The Weekly Anthropocene, January 10 2024
Wildlife-friendly wind power, mini-forests to beat the heat in Jordan, kiwi eggs near Wellington, the great American battery boom, hope for Florida manatees, and more!
Wind Power
Around the world, brilliant innovators are developing a wide array of new methods to prevent bird and bat collisions with wind turbines. A bat-alerting ultrasonic deterrent has been tested at a south Texas wind farm. Painting blades black to warn birds is being tested in Wyoming after successful tests in Norway, and the strategy may soon be adopted in Great Britain. Offshore wind farms in the Netherlands are simply turning the turbines off when migratory birds move through. This is an excellent and much-needed developing field; clean energy projects where extra care is being taken to safely coexist with animals positively exemplify a good Anthropocene!
Jordan
Amman, the capital city of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is working to provide relief from extreme heat by planting Miyawaki-style high-density mini-forests. The forests use native species like Palestine buckthorn, spiny hawthorn and Atlantic pistachio, provide a cooling effect of about 14°C to the area under their canopies, and have already attracted birds, invertebrates, and even fennec foxes. A great example of local climate resilience efforts!
New Zealand
For the first time in living memory, kiwi eggs have hatched in the metro area of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, with two hatchlings recently found in a burrow in the hills of Wellington suburb Makara. New Zealand started an intense national introduced-predator-elimination program in 2016, and has seen its beleaguered native birds start to rebound. Another great rewilding success!
Japan
Researchers have spurred new growth in the population of the Plebejus argyrognomon butterfly, known as the miyamashijimi, by restoring the species’ preferred habitat landscape. A collaboration with the town of Iijima established established four sanctuaries mimicking traditional Japanese mixed-land-use satoyama landscapes, a mosaic of rice paddies, grassland, and woodland.
United States
The 800-MW Vineyard Wind offshore wind project has started to provide power to the Massachusetts grid! When fully completed, Vineyard Wind will power over 400,000 Bay State homes and businesses. Thanks to the Biden Administration’s steadfast support (as long chronicled in this newsletter), grid-scale offshore wind has become a reality in America!
The great American battery manufacturing boom continues to exceed all expectations (thanks, Biden!)—this humble newsletter can’t keep up with all the new project announcements!
“Just over a year ago, in quick response to the IRA incentives, a raft of manufacturers announced plans to set up shop in the U.S. And the announcements continue: Freyr announced a multi-phase project that is expected to bring battery manufacturing to Georgia. Kore Power recently received a conditional loan commitment from the DOE Loans Program Office, receiving $850 to build battery cells for electric vehicles and grid-scale storage. LG Energy Solution quadrupled its announced investment in two manufacturing plants in Arizona. —pv magazine.”
The state of Maine is getting its largest-ever grid-scale battery facility, and it’s in this writer’s hometown of Gorham! Construction will soon begin on the 175-megawatt Cross Town Energy Storage facility, set to consist of 156 battery containers next to a grid substation. The project should be fully operational by mid-2025. The great American renewables boom keeps on keepin’ on!
In other Maine news, a fully-electric heat pump-equipped tiny home park in Bangor looks set to become a model for more affordable housing projects across the state!
The largest solar farm in the history of Wisconsin is now operational! Badger Hollow Solar Park is a 300-MW, 830,000-module behemoth, located in Iowa County, WI and producing enough power for 90,000 homes. Once upon a time, this would have been the clean energy success story of the year…and now, it passes nearly unnoticed. The exponentially advancing Renewables Age is well and truly upon us!
The carbon offsets field, in which people pay to “cancel out” their carbon emissions has an infamous reputation1 of widespread fraud, misconduct, and general uselessness. Now, a new project in Juneau, Alaska, appears to actually be working: tourists are paying into a fund that helps residents install heat pumps to replace oil heating.
Researchers at the University of Maryland have invented a new extra-durable reflective cooling glass material to help efficiently cool down buildings.
Another win from the climate action gift that keeps on giving; a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act allows nonprofits to access clean energy tax credits as a direct refund, instead of having it subtracted from their tax bill (which being nonprofits, they might not have). This could financially turbocharge a lot of awesome projects; the Georgia BRIGHT solar leasing program
The Port of Virginia in Norfolk has become the first East Coast port to be 100% powered by clean energy (solar, nuclear, and wind)!
The future of electricity in Texas is renewable, with solar, wind, and battery projects accounting for almost all of the planned new additions to the regional ERCOT grid!
A few years ago, the school district of Batesville, Arkansas installed a solar array to counter heavy energy bills. In the following three years (from 2017 to 2020), the energy savings transformed their budget from a $250,000 deficit to a $1.8 million surplus, enabling pay raises averaging between $2,000 and $3,000 per teacher. Just one of many such clean energy-powered local life improvement stories playing out across America and the world!
The manatee population of Florida has suffered from mass starvation deaths in recent years, as algal blooms in polluted and warming water kill off meadows of seagrass, their favored forage fodder. The manatees of Mosquito Lagoon on the Atlantic coast (a major feeding ground which lost 90% of its seagrass and became the site of many of the deaths) have been forced to rely on an experimental lettuce-feeding program to survive the last few winters.
Now, it looks like things might be turning around for Florida’s manatees: a preliminary count found only 518 dead manatees in Florida in 2023, down from over 700 in 2022 and over 1,000 in 2021. Halodule seagrass seems to be rapidly growing back in Mosquito Lagoon for unknown reasons, and the lettuce-feeding project has been discontinued. And this progress looks set to be durable; the state government has provided more money for clean water and manatee conservation efforts, while a seagrass nursery project is being developed to help the local ecosystem build itself back up. Good news!
Lassen Volcanic National Park in California was ravaged by wildfires in August 2021, with burn area covering 70% of the park, but now appears to be recovering nicely! Years of “prescribed burns” work beforehand helped the fires slow down or burn out in some places, and wildflowers are now beginning to cover the park’s slopes.
One study found that California’s carbon market as a whole had a net emitting effect! Here’s an in-depth look at how fraudulent and misleadingly calculated credits added up to make this program worse than nothing. In Brazil, ex-President Bolsonaro of ignoble memory tried to screw around with the old Kyoto Protocol carbon offset system (attempting to double-count them, essentially). And another recent analysis found that 90% of carbon credits certified by Verra, the world’s leading carbon credit standard, were worthless or worse.
The last Liberal Govt (confusingly named, they are our Conservative Party) tried the same double counting bullshit on Kyoto
Nice to read some good news in light of all of the gloom.