Only last spring, Joe Szabo was playing a familiar role in his job as head of the Federal Railroad Administration: fending off criticism of California’s high-speed rail project from congressional detractors questioning whether it would ever be built.

Earlier this month, as he prepared to leave the post he’d held for almost six years, Szabo was in a less accustomed spot: celebrating the huge — and hugely controversial — endeavor at a ceremonial groundbreaking in Fresno (Greenwire, Jan. 7).

Although the timing was coincidental, "I just can’t think of a better way to end my tenure," he said afterward.

It was a final high note in what Szabo calls a "wonderful and wild" ride unlike that of any of his predecessors at the small Transportation Department agency — one marked by partisan strife over unprecedented passenger rail spending, the struggle to implement two landmark laws, and safety worries unleashed by the boom in railroad oil shipments. At congressional hearings, Szabo bore the brunt of Republican attacks on the Obama administration’s embrace of high-speed rail. Even allies question whether he was able to change the mindset of an agency historically aligned with the freight rail industry.

Regrets? Szabo, 57, professed none in a follow-up interview just before he officially stepped down this month to take a job in his hometown of Chicago.

"You can’t have regrets," he said. "You have to have confidence in the job that you’ve set out to do."

Among his proudest accomplishments, he said, are a sharp drop in on-the-job deaths among railroad workers and fostering "game-changing" improvements in states’ ability to plan and carry out rail projects. FRA’s policy office was restructured, he said, with fresh talent. If the Obama administration’s vision for high-speed bullet trains remains a tough sell with Republican lawmakers, Szabo predicted it’s only a matter of time before Congress catches up with grass-roots pressure to get on board.

"I leave with a high level of satisfaction," Szabo said. Prompting his departure, he said, is the need to tend to his ailing 87-year-old father. Last week, he started a job as senior fellow at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. Temporarily taking his place at the railroad administration is Sarah Feinberg, a former White House aide who joined the Department of Transportation as chief of staff 16 months ago. There is no timetable for naming a new permanent administrator, according to DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx.

President Obama nominated Szabo, who had the backing of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), to run the railroad administration in March 2009. Unanimous Senate confirmation followed little more than a month later. In naming Szabo, a onetime railyard switchman and train conductor who became a state lobbyist with what was then the United Transportation Union, the White House broke with a tradition of plucking FRA leaders from the ranks of railroad management, said Larry Mann, a rail safety attorney. Mann, who considers Szabo a friend, called him "an excellent administrator."

Despite his labor background, Szabo "did not cater to the unions," Mann said. "His approach was balanced. He called it the way he felt was appropriate."

But because career federal employees cannot be easily removed from their jobs, Mann said, Szabo had less success in overhauling the culture of a regulatory agency long seen by critics as tilted toward the industry it is supposed to oversee.

In 2005, for example, DOT’s inspector general reproved one top official for taking vacations with a lobbyist for Union Pacific Corp. Although the review found no evidence of favoritism, the inspector general noted that Union Pacific was inspected proportionately less even though it had the highest average number of train accidents of the four major freight railroads. In addition, all four carriers "had substantial safety and inspection issues," the report said.

Szabo arrived at FRA just after Congress had handed the agency sweeping new mandates with the 2008 passage of two major laws: the Rail Safety Improvement Act and the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act. The first, enacted barely a month after a collision between freight and commuter trains killed 25 people near Los Angeles, was the most comprehensive piece of rail safety legislation in almost 40 years. Most notably, it set a December 2015 deadline for railroads to implement positive train control, an umbrella term for an array of costly anti-crash communication technologies.

The passenger rail investment law was Amtrak’s first reauthorization in more than a decade. Among other provisions, it ordered FRA to help the passenger railroad set standards to improve chronically poor train punctuality. In addition, the railroad administration, which had hitherto run only small grant programs, was charged with doling out some $8 billion for high-speed and intercity passenger rail projects appropriated in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"Obviously, the plate is full, but I truly cannot think of a better time, a more exciting time to be leading FRA," Szabo said at his Senate confirmation hearing.

Szabo quickly established himself as a strong advocate of expanding passenger rail service to meet future transportation needs.

But FRA’s handling of the high-speed rail program came under fire from critics who said the agency was spreading the money around too many projects to produce much payoff.

In the 2010 elections, Republicans targeted the grants as a prime example of stimulus-related waste. Within months of winning office, newly elected GOP governors in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin canceled planned high-speed rail ventures, cumulatively rejecting more than $3 billion in previously approved federal funding.

"I laughed at them," Szabo said, adding that Wisconsin is now proceeding with improvements to the Chicago-Milwaukee line "on their own dime."

A large chunk of the returned money was rerouted to California, where boosters credit the shift with helping the state move forward with what is eventually supposed to be a line linking San Francisco and Los Angeles. While further challenges are inevitable, Szabo said, the project has reached a tipping point where "sustained construction is a reality."

On Capitol Hill, however, it remains an object of scorn for Republicans, who question both the ballooning price tag — now projected at $68 billion — and California’s long-term strategy for paying the bills.

At last April’s hearing of the House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, Szabo had to rebut a suggestion from then-Chairman Tom Latham (R-Iowa) that the administration had given up on the endeavor. In a news release on the day of the groundbreaking, Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) again predicted that the link will never be finished.

"It’s hard to celebrate breaking ground on what is likely to become abandoned pieces of track that never connect to a usable segment," said Denham, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure railroads subcommittee.

Szabo has also clashed with the Association of American Railroads, the freight rail industry’s main trade group, over issues like the minimum crew size needed for freight trains (Greenwire, Dec. 23, 2014).

The association has challenged Amtrak’s authority to set the performance standards in a lawsuit now awaiting a Supreme Court decision (Greenwire, Dec. 8, 2014).

Asked for comment on Szabo’s tenure, the association’s president and CEO, Edward Hamberger, issued a statement wishing him well and thanking him "for his service and his shared dedication to safely bringing home each rail employee after his or her shift."

The railroad administration nonetheless continues to face criticism that it’s not aggressive enough in promoting safety, particularly as crude-by-rail traffic skyrockets.

While Szabo touts across-the-board improvements in every safety area tracked by FRA, the agency is a "pitiful" regulator, said Fred Millar, a rail safety consultant who says more must be done to reroute trains carrying crude and other hazardous materials away from major urban centers.

Following the release of a scathing National Transportation Safety Board report in October on lapses at a New York City-area commuter railroad, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called the findings an indictment of FRA oversight. "We must assume that safety and reliability standards receive real enforcement, not just lip service," Blumenthal said in a news release.

"We accept as part of our daily challenge to ourselves that you always have to do better," Szabo responded. But, he added, "our record of success is impressive and it speaks for itself."

Szabo’s departure came with the Supreme Court decision pending. The rail industry is expected to miss this December’s deadline for positive train control implementation. In Congress, the reauthorization process for the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act has already begun.

Asked how FRA, whose 840-strong workforce is little changed from six years ago, despite the added workload, can do its job without permanent leadership, Szabo said he had the "highest level of confidence" in the agency’s permanent staff.

One of the biggest take-aways from his tenure, Szabo said, is the "level of intellect, dedication, the work ethic of the career professionals here, and so I am not concerned."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last Friday quietly approved an 8-mile access road for a drilling project that would be the first to produce oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A).

The Army Corps’ record of decision allows ConocoPhillips Co. to continue pursuing its Greater Mooses Tooth project, known as GMT1, to drill up to 33 development and injection wells at an 11.8-acre drilling pad in the northeastern corner of the 22.5-million-acre NPR-A. The Bureau of Land Management still must give final approval for the project.

The Clean Water Act permit "incorporates all practicable avoidance and minimization measures" and allows up to 73 acres of waters and wetlands to be filled, the corps said.

"The authorization includes special conditions to further avoid and minimize potential adverse impacts and to compensate for unavoidable adverse impacts to the aquatic ecosystem," the corps said.

The approval follows BLM’s decision last October to issue a final environmental impact statement (EIS) on the project offering tentative final approval of the project.

BLM’s EIS selected alternative B, which would reduce the project’s impact on subsistence hunting and fishing in areas used by the nearby Native village of Nuiqsut. Environmental groups are skeptical of the need for a permanent road and have urged BLM to strongly consider roadless and seasonal drilling options. But if a permanent road is to be approved, environmentalists favor alternative B, arguing it better protects Fish Creek.

But the corps permits would authorize Conoco’s preferred route, which was analyzed by BLM as alternative A. The corps said that alternative is the "least environmentally damaging practicable alternative."

That alternative is also preferred by Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (R) and the North Slope Borough, the county-level government representing the North Slope.

BLM said the corps’ permit decision will inform what alternative it ultimately selects in its own record of decision. A BLM spokesman said there was no immediate timeline for a final decision.

Conservationists have long opposed plans for the gravel road, arguing that it could lead to development of an ecologically damaging network of roads and encourage future exploration deeper into the petroleum reserve. BLM’s review of the Conoco project is seen as a bellwether for future projects as industry moves westward into the mostly untapped reserve.

"We have not had a chance to review this decision and the reasons behind it, but we are disappointed that the Army Corps of Engineers has chosen to encroach on Fish Creek, an important watershed and subsistence resource for local communities," said Nicole Whittington-Evans, who directs the Wilderness Society’s Alaska office.

In a Jan. 9 letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, the heads of five major environmental groups said BLM must retain a protective buffer for Fish Creek, calling it an important tributary to special protected areas within the reserve.

"The Fish Creek area would be needlessly damaged under Alternative A by the construction of multiple bridges and other infrastructure," said the CEOs of the Wilderness Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Alaska Wilderness League, Sierra Club and Conservation Lands Foundation. BLM must protect the creek to "uphold the integrity" of its 2013 integrated activity plan for the reserve, they argued.

BLM’s record of decision could include additional environmental mitigation measures, including proposals for legacy well remediation, aircraft and traffic limits to minimize impacts on caribou and an agreement giving local Native communities access to the road.

If ConocoPhillips receives the necessary permits and decides to move forward with the GMT1 project, construction could begin during the last quarter of 2015, with first production likely two years later.

The project could add 30,000 barrels of oil per day to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System by late 2017.

KENEDY, Texas — David Stobaugh parked his Chevy Tahoe along County Road 171 with the nose pointed east, toward the main highway, and waited with the headlights switched off and the engine running.

It was an hour before dawn, and the only illumination came from a drilling rig just off the road. A few hundred yards away, a flare at an oil collection facility flashed and ebbed.

Stobaugh, a Karnes County sheriff’s deputy since last February, already knew the road well. County Road 171, on the western edge of the county, is a two-lane track that’s only partially paved; there’s a strip of blacktop down the center, a few feet of gravel on either side. The speed limit is 30 mph. A few weeks ago, Stobaugh clocked a driver doing 74 mph.

Within minutes, headlights from an approaching pickup appeared in the distance, disappeared behind a hill and reappeared as the truck reached the crest. Stobaugh’s radar gun displayed the truck’s speed in red numbers: 59 mph. Then 60.

As the truck came abreast of the Tahoe, Stobaugh hit his flashing lights, put the Tahoe in gear and swung in a U-turn behind the pickup. By the time the sun came up, he had ticketed four vehicles in the same stretch of road, including an 18-wheeler hauling a tanker-trailer, all for speeding, and all of them driving at least 15 mph above the limit.

"It was going to be a warning, but he’s just going to keep doing it," Stobaugh said after processing a ticket on the Tahoe’s built-in printer.

Welcome to law enforcement in one of the most dangerous places in the oil patch.

As Texas’ oil production has reached 40-year highs, traffic deaths have spiked in oil-producing counties, stretching the resources of local police agencies and angering local residents.

Karnes County, an hour southeast of San Antonio, may be the starkest example. It’s in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale field, and it’s the biggest oil-producing county in Texas, according to state statistics. It has a full-time population of about 15,100 people.

In 2009, before the oil boom started, Karnes County had three traffic deaths, none of them involving heavy trucks or commercial vehicles, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. In 2013, the last full year for which statistics are available, 11 people died in wrecks, including six deaths in wrecks with commercial vehicles.

It’s the same story in neighboring DeWitt and Gonzales counties, the third- and fourth-biggest oil-producing counties in the state. DeWitt had a single traffic death in 2009; the number spiked to nine in 2013, including five involving commercial vehicles. Gonzales had five vehicle deaths in 2009, and the number rose to 10 in 2013, including four in commercial vehicle wrecks.

In rural Texas, local sheriffs provide the bulk of law enforcement, with assistance from the Department of Public Safety’s Highway Patrol.

Over the last five years, shifting priorities and budget reductions have cut into the DPS’s historical role in traffic patrol, at the same time the oil boom has pushed up the number of traffic accidents. That has left Karnes County and other oil-producing counties bearing more of the burden for their residents’ safety.

The DPS’s Commercial Vehicle Enforcement unit, which specializes in heavy trucks, wrote 29 percent fewer tickets in fiscal 2014 than it did in fiscal 2010 — 137,529 compared with 194,618 in 2010, according to statistics obtained by EnergyWire under the state Public Information Act. The Commercial Vehicle Enforcement unit’s criminal arrests fell 7 percent during the same years, to 1,238 in fiscal 2014 from 1,337 in fiscal 2010, the statistics show.

The state Legislature cut the DPS’s highway patrol budget by about 11 percent, from $178 million in fiscal year 2010 to $157.8 million in fiscal 2011, according to data from the Legislative Budget Board. The state has increased the budget for highway patrol to $165.1 million in the current fiscal year — still lower than 2010.

The DPS’s spending for commercial vehicle enforcement rose from $26.6 million in fiscal 2010 to $38.3 million in fiscal 2012. But it fell to $34 million in fiscal 2011. This year, the DPS is budgeted to spend $38 million on commercial vehicle enforcement — about $300,000 less than it did three years ago. A spokeswoman said the funding levels fluctuated because of changes in federal funding.

At the same time, the DPS has had to pull troopers away from routine patrols in other parts of the state to focus on security at the Mexican border, which has been a top priority for outgoing Gov. Rick Perry (R), DPS Director Steve McCraw testified at a legislative hearing in September.

The DPS turned down repeated requests for interviews. In an emailed statement, spokeswoman Summer Blackwell said the statistics may not paint a clear picture of the DPS’s efforts.

"Focusing only on citation numbers does not provide a comprehensive picture of commercial vehicle enforcement in the state of Texas," she said. "Commercial vehicle enforcement activities in the energy sector areas of the state have been a major focus for DPS because the department is aware of the challenges in these areas and is making every effort to respond accordingly."

For instance, the number of commercial vehicle inspections — which can be done by civilians as well as sworn troopers — rose 16 percent in four years, from 345,385 in calendar year 2010 to 401,487 in 2013. Preliminary figures show that the number of inspections fell in 2014 to 352,514. The department is also conducting more audits and compliance reviews of truck operators.

The DPS also does regular "sweeps" of the Eagle Ford, Permian Basin and other oil-producing areas to check for commercial vehicle violations, Blackwell wrote.

State highway spending also took a hit. Funding for highway construction fell from $5.2 billion in 2008 to $4.2 billion in 2012, according to the Texas Department of Transportation (EnergyWire, Aug. 27, 2014).

The lack of spending has left roads throughout the oil patch in bad condition, further eroding safety.

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies have drilled at a furious pace. Karnes, DeWitt and Gonzales counties are in the middle of the Eagle Ford Shale, a huge oil and gas field that has only seen development in the last five years.

In 2009, the state issued 94 drilling permits in the Eagle Ford Shale, which includes Karnes, DeWitt and Gonzales, and parts of more than 20 other counties. In 2013, the number increased to 4,416. In the first 11 months of 2014, it issued 5,254. Each well can require more than 1,100 truck trips to haul in equipment, sand and water and to haul away oil and wastewater.

State officials say more resources are on the way.

Voters approved a ballot proposal in November to divert some of the state’s taxes on oil and gas production to road construction. At least 15 percent of the money — estimated at $261 million during the current fiscal year — will be spent on roads in oil-producing counties, Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Nick Wade said in an email.

The Transportation Department adopted an emergency rule in October that allowed it to lower the speed limits on some rural, two-lane state roads in response to the high crash rates. The department is seeking a permanent rule change that will allow it to adjust speed limits in weeks rather than months.

The DPS has obtained federal funds to pay travel costs and overtime for its troopers to conduct sweeps in the oil-producing regions, spokesman Tom Vinger said in an email. It has also asked for additional funding in the next budget cycle to hire more troopers.

The trucking industry is trying to improve its record, too, said Scott Smith, safety director at Lake Truck Lines in San Antonio. The company specializes in hauling cement and other ingredients to drill sites and is one of the fast-growing shippers in the oil patch.

Lake uses GPS monitors to track the speed of its trucks, and its managers get automatic alerts if a truck is speeding or has to make a quick stop, Smith said.

Still, hauling materials in the oil patch is inherently more difficult — and dangerous — than open-road driving. Lake’s drivers work all hours of the day and night and have to traverse unpaved lease roads with heavy loads.

It’s constant work to make sure that trucks are maintained and drivers don’t work too many hours, Smith said.

"These guys aren’t machines; they’ve got to rest sometime," he said.

Public anger about the danger of oil field traffic is palpable. On Dec. 5, an oil company pickup clipped the back of a Karnes City school bus as it was unloading students on a rural road. No one was injured.

"How can you not see that there’s a school bus right in front of you?" Jeanette Winn, superintendent of the Karnes City Independent School District, said in an interview.

Tracey Honig, a mother of two who lives northeast of Karnes City, got so tired of seeing trucks fly past her daughters’ school bus every morning that she started posting videos of the trucks on Facebook. One clip from October got 73,000 views.

"Last year was really bad — we had one or two trucks a month run the bus stop," Honig said in an interview.

Traffic safety is just one of the worries that Karnes County Sheriff Dwayne Villanueva inherited when he took over the office in 2012.

The oil boom has brought jobs and prosperity, but the influx of oil field workers has brought a predictable increase in bar fights and other disturbances, and the county has seen an influx of synthetic marijuana, Villanueva said.

Most of Karnes County’s firefighters are volunteers, and the county is now home to several industrial plants that process oil and gas, along with thousands of wells and hundreds of miles of pipeline.

Karnes County doubled the size of the sheriff’s department to about 30 deputies in 2014, and the county is building a new 50-bed jail. Traffic lights have popped up in small towns. The sheriff and the local school district have experimented with cameras on school buses to monitor for unsafe driving.

One reason Villanueva created a six-deputy traffic unit was to free the rest of his deputies to focus on other calls.

One deputy is certified to inspect trucks for some safety violations, such as heavy loads. The DPS, though, is in charge of other aspects of commercial vehicle enforcement, like inspecting trucks’ brakes and monitoring drivers’ working hours.

Villanueva said he’s still grateful for the DPS’s assistance. The state agency has made up for the cuts in routine patrols by conducting regular sweeps of commercial vehicles, enforcing the laws that the sheriff’s deputies can’t.

The oil companies also help out by providing firefighting equipment and other necessities. Villanueva said he and other local law officers have spoken about traffic issues at oil companies’ safety meetings.

Villanueva said he has enough deputies these days to handle the load, but the county will need to maintain the level as long as the drilling lasts.

"The meetings we go to, they tell us 15 to 25 years is how long it’ll be here," he said.

Back on patrol after a court appearance, Stobaugh said he was surprised to make it through a shift without having to investigate an accident.

Shortly after his lunch break, an 18-wheeler clipped a guardrail on a highway bridge between Kenedy and Karnes City. Stobaugh, cruising the highway a few miles away, turned on his siren and gunned the Tahoe as he responded, then slowed back down when other deputies radioed that it was a minor incident.

After a year on the traffic beat, he said the focus on speeding is helping.

"If you’ve got a heavy presence in problem areas, they’ll slow down," he said.

Were it not for two large universities and a steady flow of traffic on U.S. 11, Potsdam, N.Y., might be just another Norman Rockwell-inspired village along the the U.S.-Canada border between Lake Ontario and Montreal.

But Potsdam (population 17,029) claims in abundance what only a few other upstate towns have — bad weather, brainpower and a unique set of conditions for engineers trying to build the nation’s first fully functional municipal microgrid for the village of Potsdam.

With an expected completion in 2017, Potsdam’s underground microgrid should be capable of delivering electricity to all of the village’s essential services using local generation assets that can be isolated from the regional transmission grid and "islanded" to roughly a dozen sites, including local police, fire, hospital and emergency response facilities, and the campuses of Clarkson University and the State University of New York, Potsdam.

If successful, the microgrid, which was first conceived as a research project in Clarkson’s electrical engineering program, could become a model for municipalities across the country where power infrastructure is vulnerable to disruptions both natural and man-made, including major weather events and cyberattacks.

Thomas Ortmeyer, a professor and director of the power engineering program at Clarkson and principal investigator on the Potsdam microgrid, said the idea was originally conceived to cover only the university campus, but he and his colleagues were persuaded "to think bigger, to a resilient microgrid that would serve critical loads throughout our community."

Other key collaborators on the project include National Grid, upstate New York and New England’s largest electricity provider, and General Electric Co., whose GE Global Research Division is backing the effort with $1.5 million in federal grand funding as well as $300,000 in private dollars.

GE’s main charge is to develop an enhanced microgrid control system (eMCS) that will "be the key element in keeping the town’s electricity system up and running for several days should it become disconnected from the main power station," according to GE scientists involved in the project.

Sumit Bose, GE’s principal investigator on the project and a microgrid technology leader at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y., said Potsdam provides an ideal mix of energy resources, technology know-how and grid connectivity to support a resilient municipal microgrid that can withstand a variety of load conditions and disruptions.

To date, only one other U.S. microgrid bears similarity to what is planned at Potsdam, according to Bose. It was built by GE in partnership with the Defense Department at the Marine Corps’ Twentynine Palms Combat Center in California’s Mojave Desert. That microgrid is designed to improve energy efficiency at the base and maintain power in the event that the 932-square-mile facility is cut off from the Southern California grid.

Other microgrids have been built on university campuses, including several in New York, and at hospitals and government-owned sites like the Food and Drug Administration’s White Oak campus in Silver Spring, Md.

But to date, there has been little in the way of scaling microgrids to the municipal level, although state funding for such projects has begun flowing in places like New York, where the New York Energy Research and Development Authority has allocated $3.3. million to improve the resilience of the state’s electricity grid.

"We had what we thought was a great idea, and DOE agreed to fund it," Bose said, "We went looking for a place to test it, and the stars kind of aligned" with Potsdam, only three hours away from Niskayuna by car.

Indeed, weather-related power outages are common in Potsdam, where arctic blasts, lake effect snows and ice storms can leave residents, students, businesses and farmers in surrounding St. Lawrence County powerless, immobile and vulnerable to deadly conditions, including as recently as December 2013, when an inch of ice coated the region and knocked out power to thousands of homes and businesses.

In an interview, Everett Basford, Potsdam’s village administrator, recalled the now infamous January 1998 storm that deposited up to 3 inches of ice across the region, its heavy weight snapping trees and power lines while sending emergency vehicles and utility trucks skidding into ditches.

"Luckily, it happened while all of our students were away on break, so that helped in terms of our emergency response," Basford said. "But the ice was so thick and so widespread that we couldn’t get essential supplies trucked in here for days."

The ice event was followed days later by up to 5 inches of rain, creating a massive flood on top of a winter weather emergency.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked the ice and flooding as among the deadliest and costliest weather events in the region’s history, with 40 fatalities and more than $3 billion in damage to property and infrastructure in New York, New England and Canada.

It would remain the storm of record for many New Yorkers until October 2012, when Superstorm Sandy made landfall on the New York and New Jersey coasts, destroying much of the densely populated coastal zone and turning the Northeast’s power grid into a heap of smoldering wires.

While communities like Potsdam were awakening to their increased vulnerability from weather-related power outages, so, too, were the region’s power utilities and telecommunications companies, many of which experienced disruptions both before and after Sandy, but especially during the 2012 superstorm, which laid waste to much of the Jersey Shore and pounded Manhattan and more inland areas with heavy wind, rain and floodwaters.

Virginia Limmiatis, a National Grid spokeswoman, said her company’s interest in developing community-scale microgrids stemmed directly from events like Sandy and the ice storms in its upstate New York service area, including the more recent December 2013 storm that coated Watertown, N.Y., and points north and east with an inch-thick sheet of ice.

"This whole project is the brainchild of some really horrific events," Limmiatis said in a telephone interview. "What we’d like to do is give customers who are in these hard-hit areas some assurance that should something like this befall them again, the microgrid could supply essential energy."

While the Potsdam microgrid’s design is still in the early stages and implementation may take several more years, following testing and simulation studies at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, GE’s Bose said that the concept is fairly straightforward. Engineers want to harness as much locally derived energy as possible — including from solar panels, hydroelectric dams and thermal resources — and manage that power in such a way that it can be routed to transmission networks during routine day-to-day operations but tapped exclusively for local needs during emergencies.

"We still have to work out how the [distributed generation] resources will work together, and what is the most efficient way to operate them for emergency power and for everyday power," he said. Some local generation assets, like a municipally owned 900-kilowatt hydrodam on the Raquette River, might run most of the time, while others might be dispatched only when the microgrid is online.

Basford, the village administrator, said he’s confident that Potsdam can generate enough electricity through hydro, solar and combined heat-and-power facilities to meet essential demand in emergencies. At the same time, the village has no plans to sever ties with National Grid, which expects to take a lead role in operating the Potsdam microgrid and balancing flows between the microgrid and its larger transmission lines.

"I believe that the utility up here has a very good reliability rating," Basford said. "It’s just that we’re in an area that is sparsely populated, and things are really spread out, with lots of back roads with power lines and mini-substations along them.

"We could have a situation where one of those substations gets knocked out and it might be days before it comes back on. So if you can create a microgrid to take care of those kinds of needs, it’s just a logical path to go."

SMAP lives in a stark white clean room at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will be launched on Jan. 29 into space, where it will unfurl a giant antenna that looks like a circular fence.

The antenna is designed to collect signals pinging up from Earth 426 miles below. To SMAP, also known as the Soil Moisture Active Passive instrument, the Earth looks like a gigantic glass chamber of carbon and water, a setup similar to scientist Joseph Priestly’s experiment in 1771 when he discovered the carbon cycle. Priestly trapped a mouse and a mint plant inside a glass jar and found that the plant inhaled carbon dioxide (CO2) for photosynthesis and exhaled water vapor and oxygen, which the mouse breathed and thrived on. The carbon got used by the plant to make leaves and stems.

Scientists will use SMAP for their version of this experiments, with the planet as their glass jar. At the Arctic circle are stands of spruce, fir and pine form one of the largest contiguous forests on the planet. These boreal forests and other vegetated areas are like the mint plant. They absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and scientists call them net "carbon sinks" because traditionally they take in about 30 percent of the emissions from fossil fuel burning.

But as temperatures rise and the summer season lengthens, the soils in Alaska and the Arctic have been thawing. Forests are getting drier and wildfires now rage more frequently, releasing carbon, so scientists do not know how much longer these forests will remain carbon sinks. Measurements are key, and this is SMAP’s task. Once it is in space, it will provide the most frequent and highest-resolution measurements of exactly how frozen the ground is in the northern latitudes.

"The problem is the nature and stability of the land carbon sink; it is largely unknown," said John Kimball, a professor of hydrology at the Flathead Lake Biological Station at the University of Montana and a SMAP science team member.

The satellite will also help with weather forecasting and climate modeling, which require accurate soil moisture measurements. This Swiss-army-knife quality of SMAP has made the mission highly attractive to Congress, which had funded the satellite through three presidential terms.

The spacecraft, an assemblage of refined steel and foil, has cost $915 million to put together and taken more than two decades of effort. Some scientists have begun and ended their careers in the satellite’s shadows, helping develop multiple Earth-observing radars along the way.

In the early 1980s, at fields in Beltsville, Md., Ted Engman, then an engineer with the Department of Agriculture and later chief of the hydrologic branch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and his colleagues experimented with microwaves of the kind that pops corn kernels. They shot pulses of the microwaves at soil. The slight shift in reflected energy told them how moist the soil was.

Soil moisture is the spoke of our planet’s water cycle. Rainfall enters the soil, which plants drink from. And as they add carbonaceous material, plants barter water vapor for CO2, much like Priestley’s mint. The exhaled water vapor forms clouds and triggers rainfall, which re-enters the soil. The entire transaction is similar to withdrawing from and depositing cash into a checking account, explained Dara Entekhabi, science team leader for SMAP and a professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Soil moisture is the bank account of water in the land," he said.

Knowing soil moisture reveals quite a lot, as well, about the carbon cycle, through which carbon enters air, gets trapped in growing foliage, dissolves in oceans, is incorporated into calcite rock cliffs and gets breathed out by living beings. It also links to the flow of energy through the planet as water evaporates and condenses, forming ice, clouds, vapor and liquid.

These processes occur at the poles, but in sub-zero temperatures, soil does not have water so much as it has ice. Out of the frozen ground rise the forests of the taiga, which have served as carbon traps for the past 11,500 years. These forests act as sinks when the ground thaws during spring and water becomes available to plants, which then grab CO2 from the atmosphere and start growing.

SMAP will track the thawing and refreezing of the Earth, split into 1.9-square-mile grids, which will help scientists understand the carbon sink in the Northern Hemisphere. The measurement is key, since more than half the planet’s vegetated land area — 25 million square miles, four times the size of Russia — freezes in the wintertime and halts photosynthesis.

As the world has been warming, this freeze-thaw cycle appears to be changing. Scientists have noted that spring is advancing by about a day and a half every decade in the northern latitudes, but they lack a good instrument to track this advance throughout the world, said Kimball of the Flathead Lake Biological Station.

"Effectively, 25 percent to 30 percent each year of the CO2 that is emitted to the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning is taken out of the atmosphere by land processes that we don’t fully understand," he said. "And if we don’t fully understand the processes, then we don’t really know the potential vulnerability to [climate] change."

Engman and his colleagues did not know all this in the 1980s, when engineers first began measuring the planet from space. Beginning in the ’60s, the early LANDSAT satellites had taken photos of the Negev Desert, which straddles Egypt and Israel. The photographs showed how land that was overgrazed on the Egyptian side appeared a shade lighter than moister and more fertile lands on the Israeli side.

Scientists then reasoned that if such minute differences in land cover could be seen from space, they could probably be measured. "We had some friends that we’d get together now and then, and we’d began to feel the potential for remote sensing was pretty big. And so we started pursuing some of that," Engman recalled.

Armed with tools and designs, Engman and his colleagues began working on microwave-emitting radars. In the ’90s, they used planes to fly their devices over fields in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. They soon wanted more than that.

"The ability to get something up in space and be able to continually measure over the globe is very intriguing," Engman said. "Oh, we dreamed of it."

The dreams led to instrument packages on the Space Shuttle that recorded, among other things, rainfall, temperature and soil moisture. As the shuttle passed over a particular field in Oklahoma, Engman and his team would fly an aircraft equipped with the radar along the shuttle’s path. At the same time, graduate students would dig into the soil to record soil moisture. The synchronous measurements were to ground the truth of the shuttle’s radar.

It was clear by then that the device could be helpful to learn about climate change. Atmospheric scientists had built computer models that split the planet into a grid, with each cell containing an algorithmic representation of the wind, ocean, temperatures and other processes of the planet. Soil moisture was an important building block in these models, but scientists had very few of these measurements from most parts of the world.

"Only over industrialized nations like Western Europe, North America and parts of Asia do we have measurements of this, and even there, it is very sparse," Entekhabi of MIT said.

Climate models have evolved since the 1990s, but they still get key rainfall processes wrong, partly because of incomplete soil moisture measurements, said Chris Taylor, a researcher at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire, England.

In climate models, rainfall occurs as a drizzle, usually around midday. In the real world, rain falls mostly in the late afternoon. Imagine, then, how challenging it must be for scientists to simulate precipitation 50 or 100 years from today in East Africa or India or over a boreal forest in Canada, affected as these regions are by swirls of very disparate atmospheric phenomena.

Soil moisture measurements, especially at the level of detail SMAP will provide, would help scientists with the challenge, Taylor said. Take a drought, for instance. Scientists need to understand how a soil dries out during times of water stress in order to accurately represent the physics of the process in a climate model. Without such measurements, "you can end up locking in a mistake," Taylor said.

"Then you are running this model forward, and the soil gets drier, and that is translated into reduced rainfall, and then you lock in a drought," he said.

The United States’ National Research Council espoused the importance of soil moisture measurements in a 1999 report in which it advised NASA to get the device into space.

It was the golden age for Earth observations. NASA launched two satellites: Terra in 1999 and Aqua in 2004. The missions were ambitious on a scale not seen before or since.

"We just didn’t have the computational ability to be able to handle that much data before 2000," said Kimball of the University of Montana.

With the costs of handling enormous data loads falling, projects like SMAP became feasible. NASA began planning for a soil moisture satellite almost immediately, but budgetary constraints shelved the first attempt in 2005.

Deliverance came in 2008, when President George W. Bush’s budget funded NASA for the soil moisture mission. The device was named SMAP and was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It will launch on a Delta II rocket in nine days.

Once in orbit, the satellite will fly between the poles and measure soil across the world every two to three days. Using the data, NASA would construct two maps for scientists to use: a soil moisture map with a resolution of 6.2 miles and a freeze-thaw map with a resolution of 1.9 miles. The satellite penetrates to a depth of 2 inches.

These qualities will make SMAP the best and most comprehensive tracker of the world’s soil. Its life span is officially three years, but it may function for much longer in the cool, benign environment of space, Engman said.

"So if they get it [SMAP] good in the first place, chances are it can run for quite a long time," Engman said.

In his first State of the Union address to two Republican-controlled chambers of Congress, expect President Obama to come out swinging tonight on energy and the environment.

The president has grown increasingly confrontational toward the legislative branch in recent years during his annual speeches. And as newly empowered congressional Republicans have put Obama’s energy agenda in their cross hairs — and now that Obama isn’t facing re-election or looming midterms — the president is likely to double down on his go-it-alone strategy when it comes to climate and environmental issues.

"I would suspect it’s going to be fairly combative," said Eric Washburn, a former Senate Democratic leadership aide who’s now an energy industry lobbyist at Bracewell & Giuliani. "I would imagine him pursuing a bit of a populist contrast with Congress."

Obama said Saturday that he’ll "call on this new Congress to join me in putting aside the political games and finding areas where we agree so we can deliver for the American people."

But as he lays out his energy and climate priorities, he’s unlikely to find much common ground with Republican lawmakers.

The president is likely to tout the recent climate deal between the United States and China, ongoing work to tackle climate change through U.S. EPA regulations and other big-ticket environmental rules his administration is looking to wrap up before he leaves office. His pitch for broad tax reforms could also include reiterating his call to end tax breaks to oil companies.

That’s all likely to ruffle feathers among the GOP and Obama’s critics in industry, many of whom have urged the president to strike a conciliatory tone in his speech tonight.

Voters in November "called for President Obama to cooperate with Congress," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during a speech Friday. "On that front, we’ve got some distance to cover. … But Tuesday can be a new day. This can be the moment the president pivots to a positive posture."

Obama’s critics among business trade groups aren’t expecting to like what they hear on the energy front tonight.

"I think that the president has started to make it clear that he has a vision for the country, and he is going to use every tool within the executive branch — and, frankly, some that don’t exist legally — to implement that vision," said Christopher Guith, senior vice president for policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

As usual, Obama is likely to speak in broad terms during his speech, rather than drilling down into policy details. The specific issues that energy stakeholders will be listening for include climate rules to curb methane and power plant emissions, energy exports, water regulations, and nuclear energy strategy.

Obama could mention the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, although several observers said they’re expecting him to steer clear of the hot-button issue. The GOP-led Congress has made forcing Obama’s hand on the pipeline a top priority this year, but the White House has pledged to veto legislation that would override the administration.

Some environmentalists are hopeful that Obama will nix the phrase "all of the above" when it comes to discussing his energy priorities. Ahead of his annual address last year, a coalition of green groups asked Obama to jettison the phrase — typically used to show support for fossil and renewable fuels — from his vocabulary. The president stuck with it, saying in 2014, "the all-of-the-above energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working" (E&E Daily, Jan. 29, 2014).

"I hope he won’t do that again," said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign and former longtime director of the Sierra Club’s global warming program.

The White House signaled that climate science will be a key theme with the announcement yesterday that Nicole Hernandez Hammer, a sea-level rise expert in southeast Florida, will be among the guests hosted by first lady Michelle Obama (Greenwire, Jan. 19).

Becker is hopeful Obama will strike a forceful tone on climate change, particularly with the speech coming on the heels of government scientists’ reports that 2014 was Earth’s warmest year on record.

Given the state of the science, Becker said, he’d like Obama to explain that "we need to take very strong action to cut pollution." With the GOP in charge of both chambers of Congress, he added, Obama "really needs to talk to the American people."

President Obama has promoted domestic natural gas development as a key economic driver in his last three State of the Union speeches, offering it as a step toward U.S. energy independence and a lower-carbon future.

And gas developers expect to get another mention tonight. Only this time, its leaders will be less than thrilled.

Industry advocates say the domestic shale boom has boosted Obama’s legacy by helping pull several states out of economic slumps, but he undermined them with last week’s announcement of proposed U.S. EPA methane emission curbs for new and modified oil and gas developers (Greenwire, Jan. 14).

"If history is any guide, President Obama’s State of the Union address will likely include a mix of rhetoric claiming credit for energy achievements with a list of policy proposals that in many instances we believe will actually undermine them," American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Jack Gerard told reporters last week.

Obama’s State of the Union shoutouts to gas were often delivered with calls for Congress to legislate on climate change. He even lauded the gas industry in his address last September to the United Nations summit on climate change in New York City.

The president has repeatedly noted that production from the Bakken, Marcellus and other shale fields has brought down the cost of gas, powering a resurgence in American manufacturing and helping reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector. He often reminds his audiences that oil and gas development has expanded to unprecedented levels during his administration, making the United States the world’s leading petroleum producer.

And Obama has used his highest-profile annual speech to show that he is implementing an "all-of-the-above" energy policy.

Obama’s 2012 State of the Union included a call for new access for offshore oil and gas development, while last year’s speech announced the creation of "sustainable shale gas growth zones" for onshore production (EnergyWire, Jan. 30, 2014).

"My administration will keep working with the industry to sustain production and job growth while strengthening protection of our air, our water and our communities," the president said last January.

But on methane, Gerard and others say the administration has abandoned cooperation with industry in favor of an onerous new regulatory regime that will scuttle petroleum production with little environmental benefit.

Methane — which is more than 80 times as climate forcing as CO2 over a 20-year period — is the major component of gas and is leaked at various points throughout the oil and gas system. But the petroleum industry says it has already taken steps to reduce venting and is willing to do more voluntarily.

"The natural gas industry has demonstrated its ability to significantly reduce methane emissions and our commitment to making further reductions through innovation," America’s Natural Gas Alliance President Marty Durbin said in a statement last week blasting the administration’s regulatory announcement.

Industry points to EPA’s own estimate that methane leakage from the sector overall has dipped 16 percent since 1990, even as gas production has grown by more than a third. Much of that reduction comes from new hydraulically fractured wellheads, which after 2012 began phasing in a new EPA rule for smog-forming emissions that also captured methane.

But Gerard said the gains were due to technology investments by operators, and the new regulatory plans do not respect what industry has already done. It is an example of "no good deed goes unpunished," he said.

"I do believe that the president for legacy purposes will try to sketch his broader vision of climate on a global scale next week, and that’s why I think there is some possibility he could touch on the methane issue," Gerard said last week.

But any claim that the methane regulation is key to that legacy is "wholly inappropriate," he said.

Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a blog post that he hopes Obama will take a more critical tone on gas than he has in years past. Obama should note, he said, that fugitive methane emissions can erode some of the climate benefits of using gas instead of coal for power generation.

And rather than appearing to endorse gas use, Obama should say that it must ultimately be phased down, too, to make way for demand-side efficiency and renewable energy, Meyer said.

"An overreliance on natural gas over the long-term won’t allow us to achieve the emissions reductions needed to address global warming," he said.

Environmentalists expressed some frustration last week that EPA’s regulatory plans won’t include rules for existing oil and gas infrastructure.

"It leaves unanswered what’s going to happen with the existing facilities," the Environmental Defense Fund’s Jeremy Symons said on E&ETV’s OnPoint last week (OnPoint, Jan. 15).

There is some evidence that the president might be preparing to sharpen his rhetoric on gas. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said last week at a reporters roundtable that methane must be addressed in any future discussion of domestic development (Greenwire, Jan. 16).

"We need to say more than ‘safe and responsible,’" she said, referencing words administration officials have often used in the past to qualify their support for gas development. "We need to make sure we underpin that with actual reductions," she said.

But Frank Maisano of Bracewell & Giuliani said that Obama would still have to walk a "fine line" on gas development because that industry supports his legacy in so many ways.

Not only has it been a bright spot in the otherwise dismal economy of the last six years, he said, but gas has allowed the United States to show the world it can meet its carbon reduction commitments ahead of this year’s U.N. talks.

"The emissions profile of the country has been dramatically reduced because of the move toward natural gas," he noted. By swapping coal-fired power plants for gas-burning units, he said, the U.S. utility sector has been able cut its emissions by 17 percent since 2005 — helping to bring about Obama’s pledge of an economywide cut of the same percentage by 2020.

And the gas boom has helped stem U.S. dependence on foreign oil, Maisano said.

"He’s always going to be supportive of natural gas, because it is the piece of the puzzle that has created this crossroads that we’re at with energy independence, which we haven’t been at in 50 years," he said. "That’s the key moment, that’s the watershed moment that natural gas has provided."

Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said the administration is aware of the benefits of unconventional gas development. The methane framework EPA put out last Wednesday was not an assault on the industry but an opportunity for collaboration.

"I think it’s a matter of making sure that there’s a level playing field for the industry, that it meets the appropriate safety and environmental standards in the processes that they use," the former EPA official said.

The blueprint leaves many questions unanswered, including how new and modified sources will be regulated and how a "modified" source will be defined. Obama may use tonight’s address to ask for input on that proposal, he said.

For the second time, California farmer Marvin Horne will argue to the Supreme Court in April that the government is violating the Constitution by forcing him to turn over his raisins without paying him.

On Friday, the justices agreed to review Horne’s challenge to a Depression-era program for setting raisin prices that the central California farmer claims amounts to an unconstitutional taking without the just compensation required by the Fifth Amendment.

The case concerns the 1937 Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act, which Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan jokingly referred to as "the world’s most out-of-date law" two years ago.

It requires the Department of Agriculture to stabilize prices for raisins, nuts and other crops by controlling the amount of product entering the market. California raisins account for 99 percent of the domestic supply and 40 percent of the world’s.

Every year, USDA has issued a Raisin Marketing Order that requires "handlers" of raisins — but importantly, not "producers," or bulk farmers — to turn over a percentage of their crop yield. Those raisins are used in school lunches and other programs.

The government has historically paid varying amounts for those raisins.

In 2000, Horne, whose family has farmed raisins in Fresno and Madera counties for more than half a century, reorganized his operation to sidestep the "handler" label. By purchasing his own packaging equipment, he sought to package his farmed raisins himself in an attempt to qualify as a "producer" and be exempt from the government program.

Two years later, he stopped turning over any raisins to the government. USDA intervened, saying he still qualified as a handler.

At issue are raisins from 2002-03 and 2003-04, when USDA required transfer of 47 percent and 30 percent of Horne’s crop, respectively. USDA brought an enforcement action against Horne’s farm, Raisin Valley Farms, noting that he was processing, or handling, raisins from several farms, not just his. Horne was hit with about $700,000 in penalties and fines.

Horne challenged the government action in court. He noted that for the 2003-04 crop, USDA paid other farmers less than the price of production. For the 2002-03 crop, the government paid nothing.

"The regulations at issue are, in short, a textbook case of an uncompensated taking," Horne’s attorney, former federal appellate judge Michael McConnell, wrote in court documents.

The case first reached the Supreme Court two years ago and garnered attention because of the bizarre aspects of the USDA program. It was featured on Comedy Central’s "The Daily Show."

In a unanimous ruling, the court in June 2013 sidestepped the constitutional taking issue. It held that Horne has a right to challenge the program in federal court — he didn’t have to go to the federal court of claims first — and sent the case back to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (Greenwire, June 10, 2013).

On remand, the 9th Circuit again rejected Horne’s claims last May. A three-judge panel acknowledged that Horne’s "impatience with a regulatory program" that may be "out-dated and perhaps disadvantageous to smaller agricultural firms is understandable."

But the panel held that the program didn’t amount to a taking because Horne never technically turned over any raisins, so nothing was physically taken. Horne, the court said, also failed to prove the program amounted to a regulatory taking.

The court also upheld the government’s penalties, saying they were justly proportional and there was a nexus between the fines and what the program requires.

"At bottom, the reserve requirement is a use restriction applying to the Hornes insofar as they voluntarily choose to send their raisins into the stream of interstate commerce," the court wrote. "The Secretary did not authorize a forced seizure of the Hornes’ crops, but rather imposed a condition on the Hornes’ use of their crops by regulating their sale" (Greenwire, May 14, 2014).

Several groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and libertarian Cato Institute, have filed briefs in support of Horne’s efforts to overturn that ruling.

The court will rule on Horne v. USDA by the end of June.

NIPTON, Calif. — The Mojave Desert’s gleaming Ivanpah solar plant is bright enough to make Las Vegas-bound air travelers and pilots squint from a distance of 60 or more miles.

The 45-story "power towers" shine with sunlight reflected by 350,000 heliostat mirrors spread across an area four times the size of New York’s Central Park. Receivers atop the towers heat to nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, boiling water to turn turbines that crank out 392 megawatts — power for more than 100,000 houses.

But that intense heat is incinerating birds that fly into the "flux field" between the mirrors and the towers.

Bird mortality is a problem for Ivanpah developer BrightSource Energy Inc., operator NRG Energy Inc. and other companies that covet the power tower technology. Killing or maiming most bird species — even by accident — is illegal under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Ivanpah, which opened a year ago, is testing new ways to prevent bird deaths, trying everything from anti-perching devices to spraying a bubble gum extract that birds hate. Its efforts could be key to the technology’s future.

"We take this issue very seriously, and Ivanpah’s project owners have gone to great lengths to investigate and minimize wildlife impacts," NRG spokesman Jeff Holland said. "We are evaluating the use of humane avian deterrent systems, similar to those employed by airports and in food industry, and implementing other practices that go beyond conventional operational procedures to reduce avian activity near the towers."

While bird kills happen at all energy projects, Ivanpah has had an outsize amount of press attention — possibly because it’s the largest power tower project in the world and because it got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.

Trouble began last April with the release of a Fish and Wildlife Service forensics report documenting debris, birds and insects — all known as "streamers" — going up in smoke at Ivanpah. Vivid pictures of charred birds spawned headlines.

According to the report, Fish and Wildlife enforcement officers reported seeing an average of one streamer every two minutes.

One falconlike bird was seen with a plume of smoke rising from its tail as it flew through the field. It lost stability and altitude but was able to clear the plant’s perimeter and land, the officers said. It was never found.

One hundred forty-one bird carcasses were found at Ivanpah from June 2012 to December 2013, one-third of which likely died from the solar flux, with telltale signs including feather curling, charring, melting and breakage. Most were house finches and yellow-rumped warblers whose diets consist mostly of insects.

Federal investigators warned Ivanpah may act as a "mega-trap" where abundant insects attract small birds that are killed or incapacitated by the solar flux. Those birds in turn attract larger predators, "creating an entire food chain vulnerable to injury and death."

Critics and media seized on the report.

An Associated Press story in August suggested a bird was being toasted every two minutes at Ivanpah, even though investigators did not know what percentage of the streamers were birds. The AP also quoted Shawn Smallwood, an ecologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, estimating that 28,000 birds were dying each year at Ivanpah, an estimate the environmentalist admitted was "back-of-the-napkin."

Ivanpah consultants said they believe no more than 1,469 birds a year are being directly killed, 898 of which could be attributed to solar flux.

FWS conceded that "we currently have a very incomplete knowledge of the scope of avian mortality at these solar facilities."

The agency late last summer said it is conducting a "systematic study" at Ivanpah "to determine its true impact on birds."

Ivanpah officials say the plant’s impacts pale in comparison to larger human threats.

They include building collisions that kill an estimated 365 million to 988 million birds annually in the U.S., according to a 2014 study by federal scientists in the journal The Condor: Ornithological Applications.

Stray and outdoor pet cats each year kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals, mostly native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles, according to a 2013 report from scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and FWS.

American wind farms kill upward of half a million birds annually, according to peer-reviewed research, and power lines kill hundreds of thousands to 175 million birds annually, according to another study.

But the lurid images of burned birds at Ivanpah seem to resonate with the public. And uncertainty over the towers’ impacts could bring headaches to new projects.

The California Energy Commission in December 2013 initially rejected a proposal by BrightSource and Spanish firm Abengoa SA to build two 750-foot-tall power towers capable of 250 megawatts each, citing "insufficient evidence about actual avian impacts from power tower solar flux." The developers’ Palen Solar Electric Generating System had been proposed in Southern California’s Chuckwalla Valley along a major north-south flyway for migratory birds and within sight of Joshua Tree National Park.

The commission last September approved the project but limited it to one tower after finding that it "would very likely result in significant and unmitigable impacts to biological resources, mainly due to the solar power tower technology’s introduction of solar flux danger to avian species."

But the developers withdrew the proposal in September, and BrightSource has since sold its interest in the project to Abengoa, which said it still intends to build one power tower in the valley along with a molten salt technology to store power into the night.

"Abengoa aims to bring forward a project that will better meet the needs of the market and energy consumers," the company said in a statement in November.

"Concentrating solar power, and specifically tower technology with thermal energy storage, can play a key role in helping California achieve its clean energy goals by providing the flexibility needed to maintain grid reliability."

In a statement today, the firm said it is committed to avoiding and minimizing environmental impacts and compensating for impacts it cannot avoid. "Over the past eight years, the company has not witnessed any significant impact on the wildlife that surrounds our facilities," it said.

The Palen setback came as the solar industry was in a sweeping transition from concentrated solar power (CSP), which concentrates sunlight to create heat and turn a turbine, to photovoltaic (PV) panels, which turn sunlight directly into electricity.

PV is currently cheaper and faster to build and uses less desert water. Solar industry analysts are skeptical when another CSP plant will be built in the United States.

In addition, the long lead time for CSP plants makes it unlikely any new ones will be built in time to receive a 30 percent federal investment tax credit that expires in December 2016, when it will drop to 10 percent.

SolarReserve LLC’s 150 MW Rice Solar Energy Project, which was also to use power tower technology, was put on "indefinite hold" last year in part due to an inability to claim the tax credit, according to a report in the Palm Springs, Calif., Desert Sun. Developers dropped the Palen project for the same reason.

But CSP has one major leg up over PV in that it can store the sun’s heat for when the sun doesn’t shine. It can mimic baseload power sources like coal, natural gas, geothermal and nuclear and is easier to integrate into the electric grid.

The Obama administration has invested heavily in CSP, with at least $5 billion in loan guarantees for five projects representing more than 1,000 MW in Nevada, California and Arizona. "Collectively, these five CSP plants will nearly quadruple the preexisting capacity in the United States, creating a true CSP renaissance in America," the Energy Department said in a May 2014 report.

One of those projects, SolarReserve’s 110 MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Tonopah, Nev., is set to become the nation’s first power tower plant with advanced molten salt energy storage when it comes online in the coming months.

Abengoa’s 280 MW Solana CSP plant south of Phoenix, which uses 2,200 mirrored troughs to concentrate sunlight on receiver tubes containing a heat transfer fluid, went online in October 2013 and was the first in the U.S. to offer molten salt storage.

Whether bird deaths at Ivanpah will crimp the technology’s development remains to be seen.

Environmentalists are unlikely to endorse the technology until its environmental footprint is better understood.

"We’re cautious and somewhat alarmed until we find out the truth," said Garry George, renewable energy project director for Audubon California. "Everything you build is going to have some impact on birds. The question is, how big? Is it affecting populations?"

Ivanpah’s owners hope to answer that through better monitoring and the use of bird deterrents.

In mid-October, Ivanpah installed a "BirdBuffer" at the top of one of its towers. The moving box-size machine sprays a concentrated grape juice extract into the air at regular intervals, 45 minutes of every hour. The vapor extract, which is used in food products including bubble gum, causes a "safe yet irritating response" in birds, according to the manufacturer, BirdBuffer LLC of Everett, Wash., which sells the units for $8,995 each.

BirdBuffer CEO Gary Crawford said the plant has since seen a reduction in bird activity.

Ivanpah is also exploring anti-perching devices, fogging and sonic deterrents, and waste and water containment to keep birds from scavenging the area for food, NRG’s Holland said. It is turning off facility lights at night to attract fewer insects and repositioning heliostats to cut down on glare.

Birds continue to fall from the sky — 115 carcasses were located last year between May 23 and Aug. 17, about one-third of which showed signed of dying in the solar flux, according to Ivanpah’s latest filing with the California Energy Commission.

A Greenwire reporter visited the site Dec. 7 but saw no streamers or bird carcasses.

The true number of dying birds is likely underrepresented by human surveys.

Large facilities like Ivanpah are difficult to efficiently search; carcasses are often hidden by vegetation or solar panels, dead birds disappear to scavengers and others degrade too fast to determine cause of death, according to the FWS forensics report.

Ivanpah is also seeking to better monitor its airspace.

Last May, the plant’s owners commissioned the U.S. Geological Survey to study the effectiveness of video cameras, radar, acoustic detectors and other tracking devices to quantify the presence, diversity, movement and behaviors of birds, bats and insects flying near the facility. The results, expected to be published this year in a scientific journal, could spur new research into best management practices.

Birds are not the first major wildlife problem Ivanpah has faced.

In addition to invading avian airspace, the plant took over about 3,500 acres of native desert scrubland with a resident population of federally threatened desert tortoise.

Developers spent $22 million to care for tortoises, moving several dozen from the construction site and building a "head start" nursery where juvenile tortoises and hatchlings are reared until big enough to resist predation from kit foxes, ravens or coyotes.

The company plans to spend $34 million more to meet federal and state mitigation obligations.

"BrightSource was a very good partner for making that work for desert tortoise," said FWS Director Dan Ashe.

Bird mortality will be an ongoing challenge, he said.

"Are we concerned? Um, yes," Ashe said during a Western Governors’ Association winter meeting last month in Las Vegas. "Except … are birds killed at that facility? They are, clearly. Are birds killed by running into this building? They are, and every building. I’ve had birds run into the glass window of my house. Everybody has. Every time we put a facility on the landscape, it’s going to take birds. The question is, is it going to have a population-level impact? We need to figure that out."

Legal experts do not expect bird deaths to thwart solar development, even as the Justice Department cracks down on wind farms that kill significant numbers of birds and extracts major penalties under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

"Enforcement of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act essentially boils down to prosecutorial discretion," said Andrew Bell, an energy attorney for Marten Law in San Francisco. "Prosecutorial discretion is in turn founded largely on a demonstration of good-faith efforts by companies to address phenomena like avian impacts."

Solar developers typically meet that burden by agreeing to mitigation and bird and bat conservation strategies as a condition of federal permits, Bell said.

Solar farms, particularly future power towers, may need to do more if they want to maintain their green credentials.

George, of Audubon California, said he’s reserving judgment on Ivanpah until more studies are completed.

"Right now, we’re cautious and not willing to support the permitting of another power tower," he said.

George visited the Ivanpah plant last fall and said the operator had roughly two dozen biologists that day fanning the property looking for dead birds with the help of scent dogs. Through binoculars, he saw plenty of streamers in the sky, though he said it was not clear whether any of them were birds.

"It was a great mystery," he said. "It wasn’t the nightmare Wes Craven movie I had in my mind."