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In the 1800s, many American families were farmers. Think Little House on the Prairie or some other scenario that is vastly different from your current life. Farm work was all about getting the ground ready for seeds, putting seeds in the ground, and hoping to harvest enough for the winter.

If you had a mule or a horse, you could access about 10 times the power of a person. That factor of ten made it possible to plow, plant, and harvest more than your family could consume, providing a cash crop. Cash was king.

For many parts of our country, the Erie Canal brought commerce. You could sell your farm’s produce to a wider market and get a new shirt that arrived on a canal boat, many times easier than the shirt you wanted before the canal existed.

Attached to the boats by a rope, mules and horses walked along a towpath next to the canal, pulling the barges behind them as they went. Teams of horses or mules worked in shifts. Compared to overland travel of their time, these barges were the equivalent of today’s jumbo jets in terms of efficiency and scale.

Today, I use a solar electric mule to power the boats I sometimes ride on the Erie Canal. But instead of a couple of acres of grassland to feed my solar-powered mule, the area on the roof of the boat provides a couple of horsepower. This remarkable ratio, maybe 1000 to 1, results from both the inefficiency of the food chain from sunlight to animals and the over 20% efficiency of doped silicon crystals in converting solar photons into a direct electric current.

Having traveled 1400 miles, the equivalent of Maine to Florida, voyaging with my son from Bellingham, Washington, to Glacier Bay, Alaska, in a 100% solar electric boat, I feel confident to say I have a solar electric-powered mule.

Solar Sal Boats is building our 12th 100% solar powered electric boat. One of our boats, a 25-foot model, has been in operation for 14 years on an Adirondack lake with no road and no electricity. As a launch, it takes people, their baggage, and most importantly, their food to up to 50 people living in the woods in tents. Sometimes it takes lumber or a cement mixer!

The most well-known Solar Sal boat is a 44-foot commercial tour boat that generates revenue for the Hudson River Maritime Museum in Kingston, New York. Named Solaris, she is the first 100% solar U.S. Coast Guard-inspected boat.

An outing on Sol, the first wooden boat. © David and Harriet Borton

During the Covid slowdown in 2020, our son Alex suggested that he and I make a solar voyage 1,400 miles to Glacier Bay, Alaska, from his home in Bellingham, Washington. This suggestion did not come out of the blue. He had been cruising around the San Juan Islands in our 27-foot solar electric boat, long enough to know the boat was good for the trip. Since I had been designing, building, and piloting solar electric boats, I knew that we could afford the fuel (free solar energy). And Covid-related slowdowns meant we could afford the time.

After a couple of experiments to test the concept, in 2011 my wife Harriet and I built a 25-foot wooden solar electric boat in our garage. I named her Sol (Spanish for Sun) because I put my soul into it, and she is the sole boat I thought I’d ever make. But things turned out differently: Sol was such a good boat that I couldn’t stop! She was designed as a launch for a lake in the Adirondacks and is still in use today.

Solaris Construction at HRMM. © DHudson River Maritime Museum

The hull form of Sol was found by our son Alex. Dennis Wolfe in Michigan had made a plug in version that looked perfect for our boat. Dennis made the ribs, or forms, and bulkheads that define the cross sections of the boat for us. These shapes are mounted on a wooden frame attached to the floor of our garage. This ladderback or hardback sets up the coordinate system for shaping the boat. Once the frames are firmly attached to the hardback, I choose to use 1-inch x 1-inch red cedar strips to frame the hull.

Other traditional boat-making techniques use wider planks and other woods and make the boat right-side up. By making the boat upside down, however, the entire hull is available for attaching the strips, then smoothing the surface, and, in this case, adding a couple of layers of fiberglass for extra strength and durability. The process of getting a smooth final shape is called fairing, and the finished result is ready for painting.

Typically, the sides are painted with the desired color, and a red “boot stripe” is painted at the waterline. The bottom usually has “bottom paint,” which is formulated for saltwater or freshwater and contains ingredients to reduce the growth of plants and animals that need a surface to grow on. ‘Roll over’ is the exciting process of releasing the hull from the hardback and turning it right side up. The interior of the boat can have a wide variety of designs and features, but some items are required. Sol has an electric outboard motor hidden in a motorwell just ahead of the transom. The motor is controlled from the helm and steered by a round or spoked wheel. A throttle controls the electric power going from the batteries to the motor and thus the boat’s speed and direction.

Sol has a solid roof that supports 1.5 kW of solar photovoltaic panels. The panels’ electrical output is connected to a charge controller that provides the correct amount of power to charge the battery. This power level depends on the type of battery and the state of charge, or how full the battery is.

Attaching panels to Solaris roof.© David and Harriet Borton

For me, a solar-electric boat is practical if the power available on the roof approximately equals the power required to move the boat through the water at its hull speed. Hull speed is the physical limit for a displacement hull moving in the water. As the boat moves, it generates a wave, and as the boat moves faster, it generates a wave with a longer wavelength. When the wavelength equals the length of the boat, the water is pushed higher, but the boat doesn’t go faster.

Experimental Model on Mohawk River. © David and Harriet Borton

Speed boats have a flatter bottom and more powerful, fuel-powered engines that can push the boat up and over the bow wave. This is a different physics that supports the boat in a planing configuration. Sol’s displacement hull is supported by the water around it. Planing boats are supported by pushing the water down hard enough to lift the boat up.

Family volunteers helping to build Solar Sal. © David and Harriet Borton

The solar panels on a solar electric boat are chosen for their high efficiency in converting light into electrical power. The system’s wiring is chosen to minimize power loss during transmission. Good charge controllers have high efficiency, and efficient batteries are a topic in and of themselves. Boat motors used to have a commutator that controlled the position of the magnetic fields by connecting carbon brushes to different windings. Recently, high-power electronic current control has enabled brushless motors and requires essentially no annual maintenance.

These practical boats have no fuel cost, require no plugging in to charge, and are usually fully charged when you step to the helm and turn on the motor. Like turning on a light switch, the power is instantaneously available.

Electric motors have several specific advantages over internal combustion engines. One is that the torque that turns the propeller is fully available when you turn up the throttle. For a fuel-powered engine, the torque depends on RPM, and so the engine must speed up to get to full torque.

A more important difference is that a fuel engine must be turning at a minimum idle speed; it can’t operate below that speed without stalling. The engine clunks into forward or reverse at idle. In contrast, an electronically controlled electric motor powers at every speed from zero to full speed, with no clunk and instant torque. This control is important for ease of docking and maneuvering in tight spaces.

My next boat was a 40-foot wooden solar-electric boat, designed as proof of concept for both cargo and passengers. She was planned for the Erie Canal, and during the building by volunteers, the group was thinking of the Erie Canal song.

“I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal…”

A friend suggested “Solar Sal,” and the name stuck. (We have since adopted the name “Solar Sal Boats” for our entire line of solar-electric boats.) Just after completion in 2015, the original Solar Sal made a cargo trip the length of the Erie Canal from the Hudson River to the Niagara River at Buffalo. There she picked up four tons of cardboard and returned to a paper mill a little north on the Hudson River, a 750-mile solar-powered recycling trip. This was the first carbon-free trip on the Erie Canal since mules.

Solaris and Solar Sal 24, traveling together near Kingston, New York. © David and Harriet Borton

These boats did not generate a lot of buzz in the boating world, so we made a plan—a 44-foot, U.S. Coast Guard-inspected boat certified to carry paying passengers. That was a big change because I’m not recognized by the Coast Guard as either a boat designer or a boat builder. Therefore, we found an excellent and well-known Marine architect, Dave Gerr, and in 2017, put his detailed design out to bid. We chose the Riverport Wooden Boat School in Kingston to build her. The Boat School is part of the Hudson River Maritime Museum, and during the build, they realized she was the perfect boat for them. The museum bought her, christened her Solaris, and since her launch in 2019, they have been giving regular tours on the Hudson River and Rondout Creek. She is very popular and never needs to be plugged in.

If you think any of this was straightforward, you’d be wrong. As required for a boat carrying paying passengers, the Coast Guard was actively involved throughout the construction process. But they had incomplete rules for electric boats and no regulations for solar boats, and we had the first 100% solar-electric boat seeking Certification. That was a learning experience in both directions.

Alex, living on the West Coast, wanted to introduce solar electric boats out there. He found Sam Devlin, a well-known and respected boat builder, and together they developed a 27-foot Solar Sal for the Pacific Northwest. Our other son, Chuck, who also lives in the east, came up with the name for the west coast boat, Wayward Sun, pun intended! Alex cruised Wayward Sun around Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, and into the Strait of Georgia in southern British Columbia.

In 2021, Alex and I prepared the boat for the Alaska trip and cruised to Sidney on Victoria Island to see if the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would let us into the waters of British Columbia during Covid. The land portion of BC was shut down to Americans, and even internal travel was curtailed. The Mounties thought our boat looked on the small side, but let us in if we followed the rules: don’t go on land; do go the shortest route; don’t stop unnecessarily, etc.

Wayward Sun in Glacier Bay. © David and Harriet Borton

About three days were sunny during the cloudy, rainy, foggy Inside Passage, but we had lots of solar energy. Because electric motors are quiet, we heard lots of whales spouting, saw lots of charismatic mega-fauna, and enjoyed mountains, glaciers, and waterfalls. Covid restrictions kept passenger vessels and cruise ships out of the waters and the docks along the way. Barges with timber and wood chips, shipping containers, and construction equipment enlivened the first half of the BC route, but thinned out the rest of the way. Occasional fishing boats went by, and a couple of times we saw them fishing.

David and Alex arrive in Ketchikan, Alaska on Wayward Sun. © David and Harriet Borton

We did get a sunny day during our stop in Ketchikan and again in Juneau. The best was the sun for our day at the face of the Margerie Glacier. We could see 14,000-foot mountains and snowfields at the top of the glacier. Calving ice made lots of different noises and various iceberg pieces around us — a small boat at the foot of a 250-foot-high, half-mile-wide glacier face. It was fun to restock our food cooler with chunks of glacier ice.

To make our boats more affordable, we decided to build a smaller fiberglass model – a day boat designed for families and small groups. After making molds for a Solar Sal 24’ model, we built three 24’ fiberglass boats, all of which are currently for sale.

Our most ambitious and high-end solar boat is now nearing completion in Port Townsend, WA., with the launch expected this August. A departure from our previous boats, its semi-displacement hull allows for higher speeds, assuming plug-in charging when needed. This will give the Townsend 34 the speed and range of a comparable diesel trawler.

Townsend 34 artist rendering, launch expected August 2026. © Alex Borton

I know that the physics works, and I consider these solar-electric boats to be practical. Some folks may think that the speed of these boats (hull speed or sailboat speed) is too slow. But the go-fast boats require either petroleum fuel or shore-based electric power to charge their batteries. Solar electric boats silently charge themselves and take me where I want to go. And the sun’s energy is free forever.

About the Author
Capt. David Borton has been in canoes and Adirondack guideboats since birth. After the 1974 oil crisis, David put his physics Ph.D. to work in solar energy research and development and in teaching solar energy engineering. More recently, he has focused on developing solar-powered electric boats. www.solarsal.solar

In 2000, the National Academy of Engineering named mass electrification and automobility as the first and second greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century.1 Now, a quarter century later, the two are converging through electric vehicles (EVs). However, many developments have been met with resistance.

EVs are giant batteries on wheels. They could smooth out the daily and seasonal variations of energy flows on the electric grid, making the grid more reliable and everyone’s electricity cheaper. But a self-serving alliance of disparate interests is working hard to discourage EV adoption. One front of their many attacks involves apocalyptic tales of grid collapse.

Reduced photovoltaic (PV) system prices have made storage costs the main hurdle to going off-grid. But if your car provides storage, the marginal cost of cutting the cord (“grid defection”) drops drastically. Grid defection is less than ideal for society, no matter how much sense it makes to an individual. But utilities, seeking to maintain their monopolies and to usurp all the benefits of solar for themselves, are creating an environment in which defection has become a logical option for many customers.

None of this opposition is based on truth. Ultimately, it will fail. But even short-term success would be problematic. If we’re to end up with the environmentally, economically, and democratically optimal energy system we deserve, we have a lot of work (education, lobbying, etc.) to do.

The electric grid is a shining example of community in action. Shared use of the equipment necessary to produce and deliver electricity results in massive cost, efficiency, and environmental benefits, compared to users acting independently. Unfortunately, these advantages introduce a huge sociopolitical challenge.

Because the benefits of cooperation are so strong, the grid is a “natural monopoly.” Unlike the “free” and “fair” markets which are the focus of undergraduate economics curricula, natural monopolies are “winner-take-all” markets. Even if competition were allowed, economies of scale would mean that one participant would eventually dominate, putting all others out of business.

At the dawn of the electric age, governments recognized this reality and chose to optimize capital efficiency by granting utilities territorial monopolies. These utilities were vertically integrated, with all necessary components vested in the same company: generation, transmission and distribution (T&D), and control. The granting governments, recognizing the dangers of relying on monopolies for a critical service, chose to retain citizen control by establishing public utilities commissions (PUCs). PUCs are state-level entities, but are now complemented by a wide assortment of federal agencies.

Regulated utility monopolies are among the most successful and visible examples of public-private partnerships in the United States today. The language and concepts of free market purity, competitive advantage earned through customer satisfaction, and other tropes of laissez-faire capitalism simply don’t apply. But that doesn’t stop dishonest actors from using such language as they try to co-opt the regulatory process.

Very soon, the grid will undergo a major shift. Climate and other sustainability goals demand much greater flexibility, far better T&D connectivity, and less reliance on inflexible base load generation. Existing storage, put in place mainly to accommodate high fractions of base generation (especially nuclear), will become increasingly useful (and hence see improved capital efficiency) in the presence of higher fractions of intermittent generating assets like wind and solar.

Before the 1990s, PV only made financial sense off-grid (starting with the ultimate off-grid application: spacecraft). As technology improved and markets expanded, prices dropped. Though still high, they fell enough that committed individuals could justify installing PV on the grid. By the early 2000s, ASES and other advocacy groups were winning fairer compensation and interconnection protocols, most notably net metering. The resulting market growth lowered system prices enough to make both utility-scale PV and grid-tied distributed generation (DG) financially attractive. For those interested in history, Home Power Magazine, now available through an online archive, chronicled this evolution in real time from 1987 until 2018.2

Customer-owned DG represents a major disruption of the investor-owned utility (IOU) business model. IOUs are fighting tooth and claw to retain their obsolete monopolies. Using a script provided by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a segment of conservative politicians disingenuously attacks DG by reducing or eliminating net metering compensation, adding bogus fees, and erecting other hurdles. Their arguments accuse net-metered customers of freeloading, claiming that DG systems add costs that their (presumably wealthy) owners don’t pay, creating a cross-subsidy from less affluent ratepayers.

Contrary to ALEC’s main line of attack, numerous independent studies have concluded that net metering introduces no significant cross-subsidy.3 In fact, many studies show the opposite: a significant cross-subsidy from net metered customers to other ratepayers.4,5

Because batteries are usually the most expensive part of an off-grid system, most grid-tied PV systems don’t include storage, and anti-islanding safety features prevent them from generating power during grid outages. Accordingly, much of ALEC’s model legislation “encourages” net metered ratepayers to add storage. The real purpose is to raise system costs, lengthening payback times, and discouraging investment.

EVs disrupt an even broader group of industries than PV. Automotive OEMs (original equipment manufacturers, the people who build complete vehicles) have generally accepted their fate: they can either develop competitive EVs or they can surrender to China and go bankrupt. But other industries (oil and gas, biofuels, ocean shipping, and automotive suppliers, to name just a few) are still resisting. Their primary weapons are euphemistically called “disinformation” and “spin”; in plain language, lies.

One pervasive claim is that EVs will crash the grid. But the opposite is true. Cars are typically parked 22 hours a day, so EVs represent an almost totally dispatchable load. Drivers can be encouraged to charge during off-peak hours by offering modest incentives, such as lower prices. With significant added revenue and almost no added expense, utilities get a much smoother load profile, making the grid more reliable. Ratepayers get lower rates.

The extent to which EVs can be used to power non-automotive loads varies, and is described using a host of associated terms.6

Quite a few existing and proposed vehicles can export power.7 It is not the purpose here to definitively establish nomenclature, nor to catalog product offerings in such a rapidly evolving market. So let’s just call all bidirectional power capability V2L (vehicle-to-load), and emphasize that it already exists and is growing fast. As IEEE (formerly the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), SAE (the Society of Automotive Engineers), ISO (the International Organization for Standardization), and other bodies standardize hardware and related protocols, we can expect V2L to spread even faster.

Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck powering a construction site. © Ford Motor Company

With V2L, EVs’ potential as storage and dispatchable supply becomes at least as attractive as their dispatchable demand. Numerous companies are already enlisting EV owners to participate in virtual power plants, which will use the EVs’ batteries to completely replace gas-fired peaker plants, the most expensive power on the grid.8

As stated earlier, the grid is a community that facilitates resource sharing. But communities only work when everyone practices the kindergarten lessons of sharing and fairness.

For example, in the western North Carolina mountains (my home), electric demand peaks in the winter, and my net-zero PV system produces a summer surplus. But that overproduction isn’t wasted; the grid carries it to the piedmont of North and South Carolina, helping power the air conditioners that define summer peaks there. Conversely, a net-zero system in the piedmont might overproduce in winter, helping run my heat pump. Grid connectivity also allows ratepayers who can’t invest in PV to share in the benefits available to those who can, such as lower rates and greater reliability.

Storage tells a similar story. Duke Energy’s Lake Keowee / Jocassee / Bad Creek pumped storage hydroelectric facility in upstate South Carolina was built to absorb the excess off-peak output of the Oconee nuclear station. But it also buffers the intermittency of all other generators
on the grid, notably solar and wind.

Utility-owned batteries, located at the substation level in the distribution network and shared by all customers in that zone, could provide buffering with far fewer batteries than an equally capable array of independent, customer-owned systems. But the ALEC playbook pushed by most IOUs “encourages” individual, civic-minded customers to install (and fund) the batteries. Through punitive fees, inadequate reimbursement rates, and other sleight of hand, the same playbook seeks to create a system which lets utilities hoard all the benefits, just as it does with customer-owned generation.

A related dynamic is playing out with massive proposed expansions to support hyperscaled data centers for artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency operations. These investments are only necessary because of the projected new loads, but well-connected lobbyists for these uber-wealthy industries are seeking to push the expense into the rate base funded by all customers.

Until recently, most ratepayers would have been forced to accept such unfairness, leaving only the IOUs to make the investments (the real goal of the subterfuge). But EVs with V2L are game changers. And there’s nothing like a disaster to put change in the spotlight.

When Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina in September 2024, EVs did yeoman service. Some EVs have built-in AC plugs, both 120 and 240 volts.9 Over-the-counter adapters can turn the J1772 AC charging port on other EVs into a 120V AC outlet. Both approaches proved useful in running medical equipment, chainsaws, and other tools as people recovered from the storm. A friend and fellow EV advocate used a simple homebrewed inverter setup to run five refrigerator/freezers and a variety of other household appliances for a week, using only half the battery capacity of his Chevy Bolt (about 32 kWh, out of 64 total).

Post-Helene, generator sales in the area have increased markedly. But a typical generator costs $12,000, installed, and requires quite a bit of ongoing maintenance. Usually fueled from a methane line or a propane tank, and always loud, you only run it when you absolutely must. On the other hand, a PV system with modest battery backup is useful 365 days a year, with very low fuel costs, no noise, and almost no maintenance.

Most grid-tied PV systems lack batteries, mainly due to cost. Batteries also carry an environmental penalty, since they consume, rather than generate, electricity. The most productive way to build a flexible, reliable, environmentally optimal system is to have more customer-owned generation directly feeding the grid, with utilities building the bulk of the storage.

However, with memories of the hurricane (and wildfires or other disasters in other locations) still strong, many home PV owners are adding battery backup. Battery prices have fallen, and continue to fall, precipitously – 99% since the 1990s. Concurrently, punitive changes to net metering tariffs are leading many to consider a minimal battery pack to enable greater self-consumption and lower bills. But it’s a slippery slope.

If a microgrid can island itself for a few hours or days, the main impediment to staying off-grid permanently is the cost of the battery pack required for the most extreme sunless stretch, which only occurs every few years. But an EV with an average-sized battery can power an entire house for several sunless days, then drive to a power source and bring home a fresh load of electricity when its charge gets low. Even the most extreme case is covered, with no need for the hawk-eyed attention to consumption required in those off-grid homes described in early issues of Home Power.

Affordable energy is a luxury by world standards, but has become essential for life in developed countries. As with most necessities, freedom and democracy matter a lot in the energy arena. However financially viable it may become, defection from the grid by DG owners would be highly undesirable for society at large. But it’s a serious risk, given the way IOUs are resisting this evolution.10,11

ALEC’s propaganda claims that penalizing DG owners protects less affluent ratepayers. But, as more PV owners defect, the grid’s fixed costs would be spread among fewer customers, leading to even more defections. Ultimately, only lower-wealth ratepayers would remain on-grid, and large amounts of extra capital would have been expended creating a socially undesirable electricity system (no longer a fully interconnected grid) that is neither economically nor environmentally optimal.

The electric grid of the near future will require significant up-front capital investment to realize the most cost-effective long-term solution. Storage and distributed rooftop solar will play an essential part in meeting those goals.12 Fair tariffs and other protocols are essential to protect IOUs from the fate already experienced by landline telephone companies.

Any game must be fair to everyone playing to be sustainable. The rules of the electricity game are heavily influenced by the people in charge of utilities and utilities commissions. We must help them make the right choices.

“It goes on one at a time, it starts when you care to act, it starts when you do it again after they said no, it starts when you say We and know who you mean, and each day you mean one more.” – Marge Piercy (from “The low road”)

About the Author
Automotive engineer and ASES Life Member Dave Erb has developed vehicles using gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, alcohol, methane, electric, and hybrid electric powertrains. He wrote Chapter 1 of David Hrivnak’s “Driving to Net 0: Stories of Hope for a Carbon-Free Future,” a collection of 15 first-person accounts of families combining electric vehicles with solar houses and other sustainability strategies. He hasn’t bought gas
since 2019.

Sources:

1. tinyurl.com/2r5nc2ba
2. homepower.com
3. emp.lbl.gov/publications/putting-potential-rate-impacts
4. tinyurl.com/brookingsnet-metering
5. tinyurl.com/sciencedirect-solar
6. tinyurl.com/insideevs-v2g
7. tinyurl.com/insideevs-v2l
8. tinyurl.com/lazards-lcoe-june2025
9. tinyurl.com/ev-f150-vs-silverado
10. tinyurl.com/eei-disruptive-challenge
11. tinyurl.com/forbes-electric-utilities
12. tinyurl.com/pvmag-roadmap-grid-distributed

A divided court rejected the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to reclaim Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants “based solely on a policy disagreement” with the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Californians are paying the second-highest residential electricity rates in the Country, and a popular explanation — that rooftop solar customers are shifting costs onto everyone else — has it backwards.1 Bundled average rates in PG&E’s service territory rose from roughly $0.24 per kWh in 2018 to $0.37 per kWh in 2024 in real USD — an increase of about 52% in six years after accounting for inflation.2 That trajectory is real, painful, and worth solving. But the data show that the principal drivers are wildfire-related capital spending, an aging long-distance transmission system, electric rate design flaws, and authorized utility returns3 — not the roughly 18 GW of customer-owned solar that Californians have installed since the early 2000s.4

This article explains how data and the law converge on two findings that lead to a single conclusion. First, the largest, fastest-growing components of Californians’ electric bills are utility capital costs — wildfire hardening, transmission expansion, and grid infrastructure — driven by forces unrelated to rooftop solar, and which distributed solar measurably helps to constrain by reducing peak transmission load and deferring infrastructure investment. Second, California’s rate-making framework — built for a one-way grid that no longer exists — neither credits the system benefits that customer owned solar delivers nor allocates costs and benefits fairly across ratepayer classes. Modernizing rate design, by unbundling the recovery of fixed grid infrastructure costs from the variable price of energy generation, is the structural fix. Together, these findings point to one conclusion: the most realistic path to affordability as electrification, EV charging, and data-center loads expand is to revisit our approach to rate design and to help many more Californians — especially renters, small businesses, and dense urban neighborhoods — own their own solar-energy supplies.

PG&E, California’s largest investor-owned utility (IOU), charged residential customers an average of $0.39 per kWh in June 2025.5 When economists, such as those at U.C. Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas, dissect the typical California residential rate, only about 12–15 cents per kWh reflects the competitive marginal cost of generating and delivering electricity.6 The remaining 25 cents or more covers fixed cost-recovery for capital projects, public-purpose programs, securitized wildfire claims, and authorized return on the utility’s investments.7 The California Public Advocates Office attributes roughly 21% of the rate — about $0.08 per kWh — to wildfire-related capital and operating costs, making them the single largest driver of recent rate increases.8

PG&E’s 2020 and 2023 General Rate Case decisions, together with separately recovered wildfire-cost memorandum accounts, authorize billions of dollars annually for vegetation management, system hardening, public safety power shutoffs, and undergrounding.9 PG&E’s 10,000-Mile Undergrounding Program alone has been projected at costs ranging from approximately $3 million per mile to nearly $6 million per mile, depending on terrain, urbanization, and contractor pricing.10

California’s liability framework intensifies that pressure. Under inverse condemnation as applied to IOUs, an electric utility can be held strictly liable for wildfire damage tied to its equipment even where no negligence is found.11 Utilities have rationally responded by deploying as much capital as the CPUC will authorize.

Authorized capital earns a regulated return on equity, which as of the date of this report, is between 10.23% and 10.33% for the three California IOUs, and above the national average.12 That return is paid on a rate base that has grown by more than 50% since 2018, but that far outpaces load growth, which has been essentially flat over the same period. Out of this dynamic has emerged the cost-shift claim: that net energy metering (NEM), California’s program of bill credits for energy solar customers’ exports to the grid, amounts to a subsidy running from lower-income, non-solar households to wealthier solar owners. It is the most repeated argument against solar ownership rights in the state. However, the myth fails under scrutiny.

The “cost shift argument” compares the retail credit that NEM customers receive for exported energy with a modeled “avoided cost” the utility would otherwise pay.13 The “cost shift” that comparison purports to measure is largely a mirage produced by California’s rate design itself — a design that picks and chooses how to load ratepayers with costs they should not bear and fails to recognize the benefits that distributed solar provides.

The standard avoided-cost calculation is structurally biased against solar in three ways analysts have repeatedly documented:

(a) The Avoided-Cost Calculator (ACC) that drives the California Public Utility Commission’s (CPUC’s) NEM cost-effectiveness analysis excludes documented benefits of distributed generation — avoided line losses, deferred transmission and distribution upgrades, locational capacity value during net-peak hours, and resilience benefits during Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events.14

(b) Rooftop solar reduces the same wildfire-related transmission build-out that drives most of the rate increase discussed above.15

(c) The calculation is sensitive to which year’s gas price, capacity-value methodology, and discount rate the analyst chooses.16

A deeper problem is that the purported “cost shift” occurring does not measure a transfer at all. The Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC’s) Powering Change report shows that the dynamic behind California’s rising electric rates is not solar customers receiving a benefit at someone else’s expense. It is the mechanics of how utilities recover their costs. NRDC’s analysis claims that today’s non-solar residential rates are approximately $0.07 per kWh higher than they would be without NEM, which is around 16% of California’s total residential IOU retail rate today; further, they state that $0.05 per kWh of that increase has occurred since 2018.17

Critically, NRDC characterizes that figure not as a payment from non-solar to solar customers, but as a rate-design construct: the consequence of behind-the-meter solar reducing IOU energy sales. It reflects the recovery of growing fixed costs on flat or decreasing demand by increasing rates, not a direct payment from one ratepayer to another.

That distinction matters. A “subsidy,” in ordinary usage, is “a benefit given by the government, or a public or private organization, to a person, business, or industry” requiring a direct, intentional transfer. What occurs with solar is a free-market outcome: utilities lose anticipated revenue when their customers generate some of their own electricity and sell the energy on the open grid. The compensation those customers receive for that solar energy is no more a “subsidy” extracted from the utility than the income a homeowner earns selling vegetables from a backyard garden at a farmers’ market is a “subsidy” extracted from the supermarket whose produce sales they displace. In both cases, the producer is paid for a good they grew or generated.

The comparison is also rigged by mismatched timeframes. The cost-shift figure is cumulative — the alleged share of the current residential bill accumulated across every NEM customer who has interconnected since 1997. The wildfire figure typically paired against it is a recent slice. Setting one against the other is like comparing the odometer reading of your car to the trip meter from this morning’s drive. Both are in miles. Neither tells you what the other does.

Compared on a consistent basis — recent against recent, or all-time against all-time — wildfire dominates by a wide margin.18 And the trajectories diverge from there. NEM 3.0, in effect since April 2023, sharply reduced export compensation for new entrants, structurally constraining NEM’s contribution to future rate growth. Wildfire spending has no such constraints.

Wildfire-related costs are the single largest driver of California’s residential rate increases. By any reasonable accounting, wildfire-related recovery is materially larger than NEM’s share of the residential bill, and the gap is widening as undergrounding capital, insurance premiums, and Wildfire Fund obligations continue to rise.19 The CPUC’s 2023 SB 695 report confirms that wildfire-related costs — mitigation, insurance, and liability — are the primary statewide driver of rate increases over the past decade. Solar customers, by reducing peak transmission load, are helping to mitigate the very wildfire-hardening build-out that drives those costs upward.20

Finally, the cost-shift framing has a deeper problem than its arithmetic: it presumes there is a net cost to apportion in the first place. Once the offsetting benefits of distributed solar are credited, that premise collapses. A 2024 analysis found that existing solar customers collectively reduced costs for all California ratepayers by approximately $1.5 billion in a single year — through reduced peak grid demand, deferred transmission investment, and lower wholesale energy procurement.21

And looking towards the future, grid-optimization modeling predicts that a distributed clean-energy system will be $88 billion less expensive to build and operate than a centralized alternative because Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) reduce the infrastructure that the long-distance transmission system exists to carry.22

The phrase “cost shift” has a much longer history in U.S. electric ratemaking than the present rooftop-solar debate. As Sharon Beder summarizes in Power Play, publicly owned utilities historically charged residential and commercial customers similar rates to industrial customers, while IOUs charged residential and commercial customers materially more to keep industrial rates competitive with the public-power neighbor next door.23

In 1994, IOU residential customers paid 31% more per kWh than publicly-owned residential customers, while IOU industrial rates were the same as public-power industrial rates. The structural pattern: IOUs have been shifting ratepayer costs among other ratepayer classes long before rooftop solar.

Two further pieces of that historical pattern are visible in present-day California. First, ownership of the IOUs is concentrated among institutional investors, layered in multiple tiers of holding companies, and held by out-of-state hedge-fund stakeholders whose authorized return on equity is ultimately recovered from California ratepayers. Executive compensation at California’s largest investor-owned utilities (IOUs) is itself a cost of service that ratepayers ultimately pay. Most of it, base salary and cash incentives, is recovered as an operating expense in the utility’s revenue requirement, not through the authorized return on equity. Regulatory filings for fiscal year 2024 (reported in 2025) place IOU CEO pay among the highest in the nation. Sempra, the parent of SDG&E and SoCalGas, paid CEO Jeffrey Martin $21.5 million, ranking him the third highest-paid utility executive in the country.24 PG&E paid CEO Patricia Poppe $15.8 million with $1.4 million in base salary plus $11.7 million in stock awards and other compensation. Edison International, parent of Southern California Edison, paid CEO Pedro Pizarro $13.8 million.25 The trend has continued: an April 2026 report shows utility CEO pay rose 16% in 2025, with Poppe at $19.8 million and Pizarro at $16.5 million.26

Second, every dollar of rate base financed at a return is a dollar of revenue requirement that non-solar and solar customers alike pay to capital. In that real and quantifiable sense, all retail customers — including non-solar customers — are continuously “subsidizing” investor returns by billions of dollars per year.

California’s 1996–2001 restructuring experiment is often cited as proof that “deregulation” failed. But that experiment did not let households or small businesses own their own electricity supply. It merely substituted competition among large generators for competition among utilities, while leaving the customer in the same passive role.27

Genuine competition for the customer means letting the customer own the means of production when doing so is technically and economically feasible. Regulating concentrated, capital-intensive generation and transmission assets is appropriate; restricting an individual household, school, farm, or warehouse from producing and storing its own clean electricity is not.

The cost basis behind this conclusion is structural. Self-generated solar electricity is priced to the customer at the equipment cost and financed at consumer-loan rates, without an authorized return on capital, holding-company overhead, or executive compensation recovery.

Each kilowatt-hour purchased from an IOU, by contrast, includes the utility’s authorized return on rate base, corporate overhead, and the share of fixed-cost recovery identified in the preceding section. The savings are not theoretical.

The mechanisms to provide these savings are not novel — they are already in operation, at varying scales, in California and in other jurisdictions: fast track permitting, community solar programs, virtual net metering for multifamily housing, public-sector rooftop programs serving schools and warehouses, and successor tariffs that preserve cost-effective payback periods for solar installations.
Scaling those mechanisms is itself the most direct equity response, extending solar’s economic and resilience benefits to renters, multifamily residents, schools, small businesses, and dense urban neighborhoods that have historically been locked out of solar ownership.

California’s electricity rate increase problem is real, and so is the search for someone to hold accountable. But the data point unambiguously toward failed utility rate structuring and IOU capital spending — driven by wildfire liability, authorized returns, and a long-distance transmission system that customer-sited generation actually relieves — as the dominant causes.

California’s solar customers are not the source of the affordability crisis; the distributed solar industry is the most rapidly deployable, customer-aligned piece of the affordability solution. Stronger policies and regulations are needed to untap the ability to expand solar ownership opportunities, especially for renters, multifamily households, small businesses, and historically excluded communities.

A structural solution is rate-design reform. If California unbundled the fixed costs of grid infrastructure from the variable cost of energy generation — rather than recovering both through a single volumetric per-kWh charge — infrastructure costs allocated to ratepayers would decline over time, because distributed resources reduce the very build-out those costs recover, and energy generation would be priced on free-market terms in which distributed generation competes on level footing with utility-scale supply. As long as rates remain bundled and grid infrastructure remains privately held by IOUs whose authorized returns depend on volumetric sales, the conflict between utility shareholder interests and solar system owners will continue to shape every rate-making proceeding.

It is time to double down on policies that expand solar ownership rights not only as the best course for the environment, but also as the best course for the economic interests of all ratepayers.

About the Authors
Angela Lipanovich is a clean energy attorney with more than twenty years of experience advising clean energy companies and the customers they serve. She founded Estriatus Law, co-founded SolarWAVE Action, and previously served as General Counsel to a publicly traded solar company. She has helped shape key policy decisions protecting solar ownership rights and is a long-standing member and former Board member of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES).

Jenny Folkesson, Ph.D., is Executive Director and co-founder of SolarWAVE Action. A computer scientist trained at the University of Copenhagen, she brings two decades of experience in data science and machine learning, including image analysis at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Her work centers on clean energy data analysis and the use of open-source code and data to support climate solutions and coastal and marine conservation.

Hugh Safford was hiking at 12,657 feet in California’s Sequoia National Park two years ago when he spotted something strange. It was a young Jeffrey pine, a tree that usually occurs farther downhill.

Safford was hiking at treeline, the forest threshold where trees still grow, but fewer and farther between. Only the toughest species can survive the strong winds, heavy snowpack, and freezing temperatures found there.

Safford is a forest and fire ecologist with the University of California Davis Environmental Science and Policy department. He knows subalpine forests are on the leading edges of climate change — and that this Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi) didn’t belong.

So how had it gotten there? Were there others? And if so, what did that mean?

The answers could portend unexpected competition at California’s treeline — and a rising threat from wildfire.

For people who know their pines, Jeffreys are easy to spot. Each fascicle — that’s a bundle or cluster — has three needles, whereas California’s high elevations are still dominated by trees with bundles of five.

These high five pines can survive in cold, harsh, windy places where few other trees can. In California they include whitebark pine (P. albicaulis) and limber pine (P. flexilis), along with foxtail pines (P. balfouriana), which are endemic to the state.

Farther south, high in California’s more arid White Mountains, grows the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, home to a Great Basin bristlecone pine (P. longaeva) that’s the oldest individual tree on Earth. At nearly 5,000 years of age, it’s nicknamed “Methuselah” after the longest-lived person in the Bible (at age 969, a mere lad by comparison).

Bristlecone pines mature very slowly. They can take 100 years to reach just a few feet in height. The resulting dense wood is part of their survival strategy. They bend to mighty winds and over time often grow into fantastically twisted — some would say tortured — shapes.

But how do these old souls respond to climate change?

They already live at timberline, generally between 9,800 and 11,000 feet. Bristlecone pines traditionally do well where most other plants do not. As a result, they’re usually a first-succession species, tending to occupy new open ground after fire or other habitat-transforming events. Over the past 50 years, in response to warming temps, they have nudged up into higher elevations. Meanwhile, the low end of the bristlecone range has contracted, where seedlings often find it too hot and dry now to survive.

The snow on California’s highest peaks is melting earlier. Temperatures are hotter. Until Safford’s discovery, scientists thought climate change would cause one of two things to happen in California’s upper reaches: Either the old men of the mountain would hold hands and march uphill together like the Von Trapp family at the end of The Sound of Music, or they’d duke it out for survival.

Bristlecones have encountered some faster-moving limber pines (no spring chickens themselves, reaching up to 2,000 years in age). Until recently it seemed like that’s where the bristlecone’s main competition would come from, as limber pines began to occupy valuable leading-edge real estate, potentially stopping new and future bristlecones from establishing there.

In 2017 Brian Smithers co-authored a study about this leapfrogging effect of limber pines. Smithers, who did his doctoral work at UC-Davis and is an assistant research professor in Montana State University’s Department of Ecology, says limber pines seem to be winning the race to migrate to higher, cooler elevations. But at least they’re close kin to bristlecones.

The Jeffrey pine situation, though, was completely unexpected.

Safford found the Jeffrey pine upstart growing well above its normal range. For now it holds the highest-altitude record for that species — nearly 2,000 feet above previous records.

When he returned with a team last summer to search other peaks for more Jeffrey pines, they found hundreds. Some were as old as 30 and even 40 years, growing younger as they moved uphill.

“Jeffrey was appearing thousands of feet above where it should be,” Safford said. “Now everything is moving uphill, but Jeffrey pines are jumping, and that’s our mystery. We’re looking at the result, without having looked much at causes.”

He has a hypothesis, however.

Climate models predicted that the highest-altitude trees would continue to migrate up mountainsides, climbing — slowly — until they couldn’t climb anymore. And that’s happening. Last summer Safford and his team found three trees above 4,000 meters (13,124 feet), the first trees ever found at that altitude in the U.S. and Canada, outside of the southern Rockies.

But Safford says those models haven’t accounted for the role of seed dispersal by birds and other species. His number one suspects are Clark’s nutcrackers (named for explorer William Clark but slated to be renamed), clever corvids who use their strong beaks to extract pinecone seeds. They often bury them to eat later, serving as accidental gardeners in the process.

“The Clark’s nutcracker is a huge part of the story,” Safford says.

In California these busy birds have a mutualistic relationship with many subalpine trees, whose seeds are a major food source. The birds can remember up to 1,000 caching spots, where they’ve stored away up to 10,000 seeds. Of course, when one bird stows 100 whitebark seeds under their tongue, flies off and buries 10 caches, “they do it in the hope that they can return at some point to consume them,” Safford says. “Germination is a fail for those birds, because they wanna eat those things.”

If a nutcracker buries 10 whitebark pine seeds and the cache is left to sprout, the germination rate is high. By contrast, seedlings from a Jeffrey pine cache germinate in ones or twos. While Safford assumes these caches contain roughly 10 seeds as well, nobody knows for sure.

“No one has ever dug up a [Jeffrey pine] cache because no one has ever tried to follow a Clark’s nutcracker from the Jeffrey pine to the cache.” Not yet, at least.

And if they did, the birds have strategies to thwart potential thieves. “The birds are in a constant battle with rodents, which are always watching to see where the nutcrackers cache food. These birds are so damn smart…” Safford laughs. “Nutcrackers will fake caching. That’s happened to us multiple times, where we ran out to see the cache, and they faked it.”

Still, he assumes the birds are probably caching Jeffrey pine seeds at the same rates as whitebark. “If only one is coming up, it’s probably because germination cues aren’t right for them to germinate,” he says, but adds that those cues — drought, warmer temperatures, less snowpack — are changing.

“What’s astounding,” Safford says, is not that the species is appearing so high up, “but now it’s starting to survive.”

Granted, these novices are growing notably slower at treeline than at lower elevations. Safford breaks off to laugh again, this time at the Jeffrey pines’ predicament.

“They don’t wanna be there. They would much rather be on the shores of (lower elevation) Lake Tahoe. But they can’t control all those cues. Or where they are dispersed!”

He doesn’t think the Jeffrey pines are a threat to their elders — yet. So far none of the high-elevation ones have any cones on them, so they’re not ready to start reproducing on their own in their new home. As it gets warmer, though, that will change.

“Maybe they’ll start making cones in my lifetime,” speculates Safford, who just turned 63. “Then you might see threshold dynamics. Not just the bird moving them upstream, but a sudden explosion. Jeffrey pine will become much more common and make more offspring, then if it’s growing faster, the other trees won’t be able to keep up.”

But that potential explosion is not the one that concerns Safford so much. It’s the explosive relationship between Jeffrey pine and fire.

In recent decades California has suffered more destructive wildfires than any other U.S. state. Safford was senior author on a study published this April that assessed the state’s rate of deforestation from wildfire between 1991 and 2023. The findings weren’t pretty. During those years, the Golden State lost roughly 8-9% of its conifer forests to wildfire.

Recent megafires have turned large expanses once covered in forest into fields of shrubs or grass. The blazes were simply too hot for conifers to regenerate, and Safford’s study found that efforts to replant California’s forests aren’t keeping pace with their losses.

“For lower-elevation forests, there’s a strong but linear increase of forest being lost to fire,” Safford says. “For high-elevation forests, the rate of increase has been strongly exponential. It’s just brutal.”

Jeffrey is a fire survivor. Like ponderosa pines (collectively “yellow pines”), its thicker bark protects young trees from fire damage, its thick cone scales insulate seeds against heat, and it self-prunes over time. By dropping its lower branches, a Jeffrey pine protects its canopy (where photosynthesis happens) from surface fuels. By contrast, the high-fives and other subalpine trees aren’t nearly as well protected for fire. Up until now, they haven’t needed to be.

“Lightning hits a bristlecone pine and it’s almost impossible for a real fire to start,” Safford explains. “They’re very scattered, there’s no connection of fuels on the ground. Bristlecones and other subalpine trees are slow-growing, with short needles, widely spaced, not a whole lot of litter, [and] compact litter beds that hold moisture and are hard to burn.”

The Jeffreys’ new neighbors “support highly flammable foliage,” Safford says, “which promotes fast, low intensity burning along the ground surface. This type of burning is much more likely to kill the less fire-tolerant competitors of the yellow pines than the yellow pines themselves.”

It’s not that these old men of the mountain will disappear tomorrow. For one thing, the southern Sierra “is so darn high,” Safford says, some peaks can still accommodate upward movement. So although the climate’s warming and changing quickly, it’ll be “multiple lifetimes of humans before a lot of this stuff transpires.”

Not so with fire. California has seen huge impacts from it already, and the Jeffrey pine is both fire-adapted and drought tolerant.

“It’s gonna be the survivor when you filter all these species out,” Safford says. And now, Jeffrey pines are being distributed “all over the landscape. They’re moving all over because the climate is permitting it, creating fuel beds and dense forests that didn’t exist before.”

In other words, Jeffrey pines are not only fire survivors, but fire purveyors.

The pairing of Clark’s nutcrackers with Jeffrey pines isn’t one that climate models foresaw or remote sensing detected. No satellite or artificial intelligence identified these facts. Instead it was quite literally “shoe leather” science: Safford stumbled on his first prophetic Jeffrey pine while out on a hike.

And this summer Safford and his team will be back, climbing more California peaks to do more on-the-ground fieldwork. Thanks to Smithers’ own shoe-leather observations, they know there’s a population of Jeffrey pines in the White Mountains, so they plan to spend a week in that high range where the bristlecones grow.

While Smithers agrees that fire is a concern, he thinks it’s a short-term one.

“I think in any time of transition, as these trees are [moving] farther upslope, a change in habitat occurs and fire is one of those changes.” He’s a big fan of letting fires back into the system naturally — counteracting a century of fire suppression — but he also thinks we need to be OK with our forests changing.

“I have a more long-term philosophical bent on this,” Smithers says. “We humans really don’t have an amazing track record with trying to figure this stuff out anyway. Nature’s gonna have to figure it out.”

Cemeteries: How the Dead Protect the Wild

The post A Gnarly Situation: High-Elevation Discovery Raises New Questions About Which California Trees Will Survive Climate Change appeared first on The Revelator.

In "Land Less" — the Third-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — filmmaker Alexi Liotti follows the activists fighting a bill that would transfer thousands of acres of Alaskan rainforest to five Native corporations, opening the land to logging.

Read more on E360 →

For generations, children walked through the doors of the Colson school in Letcher County, Kentucky. Among the teachers who helped shape those memories over the decades was Shirley Sexton, who spent years teaching in the building before retiring in 1995. Like so many others in the community, she watched with sadness as the school closed and fell into disuse. 

After eight years of sitting empty, in 2020, she was able to purchase the building with a vision of giving it a second life. Working closely with Martin and Melanie Holbrook, fellow community members, they began building Colson Civic Center in 2021 to serve local families with opportunities for fun and fellowship.  

Then, the following year, the 2022 flooding disaster struck. 

More than six feet of water rose in the building, leaving behind 18 inches of mud. The force of the flood was so powerful it pushed furniture out the doors, ruining their commercial kitchen and the heating and cooling system. For a community already facing population loss and economic challenges, the flood was another painful setback.  

However, volunteers arrived from near and far to help get them get back to serving the community. Save Our Sheep, Helping Hands from North Carolina and Team Rubicon joined in the massive cleanup effort.  

Organizations and partners stepped up in remarkable ways. Members of Kentucky-based nonprofit, Clean4Change, visited multiple times to assist with recovery work, including cleaning floors and helping restore damaged spaces. They also helped secure funding via the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky for three mini-split heating and cooling systems, allowing individual rooms to be heated and cooled efficiently within the large building. 

Mountain Association became another key partner in the center’s recovery and long-term sustainability. Through energy-efficiency improvements spearheaded by our Energy Team, the center upgraded its lighting system with LED fixtures. We provided additional free technical assistance thanks to support from the KY Office of Energy Policy, and facilitation for solar, with panels donated via the Footprint Project and installed via Letcher County’s own HOMES, Inc. HOMES received funding from the Solar Finance Fund to bring down the cost by $6,000. 

Combined with efficiency improvements, the impact has been dramatic. Electric bills that once ranged from $200 to $300 per month have dropped to around $40. At new rates, they are expected to save more than $2,600 per year.  

This means more money can be invested directly back into the community. 

The center hosts food giveaways twice each year in partnership with God’s Pantry and the Letcher County Food Pantry. Every Christmas, more than 300 families visit to take photos with Santa and receive free toys. Every fall, children can explore a one-acre corn maze, pose with giant hay bale creations, and pick one of 500 pumpkins that are grown and given away. School groups visit from Letcher and Knott counties, as well as the Autism Center and Adult Learning Center. They also operate B&G Thrift Store out of the back half of the school, providing affordable clothes and household items for families. 

“A lot of people around here are working two jobs, and just struggling. Everything we try to do has the goal to make things easier and more joyful for families,” Martin Holbrook said.  

That mission is working. Parents and grandparents often come through the doors and immediately find themselves walking down memory lane. Former students wander the halls pointing out classroom or their lockers. After events, children cry when it’s time to get back on the bus because they don’t want to leave, though there’s always another event coming up they can look forward to. 

Even though they are back to offering activities, recovery projects continue and the list of maintenance needs is long. They are now better prepared for future flooding with flood doors, sandbags, and drain plugs ready, but the center lost nearly half an acre of land to creek erosion following the flood, and work is underway to stabilize the streambank with rock to prevent further damage. They are also looking for funding for critical roof repairs and ultimate replacement. 

Through floods, setbacks, and years of hard work, the Colson Civic Center stands today as a symbol of resilience and generosity for the people of Colson and Letcher County. 

To learn more about them visit their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/p/Colson-Civic-Center-100079497507885/  

The post A Shuttered School Becomes a Place for Community in Colson, Kentucky  appeared first on Mountain Association.

Also, Public Service Enterprise Group is “encouraged” by potential changes to the utility business model in New Jersey, CEO Ralph LaRossa said.

Bemnet Agata is a communications officer at the Tax Justice Network, where Alison Schultz is a research fellow.

We are entering an age of permanent volatility.

Climate change is making extreme weather more destructive. Geopolitical tensions are disrupting energy markets and supply chains. Governments are expected not only to decarbonise their economies, but to protect them against an increasingly unpredictable world. That requires sustained public investment at precisely the moment repeated shocks are placing ever greater pressure on public finances.

Governments are rightly debating how to mobilise the trillions needed for the energy transition. Yet one of the largest untapped sources of climate finance requires neither higher corporate tax rates nor new international funds. It lies in correcting one of the oldest assumptions underpinning the international corporate tax system.

One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax.

• Jul 31, 2026 News UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire Top politicians and scientists blamed the deadly fires on the climate crisis and said it should inspire more emissions reductions and adaptation measures Read more
• Aug 4, 2026 News Governments weigh response to US going alone on deep-sea mining At annual talks in Kingston, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) launched legal processes to challenge a unilateral US push for deep-sea mining Read more
• Aug 3, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Egypt seeks to unlock renewable potential to power regional clean energy hub Europe is investing in Egypt’s bid to position itself as a clean electricity exporter to reduce its emissions and generate a new source of income Read more

Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, production and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes its subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies.

Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest.

That legal fiction does more than misdescribe how multinational businesses operate. It enables profits to be shifted away from the places where real economic activity takes place and into jurisdictions where little or no tax is paid. This not only erodes public revenues, but also undermines the level playing field by giving multinational corporations tax advantages that purely domestic businesses cannot replicate.

Taxing multinational corporations as the integrated businesses they actually are could generate around $500 billion in additional corporate tax revenues every year. That’s almost 40% of the $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance that, two years ago, governments agreed should be mobilised by 2035. That is exactly what governments are negotiating this week under the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation in New York.

Imagine Apple sold one million iPhones in Kenya. Few people would dispute that those sales depend on the Kenyan economy. Every iPhone arrives through Kenyan ports, travels on Kenyan roads, is sold by Kenyan workers, connects through Kenyan telecommunications infrastructure and is protected by Kenyan courts. Apple’s success depends not only on its own innovation, but on the public investments and institutions that make economic activity possible.

The negotiations underway under the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation would replace this legal fiction with a system known as unitary taxation with formulary apportionment. Rather than allowing multinational corporations to pay tax where they say their profits arise, it would allocate taxing rights according to where they undertake genuine economic activity—where they employ workers, manufacture goods, provide services and sell to customers. It would replace today’s pay where you say model with one based on pay where you play

This is not about increasing corporate tax rates. It is about deciding where multinational corporations should pay tax on the profits they already earn. Allocating taxing rights in this way would benefit countries across the income spectrum. While higher-income countries would gain the most in absolute terms, lower-income countries would see the largest proportional increases.

France, for example, would collect an additional US$25.5 billion each year, while Kenya would increase its corporate tax revenues by 406%. At a time of mounting climate costs, those revenues could help governments drive the transition to clean energy while investing in the resilience needed to withstand future shocks.

The strongest argument for reform, however, is not the scale of the projected revenue gains. It is that the proposal corrects a century-old foundational error by bringing international tax rules into closer alignment with how the modern economy actually works.

Every successful market depends on foundations that no company creates alone: public investment, functioning institutions and the participation of millions of workers and consumers. If multinational profits are generated collectively across many countries, the rules governing where those profits are taxed should recognise that reality rather than the legal and accounting artifices that determine where profits appear on paper.

The international tax system remains an outlier. Every other area of economic governance has long since recognised multinational corporations as integrated global businesses. Tax rules remain the last custodian of the legal fiction that multinational corporations are not, in fact, multinational.

The debate taking place in New York is therefore about much more than tax. It is about whether the rules underpinning the global economy still reflect the economy they are meant to govern—and whether they equip governments with the fiscal capacity to confront the defining challenges of the twenty-first century.

Energy sovereignty without fiscal sovereignty is an unfinished transition. Countries cannot build a more secure and resilient future if the wealth generated within their economies continues to escape taxation where it is created.

Recovering those revenues would strengthen public finances, giving governments not only the resources to accelerate the energy transition but also the fiscal capacity to plan, coordinate and sustain it over the long term. In an age of permanent volatility, that capacity may prove to be every country’s most important climate adaptation strategy.

The post A legal fiction blocking billions in climate finance will be challenged this week appeared first on Climate Home News.

Headline News:

• “The Elusive Dream Of Solar Powered EVs Is Not So Elusive After All” • The pursuit of solar-powered EVs has discouraged more than one would-be automaker, but the US startup Aptera has a unique angle. Instead of pitching four-wheeled passenger cars decked out in solar panels, the company has kept the solar panels and removed one wheel. [CleanTechnica]

Aptera (Aptera image)

• “Europe’s Hydropower Nears ‘All-Time-Low’ As Summer Drought Worsens” • Hydropower in the Alpine region is “close to an all-time low,” as Europe’s summer drought worsens. Fueled by climate change, back-to-back heatwaves and scant rainfall have left much of the continent parched. Concerns go beyond energy to food shortages and wildfires. [Euronews]
• “Five Amazon Countries Arrest Hundreds In Major Crackdown On Environmental Crime” • Police from Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru have arrested hundreds of people and seized timber, minerals, and thousands of livestock in one of the largest coordinated crackdowns on environmental crime ever carried out in the world’s largest rainforest. [ABC News]
• “As The Stock Market Soars, European Central Bank Warns Climate Change Threatens Global Economy” • As wildfires are devastating almost every continent and water levels are too low to cool some nuclear power plants, stocks in New York hit an all time high, fueled by a belief that AI will lead to unimaginable abundance. But ECB is assessing damage. [CleanTechnica]
• “Remote Mining Proves Australia’s High-Renewables Energy Future” • Remote mining operations in Australia are showing several off-grid industrial sites are consistently operating at renewable energy penetration rates above 80%, according to Zenith Energy. Mining companies are increasingly investing in hybrid energy systems. [Mining.com.au]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

Leaders of the Santa Marta coalition – a group of governments, businesses and civil society organisations seeking to transition away from fossil fuels – hope it can withstand the loss of one of its founding members as a far-right, pro-fossil fuel government takes office in Colombia this week.

In April, Colombia hosted 57 governments in the Caribbean city of Santa Marta for the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels – a voluntary meeting outside of official UN climate talks. In June, far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won a general election, and is set to take office on Friday.

De la Espriella has pledged to ramp up coal exports and begin fracking for methane gas, reversing a ban on all new hydrocarbon exploration enacted by the current government of Gustavo Petro since 2022. The soon to be environment minister Fabio Arjona said the Santa Marta conference was an “absolute waste of time and money”.

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• Aug 4, 2026 Comment Is FOMO undermining climate diplomacy? The negotiating community has not become 20 times larger, but the COP has – and the rising number of participants, from politicians to business executives, is getting in the way of the task at hand Read more
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He will replace Irene Vélez Torres, who co-chairs the Santa Marta coalition. Torres told a press briefing last week that the initiative was created in a way that made sure “it could live without Colombia because we knew [a change in government] was a risk”.

“It’s a coalition of countries but also subnational governments, civil society, scientists… so there is a lot more than just Colombia. It’s a shame that Colombia cannot continue with its international leadership, but it doesn’t mean that what we created as a global legacy will not continue,” she said.

Dutch environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, also a co-chair in the initiative, told Climate Home News in a statement that “the organization is set-up in a way that progress does not depend on one or two countries”, and highlighted the role of incoming co-chairs Ireland and Tuvalu.

The new co-chairs will officially take the lead after COP31 and are set to host the second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Tuvalu next year. Van Veldhoven said the two countries are already involved in preparing for this transition.

After meeting in Santa Marta to kickstart work on phasing out fossil fuels, governments agreed to focus on three priorities: developing national roadmaps to phase out fossil fuels, decoupling trade from coal, oil and gas, and reducing global finance’s dependence on fossil fuels.

At last year’s COP30, a group of around 80 countries led a failed push for the UN to adopt a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. To keep talks from collapsing, Brazil proposed to draft a voluntary roadmap instead, which has received suggestions from dozens of countries.

In June, Vélez Torres told journalists that Colombia and the Netherlands would seek for COP31 to reflect the work of the Santa Marta coalition, something the co-presidency of Türkiye and Australia was “open” to consider, she added.

Last week, she stressed that the workstreams are also set up independently from the Dutch and Colombian governments, and that each area of focus will have its own “madrina”, which translates as “godmother”, a contact point that will oversee progress and support countries.

Van Veldhoven noted that, while the coalition is open to new members, the current priority is “setting up the organisation with the current involved countries and stakeholders”. The Dutch government noted that “several countries” have expressed interest, but could not disclosed which ones.

While the coalition is set up to withstand changes in government, Colombia’s shift to a pro-fossil fuel government represents an important blow to global initiatives seeking to phase out fossil fuels, said Andreas Malm, author and professor of human ecology at Lund University.

“The gap that we have after this defeat is charismatic political leadership that makes the necessary links and arguments on the global stage. For the moment, I don’t see who could replace Colombia in that role,” he said. “But who knows… perhaps some miracle will happen somewhere in the world and you will have someone to pick up that mantle that is now on the ground.”

Colombia not only leads the Santa Marta coalition, but is also one of the few fossil fuel producers in the group to actually halt new exploration licenses. Coal and oil derivatives account for about a third of the country’s exports, but both industries have followed a downward trend over the last decade.

De la Espriella’s government will also have to start from scratch, as Petro’s government halted all oil and gas exploration pilots in the key Magdalena and Cesar-Ranchería regions. Both areas are also home to indigenous communities who are likely to challenge any projects in court.

Vélez Torres said that halting all new coal, oil and gas exploration licenses “was not easy” and led to “violent reactions” from national elites, including “violent threats”, but that it came with the deep belief that “it is needed, it is urgent, and it cannot be delayed”.

At an international level, she added that more countries need to show “political bravery” to take similar decisions, and that the global discussion to phase out fossil fuels “cannot be delayed” because the time window for humanity to act is shrinking.

“We decided to go against the current. That has been one of the bravest decisions, and I hope that other governments and particularly civil society can get to lead that conversation forward”, she said.

The post Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

When heavy storms triggered a fault on a major power line in Indonesia’s Sumatra in late May, blackouts plunged homes and businesses across the island into darkness, leaving millions to cope without power in the humid heat for up to a day.

Failed traffic lights caused chaos on the streets of Medan, one of the country’s biggest cities, and restaurants and shops had to shutter or throw out food after fridges stopped working. Four people were reported to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning from generators.

A power outage caused by damage to cables on a high-voltage transmission line, the first of two to strike Sumatra in a fortnight, highlighted the huge challenge facing Indonesia and much of neighbouring Southeast Asia – the maintenance and upgrading of inadequate grid capacity that industry analysts say is proving an obstacle for billions of dollars in planned clean power investments.

Experts told Climate Home News the Galang–Simangkuk transmission line, which was relatively new and only began operating seven years ago, should have been able to withstand the storms that caused transmission towers to collapse in early June.

“It should not have had these grid failures,” said Wai-Shin Chan, Hong Kong-based head of research at Asia Research & Engagement, a consulting firm, warning that climate change would bring more frequent episodes of extreme weather.

“The grid resilience is really not there,” Chan said.

The Indonesian Air Force helped state-owned utility PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) transport emergency power towers to restore electricity supplies within 24 hours, but the two incidents could cause longer-lasting damage to investor confidence – hurting the delivery of much-needed reliable clean electricity supplies.

PLN did not respond to a request for comment.

• Jun 3, 2026 Comment Indonesia’s failing Just Energy Transition Partnership is a cautionary tale The government has abandoned its plan to shut down a major coal plant, which was a key part of the deal, raising doubts about the donor-backed approach Read more
• Jun 24, 2026 News EU, UK lead push for electrification as “powerful weapon” against fossil fuels A group of dozens of countries seeks to build momentum for a COP31 pledge to electrify 35% of global energy use by 2035 as an alternative to fossil fuels Read more

With electrification high on the agenda of the COP31 climate talks later this year, there is growing global focus on the need to bolster grid infrastructure to cope with increased electricity use and more renewables in the power mix.

In Southeast Asia, energy experts say inadequate grid capacity and maintenance is already proving a major factor in the region’s stuttering rollout of new clean energy projects.

About 50% to 60% of renewable energy projects in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia were cancelled or stalled between 2021 and 2025, according to a recent report by consultancy Bain & Company and Standard Chartered. In Indonesia, 48% of announced projects were subsequently dropped or delayed during that period. 

Progress in the region is also being hampered by issues ranging from unclear power purchase agreement (PPA) structures, a failure of power policies to keep up with investor needs, permitting and licensing approval delays, grid connection constraints, limits to private sector involvement in electricity markets, and policy and tariff uncertainty, energy experts said.

Some renewable energy projects have also faced opposition due to their environmental impact and issues related to land rights.

But Bain researchers found grid infrastructure was the biggest bottleneck for Southeast Asia’s energy transition, with about $18 billion per year needed in investment for modernisation and upgrades.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that electricity grid and storage investment in the region was higher in 2015 at $15 billion compared with $12 billion in 2025, even as electricity demand and renewable energy growth accelerated.

“It’s a concern for long-term power development in the region,” Chan said. 

“If these risks – grid curtailment, policy uncertainty, permitting and PPA – are not adequately addressed, investors just don’t have the confidence to hit the final investment decision button,” he added. 

Ramping up progress on solar, wind, hydro and geothermal projects is vital for Southeast Asian nations to hit their targets on cutting planet-heating carbon emissions.

Indonesia has pledged to reduce emissions by 31.9% by 2030 compared with business-as-usual levels, or by 43.2% with international support, on the way to reaching net zero by 2060. 

Renewables accounted for about 18% of Indonesia’s energy mix in April 2026 according to local media reports, falling short of the country’s initial 23% target for 2025, with the majority of its energy needs met by coal, oil and gas. In 2025, a new National Energy Policy postponed achieving the target to 2030. 

“The region carries significant weight in global terms, given its share of world population and energy consumption,” said Joseph Jacobelli, an impact investor and author of Asia’s Energy Revolution and Powering the Unstoppable Green Shift. 

“Every delay in renewable energy deployment extends dependence on fossil fuels and pushes net zero targets further out of reach,” he said. 

There are cost benefits of increasing renewables in the overall power mix, too. 

In many parts of the region, new renewable power – especially solar and onshore wind – is cheaper than building new fossil fuel generation. The global energy shock unleashed by the Iran war has highlighted the energy security benefits of renewables, though it also raised concerns about coal backsliding in countries including Indonesia.

Surging oil prices exposed Southeast Asia’s vulnerability to fossil fuel supply disruptions, causing energy prices to soar and widespread fuel shortages that led the World Bank to downgrade the region’s growth projection. 

“This situation pushes us to accelerate [the energy transition], we must move faster,” Indonesian President  Prabowo Subianto said in March, adding that the government was focused on solar projects that would deliver a total installed capacity of up to 100 GW.

At the same time, progress on moving away from coal has been sluggish. Both Indonesia and Vietnam signed up for Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) – a funding initiative set up by the G7 to help developing nations shift away from coal – though a lack of favourable financing is holding back these plans.

The US withdrew from its JETP deals with the two countries last year, reflecting President Donald Trump’s wider energy policies, and Indonesia abandoned plans to close a major coal power plant.

But a shortage of financing to bring new renewables projects online is not the cause of foot-dragging in Indonesia, where installed solar capacity reached only about 20% to 30% of the government’s 2020-2025 target, Bain researchers said.

Of an estimated $540 billion in green capital expenditure announced across Southeast Asia’s power and electric vehicle value chains between now and 2030, only about $315 billion is on a credible path towards deployment under current conditions, according to the report. 

Between 2022 and early 2026, more than a quarter of the 452 new solar projects announced in Southeast Asian countries were postponed or cancelled, according to Global Energy Monitor‘s Global Solar Power Tracker.

In Indonesia, the Batam Bintan Karimun solar farm was initially expected to come online by 2024 but was cancelled in 2023 for unknown reasons, Kasandra O’Malia, a project manager at Global Energy Monitor, told Climate Home. The project also included plans for Southeast Asia’s largest associated battery storage facility.

Another high-profile Indonesian development that has stalled is a 3,500 MW solar and storage project proposed on Riau Island to export clean electricity to Singapore. While not formally abandoned, there have been few updates to this project since April 2022. 

“This execution gap is not really to do with money – there is available capital – but the finance is not being deployed effectively because the risks have not been adequately redressed,” Chan said.

In a bid to foster investor certainty, Indonesia’s government approved a new 2025-2034 Electricity Supply Business Plan (RUPTL) for PLN in May 2025, replacing years of delays over the country’s power development roadmap.   

As well as aligning government policy, streamlining permitting, simplifying purchase procedures and targeting 70 GW of new generation, with renewables accounting for the vast majority of additions, the plan includes the construction of about 47,800 kilometres of new transmission lines and substations with a total capacity of 108,000 megavolt-ampere, spread across Indonesia.

The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, several domestic and international renewable energy developers, and the Indonesia Renewable Society, did not respond to requests for comment.

Another way to soothe investors’ nerves would be for governments to use public money to de-risk investments, but there is little appetite for this approach in the region, Chan said.

A more effective tool would be ensuring stable, investment-friendly energy market policies and regulations, said Alnie Demoral, a Manila-based energy analyst at climate think-tank Ember who previously worked with solar developers and investors.

Renewable energy developers, investors and authorities can spend years negotiating the project’s costs, permitting and whether grid connection will be available to bring clean power online, she said. 

Often the longest discussions focus on the power pricing tariffs that governments set for renewable energy producers. Changing policies or disagreement on underlying cost assumptions can stall or delay a project before it reaches financial close, she added. 

“Governments have to do their part by making sure the investment environment is stable,” Demoral said.

“But this is a two-way process. The private sector and developers must also ensure that their assessments of the project are based on robust assumptions.”

At the same time, rapid growth in power-hungry AI data centres is putting extra strain on the region’s overstretched grids.

AI data centres, which use much more power than regular data centres, are becoming one of the largest drivers of new power demand in Southeast Asia as governments in the region jostle for more multibillion-dollar investment in the sector.

• Mar 3, 2026 News Explainer: Will AI data centres make or break the energy transition? As grids struggle to meet soaring electricity demand for AI data-crunching, big tech is under pressure to cover the costs of boosting power supplies – which may be dirty or clean Read more
• Jun 23, 2026 News UN asks AI companies to reveal full environmental impacts UN chief António Guterres says big AI firms should disclose the emissions, water and energy use of their data centres amid community opposition Read more

The slow pace of renewable energy deployment and grid modernisation, coupled with ongoing reliance on fossil fuels in the electricity mix, will make it difficult for the region to meet a new, fast-growing source of additional demand without increasing emissions. 

Emissions from data centre power use in Indonesia are expected to quadruple between 2024 and 2030, according to Ember.

AI data centres operate around the clock and will often use any power that is available – be it renewables or fossil fuels, said Chan, urging policymakers to first ensure they can meet the power needs before courting data centres.

Many new AI data centres are planned for areas with insufficient high-voltage transmission capacity, according to the Bain report, suggesting that countries should focus on new high-voltage lines, larger substations and stronger interconnections between regions.    

The researchers note that AI data centres also typically take about one to three years to build, while major electricity transmission lines and grid updates can take five years or more, adding that power grid investments must happen before renewable energy or AI projects.  

“Growth in data centres and AI is already adding pressure to constrained grids,” said Christina Ng, the Kuala Lumpur-based co-founder of Energy Shift Institute, an Asia-focused, independent energy finance think-tank.  

“The risk is that new demand is met through high-emitting electricity if clean power and clean grid investment do not keep pace.” 

Main image: A technician walks next to solar panels that partially provide electrical power to the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan)

The post Southeast Asia’s fragile grids threaten billions in clean energy investment appeared first on Climate Home News.

Energy drink brands like Monster and Red Bull have dominated the market for years with gritty marketing. Now, wellness-focused brands like Celsius are promoting energy drinks they claim will boost metabolism and support an active lifestyle – but are they actually healthy?

These newer brands swap the sugar and high calories for wellness-inspired branding; think bright colors and fruit-forward imagery. Alani-Nu, owned by Celsius, says its products break away from “dark cans, extreme sports” energy drinks. Instead, the company says its drinks provide “ingredients you can feel good about” and a “high energy” boost.

But efforts to create a healthier image don’t necessarily lead to a healthier product. Many of these drinks contain high levels of caffeine and ultra-processed ingredients, including artificial chemicals used to enhance flavor, color and shelf stability rather than nutrition.

An increasingly common ingredient in these newer energy drinks is green tea extract. While green tea is often associated with health benefits, the highly concentrated extracts used in some beverages are a different story. 

One of green tea’s primary compounds, epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, can be present in concentrated forms at levels far higher than those found in a typical cup of tea, raising safety questions.

The Food and Drug Administration has questioned EGCG’s effects, including its potential association with increased risk of cancer based on studies conducted in cells and on harm to several organs. 

But you may find EGCG in your drink anyway, thanks to a legal loophole that allows food ingredients to be considered “generally recognized as safe” by industry scientists – even without FDA review. The exemption lets manufacturers determine which food chemicals are safe.

Chemical and food companies have exploited this loophole for decades – in fact, that’s how almost all new food chemicals get introduced to the market. 

“Zero sugar” doesn’t mean zero risk. Many of these beverages rely on artificial sweeteners such as acesulfame potassium and sucralose, which is 600 times sweeter than regular table sugar.

Sucralose is included on EWG’s Dirty Dozen Guide to Food Chemicals. The list highlights ingredients to avoid because of links to health and safety risks.

Don’t overlook the high caffeine content, either. These “healthy” alternatives often pack as much as 200 milligrams of caffeine per can – nearly double that of traditional options like Red Bull and Monster. That’s about half of the FDA’s recommended maximum daily limit, potentially triggering spiked heart rates, anxiety and insomnia.

The bottom line? Don't let these drinks’ clean packaging designs fool you – they don’t make the beverage it contains any better for you. Reading ingredient lists and nutrition labels are the best way to find out what’s in the food and drinks you consume.  

That’s where EWG’s Food Scores database comes in. 

Food Scores rates more than 150,000 products based on nutrition, ingredient concerns and the degree of processing, making it easy to compare products side by side and make more informed choices at the grocery store. Food Scores also flags unhealthy ultra-processed food and drinks and can help you identify alternatives.

When wildfire smoke blanketed northern Michigan skies last month, Kasey Wierzba thought the vineyard at Shady Lane Cellars in Suttons Bay looked like a different planet.

“That kind of pinky, peachy haze really was filtering through the whole vineyard. The visibility was really minimal,” said Wierzba, the general manager and executive winemaker at Shady Lane Cellars, a winery and vineyard that sits on the “little finger” of the state on Leelanau Peninsula, a region famous for its winemaking.

Wierzba also thought about how the pungent smoke might impact the grapes, something that the larger wine industry is becoming more familiar with as global warming increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Though she and other local grape growers were spared — the worst of the wildfires were burning far away in Canada and Minnesota, the smoke didn’t linger long, and it’s still early in the growing season — climate change could bring the threat closer to home in the future. 

At stake is the state’s nearly $9 billion wine industry, which may have to adapt to the smoke’s effects on grapes, a challenge those in wine regions like the West Coast and Australia are already confronting.

When grapes are exposed to smoke for an extended amount of time, finished wines can develop what’s known as “smoke taint” — unwanted flavors that have been described as everything from barbecued food to burnt bacon.

Because it’s early in the growing season, Wierzba said she’s confident there won’t be any impact on finished wines. The grapes are shaped like small pellets at this point of the year, known as the “buckshot berry stage” because they resemble the size of bullets used for hunting deer.

Still, if and when smoke hits again, Wierzba said she’ll consider sending grape samples to labs that could detect the compounds associated with wildfire smoke. “I think having the smoke incident at this time in the grape growing, when they wouldn’t be affected, spurred me to think, ‘Wow, I need to be prepared,’” Wierzba said.

Tests can help, but it’s generally difficult to measure damage from smoke before wine is produced, said Paolo Sabbatini, a viticulture professor at Michigan State University. Smoke compounds bind with the grape skin and tissues, and the flavors associated with smoke taint only come through during the fermentation process.

“You need to wait for the finished wine. So during the season, unless your vineyard catches on fire and you see damage on the berries after a smoke event, you can’t even measure anything,” he said.

Sabbatini received 10 calls from grape growers and winemakers around Michigan with questions about smoke impacts. But he said he’s “pretty confident” that there wasn’t enough smoke exposure over a long enough period of time for grapes to be impacted by the fires, which are still burning in Ontario and Minnesota and have so far destroyed more than 64,000 acres, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Local growers said it was fortunate that smoke didn’t hit the region during the key time that grapes change color in the fall — the period when they are typically most sensitive to smoke.

“We are sitting with our fruit still at a very immature stage, when we’re still going through cell division. So all of the cells, and the cluster, and the berries aren’t formed yet,” said Brian Hosmer, winemaker at Chateau Chantal, a winery and inn on Old Mission Peninsula, another northern Michigan winemaking hotspot.

Smoke taint is a rising concern elsewhere around the world, where hotter, larger wildfires have crept ever closer to vineyards. Ongoing fires in southwestern France have already scorched more than 160 square miles of forest near Bordeaux, pushing up against the country’s world-famous wine region.

“We’re talking about places where the fire is literally up to the edge of the vineyards, or even a couple miles away, where they’re getting ash falling directly on the fruit,” Hosmer said.

As climate change fuels the hotter, drier summers that increase the likelihood of wildfire events and widespread smoke, the number of places exposed to smoke taint is also increasing, said Ben Montpetit, chair of the department of viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis. The program is one of the country’s leaders in the area of smoke taint research.

There aren’t simple solutions to smoke taint, Montpetit said. Treatments to remove some of the unwanted flavors could impact wine quality or introduce other tastes. While growing awareness of the issue has led to increased state and federal support for studies — the latest draft of the U.S. farm bill includes a directive for more research and development into wine grapes and wildfire smoke exposure — Montpetit said smoke taint will remain a problem. 

“As much as we can prepare, there are going to be fires in the future, and unfortunately, they will impact wine regions,” Montpetit said.

Grape growers said they’re learning to adapt to multiple changes in the environment, from drifting wildfire smoke to increasingly variable weather conditions. Studies looking at climate change impacts on Michigan’s wine region cite early spring frosts that can damage vines and hotter temperatures during the growing season.

Those in the industry said adaptation is part of the job. After all, winemakers first flocked to the region centuries ago to take advantage of the extended growing season that Lake Michigan provides.

“It’s always challenging. It’s farming. It’s legalized gambling,” Hosmer with Chateau Chantal said. He’s not concerned about impacts from this recent smoke, he said, but a trend of warmer summers “definitely makes us think about what’s going on in the woods around our vineyards” in terms of local fire danger.

Andy Fles, vineyard manager for Shady Lane Cellars, said it’s already been a tough growing season in northern Michigan this year, between extreme precipitation and fluctuating temperatures.

“Global warming doesn’t mean everywhere is going to be warmer every single year,” he said. “I think what it means for us is that it’s climate chaos, and it’s very hard to predict what is going to happen.” 

And that includes wildfire smoke.

“It’s something that you can’t necessarily control, which is frustrating at times,” Fles said. “So this is just a new hurdle, and we’ll find ways to deal with it when we have to.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Michigan winemakers have a new climate worry: More wildfire smoke on Aug 5, 2026.

Betsy Robertson was standing in the center of the Spokane Convention Center on Monday afternoon, but she wasn’t there for a gala or a conference. Instead, the event space in the middle of Washington state’s second-largest city had been transformed into a Red Cross emergency shelter as a trio of wildfires, just a few miles away, burned down entire neighborhoods.

Nurses and volunteers were moving between the rows of cots around Robertson, making sure that the hundreds of evacuees – from the mothers with their babies to the elderly with their caretakers – had blankets and enough to eat. Just outside, the air was noxious with smoke “thick enough to burn your eyes,” she said.

Robertson, a communications director for the Red Cross, is from Washington, and has been with the organization for 10 years. She has seen communities devastated by wildfires before. But never like this.

“The scale of homes destroyed and lives changed forever – this is a new level,” she said. “We are bracing ourselves for seasons like this getting worse and worse, and starting earlier and going later.”

A historically dry winter, extreme drought and heat waves set the stage for the hundreds of wildfires that have burned across the Pacific Northwest this summer. Dozens of large ones have broken out in the last week alone. Though it’s still early in the fire season, Oregon recently broke its annual record for acreage burned with nearly 2 million acres scorched. 

Washington is also in the middle of its most destructive season on record, with more than half a million acres burned and at least 65,000 residents ordered to evacuate across the state. The three large fires that started on Saturday around Spokane had destroyed more than 700 hundred buildings by Monday afternoon. 

“I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how we’re going to house all these folks,” said Kitty Klitzke, a member of the Spokane City Council representing a hard-hit area where two fires were burning on Tuesday morning. Many of the people displaced by the fires in Spokane are senior citizens and their caretakers. “It’s a miracle that, so far, we know of no fatalities and no reported missing people,” Klitzke said.

As the planet heats up, the conditions that fuel extreme wildfires are becoming more common. A warmer atmosphere can hold about 7 percent more water vapor for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, drawing more moisture from soils and vegetation and leaving forests and grasslands primed to burn. That dynamic also causes rain to fall more intensely but less frequently, leading to long periods of drought.

“This fire, and what we’re expecting to come, makes no sense unless you connect the dots through a changing climate,” said Bob Freitag, who recently served as director of the Institute of Hazards Mitigation Research and Planning at the University of Washington. “The science is known, and this is not something that is a one-off.”

According to Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, a lack of snowfall across the region helped set the stage for these fires. Normally, snowpack builds up during the winter and melts gradually through the rest of the year, providing a steady source of moisture. This year, the already-small snowpack was hit with hot spring temperatures, causing this reserve to melt early and leaving the landscape parched. Spokane had half of the typical snowfall this year, Pastelok said. Other parts of the state had even less, with many areas reaching historic lows.

In the last few days, powerful winds carried hot embers from the Little Giant fire, a 70,000 acre blaze in central Washington, for more than 3 miles, sending the flames clear over the waters of Lake Chelan and into the forests on the other side. Ryan Rodruck, a communications manager at the Washington Department of Natural Resources, called the overall situation “extremely tragic” and said that it had been an exceptionally challenging season for the thousands of wildland firefighters deployed across the state.

In Spokane, more high winds forecast for this weekend could further worsen conditions, said Benjamin Cossel, a wildfire public information officer from California working with fire-fighting crews in the city.

The situation is comparable to the Los Angeles fires in 2025, Cossel said. Both outbreaks began in wild areas before moving into partially forested suburban neighborhoods. The urban setting also makes the smoke especially toxic, he said. A recently released study found that the Los Angeles fires, which sent more than 200,000 residents fleeing, had exposed an estimated 3.3 million people to high concentrations of a cancer-causing toxin. 

Klitzke, the city council member, said the affected neighborhoods in Spokane were known to be vulnerable to fires. Steep terrain and abundant plant life helped the fires spread quickly over the weekend, while the winding cul-de-sac layouts of the neighborhoods slowed evacuations and made it difficult for emergency responders to reach the fires.

“These are neighborhoods with thousands of people and only two ways in or out,” Klitzke said, adding that many evacuees were stuck waiting in traffic for hours, watching the houses around them burn down. 

Areas where homes mingle with natural areas are known as the wildland-urban interface. This kind of suburban housing is the fastest growing type of land development in the United States, and research shows that the homes built in these areas are more likely to burn down when wildfires spread.

“We already knew that this was a dangerous situation,” she said. “We need to get really serious about addressing climate change.”

Increasingly, fire-prone states like California are requiring homeowners to clear the trees and shrubs in a radius surrounding their home. This buffer zone, known as a defensible space, can dramatically reduce the risk that a wildfire will ignite a building. 

People chose to live in these neighborhoods precisely because they love the vegetation, Cossel said. “I understand why people don’t want to remove them,” he said. “But we can’t live in that world anymore because of these fires.”

This story has been updated to clarify where the fires started around Spokane.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire season is changing. Spokane is showing how. on Aug 5, 2026.

In a win for opponents of Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 pipeline, the Michigan Supreme Court vacated a key permit last week for a proposed project that would replace a segment of the pipeline running underneath an environmentally-sensitive area of the Great Lakes, finding that a state commission did not examine the full scope of possible harm to the environment.

Following the 6-1 decision, the justices remanded the permit back to the Michigan Public Service Commission for a more thorough review, which likely extends the timeline for a decision on a project that’s already been mired in legal and procedural hurdles for years. 

Enbridge Energy received the permit in 2023 for its proposal to replace a segment of the oil and natural gas liquids pipeline — which connects lakes Michigan and Huron via the Straits of Mackinac — with a new one encased in a tunnel buried in the lakebed. Environmental groups and tribal nations appealed the decision, landing the case before the state’s highest court this year.

Writing for a nearly unanimous court in a 58-page opinion, Justice Elizabeth Welch said that the commission didn’t consider the full range of potential environmental harms, nor did it look at how the project would impact the public’s right to use the state’s natural resources, which includes the Great Lakes — protections granted under the state’s public trust doctrine.

“We cannot fault (the commission) for this failure, because there was little authority on this issue prior to our decision today. Even so, it was error,” the opinion stated.

Justices found that the commission incorrectly limited its scope of review under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act to just the tunnel, when it should have examined how the project would impact the broader pipeline. Line 5 transports crude oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario, with 4.5 miles of the pipeline crossing the straits. 

In its new review, the justices said that the public service commission must answer whether the tunnel project will extend the lifespan of the 73-year-old pipeline, and if it does, determine what impacts there are to the environment and to the public trust.

“It is impossible to prevent or mitigate an environmental risk without understanding the nature of that risk,” the justices wrote.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs — four tribal nations across Michigan and three environmental groups — argued that because the tunnel project would extend the pipeline’s lifespan, it causes harm by increasing the risk of oil spills along Line 5’s entirety and increased greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil fuels it transports.

“The court has made clear that our understanding of environmental harm, it’s a practical understanding, but it’s also a broad one,” said Chad Hughes, senior attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which argued with the plaintiffs. “There’s no requirement to narrowly focus on the physical location of the project. You look at the environmental harms where they happen.”

By broadening the scope of reviews under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act, opponents said conversations about shutting down the entire pipeline are finally a possibility. The justices wrote that “a meaningful examination” of alternatives can’t happen until the commission determines the full impacts of the project.

“The door has been kicked open to an imaginable future where we can talk about alternatives other than Line 5,” said President Whitney Gravelle of the Bay Mills Indian Community, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

In a statement, Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy wrote that the company disagrees and is disappointed by the ruling, calling it an additional delay to a project that has already been under review for nearly a decade. Enbridge is reviewing the opinion and assessing legal options, he said.

“What remains unchanged is our commitment to operating Line 5 safely and responsibly, incorporating enhanced safety measures in the Straits, and protecting Michigan’s natural resources for generations to come,” the statement said.

The lone dissenting opinion from Justice Brian Zahra said that the court’s directive to consider the full scope of potential harms was “a moral hazard,” because state regulators already decided Line 5 was in the public interest when it approved construction more than 70 years ago. 

But Zahra agreed with the majority on the requirement to consider the public trust doctrine, and recommended that the commission use last month’s permit issuance from a separate state agency as a guide. The Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy said the necessity of the tunnel in preventing an oil spill in the Great Lakes outweighed other public interests.

Separate from the tunnel project, Line 5 faces legal challenges from groups that have fought to shut down the pipeline for years, including Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration. This spring, a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for state court proceedings on whether the aging pipeline can continue operating in the straits.

Last week’s ruling was also a significant win for public trust considerations, according to environmental lawyers. The public service commission declined to consider the public trust doctrine in its analysis prior to issuing its permit in 2023, a decision upheld by the Michigan Court of Appeals because it argued the commission “possesses only that authority bestowed upon it by statute.”

The justices reversed this ruling, agreeing in a concurrent case with plaintiff Flow Water Advocates that the state legislature grants the public service commission “the authority — and indeed, the responsibility — to consider the public trust doctrine.”

“It is elevating the rights of the public. It’s saying that the intergenerational equity that we promise our children will be there,” said Liz Kirkwood, executive director of Flow.

Gravelle with the Bay Mills Indian Community said this new consideration of the doctrine is a win for tribal treaty rights. Tribes in Michigan have long asserted that Line 5’s operation interferes with their rights to fight, hunt, and gather on treaty-ceded lands, which include the Straits of Mackinac.

“You can’t have a treaty right to fish if you don’t have healthy waterways for fish to spawn. You can’t have a treaty right to hunt if you’re cutting down forests and filling wetlands, you can’t have a treaty right to gather if you’re polluting waterways and watersheds that are impacting plant species that you rely on for ceremonial or medicinal purposes,” she said.

The court’s ruling reflects an Indigenous way of thinking that could shape future environmental reviews, Gravelle said.

“We have teachings in our culture that require us to think generations ahead: Is the decision I made today going to benefit seven generations from now?” she said. “We need more holistic, proactive decision-making from our state agencies moving forward. And so, I hope that’s the pathway carved.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A controversial plan to update Line 5 just suffered a major loss at the Michigan Supreme Court on Aug 5, 2026.