You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
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 the California waiver, an SMR, and CATL
Current conditions: Burbank, California, may hit 95 degrees Fahrenheit today, matching or potentially breaking the 1988 daily record • An area of low pressure could bring snow to the mountains in South Africa• Heavy rain is expected in Washington, D.C., where House Speaker Mike Johnson — perhaps wishfully — aims to hold a floor vote on the reconciliation bill today.
California Air Resources Board
Senate Republicans plan to vote this week on California’s ability to set its own emissions standards, Majority Leader John Thune said on the Senate floor Tuesday. Since 1967, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted California a waiver to set stricter-than-federal restrictions on emissions in acknowledgment of the state’s unique air pollution challenges, including smog; due to the state’s size, however, those standards have largely been adhered to by automakers nationally. The House voted earlier this month to end California’s waiver — which has long been opposed by Republicans, who’ve called it, erroneously, an “electric vehicle mandate” — although there had been some uncertainty over whether the Senate would take up the vote, since Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough and the Government Accountability Office had both ruled that the EPA waiver is not subject to the Congressional Review Act, which is what Republicans have called upon to attempt to overturn it.
Thune confirmed that the chamber would take up the three House resolutions unwinding the California waiver, claiming Democrats were “attempting to derail a repeal by throwing a tantrum over a supposed procedural problem.” In response, Senator Alex Padilla of California, a Democrat, said, “If this attempt is successful, the consequences will be far-reaching, not only for our clean energy economy, the air our children breathe, and for our climate, but for the future of the CRA and for the Senate as an institution.”
The Tennessee Valley Authority is seeking a permit to build a small modular reactor, the Journal-News reports, the first utility to do so. On Tuesday, the TVA — the nation’s largest public power provider — took another step toward adding an SMR to its nuclear fleet by applying for a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a site on Tennessee’s Clinch River.
While the project had previously been touted by the Biden administration as helping advance the nation toward “a clean energy future,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin noted that language has vanished from the construction application, which now argues the SMR is the next step in “establishing America’s energy dominance to power artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.” Regardless of spin, the fastest Clinch River could go into operation is about five years, Adam Stein, the director of the nuclear energy innovation program of the Breakthrough Institute, told Matthew.
The world’s biggest manufacturer of electric vehicle batteries, CATL, raised $4.6 billion in its debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Tuesday, making it the largest share offering of 2025 to date. The stock surged 16% over the subscription price, although onshore U.S. investors were largely shut out by the company in order to “limit its exposure to U.S. legal liability,” with the Pentagon having put the Fujian province-based company on a blacklist earlier this year for its alleged links to China’s military, Bloomberg writes.
CATL’s manufacturing is done almost entirely within China, although the company has said it will use 90% of its proceeds from the Hong Kong offering on the construction of a new factory in Hungary, The Economist reports. Though the company faces an uphill battle making inroads in the U.S. due to slowing demand for electric vehicles and scrutiny of Chinese companies by American politicians, The Economist adds that CATL also has “plenty of room for further expansion,” including growing its “higher-margin energy-storage business.”
Japanese automaker Honda announced Tuesday that it will pivot away from its investment in electric vehicles in order to focus on growing demand for hybrids, Reuters reports. The company revised its electrification investment from about $69 billion to $48 billion, while at the same time planning 13 hybrid models between 2027 and 2031.
Honda cited a slowdown in EV sales as justification for its decision, though as Electrek points out, “It’s estimated that this year – not 2030 – 25% of cars sold globally will be EVs,” and that “any company that sells less than that is lagging behind the curve, losing ground to companies that are ready for the transition that is already happening.” Electrek adds that Honda’s profits have largely slipped due to competition in the Chinese auto market from domestic EVs.
If the world merely sustains the current level of warming, at 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, ice melt off of Greenland and Antarctica could still “profoundly alter coastlines around the world, displacing hundreds of millions of people, and causing loss and damage well beyond the limits of adaptation,” a grim new study published in Nature has found. Even keeping global temperature rise beneath the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold established in the Paris Climate Agreement could result in “catastrophic inland migration and forced migration,” the University of Bristol’s Jonathan Bamber, one of the authors of the report, told The Guardian. In fact, “you don’t slow sea level rise at 1.5,” lead author Chris Stokes of Durham University told CNN. Rather, “you see quite a rapid acceleration.”
Around 230 million people live less than a meter, or 3.2 feet, above sea level, including many residents of Miami. The researchers estimated that due to ice melt, seas could rise 40 inches by the end of the century, requiring “massive land migration on scales that we’ve never witnessed since modern civilization,” Bamber told CNN. As Stokes added, “There’s very little that we’re observing that gives us hope here.”
Svea Solar
Ikea has begun selling air-to-water heat pumps in Germany, in partnership with Svea Solar. “Sustainable living should be accessible to the masses,” Jacqueline Polak of Ikea Germany said in a statement.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”