scholar_vit

Posted by Byrd Pinkerton

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/405398/tidepools-sunflower-seastars-climate-change-ocean-warming

https://www.vox.com/?p=405398

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

In just a few hours, the world I’m walking into will disappear beneath the waves. 

I’m at Pillar Point Harbor, a 40-minute drive from San Francisco, near low tide. And because this is one of the lowest tides this August, the water has drawn back like a curtain to expose an ecosystem that’s normally hidden away — a place called the rocky intertidal, or, because the receding water leaves little pools behind in the rocks, “the tidepools.”

Dawn has just broken, pods of pelicans fly overhead, and sea lions bark from the nearby harbor. But I’m more focused on following my guide, a zoologist named Rebecca Johnson, as she picks her way out into these seaweed-covered rocks, pointing out species as she goes. These smooth green strands are surfgrass. Those fat bladders of air that look kind of like puffed-up gloves are called “seasack.” This dark brown frond Johnson is draping over her shoulders is the aptly named “feather boa kelp.” 

“ They’re like wildflowers,” Johnson says, “But it’s seaweed.”

As we make our way deeper, she points out odd creatures that only the ocean could dream up. A boring clam (which is far from boring, but does bore into rock) puffs itself up like a fierce fleshy ball before squirting a jet of water directly into the air to fend off our threatening vibes. A pale white brittle star, like a flexible daddy longlegs, dances for us across some algae. And rows of fat green anemones wear bits of shells like tiny hats. 

“ The theory is that…they’re protecting themselves from the sun, like a sunscreen,” Johnson tells me.

We crouch together at the edge of a deep pool and see first one, then two — then three, four, five, six! — species of nudibranchs, the sea slugs that Johnson specializes in. One is hot pink and spiky. Another is an aggressive shade of orange. There’s a pale lemon one, a ghostly white one. Johnson even finds one covered in orange polka dots, like a marine clown. Some of these species, she tells me, bubbling with enthusiasm, eat anemones and steal their stinging cells, repurposing them as their own defenses.

This kind of diversity is wild to witness, but it isn’t unusual for these tidepools. 

“It’s one of the places in the world that you can see species of invertebrates all really, really concentrated,” Johnson told me.

We wander farther out, exploring this alien landscape together, until the tide begins to come back in and cover it over, bit by bit, hiding this weird world away again in a slow disappearing act.

“ It’s extra magical that you can only see it at certain times,” Johnson told me before we came out here. “You get this little peek, this little window. And that’s one of the things I love the most about it.”

Johnson has been coming to this exact spot off Pillar Point for almost three decades now, and in her role as director for the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science for the California Academy of Sciences, she spends time with volunteers monitoring tidepools up and down the California coasts. But she’s still enchanted with them. 

I’m not surprised. I fell in love with tidepools myself 20 years ago, when I first got to explore them as a kid at a summer camp in Mendocino. The odd, colorful creatures in them made me feel like magic was a little bit real, that science could feel like fantasy. It’s part of the reason I’m a science reporter today. 

But Johnson is worried about the future of these tidepools she loves so much. She’s worried that, like so many ecosystems around the world, they may be heading toward a much more dramatic, much more permanent disappearing act. 

So she, along with many, many collaborators all across the state of California and beyond, is doing what many scientists are trying to do for the ecosystems they study: to figure out — first, what’s actually happening to them, and second, what, if anything, we can do to save them. 

How did we get here? 

For Rebecca Johnson, the troubles really began around the arrival of “The Blob”: a marine heatwave. By 2014, it had warmed waters significantly along the West Coast of the United States. Johnson was hearing concerning things from participants in the programs she organized through Cal Academy to get people to go into the tidepools and make observations.

“They started seeing an increase in this really beautiful pink nudibranch called the Hopkins Rose nudibranch,” she says. 

Historically, the Hopkins Rose nudibranch has lived in Southern California — and ventured up to Johnson’s more northern tidepools mostly during El Niño years. But as the temperatures shifted for the Blob, the spiky pink balls were showing up in huge numbers.

“It became the most common thing,” Johnson remembers. 

She was also hearing disturbing reports about another animal — the sea star, known more colloquially as the starfish.

As early as 2013, before The Blob really hit, divers and researchers had started noticing that sea stars were, quite literally, wasting away. 

“They were seeing white lesions on starfishes. And they were seeing the starfish kind of disintegrate in front of them,” she says. “[They would] see it one day with these lesions. They’d come back the next day and it was like almost dissolved and then almost gone.” 

Sea star wasting also isn’t unheard of, but in this instance, the wasting hit species after species of sea stars — at least 20 species in all. Also, as an evolutionary ecologist who studied this outbreak, Lauren Schiebelhut, told me, wasting normally happens on a more local scale — isolated to a single bay, for example.

“For it to spread across the entire West Coast here, that was something we had not seen before,” Schiebelhut says. 

Scientists have been trying to work out what caused this massive shift for over a decade. Some theorized that it was a virus, and people have investigated the possibility of a bacterial issue. One researcher told me that her team is close to publishing a paper that should provide some more answers about an infectious agent here. But whatever the exact cause — and even though the wasting started before The Blob set in — scientists studying one species of sea star found that the biggest declines coincided with the warmer temperatures. Huge numbers of sea stars wasted away — with some locations losing over 90 percent of their stars. 

The Blob “certainly seemed to exacerbate it,” Schiebelhut says.

At one point, Johnson went down to her favorite tidepooling spot, Pillar Point, with a colleague, just to “see what they could see,” and they saw almost no sea stars. 

“It was just like the most bizarre feeling,” she says. “I was still at this place that was spectacularly beautiful, covered with algae. All these other invertebrates are there. But there’s just something kind of off about it.”

She says it was like going into your room, only to realize that someone has moved all your stuff very slightly. 

“And you’re like, ‘What’s wrong with this room?’ It had that disconcerting, unsettling feeling.”

This place Johnson knew so well — had been documenting and sharing with people for decades — suddenly felt unfamiliar. And at that moment, she felt a deep, deep uncertainty about its future. 

“Like, there might not be starfish, like ever,” she remembers thinking, “What does that mean?”

What it would mean to lose so many sea stars

The reason that Johnson was so worried about sea stars was not just that the tidepools at Pillar Point looked different. She was worried about the role sea stars play in the tidepools ecosystem. To us, they might seem like pretty creatures that come in a fun shape, but to many of the ocean animals they interact with, they are voracious predators that help keep their ecosystems in balance — chowing down on everything from mussels and barnacles to snails.  

To understand why this is so important, let’s journey a little beyond the tidepools, a little farther offshore, into the California kelp forests. These are underwater forests of algae that are home to a huge diversity of animals, from fish and octopi to abalone. Kelp forests also provide a buffer for the coast against erosion, and they absorb and store large amounts of carbon dioxide, which benefits all of us as we try to stave off climate change. So they’re amazing ecosystems.

But, like any forest, California’s coastal kelp forest has grazers — basically the marine equivalent of deer. In this case, these are animals like the purple sea urchin, a spiky purple pincushion that chows down enthusiastically on kelp. 

Normally, Peter Roopnarine, a paleontologist at the California Academy of Sciences who has studied kelp forests tells me, sea urchins are content to eat the bits of detritus that the kelp shed naturally. But if there isn’t enough kelp detritus to go around, urchins can start feeding on the living kelp itself. 

“ That will happen if, for example, there are not enough predators around to keep their population in control, to keep them hiding,” Roopnarine says. “ Pretty soon they kill the kelp, and what you’re left with is what we call an urchin barren, which are these stretches of seafloor that are covered with urchins. And nothing else.” 

Sea otters are one of the predators — one of the wolves, to continue the metaphor, to our urchin deer — keeping urchins in check along some parts of the coast. Sea otters were hunted aggressively by European settlers, and have not returned along the northern part of the coast, but have made a comeback in central California.  

Another important wolf for these kelp forests, though, is a sea star known as pycnopodia helianthoides, or the “sunflower sea star.” Sunflower sea stars are beautiful, often purple or pink, and kind of squishy. But they are also, at least as sea stars go, big. They can have 20 arms, and grow to the size of a dinner plate or larger. (As a kid, when we found them in the tidepools, we used to have to hold them in two hands.) And researchers have increasingly found that they, too, did a lot of work to keep urchins in check.  

This is why it was such a big deal when the sea star wasting syndrome hit and wiped out so many sea stars, sunflower sea stars very much included. 

After the sickness, a lot of sea star species did start to come back. You can find sea stars like ochre stars, leather stars, and bat stars in California tidepools, for example. But while sunflower sea stars can still be found in the wild further north, in places like Washington state, they have not bounced back along the coast of California. And that, scientists suggest, may have contributed to the issues they’re now seeing in kelp forests. 

Satellite surveys from a few years ago showed that the kelp forests off of Northern California have shrunk by 95 percent. Once again, this is probably due to a combination of factors. High water temperatures may have weakened the kelp, for example. But another factor was the explosion of urchin populations. 

“This lack of the sunflower star in the kelp forest, especially in Northern California,” Johnson says, “led to the increase of urchins. And the urchins then ate all the kelp.”

What does this mean for the future of these tidepools? 

The tidepools haven’t been hit as hard as the kelp forests. Clearly, as our visit in August showed, a place like Pillar Point has not turned into the equivalent of an urchin barren and is instead still home to a diversity of creatures.  

Still, Johnson says, they have been affected. She has, anecdotally, noticed grazing species like abalone that normally spend more of their time in the kelp forests moving over to tidepools, probably in search of kelp to eat. And as temperatures continue warming over time, tidepool ecosystems are changing in other ways. A recent paper showed that a species of nudibranch range has moved northward. Another study showed that a whole bunch of different marine species, including nudibranchs, but also species of snail, lobster, and crab were spotted farther north than their usual range during a heat wave. Some of these species are predators that might shake up the dynamics and the ecosystems they’re coming into. 

“We don’t actually know what happens when they move north,” Johnson says. “ We don’t really know the impact.” 

And then, as Schiebelhut, the geneticist who studies sea stars, told me, there are other stressors like pollution and runoff from wildfires. In January, more than 57,000 acres burned from a series of wildfires in Greater Los Angeles — a disaster whose scope of damage on intertidal ecosystems is not yet clear, researchers told me.

 “The disturbances are becoming more frequent, more intense,” Schiebelhut says. “It is a challenge to the system.” 

Johnson admits that it’s hard to know exactly how to interpret all these changes and stressors and use them to predict the future of the tidepools. After all, the California coastal ecosystems have survived the loss of important species before, and survived big natural disasters too. 

So I turned to Roopnarine, the paleontologist. He studies how ancient ecosystems weathered — or didn’t weather — things like climate change, and what we might learn from them to apply to ecosystems facing challenges today. I hoped he would have a sense of how the current moment fits into the bigger patterns of history. 

“If you look in the fossil record,” he told me, “one of the things that’s really remarkable is that ecosystems can last a very long time. Millions of years. Species will come and go in those ecosystems, but what they do, who they do it to, and so on? That doesn’t change.”

Ecosystems are a little like, say, a baseball team. You’ll always need certain players in certain roles — pitchers and catchers and shortstops and outfielders. Different players can retire and be replaced by other players — if one predator disappears, another predator might be able to take over some of the role that it plays, for example. 

But Roopnarine’s research into the fossil record also shows that no ecosystem baseball team is endlessly flexible.

“They do eventually come to an end,” he says. Usually, that’s when really extreme changes occur. And when he looks at the moments in the past when the climate changed dramatically, and he looks at forecasts for our future, he’s very worried. 

“We have to be realistic that if we do nothing, the future is extremely grim,” he tells me, “There is no sugarcoating it.”

What can we do? 

When it comes to safeguarding the future health of California’s coastal ecosystems, there are lots of people doing lots of things.

Johnson is working with colleagues on a system that uses the community science app iNaturalist to better monitor the health of coastal tidepools. 

Anyone who goes to the tide pools can upload photos of all the species that they see. Those photos, geotagged with locations and timestamps, will hopefully help researchers figure out how populations are changing, to model the future of this ecosystem. They could also potentially serve as a warning system if there are big die-offs again, so scientists can try and intervene earlier. 

Schiebelhut has studied the genomes of sea stars that did recover, to see what can be learned about what made them so resilient to wasting. 

The California state government has partnered with nonprofits and commercial fishermen to clear urchins and restore kelp. 

And then there’s the consortium of institutions up and down the coast, all working on an initiative to try to breed sunflower sea stars in captivity so that they might, eventually, be released back into the wild and resume their role as key predators.

“ There is no one person that can do all the things,” says Ashley Kidd, a project manager at the Sunflower Star Lab, one of the many groups working together to bring sunflower sea stars back. What gives her hope is that so many different people, from so many institutions, are working together toward solutions. 

“ You can’t have all the knowledge of disease ecology, behavioral ecology, aquaculture by yourself,” Kidd says. “It is a much bigger, wonderful group of people that you get to work with and then be connected with. … You’re not alone.”

When I first heard that these tidepools might be in trouble, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. 

This ecosystem made me believe that the real world had its own magic — because sure, fairies might not be real, but opalescent nudibranchs come pretty close. It hurts to think that that magic might dim, or even disappear. But walking through these pools with Johnson and watching her walk over to a mother and her daughter to show them nudibranchs, eagerly sharing this world with strangers, I felt delight, and a wonderful sense of present-ness. I felt part of that community. A sense that, whatever the future of these tidepools might look like, they were here, now, and as magical as ever. 

“In the midst of climate change and a future that is going to be hotter and harder and more difficult for people, you have to have joy,” Johnson says. “I struggle with it. I feel like marine systems especially are pretty complicated to think about restoring. What do you actually do out here? How do you protect things?…But you can’t stop doing it, because then you’ve kind of lost everything.”

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/405398/tidepools-sunflower-seastars-climate-change-ocean-warming

https://www.vox.com/?p=405398

Posted by Benji Jones

https://www.vox.com/climate/407981/wind-energy-iowa-trump-escape-velocity-energy-climate-progress

https://www.vox.com/?p=407981

If you drive across Iowa, you’ll probably notice two things aside from the many farms: Trump signs and wind turbines.

Iowa is Trump country. While the state was once considered politically purple, it decisively supported President Donald Trump in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024, when Trump won in 94 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Iowa’s governor and two senators are also Republicans, and, after some early friction, have fallen in line with Trump. 

Iowa is also a wind energy powerhouse. A remarkable 59 percent of the state’s energy in 2023 came from wind turbines, a larger share than any other state in the country. Texas is the only state that produces more wind energy than Iowa, though wind power makes up a much smaller portion of the Lone Star State’s energy mix. Wind turbines are now so common in Iowa that they appear on the state’s regular license plates. 

At face value, wind energy and Trump don’t mix. Many of his supporters downplay or disregard climate science showing that fossil fuels are warming the planet far faster than it would naturally — a key fact underlying the value of wind energy and other power sources that don’t have significant carbon emissions. In some cases, Trump supporters, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also help elevate unproven claims that offshore wind turbines are killing whales.

Trump himself, meanwhile, is the most anti-wind-energy president in history. He’s been bad-mouthing wind power for over a decade, often relying on similarly spurious claims. “We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said in a speech on Inauguration Day. “Big, ugly wind mills. They ruin your neighborhood.” And Trump has already made policy moves intended to slow growth in the sector — causing some developers to halt or totally abandon projects.

On one hand, Iowa is a test case for the staying power of renewable energy. Wind farms have expanded in the state not because of climate concerns but because of economics. Wind energy is cheap in Iowa.

But Iowa also highlights an important disconnect that exists across the country — between the anti-climate, “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric that helped get Trump elected and the reality facing much of his base living in states that benefit from renewable energy. The economics of wind energy are incredibly strong, experts told me, so the industry won’t just disappear. But Trump’s energy policies, if successful, could have harmful consequences for Republican strongholds like Iowa. A question now is if conservatives who rely on wind energy push back, will Trump soften his anti-wind stance?  

How wind took over Iowa, a Republican stronghold

If you want to learn about wind energy in Iowa, the person to talk to is Tom Wind. (Yes, his name is literally Tom Wind, and yes, people point it out a lot to him.) He’s a crop farmer and electrical engineer in Iowa who’s been working in the sector — first at a utility, then as a consultant, and now as a wind-farm manager — for decades.

There are several reasons for Iowa’s ascendency to wind dominance, Wind told me. The simplest reason is that Iowa is windy. And while some Great Plains states like Nebraska and Kansas are technically windier, Iowa is closer to big population centers, like Chicago, that need lots of power.

Iowa was also quick to adopt policies that benefited wind and other renewables. In fact, Iowa was the first state in the country to establish what’s called a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), in 1983. It required the state’s investor-owned utilities to contract out or own at least 105 megawatts of renewable energy, which is enough to power tens of thousands of homes. Iowa reached that goal by 1999, Wind said. When the RPS was enacted, the state legislature was run by Democrats, though it still wasn’t that controversial: Iowa lawmakers, including Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, saw an opportunity to make Iowa more energy independent in the wake of the 1970s energy crisis (an actual crisis, by the way, not the manufactured energy emergency Trump has conjured). The state has also never had a large fossil-fuel industry to lobby against pro-renewable legislation, Wind said.

Later, state and especially federal tax incentives for renewable energy further propelled wind to dominance in Iowa. In the ’90s, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican, helped establish a federal tax credit for building wind farms. That ultimately helped earn Grassley the title of “father” of Iowa wind energy.

MidAmerican Energy Company, the largest electric utility in Iowa and a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, was especially hungry for tax credits, Wind said, and has since built out an enormous amount of wind energy. (In reporting this story, Vox reached out to several Republican politicians and energy authorities in the state. Branstad, Grassley’s office, MidAmerican, and Berkshire Hathaway Energy all declined interview requests. Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds did not respond to interview requests.)

The state’s many farmers — a core section of Iowa’s economy that maintains a lot of political power — have also helped the wind industry take off. Farmers across Iowa have put turbines on their land as a way to earn more income. While crop prices and yields are volatile and at the whims of natural disasters, wind turbines offer a relatively stable source of revenue, on the scale of thousands of dollars per year, per turbine.

“It’s a real blessing for us,” said Dave Johnson, a livestock farmer in northern Iowa who leases his land to a utility that installed four turbines on his property. He earns about $30,000 a year from the four turbines combined, he told Vox. Johnson’s son also has turbines on his farm. 

Johnson, a Republican who says he voted for Trump, had the turbines installed primarily because he wanted his farm — where he raises cattle and hogs — to generate more value. “I never had a 401(k),” he said. “I farmed and stuck everything back into the farm. This is the 401(k) that I never had.” 

Fred Koschmeder, a corn and soybean farmer near Johnson’s farm, also has turbines on his land. “I don’t even look at it as a political thing,” Koschmeder, who also says he voted for Trump, said of wind energy. “It is economic development. If you’ve got a chance to participate in something that brings value, I think you’re kind of foolish not to do it. … It adds a lot of value to your farm and extra income, too.”

Farming in Iowa has become more economically challenging in recent years, as the price of some crops like soybeans have dipped, and farm costs, such as tractor repairs, have spiked due to inflation. Climate change is also raising the risk of drought and flooding, according to government and academic researchers. Wind energy “is allowing farmers to stay on the farm,” Johnson said. “That helps rural America.”

But even if you’re not a farmer, you likely benefit from wind turbines if you live in Iowa, said Steve Guyer, senior energy policy counsel at Iowa Environmental Council, a nonprofit green group. The state has stable energy bills that tend to be well below the national average in cost. Onshore wind is the cheapest source of energy with or without tax credits, as of 2024, according to the financial firm Lazard.

“All customers benefit from it,” said Guyer, who formerly worked for utilities in Iowa. “Although other costs may rise over time, the cost of the wind actually remains stable or lowers. When we factor that into the overall utility bill, it at least stabilizes the bill.”

The wind industry also employs roughly 4,000 people across the state and draws billions of dollars in capital investments. Plus, it’s the No. 1 taxpayer in a third of Iowa counties, according to Mak Heddens, who runs a group called Power Up Iowa, a coalition of clean energy companies in Iowa.

While wind energy projects have faced fierce opposition in several counties — anti-wind advocates often rely on misinformation to argue that turbines harm wildlife and threaten human health — the industry is popular on the whole. This likely has little to do with politics or concerns about climate change. People across the political spectrum like wind energy because it’s cheap, local, and generates money for the state’s economy. These are things Republicans really care about, said James McCalley, an electrical engineer and wind energy expert at Iowa State University.

“We’re a red state, and we’ve embraced it, and I’m proud of that,” said Brent Siegrist, a Republican state representative in the western Iowa’s Pottawattamie County, where a large wind farm produces enough electricity to power up to 122,000 homes. “Maybe it’s the commonsense approach of Iowans: We need energy, and if we can do it renewably — and it’s not costing us a fortune — why wouldn’t we do it?”

Are Iowa Republicans worried?

There’s no doubt that wind energy is a massive part of Iowa’s economy — powering the bulk of homes and businesses in the state — and a boon to residents. Yet people who support Trump often don’t see his anti-wind position as much of a threat or expect it to shift. 

Johnson, the livestock farmer, says he doesn’t pay close attention to Trump’s comments on wind energy. “I know he just shoots his mouth off,” Johnson said. When asked about real policies Trump has put in place, including an executive order that pauses new approvals for wind projects, Johnson said he’s not worried because wind energy has a lot of support, even among Republicans. 

Siegrist, meanwhile, downplayed how much Iowa depends on wind energy, mentioning that the state still uses coal. And while Siegrist doesn’t think the federal government should be controlling what happens to wind development within states, he’s not worried about Trump’s anti-wind statements. “I’ve got enough things to do in Iowa to worry about Washington, DC,” he told me. 

Paul Roeder, a Republican who owns a handful of wind turbines in Iowa, is similarly untroubled by the administration’s position. “I’m not so much worried about politics as I am about some of the other external factors that drive the price of energy,” Roeder told me. “The president doesn’t drive the price of energy.” 

Roeder says he voted for Trump but not because of the president’s stance on renewable energy. This raises a key point: Many Republicans support renewable energy, and they may even worry about carbon emissions, but energy simply isn’t as salient for them as other issues, such as immigration. That helps explain how someone like Grassley — the father of Iowa wind energy, remember — is a Trump ally, even though he’s previously called Trump’s comments about wind energy “idiotic.” 

It’s also worth pointing out that, more generally, people don’t often think about where their energy comes, as long as their lights turn on and their bills aren’t surging. I grew up in Iowa and have visited at least once a year since. But it wasn’t until recently — through my environmental reporting — that I realized how important wind energy is to the state. So it’s not shocking that Iowan’s don’t connect their energy to Trump. “They don’t necessarily make the connection to what the president is saying,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, an association of business leaders, many of whom work in the clean energy industry.

But there is real cause for concern. 

The strong economics of wind energy — what allowed turbines to proliferate in a conservative state — persist today, and so it’s reasonable to expect that the sector will still grow. Yet policies from the Trump administration could seriously dent the industry across the country, including in Iowa. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that aimed to curtail growth of the wind-energy industry. Among other things, it directed agencies to pause new and renewed federal approvals and leases for both onshore and offshore wind projects. 

Since Trump’s executive order from January 20, the administration has put in place or threatened additional tariffs on countries, such as China, that would substantially raise the cost of onshore turbines, some of which are manufactured in Iowa. Even turbines that are manufactured locally are typically built with at least some foreign parts.

“There is a certain level of nervousness in the market,” Manav Sharma, North America division CEO for Nordex Group, a wind turbine manufacturer that has a production facility in Iowa, told KCRG.

In a statement, Alliant Energy, the third-largest utility owner and operator of regulated wind energy in the US, according to the company, said it will “continue to monitor the Trump Administration executive orders on national energy policy.” TPI Composites, a global company that manufactures wind turbine blades in Iowa, declined an interview request. 

Some wind advocates and lawmakers — including some conservatives — are also worried that the Republican-controlled Congress may stamp out tax incentives for clean energy that are part of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Those incentives have largely benefitted Republican districts but are at risk of getting cut as Trump has vowed to repeal the IRA. “I think the subsidies are the biggest issue,” Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University who specializes in the Midwest, told Vox. “If they are reduced, will wind energy survive?” 

Even if tax credits remain, the Trump administration may still weaken incentives, such as through efforts to shrink the IRS. “What could also happen is they cut the IRS workforce,” Wind said, adding that applications to get tax credits have to go through the agency. “If you start losing employees, things start slowing down. It just gets harder to do business with the IRS.”

These concerns are especially pressing today as Iowa becomes a hot spot for energy-intensive data centers in step with the AI boom. It will need more energy quickly. Google, Meta, and Microsoft are all building out or operating data centers in the state, in part, because the state has affordable energy.

Policies from the administration that harm renewable energy stand to harm Iowa, said Keefe of E2. This is true whether or not you care about climate change. “You don’t do this kind of damage to an industry, you don’t spin off this kind of market uncertainty, and things will be okay,” Keefe said. “The only way they’re going to be okay is if businesses and consumers stand up and demand that their lawmakers not take an energy source away from them that happens to be the cheapest energy we can develop right now.”

“If I was one of those thousands of Iowans that work in the wind industry, or if I had family that worked in the industry, I would be calling my lawmaker today and saying, ‘Hey, recognize the risks that you are putting my community at — my family, these jobs, our economy,’” he said.

Correction, April 22, 5:30 pm ET: James McCalley’s political affiliation was misstated in a previous version of this post.

https://www.vox.com/climate/407981/wind-energy-iowa-trump-escape-velocity-energy-climate-progress

https://www.vox.com/?p=407981

Posted by Adam Clark Estes

https://www.vox.com/climate/408657/home-battery-technology-climate-solution

https://www.vox.com/?p=408657

Growing up in rural Tennessee, power outages were frequent and sometimes fun. With no TV or lights, we played boardgames by candlelight or played outside if the storm stopped. But because my family also ran a restaurant out of our house, sometimes the food in the fridges spoiled, leading to thousands of dollars worth of lost groceries. It never occurred to me so many years ago that a big battery could one day solve this problem. 

As extreme weather worsens due to climate change, leading millions more to experience debilitating blackouts, the home battery industry is booming. Home batteries are not like the AAA batteries that go in your TV remote control. They’re big, high-capacity lithium-ion workhorses designed to power multiple devices and appliances in the event of a power outage. The amount of energy that can be stored in residential batteries, which is measured in gigawatt hours (GWh), grew by a record 54 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a new report on energy storage in the United States. It’s now enough to power up to 1 million homes. Growth is even bigger in Europe. 

Many home batteries are being used to store energy from solar panels, but there’s a burgeoning market for backup batteries that can keep essential appliances, like refrigerators, running during a power outage. Some of these batteries are also smart enough to charge up when energy is cheap and then discharge when it’s expensive to save on utility bills. We’re also starting to see appliances with built-in batteries that make them more efficient and effective.

Solving the lost groceries problem is only the beginning. As more people add battery capacity to their homes, the power grid can become more resilient to spikes in energy usage and bring down costs for everyone. While the number of battery-powered houses still make up a minority of all the homes in the US, home batteries are becoming more affordable and accessible, giving the average American household the chance to take advantage of what an electrified future has to offer.

One of the more interesting home batteries I’ve come across is made by BioLite, a Brooklyn, New York-based company that got its start building camp stoves that can charge your phone. Backup by BioLite is a home battery specifically designed for the dead fridge problem, or any other dead appliances. The primary unit is a slim battery pack that can fit behind your refrigerator or sit on top of it. It plugs into a standard wall outlet and doesn’t require a contractor or any rewiring to install. Just plug your fridge and any other devices into the Backup’s power strip, and it’s ready to take over in the event of an outage. One $2,000 Backup battery gets you 15 to 30 hours of power, and if you daisy-chain several batteries together, you can get a few days worth of power. 

“This is not meant to be a niche product for the bleeding-edge solar battery storage expert,” Erica Rosen, BioLite’s vice president of marketing told me when I visited BioLite’s headquarters in March. “This is for folks who are, like, ‘I just threw out $400 worth of groceries. I can never do this again.’”

That example hit home for me. But it’s not actually what I think is most useful about the capabilities of home batteries. For people who pay attention to their power bills, Backup and other home batteries make it easier to take advantage of the time-of-use pricing some utilities offer, which makes electricity cheaper during low demand hours and higher when demand is high. Backup, for example, works with an app that lets you schedule the battery to kick in during high demand hours; BioLite is planning to eventually update the app so that this feature works automatically.

Plugging solar panels into these batteries gives you even more autonomy over your energy sources. Once you’re actually generating electricity, you can fill up your home batteries without drawing from the grid at all. If there’s an outage, the panels can keep those batteries charged when the sun’s out. If your utility offers it, you can also take advantage of something called net metering, which enables you to sell some of that stored energy back to the grid during peak demand. 

If battery-powered living sounds appealing to you, there are now even more creative ways to ease into it. A company called Copper started selling its battery-equipped stoves this year. The $6,000 Copper Charlie is an electric induction range with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery inside that’s programmed to charge when electricity is cheapest. The range plugs into a regular wall outlet — other inductions require a 240-volt outlet that not all homes have — and the battery supplies enough power for everyday cooking. It also kicks in during power outages so that you can keep cooking if the lights go out. The battery also gives the oven a boost, so that preheating is faster. 

This is just the first of many battery-assisted appliances that Copper plans to make, according to Weldon Kennedy, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer. It’s not hard to imagine how the same basic backup features of the Charlie stove could work in a hot water heater or a washer-dryer. These kinds of appliances require a large amount of energy all at once and then sit idle for hours at a time. It makes great sense to charge them up when energy is cheap and then discharge that stored energy later.

“Because you don’t have these giant spikes in energy use across the electrical grid at, say, six o’clock when everyone turns on their electric stove,” Kennedy told me. “It just makes the whole system better.”

None of this comes cheap. The Copper Charlie range and Backup by BioLite are four-figure investments. There are other companies in the space, too, but they’re just as expensive. Impulse makes a battery-equipped stovetop that also costs $6,000, and Jackery sells a home backup battery for $3,500 and up. You can find even more expensive and extensive home battery systems from companies like Tesla, Anker, and Bluetti. There are some government subsidy programs available to offset those high costs, but on a federal level at least, it’s not clear if the Trump administration will keep them in place.

There is, nevertheless, something unstoppable about the home battery revolution. As certain solutions get cheaper and easier to use, like Biolite’s Backup, other options are becoming more appealing. Electric vehicles, after all, are basically big batteries on wheels, and a growing number of automakers are enabling bidirectional charging, which lets your vehicle power your home or send power back to the grid. GM is even working with some utility companies to help its car owners buy the equipment necessary to turn their EVs into home batteries.

Still, with the Trump administration downright hostile to clean energy, the US is lagging behind Europe and China in adopting more battery power. But the cost of battery production is falling fast, and we should expect to see batteries show up in more home appliances in the near future. After all, just one big battery could save you a fridge-full of groceries in the next power outage, and that outage is definitely coming. Climate change is making weather more extreme and unpredictable, which means it’s more essential than ever to be prepared for anything.

A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

https://www.vox.com/climate/408657/home-battery-technology-climate-solution

https://www.vox.com/?p=408657