(light music) - [Narrator] Coming up on "Great Lakes Now."

Our region's maple Sugar producers feel the effects of climate change.

- [Jen] Everybody used to tap by the calendar.

Now, we just have to be ready when Mother Nature is ready.

- [Narrator] One Toronto Company aims to push the transition to renewable energy.

- By building it, you're shutting down a coal plant or a gas plant and you're enabling a lot of wind and solar.

- [Narrator] And news from around the Great Lakes.

(light music) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

- [Commentator] The Consumer's Energy Foundation is committed to serving Michigan, from preserving our state's natural resources and sustaining our future, to continuing business growth, academic achievement, and community involvement.

Learn more at consumersenergy.com/foundation.

- [Announcer] The Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at DPTV, the Polk Family Fund, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hi, I'm Ward Detwiler.

Welcome to "Great Lakes Now."

PBS has announced an environmental and climate programming initiative that explores impacts of climate change on the country and planet.

You'll hear more about that programming later, but first, we're taking you to two stories about climate change, it's consequences for our region, and how we're adapting to it.

Our top story is about maple syrup production and how our changing climate is making it more difficult.

"Great Lakes Now" contributing reporter, Capri Cafaro takes us to northeast Ohio where one local producer is having to adapt.

- Chardon, Ohio is maple country and Jen Freeman, president of Richard's Maple Products, is a fourth generation maple producer.

Tell us a little bit about Richard's Maple Products and how you and your family are connected to it.

- My great-grandparents started this back in 1910 and we've been going ever since and I feel like we're really a staple in this community.

- [Capri] Freeman's operation includes a general store stocked with a wide variety of maple products, including syrups, candies and rubs; a sugar house for producing sap, and a three acre sugar bush, that's the term for a grove or orchard of sugar maples where the sap comes from.

Historically, the weather in this region has been perfect for maple production.

- One of the blessings and the curses of northeast Ohio is the snowfall.

Lots of snowfall gives us great maple production in this region.

- Snow insulates the ground, preventing it from freezing too deeply and promoting growth.

Snow also provides moisture to the maple trees as it melts which increases sap production.

But climate change is altering weather patterns and that's forcing maple producers like Freeman to adapt.

What kind of changes have you seen and when it comes to the conditions surrounding maple production here in this region?

- So, some of the changes I've seen is everybody used to tap by the calendar.

Every agricultural product used to be done by the calendar and that has changed over the years to now we just have to be ready when Mother Nature is ready.

- [Capri] Maple sap flows during thaws, but thaws are less predictable now than in years past.

According to Adam Wild, director of the Uihlien Maple Research Forest at Cornell University, Freeman isn't the only producer to notice the shift.

- The maple season has moved up a couple weeks and is oftentimes starting sooner now and is more sporadic.

So, instead of being cold all winter and then gradually thawing out, we're finding that we're getting some thaws in January, maybe a week where it's warm again in February, and then in March.

And so we're getting kind of these short little multiple seasons throughout the year.

And so, that makes it more challenging as a maple producer.

- To stay ahead of climate change, producers must adapt their operations so they don't miss a single maple flow.

And Freeman has done just that.

Unlike her ancestors, who collected sap using buckets and wagons, Freeman uses an efficient tubing system to connect 150 individual taps to a single collection point.

If you look at it from afar, you might just think it's kind of like, I don't know, plastic tape saying, okay, like don't go in this part of the woods or something.

You don't realize until you get up close that it actually is a tube.

And it's pretty substantial as well.

- Right, it's all over the woods.

There's 5/16 tubes that go from tree to tree and then we've got 3/4 inch line that those all feed into.

- Right.

- Take it down to the one collection.

- The collection point is located here in the pump house.

So, what is this huge contraption here?

I see blue tubing and then there's a lot of mechanics in the shed.

- There are, yeah.

So, this is our little pump house.

This is where all the sap from the entire woods collects into one central location.

It's got a vacuum pump in here.

A releaser.

- Yeah.

- And then it's got a little pump where it'll pump up the line and then go over to our 1,000 gallon tank to be held.

(light music) - [Capri] According to Wild, the vacuum pump is essential in the now sporadic sap collection process, helping producers increase their yields even on days when weather conditions are less than ideal.

- And the vacuum actually allows us to draw more sap from the trees, it's created a negative pressure at the tap so more sap will flow out from those pressurized trees and so we're able to gather more sap from those trees.

- [Capri] The tube and vacuum method streamlines the collection process and greatly increases sap yields Without it, climate change would make it tough for some producers to survive.

And there are other challenges too.

According to Wild, with more sap flowing sporadically and on unseasonably warm days, producers need to process sap fast before it spoils.

- [Adam] I like to think of maple sap as kind of like milk and you wouldn't keep milk out on a 70 degree day for too long 'cause it's gonna spoil, right?

And so, the maple sap is kind of like that.

If we have that sap in an open top tank or sitting in a bucket or traveling down through your tubelines it's gonna heat up and there's microbes that can get in there and can spoil it.

And so, if that sap starts to ferment too much, it's gonna give off flavors when we cook that down into maple syrup - A tool in the sugar house reduces the time and energy it takes to produce sap into syrup.

I see, okay.

We're here in the sugar house, which is where kind of the magic happens, where sap starts to turn into syrup.

The sap then comes in and it goes into this very fancy piece of equipment.

Tell me about what's in here.

- So, it's the reverse osmosis machine in here and this allows us to process so much quicker.

We don't have the colder days to be able to keep sap.

- Right.

- So, we need to process it as quickly as possible so it is the best quality sap we can have.

- Mm-hm.

- And this allows us to do that.

- So, we're able to remove anywheres from 50 to 95% of the water before we even boil that down into maple syrup.

So, instead of taking 40 gallons of sap and boiling down to make one gallon of syrup, we're now taking four gallons of sap and boiling that down to make one gallon of maple syrup.

It saves a huge amount of energy in that boiling process.

It allows us to make more syrup a lot quicker and it's just a lot better that where's a lot less energy use going into, so we're reducing kind of that carbon footprint for maple syrup.

- [Capri] Outside of the sugar house, another adaptation producers can add to mitigate climate change is smart forest management.

- [Adam] We need to think about making sure as maple producers that we have resilient forests and that we are managing our forest for resiliency.

Creating a diversity of forest habitat is important so we don't want a monoculture of just maple trees, that we actually want to encourage a diversity of different tree species beyond the maples, and so that is gonna actually create a more resilient forest soils when you have different species of trees and plants, it's gonna bring in more diverse microbe species which are gonna create healthier soils.

- Despite the challenges of climate change, the future of maple remains sweet.

Where do you see the maple industry and maple production in particular going in the next 100 years?

- From a sales consumer standpoint, I think that will continue to be strong.

People are now recognizing that they want natural products, straight from the stores and are appreciating that maple syrup is from that native ecosystem.

We just need to make sure that our forests are actively growing and that we're also continuing to be better stewards, but I guess time will tell.

- When she isn't reporting for "Great Lakes Now," Capri Cafaro also hosts the podcast, "Eat Your Heartland Out," which covers the often overlooked culinary depth of the Midwest.

For podcast episodes focused on the Great Lakes region, and for more about Great Lakes agriculture, visit GreatLakesnow.org.

As we make the transition to renewable energy like solar and wind, an obvious problem arises.

The sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, but there's at least one technology being developed here in the Great Lakes region that could help with that problem.

This scene is becoming more common across America.

Wind Farms, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says the massive three blade wind turbines generate about 10% of America's electricity.

Solar power generates about 3.5% and increasing number of homes now have solar panels on the roof.

Both wind and solar are renewable forms of clean energy that produce no emissions, but there's a problem with both.

- They're controlled by WHEN the wind is blowing and when the sun is shining.

- [Ward] That's Nate Blair, a group manager at the National Renewable Energy Lab.

Blair says, as existing power plants get old and need to be replaced, wind and solar can fill the gap, but their ability to produce energy is intermittent.

So, then the question becomes how do we harness all that clean renewable energy and store it for future use?

Energy storage is a high priority for both the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Gene Rodriguez is the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy over the office of electricity.

He says one major goal is to solve the inherent problems posed by renewable sources of energy.

- What we are doing is finding solutions, cost-effective, long-duration, grid-scale solutions that will help us to better integrate these intermittent resources.

And energy storage is one particular area of great promise and we're looking at all kinds of technologies.

- [Ward] Canada is also working on ways to harness and store renewable energy.

Todd Smith is the minister of energy for the province of Ontario.

- If you're gonna put renewables on the grid then you have to have a backup supply or you have to have the ability to store it.

We've always said that storage was sort of the holy grail when it came to to renewables.

- [Ward] One solution for energy storage already in use is something called pumped hydro storage.

This may look like just an ordinary lake, but this body of water near Ludington, Michigan is really stored up energy.

Water is pumped uphill from Lake Michigan and stored in a reservoir.

When the water is released and tumbles downhill it spins a series of turbines that generate electricity.

It's an old technology and it still works, but there are limitations to pumped hydro.

The biggest one, just like traditional hydroelectric power which is used extensively in Canada to produce electricity, pumped hydro requires very specific geography, a source of water with a nearby elevated reservoir.

There are only so many locations where you can build.

- It's difficult to build new, pumped hydro storage because of the locational issues, and so people are adding batteries to the grid in large quantities today.

- [Ward] Batteries are another form of stored energy currently being used, but as any cell phone user can tell you, batteries have their limitations too.

And as the demand for electricity goes up, that means larger, more efficient batteries will be needed and that gets costly.

- You really want a storage device that can have a lot of duration, a lot of number of hours without a lot of additional costs.

- [Ward] So, if batteries don't cut it and there's no room to expand pumped hydro storage, what's left?

- Unfortunately, any type of form of energy storage has been really difficult to produce and comes with a lot of trade offs and so that's why we're here because we think we have a really good solution for it.

- [Ward] John Norman is president of Hydrostor, a Canadian company headquartered in Toronto, offering a modernized version of an old technology to capture and store energy.

- And so, what we do is we store energy in the form of compressed air.

We just run a compressor with off-peak electricity.

We store that high pressure air underground and when the grid's ready and needs it then we release it through a turbine.

- [Ward] The first patent for compressed air energy storage underground was issued in the U.S. in 1948.

The first plant was built in Germany in 1978.

Technical advances since then with heat retention have increased efficiency of the system.

This Hydrostor animation shows how the technology works.

The system takes in off-peak renewable energy to run a compressor.

Heated compressed air is produced.

The heat energy is extracted and saved for later reuse.

The compressed air is then sent underground and stored in caverns where it can't escape.

The pressure of that air also displaces water, raising it up into a closed loop reservoir.

The air wants to expand and the water wants to fall, but that doesn't happen until power is required.

Then the energy is released, the water in the reservoir is allowed to fall back underground, forcing the compressed air to the surface where it's reheated and allowed to expand and the expanding air rushing out of the system drives a turbine to produce electricity.

The company's first such operation was built in Goderich, Ontario near Lake Huron, but before that the company had to convince investors it would work by conducting an experiment that used the power of Lake Ontario.

- So, we came up with the idea of sinking giant balloons about, I guess about 200 feet underwater.

- [Ward] Curtis VanWalleghem is Hydrastor's CEO.

- These balloons were 30 feet high, 15 feet wide and we did six of them, and then we had a plant connected with a pipe, and we would send the air out to be stored under the water pressure of these balloons and then fed back to the system on-demand to reproduce power.

- [Ward] The experiment worked.

It demonstrated that water pressure alone could push air with enough force to spin a turbine on dry land and generate electricity.

In turn, the company impressed investors to finance construction of the company's first plant in Goderich, which sits a top an old salt mine where the compressed air is housed many feet below the surface.

According to the company, the plant stores up enough energy to power hundreds of homes in that area.

Hydrostor says storage plants like this can be built almost any place where there is solid rock underneath.

- And one of those plants, by building it, you're shutting down a coal plant or a gas plant, and you're enabling a lot of wind and solar, about five times as much.

- [Ward] The company says that people who work in coal or gas-fired power plants can easily transition to compressed air energy jobs because the skill sets are basically the same.

So, three basic ways to store renewable energy: pumped hydropower, batteries, and compressed air.

Which method will be best for the demands of our 21st century power grid?

- The bottom line is this.

We're not picking a winner in the energy storage race.

What we're doing is trying to enable each and every technology, each and every approach to find its way onto the grid in a way that serves the American people.

- While we are not anywhere close to 80% renewable energy today, we need to be doing the research and developing these technologies, these long duration storage technologies, so that in 10 years, 15 years, et cetera, when we really start to need them, they are developed, they are commercial and they're ready to deploy onto the grid.

- For more about climate change and how our region is adapting to it, visit GreatLakesnow.org.

And now it's time for The Catch, where we put a spotlight on reporting from and about the Great Lakes.

- [Reporter] The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed nationwide rules for limiting the amount of toxic forever chemicals, known as PFAS, in drinking water to trace amounts.

MLive reporter, Garret Ellison, has been following this story.

- It's an important moment in public health in the United States.

It's the first time that you know the EPA is proposed to regulate a drinking water contaminant in decades.

- [Reporter] The term PFAS refers to thousands of chemicals that have been widely used for decades, often to make items waterproof, stain resistant, or non-stick.

The new rules would require utilities to treat drinking water if the individual chemicals PFOS and PFOA are measured above four parts per trillion or if a combination of other PFAS chemicals exceeds a calculated threshold.

- There was a lot of applause from the activist community who have been pushing for very stringent nationwide rules just like this for a long time.

- [Reporter] However, some utilities and water providers see the situation differently.

- They look at this as sort of an unfunded mandate and say, you know, this is gonna be expensive to comply with and it's very likely to raise water rates on customers.

- [Reporter] There's also the possibility of funding coming through federal grants.

As details will continue to unfold, Garrett says the EPA is proposing to finalize the new limits by the end of 2023.

- However, most people are expecting that deadline to be pushed because there is it expected that there will be some challenges to this in court, which could, you know, extend the timeline for implementation.

- [Reporter] Although nearly half of all U.S. states have some PFAS drinking water regulations, the new standard would be the first enforceable, national standard for a contaminant in drinking water in decades.

Garrett says the national guidelines are a move in the right direction when it comes to cleaning up drinking water, but he says it's important to remember that these contaminants show up in a lot of other places too.

- People get PFAS exposure through food, the food packaging materials.

They can be exposed through clothing, cosmetics, carpeting.

There's a lot yet to come.

You know, when it comes to news on PFAS.

- [Reporter] It's not hard to find stunning views along the Great Lakes shorelines, but journalist Jacqueline Kehoe recently explored the little known volcanic history of the region in a story for "National Geographic."

- Basically 1.1 billion years ago, the country, the U.S. was ripping apart and it was happening right through the Midwest.

So, we are talking a molten sea, a lava ocean just right in the center of the country, and the broken heart of the country was right in Lake Superior.

This thing stretches for 1300 miles.

- [Reporter] This massive event is known as the Midcontinent Rift and the volcanic rocks it left behind are distinct and still visible at multiple sites along Lake Superior's shoreline, including at the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Michigan's upper peninsula.

- They're extra cool, I think, because they're rhyolite and rhyolite is a stickier, more explosive rock that usually forms stratovolcanoes.

And the fact that you can find that in Michigan is so wild.

- [Reporter] Almost any land along Lake Superior is likely to have evidence of volcanic activity including Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, Cooper Falls, and Interstate Parks in Wisconsin, and the Apostle Islands.

- People tend to revere the landscapes out West as being the most beautiful when truly there's nowhere like Lake Superior.

It is one of the deepest, cleanest lakes in the world and it sits in this amazing volcanic basin that has seen a billion years of fire.

It's so cool.

It does not get the reputation that it deserves.

- [Reporter] The long-running BSS show "Nova" has recently announced a new initiative, called "Climate Across America."

Producer Caitlin Saks says that this is just the latest in a long line of "Nova" content about our changing planet.

- This project was built around trying to create and foster really engaging conversations across the country about this issue.

We feel that it is our role to help inform the public about what is really going on and help foster productive discussions.

The first program, "Weathering the Future," looks at five different regions across the United States and how those communities are adapting to the effects of climate change.

We chose our locations in order to sort of sample what some of the biggest impacts are to the country and look at solutions that can be used to start to address some of those impacts.

- [Reporter] The second program is "Chasing Carbon Zero" which explores the ambitious emissions goals recently set by the U.S. government and how we plan on achieving them.

- "Chasing Carbon Zero" really looks at how do we stop making this problem worse?

How can we stop the climate from changing so much that we're going to face really, really dire consequences?

- [Reporter] Part of the "Climate Across America" initiative involves engaging other PBS stations to help amplify what their communities are doing to tackle the climate crisis at the local level.

- We've been working with 10 stations around the country to help them create content that will be put out and shared on social by their station, and also amplified by "Nova," as well as working with middle and high school students to help them learn how to create content on climate change.

- [Reporter] Even though climate change is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed, Caitlin hopes that the storytelling in "Climate Across America" gives viewers hope for the future of our planet.

- My hope is that viewers walk away with a little bit of inspiration.

The climate challenge is big and the stakes are high, but it is possible.

I mean, there are a lot of creative, brilliant people working on this problem, and there is hope and in fact, it's something that anyone can be a part of.

In fact, everyone kind of has to be a part of it.

- Thanks for watching.

For more on these stories and the Great Lakes in general, visit GreatLakesnow.org.

When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.

See you out on the lakes.

(light music) (light music) (light music) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

- [Commentator] The Consumer's Energy Foundation is committed to serving Michigan, from preserving our state's natural resources and sustaining our future, to continuing business growth, academic achievement, and community involvement.

Learn more at consumersenergy.com/foundation.

- [Announcer] The Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at DPTV, the Polk Family Fund, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(light music)