microwave
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Can you put plastic in the microwave?
Experts say no, even if it claims to be “microwave-safe.”
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Kitchen appliance could make solar panels easier to recycle
Microwaves could process silicon solar cells using less time and energy than high-temperature furnaces, making panels easier to disassemble and recycle.
2 gonzo ideas for slowing down a hurricane that might actually work.
Scientists are looking into ways to weaken hurricanes early on.
Hurricane Maria rampaged through Puerto Rico last week, leaving behind an ongoing humanitarian crisis for the island’s 3.4 million residents who are struggling without electricity and clean water.
With so much devastation, one may wonder whether anything can be done to stop these storms in their tracks.
It’s quite a daunting challenge, given that the average hurricane’s wind energy equals about half of the world’s electricity production in a year. The energy it releases as it forms clouds is 200 times the world’s annual electricity use.
The heat energy of a fully formed hurricane is “equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes,” as NOAA meteorologist Chris Landsea has explained.
And these are typical hurricanes, not extraordinarily intense ones like Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Maria.
There’s really not much anyone can do once hurricanes like these spool up. Scientists have tried and failed to stop full-on hurricanes in their tracks.
But rising sea levels and increasing average temperatures due to climate change are further expanding the destructive reach of these storms. And with an eye to the potential to save lives and avoid billions of dollars in damage, some engineers and entrepreneurs, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, are studying ways to dial back destruction from a hurricane.
Much of the research is focused on manipulating temperature, moisture, and wind to steer when and where these storms will occur. It involves geoengineering with giant tubes and aerosols. And it’s pretty intriguing — if still quite preliminary.
Scientists have tried to stop hurricanes — and failed miserably
Weather modification has a long, sordid history and hurricanes have inspired some of the more far-fetched proposals, from bombarding cyclones with sonic booms from aircraft to beaming down microwaves from space into nascent storms.
In one of the most infamous attempts to slay a hurricane, Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir led a US military experiment in 1947 to seed Hurricane King with ice in hopes of sapping its vigor. The storm at the time was sliding away from the United States and losing strength.
In an excerpt in the Atlantic from his book Caesar’s Last Breath, author Sam Kean explained Langmuir’s idea: Growing ice in the eye of the hurricane would make the eye grow wider and collapse the storm. But Hurricane King didn’t respond as expected. “To everyone’s horror, it then pivoted—taking an impossible 135-degree turn—and began racing into Savannah, Georgia, causing $3 million in damage ($32 million today) and killing one person,” Kean writes.
Other meteorologists at the time were skeptical that Langmuir’s experiment made the storm change course.
US scientists continued to study seeding clouds inside hurricanes as late as 1983 under Project STORMFURY. But they concluded, according to NOAA, that “cloud seeding had little prospect of success because hurricanes contained too much natural ice and too little supercooled water.”
The remaining tactics for fighting hurricanes require weakening them before they start by deliberately cooling seas and brightening clouds when storms are brewing, robbing them of the fuel for their destruction.
Stephen Salter, an emeritus professor of engineering design at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, has studied how to harness wave energy since the 1970s, and in 2003 began looking into using this energy to cool the seas.
A less-crazy but still far-out idea: cooling the seas with a giant tube
For ocean temperatures, the magic number for hurricane formation is 26.5 degrees Celsius (or 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit). So what if you could nudge that number down early on and reduce the risks and intensities of ensuing storms?
That was what Salter set out to do.
To cool the surface of the ocean, Salter invented a wave-powered pump that would move warm surface water down to depths as far as about 650 feet.
Made from a ring of tires lashed together around a tube extending below the surface, waves would overtop the ring, pushing the column of water down, while a check valve in the tube would keep it from flowing back.
Salter’s namesake device, the Salter Sink, was invented in 2009 at Intellectual Ventures, a technology firm led by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold.
(Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also filed for a patent in 2009 to cool the ocean’s surface with barges to fight hurricanes.)
The idea is that hundreds of thousands of these devices in hurricane-prone regions of the world would cool waters enough to make a measurable reduction in the strength of storms.
Another promising scheme: making clouds a tiny bit brighter
Salter’s other tactic for fighting hurricanes is making clouds a tiny bit brighter using aerosols, harnessing a phenomenon called the Twomey effect.
This is the observation that for clouds containing the same amount of moisture, the clouds with smaller suspended water droplets reflect more sunlight.
The increased sunlight reflectance in the sky would keep the waters below from warming up to the hurricane threshold while also curbing evaporation, thereby reducing the atmospheric moisture needed to make a storm.
“If you really want to stop hurricanes, I believe that cloud brightening is the better way to do it,” Salter said. Cloud brightening yields a much greater impact on the weather for a much smaller perturbation than directly cooling the ocean, he explained.
Salter envisions unmanned boats spraying sub-micron-sized water droplets into the sky, seeding shinier clouds in areas forecasted to spawn storms.
This would be much cheaper than spraying aerosols from aircraft, the boats could target specific regions, the effects would dissipate quickly and the change in cloud brightness would be imperceptible to the human eye.
He estimated that it would cost $40 million to construct a prototype cloud seeding system but has not been able to find any public or private takers.
“At the moment, the governments are saying its premature, we don't need it yet,” he added. “Irma might change their minds.”
However, Salter acknowledged the prospect of cloud brightening is just an idea at this point. “Most of the work is done in computers,” he said.
One reason diffusing a hurricane is so hard: conditions have to be perfect and they’re often not
For those that have tried out weakening the ingredients of hurricanes in the real world, the results have been disappointing.
Atmocean, a company developing ways to harness energy from ocean waves, looked into making devices to cool the surface of the ocean after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Unlike Salter’s device, Atmocean’s approach used a contraption to instead bring cooler water from the depths up to the surface.
The test devices proved successful, but only under ideal wave, temperature, and geographic conditions.
“The physics of it work if the conditions are right,” said Atmocean CEO Philip Kithil. “You can in fact reduce the upper ocean [temperature] by a degree Celsius, maybe 2, which would have a measurable effect on the intensity of the hurricane, but the practical concerns were hard to overcome.”
The wave pumps have to be right in the path of a developing hurricane, and they require cool water to be at an accessible depth, which isn’t always the case. It definitely wasn’t the case in late August when Hurricane Harvey barreled through the Gulf of Mexico toward Texas.
“Harvey passed through an area where there was warm water all the way down to the bottom of the ocean,” Kithil said. “If there is no cold water, you can’t change anything.”
According to a study the company conducted looking back at Katrina, they found that they would need to deploy 100,000 pumps over just two days at a cost of $1,000 each, leading to a price tag topping $1 billion to mitigate the effects of the storm.
At those prices, planners have to consider whether that money would be better spent elsewhere, such as evacuations or shoreline hardening, and neither insurance companies nor governments were willing to investigate further.
Reinsurance firm Swiss Re estimated that Katrina led to $80 billion in insured losses.
Kithil noted that the company also had a hard time finding buyers for their devices. “The insurance industry was not willing to invest, since it was too early stage, too hypothetical,” he said. “And governments are not that proactive.”
Atmocean bowed out of the weather modification business in 2007 and has since pivoted toward using wave energy to drive desalination and onshore aquaculture.
Some hurricane researchers are skeptical these schemes will ever work
At the same time, hurricane researchers have grown weary of responding to proposals to slow storms and most remain skeptical that any tactic could be deployed in large enough numbers to have an effect on giant cyclones.
“As a general comment they show a lack of appreciation for the physical scale of hurricanes and simple ignorance of how they work,” wrote Hugh Willoughby, a hurricane researcher at Florida International University, in an email.
Mark Bourassa, associate director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, echoed the skepticism about scale.
“For sea surface temperature change, you would have to do it over a very large area and you would have to do it quickly,” he said.
These ideas might be useful thought experiments to better understand the makings of hurricanes, but Bourassa noted that there always concerns about unintended consequences, especially about deploying these tactics at scale.
Scientists already have a hard-enough time recognizing hurricane progenitors and figuring out where the storms will go once they’re spinning, so adding artificially brighter clouds and cooler waters to the mix could prove dangerous.
“I’d be really nervous about trying them,” he said.
For now, computer models are the only place to deploy hurricane mitigation tactics, but that hasn’t deterred Salter, who despite his retirement and lack of a patron says he’s “still working seven days a week on it.”
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Is climate-themed fiction all too real? We asked the experts.
Some works of apocalyptic fiction are starting to feel too close for comfort. We chose seven of them and asked: How likely are they to come true?
CLIMATE
Is Climate-Themed Fiction All Too Real? We Asked the Experts
By LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA SEPT. 26, 2017
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Credit Illustration by Jordin Isip
When extraordinary hurricanes and floods battered parts of the United States and Caribbean this month, Paolo Bacigalupi’s readers started sending him news clips. In “Ship Breaker,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, Mr. Bacigalupi, a science fiction writer, had invented a monster “Category 6” hurricane.
Now, his readers were asking: Is this what you were talking about?
Climate change presents a peculiar challenge to novelists; it often seems to simmer without a singular moment of crisis. So fiction writers like Mr. Bacigalupi hurtle current science into drought-ravaged, flooded, starved, sunken and sandy futures. Climate-themed fiction, like most science fiction, is extension, not invention.
But as scientists’ projections about the effects of climate change have increasingly become reality, some works of apocalyptic fiction have begun to seem all too plausible. We chose seven climate-themed stories and asked the experts: How likely are they to come true?
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CLIMATE EFFECT: WATER WARS
‘The Water Knife’
by Paolo Bacigalupi
In his fifth climate-related book, published in 2015, Mr. Bacigalupi asks: What would happen if drought became the “new normal” in the American Southwest? His answer: Refugees, apocalyptic cults and drug dealers roam a land where water is controlled by thugs.
“What if our underlying prosperity is ripped out from underneath us?” Mr. Bacigalupi said. “If you put those questions in people’s mind, it changes how they look at their daily life.”
Leon Szeptycki, an attorney and professor specializing in water rights at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, described the book as fictional extension. “Climate change will cause a lot of social and economic disruption in the American Southwest, but not at the level the author envisions,” he said.
Eighty to 90 percent of water in the Southwest is used for agriculture, so rural communities would be hit first by shortages, Mr. Szeptycki said. “Available water will shift to cities,” he said. “There will be less water, less food, fewer jobs.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DESERTIFICATION
‘Gold Fame Citrus’
by Claire Vaye Watkins
Claire Vaye Watkins’s 2016 novel, her first, imagines drought differently. Sand has swallowed California; now it’s known as the Amargosa Dune Sea. Nothing grows in the lawless desert, but a wandering dowser claims that new species — a diurnal owl, carnivorous plants and albino hummingbirds — have emerged through a “super-speed evolutionary time warp.”
“Absolutely, climate change can accelerate evolution,” said Jeffrey Townsend, a professor of evolutionary biology at Yale. Humans have set off many evolutionary changes, like when insects have adapted to pesticides or when the peppered moth lost its spots to more closely resemble industrial soot. Plants becoming meat eaters would be more of a stretch, Dr. Townsend said.
The novel is “not an unreasonable fictional depiction” of drought, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system science at Stanford. California already has a “new climate,” he added. Anthropogenic warming has increased the state’s drought risk, but permanent rainlessness remains unlikely.
“That’s probably where the scientific literature and the novel diverge,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said. “Humans are able to probe these issues in ways that are different through the lens of fiction.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: SPECIES EXTINCTION
‘Flight Behavior’
by Barbara Kingsolver
The central character in Barbara Kingsolver’s 2015 novel doesn’t believe in climate change until she has a “vision of glory” — a colony of monarch butterflies from Mexico appears in southern Appalachia, disoriented by warming temperatures.
“I think it could happen, but pretty far into the distant future when global warming really has an effect further north,” said Lincoln Brower, a research professor of biology at Sweet Briar College, whom Ms. Kingsolver consulted while writing the book.
Dr. Brower, who has been studying the death of monarch butterflies for six decades, said their numbers were already “way down” because of a combination of pesticide use, logging and the impacts of climate change. But he guessed it would take about half a century before temperatures in Appalachia rose enough to accommodate the butterflies during their winter migration.
“It’s hard to know what’s going to happen,” Dr. Brower said, “but I don’t think it will be good.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DISRUPTED FOOD CHAIN
‘The History of Bees’
by Maja Lunde
China, 2098: Tao is up a tree, hand-pollinating its blossoms with a tiny brush. The bees are long since gone. Maja Lunde’s first book, published in 2017, chronicles three generations as they exploit, try to save and eventually mimic bees, whose extinction has become a familiar device in climate-themed fiction.
“It’s a crazy idea, and it’s being done,” said Jeremy Kerr, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Ottawa, describing the hand-pollinators of Hanyuan County in China’s Sichuan Province.
Pollinators like bees (and birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, beetles, bats and mosquitoes) are crucial to the food chain because they move pollen between fruit, vegetables and nuts. Plants that depend on pollination are 35 percent of global crop production. While Colony Collapse Disorder — previously believed to pose a major threat to all bees — has declined substantially in recent years, Dr. Kerr said it was conceivable that five or six “keystone” species, which pollinate crops like canola, tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries, could be lost, in part because of global warming.
But hand-pollination? “The question of whether you could do something like that on a planetary scale,” Dr. Kerr said, “Holy moly, if that’s where we got to, I think other things would probably kill us first.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: REFUGEES
‘Borne’
by Jeff VanderMeer
In Jeff VanderMeer’s 2017 novel, rising waters force a child named Rachel to flee her island home, so she moves “from camp to camp, country to country,” hoping that she “could outrun the unraveling of the world.” Later, in a nameless ruined city, the 28-year-old Rachel befriends an amorphous creature, Borne, who smells like brine and reminds her of the sea animals of her childhood.
Extreme weather events uproot 21.5 million people each year, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and climate change is expected to increase that number. But there is no internationally accepted legal status for people who have been displaced by the impacts of climate change.
“What would be fair,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, “would be for each of the major emitting countries to accept a portion of the world’s climate-displaced people proportional to its historic contribution” of greenhouse gases.
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CLIMATE EFFECT: DROWNED CITIES
‘New York: 2140’
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Veering from the dystopic futures common to climate-themed fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 book is what the author calls a “comedy of coping,” set in a Venetian-like half-submerged New York City. Seas have risen 50 feet, making lower Manhattan a low-rent “intertidal” zone; water washes up to 46th Street every 12 hours. New Yorkers commute not by subway, but by vaporetto.
While multi-meter sea level rise in New York City is realistic, the timescale is not, said Benjamin Horton, a professor at Rutgers who focuses on sea level change. He said that current modeling predicted extreme flooding of New York City by around 2300, but that the city would likely protect itself from rising waters with sea walls and other infrastructure.
Mr. Robinson said he had chosen the year 2140 to balance scientific predictions with a plot that could incorporate a transformed economic system.
“Climate change is basically a capitalist catastrophe,” he said. “We have to create post-capitalism to deal with climate change.”
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CLIMATE EFFECT: ADAPTATION
‘The Machine Stops’
by E. M. Forster
Forster’s eerily prescient novella imagines a world where life on earth’s surface — besides ferns and “a little grass” — has become impossible. Humans live underground, where they communicate via glowing blue-lit plates and eat, drink and sleep to the rhythm of the eternally humming “Machine.”
Written in 1909 — just over a decade after the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested anthropogenic emissions could change the climate — “The Machine Stops” prophetically described something like the internet. But it was far off in imagining how we would adapt to climate change, said Jonathan Foley, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences.
“The idea that we could have self-sufficient civilization underground basically requires we replace the sun,” Dr. Foley said. “And any technology that’s capable of doing that — whether it be fusion, or some kind of magical technology — would have to be so powerful that I’d ask: Why didn’t we solve the climate problem first?”
Dr. Foley said the novel’s ideas weren’t that far from the science-fiction-like discussions he heard coming from Silicon Valley, where vertical gardens, orbiting microwave transmitters or machines that harvest carbon are touted as silver bullets for climate change. “The actual solutions are far simpler,” he said. “But they’re not as sexy. Like, hey: What if we threw less food away, or we ate less meat?”
Dr. Foley said that if he ever wrote a novel, it would be one in which “we all do the slow, hard muddling work of just pitching in, but no hero rides in on a spaceship to save us all.” It would be a terrible novel, he admitted. “No one would buy it, and Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie, but it’s the one I want, and it would surely save the world.”
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What could we lose if a NASA mission goes dark?
Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts.
What Could We Lose if a NASA Mission Goes Dark?
Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts.
By JON GERTNERSEPT. 12, 2017
In late August, as Hurricane Harvey began smashing into the Texas coast, a flood of data began pouring in along with the catastrophic quantities of rainwater. It wasn’t from the nonstop news coverage on CNN and elsewhere; it was from the transmissions that lay behind it, in the pulses of information coming down from space. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites, crucial tools for monitoring big storms in the Gulf of Mexico, were capturing cloud formations, surface temperatures and barometric pressures, which were then fed into computer models tracking the storm’s strength and intensity. At the same time, NASA was using a group of satellites to keep tabs on soil moisture, flood patterns and power failures all over East Texas. In various ways, this torrent of data was being collected continuously from hundreds (or even thousands) of miles overhead, through radar instruments and spectroradiometer sensors and exquisitely calibrated imaging cameras. The machines being used aren’t household names — they go by acronyms like GOES-13, Modis and SMAP — but they demonstrate why the popular view of Earth as a big blue planet with only the Moon as its companion could do with some revising. We are also surrounded by a constellation of satellites spinning elliptical webs of environmental observation, day and night.
This array of American satellites, comprising dozens of NOAA and NASA missions, is the product of some 40 years of experimentation and investment on the part of the federal government. They’re joined in their orbit by weather and climate satellites from scientific agencies in Europe and Asia, along with a host of satellite-borne sensors from both the private sector and the military, that measure everything from air pollution to land development to agriculture. Without question, we’re living at the start of a dark era of warming climates. But we’re also living in a golden age of environmental data, in which our technology in space can deliver surprising measurements with profound implications. After a big hurricane like Harvey or Irma dumps extraordinary amounts of water on a region, for instance, a pair of NASA satellites known as Grace, which is short for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, is able to assess how much water floods in and how it dissipates as the storm recedes. This has been merely one of their functions. Grace’s two spacecraft have been circling Earth every 90 minutes for the past 15 years at an altitude of 300 miles or so. On a dark, clear night, you can sometimes look up and see them for a brief moment: two bright, blurry dots, rushing by at a velocity of about 17,200 miles per hour. They chase each other around the sky, one pursuing the other like cat and mouse (hence their nicknames, Tom and Jerry). By monitoring how their positions in space are affected by gravity, the scientists at NASA can draw a number of conclusions about what’s happening on Earth, especially to our freshwater resources.
Yet Grace also illustrates how tenuous the golden age of data really is. The two craft, which were launched in 2002, were originally expected to orbit the planet for five years. They are now dying, and in fact the batteries on one of the satellites are so depleted that it periodically goes to sleep. Since 2010, NASA has been planning and building replacements, and if all goes well, they will be in orbit early next year. But if Grace goes dark or perishes before then, there will be a break in NASA’s continuous observation of Earth’s gravity field and water dynamics. Climate researchers will be confronted with what’s known as a “data gap,” which can leave them at a loss for drawing scientific conclusions about environmental trends.
This sort of gap has threatened to become a more common problem in recent months. The federal government’s entire climate-science enterprise, much of it linked to NASA’s satellite research, is under duress. The most prominent of the Trump administration’s related proposals was a request to cut 31 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget; later, pages featuring global-warming data were removed from E.P.A. websites. But the proposed reductions for NOAA and NASA were similarly drastic. The White House asked that NASA drop four climate-related missions in its Earth-sciences division, which accounts for about 10 percent of NASA’s $19 billion annual budget. It also unveiled a plan to cut 18 percent from NOAA’s annual spending on satellites, which would force a huge reduction in the agency’s climate work.
At this point, an ax has been sharpened but not yet swung. In the coming weeks, as the 2018 budget is debated in Congress, the two chambers will try to work out a deal. If the House gets its way — it has mostly endorsed the White House plan and calls for reducing NASA’s Earth-sciences budget by $217 million, while the Senate has proposed restoring the cuts — missions will most likely be scuttled and holes will open in the data-collection records. Even if our science agencies avoid the worst, however, the Trump administration’s intent to slash funding on technology that helps make planetary surveys possible — much of it obscure to the public — signals an embattled future for this type of research.
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The effects are hard to predict. Most of our climatic and meteorological information shares a common origin, even when it seems to come from the Weather Channel or CNN. “The monitoring of the atmosphere, of the surface of the Earth, of what’s going on in the ocean and under the ice — all of that is overwhelmingly funded by the federal government,” John Holdren, President Obama’s chief science adviser and a Harvard professor of environmental science and policy, told me recently. While some of this information is made familiar to us — the unending stream of satellite images on TV as Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston — some of it is experimental and unknown outside scientific circles. That sort of data comes from missions like Grace, funded in the belief that a risky idea might turn up something valuable for human understanding or even, in the case of climate change, for human survival.
Every satellite has its own story, and Grace’s begins in the summer of 1969 at a NASA-sponsored conference in Williamstown, Mass. The scientists convened there to discuss how a variety of new technological tools and sensors might allow them to gain a better understanding of our planet. Several recommendations emerged from the gathering, among them the suggestion that the agency launch satellites to measure sea levels, monitor changes in Earth’s crust and analyze the planet’s gravity.
The reason for wanting precise gravity measurements was practical as well as scientific. The gravitational pull on an object can be greater where Earth’s mass is denser — above mountain ranges like the Rockies or Alps, say, or over vast ice sheets like Antarctica’s. The resulting variations in gravity have subtle but important effects on the paths of ballistic missiles, for example, which the Defense Department cares deeply about. “You want to be able to predict where they’re going to fly and exactly where they’re going,” Mike Watkins, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the original project scientist on Grace, told me. Starting in the 1970s, Watkins said, oceanographers were also trying to map the surface of the ocean, an effort complicated by the fact that the gravitational effects of features far beneath the surface — like deep trenches, submerged mountain ranges and lost continents that slid under Earth’s crust billions of years ago — are constantly distorting the sea level above.
By the time of the Williamstown conference, satellite observations of Earth, which were beginning to be referred to as “remote sensing,” seemed enormously promising. Researchers and mapmakers had been collecting aerial images since the 1840s, usually from balloons, but remote sensing advanced drastically using cameras on aircraft during World Wars I and II, and then later still on U-2 planes that began conducting detailed military surveys in the late 1950s. In the 1960s, NASA and other government agencies started launching Earth-orbiting satellites to study weather patterns, ocean circulation and agriculture. By the late 1970s, some of them, with names like Landsat and Seasat, carried sophisticated microwave and laser instruments and imaging equipment.
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Engineers adding a solar panel to one of the twin satellites known as Grace-FO. Credit Thomas Struth for The New York Times
A few of these satellites fulfilled the recommendations laid out at Williamstown. Subsequent missions took their cue from an expanded vision for Earth observations put forward by NASA administrators in the 1980s. One of their reports presciently urged that scientists focus on how human activity was warming the planet, noting that “the burning of oil and coal is injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at unprecedented and accelerating rates.” Eventually, the NASA directives of the 1980s led to a number of satellites that were deployed in the 1990s and early 2000s, like Aqua, Terra, Aura and ICESat. Some of these missions are still orbiting and considered vital to Earth observations. Byron Tapley, the director of the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that during this era he worked on various NASA satellite efforts that would have measured Earth’s gravity field, but none of them made it to launch. That changed with the proposal for Grace, which was written in large part by Tapley’s former student from Austin, Mike Watkins, who had gone to work at J.P.L. NASA gave the go-ahead in 1997. “That was the last piece of the puzzle from Williamstown,” said Tapley, who was named the principal investigator — in effect, the research leader — of the project.
The goal for Grace was to produce an unprecedentedly accurate reading of Earth’s gravity field. But early on, Watkins began to think that its two craft could also register details on what’s known as variable gravity, which mostly depends on the way water moves around the world under the influence of seasonal changes, droughts and other climate factors. Where there’s more water in one place, there’s more gravitational pull; where there’s less water, there’s less pull. A good illustration of the satellite’s promise had to do with the problem of measuring variation in the world’s great ice caps. When the first Grace satellite approached, say, the Greenland ice sheet, which weighs about three quadrillion tons, the craft would presumably respond to the subtle gravitational tug and be pulled slightly forward and away from its trailing partner. The distance between them — 137 miles or so — might increase by less than a human hair. But because the twin spacecraft were in constant contact with each other through a microwave communication link, that change could still be measured precisely. And it could be measured over and over again, month after month, year after year. If the ice on Greenland kept pouring into the ocean, scientists could convert that remote measurement into a calculation of ice loss. In this respect, Grace would be unlike so many other satellites: It wouldn’t render beautiful images of our planet from space. Its movement — or more exactly, its change in movement from one month to the next — would itself create the measurement.
In the mid-1990s, Watkins and his colleagues started to do detailed simulations. “We wondered: How much can we measure changes in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets? How well can we measure aquifer changes in groundwater? And we started to realize that this was the thing that was really going to break the mission wide open.” The proposal he wrote expressed confidence that they could get a measurement for the planet’s gravity field, but as Watkins recalled, it also hinted, “Here’s this other supercool thing we can do.”
Grace was authorized during an era at NASA, the late 1990s, when some science missions were approved on the condition that they satisfy an agency directive to be “faster, better, cheaper.” The joke at NASA at the time was that you get only two out of the three. What ultimately made Grace possible was a cost-sharing partnership struck between American scientists and the German Research Center for Geosciences and the German space agency. The German contribution was to pay for a launch vehicle and conduct the mission operations. “We worked with a German company that’s now part of Airbus on the design of the satellite, and J.P.L. did most of the instrumentation,” Watkins explained. By the time of the launch, the cost amounted to $97 million for NASA and about $30 million for Germany.
The German team secured a Russian rocket, and Grace was sent into space from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a launchpad about 500 miles north of Moscow, on March 17, 2002. The two spacecraft — looking like oversize gold bars, each about the size of a small automobile — moved into orbit and, using onboard tanks of nitrogen for acceleration and positioning, eventually achieved the necessary 137 miles of separation. The satellites travel in a circumpolar orbit, meaning that instead of tracing the Equator they fly on a path that we might consider northerly, cruising over the poles. They soon began transmitting measurements several times per day, often to a ground station in Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean north of Norway. From there, the information was routed to the German science team, near Munich, and to the engineers at J.P.L. In those early days, as the raw data about gravity fields began coming back — data no one had ever really seen before — scientists didn’t immediately gape in wonder. Mostly they scratched their heads and tried to figure out what to make of it.
One lesson of publicly funded science is that Americans are not very good at predicting how useful it will be. It’s only later that we look back and see how the investments paid off. Some of the returns are economic; most of the crucial components of smartphones (not to mention the internet itself) began with publicly funded science, for instance. Investments in the collection of climate data fall into a similar category: They started as science projects, then gave us significant economic and social information — like insights into hurricanes and droughts. Among other things, satellite data about oceans has helped scientists create models to predict El Niño and La Niña patterns that wield considerable influence over the global climate. It has even helped predict shortfalls in Russian wheat harvests.
The “E” in Grace may stand for “experiment,” but the project produced useful data fairly quickly. Measuring the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets was a case in point. For most of the 20th century, one of the essential questions bedeviling glaciologists was how sea levels and coastlines could be affected by the fluctuations in the size of these ice caps. As a 1985 NASA report put it, “Despite 25 years of intensive fieldwork in Greenland and Antarctica, and the expenditure of billions of dollars, we are still unable to answer the most fundamental glaciological question: Are the polar ice sheets growing or shrinking?” In the 1990s, researchers tried various methods on the ground to record the height of the Greenland ice sheet from year to year to determine its loss or gain. But Grace promised a different, and previously impossible, kind of calculation.
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The satellite dispenser, which holds the craft during launch. Credit Thomas Struth for The New York Times
In 2006, Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr, both at the University of Colorado at Boulder, published two studies that interpreted the first few years of Grace data; their initial paper was about Antarctica’s loss of ice, while the second was about Greenland’s, which appeared to be losing at least 100 billion tons per year. Some scientists were awe-struck. “I remember reading their first paper, and I literally couldn’t believe it,” said Berrien Moore, a dean at the University of Oklahoma who has worked on NASA missions on and off for several decades. “A quantitative measure of a mass change from year to year? It was just unheard-of.” Velicogna, now a professor at the University of California at Irvine and a J.P.L. scientist, told me that the Grace measurements didn’t suddenly make field studies of individual glaciers less important — her data couldn’t tell scientists why the ice sheet was losing mass. But they allowed her to systematically account for drastic losses in places so far-flung that they were almost impossible for human beings to reach, like parts of Greenland and West Antarctica. What’s more, the measurements enabled glaciologists to look at the decline of massive mountain glaciers, like those in Central Asia, which are a critical resource for regional water supplies. As Velicogna noted, those glaciers “could mean the difference between life and death in those places.” They can also lead to profound geopolitical conflicts. Grace soon indicated that many were shrinking.
Similar changes began to be revealed in the world’s hidden aquifers. Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at J.P.L. who focuses on tracking changes in groundwater — water stored in underground aquifers around the world — worked as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1990s. Back then, a typical way to study aquifers was to monitor wells in the field. When Famiglietti was invited to meetings in Austin to hear about what Watkins and Tapley were planning, he told me: “I didn’t believe it would work. They were all talking about how we’re going to be able to see groundwater. I thought, these guys are nuts.” As the data began coming in, however, Famiglietti found that Grace could measure groundwater with astounding effectiveness. He came up with a nickname for Grace — “the scale in the sky” — and began tracking California’s water supplies during what eventually became a decade of unrelenting drought.
One of Grace’s shortcomings is its limited resolution: It can map increases and losses in only large aquifers. Still, Famiglietti told me that from 2011 to 2015, California lost so much water every year — trillions of gallons — that it showed up clearly in the Grace measurements. About two-thirds of the losses appeared to be groundwater. He also noted that the satellites were able to capture a freshwater predicament bigger than California’s. Before Grace, Famiglietti said, most of our knowledge about underground water reserves was a hodgepodge. “What Grace added was a regional, global understanding — like, holy crap, this is happening all over the world.” In 2015, Famiglietti’s team used Grace to determine that more than half of the world’s largest aquifers were “past sustainability tipping points.” They were being depleted significantly faster than they were being replenished. The Arabian Aquifer System, on which 60 million people rely, appeared severely overstressed; so did water reserves in northwestern India and northern Africa.
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Beyond showing declines in the world’s ice sheets and aquifers, Grace clarified the factors influencing the rise in sea levels. In the early 1990s, NASA began putting a succession of Earth satellites into orbit, the most recent being NOAA’s Jason-3, that use a tool called a radar altimeter to measure the ocean’s surface, which has been rising by an eighth of an inch per year since 1993. But in a warming world, sea levels increase for two distinct reasons. The first is that the ocean expands as it gains heat: It just gets bigger. The second is that ice sheets and glaciers melt and break into the ocean. “With an altimetric measure like Jason,” Felix Landerer, a J.P.L. Earth scientist, told me, “you know the height change of the ocean, but you don’t know really what’s causing it.” How much is from heat expansion, in other words, and how much is because of the displacement caused by more ice? Grace, however, constantly weighs the oceans, which makes it possible to determine how much water is pouring into them from melting ice and other sources.
Landerer showed me a video he had just made from Grace data. It showed losses on the Greenland ice sheet from 2002 to 2016. A map of Greenland was white, and the areas with the biggest declines grew yellow and then dark brown and then black with each passing year. Since about 2008, the ice loss has totaled nearly 300 billion tons annually. To watch the progression was to see the entire southeast and southwest coasts of Greenland become increasingly dark over the course of a decade. The ice sheet looked like a piece of paper burning from the edges.
The goal of remote sensing, as Landerer’s map demonstrates, is not merely to measure unmeasured aspects of the planet. It’s to measure them nonstop, ideally for decades on end, so that long-term trends can be identified in a notoriously chaotic and variable natural world. This is why recent calls in Washington to defund some satellite missions rattled so many of the NASA scientists I spoke with. The end of a mission means the data stream will stop or pause, and a gap in the data makes it more difficult to infer whether the melting of an ice sheet or the loss of water from an aquifer is accelerating. Just as crucially, a gap can interrupt a long series of observations that allow researchers to understand future events. “From the perspective of Earth scientists,” Watkins told me, “you need to understand the system so that you can then model that system physically and make forecasts with some skill.” In the case of Grace, such observations could help predict the future of Greenland’s ice, as well as California’s water.
‘To really understand these processes requires more than any one nation can do, and the U.S. has really been the leader. And to say that other nations can pick up the slack is not really accurate.’
The administration’s exit from the Paris accords this year represents a public retreat from diplomatic engagement on climate change. But its budget priorities — seeking to minimize the need, as well as the means, for gathering climate information — suggest the start of a quieter but arguably more consequential shift: undercutting the very data and evidence that has helped bring urgency to the issue. This strategy has hardly been covert (“We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s budget director, said about climate change), yet the implications are almost certainly more significant than they appear, especially if they become law in a new federal budget. While there have always been policy debates about allocating taxpayer dollars to environmental research, according to Holdren, the fundamental reason we collect the data is because it has long been considered an apolitical “public good,” with a variety of benefits for the nation’s economy, public health and safety. Even the curiosity-driven forays at NASA — undertaken more in pursuit of scientific understanding than a desire to improve, say, storm or drought forecasting — seem to be gaining value in an era of disruptive climate-related events. “About a decade ago, NASA could have gone out and counted easily the users of all its data,” Bill Gail, an executive at the Global Weather Corporation, a forecasting-services company based in Boulder, Colo., told me. But now it’s used by a multitude of local planners, fishermen, agribusiness companies and shippers who want longer-term insights — even if they avoid calling it climate-change forecasting. Sometimes, Gail said, they prefer to call it “long-range weather prediction.”
In the event of a drastic scaling back of our Earth-sciences efforts, is it possible that other countries — China, Japan, India, the nations of Europe — would step up their satellite investments? “They’re a valuable complement,” Waleed Abdalati, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and former chief scientist at NASA, told me. “But to really understand these processes requires more than any one nation can do, and the U.S. has really been the leader. And to say that other nations can pick up the slack is not really accurate.” Stopgap solutions don’t look so promising, either. While Gov. Jerry Brown of California has vowed that his state would send up its own climate-research satellites, the logistics and financial costs — climate satellites now usually require half a billion dollars and a decade to plan, build and launch — would prove formidable, even if backed by California voters. Private-sector satellite companies have in recent years been expanding the business of collecting and selling Earth observational data, but it’s very unlikely that such firms (or a group of tech philanthropists) could adequately replace NASA’s work. “These are projects that are too expensive or require a large and diverse group of collaborators that can only be assembled as an international project,” said Rush Holt, a former Democratic congressman who is now the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Or this is work that has to be sustained for a longer period of time than any board of directors from a private company would consider, because it’s not clear enough that it would produce a return on investment in anyone’s lifetime.” That explains why the government’s involvement in basic research, going back at least to the late 1940s, was premised on the idea that it fills a role that would not be filled otherwise. As one scientist put it to me, If the government thinks a project is too long-term to make it worth funding, no other organization is going to pay for it either.
Grace, as one of those long missions, has enjoyed some good fortune: Its durability has exceeded expectations, and thanks to international partnerships it has almost certainly dodged contemporary political disruptions. What’s less fortunate, though, is Grace’s current death spiral. Over the past year, a soft-spoken engineer at J.P.L. named Rob Gaston has been focused on extending Grace’s life as long as possible. When I visited him at his office in the spring, he explained that the batteries were already failing and that the fuel, which made adjustments in orientation possible, was nearly exhausted. Another problem was its distance from Earth. “You don’t think about it,” he said, “but there’s actually atmosphere at that altitude, and even though it’s very thin, it does create some friction on a satellite. And it does cause the orbit to degrade.” Even if Grace’s depleted batteries allow it to function for the next few months, its physical demise is approaching; it will begin when the satellites fall to 186 miles in altitude. At the beginning of September, Gaston updated me: Grace was at 201 miles and dropping about 250 feet per day.
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A view from the bottom of one satellite, showing an undeployed antenna boom (center) and golden-colored thermal protection. Credit Thomas Struth for The New York Times
For almost a decade, the fear has been that Grace will die before a replacement mission could sustain its data stream. Tapley, the lead investigator, recalled that in 2010 his team settled on replicating Grace precisely rather than building a more sophisticated and expensive improvement. “We decided we want to get the follow-on as quick as we can,” he told me. “We don’t want to break the timeline. We’ll use a cookie-cutter approach. And let’s see if we can get the Germans to partner with us again.” In fact, the proposed model wasn’t called Grace-2 — that was the souped-up version — but Grace-FO, for Grace Follow-On. The team received a green light from NASA, and after striking a deal with several German science agencies, the design and contracting began in 2012. This time, though, the process would not be “better, faster cheaper” — not when it would require about $450 million from NASA and roughly $100 million from Germany.
It’s possible that some policy edict could curtail the planned satellite mission — the recent Trump budget proposal, for instance, made the unusual request of turning off the Earth sensors on an orbiting spacecraft, Dscovr, to save $1.2 million. To Tapley’s great relief, though, German engineers will maintain Grace’s operations (and the European Space Agency is now contributing financial support). He pointed out to me that his goal going back to the 1960s has been to create an instrument to measure Earth’s gravity as precisely, and for as long, as it could be measured; for him today, this means thinking beyond Grace-FO and ahead to the more advanced Grace-2, a project now being discussed. He did not think he would see it through, because he is 84, but he thought he could help it begin. “I am worried,” he told me. “Not so much worried about Grace-FO, because the satellites are built, and it isn’t NASA dollars that are launching it — it’s German.” And it would be a surprising thing if it failed to proceed, he said. “But I’m very worried about the future, both for NASA as a whole and the Earth sciences in particular.”
I asked Tapley what we wouldn’t know if Grace had never existed. “An awful lot,” he said. We wouldn’t have the same sense of how steadily the ice sheets are melting — “and we would have no clue how much of the sea-level rise is temperature-related and how much is coming from land ice.” We wouldn’t be able to interpret the losses of various mountain glaciers and the changes to aquifers in Texas and California. Above all, we would lack an enhanced sense of how Earth works, how its masses of water flow from land to ocean in ways never witnessed or understood before. All this has taken money, but also time. Indeed, it has taken Tapley’s entire life.
In early February I went to see the replacement satellites at an aerospace facility on the outskirts of Munich. The Grace-FO twins — each about 10 feet long and 3 feet high — were positioned next to each other, horizontally, under bright lights in a sealed white room the size of a high school gymnasium. Supporting racks held each spacecraft at shoulder height; each had its side panels open, exposing metallic innards: snaking tubes and wires covered in foil. The engineers hovering around gave the place the feel of a surgical theater. Frank Webb, Grace-FO’s project scientist, who works out of J.P.L., happened to be there. We were joined by Peter Gath, the project manager for the German team. Everyone wore long white coats and covers over shoes and hair. As we entered the clean room, Gath warned me, “Don’t touch anything.”
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The twin satellites at an aerospace facility on the outskirts of Munich. Credit Thomas Struth for The New York Times
You might think it would be easy to recreate a satellite you’ve already made before. But an engineering team tasked with designing and building a new spacecraft can’t easily replicate something that was constructed in a different technological era. Mike Gross, now the deputy project manager for Grace-FO, suggested it would be akin to building an iPhone 1 — but doing so in 2017. “You wouldn’t want to take parts for an iPhone 6 or 7 and try to rebuild an iPhone 1,” he said. “You’d want all the parts from an iPhone 1 to build it.” But the exact parts that went into making the iPhone 1 no longer exist. Nor do the parts that made up the original Grace. Old contractors are gone; old materials have been altered and improved.
The J.P.L. and German teams both began their work by consulting old blueprints. The new satellite models were to be assembled at an Airbus factory in Germany, with the manufacturing of parts and instruments contracted out to as many of the original suppliers as possible, in Denmark, France, Italy, Spain and the United States. The “cookie-cutter approach” that Tapley described made sense from a science perspective, because the most important thing about Grace-FO is to get the kind of data that Grace is now collecting. If you build a different spacecraft — one that’s bigger, or shaped a hairbreadth differently, or made from different materials — it could introduce all sorts of errors and complications. In short, the new spacecraft must function precisely as Grace does and look just like Grace. “But that’s where the rub came in,” explained Phil Morton, the project manager. The new satellite could not actually be Grace.
At the time of my visit, the satellites were essentially finished. Over the course of several months, they would be exposed to vacuum tests that simulated the airlessness and low temperatures of space and to vibration and acoustic tests that mimic the shaking and caterwaul of an actual launch. If all went according to plan, before the end of the year they would return to California and be installed within a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that would take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Los Angeles. The launch date, Webb said, would most likely be in early 2018.
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Listening to Webb walk me through the interior, part by part, the complexity and engineering seemed considerable. Communication links so the twins can talk with each other and with Earth. Accelerometers to measure forces felt by the satellites. Star cameras to point at the sky for orientation. There were computers, horn antennas and tanks for the nitrogen thrusters that would enable the spacecraft to swap places every few years to minimize wear and tear. There were heating pads to ensure that the interior would stay at a comfortable 68 degrees, even as the satellite’s outside panels chill in Earth’s shadow (to minus 75 degrees) and heat up in the sun’s glare (to 250 degrees). The list went on. “The original Grace satellites are not nearly as dense in electronics as these are,” Webb remarked, almost apologetically, adding that each craft had gained a few hundred pounds since the last version, largely because they now included a new, experimental laser system. The weight of each original satellite was about 1,000 pounds. “Now we’re at roughly 600 kilos,” Gath added, or just over 1,300 pounds.
The extra weight would not be a problem, he assured me, because the engineers had found ways to accommodate it. And before we left the room in Munich, Gath also let me know that while the satellites had been built separately, “they will stay together from now on.” I found this reassuring. It was as though the two spacecraft were the kind of close companions that would need each other’s support to endure a difficult set of circumstances, which in a sense they will. Whatever the larger fate of our climate research, if you assume a safe deployment for Grace-FO, the twins might circle Earth together for two billion miles or so, measuring the subtle gravitational tug of our water much as their predecessors have, until their orbits drop and drop and then drop so much that both burn up and vanish. And at that far-off point — assuming that there is still the will to spend the money and keep taking the measure of the planet — the whole process would begin again.
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Welcome to paradise: Batteries now included.
The power grid of the future will require sunny skies above and energy storage below. Thanks to Tesla, Kauai has both.
When people ask Luke Evslin why he decided to live off the grid, he starts with the time he almost died.
Evslin grew up on Kauai, a nub of a former volcano at the oldest end of the Hawaiian archipelago, but he was living on nearby Oahu at the time of the accident, working and competing in races with an outrigger canoe club.
The biggest race of the year is a daylong ocean crossing from the island of Moloka’i to Oahu’s Waikiki Beach, which can take between five and eight hours. Exhausted paddlers rotate out of the canoe during the race, jumping into the water to be scooped up by a waiting motorboat. During the first switch, Evslin was getting ready to heave himself into the canoe when the motorboat struck him.
The propellor sliced across his back in five places, severing muscle and bone along his spine and pelvis, each cut a potential death blow. His teammates pulled him out of the ocean and rushed him to shore. Judging from the looks on everyone’s faces, Evslin wasn’t sure he would survive the hour-long trip to land.
“I wasn’t scared to die,” he wrote a month later from his hospital bed, “but I was sad to die. I realized how much I love our beautiful world and everyone that is a part of it … and I was sad that I’d only just noticed.”
Soon after, still recovering from his wounds, “I made the terrible choice to read Walden Pond,” Evslin recalls. He came across these famous words from Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Evslin began dreaming of a self-sufficient life, in touch with nature and free of the careless consumption of modern society. He convinced his then-fiancee, Sokchea, to move to a rainy acre on his native Kauai, where they built an off-grid yurt powered by six solar panels and a bank of batteries.
They planned to use only their own energy, eat what they grew, and eliminate their carbon footprint. Luke even planted a few coffee trees, imagining he would keep up his caffeine habit guilt-free.
“I had this grand plan of being an example for people,” he says, “showing how easy it was going to be.”
He had good reason to think that. Bathed in Pacific sunlight year-round, Kauai has all the hallmarks of a renewable energy paradise. Others thought so, too. In 2008, the member-owned electricity cooperative set an ambitious goal to run the entire island on 50 percent renewable energy by 2023.
At the time, Kauai had no utility-scale solar at all. But by the final day of 2015, the island’s main power plant — a rusty sugar plantation-era diesel generator — shut down for the first time since firing up the 1960s. For a few hours in the middle of the afternoon, two large solar farms did the heavy lifting on the island of 65,000, and the diesel plant sat dormant.
It was a good omen. By the end of 2016, the utility was on track to hit its 50 percent renewable goal five years ahead of schedule.
This February, the co-op board voted to move the goalposts again: 70 percent renewable energy by 2030. It will probably clear that mark early, too.
But, as Evslin quickly learned, the path to a low-carbon future can be tougher than it seems. Even in Hawaii, the sun doesn’t always shine — and when it does, sometimes you end up with more power than you can use in the moment.
How to collect that solar energy, predict it, get it to the right places at the right time, save it up for a rainy day — those are the kind of challenges our massive, spread-out, and unevenly populated country faces as we make the switch to clean energy. It’s one of the reasons that Tesla is making a major investment on Kauai, hoping to get it right.
And it all comes down to a lesson that the Evslins learned the hard way: It’s not about getting off the grid. It’s about building a better one.
“I imagine that there will be a lot more failures than successes to report,” Luke Evslin wrote in the first post of a blog he started to document his life off the grid, on January 1, 2011. “But that’s the point of it.”
Evslin didn’t know just how much he would come to reconsider what counts as failure and what constitutes success. On a visit with the family this summer, I walk the property with Luke as he points out trees he had planted. He’s tailed by a handsome dog named Asher and a mismatched set of terrier mixes, Peanut and Pico. A calico cat appears and settles on the railing with a view of the yard, where ducks and wild chickens peck hopefully.
“I’ve failed at most things I’ve grown,” Luke says with a shrug. Other than the fruit trees dotting the property — supplying all the banana, papaya, breadfruit, and lychee the Evslins could want — little else has taken root. His attempts at arugula and tomatoes fell prey to the chickens, and the ducks discovered a taste for sweet potato; other crops didn’t take to the damp.
“The only real success I’ve had is taro,” Luke says. An easygoing, water-loving crop that can be regrown from its own stem, taro makes up the bulk of the calories the Evslins get from the land. Their one-year-old daughter, Finley, subsists largely on homegrown poi. For Luke and Sokchea, the grocery store remains a necessity.
Then there’s the water. Their water tank, which collects rain from the hill above the yurt, also provides a welcoming home for mosquito larvae. The tank’s lining recently sprung a leak, so the family has been living on jugs of municipal water hauled from Luke’s sister’s house. At one time, Luke might have thought of this as a betrayal of principle; now it’s mostly just inconvenient.
But the biggest problem for Luke, like the utility that serves his island, has been the sun itself. He and Sokchea scaled back their lives to live within their solar-powered means — ditching their toaster and microwave, giving up laundry on cloudy days when their batteries wouldn’t be able to recharge. But they still have rainy weeks where they run out of power and have to run their gas-powered generator to keep the refrigerator from spoiling.
Most days, however, produced more solar power than they could use or successfully store in their batteries. If they were connected to the grid, Luke thought, that power could be used by his neighbors.
It took about a year for Luke to regret his move off the grid. “It’s not that it wasn’t what we expected,” he explains. “We wanted the difficulty of it.” But he also wanted to show people it was possible to live with a smaller carbon footprint; instead, he was burning gasoline and watching the island’s electric utility outpace him, installing solar power and cutting carbon all over the island.
“That was all happening, not because of me,” he remembers thinking, “but despite me and my efforts.”
Just after 10 a.m., the sun comes down hot on Kauai’s biggest solar field. Rows of darkly gleaming panels ripple toward a horizon of jungle-green mountaintops and whipped-cream clouds.
By high noon on the sunniest days, the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative generates 97 percent of its energy needs from a combination of three large solar fields, residential rooftop solar, biomass, and hydropower. Last year, 42 percent of the electricity used on island came from renewable sources.
In fact, Kauai is capable of generating so much energy from sunlight that any additional solar power the utility installs would likely go unused much of the time. Unlike the mainland United States, where a massive power grid connects far-flung regions, Kauai has nowhere to send the power it doesn’t use — and right now, it’s got about as much solar power in the middle of a day as it needs.
Yet even on the brightest day, the utility’s diesel-fired power plants start chugging back to full speed as the sun sets. It’s the solar version of feast or famine. And it’s why, despite all its advantages, Kauai is still a long way from complete clean-energy conversion.
That’s where the ranks of industrial, refrigerator–sized boxes lined up beside the solar field come in. Grouped together on neat concrete pads, only the occasional Tesla logo hints at what lies inside: batteries.
In March, Tesla cut the ribbon on this groundbreaking grid-scale battery installation, a key test of the viability of energy storage in making renewable energy a more reliable part of the grid. With 50,000 solar panels and 272 batteries, the combined solar-and-storage plant provides enough energy to power 4,500 homes for four hours.
If Tesla can help keep Kauai solar-powered around the clock with its batteries, then it can apply what it has learned elsewhere in the country, and around the world.
On this particular sunny day, Tesla engineers are doing some final tests before signing off on the plant. The site manager unlocks the front panel and swings the door open to reveal lithium-ion battery cells stacked like cafeteria trays.
Much of this hardware was borrowed directly from the electric cars that Elon Musk built his company on. (The coolant reservoir fastened to the door looks especially automotive.) Decades of research and development into smartphones and electric cars make lithium-ion batteries the most reliable and cheap battery on the market today.
“We designed the Tesla plant to be like a conventional power plant,” Brad Rockwell tells me. He is the head of power supply for Kauai’s utility cooperative, the one in charge of balancing supply and demand.
“I can say, ‘OK, give me 5 megawatts on the grid,’” Rockwell says. “And the plant looks around and says, ‘Am I getting any solar? What do you know, I’m getting 7 megawatts of solar — the grid only needs 5, so I’m going to give them a solid 5, and 2 will go to the battery.’”
He moves a pen across a sheet of paper to underline the shifting arithmetic. “Then when a cloud comes over and the [solar panels are] only putting out 2 megawatts, now I need 2 from the solar and 3 from the battery. And it just does that all day long.”
Rockwell is a former U.S. Navy engineer, familiar with photovoltaic and battery systems because he studied them in the early 1990s. “It turns out that most remote islands are powered like ships are,” he says. Neither can rely on copious cheap fuel, and they can’t afford to waste what power they do have.
Most places, including Kauai, see two big, predictable peaks in energy use every day: one in the morning, when most people are waking up and getting ready for work, and a bigger one at night, when they return home. Both of those peaks occur outside the period when most solar power can be generated.
That’s why “there’s a finite limit” to how much solar power Kauai can consume right now, Rockwell says, showing me a graph of energy use over the course of a day. Between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on most days, Kauai nearly reaches its 100 percent renewable goal. Rockwell points out a gap of only a few megawatts between solar supply and the total electricity demand during the daytime hours, represented on the graph as a slim gray wiggle of conventional power under a heap of solar power.
“We’re already adding that much in rooftop solar every year. But,” he goes on, “if we can keep adding projects that don’t have to deliver here,” he taps the sunny yellow hill, “then we can start to erase this stuff,” he says, gesturing to the twin peaks of dark gray conventional power book-ending the day. “And that’s how we get to 100 percent renewable.”
Now that the Tesla battery plant is up and running, the utility will be able to cut 1.6 million gallons of fuel use per year. That power will come right off the top of the morning and evening peak demand. Because those peaks are also the most expensive times to generate power, Kauai’s customers should see a drop in their electric bills, too.
The co-op is already looking to its next solar-plus-storage installation, this one in partnership with the energy company AES. Announced in January, the AES plant will be about twice as big as the Tesla plant, and will supply 11 percent of the island’s annual electricity needs by the end of 2018.
By 2025 — three years ahead of their latest goal — the utility expects to get 70 percent of its annual energy from renewables, much of it stored in those battery packs for use during the evening and morning peaks.
In June, Hawaii became the first state to formally adopt the Paris Climate Accord, in the wake of President Trump’s announcement that he planned to pull out. The mayor of Kauai, Bernard Carvalho, also threw his support behind the agreement.
“Although Kauai is a small island,” Carvalho said, “we believe it is our responsibility to take a leadership position on climate change mitigation. And we are strongly committed to staying on course to build a more sustainable and resilient future.”
But what will that future look like? It’s increasingly clear that it won’t be the off-the-grid Eden that folks like Evslin once imagined. Personal solar panels and other attempts to live the virtuous life look outdated in a place like Kauai, where the utility is committed to cutting carbon and costs at the same time.
The economies of scale are such that Kauai’s utility cooperative can install a solar-and-storage unit for about half what it would cost a family to install the same amount on a house. Even when it comes to the island’s fossil fuel–generated power, the utility can produce more from a gallon of gasoline than someone with a $100 generator in their basement.
Relying on personal power, Rockwell says, is no way to power a community, let alone an island.
This became obvious to Evslin midway through his yurt experiment: Inefficiency is the ultimate downfall of any individual effort to address climate change.
“Either you’re wasting electricity in a closed system, because it’s sunny and your batteries are full, or you don’t have enough power and you gotta run your generator,” Evslin says. “That’s not a bug in my system. That’s a feature of any off-grid system.”
These trends mean incentive programs set up to encourage homeowners to install solar panels are now out of whack. Hawaii’s public utility commission still requires Kauai’s utility to pay early solar adopters for power they generate, based on “avoided cost of fuel.” But these days, the power that’s being avoided doesn’t come from fossil fuels — it’s being provided by the island’s solar farms.
So although the utility is offsetting some panel owners’ bills for their (less efficient) solar power, the rest of the utilities’ costs (like batteries) are divided among members who don’t have access to rooftop solar power. These are the kinds of policy disincentives that Hawaii and the rest of the country will need to take into account as renewable power scales up.
As the island around them goes solar, Luke and Sokchea are looking at houses — they’ve tentatively picked one out — that would put them back on the grid, and back in a community they could feel a part of. If they lived in town, they could cut down on a huge chunk of their remaining energy use by walking or biking to work, or to run errands.
Still, they both admit they are reluctant to leave the yurt. Settling onto the couch with their dogs in the evening, Finley sleeping in a crib on the other side of their single large room, Luke and Sokchea weigh the pros and cons. They could shell out several thousand dollars to the utility company to hook them up to the grid out here, sure, but they’d still be left with many unanswered questions.
What about the benefits of neighbors, a little lacking out here at the end of the road? What about walls, which might come in handy as Finley gets older? It’s still beautiful here, but it’s no longer the dream it was when they moved in.
The experience taught Luke a lot. He learned first-hand the challenges of solar power — how cheap it seems when he needs to run a fan in the middle of the day, how expensive when he’s rationing out the last watts in his batteries.
By retreating to his hideaway, Luke came to understand the power of civic participation. He’s pursuing a masters in public policy online, and it’s not hard to imagine him — wry, self-deprecating, easy to talk to — running for a seat in county government, or maybe even on the utility board.
“The solutions to all of this can’t be individual,” he says — and by “all of this,” it’s clear he’s thinking about the challenges facing society as a whole, not just Kauai, not just energy.
Walking me out past the taro patch, back across the swinging bridge that spans the creek surrounding his property, Luke points out one last thing. “It’s funny,” he says, “it was only recently I learned that Thoreau had his mom bring him food out in the woods.”
Reporting for this story was supported in part by Longreads and the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
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A huge part of Antarctica is melting and scientists say that's bad news.
Antarctica is experiencing weird weather, and the changes have some scientists worried about the future.
Antarctica is experiencing weird weather, and the changes have some scientists worried about the future.
There's an area on the west side of the icy continent called the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and last January, scientists found a 300,000-square-mile portion of its perimeter was melting. That's an area roughly two times the size of California, covered in slush.
According to recent research published in Nature Communications, the melt was caused by an unusually strong El Niño event around January 2016.
What is El Niño? 02:00
"A melt of this magnitude is relatively rare in Antarctica," said Julien Nicolas, one of the paper's authors at the Ohio State University Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. "There have been about three or four events of this size in the last 40 years."
Warmer weather, more melt: Confirmed
El Niño is a weather event that brings unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean, and one of the big takeaways from the research is that this strong El Niño in 2016 directly contributed to the unusually widespread Antarctic ice melt.
For more than two weeks in January 2016, a passive microwave satellite observed surface ice melt two times the size of California.
The news also is ominous for another reason: It means the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is essentially being melted from both sides. El Niños push warm water under the sheet. On top, colder westerly winds usually do enough to stave off any approaching warm weather, but in the 2016 incident, they didn't.
This event also brought about another surprise for scientists: Rain.
"We saw in our observations that there were some rain, we heard from some parties on the Ross Ice Shelf, and we saw it on the weather models," Nicolas said. "That's very unusual. We don't have a record of rain in Antarctica, so we don't know how often it's happened in the past."
Why it matters
Rain and slush would make for a miserable day anywhere, but the weird weather patterns observed over the two-week period in 2016 painted a potentially worrisome picture for the future.
If more extreme El Niños occur, ice shelves such as the Ross Ice Shelf on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt and be weakened. Sometimes, those ice melts can lead to dramatic rivers and waterfalls that leak off of the ice structure. Take a look at a recent video of the Nansen Ice Shelf, which is north of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet:
The ice melt from 2016 wasn't as dramatic. It was more of a slush on top of the ice, Nicolas says. Still, he adds, even if the melted slush and water refreezes it can leak into cracks and damage the inner structure of the ice. Remember, these are massive, massive networks of ice that can't really be thought of as one homogenous, unchanging object.
If these shelves are weakened, the could crack and break off, and that would open the floodgates -- literally.
"When it comes to the disintegration of the ice shelves, they are like corks in a bottle," says Dr. David Bromwich, another author of the paper and a professor at the Ohio State. "They are holding back the contents of the bottle, in this case the ice sheet, and you take the cork away and everything flows out to the ocean."
Once the ice is in the ocean, Bromwich says, it could cause sea levels to rise dramatically and rapidly.
"Rapidly," of course, means something completely different on a geological time scale.
"We don't know the time scale of this," he said. "There was one modeling study that showed quite dramatic changes on the scale of a few hundred years, and another scenario would be quite a slow change. But a foot of sea rise, or two feet, in the order of 100 years would be alarming."
CNN's Judson Jones contributed to this report.
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