Reverse Course: Sheep meet solar, AI detects wildfires

0:00Chris Bentley:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. If you're in the middle of fire season, battling active blazes, the last thing you want is false alarms. AI is helping detect wildfires in the West. It's a powerful tool, but humans still have to do the work of actually fighting and preventing those fires.

0:47Chris Bentley:This is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:56Chris Bentley:Today on the show, we've got another installment of our environmental series reverse course. It also happens to be NPR's Climate Solutions Week, and the theme was local lessons. So we look for stories close to home. I drove south from Chicago to Illinois farm country for a glimpse at how solar farms and agriculture are sharing the land, like sheep grazing under solar panels. They like eating grass. As long as they got good, clean grass in front of them, it doesn't matter to them where they're at. Also, Peter O'Dowd made a whistle-stop tour of three states in the West to find out how fire agencies are using artificial intelligence to detect wildfires.

1:34Chris Bentley:But can AI-equipped cameras tell the difference between smoke and a cloud of dust? In the early days, there were some funny occasions where we detected what we thought was smoke, but it was actually a snowblower. We're going to hear those stories in a few minutes. But first, Peter, I was surprised to hear just how widespread this practice of AI wildfire detection is. You've done a lot of stories on wildfire. Did you ever think AI would be part of the story? No. You know, I probably should have. I mean, AI is part of basically everything we do these days. But I was working on a story months ago, months ago, about birds landing on power lines.

2:12And I just had a random conversation with the person at the utility who's like, oh, you know what else we have on power lines is AI equipped cameras. And I was like, what? That's really interesting. And it turns out that utilities and state forest agencies and all sorts of local governments are turning to these cameras to keep an eye on their forests, not only across the West where the forests are parched and really prone to burn, but actually increasingly all around the country.

2:40Chris Bentley:Right, right. And they've got these huge networks of cameras in Arizona and California. you saw some of their control centers, right? What does it look like? Oh, there's, um, it's really high tech. It's very interesting. You walk into these control and command centers and there's video screens all over the walls. And a lot of those screens will have like live feeds of the fires that are burning, um, across the state. So I was in California. They've got 1200 cameras keeping an eye all the way from Northern California, all the way down to the border, keeping an eye on their forests and the area between urban areas and the forest, which are often dangerous when it comes to wildfire.

3:22You walk in and you see that there are fires actually burning all the time across the state of California. I mean, 1 ,200 cameras, it's easy to find a handful of fires burning. Now, they're not all serious and they're not all wildfires, but maybe someone's lit a pile of trash in their backyard or something, the cameras can pick that up.

3:43Chris Bentley:Yeah, that is amazing, actually, to think about just seeing all these simultaneous little fires everywhere, I guess you might say. Yeah, little fires and big fires, because there's also a big fire burning in California as we speak. And I went into the camera system, and I immediately found it burning huge plumes of smoke billowing into the sky. The technology is impressive. But you point out in your story that the tech itself is not fighting fires or preventing them from happening. It's just about early detection, which can be critical. But, you know, we're talking about wildfires at a time when the federal government has fired workers who manage public land, where a lot of these fires start.

4:20Chris Bentley:How are you seeing local agencies and states sort of picking up the slack there? Well, you know, local agencies are desperate for any tool that they can find. This isn't going to replace firefighters. Absolutely not. This will not replace humans. But the situation with fire, especially across the Western United States is so dire. You know, we're seeing these catastrophic wildfires, times of years when we never saw fires before, you know, huge blazes that are just ripping apart forests. They need anything they can to help them. You know, the way a lot of people put it to me was like, we'll just take this tool in our toolbox because we need to do something to solve this problem.

5:07Chris Bentley:Yeah, totally. I mean, local governments stepping in is kind of the theme. And that's something that I also saw in my story, which was about something totally different in a totally different part of the country. I've seen solar farms popping up everywhere around Illinois. You know, that's not uncommon. Solar is booming in a lot of places in the country. In Illinois, there's this subsidy, there's a lot of support for community solar, which are smaller scale solar farms that often allow people to sort of subscribe to them to if they can't put solar panels on their own roof, they'll basically subscribe to a small solar plant down the road.

5:42Chris Bentley:And so as a result, you see a lot of small solar farms popping up in farm country. So you'd be driving through rural Illinois, a lot of corn, a lot of soybeans, and then a solar farm will pop up. There's this boom happening in rural America for solar power because it's like the same type of land that's desired by solar developers and farmers. Flat, sunny land. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That obviously makes some people anxious about the loss of farmland, which is a real thing. There's farms that are disappearing all over the country for a lot of reasons. One sort of solution for balancing those two desires for land use is this thing called agrivoltaics that's been around for a while.

6:25Chris Bentley:I've been wanting to do a story about it. We've talked about it, you and I, for years, actually. One thing that I thought was interesting is like Illinois is the corn belt, right? So you'd think, all right, maybe we grow corn between solar panels. But that's actually not really happening yet. Instead, a lot of what you see is grazing of livestock, specifically sheep. That tends to work really well. People can graze their sheep between solar panels. because they eat a lot of grass and they tend to just not be bothered by solar panels overhead. Whereas, you know, goats might be a little more curious and jump around them.

7:03Chris Bentley:They do it with cows too. There's a few cows grazing on solar farms in Wisconsin and some other places, but sheep is by far the biggest thing. But I was also interested because it's like, that's kind of a limited market, right? Especially in the Corn Belt, like this model of sheep deep grazing on solar farms has actually taken off in the West and the South and different parts of the country where there's like more pasture land. But in the Midwest here, it's all corn and soybeans. And that is tough to grow between rows of solar panels, because you got to space out the solar panels a lot more. So there's a lot of research happening, you know, how can we design solar farms a little different?

7:44Chris Bentley:How can we balance the needs of farmers and renewable energy developers. And so some of that research is happening at University of Illinois. Some is actually happening where you are in Arizona. Yeah, I just thought it was interesting. Like, how are we going to balance this as renewable energy continues to grow? And, you know, we want to preserve farmland at the same time. You know, it's Chris, it's interesting that you say that debate is happening in the Midwest, because even here in the Southwest, it is a significant issue as farmers consider leaving farming to use their land for solar. That is a big decision that a lot of farmers are having to make.

8:24And it's not without controversy. I mean, in Southern California, I know they're always having that debate because it's getting so hard to grow with the question of whether there's going to be water in the future. And so farmers are making this tough decision and converting to solar in some cases. And it's a tough one.

8:44Chris Bentley:Absolutely. I mean, the economics of it are kind of wild. I was trying to read studies and find out, you know, just how much money does someone make farming these days, row crops, versus how much will a solar developer pay for the land. And it's in most cases, a solar developer will pay several times more for a lease on that land, which can be 20 or 40 years sometimes, than that farmer or the landowner of that farm would be making growing corn and soybeans. I mean, the prices for corn and soybeans have crashed, and then the costs for farming have gone way up. And meanwhile, we've got rising electricity demand, so solar developers often have a lot of money.

9:22Chris Bentley:So it's a trade that a lot of people will make. So yeah, and the anxiety is real, and there's a real concern there. But I also should stress the amount of farmland that's been converted into solar farms is well under 1 % of American farmland. So it's not as if we're losing all of America's farms to solar farms, but some are being converted for sure. So probably more to come on that story in the years ahead. But before we get to all that, Peter, let's take a short break. And when we come back, we'll hear your story about AI and wildfire detection.

10:07Support for NPR and the following message come from ID Tech. ID Tech is a summer camp for ages 7 to 17 with over 50 courses like BattleBots, AI, coding, game design, and more. Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTech to save$150. This message comes from NPR sponsor Raymond James, a financial firm offering wealth management, banking, and capital markets services that are inspired by people. Before Raymond James financial advisors build plans, they build relationships so they can craft individual strategies designed to achieve priorities and pursue what's possible. That's the power of personal. Disclosures at Raymond James dot com.

10:49Raymond James and Associates, Inc. Member NYSE SIPC. Drought conditions across the United States have many people anxiously bracing for what could be a very busy summer for wildfires. This week in Southern California, a fast-moving grass fire threatened tens of thousands of homes in Simi Valley. And just a few weeks before that, fires erupted in two states better known for hurricanes. Developing right now this wildfire emergency across the southeast, Florida and Georgia. Nearly 90 homes burned to the ground now. As part of our Climate Solutions Week, we're going to take a look at technology that can help detect a fire before it spreads out of control.

11:29So if we click on that, it will be a zoomed in view that will actually show you the smoke that is on the ground. Cindy Kobold is supervisor for fire science and meteorology at APS, Arizona's largest utility. Kobold is at a command center in Phoenix with a bank of video screens lit up on the wall in front of her. Oh, there it is. There's a video of some sort, a pile of something burning in someone's backyard. Yes, yes, that's correct. About an hour earlier, APS had been alerted to this fire burning 150 miles away. The utility has dozens of cameras across the state installed high atop power lines.

12:06The cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence, alerting APS to the first wisps of smoke curling toward the sky. It looks like someone's possibly burning trash. So not a wildfire. Correct. Not a wildfire. But at least it's good to know. Absolutely. Kobold calls the technology a game changer, helping the utility decide if it should turn off its power lines in the event of a major fire. It's one reason why power providers and local fire agencies are installing AI-equipped cameras across the West. Some heavy-duty clips. Yeah. I got to see one in Aurora, Colorado, where Cody Jones is gearing up to climb a cell tower to do some basic maintenance.

12:50Chris Bentley:This one, I believe, is only mounted around 40 feet. Jones pays no mind to the wind that's ripping across the prairie. And as he climbs, Douglas County's Mike Alexander stays safely on the ground. Alexander runs the county's Office of Emergency Management. What they're doing for me just keeps the system running and ensures that we're going to get alerts when we need them, every time we need them. There's a reason why the camera is here in the Denver suburbs just a few yards from a new housing development. We're out in the plains, the grassland plains of Colorado, and this area is prone to rapidly spreading wildfires.

13:27So any spark under windy conditions, when the grass is available to burn, have the potential to grow very quickly, very large, and burn into communities and threaten lives and property. We've seen that in Colorado. Absolutely. The Marshall Fire several years ago proved that grassland fires can become urban conflagrations under the right set of conditions. The Marshall Fire ripped through nearby Boulder County in the winter of 2021, destroying about a thousand homes and killing two people. It was the most destructive fire in Colorado history. Since then, Alexander says AI-equipped cameras have helped avoid disaster.

14:05Just last month, cameras alerted officials to the Bear Creek Fire in a rugged, mountainous part of the county, no humans could see it burning. But the cameras did. They sent precise GPS coordinates to Alexander's team. We then followed it up with boots on the ground response, verified the location, and it was exactly at the triangulated coordinate. If we hadn't had that, we either A, would have spent the whole night looking for it and maybe found it, maybe not, and potentially caused us a situation where we might have lost that fire. Do you think this could save lives? Without a doubt. In wildfire response, every minute matters.

14:44Sonia Kastner is CEO of Pano AI, the company that developed the cameras for Douglas County in Colorado and APS in Arizona. She says Pano cameras are monitoring 50 million acres across 17 U.S. states and parts of Australia and Canada. The system can alert fire officials to danger before a 911 call comes in. When we founded Pano in 2020, we never would have guessed that we'd be sitting here in 2026 doing deployments in Georgia, in the Dakotas, in New Jersey. Wildfire risk is spreading east at an alarming rate as conditions get worse and worse and worse. But AI systems are not perfect. In the early days, there were some funny occasions where we detected what we thought was smoke, but it was actually a snowblower.

15:34A cloud of dust can also look like smoke. The algorithms get more precise as they collect more data, but Kastner says a human still reviews every alert before it's sent out. If you're in the middle of fire season battling active blazes, the last thing you want is false alarms. There's no time in an emergency to deal with hallucinating AI. Arizona State University's Hannah Kerner says that while artificial intelligence can help detect a fire faster, it cannot be the solution to catastrophic wildfires. We also control what's happening on the ground. Kerner uses AI and satellite data to predict fire hazards, but she says the technology can't fix every problem.

16:16The federal government has fired workers and fallen behind on its goal to reduce fuels on public land. AI can't thin trees in an overgrown forest in Idaho, and it can't reduce fuel that's quick to burn houses in Hawaii. We know that invasive grasses in Maui are a huge problem. And so it's important to remember that there are like on the ground solutions that can also help to reduce fires, not just letting those continue while we develop systems to detect them better. Meanwhile, there's the question of who should benefit from this technology. Not far from the crashing waves on the beaches of La Jolla, researchers at the University of California, San Diego are hard at work on AI fire detection.

17:06So we are now going into one of our command and control environments called the Wave Lab. All right. Big screen. Very big screen. Falco Cooster is with Alert California. Inside the Wave Lab, a wall of monitors stretches across the room. On one side is a live video feed of actively burning fires across the state. On the other, a gigantic 3D virtual reality representation of an iconic California landscape. Wow. Oh, yeah, that's coming to life, isn't it? Three-dimensional model of Yosemite Valley. The towering cliffs feel so real, it's like standing in the Star Trek holodeck. But now you get to see, okay, there's a river going through.

17:51There's vegetation.

17:52Chris Bentley:Some of that vegetation has been infested by a bark beetle. Are those dead trees actual representations of real trees? Yes, there's an actual representation at scale. Here they are, right in front of you. You can literally touch them. This level of detail is possible thanks to Alert California's network of cameras. More than 1 ,200 of them peering out in all directions, all the way from the northern mountains down to the southern border. Like Pano AI, Alert California is using the cameras to collect a tremendous amount of data to train artificial intelligence. Every day. So every second, every minute of every hour of every day throughout the year.

18:33The state's fire agency, CAL FIRE, says last year the system detected 915 fires before they were reported by the public. Hooster says it is a powerful tool that should not be sold for profit. So from our perspective, it's critically important that all of the data is out there for the public good. It shouldn't be paywalled away, firewall, locked away. And in this case, the shareholders, really everyone, right? All of us benefit from this. In fact, when that Southern California grass fire outside of Simi Valley broke out this week, anyone could track its progress. An alert California camera installed on a nearby mountain provided a live feed of the action.

19:14Plumes of smoke towered toward the heavens, visible from a virtual fire tower.

19:31Chris Bentley:Well, as we were just hearing from Peter O'Dowd, technology is changing the face of remote parts of this country. That's something that I saw recently, too, here in the Midwest, where solar farms are popping up in our sea of corn and soybeans. Solar is a big part of Illinois' push to get 40 % of its electricity from renewables in the next four years. That's going to mean replacing more farms with solar panels. But sometimes the two can coexist. Fist.

20:04Chris Bentley:Bryant Parker opens the gate of his trailer in Dunlap, Illinois, and lets his flock out to pasture. 75 sheep step out, gingerly at first, then shuffling as a herd toward green fields. If they notice the rows of solar panels overhead, the sheep don't show it. They're too busy chowing down. Your sheep seem happy out there. Yeah, they're doing what they always do, man. They like eating grass. As long as they've got good, clean grass in front of them, it doesn't matter to them where they're at. Where they're at is a 7-megawatt solar farm in Peoria County that came online late last year. It sits on about 35 acres of what used to be corn and soybean fields.

20:44Chris Bentley:These panels produce enough electricity to power about 1 ,200 homes. That's small, as far as power plants go. But Illinois is seeing a boom in community-scale projects like this. And they all need someone to mow the lawn. Parker, who runs Tin Can Farms out of nearby Glassford, says he had been looking for somewhere for his growing herd of sheep to graze when he noticed solar farms popping up in the area. And I kept looking at him thinking, man, if that's a lot of grass that could be eaten, right? Like, there's something that could be done with that. I am now fattening my lambs using somebody else's grass and getting paid in the process.

21:21Chris Bentley:Parker cold-called solar companies until he found Angie Burke at Pivot Energy, the developer of this site. She says Parker's flock provides a service. So we want good establishment of vegetation on site to avoid erosion concerns. But then we also don't want the vegetation to get too high so that it's shading the solar panels and we're losing energy production. So sheep kind of meet in the middle and strike the right balance there. Pivot has dozens of community solar projects around the country. Almost all of them combine solar power and farming in a practice called agrivoltaics. Sometimes it's cows grazing around the panels, but it's usually sheep.

22:01Chris Bentley:Burke says goats, on the other hand, have a tendency to climb where they're not supposed to and chew on wires. Yes, it was attempted, and I think enough lessons were learned that we've defaulted back to sheep. Not every solar farm can host livestock. Some sites have to space the panels a little farther apart, making the power plant a little less efficient per acre. But Burke says there is a business case for keeping the land agriculturally productive. So for us, we spend a little more on fencing, maybe burying wires or more time on wire management and more cost on seeding to make sure we're getting really good, high-quality forage for the animals.

22:45But then in the long run, we're saving about 10 to 15 percent year over year over year over year throughout the lifespan of the system by using sheep instead of mechanical mowing. Like, yes, these sheep are cute, and they're effective at doing the job that we're paying their grazers to do.

23:04Chris Bentley:The solar company signed a lease on this land for at least 20 years, Burke says, agreeing to pay the landowner several times more than they had been earning from corn and soybeans. That's a trade that many rural landowners are making as farmers are increasingly squeezed by soaring costs and plummeting commodity prices, says Bill Bodine of the Illinois Farm Bureau. It's no secret that farmers are facing economic challenges right now. Our farmers haven't been profitable for a number of years. You know, if they're being approached by a developer, they may look at that as an opportunity. Others look at it differently, and nothing forces them to be a part of it.

23:39Chris Bentley:The American Farm Bureau Federation says more than a million acres have already been converted for solar, which might sound like a lot, but that's less than one-half of one percent of American farmland. Bodine says agrivoltaics could help Illinois meet its renewable energy goals while preserving farmland, if it can scale. I do think there are some challenges for agrivoltaics, and that's where some of the research is focused as well. Are there ways to grow more traditional row crops, things that could be mechanized to cover larger areas? A lot of what's happening is at a smaller scale, what we call community-scale solar development, mostly in Illinois.