Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle/AP

Ed Newby, owner of All Star A/C and Heating, fields calls during a heat wave, June 26, 2023, in Houston.

With an extreme heat wave gripping half the country, this summer has been less one to enjoy than one to endure.

Temperatures averaging above 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and in the 90s at night have kept Americans in the Southern and Western United States sheltering inside whenever they can, as the country’s aging electrical grid works overtime to support air conditioners fighting Saharan heat. And for Texas, prolonged heat waves in June and then July had the potential for widespread disruption, if not disaster.

Unlike the rest of the country, which is part of a network of interconnected power grid systems, most Texans live on an isolated grid. That grid, operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), is also supporting a growing number of people and facing a growing frequency of extreme weather events. If that grid fails, the state goes dark – as it did with tragic consequences during a winter storm in 2021.

But in the crucible of a blazing summer, Texas is forging a reputation as a clean energy leader.

As each new week seems to bring a new record for electricity demand, the Texas power grid has held firm. Lights have stayed on and air conditioning has kept running, thanks in part to a significant increase in clean energy hooked up to the ERCOT grid.

No state produces more wind power, and solar capacity has been doubling year over year. Battery storage – critical to buttressing intermittent renewables like wind and solar – is poised for a similar boom. This transformation has occurred despite broad antipathy, and at times hostility, from the state’s mostly Republican lawmakers. How the state weathers this summer of extremes may be educational as power grids around the country seek to decarbonize.

“The energy transition is here, and Texas is among the states that are leading the way,” says Ryan Wiser, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

SOURCE:

ERCOT, U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Energy Technologies Area

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The Energy State

Modern Texas has been built on fossil fuels. Since the Spindletop gusher in 1901, Texas has led the U.S. in oil and gas production. The U.S., in turn, has been among the top oil and gas producers in the world.

Natural gas continues to meet the majority of electricity demand in Texas, but in the past decade or two, renewable energy has begun to rival it. The state has led the country in wind power for 15 years. It could soon take the top spot in solar power as well, having more than tripled its capacity between 2020 and 2022. Battery storage in the state is projected to grow rapidly in the next few years as well, according to Reuters.

The geography of the state – vast and windy plains, bright sunshine – the pricing mechanisms of the ERCOT market, and the business-friendly regulatory environment have all helped drive the Texas clean energy boom. The state installed more utility-scale wind, solar, and battery storage than any other last year, and accounted for one-third of the entire country’s new capacity, according to Dr. Wiser. Over the past decade Texas added more wind, solar, and battery storage than any other state, and twice as much as runner-up California.

David J. Phillip/AP

Workers repair a power line in Houston, June 29, 2023. An unrelenting heat wave in Texas has been testing the state's power grid as demand soars.

“Not only do you have a state that is just generally friendly to development activities, but it also has the land to support those development activities,” says Dr. Wiser.

“It’s phenomenally windy and sunny,” he adds. And “it’s just an easier place to do business.”

This increased renewable energy capacity has been put to good use, particularly this summer. The ERCOT record for daily peak electricity demand has been broken six times in the last four weeks alone. (Last summer the same record was broken 11 times.) Over the past five years, renewables have saved the average Texas ratepayer $200 a year, according to a report from Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.

As dangerous heat waves become more common – Texas saw at least 279 heat-related deaths last year, according to a Texas Tribune analysis, and there have been at least 14 such deaths reported this year – grid reliability is critical to public safety in the summer. And amid the record-breaking demand, solar power and renewables in general have set their own records for supplying that need. So far this year, carbon-free energy has generated more power for ERCOT than natural gas, according to data from the operator.

“The same sun that drives that heat is driving that solar [output],” says Dr. Rhodes, who is also a founding partner of the energy analysis firm IdeaSmiths.

“So far this summer, wind and solar have really been hitting out of the park.”

An open field to innovate – for now

Geography isn’t the only reason clean energy has boomed in Texas. ERCOT’s laissez-faire approach to new projects, compared with other markets, has also made it easier for renewable energy facilities to get up and running in the state.

A problem for grid operators nationwide is how long it can take to upgrade infrastructure and add new power sources. The country needs more transmission lines, and bureaucratic hurdles are leaving new renewable energy projects to wait years on the so-called interconnection queue before they can connect to an electrical grid.

“In many parts of the U.S., [interconnection] is the single biggest obstacle to building new power” capacity, says Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington.

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman/AP/FILE

Pablo Vegas, the new CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, is introduced at a news conference at the Texas Public Utility Commission headquarters in Austin, Oct. 13, 2022.

The Texas grid hasn’t felt these issues as severely, however. ERCOT built new transmission lines as wind power started growing in the 2010s, and it’s been able to connect new projects faster than many other grids in the country, experts say.

Between 2000 and 2017, only two grid operators saw over 30% of proposed new projects reach commercial completion, according to a report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. ERCOT was one of them. With battery storage projects making up about one-third of the grid’s queue last year, that speed of bringing projects online is expected to result in Texas becoming a national leader in energy storage.

“ERCOT is among the leaders in processing interconnection requests more rapidly than other markets across the nation,” says Dr. Wiser. “There are certainly some lessons to be learned there.”

Federal incentives and allocations – including an array of new programs worth billions of dollars contained in the Inflation Reduction Act – have helped drive clean energy investments around the country. But Texas is a rare case, in the sense that the renewable energy boom here has been unfolding with limited support from state lawmakers. In fact, hostility toward clean energy has been more common.

During the 2021 winter storm that claimed 246 lives and left millions without electricity for days, officials erroneously blamed wind power for the grid failures. And during the state legislative session this year, lawmakers tried – but failed – to pass bills that would have imposed onerous new regulations on renewable energy facilities and projects, according to the energy law firm Foley & Lardner.

As much as anything, it’s the political landscape in Texas that worries experts tracking the state’s power grid. Oil and gas have fueled a century of prosperity in the state, becoming central to its identity and culture.

“While it’s economically winning, there are these policy head winds that seem to be getting thrown up,” says Scott Hinson, chief technology officer at Pecan Street, an Austin-based clean energy research and development organization.

“I’m wondering at what point that is going to put the brakes on things.”

But the clean energy boom isn’t the end of that story, experts say. It can be the next chapter.

“There’s a clash going on over what is truly Texan. And I’d argue making money off of land from energy resources is truly Texan,” says Michael Webber, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In that sense, experts say, how the Texas grid has transformed over the past decade is instructional both for the country and for Texas. Other grid operators are likely looking at how ERCOT makes it easier to get through its interconnection queue. But it may also be worthwhile for Texas to look at how other systems benefit from being able to sell excess power to their neighbors, and how they decrease demand by asking – and sometimes requiring – users to be more energy-efficient.

Texas, and the country, needs to improve grid resilience to extreme winter weather events. But for now, ERCOT is showing this summer that a power grid loaded with clean energy capacity can withstand extreme heat.

“You can manage power systems with high shares of clean energy. But we’ve got to manage the transition,” says Dr. Wiser.

“That’s maybe the residual concern, is whether we’re being deliberate enough in our planning,” he adds. “It’s not that we can’t do it, but are we going to do it in an effective and planned fashion?”

Nikita Sapiha likes to remember that his dad had “golden hands” – he could repair just about anything friends and family brought to him to fix.

He also used those hands to make things. “I learned from my father to work with wood,” says the 11-year-old, sporting a summer-season buzz cut and a Vans T-shirt. Brightening, he adds, “He also taught me to play soccer. He did a lot.”

Nikita speaks in the past tense because his father was killed last September when he stepped on a mine. He had volunteered for the Ukrainian army after Russia invaded in February 2022.

Nikita likes to remember all the good things his father taught him, but sometimes he gets sad when he thinks about what he’ll miss out on. “My father really liked to fish,” he says, “and he always told me that someday he’d teach me to be a good fisherman.”

Learning to confront and deal with emotions like sadness and loss is one reason Nikita is attending a special summer camp. For two weeks he is living with other children affected by the war – kids displaced from their homes by the fighting, others whose soldier-parents are off on the front lines, and still others who, like him, have already lost a father or mother.

“We know our kids are dealing with a lot, this has been a difficult year for everybody in Ukraine. But for children, the impact of this war can be especially hard,” says Tetiana Myalkovska, camp director and manager of the Warm Palms regional project that oversees the camp, located at a retreat center for Polish Catholic priests in the Volyn region of northwestern Ukraine.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Nikita Sapiha, whose father was killed in the war last September, with one of his paintings in the art and crafts room at Warm Palms camp in Ukraine's Volyn region, June 23, 2023.

Giving Nikita a big hug and a peck on the head, she adds, “It’s important for these kids to have fun and be kids while they are here, but we also want to help them learn to face the difficulties they are going through.”

The Warm Palms camp is one of a new crop of initiatives across Ukraine this summer to help kids cope with the war’s impact – and to allow them to enjoy the months off from school as much as kids anywhere.

Last summer, just a few months into the war, uprooted families were still scrambling for safer living conditions in or out of the country, and schools and educators were more focused on ensuring that the coming school year could open in September as normally and safely as possible.

Providing services over the summer months to help children cope with the impacts of war was not a top priority.

But a year later, the reality is setting in of a long slog ahead for Ukraine, millions of displaced families are getting to know new communities, and officials are estimating there are thousands of children like Nikita who have lost at least one parent in the fighting. In response, a variety of children’s welfare groups and individuals have turned to making summer a fun and healing time.

“It’s really important for kids to have childhood during war,” says Inga Kordynovska, who practices family law in Odesa and who decided last winter that summer would bring with it a great need for new kinds of children’s services. She set out to do what she could to fill a sliver of that need.

The result is the Sandbox Kids day camp in one of Odesa’s most cherished green spaces.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

A group photo at the Warm Palms summer camp in Ukraine, June 23, 2023.

The Green Theater in Shevchenko Park has been closed for years – first because of the pandemic, then as a result of the war and concerns that any regular gatherings of large numbers of people could be targets of Russian missiles.

But Ms. Kordynovska saw the sprawling theater, with its extensive tree cover, stages once used for experimental theatrical productions, and open areas designed for picnics and food trucks, as the perfect setting for an urban summer day camp. And as the managing partner of her law firm, she had the city and corporate connections to make Sandbox Kids a reality.

Now, every day, Sandbox Kids operates for eight hours, with morning and afternoon four-hour sessions. Priority is given to the children of parents on the front lines, the children of volunteers for military service, and then to the internally displaced. Parents are asked to contribute to the cost of running the camp if they can, but no one is turned away.

On a recent camp day, a couple dozen kids are on hand, some at an arts and crafts table, some dancing to a TikTok video, others learning the rules of a field game.

“Many of the kids don’t want to talk much about the feelings they are dealing with, but sometimes it can be expressed in their artwork,” says Ms. Kordynovska, who has an art therapist and a child psychologist on staff.

“Some kids are traumatized by what they’ve experienced, some are depressed, and some are just plain angry,” she says. “That anger especially can be expressed with bad behavior, so we find ways to address that.”

One particularly wrenching case was that of a boy from the Luhansk region, where heavy fighting had destroyed his school and shattered his family.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Learning dance steps to go with a TikTok video of a Ukrainian rap song, at the Sandbox Kids day camp in Odesa, Ukraine, June 15, 2023.

“When he started coming to the camp, he wouldn’t speak to anyone; he just wanted to sit by himself in our internet zone,” Ms. Kordynovska says. “What gave us hope, though, was that he kept coming, day after day.”

The camp staff worked with the boy, letting him know everyone cared about him and wanted to help him have some fun. “Pretty soon he was using a word here or there with the other children; then he started speaking with all of us,” she says. Beaming, she adds, “By the end of the [session] we couldn’t get him to stop talking!”

A key feature of Sandbox Kids camp is its emphasis on Ukrainian language and culture.

“In Odesa, and especially in areas closest to Russia, we are confronting 200 years of efforts to cancel Ukrainian culture, to replace Ukrainian with the Russian language,” Ms. Kordynovska says. “All the children have heard that Ukraine is not a nation, that Russian is our true language,” she adds. “We want to battle these ideas with books and activities that instead say, ‘It’s really cool to be part of Ukrainian culture!’”

Like dancing to TikTok videos of popular Ukrainian songs.

Some of Ukraine’s summer camps are able to operate at least in part with foreign charitable or humanitarian funding. The Warm Palms camp gets some assistance from a church group in Pittsburgh. The Dissent Pins social action website based in Pennsylvania is helping to fund efforts to get a summer camp up and running in the Kyiv area.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Warm Palms camp director Tetiana Myalkovska hugs one of her campers, June 23, 2023. “For children, the impact of this war can be especially hard,” she says.

Ms. Kordynovska in Odesa says that while she appreciates the assistance foreigners have provided to some summer camps, she is sticking to her vision of Sandbox Kids – which she hopes to expand beyond Odesa – as a project by Ukrainians for Ukrainians.

“Everyone I’ve contacted for some form of help with this project, their answer has always been ‘Yes!’” – whether permission from one of Odesa’s largest corporations to use the Green Theater, donations of supplies, or professionals helping out, she says. “I want the camp to be an expression of Ukraine as a nation of ‘Yes!’”

Back at the Warm Palms camp, Ms. Myalkovska and her staff of coaches, therapists, teenage junior camp counselors, and beloved Father Jan – the director of the priests’ retreat – are preparing for a new challenge: For one of the August sessions, the camp expects to receive a number of Ukrainian children who were abducted by Russia from occupied areas of the country. Ukrainian authorities estimate that a few hundred out of perhaps thousands of abducted children have returned home.

Yet while these children might have particular needs, Ms. Myalkovska says she’s confident the range of cases the camp has served has prepared it to embrace this new group.

She notes for example that a number of this summer’s campers have been from Bakhmut, the southeastern city virtually destroyed in months of intense battle before Russian troops finally claimed it.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Yesenia Zabashta with some of her artwork at the Warm Palms summer camp in Ukraine's Volyn region, June 23, 2023.

One of those kids is 13-year-old Yesenia Zabashta, who was displaced from her home in Bakhmut a year ago.

Yesenia likes to paint, loves animals, and favors pretty dresses. But she takes out her anger at the world by bullying other girls – in one case so mercilessly that the girl chose to leave camp early.

Still, Warm Palms has not given up on Yesenia, a reflection of Ms. Myalkovska’s conviction that all of Ukraine’s children traumatized by the war can be helped and loved to exit whatever darkness besets them.

And Yesenia says the camp is helping her understand and stifle a trait she wants to banish.

“We’re working on the bullying,” she says, a tear rolling down her cheek. “And now I have good friends among the girls in my room.”

Reporting for this story was supported by Oleksandr Naselenko.

The siren songs of wildflowers come in blue and orange and red. Electricity runs through roots, it seems, to light each neon face.

A year of hearty snow in Colorado has meant a stunning wildflower season, feted by a mountain festival in the town of Crested Butte – known as the state’s “wildflower capital.” Many events are held in federally protected wilderness meant for the masses to enjoy. But admiring backcountry blooms, upon which pollinators rely, calls for an outdoor ethic of restraint.

“If you preserve the wildflowers, you’re helping to preserve the ecosystem,” says Jeff Delaney, guiding hikers through a winding meadow trail. Mr. Delaney is the vice president of the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival Board of Directors. “We have to behave ourselves here.”

Behaving means no picking. No cutting, no trampling.

“And if you see someone doing this, please give them a friendly reminder not to, and ask them to pass it along to others,” says the festival website. As doily-white oshá rise waist high, hikers avoid causing harm by sticking to the trail. So do their panting dogs, bellies wet from crossing creeks. 

The annual July festival, begun in 1986, secures permits with the U.S. Forest Service to lead events on public land, including photography workshops and hikes.

On a recent weekend, Mr. Delaney leads an 8-mile excursion of a half-dozen hikers through Gunnison National Forest. With the patience of a kids coach, which he has been, he explains the geology behind the rugged peaks (millions of years old!) and points out the soft soil underfoot. That Mancos Shale is a nutrient-rich wildflower food. (It also dusts up in the dry heat, tickling the nose.)

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

An elephant's head wildflower visually trumpets its presence in Gunnison National Forest, Colorado, July 15, 2023.

“Botanizing” plants along the way – identifying species by guidebook, app, or naked eye – resembles celebrity sightings. Bluebells, sneezeweed, and columbine stop the hikers in their tracks.

“I think the lupines are my favorite,” says Emma Montgomery, a hike assistant, talking about the stately purple cones.

As a rising college senior, she’s around the age of a two-decade megadrought parching the American West. An especially wet water year has brought short-term relief, experts say, but far from full recovery. 

Above-normal snow in Colorado, however, has meant an abundance of wildflowers in lower elevations. And in higher elevations, where snow continues to melt, peak wildflower season has been delayed a couple weeks to late July or early August, says Ian Breckheimer, a landscape ecologist at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.

“This is a spectacular wildflower season on the Western Slope,” says Dr. Breckheimer. 

He works in nearby Gothic – a former silver-mining town turned ghost town. It’s also home to the laboratory, a world-renowned field station. In the surrounding wilderness, he and colleagues study changes to plant and animal life over time and under climate change. 

Take the delicate glacier lily, found on the hike at around 11,000 feet where splotches of snow remain.

“As soon as the snow melts, these guys come out,” Mr. Delaney, the guide, explains.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

A hiker regards a mule's ear wildflower in Gunnison National Forest, Colorado, July 15, 2023.

Yet as climate change leads to earlier springs, the glacier lily has recently been flowering an average 17 days earlier in research plots than it did in the 1970s, says Brian Inouye, a principal investigator at the lab. That makes the canary-yellow flower a canary in a coal mine.

Stewards like Mr. Delaney offer help to nature that’s within their control, like extracting invasive, or problematic, species (seen as an acceptable excuse to pick). The day before the hike, he had plucked out a nonnative plant called a salsify, a cousin to the dandelion.

Pausing for lunch beside the trail, he opens his backpack and pulls out what looks like a tuft of fluff. The weed had gone to seed in his bag overnight – better there than on the ground.

Not everyone needs this kind of mission in the great outdoors, of course. It’s also a place to find love. 

Nearby sit Megan and Nicholas Foss of Denver, who met pre-pandemic in Iceland. Solo hikers then, they’ve been companion hikers since. Traveling as a pair has been an adjustment requiring compromise, says Ms. Foss, perched on a rock beside her husband. Of course, there are perks, too.

They can’t take the wilderness with them, but they can share the view: a sun-stained valley, azure air.

“We’re going to want to come back,” she says.

AP

A fan waits for the start of a Women's World Cup soccer match between the Philippines and Switzerland in Dunedin, New Zealand, July 21.

As a benchmark of social progress, the FIFA Women’s World Cup that got underway yesterday in New Zealand and Australia has much to applaud. For the first time, six countries will pay their female soccer players the same wages they paid their male counterparts in last year’s men’s World Cup.

That represents a hard-won gain. Yet economics is only one measure of value. This year’s tournament includes some surprising newcomers from countries or regions where women struggle for equality. Their ascendance to the highest level of international competition is evidence of the unique power of sports to uplift cultural attitudes about the worth and dignity of girls.

Take Vietnam, one of eight new teams making a debut this year. When the country’s Football Federation was established in 1989, girls were an afterthought. On Saturday afternoon New Zealand time (Friday night Eastern time), the women’s team will take the field against the United States, marking the first time the two countries have ever met in a sports match. The team’s rise charts a gradual societal shift marked by increased investment in education and opportunities for girls. The players are now national heroes.

“They have demonstrated the talents, intelligence, qualities, will and bravery of the Vietnamese people,” Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said.

Nearly 190 countries now have national women’s soccer teams. China now invests more in women’s soccer than in its men’s program. In Morocco, a focus on the women’s game in recent years by the Royal Moroccan Football Federation has helped transform attitudes across the Arab region. Last year, the country hosted the women’s Africa Cup of Nations. This year, it sent the first Arab women’s team to the World Cup.

“Sports don’t differentiate between genders,” said Idriss Benazzouza, a Moroccan fan who recently  took his daughter to see the national women’s professional team square off against the national armed forces women’s team. “I teach [my daughters] confidence, not fear,” he told Voice of America.

“Once every four years, we get a chance to celebrate the millions of women and girls who play soccer around the world,” Human Rights Watch wrote during the 2019 Women’s World Cup. It is “a chance to reflect on the fact that in many countries, women and girls have to fight to even get onto the playing field.” Yet once they do, they are capturing hearts and changing minds.

Editor's note: The original misstated the time of the match between the United States and Vietnam.