JACKSON COUNTY — When she first bought her house in Millwood nearly 20 years ago, Michelle Roach saw it as an investment for her family.

“I plan to give my property to my son,” she said. “That’s supposed to be his, and I’ve been telling him that since he was little.”

But now, for the first time, she’s reconsidering that plan in light of a plant to turn medical waste into energy proposed off state Route 2 — roughly a mile from her home.

“I don’t want to leave. I love it up there,” she said. “But that’s what everybody is talking about.”

Spurred by federal incentives meant for clean energy, these kinds of waste-to-energy facility proposals are becoming more common, especially in West Virginia. A plan for a plant in Follansbee was scuttled earlier this year, and there are two other projects in the works, including the proposed plant in Millwood.

There are some environmental benefits to these types of facilities. Waste incinerators are viewed as an alternative to landfills, and have been lauded as an eco-friendly substitute method for disposing of waste.

But residents like Roach are concerned about what they see as a lack of transparency in the process, and they’re worried about the potential environmental and health effects of a new waste incinerator. Because these sites are proposing to use relatively uncommon chemical processes, Heather Sprouse, an organizer with the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, said the consequences of the facility’s potential emissions are unknown.

“One of the challenges here is that many people don’t have understanding or no access to even understand what the long-term impacts can be because there’s very little information available about cumulative impacts,” Sprouse said.

A plan to convert needles and syringes into energy

The proposal by Thunder Mountain Environmental Services would build the medical waste facility in a warehouse space off Point Pleasant Road, right outside of Ravenswood.

The facility would dispose of solid medical waste by converting it into energy through gasification — a process that converts waste into synthetic gas, which can then be used to produce energy. The company plans to power the facility with that energy. It expects to employ between 15 and 20 people full time, according to Thunder Mountain President Bryan Fennell.

The waste the facility is incinerating will include used medical gloves, paper towels, bandages, needles, syringes, chemotherapy administration supplies, expired or tainted medicines and human or animal tissue or fluids generated during medical procedures. And while it will keep about 1,650 pounds of this waste from going into a landfill every hour, the incinerator will emit 12.29 tons of pollutants into the air annually, according to the permit engineering evaluation.

One of those pollutants is tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, otherwise known as TCDD, one of the most toxic kinds of dioxins.

While the engineering evaluation estimates that the Millwood site will emit less than two tenths of a milligram of TCDD per year, the chemical is a carcinogen — a substance or agent capable of causing cancer — and dioxins can be incredibly harmful even at low emission rates.

“They induce birth defects, they alter the immune responses, and so even exceedingly low concentrations are quite troubling for people,” said West Virginia Sierra Club chair Jim Kotcon, also an associate professor of plant pathology at West Virginia University.

The facility will operate “in strict compliance” with its permits, said Fennell. The site is permitted to emit nine nanograms of TCDD per cubic meter; 90 times greater than the emissions level permitted in the European Union.

Medical waste-to-energy facilities: An emerging trend

The proposal by Thunder Mountain Environmental Services marks the second recent attempt by an out-of-state company to establish a medical waste-to-energy facility in West Virginia.

“It does seem like we’re seeing this as a trend, and it looks like Central Appalachia might be kind of the bullseye for how these facilities are developing throughout the nation,” Sprouse said.

Concerns over medical waste-to-energy facilities in the state began following the proposal of a facility in Follansbee last year by Empire Green Generation. The out-of-state company proposed using pyrolysis — a process that thermally decomposes material into combustible gas — to convert medical waste into gaseous fuel. The company dropped the project following opposition from residents and city officials.

A June announcement by Gov. Jim Justice of another waste-to-energy facility, this time in Eastern Kanawha County, has only further heightened concerns.

Sprouse credits the sudden boom to state and federal governments incentivizing such facilities.

Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act included a variety of incentives to promote clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. Some of those benefits were aimed at encouraging the commercialization of carbon capture and storage and hydrogen hubs.

The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021 also allocated funds to invest in projects utilizing hydrogen technology in an effort to help the country transition to a zero-carbon economy.

“These tax credits are available for a variety of circumstances, but we’re seeing that it does create an environment where for business owners it can be ever more profitable for them to engage in this waste incineration technology,” Sprouse said.

While it’s unclear whether the Millwood or Follansbee facilities would qualify for the incentives, the interest in the capture of carbon from waste-to-energy plants has grown over the past decade, according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

A community effort to educate

Millwood resident Henry Ligier, sat in his den, flipping through a stack of papers in his lap. A few stray papers were scattered around him, while his wife Adelle perched on a seat nearby, her own documents in hand.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research in reference to how this whole process works,” Ligier said. While he’s not an engineer, he previously worked at a recycling plant as a safety director before retiring. Over the past few weeks, he’s read the DEP’s engineering evaluation for the facility, researched the proposed processes and watched videos on the technology.

“I understand the recycling business and I understand safety,” he said. “I’m trying to learn this, and what I’m learning I’m passing on to all the community.”

Most, if not all, of the information the community has on the proposed medical waste facility has come from research by either the Ligiers or Roach, and it’s what they plan to use as they now set their sights on mobilizing opposition in the neighboring town of Ravenswood.

But even as their effort grows, their underlying frustration has too. Despite their research, they still have a lot of unanswered questions and concerns over the overall impacts of a medical waste facility.

“Had we known that this was happening, we would definitely not have moved here,” said Ligier, looking at his wife. The couple moved to West Virginia just two years ago from New Jersey. “We would not have moved here at all.”

For now, whether Thunder Mountain’s plant will open down the road from the Ligier’s house is still unknown. The facility needs three state permits to operate: an alternative treatment technology permit and a commercial infectious medical waste facility permit from the Department of Health and Human Services and an air permit from the Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Air Quality.

In early August, DHHR’s Office of Environmental Health Services denied two of the permits, saying the facility is classified as a large Hospital Medical Infectious Waste Incinerator, which are prohibited under the state’s Medical Waste Act. The site’s failure to qualify for the exemption to the rule also contributed to the permit denial.

While Fennell says the company hasn’t yet made any decisions, they’re still hoping to continue with the Jackson County project.

Spurred by government funding, controversial waste-to-energy plants eye West Virginia appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.

Laramie resident Sylvia Bagdonas asked Wyoming Game and Fish commissioners to “not disappoint the public” as they mull a 50% hike in mountain lion hunting in western Wyoming to help mule deer populations that took a beating last winter.

“After reading news accounts about this proposal it seems that the boosts in hunting quotas are intended to appease outfitters and big game hunters with little science involved in the decision,” Bagdonas wrote in a comment letter. “It is assumed that proper stewardship of Wyoming wildlife is based on science, not politics and money.”

Bagdonas was one of 84 people who wrote in response to a state proposal to increase the maximum numbers of cats that can be killed in four hunt areas from 46 to 70 animals. The 24-cat increase is under consideration outside the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s triennial regulations review, because concerned outfitters pressured the commission to target more coyotes, black bears and mountain lions in hard-hit deer range. The agency obliged, reopening the process out of cycle.

The majority of the seven dozen people who jotted down thoughts on the mountain lion hunting hike were opposed. That includes many commenters from out of state, but also those who typically pay the most attention to Wyoming lion hunting: the houndsmen who partake.

“I don’t want to speak as a collective for the group, but most of the people I’ve talked to who are avid mountain lion hunters don’t support increasing quotas,” Dan Thompson, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s large carnivore supervisor, said about the regulation change at a July public meeting in Pinedale.

Brad Huffaker, of Rock Springs, was one houndsman who wrote in opposition to boosting quotas. Alex Krabbenhoft, of Cheyenne, was another.

“I am currently not in favor of raising quotas in the state as all quotas were renegotiated last year,” Krabbenhoft wrote, “and I don’t believe the data is conclusive enough to warrant an increase already.”

Houndsmen were widely supportive of another revision to the regulations: a new mountain lion “pursuit season” that will let successful resident lion hunters continue running their dogs after they’ve fulfilled their one-cat quota. That change sprang from Senate File 179 – Mountain lion pursuit seasons, which cleared the Wyoming Legislature this year.

There was also some support for increasing quotas in the four hunt areas that encompass the Wyoming and Salt River ranges. Specifically, unit 14 would go from a 20-cat quota to 30; unit 17, from five to eight; unit 26, from 15 to 23; and unit 29, from six to nine cats.

Sy Gilliland, who presides over the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association, encouraged the increase: “Everything we can do to help keep mule deer on the landscape we must do, and this includes significant predator control,” he wrote. “Coyotes, black bears and especially [mountain] lions must be heavily harvested to give the few remaining mule deer a chance to repopulate their habitat.”

A representative for a national trophy hunting advocacy group, Safari Club International, also took the time to weigh in. The state’s lion hunting proposal “generally demonstrate responsible and sustainable management,” SCI State and Local Liaison Chris Tymeson, of Kansas, wrote.

Other out-of-state wildlife advocates wrote in opposition.

Nancy Hilding, president of Prairie Hills Audubon Society in South Dakota, argued to commissioners that the planned reduction of lions “may be pointless” because quotas in two of the four hunt areas didn’t even fill anyway.

Thompson affirmed that’s the case at the Pinedale public meeting. Lion hunters killed three of the six maximum cats allowed in hunt area 29, which runs south of the town of Jackson and includes the Snake River and Gros Ventre mountain ranges. In hunt area 14, which encompasses the southern Wyoming and Salt River ranges, 18 of the 20 cats allowed were harvested by hunters, Thompson said.

Quotas filled in the other two areas: Star Valley’s unit 26, and unit 17, which covers the east slope of the Wyoming Range.

The intent of the 50% quota increase is to transition the four hunt areas into “population sinks” that drive down lion numbers, Thompson said. And the amount of pressure proposed is not unheard of. When mule deer populations were much higher in the early 1990s, there were similar numbers of cats being targeted in the Wyoming Range, he said.

If the quota hike succeeds and lion numbers do tumble, Thompson anticipates that the puma population could promptly bounce back if pressure was eased up down the road.

“That’s what our plan is predicated upon: That [lion numbers] can rebound, as long as there’s prey and habitat,” he said.

Whether reducing lion numbers helps the embattled deer population is another question.

A study out of southern Idaho in the early 2000s found that extensive predator removal essentially had no impact on fawn production, though did temporarily increase doe survival. Ahead of the proposed lion hunting hike, Wyoming Game and Fish did not attempt to model how killing up to 24 more cats could influence a deer herd that’s historically numbered in the tens of thousands.

“We’ll be able to look at that,” Thompson said. “Hopefully we can answer some of those questions with ongoing research.” Game and Fish commissioners are scheduled to consider the agency’s lion hunting regulation revisions at their Sept. 13 meeting in Gillette.

The post Killing more lions to boost Wyoming deer draws scant support appeared first on WyoFile.

Two forestry companies that were announced as recipients for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state grant money last December were issued environmental violations at their Maine facilities over the past several years.

One of the companies, ND Paper Inc., had a $101,400 state penalty finalized in late August for chemical spills at its Old Town mill in 2020 and 2022. 

One spill led to a limited fish kill in the Penobscot River and continued issues with high-pH at the spill site near the riverbank, according to Maine Department of Environmental Protection officials.

A second company, T&D Wood Energy LLC, operates a wood pellet manufacturing facility in Sanford that was cited for nine violations of DEP regulations between 2019 and 2022, DEP records show. 

Its violations stem from inadequate recordkeeping and exceeding the facility’s emissions limits. The company was most recently issued a violation notice in April 2023. If left unresolved, the violations could lead to monetary penalties.

David Madore, the DEP deputy commissioner, wrote in an email Monday that there is an enforcement action pending against T&D Wood Energy.

Last year, ND Paper was awarded $1 million through a state grant, called the Forestry Recovery Initiative, and T&D Wood Energy was awarded $600,000.

The initiative is administered by the Maine Technology Institute, a nonprofit created by the Maine legislature in 1999 to distribute state-funded grants and loans to spur economic growth and innovation.

T&D Wood Energy did not respond to a request for comment. An ND Paper spokesperson said the company works to monitor compliance at its facilities and reports to state regulatory agencies when issues arise.

When asked by The Maine Monitor if MTI had any concerns that some of the awarded companies, including ND Paper and T&D Wood Energy, had poor environmental compliance histories, the MTI president, Brian Whitney, wrote, “MTI does not necessarily agree with the assumption of the question that any of the companies have a poor compliance record.”

The Forestry Recovery Initiative grant uses funds from the federal pandemic rescue plan. The funds were allocated by Gov. Janet Mills to a state pandemic recovery plan, called the Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan, in 2021 with legislative approval.

The grant was to help Maine’s forestry companies recover financially from the COVID-19 pandemic, and support company projects that bolster long-term economic growth and job creation.

Phase One of the initiative in March 2022 awarded 224 small-scale forestry companies with $6 million in grants. The second phase awarded $14 million to a total of 19 larger forestry companies.

ND Paper and T&D Wood Energy were in the second phase. They plan to use the funds to expand productivity. 

ND Paper intends to enhance the efficiency of a packaging paper machine at its Rumford mill, and T&D Wood Energy wants to acquire two shuttered facilities to expand operations, according to a webpage announcing the grant awards.

Since announcing the awards last December, Whitney wrote in an email that MTI has been finalizing the details.

Whitney said the application process for Phase Two included self-certification from the applicants that they were a business in good standing and confirmation from state agencies that the companies have not been banned from contracting with the state or federal government.

Overall consideration of grant applications, however, did not include separate investigations of the companies’ compliance with environmental laws, and an applicant’s history of environmental compliance was not used as a criterion to score applications, according to MTI.

“The application did not inquire about historical violations of environmental law,” Whitney wrote in an emailed response to the Monitor’s questions.

Whitney stated that such investigations into environmental compliance are not a requirement of the Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan.

Whitney wrote that before contracting with the awardees, MTI shared the list of grant recipients with the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development, and Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

After the awards were announced, MTI “learned that T&D Wood was not in compliance with DEP,” Whitney wrote. “(T)hat contract and conditional award has not moved forward pending resolution of the outstanding issues with the state.”

ND Paper’s violations

Whitney said officials were unaware of ND Paper’s environmental violations until they saw a news report in July that ND Paper “faced a Maine DEP issue resulting from a spill at one of their other Maine locations” in Old Town.

Whitney said the MTI then received confirmation from DEP and the state DECD that ND Paper “​​had satisfactorily settled the issue.”

The $101,400 penalty for ND Paper was finalized by the Maine Board of Environmental Protection in August.

It was prompted by separate spill incidents at the company’s Old Town mill. In the first, 30,720 gallons of a sodium hydroxide mix was poured through a drain in September and October 2020 because of an open valve, leading to the increased pH levels and corresponding small-scale fish kill.

DEP staff members reported the floor drain system associated with the fall 2020 spill has been repaired, though Pam Parker with DEP’s Water Quality Bureau said in a meeting this month of the Maine Board of Environmental Protection that extensive repairs were difficult due to the facility’s age.

“… (T)his is an old industrial building with a tremendous amount of legacy piping, but also actively used systems,” Parker said. “So it was hard to be able to wholesale repair the facility …”

A smaller spill occurred at the same building in June 2022, when 1,076 gallons of a sodium hydroxide solution were released over a 30-day period.

ND Paper has repaired the parts of the Old Town facility that the spills originated from, according to the DEP, and installed monitoring equipment to prevent another incident.  

As part of the consent agreement, ND Paper also has to investigate the high-pH material still detected underneath the spill site and create a remediation plan.

The Old Town mill has been closed since March.

Although ND Paper’s Old Town mill has been the most recent target of DEP enforcement, its Rumford mill, which its Forestry Recovery Initiative award is designated for, also has had recent environmental deficiencies, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database.

Between April 2020 and September 2022, the Rumford mill violated its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit five times, the database shows. The permit is a federal license enforced by DEP that limits the wastewater a facility can legally discharge.

In an email, ND Paper spokesperson Jay Capron wrote that the company carefully monitors and maintains its systems to ensure environmental compliance with regulatory agencies.

“In addition, incidents are reported and elevated internally, and the process includes completing incident investigations, developing corrective actions, and presenting findings,” Capron wrote.

T&D Wood Energy’s track record

DEP has issued four warning letters to T&D Wood Energy’s Sanford facility since it came online in November 2018, as well as two violation notices, according to documents obtained by the Monitor through a Freedom of Access Act request. 

In the first violation notice, issued in February 2020, DEP wrote that the agency received 13 air quality complaints between 2018 and 2020. Agency officials also made several visits to the plant.

The violation notice said because of the facility’s classification under the federal Clean Air Act and its guidance for state agencies to oversee facilities with the greatest potential for significant impact on human health and environment, DEP identified the violations as “High Priority,” and labeled T&D Wood as a “High Priority Violator.”

DEP acknowledged that as a new operation, T&D Wood and Player Design, Inc., which jointly hold an air emissions license for the facility, “have been working through startup of the new manufacturing process to come into compliance, resolve operational problems, and run an efficient, profitable business.”

However, DEP officials wrote, “The Department has given T&D Wood ample time to come into compliance.” That included delaying compliance testing and providing technical assistance from a department compliance inspector, according to the violation notice.

Four months later, in June 2020, T&D Wood received a DEP warning letter that stated, “Based on our findings there is more work to be done to come into full compliance,” citing excess smoke and dust, as well as incomplete reports. 

In a follow-up inspection in August 2020, a DEP official wrote that an inspection at T&D Wood’s facility indicated compliance with the company’s air emissions license, but more test results were required.

A string of warning letters came two years later in July and December 2022, when the facility was again dinged for its emissions and incomplete recordkeeping. A full compliance evaluation in February 2022 identified several more violations. 

The facility received its most recent violation notice in April, followed by the pending enforcement action.

T&D Wood Energy did not return emails or phone calls requesting comment.

Safeguards and concerns

According to Whitney with the Maine Technology Institute, there are several safeguards that keep grant awardees on track with the goals of the Forestry Recovery Initiative, including five years of quarterly reporting requirements beyond a project’s completion. 

He added that if a grantee fails to comply with federal and state statutes, regulations or other grant requirements, MTI “would provide the grantee an opportunity to cure its issues, but MTI does retain the ability to terminate the agreement and seek reimbursement of the grant funds if necessary.”

Whitney said most of the funds have yet to be distributed.

In addition to ND Paper and T&D Wood’s outlined violations, five other companies awarded Forestry Recovery Initiative grants had instances of non-compliance with DEP regulations, according to the EPA database.

Sappi North America, Inc. was awarded $1 million for improvements in pulp and paper mill productivity at its facility in Skowhegan.  

At that same facility, Sappi has five violations reported under its wastewater permit between April 2020 and September 2022, according to the EPA database.

Sappi received two violation notices from DEP and one warning letter for operations at its Skowhegan plant during that two-year span.

The EPA database shows two other violations from 2020 against Sappi on its water permit for its operations at a Westbrook mill. EPA also lists one more violation on Sappi’s air emissions license. Those notices came before the initiative awards were announced last December.

There were three warning letters issued under the air emissions license between January 2020 and July 2022, the EPA database shows.

Sappi North America did not respond to requests for comment on those violations and its plans for the grant award.

Hancock Lumber Company, Inc. was also awarded $1 million through the initiative for a project labeled “Bethel Value Added.”

At its Ryefield mill, Hancock Lumber has received several violation notices for a permit under the Safe Drinking Water Act, another federal license but for community water systems, though the company’s water system is listed as private and only serves 45 people.

Almost all of those violations are listed as “resolved” on the EPA database.

After initially responding to a reporter’s email, Hancock did not respond to email inquiries on the violations and the company’s designated project for grant funding.

Robbins Lumber East Baldwin, LLC was awarded $1 million to purchase a sawmill edger that will replace a 40-year-old piece of equipment at its East Baldwin mill, according to Robbins spokesperson Catherine Robbins-Halsted.

Robbins-Halstead wrote in an email that the project will improve equipment efficiency and reduce energy consumption while making a demanding job easier for operators.

In response to a question about water violations reported at the company’s Searsmont facility, Robbins-Halsted said one group of violations was due to existing background groundwater concentrations. 

Another violation stemmed from an effluent discharge that DEP had authorized, according to Robbins-Halsted.

“In both instances Robbins was communicating with DEP and working with DEP to comply with standards in a mutually agreed upon path. The alleged violations represent a gap between State DEP and Federal EPA data recordkeeping,” Robbins-Halstead wrote.

DAAQUAM Lumber Maine, Inc., was awarded $500,000 by the Forestry Recovery Initiative for a project to replace a kiln at its Aroostook County facility.

It has one violation for its air permit in August 2021 and two warning letters from DEP. 

DAAQUAM did not return phone call and email inquiries on the violation, nor its plans for the Forestry Recovery Initiative awards.

ReEnergy Biomass Maine, LLC is the fifth company with listed environmental infractions before it was awarded initiative funding.

The company received $523,900 for projects at its Livermore Falls and Stratton facilities to harness a charcoal-like substance called biochar for potential use as a soil supplement, according to its spokesperson, Sarah Boggess.

In October 2022, the company had an NPDES permit violation at its Livermore Falls biomass-to-energy facility, which burns wooden material and converts it to electricity, when the facility exceeded its monthly average chromium limit by 18%.

According to Boggess, the company determined that the excess was due to washing activities while the facility was offline for the fall.

“To prevent a recurrence, the Livermore Falls team will isolate the wash water and dispose of it before it reaches the cooling tower so it is not included in the facility’s discharged water,” Boggess wrote in an email. “There was no financial penalty assessed.”

In response to those violations, Whitney said because the ECHO database relies on self-reported and time-limited violations, some may be relatively minor and do not result in enforcement actions if resolved with the regulator. 

He said MTI is not in a position to pre-empt the responsible agency in enforcement proceedings or decisions.

Asked if any companies aside from ND Paper and T&D Wood energy that were awarded forestry initiative funds had outstanding environmental violations, DEP’s Madore directed a reporter to the EPA ECHO database.

Sean Mahoney, vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Maine Advocacy Center, an environmental advocacy group, wrote in an email that if the state is going to provide public funds to help the private sector, there should be certain assurances.

“(T)hose companies should have their houses in order and be in compliance with all state and federal laws,” Mahoney wrote. “The situation with T&D Wood Energy appears particularly noteworthy given (its) lengthy history of noncompliance.”

The story Forestry companies granted state funds despite environmental violations appeared first on The Maine Monitor.

Wyoming Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, leading Republican voices on energy policy, have been among the foremost critics of the nation’s first comprehensive climate law.

Barrasso has called the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the Democrats’ “reckless green spending spree,” while Lummis derided its “unrealistic measures to cut carbon emissions.”

But earlier this summer, Barrasso and Lummis co-hosted what they billed as a first-of-its-kind  “federal funding summit” to help train Wyoming communities and organizations to apply for the new funds available under bipartisan infrastructure legislation and the IRA’s unprecedented $370 billion federal investment in the clean energy transition.

In a press release announcing the four-day session, the senators acknowledged that they had opposed the bills, but said “both senators are committed to ensuring Wyoming communities and citizens have fair access to the programs their tax dollars are helping to fund.”

Wyoming, the nation’s top coal-producing state, second only to Texas as a net energy supplier, finds itself in a unique position under the incentives-driven climate policy that President Joe Biden succeeded in getting through Congress one year ago.

If the United States acts aggressively enough to meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement, Wyoming has the potential to reap more than $7 billion from the climate-related provisions of the IRA, according to an analysis by the think tank RMI, formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

That would work out to more than $12,000 per person in Wyoming — greater potential per capita benefits than any other state.

Wyoming could take advantage of numerous provisions in the law designed to assist fossil fuel-dependent communities while tapping into some of the best wind energy resources in the country, which roll off its mountain ranges and across its vast expanses of ranchland.

But there are obstacles to Wyoming making a rapid, federally funded transition from fossil fuel giant to national leader in carbon-free energy. The Barrasso-Lummis summit was meant to address one of those barriers — the rural state’s lack of capacity and experience in competing for big federal dollars. Other hurdles may be more difficult to overcome, including local resistance to renewable energy growth and the state’s deep commitment to coal, oil and gas — and the tax revenue they generate.

Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican who hosted the federal funding summit along with Barrasso and Lummis, has welcomed clean energy technologies as an addition to — not a replacement for — the state’s traditional energy sources. Fossil fuels are “a vital component of any effort to successfully address reasonable climate goals,” he said earlier this year.

Gordon’s office would not comment on RMI’s projection of the potential windfall for Wyoming in the IRA. “We find the methodology to be speculative and flawed, as there are many factors that will determine whether or not Wyoming may benefit from potential funding/incentives from the IRA,” said his spokeswoman, Ivy McGowan-Castleberry, in an email.

New opportunities in wind, nuclear and carbon capture

Most of Wyoming has a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding under the IRA. The Biden administration’s mapping delineates nearly all the state as within an “energy community” zone, either adjacent to a former coal-mining or power-plant site or reliant on fossil fuels for jobs and tax revenue.

Clean energy projects that locate in energy communities are eligible for a 10% bonus to the federal clean electricity investment tax credits, which cover 30% of project costs. Further bonuses are available for projects that include apprenticeship programs, rely on domestic content for raw materials and aid low-income communities.

RMI senior associate Ashna Aggarwal, who worked on the think tank’s state-by-state analysis on the potential impacts of the IRA, said more than half of the benefits that could flow to Wyoming are from the clean electricity investment tax credits. That analysis takes into account the state’s substantial wind energy resources as measured by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The laboratory projects that wind power capacity could expand five-fold by 2030 in Wyoming if the state takes full advantage of the incentives available in the IRA.

“Wyoming is really well-poised to take advantage of clean resources that they have in the state, like wind, and Wyoming is already taking action,” said Aggarwal.

She points to the 3,500-megawatt Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project now under construction near Rawlins in southern Wyoming, set to be the largest wind farm in the United States. Once it begins operations in 2027, its power will flow to Nevada, Arizona and California via the 732-mile TransWest Express high-voltage transmission line, which is also under construction, after receiving final approval from the Biden administration earlier this year.

Another IRA provision that could be important to Wyoming is the new Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, expected to roll out next year, offering support to projects that seek to “retool, repower, repurpose or replace” existing energy infrastructure. Unlike other federal clean electricity loan programs, the EIR program will not require projects to use innovative technology; they can be eligible as long as they reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reinvest in the affected community.

The idea of retooling legacy energy sites had taken hold already in Wyoming before the IRA’s passage, with Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’ company, TerraPower, selecting an old coal plant site in Kemmerer as the location for his liquid sodium-cooled Natrium advanced nuclear energy demonstration project. After the IRA’s passage, TerraPower and its partner, the utility PacifiCorp, announced that they would study deploying up to five additional commercial Natrium reactors and integrated energy storage systems, including the possibility of locating them near current fossil fuel sites.

And carbon capture, which Gordon and other Wyoming politicians have long seen as the hope for maintaining coal’s future in the state, also could get a boost from the IRA. Utilities have viewed the technology as too expensive, but the IRA could ease the costs by greatly increasing the value of the tax credits available for carbon capture and utilization (for enhanced oil recovery, for example) or sequestration. A test case could be the direct air capture carbon removal project, Project Bison, announced after passage of the IRA and being constructed in Rock Springs near a coal plant that is currently switching over to natural gas. Meanwhile, the University of Wyoming has been tapped to receive the largest of nine federal grants to develop carbon storage hubs across the country.

Nathan Wendt, president of the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs, a non-partisan think tank focused on engaging energy communities in the clean energy transition, said he sees great interest across the state in the new opportunities offered by the IRA.

“We might have some of the best energy workers in the world and a lot of the necessary energy infrastructure,” Wendt said. “Wyoming wants to continue to remain a leader in energy production. And I think that they see the great opportunity to do so by, you know, chasing as aggressively as they can the clean energy opportunities that are really now turbocharged because of the inflation Reduction Act.”

Community concerns about wind power, harm to ecosystems

But there have been obstacles to the clean energy build-out in Wyoming, as is clear from the fact that the state is not now among the top 10 wind energy producers, despite the extraordinary resources that whip across its landscape as air flows from higher to lower elevations.

Because Wyoming — the nation’s least populous state — produces nearly 12 times more energy than it consumes, any new energy generation projects have to be able to move power outside the state to population centers. And because the state is located on the eastern end of the nation’s western electric grid, that means putting transmission lines over hundreds of miles of federal land to Western population centers. It took 18 years for the TransWest Express line, which is crucial to the viability of the Chokecherry/Sierra Madre wind project, to get all of the needed approvals before the groundbreaking this year. The debt ceiling legislation Congress passed this summer included new deadlines for environmental reviews of such projects; it remains to be seen whether they will substantially speed the permitting process.

Some clean energy projects have faced opposition in Wyoming, including a 504-megawatt wind project near Laramie where local landowners waged a years-long fight before their defeat before the state Supreme Court earlier this year.

“People really like the long views we have in Wyoming,” said Jonathan Naughton, director of the Wind Energy Research Center at the University of Wyoming. “It’s big sky country and you can see the horizon, so you can see turbines that are 50 miles away.”

At the same time, Naughton said, local economies see benefits from wind development, with landowners earning substantial royalties for turbines located on their properties. That’s revenue that allows them to weather ups and downs in the agricultural markets, and avoid subdividing and selling off their land. “Part of the agricultural community really embraces wind energy because it allows them to keep those big ranches intact,” he said.

Another issue on which there is continuing scientific study and debate is how to accelerate the build-out of wind energy while protecting the fragile sagebrush ecosystem of Wyoming, and the species that rely on it, including the iconic sage grouse.

“I think people look at Wyoming from the outside, and they’re like, ‘Oh, small population, lots of land, lots of space, the perfect place to put the large-scale renewable energy build-out that our country, frankly, needs,” said Monika Leininger, director of external affairs and climate policy at The Nature Conservancy. “What I don’t think people always understand is the sensitivity of the landscapes we have.”

The Nature Conservancy has an initiative to encourage siting renewable energy on the previously disturbed land in Wyoming — often, former fossil fuel sites — to avoid breaking new ground.

“We think there is enough room for wind and solar and wildlife and our landscapes to thrive,” she said. “I think it’s going to depend on how well utilities can work together to plan and utilize existing rights-of-way for transmission and think about the best way to share resources.”

No income taxes, but lots of fossil fuel revenue

But Wyoming’s Republican leaders do not talk about clean energy as a replacement for fossil fuels. With no state income tax, Wyoming is heavily dependent on severance taxes and other fossil fuel revenue to fund its state government.

Wyoming does levy an excise tax on wind energy production in the state, but it does not begin to approach the revenue generated by coal, oil and natural gas. A study last year by University of Wyoming researchers estimated that with aggressive growth of wind energy in the state, wind production tax revenues could increase to $89 million per year. But Wyoming currently expects to bring in $744.3 million in mineral severance tax revenue over its two-year 2023-2024 budget period. With another $597 million expected in federal mineral royalties, fossil fuel revenue will make up about 40% of Wyoming’s expected $3.5 billion in revenue.

Although the state Legislature has repeatedly considered raising the wind energy tax, lawmakers concluded that such a hike would cause Wyoming to lose wind development to other states.

Wyoming doesn’t have a renewable energy portfolio standard, the kind of policy that has driven an increase in wind and solar development in other states. And the state puts limits on net metering — payments to rooftop solar owners for the excess power they sell back to the grid — in a way that could hinder the kind of community solar projects supported by the IRA.

But Rob Joyce, organizer for Sierra Club in Wyoming, said there are positive signs, including indications that Wyoming will apply for a climate pollution reduction grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and that the state is pursuing energy efficiency rebate programs. Such small steps alone show the state has come a long way.

“It’s been a little bit tenuous to have these conversations — even the idea of taking federal money is an issue in some parts of our state, and certainly at our state legislature,” Joyce said. “But I think the majority of people in Wyoming, even the people who are in those positions of power, recognize the opportunity here. We’re maybe not moving as quickly as we would like to, but we’re certainly not at a standstill here.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The post Wyoming could gain the most from federal climate funding, but obstacles remain appeared first on WyoFile.

The 50th anniversary of Project Puffin has just ended, with researchers fully realizing how their quest has morphed from saving one bird to playing a part in saving the planet.

Its purpose in 1973 was simply to return puffins to islands off the coast of Maine, where hunters had killed them off by the late 1800s. Led by Steve Kress, then an Audubon camp bird instructor in his late 20s, the project moved puffin chicks here from Newfoundland. 

The effort became the world’s first successful seabird restoration of its kind. There are now more than 1,300 breeding pairs of puffins across several Maine islands. The irony is that a bird that gives us a sense of the watery riches of Maine in the 19^th century today warns us how we are impoverishing our oceans. 

The warning zoomed past me while I sat in bird blinds. 

It was early July on Eastern Egg Rock, a seven-acre island six miles off Pemaquid Point and the original site of the project. Puffins began breeding anew here in 1981, and the population reached a record high of 188 breeding pairs in 2019. 

Early July is the time of summer when scores of puffin chicks hatch in burrows under the boulders of the island, triggering one of nature’s most amazing sights. At dawn, parents pop out of the dark of burrow openings one by one, surveying their surroundings in the yawning manner of humans rubbing their eyes as they rise from bed. They then take off and fly out of sight over the Gulf of Maine. 

About 45 minutes later, an aerial parade of parents return with glistening, silver beak loads of fish in their mouths. Some zip over the boulders from the right, others from the left. Some come straight at me to burrow directly in front of my blind. Some arrivals are so simultaneous, I can’t keep track. They all plunge back into burrows with breakfast for chicks.

The parade was among the most memorable in the project’s history because of the species of fish that nearly every puffin parent and many terns brought back:

Sand lance. 

Small in size and obscure in direct value to humans, you will not see this fish on ice at the seafood counter. But many of the fish we prize in the pan or sizzle on the grill are there because of sand lance.

They are eel-like, which makes them as easy to swallow as spaghetti, 4 to 8 inches long as adults, and high in fats. That makes sand lance royalty in the realm of “forage fish,” a banquet for much larger creatures.  

According to a 2020 study by two dozen government, university and marine institute scientists, 72 animal species eat sand lance in Atlantic waters from North Carolina to Greenland.

The fish include cod, bluefin tuna, haddock, flounder, striped bass, herring and bluefish. The mammals include whales and seals, and the seabirds include gannets, endangered roseate terns and yes, puffins.

Sand lance is not normally the top food for puffins in the Gulf of Maine; it historically is a supplement to other cold-water fish. In the early decades of Project Puffin, hake and herring were the top choices.

Hake became the dominant fish as herring declined from multiple impacts. Herring is also overfished, and a major 2021 study said its decline is also consistent with climate disruptions in the marine food web.

In more recent years, haddock has sometimes been a major supplement, as species rebounded with federal and state management. Citing 2017 data, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries website says, “haddock are currently experiencing a record abundance in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank.”

(But in yet another example of how humans so quickly alter the oceans, a 2022 federal stock assessment says there is new evidence that haddock in the Gulf of Maine are suffering from a new round of overfishing).   

Add in the altered weather patterns brought by human-made climate change and puffins no longer know from year to year what they can find.

The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest-warming swaths of ocean in the world, with frequent marine heat waves that drive cold-water species too deep or too far out to sea for puffins to catch. Often taking their place are more southerly fish too oval for small chicks to eat, such as butterfish. 

But just when you think this chaos is all bad news for the seabirds, the new mélange of ocean conditions for the second straight year delivered jaw-dropping feasts to puffins.

Last year, puffin parents flew onto the islands with unprecedented levels of elongated Atlantic saury, dramatically dangling a half foot or more from their beaks to feed chicks.

No one knows why this forage fish appeared. Saury are highly mobile, with little data connecting its movements to climate change. 

This year it was sand lance. The only other year over the last quarter-century that sand lance was so abundant was 2015. It is not clear why because not only is it a cold-water species, but its presence is highly tied to what it eats, the zooplankton Calanus finmarchicus, which itself is projected to dramatically decline with warming waters. But in that blind on Eastern Egg Rock, in early July, I observed 61 feedings in a morning, 60 of them sand lance.

There were similar sights elsewhere in the Gulf of Maine. On Seal Island, 32 miles to the east, one researcher wrote in the island journal, “I tried to keep up with the astonishing number of puffins circling the blind, bills heavy with sand lance. I got more feedings than I ever have before, and about twice as many as in a normal stint!”

Then, in mid-July, as if a switch flipped in the ocean, the sand lance disappeared. For the most part, the puffins did not miss a beat. On some islands, puffins swapped it out for mostly haddock. On others, parents switched to more of a smorgasbord of haddock, hake and redfish.

By July 22, when I stayed on Seal Island, the feedings were vastly of haddock, with some hake. This also amazed Don Lyons, director of conservation science for Project Puffin, formerly known as National Audubon’s Seabird Institute. 

“I can’t offhand recall such a seamless transition from one fish to another,” Lyons said. “It tells you a lot about the resourcefulness of puffins and at the same time, it’s a reminder of how much we still don’t know of when and where food is for seabirds, and how fast that all can change.” 

For Tracey Faber, the supervisor of Matinicus Rock and a longtime Project Puffin research assistant, both the sand lance and sudden shift to haddock was cause for nuanced celebration. She said while it was important that haddock helped puffins fledge chicks through later July, haddock also are significantly less fatty than sand lance, hake or herring, providing less nutrition. 

She said she worries about puffins hitting a threshold, because of climate change, of being able to change their foraging habits from “boom and bust” fish such as saury and sand lance to other species.

Arctic terns, for instance, had much more trouble finding food on Matinicus Rock and Seal Island when the sand lance disappeared, sadly settling for tiny crustaceans.

On Seal Island, the crew, supervised by Faber’s sister Coco, noted how several terns that fledged with some of the highest weights recorded in recent years, came back to plots to die. 

“Without consistently available species that can be provisioned throughout the entire chick-rearing process, productivity in any given year will be far more dependent on these unpredictable fish species,” Tracey Faber said. 

That makes you wonder what the summer would have been like without sand lance at all, because it was otherwise difficult for seabirds in the Gulf of Maine. Two years ago, record water warmth and record rain resulted in catastrophic nesting failure. Last year, with calmer weather, seabirds rebounded beautifully. 

This year was marked with more above-average heavy rains and more continuous days of soaking fog than veteran researchers could remember. Tern nests were flooded to the point where eggs floated in them, and a significant number of hatched chicks soaked to death. 

Puffins on Seal Island and Matinicus Rock were hit hard. Seal Island had the lowest puffin egg hatching rates in five years and chick survival rates just above the disastrous levels of 2021. Matinicus Rock had the lowest puffin hatch success in a decade. Petit Manan also lost puffin nests due to storms. 

For puffins that did hatch, many chicks grew to nice weights on some islands, fortified by the sand lance. On Petit Manan, the early banquet of sand lance might have given chicks critical sustenance; two heat waves in July drove away supplemental prey to the extent that the chicks rapidly dropped weight. Cooler waters mercifully returned, and the chicks started gaining weight again.

Tasha Gownaris, a Gettysburg College environmental studies professor whose lab conducts research on Petit Manan, said the heat waves “likely exceeded the thermal tolerance limit of herring and hake. Scary stuff.” 

The fog and rain also sometimes made it impossible for researchers to locate and deal with predators. Several islands were plagued with mink, owls, peregrine falcons or black crowned night herons that tore through tern colonies. On Eastern Egg Rock, some voracious gulls used the fog as cover to prey on tern chicks. 

Matinicus Rock had to contend with clever ravens that last year killed nearly 50 puffins, and a ruddy turnstone that this summer wiped out at least 50 Arctic and common tern nests. Petit Manan saw a significant amount of tern nest abandonment, probably because a peregrine falcon took advantage of the fog to terrorize the colonies.   

“Even when you knew a predator was out there, the fog made it so you couldn’t even leave the cabin,” said Meg Getzinger, an Eastern Egg Rock research assistant. “It was sometimes so wet, you didn’t want to walk out there and kick up the tern colony, because the parents were working so hard to cover up their chicks. If we stirred them up, that would expose the chicks to yet more water.”

This summer also brought more sobering evidence of what the whole world is exposing seabirds to, when the whole world is their ecosystem. Keenan Yakola, a 10-year veteran of Project Puffin and a doctoral student at Oregon State, noted how many Arctic terns arrived to Gulf of Maine islands with poor weight; possibly their winter food supply in the Antarctic was disrupted by the same record low levels of sea ice that is causing total nesting failures for emperor penguins.

On Petit Manan, Gownaris and Linda Welch, biologist for the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, also noted how Arctic terns arrived this spring lighter in weight. 

Yakola and partners such as Welch are making other connections with modern technology to remind people of the vital importance of waters far from where Maine’s summer tourists might see a puffin.

For instance, GPS tagging on Matinicus Rock of another species, Leach’s storm petrels, have shown for two straight years that the bird flies down to the latitude of Philadelphia to forage for chicks in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument. Puffins also feed in the monument during the winter.

Other joint tracking projects between the Maine Coastal Islands refuge and Project Puffin have detailed the incredible migration of Arctic terns. Some Gulf of Maine terns wind all the way around South Africa into the Indian Ocean before wintering along the Antarctic ice pack.

“There are so many greater connections that we don’t pay attention to,” said Yakola, who hopes that research leads to a broader public concept of what an “ecosystem” is, and informs efforts in other nations to protect migrating birds wherever they are vulnerable. “It’s important to keep talking about how the Gulf of Maine is heating up,” Yakola said. “But the birds leave the Gulf for seven or eight months, most of the year. We must keep making connections.”

Tens of thousands of seabirds did successfully fledge chicks in the Gulf of Maine this summer. Overall bird populations on many islands remained strong. In mid-August, at the season-ending conference of the Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group, several islands in the Cape Cod region reported increases in various tern populations. 

The White and Seavey Islands off New Hampshire reported a record number of nests for the federally endangered roseate tern. Pond Island had a record number of common tern nests. Among islands managed by the Maine Coastal Islands refuge, terns on Metinic and Ship did well while making a successful transition from sand lance to herring or hake. 

The longevity of seabirds also cheered researchers. On Eastern Egg Rock, the crew welcomed back a 28-year-old puffin. On Matinicus Rock, research assistant Ali Ballard led me to a burrow and joyfully pulled out the chick of a 34-year-old puffin, tying the record for the oldest bird ever reared in Project Puffin.

The senior bird is one of the last surviving from Kress’ original project. It was brought down as a chick from Newfoundland in 1989 and raised on Seal Island. The oldest known puffin was a Norwegian bird that made it to 41. 

The bird is older than nearly all the researchers, reminding them of all the ocean changes it must have seen. It also makes them more determined to demand we stop putting puffins through so much with climate change.

“I tell people what I do and many of them say, ‘You’re saving the birds,’ ” said Coco Faber. “I say, no, we’re not saving them. Mostly they’re saving themselves from us.” 

The story Off the coast of Maine, puffins are rebounding and feasting on a new snack appeared first on The Maine Monitor.

Following a year that saw 17 deaths from avian flu in the southwestern flock, the Central Coast flock of California condors saw the hatching of five young and the expected fall release of 10 juveniles from the release pen in San Simeon. These birds will bring the Central Coast population to 103, up from 86 reported in May 2022.

Last year, there were 537 reported condors worldwide. As of August 2023, there are 559 condors. Of those, 345 live in the wild and 93 are part of the Central Coast Flock.

According to Alacia Welch, condor program manager at Pinnacles Condor Recovery Program, two of the young are part of the program’s managed birds and the other three are managed by Ventana Wildlife Society.

This year’s wild nesting pairs include:

• Condor #340 and #236, producing chick #1238
• Condor #589 and #569, producing chick #1215
• Condor #646 and #204, producing chick #1204
• Condor #538 and #219, producing chick #1229
• Conder #550 and #652, producing chick #1230

The California condor was first listed as an endangered species in 1967.

Avian flu remains a concern and according to Ventana Wildlife Society vaccine trials have been carried out in black vultures, which are found on the East Coast, and administration to wild living condors could begin in September.

According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, there are two species of vultures in California—the California condor and the turkey vulture.

The pathogen has been detected in San Benito and Monterey counties in several bird species including turkey vultures.

Since May seven birds have flown to and back from the Bitter Creek Wildlife Refuge condor recovery program site in Kern County and met up with the Southern California flock. Welch said that in July condor #1027, a three-year-old female, returned to Southern California and has yet to fly back to the Central Coast flock. She said it is too soon to say if she will stay, added that the Condor Recovery Program hopes the flocks become one.

The 10 birds in San Simeon came from different captive breeding programs around the country and Ventana expects to release them in the fall. Two of these birds will be managed by Pinnacles.

Lead toxicity, which primarily comes from ammunition, remains the highest cause of condor mortality.

History of recovery program from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife website:

• In 1979, when there were 25 to 35 condors in the wild and one in captivity, the California Condor Conservation Program was formed.
• From 1980 to 1987, field investigations and management programs were undertaken, including radio telemetry studies of birds and captive incubation of wild-collected eggs.
• In 1987, the last wild condor was removed from the wild, and all 27 condors left in the world were being kept in breeding facilities at the Los Angeles Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park.
• In 1988, the first California condor chick hatched in captivity.
• From 1989 to 1991, female Andean condors were released and studied to assess reintroduction techniques.
• In 1992, two of the captive-bred California condors were released in Ventura County, five years after the last wild birds had been captured.
• In 1993, a third condor breeding center was established at the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho.
• By 1994, the captive condors had laid more than 100 eggs.
• In 2003, a fourth condor breeding center was established at the Oregon Zoo’s Jonsson Center for Wildlife Conservation in Clackamas County Oregon.
• Releases were undertaken in Santa Barbara County beginning in late 1993; in San Luis Obispo County in early 1996; in northern Arizona beginning in late 1996, and in Monterey County beginning in 1997; Baja Mexico in 2002; and San Benito County in 2003.
• Additional release sites were added; along the Big Sur coastline in 1997; in Pinnacles National Monument in 2003; in Arizona near Grand Canyon National Park in 1996; and in Baja California, Mexico in Sierra San Pedro de Martir National Park in 2002.
• The first nesting in Central California by free flying condors in over 100 years was documented in 2006. A Big Sur condor pair was found nesting in the burned-out cavity of a coastal redwood tree.

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After a blazingly hot stretch of summer in early July 2022, the skies broke open over Buchanan County, Virginia. Floodwaters damaged almost 100 homes and destroyed miles of road in the rural, overwhelmingly low-income mountain towns that dot the region. In the wake of the devastation, local officials spent $387,000 compiling a flood preparedness plan. The multistep blueprint analyzed inundation risks and recommended potential risk-reduction projects.

To develop the proposal, the county tapped the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, a state program that makes hundreds of millions of dollars available for disaster risk analysis and mitigation. They were among the first to do so after money for such things became available in 2021 through proceeds from a carbon-offset program called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. But those plans, and the fund, are now in doubt because Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to withdraw from the initiative despite the fact it has provided $657 million for flood preparedness and energy-efficiency programs and reduced the state’s carbon emissions by almost 17 percent.

Critics of such a move say that, beyond curtailing the significant emissions reductions RGGI has already incurred, pulling out will reduce the funding available to help communities prepare for increasingly common extreme weather. It is, they say, a huge mistake and, what’s more, illegal. A group of four Southern environmental nonprofits, led by the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed suit on August 21 to stop it.

“Repealing this regulation is just outside of their authority,” said Nate Belforado, a senior attorney with the center. “If they disagree with it, they have to take it to the General Assembly, and they’ve tried to do that and it hasn’t been successful.”

RGGI, often pronounced “Reggie,” is a collaborative cap-and-invest effort that links 12 states stretching from Maine to Virginia. Power plants in those states must acquire one carbon-emission allowance for every ton of CO2 emitted, with the permissible level of emissions declining over time. Ninety percent of the allowances are sold through quarterly auctions, generating money states can invest as they choose. The program reportedly has slashed power plant emissions in participating states by half and raised nearly $6 billion.

Virginia joined the program two years ago, following the legislature’s 53-45 vote to require participation. Of the $657 million Old Dominion has raised, 45 percent has gone toward the Community Flood Preparedness Fund to help communities with resilience planning and municipal projects. (At least a quarter of the fund’s annual allocations go to low-income communities.) The remainder has financed home weatherization for low-income residents, reducing their utility bills through simple, but often expensive, home improvements.

But Youngkin says the rate increases utilities instituted to cover the costs of participation in the initiative create a financial burden for low-income Virginians. “RGGI remains a regressive tax which does not do anything to incentivize the reduction of emissions in Virginia,” his office told 13th News NOW. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) “Virginians will see a lower energy bill in due time because we are withdrawing from RGGI through a regulatory process.”

The appointed Air Pollution Control Board, of which four of seven members were personally named by Youngkin, voted in June to withdraw from the program by repealing the Community Flood Preparedness Act that made Virginia a part of it in 2020. If the decision stands, the move would take effect December 30. Environmental groups said the proper procedure would have been to introduce a legislative bill and have lawmakers decide. One poll found that 66 percent of Virginians support staying in RGGI; to go against them, Youngkin’s critics argue, is a fundamentally anti-democratic move. A comment period for the withdrawal remains open until Wednesday.

Beyond that criticism, Benforado calls Youngkin’s move frustrating given the progress made under the initiative. “Virginia’s monopoly utilities are required to zero out their carbon by 2050,” he said. “RGGI is the tool that will help us get there.”

Municipalities all over Virginia have used the flood-resiliency funds to shore up infrastructure, draft evacuation plans, and restore blighted wetlands. “Local governments are on the front lines of the climate crisis,” said Mary-Carson Stiff, the executive director of the nonprofit Wetlands Water Watch, which worked with Buchanan County on its flood-resiliency plan. “And they are on their own, to come up with resources to come up with plans and to fund strategies to protect against losses.”

In a 2020 report, the organization noted that most of the state’s rural communities do not have any flooding or other climate resilience plans to speak of. Proponents of RGGI say that before Virginia joined, there was almost no money for disaster preparation and planning, which can be time- and labor-intensive, and requires hiring specialists and conducting environmental studies.

Stiff says Virginia’s use of funds raised through the initiative has been fairly forward-thinking. “We’re unique in the other participating RGGI states where our auction proceeds are being spent on grant programs that are actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

Youngkin’s claim that Virginia ratepayers underwrite the cap-and-invest effort echoes an argument Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest utility, has made. It has said in public comments that the costs it had incurred under RGGI made it necessary to raise rates. It has proposed a rider of $2.29 on top of recent increases caused by fluctuating natural gas prices.

Mayor Justin Wilson of Alexandria, which has benefited from RGGI-funded flood-resiliency projects such as a redesigned downtown waterfront and storm drain expansion, says people were already paying dearly for the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, and that the Community Flood Preparedness Fund has been a godsend. Flooding costs Virginians $400 million per year, according to some estimates.

“I’ve stood in the homes of residents that have seen their livelihoods destroyed,” said Wilson. “The impacts of these storm events are a tax on the community.”

Youngkin has promised alternative sources of funding for flood preparedness and weatherization, and has proposed a $200 million revolving loan fund with a similar purpose. Wilson said he’ll believe there’s a contingency plan when he sees it. All the while, small floods that would have been unusual a couple of decades ago are happening with greater frequency, and the city struggles to keep up. “We have billions of dollars of investment we are gonna have to make,” the mayor said.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the state, Buchanan County’s flood-resilience planning may be complete, but officials must find money for the improvements it outlines. On the anniversary of last summer’s inundation, flood survivors were still fixing up their homes, mourning the woman who had died, wondering where the next resources for them were going to come from, and nervously looking at silt-filled and waste-dammed creeks as summer rain began to fall.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Virginia is bailing on a carbon cap-and-invest program. Activists say that might be illegal. on Aug 28, 2023.

On Tuesday, dozens of Montpelier residents gathered to discuss ideas for improving the city’s relationship with the three rivers that run inside its borders.

The stakes were high. Just over a month earlier, Montpelier had been inundated with 4 to 6 feet of floodwaters, destroying or damaging large portions of the downtown area and residential neighborhoods.

Amid discussion of building up water infrastructure and restoring upstream floodplains, one key question circled: How far and how high did the flood go, exactly?

One resident, who did not give his full name, made a request for “accessible and easy-to-understand maps” that could tell Montpelierites “where did the rain come from that comes into the city?”

Those maps, to an extent, already exist. The Federal Emergency Management Agency maintains the largest database of estimated flood hazards in the nation, including for Montpelier and many other Vermont communities.

The data that powers these maps — the data that determines federal regulations on flood insurance and community participation in flood programs — is collected through a painfully in-depth and yearslong process of studying the hydrology and geology of every section of river in Vermont.

Which is why, according to FEMA, many of these maps are years or even decades out of date.

One of the latest flood studies in Vermont, for Washington County, was completed in 2013, according to FEMA’s flood study website. But because the study took years to complete, it doesn’t even include data on what happened during Tropical Storm Irene 12 years ago, or during a May 2011 rainstorm that flooded Montpelier with several inches of water.

In other locations in Vermont, far older studies power their flood maps. Windham County, with communities hit hard in Tropical Storm Irene, hasn’t had an update since 2007. Some flood studies date all the way back to 1977, during the decade when the maps were first created by regulatory mandate.

FEMA redoes its flood studies on a rolling basis for different communities, said Kerry Bogdan, a spokesperson for the agency. She cited budget constraints as one reason for the delays.

“Congress does not give the agency enough money to, every time they do a study, to update the engineering on every single flooding source within that geography,” she said.

At least 13 Vermont watersheds are in the process of having flood studies right now, said Chris Hutchins, a senior program specialist who works on flood maps for FEMA. The furthest along is the Deerfield River watershed study in Bennington County, where FEMA recently released preliminary maps for communities to review.

But the 2023 floods are not yet included in those studies, and it’s unclear at this point if and how they will be. Bogdan said FEMA has commissioned a separate study to review the data from the 2023 floods, and evaluate if they would invalidate or complicate the other ongoing flood studies.

Either way, new maps are still years away from the finish line. Hutchins said the earliest Vermont can expect finalized maps would be 2025 or 2026, “barring no hiccups.”

Bogdan pointed out that data from historic floods is only one component of flood studies. Changes in the topology of the area, or in water-related infrastructure like culverts and dams, also determine when and how flood studies are conducted.

FEMA develops a “prioritization” schedule based on engineering and conversations with local officials about what’s been observed on the ground, she said.

Researchers across the country are looking at ways to make the process for determining flood risk go faster. In a 2021 paper on alternative flood models, University of Vermont researcher Rebecca Diehl called the traditional process “insufficient” and “data- and resource-intensive.”

In an email to VTDigger, she said there are numerous challenges with the current system — including the amount of data collection needed to detail the risk faced by specific properties.

“We make decisions (and) tradeoffs between getting these details right, and capturing the general inundation patterns that are likely to occur,” she said via email.

What does a flood map mean?

Under the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, FEMA was given a specific goal when creating flood maps: To determine whether specific property owners were required to purchase flood insurance because they were in a high-risk flood zone.

These Special Flood Hazard Areas, sometimes referred to as 100-year flood zones, also determine how communities in the National Flood Insurance Program regulate development in floodplains.

But the “100-year flood” term is a bit of a misnomer. Bogdan said the agency has moved away from using that term in favor of calling those areas “1% annual chance events.” In other words, that flood has a 1% annual chance of occurring.

“People think it’s only going to happen in every 100 years, right like it happened in 1927. So we shouldn’t be dealing with it again until 2027, right?” she said. But in actuality, “unfortunately, you could have 100-year, or a 1% chance, flood three times in a month, three times in a year. (Or) you could have 100 years go by and never experience that.”

Another way FEMA describes it: If a homeowner has a 30-year mortgage, there’s a one-in-three chance that a flood will reach the ground floor before the mortgage is paid off.

Those chances are further complicated by the fact that up to 40% of flood insurance claims come from outside of flood zones, according to FEMA. Vermonters in the recent floods have reported that they were affected, even though their homes were outside the FEMA flood zones.

Conversely, some Vermont communities have a greater than 1% annual chance of flooding, although it’s not marked on the FEMA flood maps. A review of flood studies for Washington County, for example, reveals that some roads and bridges have a 2% chance or even a 10% chance of flooding each year.

In recent years, the biggest challenge to how FEMA flood maps are created has come from climate research groups, which claim the agency underestimates flood risk by not taking into account how climate change could increase the chances of extreme weather.

First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that publishes and sells risk factor data, estimates that 15% of Vermont properties are located in a 1% annual chance flood zone, compared to FEMA’s 1.6% to 8% of properties, depending on the county.

“In the absence of a property-specific risk model, (FEMA maps) have been used as a default tool for understanding property-specific flood risk. And because of that, you know, they’re really being used for something they’re not designed for,” said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street Foundation.

The nonprofit organization incorporates real-world data on river heights, elevation and property zones, but makes different assumptions than FEMA does about the likelihood of extreme weather events, Porter said. It provides free data on its website and sells more in-depth, premium data at an additional cost.

Diehl, the UVM researcher, said via email that climate change means “catastrophic storms” will become more common, shifting the meaning of the 1% flood zone and expanding areas that are regularly flooded.

While flood maps are based on river flooding, she said, the traditional models do not account for flooding that comes directly from hard, fast rain, which is more likely during intense storms. One example would be the flash flooding that occurred in Addison County during heavy rainstorms in early August.

Porter said that, by calculating the chance of extreme weather in a particular area based on historical events, “you’re inherently taking the average of a period that’s already passed.”

“If you don’t incorporate climate metrics that allow you to understand the trending in that data over time, and integrate that into the future, then you end up missing both what the current risk is and what the future risk is,” he said.

Diehl has worked to develop new methods of calculating flood risk that could be performed more quickly and with less detailed data. Her model is a low-complexity system that doesn’t produce enough accuracy for the flood insurance program, but could provide a better overview for communities to prioritize flood hazard areas and test mitigation systems, according to the study detailing the model.

The biggest challenge for First Street Foundation is getting more high-quality data to adopt into its modeling in the first place, Porter said. “The flood model is only going to be as good as the data that you put into the model,” he said, and the organization is continually updating it with factors such as new developments and new elevation levels.

FEMA officials said their hands are tied by that flood insurance law.

“These products are regulatory because of insurance requirements,” Bogdan said. “So we are not … allowed to include future forecasted conditions into these particular products.”

In an email statement, FEMA said “the accuracy of the flood data necessary to service the nation’s largest flood insurance program and the nation’s largest regulatory land use program is fundamentally different than the level of accuracy necessary to support First Street Foundation.”

So with all those factors in mind, should communities and homeowners trust the flood maps?

As Porter sees it, “all climate is local,” so communities need to understand their specific environment and climate conditions in order to take action. Different regions have taken very different approaches to adapting for flooding hazards — from wetlands management in Maine to a massive underground water-detention system near Chicago.

He suggested incorporating “as many data sources as you can” in order to understand your risks.

Diehl wrote that, short of “specific projections” of flood characteristics under a changing climate, communities should consider “taking a conservative approach” — for example, making 500-year or 0.2% chance floods the target to plan for.

“It is likely that the frequency of these larger-magnitude flood events, the ones that cause widespread damage, is likely to increase,” she said via email. “The relatively close spacing in time of Irene and this more recent storm highlights this reality.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: It may be years before FEMA maps show the full flood risk to Vermont communities .