This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

At the tail end of the aughts, as it became clear that the United States would need to create much more renewable energy, fast, many believed the transition would be bolstered by the proliferation of offshore wind. But not off the coasts of states like Massachusetts and California, where it’s best positioned today. They thought the industry would emerge, and then take hold, in the Great Lakes.

Things looked promising for a while. Glimmers of an offshore wind boom arose from the depths of the Great Recession, as developers offered up proposals on both the U.S. and Canadian sides of the lakes. In 2010, the Cleveland-based Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation, better known as LEEDCo, announced plans to install its first 20 megawatts by 2012 and scale up to 1,000 megawatts by 2020. Two years later, the Obama administration and five states—though not Ohio—formed the Great Lakes Offshore Wind Consortium to help streamline the permitting process.

“That was really a peak of burgeoning interest in climate,” said Greg Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies energy policy. “There was also a spike in energy prices just before the global financial crisis … that also stimulated awareness and interest in energy. And at the same time, the prices of renewable energy were really starting to come down.”

The wind that blows over the Great Lakes is stronger and more consistent than what inland wind farms receive. It holds steady even in the middle of the day, when power demand is high but generation from onshore wind farms tends to slow down. Which means that, in theory, tapping into the wind resource over the lakes would allow the electric grid to rely more on renewables without being as affected by their intermittency.

Yet more than a decade on, none of those early offshore wind projects have succeeded. There are still no commercial wind turbines in any of the five Great Lakes. And as the industry debates when, if ever, it will give the region another shot, those who tried before want newcomers to avoid making the same mistakes that they did.

Icebreaker wind

Perhaps the most famous (or most infamous) such proposal is Icebreaker Wind, the sole project of Cleveland’s LEEDCo, a public-private nonprofit launched by several lakefront counties and a local foundation in 2009. By most accounts, the six-turbine pilot project is the most successful Great Lakes offshore wind initiative of its time—even though it may never be built.

“They were really ahead of their time,” Nemet said of LEEDCo. “It’s high risk, and just because it’s high risk doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea…You can learn from success, but you can also learn from failure.”

Two key qualities set Icebreaker apart from nearly all of its counterparts: It has been permitted, and it hasn’t been canceled. It survived the labyrinth of federal reviews and state and local hearings that took out the handful of others that made it that far. And it’s being spearheaded by a developer that, despite blow after blow from local policymakers, still hasn’t given up.

These days, though, LEEDCo is struggling to overcome the resistance it’s faced from birders, anti-wind groups and fossil fuel interests.

“There was an awful lot of delay and uncertainty,” said Will Friedman, president and CEO of the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority and the acting president of LEEDCo. (The nonprofit, which no longer has any full-time staff, is being held together by Friedman and a few other volunteers.)

Following years of permitting slowdowns, LEEDCo sparred with Ohio regulators in 2020 over conditions tacked onto a key state permit that it said would’ve killed the project, then slogged through an Ohio Supreme Court case—brought by area residents but partly funded by a coal company—that lasted another year and a half. It won both, but development has dragged on for so long now that some of LEEDCo’s initial work has become outdated.

“While we currently hold all the permits, we don’t know if we can build the project consistent with the original permits, so maybe we have to go back to the drawing board and do that over again,” Friedman said. With a resigned chuckle, he added, “Do we then open ourselves up to being sued again by opponents?”

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Major barriers

The challenges LEEDCo has confronted are far from unique. Onshore renewable energy projects have long faced pushback from prospective neighbors and are, increasingly, being met with inhospitable new regulations designed to shut them down. The idea of offshore wind turbines being built within sight of beloved coastlines can have entire communities up in arms.

“I think a lot of policymakers are hesitant to get offshore wind attached to their name, because it’s such a controversial technology,” said Doug Bessette, an associate professor at Michigan State University whose work explores the acceptance of renewables. “I think people are afraid to push it forward.”

Most of the Great Lakes region has made little headway on enacting policies that would help offshore wind. Efforts to change state or Canadian provincial laws to facilitate or subsidize offshore wind projects have struggled to gain momentum. For pilot-sized wind farms like Icebreaker, designed to prove that the technology is safe and effective, but too small to take advantage of economies of scale, cost remains a nearly insurmountable barrier.

The progress made by offshore wind projects in the Northeast, where supportive policies have found more traction and turbines have actually made it into the water, could be a boon for the industry if it ever returns to the Great Lakes, according to David Bidwell, an associate professor in the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Marine Affairs.

There’s real data now on offshore wind farms’ socioeconomic impacts, along with evidence that overwhelming public opposition is not, in fact, inevitable. While the approval process would be different—Great Lakes states have more authority over the lakebed than East Coast states have over the ocean floor—and studies on things like bird migration routes wouldn’t translate very well, the region would no longer be starting from scratch.

But there are also infrastructure barriers specific to the Great Lakes, Bessette noted. U.S. supply chains for freshwater turbines, designed to resist annual icing and de-icing, don’t exist. The workforce hasn’t been trained. There are a limited number of ports deep enough to support offshore wind, and some of those don’t yet have the capacity. There’s no way to get a ship big enough to put up turbines through the St. Lawrence River and into the lakes, meaning that the first company to make it to the construction phase will probably need to build one.

Offshore wind turbines themselves have advanced considerably in the last decade and a half, thanks to ongoing research and their continued deployment in Europe and, more recently, on the U.S. East Coast. They’re sturdier. More efficient. Better at withstanding freshwater ice. All that technological progress will inevitably boost the odds of an offshore wind project one day succeeding in the Great Lakes.

The political climate may be working against them, however. In the early 2010s, and maybe even more recently than that, there was an appetite in the Great Lakes region for bold new clean energy projects, Bessette said. “I don’t know if we’re there right now.”

Still, as the developers that flocked to the Great Lakes region back then quickly learned, building wind turbines that are visible from shore has never been an easy sell, even in places that are supportive of the idea of creating more renewable energy.

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Trillium power

In many ways, the Great Lakes offshore wind sort-of-boom started in Canada. Toronto-based Trillium Power led the charge. The company’s plan was ambitious: 80 turbines, situated on a shallow shelf about 10 miles off Ontario’s mainland, together capable of generating roughly 500 megawatts of electricity.

The concept went over well at first, according to John Kourtoff, Trillium’s CEO. Kourtoff felt like local officials were on his side until a swarm of other developers—over a half-dozen by some counts—got the same idea. Some of the projects, he said, were proposed very close to shore, well within the lake views of affluent communities. That’s what he believes turned the tide of public opinion.

Trillium almost made it to construction. “We were just ready to close the financing to do detailed engineering for two specialized barges that we were having made to erect the turbines,” Kourtoff said. 

It was Feb. 11, 2011, a Friday, when he got the call. Facing increasing public opposition to offshore wind months, and with a general election coming up that October, Ontario had imposed a moratorium on offshore wind. Ontario officials cited a lack of scientific research on the turbines’ impacts. Offshore wind’s proponents believe, however, that the moratorium was prompted by opposition from the public and from the province’s influential nuclear power industry.

Following the cancellation, Trillium sued, ultimately securing a partial victory in response to its claim that the province had destroyed relevant evidence, but failing to convince the courts of its primary argument that officials had targeted the project unfairly when they issued the moratorium.

Twelve years later, Kourtoff hasn’t given up on his flagship offshore wind project, or on the three others he wants to build in the Great Lakes. But he hasn’t been able to move forward on any of them, either. The moratorium is still in place.

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Public outcry

Toronto Hydro, the city-owned electric utility, relinquished its own vision for offshore wind after the province’s moratorium went into effect. It had planned to start with an approximately 20-turbine, 100-megawatt project at a promising site about two miles offshore, said Joyce McLean, who worked as Toronto Hydro’s director of strategic issues and oversaw its clean energy programs at the time.

“We basically put the anemometer in the lakes, collected the data, and then there was nothing for us to do, because the program disappeared,” McLean said. The province, she said, “couched [the moratorium] in terms of ‘Well, we’re going to study it.’ But they never did, and it was deemed dead.”

Residents had reacted more strongly to the proposal than the utility expected. They’d packed its public meetings to ask about what would happen to their views and their property values and whether construction would stir up old industrial toxins sitting on the lakebed. One man, McLean said, yelled in her face about the harm the project would cause him. Then the moratorium came down, and the wind project went away.

“I think that we were a cautionary tale,” McLean said. 

Scandia Wind arrived in Grand Haven, Michigan, even less prepared for the backlash it would face. The prospect of somewhere between 100 to 200 turbines, some of them situated as close as a mile and a half to shore, didn’t sit well with the beachfront city. The Norwegian developer’s later decision to reduce the scale of the project by half and move it six miles offshore did little to remedy the situation. In the end, unable to win over much of the community, Scandia was all but run out of town.

“I think they came with a mindset that, ‘Well, we have crossed these thresholds in Europe, and surely the Americans, with their desire for renewable energy, would welcome similar developments in their Great Lakes,’” said Arnold Boezaart, then-director of Grand Valley State University’s Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center. “Well, they miscalculated.”

Some Michigan leaders believe that the fallout from Scandia ruined the chances for any offshore wind project to move forward in the area. Boezaart disagrees. “Even without Scandia,” he said, the offshore wind industry would still be figuring out how to better navigate public concerns about safety and visibility. “But certainly, there’s no question that Scandia Wind caused a big dustup during that time.”

Looking ahead

In 2009, the New York Power Authority put out its own call for offshore wind projects aimed at a swath of eligible sites in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Several interested developers responded, but facing higher-than-expected costs and angrier-than-expected residents, the state-owned power organization scrapped the idea in 2011.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority revisited the question of Great Lakes offshore wind two years ago. Advocates hoped the results of its feasibility study, published in December 2022, would catalyze new development across the Great Lakes region. Instead, NYSERDA found that freshwater offshore wind “currently does not offer a unique, critical, or cost-effective contribution” toward the state’s climate goals, and concluded that “now is not the right time to prioritize Great Lakes Wind projects in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario.”

Walt Musial, a principal engineer and offshore wind researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory who worked on the New York state feasibility study, isn’t sure turbines that are anchored to the ground will ever succeed, at least at scale, in the Great Lakes. He anticipates, though, that floating turbines will be a game-changer, tapping into some of the lakes’ best winds and potentially opening the door to the sort of growth that LEEDCo envisioned in the early 2010s.

“In Lake Michigan, for example, you can go 15, 20 miles out, get out of the viewshed of most people,” Musial said. “You can avoid the ice, you can avoid the birds and you can avoid the toxic sediments that people are concerned [about]. … So maybe we made a mistake not looking at that sooner, but I think that’s where the biggest opportunities will be in the Great Lakes.”

Floating wind turbines are still being tested. Floating freshwater wind turbines are even more experimental. But Musial is one of many offshore wind researchers who suspect that when the technology does mature, it’ll unleash a plentiful new source of relatively dependable renewable electricity—assuming, as many do, that the grid will still need it by then.

Yet none of offshore wind’s lingering limitations have dissuaded more than 50 Illinois state lawmakers from pushing for a 150-megawatt (or larger) pilot project to be built somewhere along the state’s coast. Ideally, they want it near the Southeast side of Chicago, where the low-carbon electricity the wind farm would generate and the local economic boost it would provide are both very much needed.

The Illinois Rust Belt to Green Belt Program Act would authorize surcharges on ratepayers’ bills once the pilot project goes into operation—guaranteeing it the sort of state-backed financial support that no Great Lakes offshore wind project has ever received (and which Icebreaker’s advocates, despite years of lobbying, couldn’t convince the Ohio General Assembly to provide). A Lake Michigan pilot, if built, would also supply the sort of unparalleled efficacy and impact data that the offshore wind industry has long hoped would come from Icebreaker.

The bill fell short in 2022 and again in 2023. Its backers plan to keep trying.

“Let’s get going,” said state Rep. Marcus Evans Jr., one of the bill’s sponsors. “What are we waiting for? I don’t want to be 185 years old when these things come to fruition. So we need a policy to make it happen. We need action. Things don’t just happen. You have to do something.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What happened to the Great Lakes offshore wind boom? on Nov 28, 2023.

Just weeks after the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history ripped through the coastal town of Lāhainā, Native Hawaiian taro farmers, environmentalists, and other residents of West Maui crowded into a narrow conference room in Honolulu for a state water commission hearing. 

The chorus of criticism was emotional and persistent. For nearly 12 hours, scores of people urged commissioners to reinstate an official who had been key to strengthening water regulations and to resist corporate pressure to weaken those regulations. One after another, they calmly and deliberately delivered scathing criticism of a developer named Peter Martin, calling him “the face of evil in Lāhainā” and “public enemy number one.”

One person summed up the mood of the room when he said, “F— Peter Martin.”

More than 100 miles away on Maui, Martin followed parts of the hearing through a livestream on YouTube. Despite the deluge of criticism, he wasn’t upset. He wasn’t even surprised. After nearly 50 years as a developer on Maui, he’s used to public criticism.

“When you’re around a gang of people, a mob, the commissioners just listen to the mob, they don’t listen to reasoned voices,” Martin told Grist. “I’m not comparing these people to Hitler; I’m just saying Hitler got people involved by hating, hating the Jews.” 

Martin, who is 76, has long been controversial. He moved to Maui from California in 1971 and got his start picking pineapples, teaching high school math, and waiting tables. Before long, he began investing in real estate. His timing was perfect: Hawaiʻi had become a state just 12 years earlier, and Maui’s housing market was booming as Americans from the mainland flocked there. By 1978, local headlines were bemoaning the high price of housing, and prices only went up from there.

Over the last five decades, Martin has made millions of dollars off this real estate boom, building a development empire on West Maui and turning hundreds of acres of plantation land into a paradise of palatial homes and swimming pools. He owns or holds interest in nearly three dozen companies that touch almost every aspect of the homebuilding process: companies that buy vacant land, companies that submit development plans to local governments, companies that build houses, and companies that sell water to residents. His real estate brokerage helps find buyers for homes built on his land, and he’s even got a company that builds swimming pools. 

Companies associated with Martin own more than 5,500 acres of land around Lāhainā, according to an analysis of county records, making him one of the area’s largest private landowners, and his web of businesses wields immense influence in West Maui, which is home to about 25,000 people. He drives his white Ford F-150 around the island with a large, black Bible on the center dashboard and peppers his conversations and emails with quotes from Scripture or libertarian economist Milton Friedman. He once served on the Maui County salary commission, where he helped determine pay for elected officials and county department heads, and he has donated $1.3 million to the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a libertarian think tank that has fought Native Hawaiian sovereignty. So extensive is the reach of his land empire that the command center for the response to the August wildfires is located on land owned by a company in which he has a stake.

Development on Maui, where the median home price now exceeds $1 million, often sparks controversy, and Martin is far from the only builder who has inspired opposition. But his staunch ideological commitment to free market capitalism and Christianity, coupled with his companies’ persistent pushback against water regulations intended to protect Native Hawaiian rights, has evoked particularly passionate distaste among many locals. “F— the Peter Martin types,” reads one bumper sticker spotted in Lāhainā. 

And that was before the wildfire. Just two days after the outbreak of a blaze that would go on to kill 100 people, fueled in part by invasive grasses on Martin’s vacant land, an executive at one of Martin’s companies sent a letter to the state water commission. Glenn Tremble, who works for West Maui Land Company, wrote that the company’s request to fill its reservoirs on the day of the fire had been delayed by the state. He also asked the commission to loosen water regulations during the fire recovery. 

“We anxiously awaited the morning knowing that we could have made more water available to [the Maui Fire Department] if our request had been immediately approved,” he wrote.

Tremble’s letter implied that a state official key to implementing local water regulations — and the first Native Hawaiian to lead the state water commission — had impeded firefighting efforts. He soon walked back the claim, but his first letter had immediate effect. The state attorney general launched an investigation into the official, the governor suspended water regulations, and the official was temporarily reassigned. Critics saw it as an attempt to capitalize on the grief of the community for profit.

It didn’t help that within weeks, when the Washington Post asked about the role the invasive grasses on Martin’s land played in the deadly wildfire, Martin said he believed the fire was the result of God’s anger over the state water restrictions. 

Most people in West Maui get water from the county’s public water system. But Martin-built developments such as Launiupoko, a community of a few hundred large homes outside of Lāhainā, draw their water from three private utility systems that he controls, siphoning underground aquifers and mountain streams to fill swimming pools and irrigate lawns. More than half of all water used in the Launiupoko subdivision, or around 1.5 million gallons a day, goes toward cosmetic landscaping on lawns, according to state estimates. Just over a quarter is used for drinking and cooking. 

The scale of this water usage is stunning: According to state data, Launiupoko Irrigation Company and Launiupoko Water Company deliver a combined average of 5,750 gallons of water daily to each residential customer in Launiupoko, or almost 20 times as much as the average American home. The development has just a few hundred residents, but it uses almost half as much water as the public water system in Lāhainā, which serves 18,000 customers. 

Martin says he didn’t set out to make Launiupoko a luxury development, but that its value spiked after Maui County imposed rules that limited large-scale residential development on agricultural land. Martin’s development was grandfathered in under those restrictions, and demand for large homes drove up prices in the area. He says criticism of swimming pools and landscaped driveways is rooted in envy. 

“People come over and make their land beautiful by using water,” he said.

Martin also maintains that there’s more than enough water for everyone, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Annual precipitation around Lāhainā declined by about 10 percent between 1990 and 2009, drying out the streams near Launiupoko, and now Martin sometimes can’t provide water to all his customers during dry periods. The underground aquifer in the area is also oversubscribed, according to state data, with Martin’s companies and other users pumping out 10 percent more groundwater than flows in each year on average. Climate change could exacerbate this shortage by worsening droughts along Maui’s coast: Projections from 2014 show that annual rainfall could decline by around 15 percent over the coming century under even a moderate scenario for global warming. 

In response, the state water commission has intervened to stop Martin and other developers from overtapping West Maui’s water, setting strict limits on water diversion and fining his companies for violating those rules. Last year, the state took full control of the region’s water, potentially jeopardizing the future of Martin’s luxury subdivisions and making it harder for him to build more in the area. 

Now, though, Martin is poised to play a key role as West Maui recovers from the Lāhainā wildfire, which destroyed 2,200 structures, including six housing units Martin had developed. Nine of his employees lost their homes. As of early November, more than 6,800 displaced people on Maui remained in hotels or other temporary lodging. Millions of dollars in federal funds are expected to flow into the state for reconstruction. Martin, with his dozens of development companies and thousands of acres of vacant land, is perfectly positioned to build new homes. And his concerns about water regulations slowing development may find a more sympathetic audience as local officials seek to address a post-fire housing crisis.  

Moreover, he is itching to build. Before the fire, county and state officials were shooting down most of his new building proposals amid a concern about overdevelopment, even the ones that Martin pitched as affordable workforce housing. Martin thinks he can mitigate West Maui’s fire risk and its housing crisis by getting rid of the barriers that prevent developers like himself from building more houses with irrigated farms and green lawns. 

“What I just want is the water to be able to be used on the land, which God intended it to,” he said.

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Daniel Kuʻuleialoha Palakiko doesn’t know what deity Martin is referring to. 

“Ke Akua is a God of love and restoration and abundant life,” he told the water commission during September’s hearing, using the Hawaiian word for God. Palakiko had flown to Honolulu with many other Maui residents to urge the state officials to uphold their responsibility to protect water.

Palakiko doesn’t take his land, or water, for granted. He was a teenager in Lāhainā in the 1980s when his family started getting priced out by rising rents. That’s when his dad remembered that his own father had once shown him the family’s ancestral land in nearby Kauʻula Valley. According to Palakiko’s grandfather, the family had been forced out by the Pioneer Mill sugar plantation, which had diverted the Palakikos’ water to irrigate crops. Palakiko’s family still owned the title to the land, and his father was determined to find a way to reclaim it.

First they cleared brush by cutting firebreaks and burning the overgrowth, controlling the flames with five-gallon buckets of water hauled from a nearby river. Once they had opened enough land to build a house, the Palakikos worked out a deal with Pioneer Mill to restore free water access to their property, connecting their home to the plantation’s water system with a series of 1½-inch plastic pipes. 

Access to that water meant that the Palakikos could live on their ancestral land for the first time in generations. Back then, Palakiko says, their property felt isolated from Lāhainā, accessible only by old cane field roads that could take 45 minutes to reach town. But the family didn’t mind. It was enough to be able to stay on Maui when so many other Native Hawaiians were forced by economic necessity to leave. 

That isolation didn’t last. In 1999, Pioneer Mill harvested its last sugar crop, ending 138 years of cultivation in Lāhainā. The abandoned fields turned brown and Palakiko heard that the company was selling off thousands of acres. Where once the Palakikos had seen Filipino plantation workers tending to crops, they noticed fair-skinned strangers and surveyors exploring the fallow grounds. 

The Palakikos soon realized that the land was now in the hands of Peter Martin, who had joined other local investors to buy everything he could of the old plantation land. These new owners soon subdivided the land and sold parcels at ever higher prices as demand for the area known as Launiupoko kept increasing. It didn’t matter that the area was zoned for agriculture: Like many other developers, Martin took advantage of a legal provision that allowed homeowners to build luxurious estates on such land as long as they did some token farming of crops like fruit or flowers, no matter how perfunctory it might be.

By the time Martin finished the development, which included around 400 homes on around 1,000 acres, he was diverting almost 4 million gallons from the stream every day, according to state data, almost as much as the 4.8 million gallons Pioneer Mill had diverted each day before it shut down.

Some days the Palakiko family would wake up to find no water running through the pipes. By the afternoon, puddles along the stream would evaporate and fish would flop on the hot rocks, suffocating. It wasn’t just the Palakikos who were suffering, but the whole river system: As Martin diverted water from the mountains, the waterway dried up farther downstream, threatening the native fish and shrimp that lived in it. Palakiko appealed to Martin’s new water utility, Launiupoko Irrigation Company, but he said the company was hostile. First it tried to shut off the water the family had been receiving through plastic pipes, then asked the family to pay for water they’d always drawn for free, only relenting after the Palakikos fought back.

In addition to diverting water away from Native Hawaiian families, Martin has tried to force some from their land. In 2002, his Makila Land Company filed a so-called “quiet title” case against the Kapus, another farming family whose land borders the Palakikos, seeking to claim a portion of the family’s ancestral land as its own. This legal strategy, which allows landowners to take control of properties that may have multiple ownership claims, later gained notoriety when Mark Zuckerberg used it to consolidate his holdings on Kauai.

When the Kapus fought back, the company kept them in court for almost two decades, appealing over and over to gain the rights to a 3.4-acre parcel. The situation between Martin and the Kapu family became so tense that in 2020, Martin sought a restraining order against one member of the family, Keeaumoku Kapu, accusing him of “verbally attack[ing] me with an expletive-laced tirade” and blocking Martin’s access to the disputed land. The court imposed a mutual injunction against Martin and Kapu later that year; two years later, Kapu finally prevailed in court and secured the title to his property.

Martin’s companies filed multiple quiet-title lawsuits over the years as Martin sought to consolidate control of the land around Launiupoko. Just after it began litigation against the Kapus, Makila Land Company made a similar claim against a neighboring taro farmer named John Aquino, seeking to seize a portion of the land belonging to Aquino’s family. The company won the slice of land in an appellate court in 2013, but the Aquino family stayed put. Police arrested Aquino in 2020 after two of Martin’s employees drove a semi onto the land; Aquino had smashed the truck’s windows with a baseball bat. Makila later filed a trespassing lawsuit in 2021 against Brandon and Tiara Ueki, who also live near the Kapus. The parties agreed to dismiss the case the following year after an apparent settlement. More recently, Martin has fanned even more frustration by selling properties with contested titles, prompting at least one ongoing legal battle.

Meanwhile, Martin and his fellow investors sought to expand to other parts of West Maui with several large-scale developments in areas along the coastline. In one instance, he and another pair of developers named Bill Frampton and Dave Ward proposed building 1,500 homes, including both single and multifamily housing units, in the small beachfront town of Olowalu, even though water access in the area is minimal and rainfall is declining. The developers later scrapped the project following protests from environmental activists, but in the meantime, Martin sold off a few dozen more lots in Olowalu, where he has a home. He also created another utility, Olowalu Water Company, to supply homes in the area with stream water.

Hawaiʻi, like most of the Western United States, allocates water using a “rights” system: A person or company can own the right to draw from a given water source, often on land they own, but they can’t own the water source itself. In states like Oregon and Arizona, this system has led to conflicts between settlers and tribal nations, but in Hawaiʻi the law provides explicit protection for Native Hawaiian users. State law stipulates that traditional and cultural uses, such as taro farming, “shall not be abridged or denied.” In times of shortage, Native users have the highest priority.

In 2018, the state water commission imposed so-called “flow standards” on several West Maui streams, capping the amount of water that Launiupoko Irrigation Company and Olowalu Water Company could divert at any given time. Palakiko had mixed feelings about this: He didn’t want to cede more control over the water that his family had used for generations, but it felt necessary in order to ensure someone could hold the companies accountable.

Even after these rules took effect, though, Martin’s water utility companies violated them dozens of times. When the state threatened to fine the companies, Launiupoko Irrigation Company stopped taking water from its stream completely. Residents of the lush Launiupoko subdivision soon had to ration irrigation water, and the Palakikos lost their access altogether. Their pipes stayed dry for more than a week until a judge ordered Martin’s company to turn on the tap back on.

As the state cracked down on stream diversions, Martin sought to secure more water by tapping an aquifer beneath Lāhainā. Here again, he was accused of infringing on Native Hawaian cultural resources: When his West Maui Construction Company started digging a ditch for a water line in 2020, it excavated an area that contained Native Hawaiian burial remains, triggering protests. Five Native Hawaiian women activists climbed into the company’s ditch to stop the construction project and were arrested. A judge later found the company broke the law by starting construction on the water line without all the requisite permits.

The new restrictions started to hamper Martin’s development activities. Last year, his Launiupoko Water Company applied to the state’s utility regulator for permission to deliver water to a new area near Lāhainā. The company said it had agreed to supply a nearby landowner with potable water for 11 new homes, and told the state it needed to increase its groundwater pumping by at least 65,000 gallons per day. The regulator rejected the expansion plan, saying the company had omitted “basic information” about where it would get this new water. The landowner that would have received the water was another company in which Martin has an ownership stake.

Even as his companies’ plans faced headwinds, Martin continued to benefit. He loaned Launiupoko Irrigation Company a total of $9 million in recent years as the company tried to expand its Lāhainā well system, charging 8 percent interest. The company tried in 2021 to secure a bank loan for the project, but three banks turned it down, with one noting that the company’s “interest payments to Pete” were “substantial.”

Glenn Tremble, a top executive at West Maui Land Company, the company at the center of Martin’s development empire, said in response to a list of questions that Grist’s statements were “generally false and often libelous.” Tremble noted that Martin has built affordable housing units on West Maui and donated to churches. He said that Martin is “well positioned to assist with recovery and efforts to rebuild.” 

If Martin’s track record with water and land made him infamous in Lāhainā, it also invigorated local support for even stricter water controls. Palakiko’s long campaign for more attention to the region’s water problems finally bore fruit last year when the state designated West Maui as a “water management area.” Instead of just setting limits on how much water Martin’s companies could take from West Maui streams at any given time, the state water commission announced that it would revamp the area’s entire water system, giving highest priority to Indigenous cultural uses like taro farming. That may mean limiting access for Martin’s luxury developments, though Tremble disputes this.

“We’ve heard a lot from the community about the development of West Maui Land’s holdings in Launiupoko,” said Dean Uyeno, the interim chair of the state water commission, about the decision. “To continue building in these types of ways is going to keep taxing the resource.” The question, Uyeno said, is whether developers “can … find a way to [be] building more responsible development that balances the resources we have.”

Martin thinks the argument that water is a scarce resource is a “red herring.” He argues that the market is calling for more housing, not more water for native fish that rely on the streams.

“All the people [who] ever come to me say, ‘Peter, can you get me a house? I want a place to live,’” he said. “They don’t go, ‘Oh, I wish I had [shrimp] for dinner.’ That’s not what people tell me. They say, ‘Can’t you give me some house, some land?’ I go, ‘I’d love to but the government won’t let me.’”

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In the days before the wildfire, Martin’s executives worked long hours in his West Maui Land Company office filling out 30 state applications justifying their current water usage and seeking more, in accordance with the state’s revamp of the area’s water system. They submitted the applications just days before the state’s August 7 deadline. The day after the deadline, Lāhainā burned. 

To Martin, this is not a coincidence. He believes the state water commission’s efforts to more strictly regulate water enabled the fire by preventing more construction of homes with irrigated lawns — in other words, more development would have made West Maui more resilient to fire. The day before the water commissioners met in September, he wondered if the commissioners would acknowledge their responsibility for the wildfire deaths and regretted not pushing harder against their restrictions.

“I feel I actually have blood on my hands because I didn’t fight hard enough,” he said.

There’s no evidence that the state management rules, which are still in the process of going into effect, had any bearing on the fire. When Grist relayed this argument to the interim leader of the state’s water commission, he was stunned.

“That actually leaves me speechless,” said Uyeno. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

Palakiko and his family spent the day of the fire watching the smoke rising from the coastline, watering the grass on their property and praying the winds wouldn’t shift, sending the flames their way. Five years earlier, another fire fueled by a passing hurricane had burned down two homes on their land. 

That day, their prayers were answered. But when Palakiko’s son, a firefighter, came home shaken from his shift fighting the blaze, the family realized that the West Maui they had known their whole lives was gone. 

Two days later, Palakiko received another shock when he read Tremble’s letter accusing Kaleo Manuel, the deputy director of the water commission, of delaying the release of firefighting water. The letter argued that Manuel had waited to release water to West Maui Land Company’s reservoir until he had checked with the owners of a downstream taro farm. That farm belongs to the Palakikos. 

The company’s allegations were explosive. The state attorney general launched an investigation and requested that the commission reassign Manuel, who had been instrumental in establishing the Lāhainā water management area and was the only Native Hawaiian to ever hold that position. Governor Josh Green temporarily suspended the rules that limit how much water Martin’s companies and other water users can draw from West Maui streams. The state later reinstated Manuel and restored the rules. In a statement to Grist, Tremble said he respects Manuel’s “commitment and his integrity” and said that “the problem is the process, or lack thereof, to provide water to Maui Fire Department and to the community.”

While there was no evidence that filling the reservoir would have stopped the fire from destroying Lāhainā, and firefighting helicopters wouldn’t have been able to access the reservoir due to high winds on the day in question, there’s a growing consensus among scientists in Hawaiʻi that one factor in its rapid spread was the proliferation of nonnative grasses on former plantation lands — including lands that Peter Martin owns. 

Before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, before the dominance of the sugar industry allowed plantations to divert West Maui’s streams, Hawaiian royalty lived on a sandbar in the midst of a large fishpond within a 14-acre wetland in Lāhainā, which was known as the Venice of the Pacific.

After plantation owners diverted streams for their crops, the royal fishpond became a stagnant marsh, and later was filled with coral rubble and paved over. Now, Palakiko imagines what it would be like if the streams were allowed to resume their original paths: what trees would grow, what native grass could flourish, what fires might be stopped. He doesn’t think this vision is at odds with the need to address Maui’s housing crisis.

For Palakiko, the fight over the future of water in Lāhainā is about more than just who controls the streams in this section of Maui. It’s also in some ways a referendum on what future Hawaiʻi will choose: one that reflects the worldview of people like Palakiko, who see water as a sacred resource to be preserved, or that of people like Martin, who sees it as a tool to be used for profit.

To Martin, such a shift is unsettling.

“I mean, for a hundred years, you could take all the water, and all of a sudden these guys come in, and say, ‘Oh, you can’t take any water,’” Martin said. “And they made it sound like I’m this terrible person.”

This story has been corrected to reflect the updated death toll provided by Maui County.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The libertarian developer looming over West Maui’s water conflict on Nov 27, 2023.

For now, it’s only a gaping hole in the ground, 100-by-100 feet, surrounded by farm machinery and bales of hemp on a sandy patch of earth in the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation in southwestern Minnesota. 

But when construction is complete next April, the Lower Sioux — also known as part of the Mdewakanton Band of Dakota — will have a 20,000-square-foot manufacturing campus that will allow them to pioneer a green experiment, the first of its kind in the United States. 

They will have an integrated vertical operation to grow hemp, process it into insulation called hempcrete, and then build healthy homes with it. Right now, no one in the U.S. does all three.

Once the tribe makes this low-carbon material, they can begin to address a severe shortage of housing and jobs. Recapturing a slice of sovereignty would be a win for the Lower Sioux, once a largely woodland people who were subjected to some of the worst brutality against the Indigenous nations in North America. 

They lost most of their lands in the 19th century, and the territory finally allotted to them two hours south of Minneapolis consists of just 1,743 acres of poor soil. That stands in contrast to the fertile black earth of the surrounding white-owned farmlands. 

Nearly half of the 1,124 enrolled members of the tribe need homes. Some of the unhoused camp on the hard ground outside the reservation, with nowhere else to turn. Those who do have shelter live in often moldy, modular homes with flimsy walls that can’t keep out the minus-15 Fahrenheit winter cold. 

Now, they have two prototypes that are nearly done and know how to build or retrofit more. While learning how to make the houses, the construction team developed a niche eco-skill they can market off the reservation as well. 

“The idea of making homes that would last and be healthy was a no-brainer,” said Robert “Deuce” Larsen, the tribal council president. 

“We need to build capacity in the community and show that it can be an income stream.”

That one of the smallest tribes in the country, in terms of population and land in trust, is leading the national charge on an integrated hempcrete operation is no mean feat, seeing that virtually no one in the community had experience with either farming or construction before the five-man team was assembled earlier this year.

“It’s fantastic,” said Jody McGuinness, executive director of the U.S. Hemp Building Association. “I haven’t heard of any other fully integrated project like this domestically.” 

Besides, hempcrete as a construction material is normally the domain of rich people with means to contract a green home, not marginalized communities. That’s because the sustainable material is normally imported from Europe rather than made locally. 

“It’s accessible to people with wealth, who can afford to build a bespoke house. It’s not accessible to the general public,” McGuinness said.

The project is the brainchild of Earl Pendleton, 52, a rail-thin man of quiet intensity, who until recently was the tribal council’s vice president. He grew obsessed with industrial hemp when reading about it 13 years ago. 

Pendleton was intrigued to learn that the bamboolike plant has 25,000 uses, including wood substitutes, biofuel, bioplastics, animal feed, and textiles. 

Hemp can grow in a variety of climates and, depending on the location, can yield more than one harvest a year. What’s more, hemp regenerates soil, sequesters carbon, and doesn’t require fertilizers.

“It blew my mind,” he recalled.

People often confuse hemp with its cannabis cousin, marijuana. But hemp has negligible THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive component that creates a weed high. And this stalky variant is more versatile than the flowery CBD (cannabidiol) type.

Hempcrete is made by mixing mashed stalks with lime and water. The oatmeal-like substance is stuffed or sprayed into the cavities of framed walls. Once it hardens, it resembles cement to the touch (thus the name) but has different properties.

The petrified substance has airtight qualities that can dramatically cut down on heating and air-conditioning needs. Unlike many commonly used building materials, it is nontoxic and resists mold, fire, and pests.

While used in Europe, commercial hemp was banned in the U.S. until the 2018 Farm Bill. Since then, hempcrete has been slow to catch on, due to a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Farmers don’t want to plant without facilities nearby to process the stalks. Potential processors don’t want to buy expensive machinery without guarantees of raw material. And most American contractors don’t know anything about hempcrete.

Aside from the green value, Pendleton saw a chance to pivot from the reservation’s Jackpot Junction Casino, the tribe’s main source of income for the past 35 years. A bronze statue of a warrior spearing a buffalo stands in front.

For many years, as Pendleton managed the floor and worked blackjack, he saw gamblers lose their paychecks, and more. The Lower Sioux weren’t getting richer. The population on the reservation has expanded rapidly since 2000, which meant the per capita cut that each family got from the $30 million yearly profits shrank. For most families, it is the only income they receive.

“We sell misery. It’s nothing to be proud of, the money to be made here,” Pendleton said.

He added that the guaranteed money from the casinos killed many people’s ambitions to get education or training for jobs, or to seek work off the reservation.

It took a while for him to convince the tribal leadership to endorse his hemp vision. “When I would bring it up eight years ago, they’d say, ‘What? You’re going to smoke the wall?’ They associated it with weed.”

He had some learning to do, too. Pendleton knew nothing about the industry, so he binged on YouTube videos about techniques and drove around the country to meet experts. 

“It was daunting,” he said. 

Once the tribal council got on board three years ago, they cobbled together loans, government grants, and their own funds to earmark more than $6 million to build the first two prototype homes and the processing campus.

They have the potential to plant hemp on 300 acres and, at a given time, grow on between 100 to 200 acres. Test seeds came from New Genetics in Colorado and the Dun Agro Hemp Group, a Dutch company with a new processing facility in Indiana that is seeking partnerships with tribal communities.

Pendleton recruited Joey Goodthunder, a cheerful 33-year-old who had picked up farming cattle and corn from his grandfather, as agricultural processing manager. Goodthunder set to planting in a field called Cansa’yap, or “the place where they paint the trees red,” which is what the tribe used to do to mark territory.

Pendleton lured as project manager Danny Desjarlais, 38, a tattooed carpenter who had been thinking about becoming a long-haul truck driver for lack of other work.

“Earl found out and took me and my kids’ mom out to eat and told her, ‘If he drives a truck, he’s not going to be home every night. I’ll have him home for dinner every night,’” Desjarlais said.

Desjarlais entertained doubts about this bizarre product he had never heard of. Pendleton sealed the deal by taking him to a hemp building conference in Austin, Texas. “That was eye-opening,” Desjarlais said. 

Pendleton signed up three other Lower Sioux, only one of whom had experience putting up walls. And he invited two luminaries in hemp building: Jennifer Martin, a partner in HempStone, and Cameron McIntosh of Americhanvre to teach the different application techniques. They are based, respectively, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

Intrigued by what this project could achieve in terms of Native sovereignty, Martin traveled to Minnesota again and again to usher the crew through the project.

“What the Lower Sioux is doing is the most compelling and forward-thinking thing that’s happening in hempcrete today,” she said. “No one else is doing anything like this. And Danny is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with; he’s like a sponge.” 

The venture has, unsurprisingly, experienced bumps. Equipment housed at another company’s warehouse nearby broke down. Replacement parts were backlogged due to pandemic supply chain issues. Since they couldn’t process hemp in the time allotted to build, the crew had to import some.

Goodthunder, meanwhile, struggled with harvesting techniques alien to conventional agriculture, such as leaving cut stalks to rot in the field for weeks so that unwanted seeds separate from the woody inner fiber, called hurd. 

Yet they’ve made progress.

They began with a demo shed in September 2022, placed on a field where the tribe holds powwows, an annual celebration of music and dance. The kids used it as a concession stand to sell sodas and candies. The remaining skeptics all wanted their pictures taken next to it. 

“Once they saw it, they changed their minds,” Desjarlais said. “They said, ‘Let’s build a house.’”

Build they did. In a 14-day blitz in July, the team threw together a 1,500-square-foot lime-green ranch, without any blueprints. It’ll be used as two units of temporary housing for people coming from substance abuse treatment or jail.

“Everyone said, ‘It‘s impossible.’ Even people in the hemp world thought it was impossible,” Desjarlais said proudly. His muscled arm, tattooed with the words “Love Life,” pointed at the hempcrete blocks wedged securely into the 12-inch-thick walls. A pleasant, haylike smell wafted through the house. 

Another four-room prototype is already framed and being filled with hempcrete. It will be rented out to community members when done.

The processing campus where they hope to manufacture blocks or panels of hempcrete has a solar greenhouse to store bags of lime and hemp, as well as equipment such as a combine harvester and a decorticator that separates the hurd from the softer fibers that can be used for textiles.

The project could serve as an example for the 573 other federally recognized tribes, many of which face similar critical shortages of jobs and housing. Native Americans retain 25 percent of U.S. land tenure in federal trust, and self-governing communities don’t have to wait for permits from other authorities.

Larsen, the tribal president, thinks hemp could provide a lucrative income stream for tribes that have the land to grow it and a trained crew that can offer its skills off the reservation.

“Native American tribes have an advantage, because they can build with materials that are new, without having to get them certified by a national agency,” said McGuinness. “They don’t have the bureaucracy holding them down.” 

What’s more, he’s hearing about non-tribal companies, Dun Agro among them, that are viewing tribal communities as development partners.

Architect Bob Escher, who has four residential designs in the works involving hemp, sees demand for skilled hemp professionals increasing as green building takes off. So far, there are only a handful of these experts in the U.S.

“Who knew five years ago that a hempcrete consultant would be sitting at the same table with structural engineers, electrical contractors, HVAC installers, and interior designers to help me and the client develop the design program,” he said. “This is the pure definition of job creation.”

For now, the Lower Sioux undertaking has caught the eye of four other reservations in Minnesota, as well as Dallas Goldtooth, who plays the Spirit in the hit show Reservation Dogs on Hulu. Desjarlais said the actor was interested in a hempcrete build for his mother, who lives in the community.

Farther north, the Gitxsan First Nation in Canada invited Desjarlais to show them in August how to build. They’ve grown enough hemp for three prototype homes on their Sik-E-Dakh reserve 16 hours north of Vancouver and are seeking $5.5 million (Canadian) to get a similar integrated project off the ground.

Desjarlais left them inspired, said Velma Sutherland, a band administrator. “This could be the start of something big.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Lower Sioux in Minnesota need homes — so they are building them from hemp on Nov 27, 2023.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

One recent autumn afternoon, I watched the Atlantic gusts collide with the cliffs that rise above Nazaré, Portugal. Rain pelted down, and the world-renowned swells rose into walls of water that even the most death-defying surfers reach only via Jet Ski. For me, this looked like a rained-out, late-season beach getaway, but for the sliver of Iberia that is Portugal, it looked like a bright future. That weekend, the nation of 10 million ran on nothing but wind, solar and hydropower.

As it turned out, those rainy, blustery days were just a warmup. Portugal produced more than enough renewable power to serve all its customers for six straight days, from October 31 to November 6.

“The gas plants were there, waiting to dispatch energy, should it be needed. It was not, because the wind was blowing; it was raining a lot,” said Hugo Costa, who oversees Portugal for EDP Renewables, the renewables arm of the state utility, which was privatized in 2012. ​“And we were producing with a positive impact to the consumers because the prices have dropped dramatically, almost to zero.”

To hit Paris Agreement climate goals by 2050, nations need to run their grids without carbon emissions not just for three or six days, but year-round. A handful of countries already do this, thanks to generous endowments of hydropower, largely developed well before the climate crisis drove investment decisions for power plants. Others score highly on carbon-free power thanks to big fleets of nuclear plants.

Portugal falls into a different, more relatable bucket: It started its decarbonization journey with some legacy hydropower, but no nuclear capacity nor plans to build any. That meant it had to figure out how to cut fossil fuel use by maximizing new renewables.

How did Portugal make this happen? It committed to building renewables early and often, pledging a 2050 deadline for net-zero carbon emissions in 2016, several years before the European Union as a whole found the conviction to take that step. Portugal’s last coal plants shut down in 2022, leaving (imported) fossil gas as the backstop for on-demand power.

“The key conclusion, in my opinion, is that it shows that the Portuguese grid is prepared for very high shares of renewable electricity and for its expected variation: We were able to manage both the sharp increase of hydro and wind production, and also the return to a lower share of renewables, when natural-gas power plants were requested again to supply some of the country’s demand,” said Miguel Prado, who covers Portugal’s energy sector for Expresso newspaper.

The task ahead for Portugal’s grid decarbonization is to reduce and ultimately eliminate the number of hours when the country needs to burn gas to keep the lights on. Leaders want gas generation, which made up 21 percent of electricity consumption from January through October, to end completely by 2040.

To reach its climate goals, Portugal has focused on diversification of renewable resources; instead of depending primarily on wind, water, or sun, it blends each into the portfolio and finds ways to make them more complementary. The country’s power companies are now chasing major additional offshore wind opportunities, expanding solar installations and repowering older onshore wind projects to get more out of the best locations.

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Anatomy of a six-day clean energy streak

After the overthrow of the authoritarian Estado Novo dictatorship in 1974, the newly formed state utility Energias de Portugal constructed a series of hydroelectric dams on the once-wild rivers that rushed from the eastern mountains to the western coast. The company built its first onshore wind projects in the 1990s, when solar simply couldn’t compete economically, and solar installations have only recently started to catch up.

That’s why the gray skies didn’t hurt overall renewable production during the country’s recent record-setting stretch, as they would have in, say, California or Hawaii. The wind and hydro were cranking, and that’s what mattered.

Any milestone in the rapidly evolving clean energy sector should come with specific parameters. So what exactly did the Portuguese grid accomplish earlier this month?

The six-day record refers to the 149 consecutive hours in which ​“energy from renewable sources exceeded the industrial and household consumption needs across the country.” The country’s previous record for that metric was 131 hours (a little over five days), achieved in 2019. That doesn’t mean that fossil fuel plants weren’t operating — just that the overall renewable generation more than met customer needs.

But Portugal also just set a national record for meeting the entire electricity system’s needs ​“without resorting to conventional thermal power generation.” This gas-free stretch started Halloween night and ran for 131 consecutive hours, about 5 days, nearly tripling Portugal’s previous record of 56 hours straight in 2021. And for 95 of those consecutive hours, Portugal exported clean electricity to Spain, because it consistently had more than it needed — again without burning gas.

That trendline is the thing to watch. Renewables-friendly weather will come and go, and shoulder months are ripe for renewables to outpace consumer demand because heating or cooling needs are lower than in the summer and winter. But the last time Portugal had ideal conditions for a renewables record, it only lasted one-third as long without burning gas. As more wind and solar capacity comes online, Portugal expands its arsenal for running entirely on renewables.

This particular week stood out, but it exemplifies a historic shift in energy sources. Natural-gas use for Portugal’s electricity production fell 39 percent year-over-year for the period from January to October, according to REN. That brought overall gas use to its lowest level since 2006.

Portugal has made grid decarbonization perfectly tangible for itself. To reach its climate goals, it needs to take the playbook from this one week in November and run it for longer periods of time, until eventually it doesn’t even need gas on standby. And it has to do so even in the parts of the year when the winds and the rain don’t lash the off-season traveler who’d heard so much about a climate reminiscent of Southern California.

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Next steps for grid decarbonization

Portugal’s clean energy accomplishments today build on several decisions made in the past: The country chose to invest in new hydropower capacity, and 18 years ago, it ran a large-scale wind auction, Prado noted.

“It was also important that the country didn’t go to a massive investment in solar capacity when the technology was still expensive,” he explained. ​“Now Portugal is facing a huge demand of developers to build new PV utility-scale plants, as well as a big demand for decentralized solar projects, taking advantage of a low-cost technology to increase the share of renewable energy in the years to come.”

The country still has a steep task ahead to hit its national target of 85 percent renewables by 2030, Prado added. Major challenges include slow permitting processes and the complexities of balancing ecological impacts with the need for cleaner power.

One way to mitigate delays in permitting new plants is to refurbish old ones.

Portugal has limited landmass to work with, and the best onshore wind sites are already taken, Costa said. But early projects still run 500-kilowatt turbines, while new turbines can produce 6.2 megawatts. Thus, swapping an old turbine for a new one could unlock 12 times the existing capacity. EDP Renewables is doing this strategically to increase production at times when projects aren’t hitting their full export levels; such upgrades produce more clean power throughout the year without necessitating grid investment to handle surges of power.

EDP Renewables is also investigating hybrid power plants, which combine wind and solar at the same location.

“If we combine wind and solar, what we see is that there is a big complementarity,” Costa said. ​“Typically, when we have wind blowing, we don’t have sun. And when we have sun, typically we don’t have that much wind.”

Grouping developments like that dilutes the fixed costs of construction, making them ​“more rational, economics-wise,” Costa said. In other words, developers can save money compared to building the same resources in separate locations.

Portugal currently has no large stand-alone battery storage plants, though some batteries sit alongside solar or wind projects. The storage built into the hydropower networks has sufficed until now to balance swings in other forms of generation. But as renewables push ever higher in their share of electricity production, the need to rapidly store and discharge power will call for more batteries, Costa said.

The most ambitious part of Portugal’s clean energy expansion isn’t even happening within Portugal’s terrestrial borders. Having tapped the choicest onshore locations, the power sector will grow wind installations by looking offshore, in waters so deep they demand floating turbines. A few pathbreaking projects globally have proved this is possible, but it remains far less mature than the offshore turbines mounted to shallower sea bottoms.

Back in 2011, EDP Renewables tested a 2-megawatt floating turbine supplied by American company Principle Power, and it valiantly survived pummeling by 17-meter waves off northern Portugal. The company followed up with three 8.4-megawatt floating turbines, and even managed to secure project financing from the European Investment Bank.

“We have a lender who is confident about the cash flows that will be generated by the project and is not relying on any kind of guarantees from the sponsor,” Costa said.

Financiers as a rule fear newer technologies they deem risky; this stamp of approval marks an important step toward normalizing floating wind as a regular part of the clean energy toolkit.

That’s exactly what Portugal aims to do: Its target is to build 10 gigawatts of offshore wind, which will have to be floating. These projects still have a lot of work to do, so Costa said not to expect them until the 2030s. But the government is set to hold an auction for 2 gigawatts of offshore development in December.

That timeline is less certain as a result of this month’s resignation of Prime Minister António Costa due to, of all things, a corruption investigation centered on green hydrogen and lithium interests.

“This government won’t be able to make relevant decisions in the coming months, until the elections in March, which would delay the launch and conclusion of the first offshore wind auction,” Prado said. Other auctions for green hydrogen, renewable fuels and energy storage are likely going to be pushed back, too.

That unexpected interruption doesn’t change a broad political consensus around the need for more clean energy. But for now, it’ll just be the surfers and the fishing boats braving the massive Atlantic waves.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Portugal just ran on 100 percent renewables for six days in a row on Nov 26, 2023.

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government, and statewide issues.

A Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education last week rejected seven of 12 proposed science textbooks for eighth graders that for the first time will require them to include information on climate change.

The 15-member board largely rejected the books either because they included policy solutions for climate change or because they were produced by a company that has an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policy. Some textbooks were also rejected because SBOE reviewers gave the books lower scores on how well they adhered to the state’s curriculum standards.

The board voted on November 17 to allow five textbooks for eighth grade science to be included on the list, published by Savvas Learning Company, McGraw-Hill School Division, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Depository, Accelerate Learning and Summit K-12.

San Antonio Democratic board member Marisa Perez-Diaz said she was disappointed by last week’s decision to reject so many textbooks, some that included Spanish texts.

“My fear is that we will render ourselves irrelevant moving forward when it comes to what publishers want to work with us and will help us get proper materials in front of our young people, and for me that’s heartbreaking,” Perez-Diaz said during last Friday’s meeting. “I’m very disappointed that so many things were voted down based on assertions or thoughts about how things are written or thematics.”

In an almost weeklong meeting that began on November 14, the members discussed dozens of textbooks that will be placed on a list of approved materials for districts to select from next fall.

While school districts are not required to choose only from the SBOE-curated list, many school districts choose to do so because those textbooks are guaranteed to be in compliance with the state’s curriculum standards.

A science curriculum overhaul approved two years ago threw eighth grade science textbooks, in particular, into the political fray. The new standards will require, for the first time next year, that Texas eighth graders learn about climate change — meaning that textbook manufacturers had to update their teaching materials.

Texas is one of only six states that does not use the Next Generation Science Standards to guide its K-12 science curriculum. The standards — developed by states and a committee convened by the National Research Council in 2013 — emphasize that climate change is real, severe, caused by humans and can be mitigated with actions that reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

The updated Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, require eighth graders to learn about climate change and describe how human activities “can” influence the climate. Critics have said that the standards don’t go far enough, arguing that the requirements don’t ensure students will learn how reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels could mitigate climate change.

But overall, most of the proposed eighth grade science textbooks did a good job meeting the state’s new requirements for including information about climate change, according to an analysis by educators who were asked to review the books for Texas Freedom Network, a progressive think tank focused on education.

The curriculum change was approved before many of the current board members were elected. It’s a body that’s taken a rightward turn in recent years after Republicans nationally began taking aim at how schools were teaching history, race and gender.

Republicans have also in recent years sought to punish companies that adopt ESG policies, which typically attempt to align companies with international climate goals, set internal emissions reductions targets, or employ investment strategies that emphasize renewable energy over fossil fuels. In 2021, Texas lawmakers prohibited state funds, such as the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, from contracting with or investing in companies that divest from oil, natural gas and coal companies.

The SBOE’s discussions last week have reflected those trends, with board members voting against books that they said were written by companies with environmentally-friendly corporate policies or that went too far in teaching students how to advocate for climate solutions. Others wanted more emphasis on religion, or argued that scientific theories should not be taught as fact.

Evelyn Brooks, a Republican board member from Frisco who represents District 14, for example, last Tuesday questioned the scientific consensus on climate change and suggested that “creation” — a religious concept — should be taught alongside scientific theories of the origins of the universe. Brooks was first elected to the board in 2022 and said that she wanted to see more perspectives of people of faith included in the books.

“The origins of the universe is my issue — big bang, climate change — again, what evidence is being used to support the theories, and if this is a theory that is going to be taught as a fact, that’s my issue,” Brooks said while discussing one of the textbooks. “What about creation?”

Board Chair Keven Ellis, a Lufkin Republican with six years on the board, responded that he believed the board had previously pushed the textbook standards “as far as we can go on that” without the books being determined unconstitutional.

In another discussion on November 14, board member Julie Pickren, a Pearland Republican who has represented District 7 since January, complained that some of the textbooks presented a “theme” that humans are causing climate change.

Human activity has likely caused around 100 percent of climate change since 1951, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, and the Global Change Research Program’s most recent report, published earlier this week, reiterated that finding.

“Human activities — primarily emissions of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel use — have unequivocally caused the global warming observed over the industrial era,” the Fifth National Climate Assessment said.

Throughout the November 14 meeting, Pickren motioned to remove several textbooks from the SBOE’s list.

She successfully motioned to remove the textbooks created by Discovery Education last Tuesday, arguing that the company has an initiative that’s aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and that the initiative was a “theme replicated throughout the curriculum.” Pickren was concerned that the book might violate anti-ESG state laws.

The board also chose to remove a textbook created by publisher Green Ninja after Republican board member and secretary Patricia Hardy argued last Tuesday that it too explicitly took a position that students should warn their friends and family about extreme weather made worse by climate change.

“It’s taking a position that all of that is settled science, and that our extreme weather is caused by climate change,” said Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who has served on the board since 2003.

Several types of extreme weather in Texas — including more intense heat, droughts and hurricanes — have been found by scientists, including the state climatologist, to be made worse by climate change.

A handful of Texans spoke to the board in favor of adopting the textbooks during the meeting this week, including one scientist.

“It’s high time that climate change was presented in a straightforward way in Texas science textbooks, beginning in the eighth grade,” Robert Baumgardner, a retired geologist who worked for the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas, told the board last Tuesday.

Others expressed dismay that elected officials were stuck in a conversation about whether climate change is caused by humans rather than preparing students to lead the energy transition.

“I can’t believe we’re having this discussion, that we need to keep climate change in the books, and keep the religious stuff out of the books,” said Ethan Michelle Ganz, a community organizer and pipefitter from Houston. “Climate change is happening right now. It’s not a future thing. … We need to be competitive in the world market.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas board rejects many science textbooks over climate change messaging on Nov 25, 2023.