ultimately save lives.

This article is from a partnership that includes MTPR, NPR, and KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Montana, 911 calls reveal impact of heat waves on rural seniors on Sep 21, 2024.

The coalition of conservative legislators has fractured — and its brand is heading for a…

The post Among Idaho lawmakers, it’s Freedom Caucus vs. Freedom Caucus  first appeared on InvestigateWest.

The post Among Idaho lawmakers, it’s Freedom Caucus vs. Freedom Caucus  appeared first on InvestigateWest.

President Biden’s administration wants to create the largest non-contiguous protected ocean area in the world, but a new paper says the effort is failing to take into account the rights and perspectives of the Indigenous peoples most affected by the change.  

The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument was established in 2009 and currently preserves nearly half a million square miles of ocean surrounding seven islands in the central and western Pacific. The Biden administration is seeking to strengthen environmental protections by overlaying and expanding the area of protection up to 770,000 square miles and designating it as a national marine sanctuary. The monument already bans commercial resource extraction like deep-sea mining, but the proposed sanctuary would both expand the protected waters and give the whole area an additional layer of federal protection.

The expansion would also make a dent in the Biden administration’s goal to conserve 30 percent of the country’s land and waters by 2030. 

However, according to Angelo Villagomez and Steven Manaʻoakamai Johnson, authors of the peer-reviewed article in Environmental Justice, the Biden administration has privileged Native Hawaiian perspectives (who are supportive of the expansion, which does not extend to the archipelago) over those of other Indigenous Pacific Islanders, namely Micronesians and Samoans, who have less political power in the U.S. system and have voiced more concerns about the proposal. 

“Anti-Micronesian bias and colonialism are harming efforts to protect and manage waters surrounding U.S. overseas territories in the Pacific Islands,” the authors wrote. “The proposal is problematic because it has failed to meaningfully include the Indigenous people who live closest to the region and who have the strongest historical and cultural ties to the islands — Micronesians and Samoans.” 

Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who is Chamorro and grew up on the Mariana Islands, has been advocating for ocean-protected areas for more than 15 years. When he began this work, back in 2007, Villagomez sought to organize support in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for the Marianas Trench National Marine Monument, which conserves nearly 100,000 square miles of water in the Marianas archipelago. Although the proposal faced pushback from locals who were concerned that the move infringed on Indigenous sovereignty, Villagomez thought the monument would not only help the planet but also bring federal jobs to the territory. He was in the room celebrating when then-President George W. Bush signed the monument into existence in 2009, hailed as a major environmental achievement.

For years afterward, Villagomez watched as government jobs for the monument were concentrated in Hawaiʻi. The office was located in Honolulu, thousands of miles away from the monument. Research vessels were being outfitted out of Honolulu and staffed with people who were from Hawaiʻi and other states. It was disappointing to see that these benefits weren’t helping the people of the Northern Marianas, which has a much more fragile economy. After all, he had seen how the 2006 Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument in the northern Hawaiian islands had given Hawaiʻi a boost of prestige and research funding.

“We were working under the assumption that [the Marianas monument] would operate like [the one in] Hawaiʻi,” Villagomez said. “But the difference is Hawaiʻi has two senators, and they have representation in the House of Representatives, and they can vote for president. And we just don’t have the political power to bring the dollars to our islands the way that Hawaiʻi does.”

Only recently has an office for the Marianas Trench monument opened in the Commonwealth. And just last month — 15 years after monument designation — the Interior Department released a proposed management plan for the Marianas Trench monument. Villagomez thinks the delays reflect a broader disregard for the territories that he’s seeing unfold again in the Pacific Remote Islands sanctuary designation effort.

“The process of colonization doesn’t only play out with the colonizer and the colonized, but it also plays out in relationships between colonized people,” said Steven Manaʻoakamai Johnson, Villagomez’s co-author who is an assistant professor of natural resources and the environment at Cornell University. “In this case, what we’re trying to highlight is that the Hawaiian perspective and the Hawaiian voice is being privileged, above that of the Micronesian and Samoan voice.”

For instance, the official community group advising government agencies about the monument includes a designated Native Hawaiian representative but not an equivalent role for other Indigenous peoples, Villagomez and Johnson wrote. 

Similarly, in documents describing the cultural importance of the islands, advocates for the marine sanctuary often describe the sacrifices of Native Hawaiians who lived on Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands during World War II, and ignore the comparable sacrifices of Indigenous Chamorros killed on Wake Island and the fact that most of the islands within the monument’s coverage are part of the Micronesian region, Villagomez and Johnson wrote. 

Sarah Marquis at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the agency plans to release a draft plan for the sanctuary designation later this year and will accept further public input on the proposal then. “We cannot comment on specific papers or articles at this stage of designation,” she said. 

Naiʻa Lewis, a member of the Pacific Remote Islands Coalition that has been advocating for the sanctuary designation, said the group has long advocated for inclusivity through avenues like co-management and renaming. 

“It’s really important when we are critiquing frameworks that we feel like do not support our communities and our perspectives that we also highlight people, organizations, and communities that are working in that space to make those changes,” Lewis said.

Villagomez said a major impetus for releasing the paper is the importance of Pacific territories to the U.S.’s ocean conservation goals: 29 percent of the country’s ocean territory surrounds Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and 99 percent of the country’s protected ocean areas are in the Pacific region. Villagomez said he would like to see the territories accrue benefits from those protected areas, such as jobs and funding, but said sometimes they can’t even get their own people on the boats that explore those waters. 

In American Samoa, political leaders have long opposed monuments that restrict commercial fishing. Even though conservation supporters point to a recent study that shows relatively few ships that dock in Pago Pago, its primary port, actually fish in the proposed Pacific Remote Islands sanctuary area, fears about economic harm persist. These concerns are particularly resonant when the islands’ struggling economies continue to fuel major outmigration and make it difficult for territories to provide essential medical care for their residents. 

In the Northern Mariana Islands, commercial fishing is not a major industry, but critics of the marine monuments have argued that closing off large portions of the ocean to potential economic activity violates their right to Indigenous economic self-determination and is especially egregious when those same areas remain open to U.S. military undersea sonar training and explosive testing. 

“Our already disadvantaged and marginalized communities carry a disproportionate burden for meeting national conservation goals,” the governors of American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam wrote in a joint letter to Biden last year.

Villagomez and Johnson both support ocean conservation but argue that any marine sanctuary designation should include dedicated funding for the affected territories and peoples, and urge NOAA to create such a fund. 

“It’s the territories who are living with the decisions,” Villagomez said. “But it’s people in Washington D.C. and Honolulu who are forcing the territories to carry these burdens for the rest of the country.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A Biden effort to conserve oceans is leaving out Indigenous peoples, report finds on Jul 3, 2024.

When Yakama Nation leaders learned in 2017 of a plan to tunnel through some of their ancestral land for a green energy development, they were caught off guard. 

While the tribal nation had come out in favor of climate-friendly projects, this one appeared poised to damage Pushpum, a privately owned ridgeline overlooking the Columbia River in Washington. The nation holds treaty rights to gather traditional foods there, and tribal officials knew they had to stop the project.

Problems arose when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of permitting hydro energy projects, offered the Yakama Nation what tribal leaders considered an impossible choice: disclose confidential ceremonial, archaeological and cultural knowledge, or waive the right to consult on whether and how the site is developed.

This put the Yakama Nation in a bind. Disclosing exactly what made the land sacred risked revealing to outsiders what they treasured most about it. In the past, disclosure of information about everything from food to archaeological sites enabled non-Natives to loot or otherwise desecrate the land.

Even now, tribal leaders struggle to safely express what the Pushpum project threatens. “I don’t know how in-depth I can go,” said Elaine Harvey, a tribal member and former environmental coordinator for the tribal fisheries department, when asked about the foods and medicines that grow on the land.

“It provides for us,” echoed Yakama Nation Councilmember Jeremy Takala. “Sometimes we do get really protective.”

Although government agencies have sometimes taken significant steps to protect tribal confidentiality, that didn’t happen with the Pushpum proposal, known as the Goldendale Energy Storage Project. Tribal leaders repeatedly objected, telling the agency that if a tribal nation deems a place sacred, they shouldn’t have to break confidentiality to prove it — a position supported by state agency leaders and, new reporting shows, at least one other federal agency. 

Nonetheless, after seven years, in February FERC moved the project forward without consulting with the Yakama Nation. 

The process known as consultation is often fraught. Federal laws and agency rules require that tribes be able to weigh in on decisions that affect their treaty lands. But in practice, consultation procedures sometimes force tribes to reveal information that makes them more vulnerable, without offering any guaranteed benefit. 

If a tribal nation deems a place sacred, they shouldn’t have to break confidentiality to prove it.

The risks of disclosure are not hypothetical: Looting and vandalism are common when information about Indigenous resources becomes public. One important mid-Columbia petroglyph, called Tsagaglalal, or She Who Watches, had to be removed from its original site because of vandalism. And recreational and commercial pickers have flooded one of Washington’s best huckleberry picking areas, called Indian Heaven Wilderness, pushing out Native families trying to stock up for the winter. 

The Yakama Nation feared similar outcomes if it fully participated in FERC’s consultation process over the Goldendale development. But there are alternatives. The United Nations recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to affirmatively consent to development on their sacred lands. A similar model was included in state legislation in Washington three years ago, but Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed it.

The requirements of the consultation process are poorly defined, and state and federal agencies interpret them in a broad range of ways. In the case of Pushpum, critics say that has allowed FERC to overlook tribal concerns.

“They’re just being totally disregarded,” said Simone Anter (Pascua Yaqui and Jicarilla Apache descendant), an attorney at the environmental nonprofit Columbia Riverkeeper. “What FERC is doing is so blatantly, blatantly wrong.”

THE YAKAMA NATION has been outspoken in its support for renewable energy development, including solar and small-scale hydro projects. But not at Pushpum; it’s sacred to the Kah-milt-pah people, one of the bands within the Yakama Nation, who still regularly use the site.

The proposal would transform this area into a facility intended to store renewable energy in a low-carbon way. Rye Development, a Florida-based company, submitted an application for permits for a “pumped hydro” system, where a pair of reservoirs connected by a tunnel store energy for future use.

FERC has offered few accommodations for the Yakama Nation on the Goldendale project. 

FERC spokesperson Celeste Miller told High Country News and ProPublica in an email that “we will work to address the effects of proposed projects on Tribal rights and resources to the greatest extent we can, consistent with federal law and regulations. This is a pending matter before the Commission, so we cannot discuss the merits of this proceeding.”

“FERC legally doesn’t have to do very much here,” said Kevin Washburn (Chickasaw), dean of the University of Iowa College of Law and former assistant secretary of Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior. “Consultation is designed to open the door so tribes can get in the door to talk to decision-makers.” According to experts, the process can range from collaborative planning that addresses tribal concerns to a perfunctory discussion with minimal impacts, depending on the agency.

“This is the problem with consultation and its lack of teeth,” said Anter. “If the federal government is saying, ‘Hey, we consulted, check that box,’ who’s to say they didn’t?”

There’s another problem with consultation, too: Any discussions with a federal entity are subject to public disclosure. That’s good for government transparency, Washburn said, but it can make tribal nations even more vulnerable. “And it’s why tribes are right to be cautious in what they share with feds,” he said.

That’s an obstacle at Pushpum. Things became even harder there in August 2021, when FERC notified the Yakama Nation that federal consultation would be carried out not by the agency itself, but by the developer. The Yakama Nation pushed back, asserting its treaty rights to negotiate as a sovereign nation only with another nation, not with a private entity. FERC, however, insisted that designating a third party was “standard practice.” The National Historic Preservation Act, signed into law in 1966, says an agency “may authorize an applicant or group of applicants to initiate consultation,” but maintains that the federal agency is still “responsible for their government to government relationships with Indian tribes.”

The Yakama Nation also worried about commission rules that require anything the tribal nation says to FERC be shared with the developer. “It gets very sensitive when we share those kinds of stories,” said Takala, the tribal councilmember. “We just don’t share to anyone, especially a developer.”

Some say FERC could change that internal rule, since it isn’t required by law. “For them to cite their own regulations and be like, ‘Our hands are tied,’ is ridiculous,” Anter said. For months, FERC and the Yakama Nation went back and forth over the conditions under which the tribal government would share sensitive information, with the Yakama Nation repeatedly asking to share information only with FERC.

Ultimately, FERC proposed four ways the Yakama Nation could participate in consultation. In the eyes of tribal leaders, all these options either posed significant risks to the privacy of their information or rendered consultation meaningless.

The first three were laid out in a letter from Vince Yearick, director of FERC’s division of hydropower licensing, sent on Dec. 9, 2021. For option one, it suggested the tribal nation request nondisclosure agreements from anyone accessing sensitive information. Yearick did not specify whether FERC would be responsible for issuing or enforcing these NDAs.

“It gets very sensitive when we share those kinds of stories. We just don’t share to anyone, especially a developer.”

Delano Saluskin, then-chair of the Yakama Nation, called this option “far from the requirements of NHPA or in line with the trust responsibility that the Federal Agency has to Yakama Nation,” citing FERC policies and National Historic Preservation Act law in a February 2022 letter to state and federal government officials requesting support. He added that it “describes a process that does not protect information that is sacred and sensitive from disclosure.”

Alternatively, FERC said, the Yakama Nation could simply redact any sensitive information from documents it filed. This option, however, would leave FERC in the dark about the details of what cultural resources the project would imperil. That would make it harder for FERC to require project adjustments or weigh the specific impacts in its decision about whether to permit construction.

Third, the Yakama Nation could withhold sensitive information altogether, which would present similar problems.

 Lastly, in a June 2022 follow-up letter, the commission suggested that the Yakama Nation submit a document “with more details regarding the resources of concern” and a request that some of the information be treated as privileged or withheld from public disclosure.

Overall, Saluskin described FERC’s options as a “failure” to conduct legal consultation in good faith.

A federal agency similarly raised concerns: In May 2023, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which advises the president and the Congress on protecting historic properties across the country, wrote to FERC suggesting that it “provide the Tribes with opportunities to share information that will be kept confidential.” FERC’s rule regarding disclosure, the council said, could insulate the agency from meaningful consultation, “and as a result from any real understanding of the nature and significance of properties of religious and cultural significance for Tribes.” 

THE CONCERNS OVER FERC’s engagement with the Yakama Nation are part of a wider discussion of U.S. government protections for tribal privacy and cultural resources. Speaking at a tribal energy summit in Tacoma in June 2023, Allyson Brooks, Washington’s state historic preservation officer, said that even though the consent language was vetoed by the governor, state law for protecting confidentiality around tribal cultural properties is still stronger than federal law, which only protects confidentiality if a site is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

In Washington, if a tribal historic preservation officer says, “‘X marks the spot; this is sacred,’ we say, ‘OK,’” Brooks declared. She said asking tribal nations to prove a site’s sacredness is like asking to see a photo of baby Jesus before accepting the sanctity of Christmas. “You don’t. You say ‘nice tree’ and take it at face value. When tribes say ‘X is sacred,’ you should take that at face value too.”

That approach is vital to the Yakama Nation, which recently saw a developer involved with a project proposed in nearby Benton County leak information that the nation believed was private. 

The Horse Heaven Hills wind farm would be the biggest energy development of any kind in Washington state history. But the sprawling 72,000-acre project overlaps with nesting habitat for migratory ferruginous hawks, a raptor state-listed as endangered.

Court documents related to the permitting proceedings show that the Yakama Nation believed it had identified the locations of the ferruginous hawks’ nests as confidential, in part because the hawks are ceremonially important. In May 2023, the Yakama Nation requested a protective order from the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, a state-level analog of FERC. The order, which the council issued, instructed all parties to sign a confidentiality agreement before accessing confidential information, similar to the nondisclosure agreements FERC proposed. If any party disclosed that information, they could be liable for damages. 

But the order didn’t stop that information from getting out. In February 2024, the Seattle Times published a story on the Horse Heaven Hills wind farm, which included a map of ferruginous hawk nests — a map that was credited to Scout Clean Energy, the developer.

The Yakama Nation quickly filed a motion to enforce the protective order, alleging that Scout Clean Energy had transgressed by passing protected cultural information to the press.

“If a tribal historic preservation officer says, “‘X marks the spot; this is sacred,’ we say, ‘OK.’”

The developer counter-filed, claiming that even if nest locations were a part of confidentiality discussion, the map itself was not, and that it was so imprecise that the critical details remained confidential. The council ultimately agreed. 

Despite the risks, Washburn said that tribes should take any opportunity to share their stories with federal officials, even if the conditions aren’t perfect. “I wouldn’t necessarily encourage tribes to give their deepest, darkest secrets to a federal agency,” he said. “But I would encourage them to meet with FERC and try to give FERC a first-person account of why they think this is important.”

Not all experts agree. Brett Lee Shelton (Oglala Sioux), an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said FERC is out of step with other federal and state agencies. “It’s hard to believe that it’s anything but disingenuous, using that tactic,” he said. “It’s pretty well known by any agency officials who deal with Indian tribes that sometimes certain specifics about sacred places need to remain confidential.”

And for Bronsco Jim Jr., a spiritual leader of the Kah-milt-pah people, sharing too many details is out of the question. Cultural specifics stay within the oral teachings of the longhouse, the site of the Kah-milt-pah spiritual community. Jim said he doesn’t even know how to translate all of the information into English. “We don’t write it; you won’t see it posted. You won’t see it in books. It’s our oral history. It’s sacred.”   

This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Photo illustration sources: USGS, Rye Development, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Columbia Riverkeeper. Leah Nash, Jurgen Hess/Columbia Insight, Steven Patenaude.

The post In green energy boom, one federal agency made the Yakama Nation an offer they had to refuse appeared first on High Country News.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, one of the largest rural cooperative utilities in the U.S., is bringing the energy transition home to its massive western service territory. It’s acquiring its first large-scale solar power plants as it prepares to shift away from its current dependence on coal power.

Tri-State generates and transmits power to 41 member cooperatives, which retail to 1 million customers in rural Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska (four states, despite the name). The customer base spans 200,000 square miles, more land than the entirety of California, with an average density of just five customers per mile of power line. Just a few years ago, two member cooperatives quit Tri-State to seek cheaper, cleaner power elsewhere. Since then, Tri-State has rolled out a series of clean energy commitments that it says will deliver 50 percent renewable electricity by the end of 2025, up from 33 percent in 2023.

The cooperative announced last week it will buy the forthcoming Axial Basin Solar, a 145-megawatt project in Moffat County, Colorado, and Dolores Canyon Solar, a 110-​megawatt project in Dolores County, Colorado. Both projects are still under construction, but they are slated to deliver power by late next year. Tri-State also signed three new power purchase agreements from solar plants that will come online by the end of this year.

Within days of that announcement, Tri-State also reported that electricity was flowing from the largest third-party solar project it has contracted for thus far, a 200-megawatt site developed by Origis Solar at the former Escalante Station coal-fired power plant in New Mexico. The cooperative also filed an innovative proposal with federal regulators to collaborate with its members that wish to generate clean energy for themselves locally.

“In the past several months and years, Tri-State has been a very significant leader in the cooperative space in identifying ways to bring the benefits of clean energy to their members, and use the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act to a maximum degree,” said Uday Varadarajan, a senior principal at climate think tank RMI who tracks rural cooperative decarbonization. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)

This embrace of the energy transition was by no means guaranteed. America’s cooperative utilities, which deliver about 12 percent of the country’s electricity but serve 56 percent of its landscape, were at serious risk of getting left behind by the clean energy transition. The U.S. incubated its renewables industry with tax credits, which don’t do much good for the many federal, municipal, or cooperative utilities that generate power as not-for-profit corporations, and thus owe little to the IRS. Many cooperatives also signed very long-term contracts, which left them committed to paying for coal plants even after they might’ve wanted to switch to cleaner, cheaper alternatives.

Those conditions are changing now, thanks to the landmark climate policies passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Chief among them is a ​“direct pay” option that lets nonprofits access the same generous clean energy tax credits as their for-profit peers — even with little to no tax burden. Once Tri-State’s leadership saw clarity on the tax rules, they decided this was the time to strike.

“Not-for-profit cooperatives simply could not take advantage of those [renewable tax credits] because we did not have the tax liability to offset,” said Lee Boughey, vice president of communications at Tri-State. Now, though, he added, ​“We are pursuing the maximum amount of funding available for cooperatives.”

From incumbent to change agent

Back in 2016, at least a few local co-ops that buy power from Tri-State were chafing at its pace of decarbonization. New Mexico’s Kit Carson Electric Cooperative cut ties that year, paying a $37 million exit fee in order to buy power from a company called Guzman Energy and generate more clean energy locally. Colorado’s Delta-Montrose Electric Association soon followed suit. Guzman won them over with renewables-heavy portfolios that it said would save them money over time, compared to staying with Tri-State.

Tri-State kicked off a clean energy planning effort in 2019, and in late 2020 promised to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2030 and shut down several coal plants. The latest solar investments represent strides toward that promise. 

Clean energy technologies and prices reached a different stage of maturity in the early 2020s compared to where they were in 2016, Boughey said. Now the utility sees ample savings and benefits for its customers in maximizing low-cost renewable generation, while ensuring it has enough ​“firm” power — today provided by coal and fossil gas plants — to keep the lights on. The utility recently hit a new record for instantaneous renewable production on May 24, when wind and solar delivered 87 percent of its generation for half an hour.

Cooperative customers are also shareholders, so the people who get to vote on the utility’s leadership are the same ones benefiting from lower-cost renewables. By investing in projects within its territory, Tri-State also supports economic development for its customer-owners. 

“You can pursue an energy transition and still retain that reliability and resilience even in the face of the challenging weather that utilities in the western U.S. can face,” said Boughey.

Inflation Reduction Act breaks down barriers for cooperatives

The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, finally gave cooperatives a chance to avail themselves of the renewable power discounts that for-profit corporations with large tax burdens could access. But it also included a program specially designed to help rural co-ops deal with closing coal plants without burdening their customers with higher power prices.

Co-ops can’t raise money in quite the same ways as Wall Street–owned for-profit utilities do — they don’t issue stock to profit-hungry investors, for instance. To build new plants without piling steep rate hikes on customers, co-ops often borrow low-cost debt and pay it off over decades using the revenue from generating or transmitting power. Many co-ops, Tri-State included, are still paying off coal plants that they expected to run for decades more; shuttering them early, for climate or economic reasons, leaves customers saddled with an outstanding debt for something that no longer generates any value.

This turns out to be one of the many obscure decarbonization challenges that the IRA tackled. It created a program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Empowering Rural America (New ERA for short), which offered up $9.7 billion to help rural utilities finance the transition from coal and support coal communities in the process. The program drew proposals for $93 billion worth of energy transition investment, from public and private sources (winning projects have not yet been announced).

“It did break down some of these barriers to make it easier than it was, and rural America showed up,” Varadarajan said. ​“It is pretty remarkable what has been proposed post-IRA by rural cooperatives.”

Tri-State used the new federal funding opportunity as a springboard for imagining the next phase of its clean energy transition. Its late-2023 proposal to Colorado utility regulators argues that federal funding, if awarded, could help move up the closure of coal plants Craig Station in 2028 and Springerville in 2031. Tri-State would fill the gap with 1,250 megawatts of wind, solar, and energy storage, including conventional lithium-ion batteries and novel iron-air batteries for multiday energy storage. The plan would also add a 290-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant with plans for carbon capture and sequestration. 

“We have to have the dispatchable capacity for when those renewable resources aren’t available,” Boughey said, noting that Tri-State goes beyond industry-standard reliability metrics to prepare the grid for extreme weather events, hot or cold.

Renewables purists may balk at the nod to carbon capture at a fossil-fueled plant, which has little precedent for economic success in the real world. But Tri-State frames that plant as more of a backup for moments when renewables can’t carry the day; and even with that new gas, the portfolio is projected to lower carbon emissions from Tri-State’s Colorado electricity generation by 89 percent by 2030, compared to the 2005 baseline. That reduction exceeds what Colorado requires of its utilities, the company noted — and the pace of many of the most progressive utilities nationwide.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This coal-heavy rural co-op utility is buying its first solar plants on Jun 22, 2024.

Main recommendations remain unfinished, governor has not read the report, and critics say Indigenous voices…

The post Four-year-old Oregon report identifies missing Native American women as a ‘emergency’ — but progress has been limited first appeared on InvestigateWest.

The post Four-year-old Oregon report identifies missing Native American women as a ‘emergency’ — but progress has been limited appeared first on InvestigateWest.

A reservoir is many things: a source of drinking water, a playground for swimmers, a refuge for migrating birds. But if you ask solar-power enthusiasts, a reservoir is also not realizing its full potential. That open water could be covered with buoyant panels, a burgeoning technology known as floating photovoltaics, aka “floatovoltaics.” They could simultaneously gather energy from the sun and shade the water, reducing evaporation — an especially welcome bonus where droughts are getting worse. 

Now, scientists have crunched the numbers and found that if humans deployed floatovoltaics in a fraction of lakes and reservoirs around the world — covering just 10 percent of the surface area of each — the systems could collectively generate four times the amount of power the United Kingdom uses in a year. The effectiveness of so-called FPVs would vary from country to country, but their research found that some could theoretically supply all their electricity this way, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Papua New Guinea. 

“The countries around the world that we saw gain the most from these FPVs were these low-latitude, tropical countries that did not have a high energy demand in the first place,” said Iestyn Woolway, an Earth system scientist at Bangor University and lead author of a new paper describing the findings in the journal Nature Water. “It meant that if only a small percentage of their lakes — this 10 percent — was covered by FPVs, it could be enough to fuel the energy demand of the entire country.”

For developing countries, floatovoltaics could be especially powerful as a means of generating clean electricity. Instead of building out more planet-warming infrastructure running on fossil fuels, like gas-fired power plants, fledgling economies could run panels on land and water, in addition to other renewables like wind and hydropower. With solar power comes autonomy: Utilities don’t have to rely on shipments of fossil fuels, but can tap into the abundant power of the sun.

Floatovoltaic solar panels — which have been proliferating globally, from California to France to Taiwan — are the same ones found on a rooftop. “It’s the same electrical system, same panels, same inverters,” said Chris Bartle, director of sales and marketing at Ciel and Terre USA, which is deploying floatovoltaic systems. “We’re just providing a structure that floats to mount that electrical system.” The solar rafts are anchored either to the bottom of the water body or to the shore, or both, to keep them from wandering.

In many ways, solar panels and bodies of water can benefit one another. Photovoltaics get less efficient the hotter they get, so having them floating on a lake or reservoir helps cool them off. “Because of the cooling effect, we see increased efficiency of the systems,” said Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new research. Returning the favor, the panels provide shading, reducing evaporation. If floatovoltaics are spread across a reservoir, that could mean more water would be available for drinking.

If a reservoir is equipped with a dam for hydroelectric generation, the floatovoltaics could hook into that existing transmission infrastructure. (Countries like Kenya, for instance, are building out more of this hydroelectric infrastructure already.) That could save local governments money because they wouldn’t need to string new transmission lines from the floatovoltaics to the nearest city. In the event of a drought, when water levels drop too low to generate hydropower, the panels could still operate as backup power. 

To do their new modeling, Woolway and his colleagues began with over a million lakes and reservoirs around the world  big enough and deep enough for floatovoltaics. Then they whittled those down based on critical qualities. For one, the body of water couldn’t dry up, beaching the panels, or freeze over for more than six months a year, entombing the panels in ice and damaging them. The lake couldn’t be protected by law, either, like as a natural refuge. And the site had to be near a human population that could use the generated power. 

A remote lake, by contrast, would require long transmission lines to connect a faraway city to the floatovoltaics. This doesn’t necessarily rule out the technology for more remote communities of people living near an otherwise suitable lake. In fact, floatovoltaics could be particularly potent there as a way to provide clean energy. These cases just weren’t included in the scope of this modeling.

Regardless, all those characteristics considered, the team ended up with 68,000 feasible locations in 163 countries. They found that on average, countries could meet 16 percent of their energy demand with floatovoltaics, but some places could generate a lot more. In Bolivia, for instance, floatovoltaics could provide up to 87 percent of national electricity demand, and in Tonga, they could meet 92 percent. The potential is much lower in the United States, however, meeting just 4 percent of energy demand — even though the country has a plethora of large lakes and reservoirs, overall energy usage is extremely high. In less-sunny climes, like northern Europe, the effectiveness of floatovoltaics drops, but Finland could still satisfy 17 percent of its electricity demand with floating panels. 

“The regions or the countries that we saw had the highest potential had these two critical variables, in that they were close to the equator, or were at high elevations, so they received high amounts of incoming solar radiation,” Woolway said. “And secondly, they had large water bodies.” 

Covering 10 percent of a 100-square-mile lake, for instance, would end up with a lot more solar panels than covering the same percentage of a 10-square-mile lake. “We considered 10 percent to be a reasonable surface area coverage without having a devastating impact on the ecology and the biodiversity,” Woolway said. “If you were to cover the surface 90 percent with solar panels, there would be no light going into the water itself.”

This is where the new science of floatovoltaics gets tricky, as there’s still little data on the potential environmental and social downsides of these floating systems. Scientists are investigating, for example, whether the floats might leach harmful chemicals or microplastics into the water. 

And keep in mind that these ecosystems are solar-powered, too: Light fuels the growth of aquatic vegetation, which feeds all kinds of other organisms. If a floatovoltaic system cuts off too much of that light, it might reduce the food supply, and hinder plants’ ability to produce  oxygen. “You’re changing light penetration, and that’s the most fundamental physical variable for an aquatic ecosystem,” said Rafael Almeida, a freshwater ecosystem scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new study. “If you don’t have enough light, and you’re reducing oxygen concentrations in that system, and that may cascade through the food web, potentially impacting fish.” At the same time, early research suggests that the panels can counter the growth of harmful algal blooms that make water dangerous for people to drink.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what amount of coverage can still produce enough power to justify the monetary cost of deploying floatovoltaics, while not incurring ecological costs. Each body of water is its own unique universe of chemical and biological interactions, so the same coverage on two different lakes might have dramatically different effects. “Would 10 percent be enough to cascade into system-wide changes?” asks Almeida. “These are things that we really don’t know.”

Researchers also need more data on how effective the panels are at reducing evaporation, and therefore how much water a given system might actually save. “What we are yet to fully understand is that so many of the existing floating solar systems that have tried to collect data on this have been smaller,” Gadzanku said. “So it is more: How do potential evaporation savings scale as you build larger systems?” 

Humans rely on bodies of water in many ways other than for drinking. Subsistence fishers rely on them for food. And owners of lakefront properties might bristle if they think floating solar panels would cut their property values. 

Still, Almeida says, this new research identifies where floatovoltaics might work, and how much energy they might provide given local conditions. “I think that now what we need,” said Almeida, “is understanding — out of these suitable sites — which ones are really the low-hanging fruits.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Coming soon to a lake near you: Floating solar panels on Jun 13, 2024.

In Washington, a dozen dams dot the Columbia River — that mighty waterway carved through the state by a sequence of prehistoric superfloods. Between those dams and the hundreds of others that plug the rivers and tributaries that lace the region, including California and Nevada, the Western United States accounts for most of the hydroelectric energy the country generates from the waters flowing across its landscape. Washington alone captures more than a quarter of that; combined with Oregon and Idaho, the Pacific Northwest lays claim to well over two-fifths of America’s dam-derived electricity. So when a drought hits the region, the nation takes notice.

That happened in 2023 when, according to a recent report, U.S. hydroelectric power hit its lowest level in 22 years. While the atmospheric rivers that poured across California provided the state with abundant energy, the Pacific Northwest endured low summer flows after a late-spring heat wave caused snowpack to melt and river levels to peak earlier than normal. Though dam turbines kept spinning throughout the year — proving that even during a drought the nation’s hydro system remains reliable — last year offered energy providers in the West a glimpse of the conditions they may need to adapt to as the world warms and seasonal weather patterns shift.

While models predict climate change will plunge California and the Southwest deeper into drought, what awaits Washington and Oregon is less clear. The Pacific Northwest will get warmer. That much is certain. But in terms of the rain that places like Seattle and Portland are known for, things get fuzzier.

“Whenever you bring in water precipitation and you’re looking at climate model results, they go in all directions,” said Sean Turner, a water resources and hydropower engineer with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Evergreen and Beaver states could get drier or wetter — or both, depending on the time of year.

Nathalie Voisin, chief scientist for water-energy dynamics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said much of the latest research suggests an increase in total annual hydroelectric power in the region, but, as Turner noted as well, uncertainties remain. “So as a trend, we see an increase” in annual precipitation, Voisin said, “but we also see an increase in variability of very wet years and very dry years.”

Even during wet years, however, the water won’t fall in a gentle mist evenly distributed from new year to year end. The bulk of it, Voisin said, is expected to come from atmospheric rivers streaming overhead between fall and spring, with rivers running low in late summer as the snow and ice in the mountains that rim the region melt ever earlier and no longer keep the waters as high as they historically have.

These are things that the Bonneville Power Administration — the federal agency responsible for selling energy from the 31 federally owned dams along the Columbia and its tributaries to utilities throughout the region — has a keen eye on. In a fact sheet detailing the agency’s plans to ensure its hydropower resources remain resilient, the administration wrote, “By the 2030s, higher average fall and winter flows, earlier peak spring runoff, and longer periods of low summer flows are very likely.” Those times of lower hydroelectric generation will coincide with periods when rising temps are expected to drive people to demand more from their thermostats to keep comfortable.

Given this, if Western states like California, Washington, and Oregon are to meet the 2045 goals for 100 percent clean energy they’ve set, their utilities are going to have to get creative. As it is, when hydropower fails to meet demand, methane, also known as natural gas, tends to fill the gap — even if power companies can’t say for sure that that’s their backstop.

Seattle City Light, for instance, which provides electricity to over 900,000 people across much of the Seattle area, reportedly has been carbon neutral since 2005 thanks in large part to an energy mix that is nearly 90 percent hydropower — around half of which is supplied by Bonneville Power. But with its standard fleet of hydroelectric plants generating below average, Siobhan Doherty, the utility’s director of power management, said it has had to procure new sources of energy to ensure it can comfortably meet customers’ needs. A fair portion of that power comes from other dams in the area, but some of it is also provided by what Doherty called “unspecified” sources purchased from other providers.

Across the West, when utilities like Seattle City Light purchase energy to cover hydropower shortfalls, most of it comes from gas-powered peaker plants, according to Minghao Qiu, an environmental scientist at Stanford University. As a result, emissions rise. Over the 20-year period examined in a study of how droughts impact grid emissions, Qiu and his colleagues found that temporary prolonged hydropower declines led to 121 million tons of carbon emissions. Qiu also found that the plants belching all that pollution often lay far from where the energy is needed.

While the seemingly obvious solution to this challenge is to rapidly deploy wind and solar, Qiu found that this didn’t actually solve the problem.

“So what really happened there is an implicit market that whoever can generate the electricity with the lowest costs are going to generate first,” Qiu said. This means that solar and wind will send all the energy they can because they’re by far the cheapest; hydropower then provides what it can, followed by fossil fuels like methane to plug any holes. “So when hydropower sort of declines,” Qiu said, “the wind power and solar power is already maxed out,” typically leaving gas plants as the remaining option.

Nonetheless, in a bid to keep its grid carbon-free in the long term, Seattle City Light recently signed agreements to buy energy from two independent solar projects, each with at least 40 megawatts of capacity, and is negotiating other, similar arrangements. The fact Bonneville Power has seen a sharp rise in requests from renewable energy developers to connect to its transmission lines suggests other utilities in the region are exploring similar deals.

While those solar farms, in a sense, address the demands that hydro alone can’t meet, the West’s dams help make utility-scale renewables work. Regardless of the inevitable expansion and improvement of turbine and photovoltaic technology, wind and solar will always be intermittent and weather-dependent. In those moments when the gusts stop blowing and the sun stops shining, something has to top off the grid. “Hydro does that better than anything,” Turner said.

Many of the dams administered by Bonneville Power are already equipped to spin up or down as demand dictates, and their ability to meet these moments was perhaps no more apparent than during the lethal heat dome that gripped the Pacific Northwest for one blistering week in June 2021. As streets cracked and power lines melted, the region’s homebound populations drove electricity demand to record levels. To keep the grid going, Bonneville Power relied on the controversial dams along the lower Snake River. The agency released a statement a month after the heat wave, revealing how critical the four lower Snake River dams were during that disaster. At times, they provided well over 1,000 megawatts of power, which is roughly the average draw in Seattle. And while there are credible reasons to remove the dams, Bonneville Power said that without those resources it likely would have had to resort to rolling blackouts to ensure the system wasn’t pushed past its limits.

That experience, and the many more like it that are sure to come, suggest that even as year-to-year dips impact the nation’s dams, the power they provide will long remain a critical component of a carbon-free future.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Rivers are the West’s largest source of clean energy. What happens when drought strikes? on Apr 26, 2024.