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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that provides the legal basis for virtually all federal regulations of planet-heating emissions, marking what The Wall Street Journal called “the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.” The 2009 “endangerment finding” concluded that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, calling for cuts to emissions from power plants and vehicle tailpipes. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the newspaper the move “amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.” In an interview with my colleague Emily Pontecorvo last year, Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman said rescinding the endangerment finding would do “more serious and more long term damage” and “could knock out a future administration from trying to” bring back climate policy. But that, Freeman said, would depend on the Supreme Court backing the administration. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s possible,” she said.
At issue is the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, which determined that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. As Emily wrote last week, “the agency claims that its previous read of Massachusetts v. EPA was wrong, especially in light of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright v. Raimondo. The former limited the EPA's toolbox for regulating power plants, and the latter ended a requirement that courts defer to agency expertise in cases where the law is vague.” An earlier report in The Washington Post questioned whether the agency would proceed with the repeal at all, fearing these arguments would pass muster in the nation’s highest court.
BYD has sued the United States government over the 100% tariff on Chinese electrics that serves as an effective ban on Beijing’s booming auto exports. Four U.S.-based subsidiaries of the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s trade levies. The litigation marks what the state-backed tabloid Global Times called “the first instance of a Chinese automaker directly and actively challenging U.S. tariffs, setting a precedent and carrying significance for Chinese enterprises to protect their legitimate rights and interests through legal means.”
Outside the U.S., BYD is booming. China’s cheap electric cars are popular all over the world, as Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast covered in December. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deal to increase trade with China will bring the battery-powered vehicles to North American roads. And the Chinese edition of the trade publication Automotive News just reported that BYD is planning a factory expansion in Europe and Canada.
Hot off last month’s news that it plans to go public, Fervo Energy has drilled its highest-temperature well yet. The drilling results confirm that the next-generation geothermal startup tapped into a resource with temperatures above 555 degrees Fahrenheit at approximately 11,200 feet deep. The company announced the findings Monday of an independent assessment using appraisal data from the drilling. The analysis found that the Project Blanford site in Millard County, Utah, has multiple gigawatts of heat that can be harnessed. Its completion will be a breakthrough for enhanced geothermal systems, one of two leading approaches to the next-generation geothermal sector that Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin outlined here. “This latest ultra-high temperature discovery highlights our team’s ability to detect and develop EGS sweet spots using AI-enhanced geophysical techniques,” Jack Norbeck, Fervo’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement.
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Chinese scientists have for the first time discovered natural hydrogen sealed in microscopic inclusions near Tibet. The finding, which the Xinhua news agency called “groundbreaking,” fills what the China Hydrogen Bulletin called “a major domestic research gap and points to a new geological pathway for identifying China’s next generation of clean energy resources.” Natural, or geological, hydrogen could provide a cheap source of the zero-carbon fuel and give oil and gas drillers a natural foothold in a new, clean industry. In the color spectrum associated with hydrogen, the rare, naturally formed stuff is called white hydrogen. But as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in December, a new color has joined the rainbow. Orange hydrogen refers to a family of technologies that naturally spur production of the gas, as the startup Vema is now attempting to do.
China’s coal-fired power generation decreased 1.9% last year, marking what the consultancy Wood Mackenzie called “a historic shift driven by new non-fossil generation that has finally outpaced demand growth.” Power demand surged 5% in China last year, but for the first time in a decade that wasn’t propelled by coal plants. Instead, that new demand was supplied by renewables, nuclear, and hydro, all of which Beijing has rapidly deployed. Over that time, the levelized cost of energy — a widely used though, as Matthew wrote last year, far-from-perfect metric — fell 77% for utility-scale solar and 73% for onshore wind. “At the heart of this transformation is the unprecedented expansion of renewable energy capacity,” Sharon Feng, a senior research analyst for Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “China’s wind and solar capacity had risen more than ten-fold to 1,842 gigawatts over the past decade.”
Gone are the days when the oil industry seemed to be on track for a lucrative decline. Demand for crude will take longer to peak than previously estimated as governments prioritize growth and energy security over efforts to curb consumption. That’s according to a report issued Sunday by Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil trader. “Over the past year, decarbonisation policies have become a less decisive driver of efforts to curb oil consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” the report stated, according to Bloomberg. “Policy priorities have increasingly been reframed around economic competitiveness and geopolitical strategy.”
The race for a long-duration energy storage solution has a new competitor. The Dutch startup Ore Energy has deployed its iron-air storage technology successfully on the grid for a technical pilot of its system that can store for 100 hours of power. The pilot, the first of its kind in Europe, demonstrated that the company’s technology can store and discharge energy for up to four days. “This pilot allowed us to evaluate iron-air performance under European operating profiles and real-world grid conditions,” Aytaç Yilmaz, co-founder and CEO of Ore Energy, said in a statement.
The fight over the billions in federal funding the White House is holding up for the Gateway rail project between New Jersey and New York, meanwhile, heated up over the weekend. On Friday night, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the nearly $16 billion to the project, just hours after construction ground to a halt as funding ran dry. In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York wrote that “plaintiffs have adequately shown that the public interest would be harmed by a delay in a critical infrastructure project.” Trump had his own idea in mind. Over the weekend, the White House proposed releasing the money only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York agreed to rename Penn Station after Trump.
Tesla has started hiring staff to ramp up production of solar panels as the company looks to build 100 gigawatts of panel-manufacturing capacity supplied with raw materials produced in America. In a job posting on LinkedIn, Seth Winger, Tesla’s senior manager for solar products engineering, wrote that the panel-producing buildout was “an audacious, ambitious project.” For that, he wrote, “we need audacious, ambitious engineers and scientists to help us grow to massive scale. If you want to solve tough manufacturing problems at breakneck speed and help the U.S. breakthrough on renewable energy generation, come join us.” One of the listings indicated that the target date for bringing the new factories online was the “end of 2028,” giving an indication of timing that Reuters noted had been previously absent from Elon Musk’s public statements. Bloomberg reported last week that Tesla is already looking at sites in New York, Arizona, and Idaho for its manufacturing expansion.
The Trump administration tried to yank permits from the offshore wind projects off New England on the grounds that the towering turbines caused more ecological destruction than the electricity is worth. On Friday, however, Trump signed a proclamation reopening a giant marine preserve in the Atlantic Ocean to commercial fishing. First established at the end of the Obama administration, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument lies 130 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, encompassing what The New York Times described as “an area the size of Connecticut that is home to dolphins, endangered whales, sea turtles, and ancient deep-sea corals.” While Trump lifted the ban on commercial fishing in the zone during his first administration, President Joe Biden reinstated the restrictions. But this isn’t the first time Trump reopened a national marine national monument to fishing. In April, he ended protections for the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument located 750 miles west of Hawaii and designated by President George W. Bush in 2009.
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Connecitcut’s Department of Insurance has launched a website that displays extensive information about the climate risk of every property in the state in what E&E News called “an unprecedented move to alert residents and to promote flood insurance.” The details include each property’s history of damage from floods and other events predicted to get worse as the planet warms. “A single risk score does not fully convey flood and climate risk,” department spokesperson Mary Quinn said. The department plans a marketing campaign this year with ads on radio, TV, and social media, and workshops for insurance agents on how to use the website. Nationwide, climate change is already raising household costs by $900 per year, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last year. Wildfires have already “destroyed California’s insurance market,” according to an interview with Heatmap's Shift Key podcast last year with an expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Unit 1 of the Taipingling nuclear power station in China’s Guangdong has reached criticality seven years after construction began on the gigawatt-sized Hualong One reactor. The debut atom-splitting means the newest reactor is months, if not weeks, from entering into commercial operation. If that enticingly single-digit number of years to build a piece of infrastructure that takes the U.S. more than a decade wasn’t enough of a sign of China’s nuclear strengths, the country this week hit another milestone on a separate atomic station. At the Zhangzhou-3 nuclear reactor, workers last week installed the inner steel dome of the containment building.
Bad Bunny, making fireworks out of Puerto Rico's power struggles.Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Nearly a decade after Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed and plunged America’s most populous territory into the second-longest blackout in world history, the island’s biggest musical star performed a Super Bowl halftime show that included linemen working on transformers. Bad Bunny’s performance, a revue of his reggaeton hits, served as an ode to what he called “my motherland, my homeland, Puerto Rico.” The grid still suffers regular outages. When it’s working, the power system sends occasional surges through wires that fry appliances. Electricity rates are higher than almost any state, despite Puerto Rico suffering worse poverty rates than Mississippi. At one point, Bad Bunny climbed a utility pole on stage waving a light-blue Puerto Rican flag, a symbol of the movement to establish the island territory as its own independent nation. It was a powerful political statement at America’s most-watched sporting event. For energy nerds, it was a rare opportunity to reflect on one of the worst, most prolonged infrastructure disasters in modern American history.
