Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
On Heatmap's annual survey, Trump’s wind ‘spillover,’ and Microsoft’s soil deal
On PJM backs offshore wind, reconciliation 2.0, and nuclear to the moon
Properly known as “manufactured homes,” they’re extremely vulnerable to extreme heat.
On bring-your-own-power, Trump’s illegal energy cuts, and New York’s nuclear bonanza
On Venezuela’s oil, South Korean nuclear, and Berlin militants’ grid attack
Forget data centers. Fire is going to make electricity much more expensive in the western United States.
A tsunami is coming for electricity rates in the western United States — and it’s not data centers.
Across the western U.S., states have begun to approve or require utilities to prepare their wildfire adaptation and insurance plans. These plans — which can require replacing equipment across thousands of miles of infrastructure — are increasingly seen as non-negotiable by regulators, investors, and utility executives in an era of rising fire risk.
But they are expensive. Even in states where utilities have not yet caused a wildfire, costs can run into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, the cost of sparking a fire can be much higher.
At least 10 Western states have recently approved or are beginning to work on new wildfire mitigation plans, according to data from E9 Insights, a utility research and consulting firm. Some utilities in the Midwest and Southeast have now begun to put together their own proposals, although they are mostly at an earlier phase of planning.
“Almost every state in the West has some kind of wildfire plan or effort under way,” Sam Kozel, a researcher at E9, told me. “Even a state like Missouri is kicking the tires in some way.”
The costs associated with these plans won’t hit utility customers for years. But they reflect one more building cost pressure in the electricity system, which has been stressed by aging equipment and rising demand. The U.S. Energy Information Administration already expects wholesale electricity prices to increase 8.5% in 2026.
The past year has seen a new spate of plans. In October, Colorado’s largest utility Xcel Energy proposed more than $845 million in new spending to prepare for wildfires. The Oregon utility Portland General Electric received state approval to spend $635 million on “compliance-related upgrades” to its distribution system earlier this month. That category includes wildfire mitigation costs.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas issued its first mandatory wildfire-mitigation rules last month, which will require utilities and co-ops in “high-risk” areas to prepare their own wildfire preparedness programs.
Ultimately, more than 140 utilities across 19 states have prepared or are working on wildfire preparedness plans, according to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
It will take years for this increased utility spending on wildfire preparedness to show up in customers’ bills. That’s because utilities can begin spending money for a specific reason, such as disaster preparedness, as soon as state regulators approve their plan to do so. But utilities can’t begin passing those costs to customers until regulators review their next scheduled rate hike through a special process known as a rate case.
When they do get passed through, the plans will likely increase costs associated with the distribution system, the network of poles and wires that deliver electricity “the last mile” from substations to homes and businesses. Since 2019, rising distribution-related costs has driven the bulk of electricity price inflation in the United States. One risk is that distribution costs will keep rising at the same time that electricity itself — as well as natural gas — get more expensive, thanks to rising demand from data centers and economic growth.
California offers a cautionary tale — both about what happens when you don’t prepare for fire, and how high those costs can get. Since 2018, the state has spent tens of billions to pay for the aftermath of those blazes that utilities did start and remake its grid for a new era of fire. Yet it took years for those costs to pass through to customers.
“In California, we didn’t see rate increases until 2023, but the spending started in 2018,” Michael Wara, a senior scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment and director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University, told me.
The cost of failing to prepare for wildfires can, of course, run much higher. Pacific Gas and Electric paid more than $13.5 billion to wildfire victims in California after its equipment was linked to several deadly fires in the state. (PG&E underwent bankruptcy proceedings after its equipment was found responsible for starting the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and remains the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history.)
California now has the most expensive electricity in the continental United States.
Even the risk of being associated with starting a fire can cost hundreds of millions. In September, Xcel Energy paid a $645 million settlement over its role in the 2021 Marshall fire, even though it has not admitted to any responsibility or negligence in the fire.
Wara’s group began studying the most cost-effective wildfire investments a few years ago, when he realized the wave of cost increases that had hit California would soon arrive for other utilities.
It was partly “informed by the idea that other utility commissions are not going to allow what California has allowed,” Wara said. “It’s too expensive. There’s no way.”
Utilities can make just a few cost-effective improvements to their systems in order to stave off the worst wildfire risk, he said. They should install weather stations along their poles and wires to monitor actual wind conditions along their infrastructure’s path, he said. They should also install “fast trip” conductors that can shut off powerlines as soon as they break.
Finally, they should prepare — and practice — plans to shut off electricity during high-wind events, he said. These three improvements are relatively cheap and pay for themselves much faster than upgrades like undergrounding lines, which can take more than 20 years to pay off.
Of course, the cost of failing to prepare for wildfires is much higher than the cost of preparation. From 2019 to 2023, California allowed its three biggest investor-owned utilities to collect $27 billion in wildfire preparedness and insurance costs, according to a state legislative report. These costs now make up as much as 13% of the bill for customers of PG&E, the state’s largest utility.
State regulators in California are currently considering the utility PG&E’s wildfire plan for 2026 to 2028, which calls for undergrounding 1,077 miles of power lines and expanding vegetation management programs. Costs from that program might not show up in bills until next decade.
“On the regulatory side, I don’t think a lot of these rate increases have hit yet,” Kozel said.
California may wind up having an easier time adapting to wildfires than other Western states. About half of the 80 million people who live in the west live in California, according to the Census Bureau, meaning that the state simply has more people who can help share the burden of adaptation costs. An outsize majority of the state’s residents live in cities — which is another asset, since wildfire adaptation usually involves getting urban customers to pay for costs concentrated in rural areas.
Western states where a smaller portion of residents live in cities, such as Idaho, might have a harder time investing in wildfire adaptation than California did, Wara said.
“The costs are very high, and they’re not baked in,” Wara said. “I would expect electricity cost inflation in the West to be driven by this broadly, and that’s just life. Climate change is expensive.”
On Redwood Materials’ milestone, states welcome geothermal, and Indian nuclear
Current conditions: Powerful winds of up to 50 miles per hour are putting the Front Range states from Wyoming to Colorado at high risk of wildfire • Temperatures are set to feel like 101 degrees Fahrenheit in Santa Fe in northern Argentina • Benin is bracing for flood flooding as thunderstorms deluge the West African nation.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul. John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Annual Summit
New York Governor Kathy Hochul inked a partnership agreement with Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday to work together on establishing supply chains and best practices for deploying next-generation nuclear technology. Unlike many other states whose formal pronouncements about nuclear power are limited to as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors, the document promised to establish “a framework for collaboration on the development of advanced nuclear technologies, including large-scale nuclear” and SMRs. Ontario’s government-owned utility just broke ground on what could be the continent’s first SMR, a 300-megawatt reactor with a traditional, water-cooled design at the Darlington nuclear plant. New York, meanwhile, has vowed to build at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear power in the state through its government-owned New York Power Authority. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote about the similarities between the two state-controlled utilities back when New York announced its plans. “This first-of-its-kind agreement represents a bold step forward in our relationship and New York’s pursuit of a clean energy future,” Hochul said in a press release. “By partnering with Ontario Power Generation and its extensive nuclear experience, New York is positioning itself at the forefront of advanced nuclear technology deployment, ensuring we have safe, reliable, affordable, and carbon-free energy that will help power the jobs of tomorrow.”
Hochul is on something of a roll. She also repealed a rule that’s been on the books for nearly 140 years that provided free hookups to the gas system for new customers in the state. The so-called 100-foot-rule is a reference to how much pipe the state would subsidize. The out-of-pocket cost for builders to link to the local gas network will likely be thousands of dollars, putting the alternative of using electric heat and cooking appliances on a level playing field. “It’s simply unfair, especially when so many people are struggling right now, to expect existing utility ratepayers to foot the bill for a gas hookup at a brand new house that is not their own,” Hochul said in a statement. “I have made affordability a top priority and doing away with this 40-year-old subsidy that has outlived its purpose will help with that.”
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup led by Tesla cofounder J.B. Straubel, has entered into commercial production at its South Carolina facility. The first phase of the $3.5 billion plant “has brought a system online that’s capable of recovering 20,000 metric tons of critical minerals annually, which isn’t full capacity,” Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor, posted on X. “Redwood’s goal is to keep these resources here; recovered, refined, and redeployed for America’s advantage,” the company wrote in a blog post on its website. “This strategy turns yesterday’s imports into tomorrow’s strategic stockpile, making the U.S. stronger, more competitive, and less vulnerable to supply chains controlled by China and other foreign adversaries.”
A 13-state alliance at the National Association of State Energy Officials launched a new accelerator program Friday that’s meant to “rapidly expand geothermal power development.” The effort, led by state energy offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia, “will work to establish statewide geothermal power goals and to advance policies and programs that reduce project costs, address regulatory barriers, and speed the deployment of reliable, firm, flexible power to the grid.” Statements from governors of red and blue states highlighted the energy source’s bipartisan appeal. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, called geothermal a key tool to “confront the climate crisis.” Idaho’s GOP Governor Brad Little, meanwhile, said geothermal power “strengthens communities, supports economic growth, and keeps our grid resilient.” If you want to review why geothermal is making a comeback, read this piece by Matthew.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Yet another pipeline is getting the greenlight. Last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved plans for Mountain Valley’s Southgate pipeline, clearing the way for construction. The move to shorten the pipeline’s length from 75 miles down to 31 miles, while increasing the diameter of the project to 30 inches from between 16 and 23 inches, hinged on whether FERC deemed the gas conduit necessary. On Thursday, E&E News reported, FERC said the developers had demonstrated a need for the pipeline stretching from the existing Mountain Valley pipeline into North Carolina.
Last week, I told you about a bill proposed in India’s parliament to reform the country’s civil liability law and open the nuclear industry to foreign companies. In the 2010s, India passed a law designed to avoid another disaster like the 1984 Bhopal chemical leak that killed thousands but largely gave the subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Corporation that was responsible for the accident a pass on payouts to victims. As a result, virtually no foreign nuclear companies wanted to operate in India, lest an accident result in astronomical legal expenses in the country. (The one exception was Russia’s state-owned Rosatom.) In a bid to attract Western reactor companies, Indian lawmakers in both houses of parliament voted to repeal the liability provisions, NucNet reported.
The critically endangered Lesser Antillean iguana has made a stunning recovery on the tiny, uninhabited islet of Prickly Pear East near Anguilla. A population of roughly 10 breeding-aged lizards ballooned to 500 in the past five years. “Prickly Pear East has become a beacon of hope for these gorgeous lizards — and proves that when we give native wildlife the chance, they know what to do,” Jenny Daltry, Caribbean Alliance Director of nature charities Fauna & Flora and Re:wild, told Euronews.
