Maine Offshore Wind Auction Draws Few Bids

RACHEL FELTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Rachel Feltman, the host of Scientific American’s podcast Science Quickly and Popular Science’s The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. I’m sitting in for Ira Flatow. A bit later in the hour, we’ll continue our coverage of how science is showing up on the ballot. This week, what’s at stake for gender affirming care. Plus, we’ll also talk about the science of running a marathon.

But first, offshore wind is coming to the Gulf of Maine. Earlier this week, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held an auction for eight leases to develop wind projects off the coast of Maine. The bad news is companies bid on only half of those available leases. Joining me now to explain what this all means in the context of the wind energy sector and to discuss other top science stories of the week is my guest, Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review, based in New York City. Casey, welcome back to Science Friday.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much for having me. Always great to be here.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So let’s start with the basics of this auction. How many leases were given out, and who got them? And how much energy will that actually amount to?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. So like you said, this auction this week was for eight potential leases off the coast of Maine. Four of those leases ended up being sold. A developer called Avangrid won two of them, and a developer called Invenergy won the other two. If all of these leases get developed, that means that we could generate up to 6.8 gigawatts of power. That’s enough to power over 2 million homes.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So what does this signal for the wind energy sector?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so like you said, it’s kind of unfortunate that only four of these eight leases ended up selling. But it could have been a lot worse. So offshore wind has sort of been struggling over the past year, especially. We’ve seen major projects get canceled. There were a couple of big projects in New Jersey that got canceled last year. And some other auctions recently haven’t even gone this well.

So one auction off the coast of Oregon got canceled, recently, another one in the Gulf of Mexico. So experts are actually kind of happy that anything happened here at all. Offshore wind is expensive, and prices have gone up. And so any good news is great in this sector right now.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, and this project is a bit different than other types of offshore wind. Could you tell me a little bit more about how?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so I was especially interested in this auction because– so along the East Coast, most offshore wind turbines are fixed into the ocean floor. Kind of makes sense, right? You stick them in the ground. The waters off the coast of Maine are too deep to do that, actually.

So these projects will have to use floating turbines, which is kind of a newer technology. It’s less common. So it’s really interesting and exciting to see developers jumping in. We’ll also have to see floating turbines in projects off the coast of California. It’s also really deep waters out there. So really interesting kind of development for the industry.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, definitely interested to see how that continues to develop. And moving on to some troubling public health news, the USDA has confirmed that bird flu has been identified in a pig in the US for the first time. Tell me more about this story.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so like you said, first time that we’ve seen bird flu in a pig. This was in a backyard farm in Oregon. There were a lot of birds on the farm that had this strain of bird flu. And so, out of an abundance of caution, officials tested the pigs that were on the farm, and one pig was found to have the H5N1 virus.

RACHEL FELTMAN: And how concerning is it, really, for bird flu to cross over into pigs specifically?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, I mean, it’s not necessarily cause for panic, but researchers are definitely concerned about this. So this form of bird flu that’s been spreading over the last few years has been responsible for the deaths of millions of birds. It’s been really bad. We’ve seen it spread to dairy cows as well. And some people have gotten mild cases.

The move to pigs is particularly concerning because pigs are one of the few animals where an avian virus can replicate and become more like a human virus. Pigs can be co-infected with bird and human viruses. The viruses can kind of like swap genes across them. And pigs were the source of the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009. So this is something that researchers are definitely keeping a close eye on.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah. Like you said, not time to panic, but definitely time to be very vigilant.

CASEY CROWNHART: Mm-hmm.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So moving on from farm animals to artificial intelligence, you wrote a story this week about the electronic waste generated by AI. This isn’t a part of the equation I’ve really heard a lot about. I’ve heard a lot about the energy input. But yeah, tell me more about what you found.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, that’s also why I was interested in this story because we’ve been talking a lot about the energy demands of AI, the water demand to cool equipment. But all of this kind of high performance computing equipment will eventually become trash. And so a new study that was out this week tried to quantify just how much generative AI will add to our e-waste problem.

E-waste is basically garbage from any old electronics. Your iPhone and your refrigerator can both be e-waste. All of the computing equipment that it takes to train and run models often gets replaced pretty quickly because tech moves really fast. Companies want to replace what they have with the best models. Researchers said that this could all add up to about 5 million tons of e-waste in total by 2030.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Wow. And I know that e-waste is, in general, a huge problem. I think about it all the time with all of the gadgets that are becoming ever more popular on TikTok Shop. I don’t think it’s morally bad to want a new straightening brush, but I think we don’t think of these as e-waste in the same way that we think of an old computer. So how big of a problem is AI, as a fraction of the e-waste we’re creating globally?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. It’s honestly a small fraction. So I said 5 million tons from AI at max, probably, by 2030. Humans produce 60 million tons of e-waste each year right now.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Wow.

CASEY CROWNHART: So that’s a problem because only 22% of that is getting recycled through official channels. We’re losing valuable metals like iron and gold and silver and rare earth metals. And e-waste can often contain hazardous materials as well– lead, mercury, chromium, stuff like that. I would say AI is not like the be all, end all villain of e-waste. But it’s kind of just one more block in this growing problem that we’re starting to see.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Hmm. So the next story is actually somewhat related to e-waste. We’re going to talk about black plastic, specifically the stuff that spatulas are often made from. So what’s so bad and spooky about black plastic, as opposed to other types of plastic?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, we’re still celebrating spooky season here. There was a great story in The Atlantic this week about black plastic spatulas and why this is one particular piece of plastic that you might want to avoid. So basically, researchers have found some concerning levels of things called flame retardants in some black plastic products.

One study this month, researchers looked at products like toys, cooking products, hair accessories as well, found that a small fraction of them contained bromine. And when they looked at those products that contained bromine, most of them contained brominated flame retardants. So these are chemicals that we use in products to help them not catch on fire. It’s very helpful. But those are chemicals you do not want anywhere near your food. These can mess with your hormones. They’re linked to things like thyroid disease. And so black plastic cooking utensils that have these chemicals in them, there’s cause for concern there.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, absolutely. And I know increasingly, researchers are saying, like, don’t have heated plastic near your food in general. Obviously, microplastics are impossible to avoid. But I’ve heard that that’s one of the basic, protective measures you can take.

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. Yeah, and to kind of bring it back to e-waste, the idea that some researchers have is that e-waste is finding its way into regular recycling streams.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Mm.

CASEY CROWNHART: And so that’s often, like, think of your TV or your computer casing. There’s plastic in there. And that’s where these products might be used. So like you said, it’s impossible to avoid all plastic, but avoiding heating up plastic, so don’t put plastic in the microwave. And it might be time to replace that black plastic spatula with something like silicone or a steel one.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Yeah, you wouldn’t eat a TV, so just saying.

CASEY CROWNHART: [LAUGHS] I personally would not choose to do that. Yeah.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So this next story definitely falls into the whoa category. Researchers found a lost Mayan city in Mexico. What exactly did they find?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so this was a complex of over 6,500 structures, a city that might have been home to up to 50,000 people at its peak. Researchers say they’re not totally sure why the city was abandoned. It’s only about a 15-minute hike from a major road in the area. But it was kind of a really startling discovery that they were able to use with some interesting technology called a LiDAR survey that basically uses pulsed laser beams. And they found the city hiding in the jungle, basically.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Very cool. Could this laser scanning technology help us discover more lost cities?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. So this is one of several cities that have been found using this technique. And what I think is really interesting about this one in particular is that this data was actually collected in 2013 through a different organization altogether. This researcher was going through this publicly available data and processing it and found evidence of the city. So we might even already have the data that reveals these cities, and we just haven’t looked that closely at it yet, which is really interesting.

RACHEL FELTMAN: So finally, our last story is about an unlikely hero that’s really won my heart, I have to say– the African giant pouched rats who are being trained to help sniff out illegally trafficked plants and animals. Tell me more about what’s going on here.

CASEY CROWNHART: I love them so much. Yeah, so like you said, these African giant pouched rats are being trained as the next line of defense in the illegal wildlife trade. People may have heard that these animals have been trained before to detect explosives in combat zones. And so researchers are now training them to detect things like elephant ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scales, and wood from endangered or at-risk-of-extinction trees.

These are all kind of things that are often illegally trafficked. And these rats have a really great sense of smell. So researchers took a few rats– there were 11 in this study– introduced them to different odors, as well as things like coffee beans and washing powder that are often used to distract from the smells of these illegally trafficked materials. And they found that most of the rats were able to detect these scents, distinguish between them, and retain the information for months afterward.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Wow, that is so impressive. And I love that they’re helping sniff out pangolin trafficking because I love those little sentient pine cones, too.

CASEY CROWNHART: Mm-hmm.

RACHEL FELTMAN: I was looking at some photos of this. And first of all, these rats completely won me over. They are large enough that my brain reads them as friend. It’s like dog and cat-sized. But I also noticed that they’re in these adorable little custom vests. Could you tell me about how those factored into their training?

CASEY CROWNHART: Oh, my gosh. I love them so much. Yes, so the researchers made these little custom vests for them that have a little ball attached to it. And so the idea is that if they’re able to actually use these rats in the field to detect these materials, that the rats would be able to pull on this little ball, and it would make a beeping sound. So they would basically be able to alert people to what they had found. I highly recommend looking at the photos. It’s very, very cute.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Ugh, man, they’re such good boys, these rats. They really are. [LAUGHS] That’s just about all the time we have. Casey, thank you, as always, for being here.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thank you so much for having me. It was really great to be here.

RACHEL FELTMAN: Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review, based in New York City.

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