Tag: climate desk

Scientists Plan ‘Doomsday’ Vault on Moon

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Thanga and his team have sketched a system that would use solar panels and batteries to provide the power to push temperatures inside a lava tube down to the deep freeze needed to create their lunar ark. This is the defining difference between Thanga’s design and Hagedorn’s thought experiment. Where Thanga’s group would aim to actively cool the ark, Hagedorn and the Smithsonian team have envisioned a repository that uses natural features of the moon to keep the samples cryogenic.

“The idea behind our proposal is that, to the extent we could make it, it would be passive,” Parenti said. She pointed out that people have long speculated about the idea of building something that stores materials on the moon, but all the ideas have required a crew to maintain them.

To passively maintain a perpetual deep freeze, they’ve proposed building the repository on the south pole of the moon where, inside some craters, coincidences of celestial geometry have aligned to create areas of permanent shadow, and temperatures can be as low as –196 degrees centigrade. Those conditions would mean that the samples could be stored without need for crew, and they could be maintained with rovers and robotics alone.

While in theory all of this makes these permanent polar shadows ideal for such a project, “we don’t know the basics of what that place is,” Thanga countered. Just last month, NASA canceled a mission that would have been the first rover to explore the pole in part because of the technical challenges posed. “This is one of the ironic things,” Thanga said. “It’s nearby Earth, but it’s perhaps one of the most extreme places in the entire solar system.”

Fitzpatrick feels confident, however, that NASA’s current lunar roadmap will provide ample opportunity to explore and understand those dark polar realms, including a mission scheduled for later this year that plans to land on a ridge overlooking a polar shadow. But as NASA looks to explore those regions, Thanga pointed out, it’s possible that we might merely learn more about how hard it is to exist and operate in that level of cold.

“Just operating in cryogenic conditions, that’s not trivial at all,” Thanga said. “Mechanical things do weird things. They may freeze up, latch up, you name it, under spacelike conditions. Even from moderately cold conditions in a vacuum, we have a phenomenon called cold welding,” where two pieces of metal fuse on contact.

Thanga argues that the more sensible thing to do, then, is to create the ark in a lava tube since his colleagues in planetary science expect those tubes to be quite similar to the ones we have on Earth, albeit much colder, which gives researchers and engineers an understanding of what to expect and how to plan for it.

Much like Hagedorn’s concept, however, price and schedule have yet to be refined. But Thanga expects that, after the design is finalized (which could yet take years), it could be built and assembled faster and cheaper than the International Space Station.

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August 31, 2024
Your Guide to Surviving Extreme Weather

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

No matter where you live, extreme weather can hit your area, causing damage to homes, power outages, and dangerous or deadly conditions. If you’re on the coast, it may be a hurricane; in the Midwest or South, a tornado; in the West, wildfires; and as we’ve seen in recent years, anywhere can experience heat waves or flash flooding.

Living through a disaster and its aftermath can be both traumatic and chaotic, from the immediate losses of life and belongings to conflicting information around where to access aid. The weeks and months after may be even more difficult, as the attention on your community is gone but civic services and events have stalled or changed drastically.

Grist compiled this resource guide to help you stay prepared and informed. It looks at everything from how to find the most accurate forecasts to signing up for emergency alerts to the roles that different agencies play in disaster aid.

Flooding in Merced, California, following a “bomb cyclone” in January 2023.

Photograph: JOSH EDELSON/Getty Images

Where to Find the Facts on Disasters

These days, many people find out about disasters in their area via social media. But it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is accurate. Here’s where to find the facts on extreme weather and the most reliable places to check for emergency alerts and updates.

Your local emergency manager: Your city or county will have an emergency management department, which is part of the local government. In larger cities, it’s often a separate agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriff’s offices may manage emergency response and alerts. Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating between different agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those via your local website. (Note: Some cities have multiple languages available, but most emergency alerts are only in English.) Many emergency management agencies are active on Facebook, so check there for updates as well.

Local news: The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a storm. Follow your local newspaper and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly.

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August 24, 2024
Urban Birds Are Harboring Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

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This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Urban ducks and crows might offer us a connection to nature, but scientists have found wild birds that live near humans are more likely to harbor bacteria resistant to important antibiotics.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is largely caused by the overuse of drugs such as antibiotics among humans and livestock.

The issue is of serious concern: According to data for 2019, about 4.95 million deaths globally were associated with bacterial AMR, including 1.27 million directly caused by such resistance.

Researchers say species of wild birds that tend to turn up in urban settings are reservoirs for bacteria with the hallmarks of resistance to a host of drugs.

“Basically what we’re seeing are genes that confer resistance to antimicrobials that would be used to treat human infections,” said Samuel Sheppard, coauthor of the research from the Ineos Oxford Institute for Antimicrobial Research.

The team say their findings are important as wild birds have the capacity to travel over considerable distances. Sheppard said a key concern was that these birds could pass antimicrobial-resistant bacteria to captive birds destined to be eaten by humans—such as those kept in poultry farms.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, Sheppard and colleagues report how they analyzed the genomes of bacteria found in 700 samples of bird poo from 30 wild bird species in Canada, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the US.

The team looked specifically at the presence of different strains of Campylobacter jejuni—a type of bacteria that are ubiquitous in birds as a natural part of their gut microbiome. Such bacteria are a leading cause of human gastroenteritis, although antibiotics are generally only used in severe cases.

Sheppard added that, in general, each wild bird would be expected to harbor a single strain of C. jejuni, specific to that species.

However, the team found wild birds that turn up in urban settings contain many more strains of C. jejuni than those that live away from humans.

What’s more, the strains found in urban-dwelling species contained about three times as many genes known to result in antimicrobial resistance, with these genes also associated with resistance to a broader range of antimicrobials.

The authors suggest that wild birds may pick up antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in a number of ways: Gulls and crows, for example, are known to lurk at landfill sites, while ducks and geese may pick them up in rivers and lakes that are contaminated with human wastewater.

Thomas Van Boeckel, an expert in antimicrobial resistance at ETH Zurich who was not involved in the work, said the research was unusual as it focused on the impact of antimicrobial use by humans on animals.

“What are the consequences of that for the birds? We don’t really know but it seems like we humans are responsible for this change,” he said.

Danna Gifford from the University of Manchester added the findings could have implications for human health.

“While alarming, the risk of direct transmission of resistance from urban birds to humans is unclear. Poultry-to-human transmission, however, is well documented,” she said. “With urban development encroaching on agricultural land, increasing contact between urban birds and poultry raises significant concerns about indirect transmission through the food chain.”

Andrew Singer, of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said more samples were needed to ensure the results stood up, but that precautions could be taken.

“The most obvious place to start is to ensure birds do not congregate in our landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and animal muck piles, where both pathogens and AMR are abundant,” he said. “Moreover, we must also eliminate the discharge of untreated sewage into our rivers, which exposes all river-using wildlife—and humans—to human-associated pathogens and AMR.”

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August 17, 2024
The Fight to Save Florida’s Oranges

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“We need more time,” said Rezazadeh. Growers in St. Lucie County started using the antibiotic last year. “There are some hopes that we keep the trees alive until we find a cure.”

The state’s total citrus acreage suffered a massive blow in the 1990s when an eradication program for canker disease, then the industry’s biggest foe, resulted in the culling of hundreds of thousands of trees on private properties. In the years since citrus greening took hold, the ripple effects of the blight have compounded with an ever-present barrage of hurricanes, floods, and drought threatening growers.

Hurricanes do more than uproot trees, scatter fruit, and shake trees so violently it can take them years to recover. Torrential rain and flooding can inundate groves and deplete the soil of oxygen. Diseased trees face particular risk because illness often impacts their roots, weakening them. Ray Royce, executive director of Highlands County Citrus Growers Association, likens it to a preexisting medical condition.

“I’m an old guy. I get a cold, or I get sick, it’s harder for me to recover at 66 than it was at 33. If I had some underlying health issues, it’s even harder,” he said. “Greening is kind of this negative underlying health condition that makes anything else that happens to the tree, that stresses that tree, just further magnified.”

It doesn’t help that climate change is bringing insufficient rainfall, higher temperatures, and record-setting dry seasons, leaving soils with less water. A lack of precipitation has also dried up wells and canals in some of the state’s most productive regions. All of this can reduce yields and cause fruit to drop prematurely.

Of course, healthy trees have a higher chance of withstanding such threats. But the tenacity of strong groves is being tested, and once-minor events like a short freeze can be enough to end any already on the verge of demise.

“We all of a sudden had a little bit of a run of bad luck. We had a hurricane. Then after the hurricane, we had a freeze,” said Royce. “Now we’ve just gone through a drought which will no doubt negatively impact the crop for next year. And so we, in a way, need to catch a couple of good breaks and have a few good years where we’re getting the right amount of moisture, where we don’t have hurricanes, or freezes, that are negatively impacting trees.”

Human-induced climate change means that the respite Royce desperately hopes for is improbable. In fact, forecasters expect this to be the most active hurricane season in recorded history. Researchers have also found that warming will increase the pressures of plant diseases, like greening, in crops worldwide.

Although “almost every tree in Florida” is afflicted with the disease, and the reality of warming temperatures spreading pathogens is a growing concern, the state’s citrus producing days are far from over, said Tim Widmer, a plant pathologist who specializes in crop diseases and plant health. “We don’t have the solution yet,” he said. “But there are things that look very, very promising.” A windfall of funding has been devoted to the hunt for answers to a befuddling problem. Florida’s legislature earmarked $65 million in the 2023-2024 budget to support the industry, while the 2018 federal farm bill included $25 million annually, for the length of the bill, toward combating the disease.

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August 3, 2024
Everything’s About to Get a Hell of a Lot More Expensive Due to Climate Change

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Agricultural yields for important commodities produced in those states (fruits, nuts, corn, sugar, veggies, wheat) are withering, thanks to punishing heat and soil-nutrition depletion. The supply chains through which these products usually travel are thrown off course at varying points, by storms that disrupt land and sea transportation. Preparation for these varying externalities requires supply-chain middlemen and product sellers to anticipate consequential cost increases down the line—and implement them sooner than later, in order to cover their margins.

You may have noticed some clear standouts among the contributors to May’s inflation: juices and frozen drinks (19.5 percent), along with sugar and related substitutes (6.4 percent). It’s probably not a coincidence that Florida, a significant producer of both oranges and sugar, has seen extensive damage to those exports thanks to extreme weather patterns caused by climate change as well as invasive crop diseases. Economists expect that orange juice prices will stay elevated during this hot, rainy summer.

(Incidentally, climate effects may also be influencing the current trajectory and spread of bird flu across American livestock—and you already know what that means for meat and milk prices.)

It goes beyond groceries, though. It applies to every basic building block of modern life: labor, immigration, travel, and materials for homebuilding, transportation, power generation, and necessary appliances. Climate effects have been disrupting and raising the prices of timber, copper, and rubber; even chocolate prices were skyrocketing not long ago, thanks to climate change impacts on African cocoa bean crops. The outdoor workers supplying such necessities are experiencing adverse health impacts from the brutal weather, and the recent record-breaking influxes of migrants from vulnerable countries—which, overall, have been good for the U.S. economy—are in part a response to climate damages in their home nations.

The climate price hikes show up in other ways as well. There’s a lot of housing near the coasts, in the Gulf regions and Northeast specifically; Americans love their beaches and their big houses. Turns out, even with generous (very generous) monetary backstops from the federal government, it’s expensive to build such elaborate manors and keep having to rebuild them when increasingly intense and frequent storms hit—which is why private insurers don’t want to keep having to deal with that anymore, and the costs are handed off to taxpayers.

When all the economic indicators that take highest priority in Americans’ heads are in such volatile motion thanks to climate change, it may be time to reconsider how traditional economics work and how we perceive their effects. It’s no longer a time when extreme weather was rarer and more predictable; its force and reasoning aren’t beyond our capacity to aptly monitor, but they’re certainly more difficult to track. You can’t stretch out the easiest economic model to fix that. And you can’t keep ignoring the clear links between our current weather hellscape, climate change, and our everyday goods.

Thankfully, some actors are finally, belatedly taking a new approach. The reinsurance company Swiss Re has acknowledged that its industry fails to aptly factor disaster and climate risks into its calculations, and is working to overhaul its equations. Advances in artificial intelligence, energy-intensive though they may be, are helping to improve extreme-weather predictions and risk forecasts. At the state level, insurers are pushing back against local policies that bafflingly forbid them from pricing climate risks into their models, and Florida has new legislation requiring more transparency in the housing market around regional flooding histories. New York legislators are attempting to ban insurers from backstopping the very fossil-fuel industry that’s contributed to so much of their ongoing crisis.

After all, we’re no longer in a world where climate change affects the economy, or where voters prioritizing economic or inflationary concerns are responding to something distinct from climate change—we’re in a world where climate change is the economy.

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June 22, 2024
Ukrainian Sailors Are Using Telegram to Avoid Being Tricked Into Smuggling Oil for Russia

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This story originally appeared in Hakai Magazine and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new video appears on the social media network Telegram: footage of the smoking area aboard a large vessel. The curtains are ripped, the lights are broken, and ash and glass litter the floor. “This is how they drink on our ship,” says the young Ukrainian deck worker filming the scene, turning to show the furniture thrown to the corner of the room. “I’m freaked out.”

A Telegram administrator asks the deck worker if he can share the vessel’s name. They change the ship’s name multiple times a year, replies Feliks Bondar, whose own name has been changed for this story. “I don’t even know what name to tell you,” he writes in Ukrainian. “Our ship was originally called Eagle, but in Venezuela, we were Matador and then Shoyo Maru.”

A chorus of similar messages had flooded the chat in recent months: stories of dangerously rundown ships, operators withholding pay, abandoned crew members, and vessel owners changing ship names or manipulating their automatic identification systems (AIS)—the global network meant to help ships recognize each other.

The Telegram group hosts over 8,000 sailors. Some are fresh out of maritime college, others are seasoned captains. All are drawn to the group by a desire to stay safe on the high seas. By telling their stories and naming names—when they can—these sailors have been gathering information about problematic vessels, detailing everything from those with low-quality food to ships where crews often experience pay delays.

But in recent years, as more sailors are finding themselves unwittingly involved in the so-called shadow fleet—smuggling oil for Iran, Russia, or other clients that have been hit by strict sanctions to restrict their sales of oil—the social media whisper network has evolved. As well as a place to find a reputable employer, it’s become something else: a way for seafarers to avoid helping the other side of a war.

Life as a contract seafarer has never been easy. Workers frequently hop from ship to ship, contract to contract, and country to country. But the rise of the shadow fleet—along with Russia’s war in Ukraine—poses a new kind of risk.

About a year and a half ago, in early 2023, Bondar sought out the seafarers’ Telegram network after a particularly troubling gig. Booked to the job by an Ukraine-based crewing agency, Bondar found that the name of his assigned vessel had been painted over, and the AIS was, once again, unplugged. A note on top of the device warned seafarers not to turn it on.

After a six-month voyage smuggling sanctioned oil to China, Bondar says the crew was told its next operation would begin in Koz’mino, Russia. Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine had begun while he was at sea and had already been underway for over four months. Bondar and the other Ukrainians on board refused to work smuggling Russian oil. The ship’s operator allegedly fired them all, ditching them at the nearest port in China.

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June 15, 2024
The End of El Niño Might Make the Weather Even More Extreme

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Since the World Meteorological Organization declared the start of the current El Niño on July 4, 2023, it’s been almost a year straight of record-breaking temperatures. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, there’s a 61 percent chance that this year could be even hotter than the last, spelling danger for areas prone to deadly heat waves during the summer months. An estimated 2,300 people in the US died due to heat-related illnesses in 2023, and researchers say the real number is probably higher.

All this heat has also settled into the oceans, creating more than a year of superhot surface temperatures and bleaching more than half of the planet’s coral reefs. It also provides potential fuel for hurricanes, which form as energy is sucked up vertically into the atmosphere. Normally, trade winds scatter heat and humidity across the water’s surface and prevent these forces from building up in one place. But during La Niña, cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean weaken high-altitude winds in the Atlantic that would normally break up storms, allowing hurricanes to more readily form.

“When that pattern in the Pacific sets up, it changes wind patterns around the world,” said Matthew Rosencrans, a lead forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. “When it’s strong, it can be the dominant signal on the entire planet.”

This year’s forecast is especially dangerous, as a likely swift midsummer transition to La Niña could combine with all that simmering ocean water. NOAA forecasters expect these conditions to brew at least 17 storms big enough to get a name, roughly half of which could be hurricanes. Even a hurricane with relatively low wind speeds can dump enough water to cause catastrophic flooding hundreds of miles inland.

“It’s important to think of climate change as making things worse,” said Andrew Dessler, climate scientist at Texas A&M University. Although human-caused warming won’t directly increase the frequency of hurricanes, he said, it can make them more destructive. “It’s a question of how much worse it’s going to get,” he said.

Over the past 10 months, El Niño helped create blistering temperatures in some parts of the United States, drying out the land. Drought-stricken areas are more vulnerable to severe flooding, as periods without precipitation mean rainfall is likely to be more intense when it finally arrives, and soils may be too dry to soak up water. As desiccated land and soaring temperatures dry out vegetation, the stage is set for wildfires.

While the National Interagency Fire Center expects lower-than-average odds of a big blaze in California this year, in part due to El Niño bringing unusually high rainfall to the state, other places may not be so lucky. The agency’s seasonal wildfire risk map highlights Hawaii, which suffered the country’s deadliest inferno partly as a result of a persistent drought in Maui last August. Canada, which also experienced its worst fire season last summer, could be in for more trouble following its warmest-ever winter. This May, smoke from hundreds of wildfires in Alberta and British Columbia had already begun to seep across the Canadian border into Midwestern states.

“We are exiting the climate of the 20th century, and we’re entering a new climate of the 21st century,” Dessler said. Unfortunately, our cities were built for a range of temperatures and weather conditions that don’t exist anymore.

To get ready for hurricanes, Rosencrans said people who live in states along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Ocean should go to government disaster preparedness websites to find disaster kit checklists and advice about forming an emergency plan. “Thinking about it now, rather than when the storm is bearing down on you, is going to save you a ton of time, energy, and stress,” he said.

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June 8, 2024
Who Wants to Have Children in a Warming World?

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How does race play a factor in how we all process those emotions?

What I found in a survey that I conducted is that the most distressing emotions were reported by people of color, who in a statistically significant way, most identified feeling traumatized by the impact of climate change. They also reported feeling fear more so than white respondents.

And they also reported feeling overwhelmed. And that came out a lot in interviews too. What I was not anticipating—but this is also significant—is that when it came to parenting in the midst of climate change, people of color in my study were most likely to report positive or action-oriented emotions, including feeling motivated, feeling determined, feeling a sense of happiness or optimism. Because that was a quantitative survey, I wasn’t able to ask questions about why those positive emotions were there.

But I can only imagine that it’s because people of color really have long histories of facing existential threat. Black and Indigenous people, in particular, have had to develop tools to become resilient, to become resilient within community, within family, and within social movements. And so I can only imagine that those responses of motivation, joy, determination, and happiness come from a sense of “We will survive, we will endure, and whatever future is ahead, we will find a way to thrive.”

So, does your work really underscore the importance of African Americans and communities of color—in the face of these threats—drawing strength from family?

Not just family. We can trace a long history in the United States of Black people, literally, facing threats to our existence, from literally the earliest days of being in this country through slavery. And so one of the things that has always been a really important institution to protect us from the harms of the outside world is family, and not just family, but multigenerational family. And for us, that often includes chosen family.

We all have “play cousins,” “play aunties,” “play uncles”—people who are not biological kin. But the lack of biological relationship does not matter at all. They are members of the family. Building and sustaining those multigenerational ties has always been important to strengthen us, not just against big existential threats, but to strengthen us in a society in which we often don’t have the necessary resources and social supports that we need.

We often have the absence of a social safety net to provide for us in the ways that we need to be provided for. Other institutions provide those supports, as well. The church, for example. Say what you want about the Black church—there are challenges, there have always been challenges, but the Black church has been a really important institution in the lives of African Americans, not just for religious reasons, but for social reasons. It was a very important institution throughout the Civil Rights Movement.

And it provides a space of safety, solace, and community as a buffer against a lot of the challenges of the outside world. How does all of this come back to climate anxiety and the kid question? Well, when you don’t have research that includes African Americans, for example, then you tend to assume that we don’t experience climate anxiety, or that, if we do, it doesn’t have any impact on kid questions for us. And that’s not true.

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June 1, 2024
In Defense of Parasitic Worms

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CAPTION: Chelsea Wood kneels to search for shore crabs at a beach in Tacoma, Washington. She will later dissect the crabs to search for parasites.
CREDIT: Jesse Nichols/Grist

The parasites were a sign that the local shorebirds were doing great, Wood explained.

As scientists have learned more about parasites, some have argued that many ecosystems might actually need them in order to thrive. “Parasites are a bellwether,” she said. “So if the parasites are there, you know that the rest of the hosts are there as well. And in that way they signal about the health of the ecosystem.”

To understand this counterintuitive idea, it’s helpful to look at another class of animals that people used to hate: predators.

For years, many communities used to treat predators as a kind of vermin. Hunters were encouraged to kill wolves, bears, coyotes, and cougars in order to protect themselves and their property. But eventually, people started noticing some major consequences. And nowhere was this phenomenon more apparent than in Yellowstone National Park.

In the 1920s, gray wolves were systematically eradicated from Yellowstone. But once the wolf population had been eliminated from the park, the number of elk began to grow unchecked. Eventually, herds were overgrazing near streams and rivers, driving away animals including native beavers. Without beavers to build dams, ponds disappeared and the water table dropped. Before long, the entire landscape had changed.

In the 1990s, Yellowstone changed its policy and reintroduced gray wolves into the park. “When those wolves came back in, it was like a wave of green rolled over Yellowstone,” Wood said. This story became one of the defining parables in ecology: Predators weren’t just killers. They were actually holding entire ecosystems together.

“I think there’s a lot of parallels between predator ecology and parasite ecology,” Wood said.

As with the gray wolves in Yellowstone, scientists are just starting to recognize the profound ways that ecosystems are shaped by parasites.

Take, for example, the relationship between nematomorphs, a type of parasitic worm, and creek water quality. The worms are born in the water, but spend their lives on land inside of bugs, like crickets or spiders.

Courtesy of Grist

CAPTION: A nematomorph worm swims in a beaker in Chelsea Wood’s office in Seattle.

At the end of their lives, nematomorphs need to move back to the water to mate. Instead of making the dangerous journey themselves, they trick their infected hosts into giving them a ride by inducing a “water drive,” an impulse on the part of its insect host to immerse itself in water. The insect will move to the edge of the water, consider it for a little while and then jump in—to its own death, but to this parasite’s benefit.

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May 11, 2024
A Company Is Building a Giant Compressed-Air Battery in the Australian Outback

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VanWalleghem said there is room to push costs down as the company gains experience from these first few plants. The storage systems have a projected lifespan of about 50 years, which is an important data point when comparing it to battery systems, which have much shorter lives, he said.

Yiyi Zhou, an analyst for BloombergNEF, said Hydrostor is one of about 100 companies that focus, at least in part, on developing long-duration energy storage.

Hydrostor stands out, she said, because its technology is “relatively mature” and the company has also been one of the most successful in the space at raising money from investors.

BloombergNEF reported a global total of 1.4 gigawatts and 8.2 gigawatt-hours of long-duration energy storage as of last September, excluding pumped hydro. The average duration, which you can calculate by dividing gigawatt-hours by gigawatts, was 5.9 hours.

For perspective, the two Hydrostor projects being developed have a combined capacity of 0.9 gigawatts, more than half of the global total now online.

For this year and next, the long-duration storage technologies likely to see the fastest adoption are compressed-air storage and flow batteries, according to BloombergNEF. (I wrote an explainer on flow batteries in 2022.)

I find it challenging to get my arms around this part of the clean energy economy because of the large gap between what’s been developed and what’s in some stage of planning. There are many opportunities for projects to sputter and die along the way.

With this in mind, I’ll be watching to see whether Hydrostor is able to begin construction on schedule in Australia and whether it can navigate the regulatory approval process for the plant in California.

The California project has gone through some big changes. At one point, Hydrostor had two proposals in the state, but dropped one because of challenges in the permitting process, including some issues with building in a location overseen by the California Coastal Commission. The remaining project, Willow Rock, has also gone through changes to the design and the location in response to feedback from the local community and from regulators.

The California Energy Commission paused its review of Willow Rock last fall to give Hydrostor time to provide details on its updated plan. The review process began again in March and could be complete as soon as this time next year.

One of the factors to keep in mind is that California’s state government and the California Energy Commission have made clear that they want to build long-duration energy storage. The state has estimated that it will need 4 gigawatts of long-term energy storage capacity to be able to meet the goal of 100 percent clean electricity by 2045.

Hydrostor and state officials want to see this project get up and running. If that happens, it could provide a showpiece to make the case for building many others.

“We’re just looking forward to the growth, just getting these projects constructed and then start doing more, five, 10 projects at a time,” VanWalleghem said.

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May 4, 2024