This article has been updated.

Puerto Rico is in the midst of a residential solar surge, one catalyzed by concerns over an unreliable grid, high energy prices, and destructive storms. In the six years since Hurricane Maria, solar installations have increased tenfold to more than 3,000 each month. Around 82,000 homes now use rooftop solar. Most of them include batteries, so when the power goes out, their systems keep working. 

But this powerful means of energy resilience remains beyond reach for hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans. The systems are expensive, and most people use leases or loans to afford them. Those with low incomes or credit scores are excluded from traditional solar financing. 

A new program from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office takes aim at that problem. Last week, it finalized a $3 billion loan guarantee to Sunnova Energy, a residential solar company with nearly 350,000 customers in the United States and the largest operator in Puerto Rico. 

It will back loans nationwide under Sunnova’s Project Hestia, which makes rooftop solar, battery storage, and demand-response software accessible to households in communities struggling with high energy bills, frequent outages, and climate risks. The agreement requires that at least 20 percent of the loans be issued to customers with credit scores of 680 or less, and that at least 10 percent, and up to 20 percent, of them be issued in Puerto Rico. 

The program represents the federal government’s single largest commitment to solar energy and could help as many as 115,000 homeowners in the U.S. It also could prevent 7.1 million tons of CO2 emissions over the next 25 years. 

The carveout for Puerto Rico is part of a sweeping effort by the Biden administration to bring clean, resilient energy to the U.S. territory as fast as possible, a commitment President Biden made last year after Hurricane Fiona, when the entire archipelago was again left without grid power. But while renewable-energy advocates agree rooftop solar is key to achieving energy independence in the archipelago, not all believe the loan guarantee is the best way to help low-income households. 

Sunnova Energy has operated in Puerto Rico since 2013 and serves 60,000 customers there, accounting for 80 percent of the residential solar systems on the archipelago. It offers lease and loan financing with 25-year terms that include maintenance and repairs for the life of the agreement. Residents of Puerto Rico pay some of the highest electricity rates in the United States, and Sunnova customers there pay about 15 to 20 percent less than they would for electricity from the local utility, according to the company.

The loan-guarantee program is meant to deepen the pool of homeowners who can access financing. The median annual household income in Puerto Rico is under $22,000, 40 percent of residents live under the federal poverty line, and 40 percent do not have a credit card. Almost every census tract qualifies as a disadvantaged community under the Biden administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. 

“It will allow Sunnova to reach a customer that it traditionally wouldn’t be able to reach,” said Michael Juarbe-Lafitte, the company’s senior manager of government affairs in Puerto Rico. 

It is also meant to help lay the groundwork for what’s known as a virtual power plant, or VPP, which uses solar energy stored in home batteries to send power to the grid during peak demand. Since Hurricane Maria, essentially all home installations in Puerto Rico have included batteries, making it one of the places best positioned to harness this approach. All Project Hestia loans in Puerto Rico will include solar panels, home batteries, and energy management software.

Puerto Rico’s electric utility, Luma Energy, is weeks away from launching a Battery Emergency Demand Response Program, which will connect 6,000 home batteries to the grid to provide power during outages. The pilot program is meant to lead the way to a much larger expansion.

“If we could use those approximately 60,000 customers with energy stored in their batteries, we could easily replace some of these old dirty peaker plants during demand-response situations,” said Juarbe-Lafitte. “And those households will be compensated, which means money stays in Puerto Rican pockets.”

For all the benefits residential solar promises, some energy-resilience advocates say the long-term loans the Energy Department is bolstering aren’t the right model for low-income households. 

Alejandra Castrodad-Rodríguez, the executive director of Resilient Power Puerto Rico, calls the Biden administration investments “transformational for Puerto Rico.” But she says organizations like hers, which advances community resilience through clean energy, want to see those investments underwrite community, not corporate, ownership of solar installations.

“The greater the local control over these climate assets, the more resilient the communities become,” she said.

That is best achieved, she said, by subsidizing loans with shorter terms to minimize the principal, so households own their systems sooner. That would further lower their energy bills. Loans also ought to be channeled through local credit unions and co-ops. 

Marcel Castro-Sitiriche, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, shared concerns about where the investments were being directed. “To provide a loan guarantee to a company that already has a large share of the solar rooftop market in Puerto Rico will provide a competitive advantage to Sunnova that could result in less competition and a deterioration of the service to customers,” he said. “We need to move in the opposite direction and incentivize local companies.”

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Castrodad-Rodríguez is also wary of any model in which vulnerable low-income households, which in Puerto Rico can mean earning as little as $12,000 a year, take on debt. She wants to know what will happen to anyone who defaults on their payments, and worries that loan costs may become higher than market energy prices over the 25-year term.

“These government incentives are what make it possible to access these households, but then the government needs to establish necessary parameters to protect those households,” she said.

A Sunnova representative confirmed that if a Project Hestia customer failed to pay, the “normal collections process ensues as it does for any other customer,” but Dan DeSnyder, the company’s vice president of capital markets, said the company does not expect customers to default because their loan payments will be lower than their current utility bills, with higher reliability.

Sunnova’s reputation in Puerto Rico has taken a hit in the past. In 2017, the Independent Consumer Protection Office asked the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, an oversight agency, to investigate the company after receiving 1,000 complaints about deceptive sales practices and poor repair service. Two years later, the bureau released a report criticizing Sunnova’s business practices, and in 2021, required Sunnova to improve its policies. Customers nationwide have submitted similar complaints to the Better Business Bureau, which currently gives the company an F rating.

Sunnova says it has taken aggressive steps to improve customer service. “As the largest residential solar and battery-storage service company in Puerto Rico, we are proud of our history on the island and want to continue to provide clean, affordable, and reliable power services to more consumers on the island,” the company told Grist in an email. It opened a call center in Puerto Rico last April, promises a 24-hour response time on service requests, and plans to expand its service team from 16 employees to 75 by the year’s end.

A DOE spokesperson said the department’s LPO team did 11 months of due diligence prior to finalizing the guarantee, including analysis of its billing and collections, warrantees, and performance obligations under its standard customer contract, and that it will continually monitor Project Hestia.

Sunnova told Grist it will provide DOE with monthly reports on who receives loans, their FICO scores, income, locations, carbon-emissions savings, and more. 

The DOE has also built consumer protection into some of its other energy programs in Puerto Rico. A $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund meant to support rooftop-solar access for the medically vulnerable and those living in last-mile communities includes $5 million to 10 million for “consumer protection efforts.”

PJ Wilson, president of the Solar and Energy Storage Association in Puerto Rico, said the rate of consumer complaints on solar companies has dropped precipitously in recent years, to around 1 percent of new installs. “Compare that with the abysmal satisfaction rate of those same customers with the grid power,” he said, “which still has the most blackouts in all of the United States, by far.” 

Update 10/6/2023: This article has been updated to incorporate a later statement from the Department of Energy.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Energy Department backs solar loans for low-income Puerto Ricans on Oct 6, 2023.

For more than a decade, an Australian company called Arafura Rare Earths has been looking for customers willing to buy rare earth metals from a mine under development in the nation’s Northern Territory. In April, it secured one of its biggest clients yet. 

Siemens Gamesa, one of the largest offshore wind turbine makers in the world, signed an agreement to purchase hundreds of tons of rare earths from Arafura, beginning in 2026, to make giant magnets for its seagoing turbines. The reason a major manufacturer entered a contract with a mining company that isn’t mining anything yet? As CEO Jochen Eickholt told Reuters, Siemens Gamesa is almost 100 percent reliant on China for rare earth magnets — and its customers want to change that.

Rare earths are a group of 17 elements with chemical properties that make them useful for a range of high-tech applications. Because of geological good fortune and early manufacturing investments, today China dominates the rare earth supply chain, producing more than half of the world’s raw rare earths and over 90 percent of the powerful rare earth magnets used in consumer electronics, electric vehicle motors, and offshore wind turbine generators. While the magnets inside smartphones might weigh a couple of grams, those inside wind turbines can tip the scales at several tons. Given the industry’s large and fast-growing rare earth needs, European and U.S. wind companies are anxious to secure future supplies — as well as suppliers in countries that have better relationships with the West.

There are already several large rare earth miners outside of China, including California’s MP Materials and Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths, and Western nations are working to set up additional processing and magnet-making capacity. But it remains to be seen whether emerging supply chains will be able to produce magnets at the scale and cost needed to help offshore wind flourish.

“The world is playing catchup, and it’s an expensive game,” David Abraham, a rare earth analyst and author of The Elements of Power, told Grist.

To understand why the offshore wind industry needs rare earth metals, you have to understand how a turbine works.

Wind turbines are essentially steel towers topped with long, propellor-like blades. As the wind blows, those blades twirl around a rotor hub, which spins a generator to produce electricity. Most land-based turbines use an electromagnetic generator, in which copper coils rotate through a magnetic field to produce electricity. But another option, popular in offshore wind, is a permanent magnet generator, which contains an enormous ring of brick-shaped rare earth magnets that spin with the rotor to produce electricity. 

There are many reasons the offshore wind sector has embraced permanent magnet generators, but a key one is their efficiency. “The performance of a permanent magnet generator is really quite good — the power density is better than we can get with a copper wound machine,” Michael Derby, program manager with the Wind Energy Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, told Grist.

More efficient permanent magnet generators, Derby said, can be “smaller and therefore lighter and potentially less costly,” all of which make them attractive to developers building massive, expensive machines in the ocean. This is especially true due to another trend in offshore wind: The use of a “direct drive” turbine design, in which the generator connects straight to the rotor, as opposed to connecting via an intermediate gearbox that speeds up the generator’s rotation. 

The gearbox is a high-maintenance component, and eliminating it has advantages offshore, where it’s not easy to conduct routine repairs. But generators lacking a gearbox spin more slowly, meaning they must be physically larger to produce the same power. In this case, “every little performance advantage you can get” by using a permanent magnet generator “really manifests itself,” Derby said.

Permanent magnet generators have one big drawback, though: They need a lot of rare earths. A large direct drive offshore wind turbine equipped with one of these generators can contain upwards of 5 tons of magnets, according to Alla Kolesnikova, the data and analytics lead for the critical minerals research firm Adamas Intelligence. While rare earths only represent about 30 percent of the weight of these magnets, that can still add up to hundreds of pounds of the rare earth metal neodymium — and often, smaller amounts of the heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium — per megawatt of electricity produced.

Those quantities multiply quickly when you consider the number of offshore wind turbines needed to help nations reach their climate targets. 

Take the U.S., where the Biden administration has set a goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind, enough to power about 10 million homes, by 2030 to help the nation reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Recent modeling work by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that in a scenario where the U.S. reaches that 2050 goal, the wind industry’s neodymium demand would consume over 90 percent of the neodymium produced domestically in 2020. And wind is just one application — neodymium is also required for the magnets used in electric car motors, consumer electronics, and defense technologies. By 2050, “there’s going to be greater demand for everything,” Derby told Grist. 

With demand rising not just in the U.S. but globally, Adamas Intelligence recently forecasted the world could face a shortfall of 90,000 metric tons per year of neodymium-praseodymium oxide, the rare earth alloy used to make magnets, by 2040.

Limited supplies of rare earths are one concern for the wind industry. Another is the reality that nearly all rare earth processing and magnet-making takes place in China today. Daan de Jonge, a rare earth analyst at the research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said that rare earth-reliant industries are increasingly concerned about how “tensions between the U.S. and China” could impact future supplies. A disruption of critical mineral supplies would not be unprecedented: Earlier this summer, after U.S. and European semiconductor manufacturers restricted the sale of advanced chips to China to slow the advancement of the nation’s military technology, China retaliated by setting export restrictions on gallium and germanium, two metals used in semiconductor manufacturing. 

The wind industry, de Jonge said, may be especially keen to secure its supply chain over the long term, since offshore wind plants can take years to develop.

Some, like Siemens Gamesa, have taken steps to find new suppliers. Through its recent contract with Arafura, the wind turbine maker will purchase several hundred tons of neodymium-praseodymium oxide yearly for five years once the company’s rare earth mine is up and running, with the option to extend the contract two years longer. In an emailed statement, Maximilian Schnippering, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa, described this agreement as part of a larger effort to build “sustainable and resilient supply chains.” Siemens Gamesa declined to answer questions about how much of its rare earth needs the new offtake agreement will support or why it chose Arafura as opposed to a more established rare earth producer. Arafura didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Siemens Gamesa isn’t the only wind turbine maker betting on Arafura. In 2022, GE Renewable Energy, the third-largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world that year, signed a memorandum of understanding with Arafura to “jointly cooperate in the establishment of a sustainable supply chain” for neodymium-praseodymium oxide. In an investor report published in June, Arafura said it has “continued detailed negotiations” with GE this year, “with a view to finalizing an offtake agreement that will contribute to GE’s wind turbine manufacturing activities.” 

A GE spokesperson told Grist that while the company has “a diversity of suppliers right now,” it is “taking steps like this to build additional resilience and competitiveness in the system.” The spokesperson declined to state when it might reach a final decision to purchase rare earths from Arafura, or in what quantities.

De Jonge said Arafura’s planned rare earth mine “ticks many boxes” for companies like Siemens Gamesa and GE. The company aims to do both rare earth mining and refining on site, making it an “an ‘easier’ offtake partner than most other mines, who will also need some agreements with processors.” (Wind turbine makers, however, will still need to find separate facilities to turn Arafaura’s refined rare earths into magnets.) Additionally, Arafura has already secured many of the permits it needs, including federal and Northern Territory environmental approvals and a Native Title Agreement that provides financial compensation to local Aboriginal groups. But de Jonge warned that Arafura still needs “a large capital investment” to actually start mining, and meeting its ambitious production goals will depend on the company raising the necessary funds. 

That isn’t a problem unique to Arafura: Anyone attempting to build a new rare earth mine, processing plant, or magnet facility must make huge up-front investments, as illustrated by the U.S. Department of Defense’s recent decision to allocate $258 million toward a new rare earth processing facility in Texas. “To set up these supply lines from mining to component, they’re billions of dollars,” Abraham said.

John Ebert, a spokesperson for the Chinese rare earth magnet maker Yunsheng, said that the “more stringent compliance requirements” of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other regulators in North America and Europe add costs for companies that want to mine and process rare earths in these regions. And buying Chinese rare earths for processing and manufacturing elsewhere doesn’t necessarily lower costs. Anyone outside of China wishing to buy Chinese rare earths to make magnets is at a disadvantage due to the nation’s value-added taxes, which make it more expensive to export raw materials for manufacturing than to use them within the country, de Jonge said. 

The structure of the offshore wind business poses additional challenges for magnet makers attempting to break in, said Ryan Corbett, the chief financial officer of California-based rare earth producer MP Materials, which is constructing a rare earth magnetics facility in Texas. Corbett explained that because offshore wind developers typically sell power to governments at a fixed price, they like to arrange fixed-price contracts with their suppliers to keep costs from exceeding revenues. But the cost of making a rare earth magnet varies as the price of the underlying metals changes. 

“When you’re in a business like ours, with significant fluctuations in prices, that’s really difficult,” Corbett said. 

While major wind energy players take steps to diversify the rare earth supply chain, some are also hedging their bets by reducing their rare earth needs. 

Many offshore wind turbines use a direct drive design, but some do include a gearbox, which means a smaller permanent magnet generator can be used to produce the same level of power. For Vestas, a leading offshore wind turbine manufacturer, gearboxes result in five to 10 times less rare earths used per megawatt of power produced, spokesperson Claes Cunliffe told Grist in an email. In recent turbine models, Cunliffe said, the company is also phasing out the use of the heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium. China controls nearly 100 percent of the processing of heavy rare earths, which are often mined in dismal conditions. Siemens Gamesa also plans to phase out the use of heavy rare earths, although it hasn’t set a target date.

GE, meanwhile, is doing early-stage research on superconducting generators that eliminate the use of rare earths entirely. Derby of the DOE, which is funding this research, says that the company is in the process of designing and building a 17-megawatt superconducting generator that should be ready for field-testing within the next few years.

The DOE also recently launched a wind turbine recycling competition that will award cash prizes to groups with innovative new ideas for how to recycle both wind turbine blades and rare earth magnets. Commercial-scale recycling options don’t yet exist for wind turbine magnets. But eventually, recycling could meet a significant fraction of the industry’s demand, offering a more sustainable alternative to mining.

“This is a great moment for the U.S. to come in with more environmentally sustainable production,” said Diana Bauer, deputy director of the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office at the DOE. “We should seize the opportunity.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Offshore wind turbines need rare earth metals. Will there be enough to go around? on Oct 6, 2023.

As Arizona struggles to adapt to a water shortage that has dried out farms and scuttled development plans, one company has emerged as a central villain. The agricultural company Fondomonte, which is owned by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate, has attracted tremendous criticism over the past several years for sucking up the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa and then exporting that alfalfa to feed cows overseas.

Governor Katie Hobbs responded to those calls for action on Monday when she canceled one of Fondomonte’s four leases in the state’s rural Butler Valley and pledged not to renew the other leases when they expire next year. Hobbs, a Democrat who took office earlier this year, said in a statement about the decision that the company “was operating in clear default” of its lease and had violated state laws around hazardous waste. She also pledged to “hold defaulting, high-volume water users accountable” and “protect Arizona’s water so we can sustainably grow for generations to come.”

That will require Hobbs to tackle a problem that is larger than just one company. Agriculture accounts for around three-quarters of Arizona’s water use, and alfalfa is one of the most water-intensive crops in the West. The state may have managed to fend off one egregious company, but fixing the region’s overall water deficit will involve much harder political and economic choices.

“I think the governor was looking for a reason to cancel these leases,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy and an architect of the state’s landmark 1980 groundwater law. “But the bigger problem is unregulated use of groundwater in rural areas of the state. That’s the big elephant in the room — we are just not addressing this use of groundwater, and it’s finite.”

Fondomonte’s aggressive water use in Butler Valley has drawn attention to Arizona’s lax groundwater regulations and the high water demand of crops like alfalfa. The state has set limits on groundwater pumping around population centers like Phoenix and Tucson, but companies in rural areas can still pump as much as they want with no restrictions, even if that means sucking water away from neighboring homes and businesses. 

To make matters worse, the Saudi-owned company operates on a section of state-owned land in a valley northwest of Phoenix, and it pays just $76,000 per year to lease that land from the state. In most parts of Arizona, it’s illegal to move water from one basin to another, but state lawmakers had marked the Butler Valley in the 1980s as one of two places that might someday send water to thirsty Phoenix. (Saudi Arabia outlawed the production of alfalfa and other crops in 2018 amid a severe water shortage in the country.)

Fondomonte has said it will appeal Hobbs’ decision, but even if Arizona succeeds in forcing out the company, the state will still have a big alfalfa problem. The hay plant is one of the most water-intensive crops in the United States, requiring about five acre-feet of water per acre each year. An acre-foot of water is equivalent to 326,000 gallons, or enough water to supply two average homes for about a year. Fondomonte told the state government in a letter in February that it grows about 7,000 acres of alfalfa in Arizona.

Producing the crop was a big business in Arizona before the Saudis arrived around a decade ago, in large part because the state’s warm climate allows farmers to achieve much bigger yields than they do in other parts of the country. The state produced more than 2 million tons of alfalfa in 2021, or about 8.2 tons for every acre planted. That’s much more than the national average of 3.2 tons per acre. Fondomonte’s production accounted for a small part of that: In its February letter, a company official said the firm produced only 70,000 tons of the crop every year, or 2.5 percent of the state’s overall output.

Tackling the larger water footprint will be far more difficult. Fondomonte was operating on state land that it had acquired at cut-rate prices, but most of the state’s alfalfa production takes place on private land. That’s the case in Cochise County, on the state’s southeast edge, where rural residents have lost out on well water since corporate giant Riverview Dairy started growing alfalfa in the area. Other foreign nations have also gotten in on the business: A United Arab Emirates-based company called Al Dahra grows and exports alfalfa in La Paz County, with support from the state’s own pension fund. Fondomonte itself has other operations on private land in Vicksburg, near Butler Valley.

“We have a church that’s just up the road from them in Vicksburg, and they haven’t had water for three years,” said Holly Irwin, a member of the La Paz County Board of Supervisors who has fought Fondomonte. She praised Hobbs for canceling the lease, but worried that the state could lease the same acreage to another company that might take over the farm.

“Moving forwards, they’re going to have to evaluate how things are done, and maybe restrict the amount of water that comes out of each well,” she said.

Foreign corporations aren’t the only ones responsible for Arizona’s groundwater shortage, though. The state exported around 22 percent of its alfalfa crop last year, up from almost none in 2011, but the vast majority of its crop still goes to feed dairy cows within the state or in other parts of the West. Moreover, most of the state’s largest groundwater pumpers, such as Riverview and Peacock Nuts, a massive nut farm operation in the western part of the state, are owned and based in the U.S. Without action from lawmakers, Hobbs can’t do anything about this overdraft on private land, even though these companies may be taking just as much water as Fondomonte.

“Our concern is that one of the things that the governor mentioned in her press release was the idea that the water use was one of the determining factors in canceling those leases,” said Philip Bashaw, the CEO of the Arizona Farm Bureau, which advocates for the state’s farmers. “We are concerned about the precedent this might set for other agricultural leases on state land.” The state leases about 150,000 acres of its trust lands for agriculture, or 1.6 percent of its total acreage.

In a statement to Grist, Fondomonte said the company hadn’t broken the terms of its state lease and vowed to appeal Hobbs’s decision. A spokesperson said the company “remains committed to progressive, efficient agricultural practices on all operations.” 

In some cases, locals have fought back against thirsty corporations, but progress has been difficult. Residents of Cochise County voted last year to impose new water restrictions in one overtapped groundwater basin, but the basin’s largest dairy and nut farms would be grandfathered in under the new rules, and they won’t have to slow down their pumping. Another referendum in a nearby basin failed after organizations backed by Riverview mounted a lobbying campaign to oppose it.

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There aren’t any other takers right now for the water in Butler Valley, but alfalfa’s water demand presents an acute problem in the state’s population center of Maricopa County, which in 2017 produced around 30 percent more alfalfa than La Paz County, where Fondomonte operates, according to USDA statistics. Farms in the Phoenix area have been draining groundwater for decades to grow alfalfa and other crops, and until the turn of the 21st century they used more water than the county’s 4 million residents did. That’s despite the fact that Phoenix has far stricter groundwater regulations than rural areas like Butler Valley. 

It’s not only Arizona that has embraced the crop. California, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah all boast alfalfa farms that stretch across thousands of acres, and the crop has guzzled up plenty of water in these states, too. According to one estimate, alfalfa and other silage crops account for as much as 55 percent of water usage in the Colorado River basin, and more than half the water usage in Utah, the nation’s second-driest state. 

The reason for this is simple: Alfalfa is a lucrative business. The hay product fetched about $320 per ton in 2022, up from $210 the year before, making it more lucrative than other large-scale crops like wheat. It provides nutritious and healthy feed for cattle and dairy cows, which means there’s significant demand for it both in the United States and overseas in places like Saudi Arabia.

“The vast majority of the alfalfa that’s grown in Arizona is grown to support our local agriculture industry, which is there to support the urban areas,” said Bashaw, adding that the hay feeds cows that produce goods like milk, cheese, and beef, and that more than 70 percent of those goods are sold within the state. “Alfalfa is a really critical part of being able to source dairy products locally for a large metropolitan area.”

For as long as companies can harvest ample water from underground aquifers, or from the Colorado River, they’re likely to keep growing it wherever they can, and water sources across the region will keep dwindling.

“The longer this goes on, the bigger the problem,” Ferris told Grist, “because the more land that gets put into cultivation, the harder it is to do anything to control the depletion. As long as farmers have the ability to pump water, they grow what they think is the most valuable crop.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Arizona is evicting a Saudi alfalfa farm, but the thirsty crop isn’t going anywhere on Oct 6, 2023.