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On Canada’s blazes, Tesla’s turnaround, and the Vatican climate summit
Current conditions: A giant billboard collapsed during a dust storm in Mumbai, killing at least 14 people • Tornado watches are in place across northern parts of Florida • The water is rising again in the flooded Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sol.
Wildfires are still raging out of control in Canada, fueled by drought and strong winds. One, the Parker Lake fire, is approaching the town of Fort Nelson, where more than 4,700 people have been evacuated. The fires have sent plumes of smoke into northern states. Parts of Iowa are experiencing hazardous air quality today as a result. The skies have cleared a bit in the Twin Cities after the entire state of Minnesota was under an air quality alert on Monday
Smoke plumes from Canadian wildfires.AirNow
There was quite a lot of news coming out of Washington yesterday. Here’s a quick catch-up:
FERC overhauled transmission planning – The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unveiled and approved a rule overhauling regional transmission planning to take into account the ongoing and planned transformation of the electric grid. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained, the new rule will require regional transmission organizations adopt the long view, extending their planning horizon over a 20-year period and calling for updates every five years. FERC is also requiring regional transmission planners to consult a specific set of economic and reliability benefits like reducing congestion on the grid and resilience against extreme weather and lower costs when selecting projects. And transmission planners will have to come up with a default method for allocating costs associated with new projects.
But Chuck Schumer downplayed the possibility of permitting reform – The Senate majority leader said a bipartisan package to overhaul permitting reform and speed up energy projects would be “virtually impossible” because Republicans have been blocking the effort.
Meanwhile, GOP attorneys challenged emissions rules – A group of Republican attorneys general launched a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the EPA’s new emissions limits for trucks, to be phased in over the next decade or so. Another lawsuit targets California for its ban on combustion trucks set to take effect in 2036.
Coming up today: President Biden is set to announce new tariffs on Chinese EVs and other imports today at 12:15 pm ET.
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When Tesla abruptly laid off its entire Supercharger team a few weeks ago, a rather stunned Robinson Meyer said on Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast that the “best case scenario” for what had happened was that Elon Musk was “cutting very deeply into teams that he knows in three to six months that he’s going to hire back.” This may be exactly what’s happened, though on a much shorter timeline. Bloombergreported yesterday that Tesla has started hiring back some of the Supercharger team, including Max de Zegher, the director of charging for North America. It wasn’t clear how many workers were being re-hired, but Meyer noted that Musk’s philosophy is that “if you don’t need to go back and hire back or build back 10% of what you cut then you didn’t cut deep enough.”
Volkswagen has released more details about its much-anticipated electric Microbus – aka the ID Buzz. In the U.S. it’ll come in three trims: Pro S, Pro S Plus, and 1st Edition. All of them will have a 91-kWh battery, 20-inch wheels, a 12.9-inch infotainment system, 30-color ambient lighting, and Park Assist Plus. “The colors are FUN,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek. They range from Energetic Orange and Pomelo Yellow to Mahi Green and Cabana Blue, plus a few more. The vehicles will go on sale in the U.S. later this year. We don’t yet know the range or pricing.
The Vatican is hosting a three-day international climate summit, starting tomorrow and ending on Friday. The event will focus on building climate resilience worldwide through mitigation and adaptation. “We no longer have the luxury of relying just on mitigation of emissions,” the event organizers wrote. “We need to embark on building climate resilience so that people can bend the emissions curve, survive the climate crisis, and bounce forward to a safer, healthier, more equitable, and sustainable world.”
The event will culminate in a protocol “fashioned along the lines of the Montreal Protocol” that will “provide the guidelines for making everyone climate resilient.” The protocol will then be submitted to the UNFCCC. In written remarks ahead of the summit, Pope Francis said “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”
EVs accounted for 4.3% of used car sales in the first quarter of 2024, according to used car sales platform Carvana. That is up from 1.8% of used car sales in the first quarter of 2023.
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The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released a budget proposal that attempts to claw back nearly $9 billion in grants.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the first draft of its portion of Trump’s big budget bill on Tuesday, and it includes the first official swipe at the Inflation Reduction Act of the months-long process ahead.
Remember, the name of the game for Republicans is to find ways to pay for Trump’s long list of tax cuts. The budget framework Congress passed two weeks ago assigned eleven House committees to craft proposals that would each raise or reduce revenue by a specific amount to accomplish Trump’s agenda.
The Transportation Committee proposal contains one new revenue-generating program, placing a $200 annual fee on electric vehicles and $100 fee on hybrid vehicles, alongside a $20 fee on conventional cars. The money would go into the Highway Trust Fund, which is currently financed mostly by the gas tax — and which, of course, EV owners don’t pay.
But the draft also includes a list of “rescissions” of unobligated funds from seven IRA grant programs. While the Biden administration awarded the vast majority of the money allocated to the programs listed, in many cases the recipients never reached a final project agreement with the government. That means a lot of the funding can, in fact, be clawed back.
Take the first item on the list, the Alternative Fuel and Low Emissions Aviation Technology Program. The IRA allocated $291 million for grants to support producing sustainable aviation fuel and developing low-emission aviation technologies, and the Biden administration awarded the full amount to 36 recipients in August of last year. It’s not clear how many reached final project agreements with the Federal Aviation Administration, however. A quick scan of the government’s database of awards is missing a $25.7 million grant to oil giant BP to produce sustainable aviation fuel at its refinery in Washington State, but it does include the full obligation of $240,000 to the City of Atlanta to conduct a study on deploying SAF at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.
Grants aren’t always logged in USASpending.gov in a timely manner, so it’s possible BP does have an agreement in place. Among the other awardees that I could not find listed in the database were World Energy, which was awarded nearly $22 million to install infrastructure enabling Los Angeles International Airport to get deliveries of SAF, and Buckeye Terminals, which got $24 million to upgrade four SAF storage facilities in the midwest. Republicans tend to support biofuels, so it’s somewhat surprising they went after this program — especially since $291 million is chump change on the scale of a multi-trillion-dollar budget.
We know a bit more about the second item on the list, the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program. This one allocated just over $3.2 billion to the Federal Highway Administration to award state and local governments with grants to improve walkability and transportation access, to mitigate transportation-related pollution in disadvantaged communities, and to improve transportation equity. The advocacy group Transportation for America found that of the nearly 100 awards the Biden administration announced from this program in 2023, totaling more than $3.1 billion, only 25 projects may have reached a final project agreement, per USASpending.gov. The group says this means it’s possible that nearly the entire $3 billion is up for grabs.
Other funding targeted includes more than $3.3 billion across three allocations to the General Services Administration to improve the efficiency of government buildings, prioritize lower-carbon building materials, and invest in other “emerging and sustainable” building solutions. The Government Accountability Office published a well-timed report about these three programs today, noting that while 99% of the money has been awarded, only half has been obligated, leaving more than $1.7 billion for Congress to take back.
Lastly, the proposal lists $2 billion in grants for states and local governments to use low-carbon materials in road projects. The Department of Transportation awarded $1.8 billion of the money to 39 states last year, although again, it's unclear how many of these awards have been obligated.
Having said all that, let’s assume for a moment that the full amount allocated to each of the programs was available to Congress to claw back. That would come to just under $9 billion of the $10 billion of deficit reductions the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is required to find under the special rules governing the budget bill.
But the draft bill also contains huge amounts of new spending, including allocating more than $20 billion to the United States Coast Guard for border security and $15 billion for upgrades to Air Traffic Control systems. The nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that the new fees on EVs and other vehicles could raise between $7 and $33 billion over the lifetime of the bill, which is not enough to pay for all of that. (They also note that it would barely make up for the more than $200 billion deficit in the Highway Trust Fund.) So if Republicans want to keep those provisions, they may have to find more cuts. They’ll likely have to find more anyway, depending on how much of the IRA money has been obligated.
I’ll leave you with a reminder that I’ll be repeating ad nauseam over the next few weeks or months as Congress hammers out its budget bill: This is just a first pass, and this is all subject to change. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will be holding a markup of the proposal on Wednesday, where it will debate each line and make changes before voting on whether to advance it.
Most of the Inflation Reduction Act programs come under the aegis of the Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees, neither of which have published any bill text yet. But we’ll be here for you when they do.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove a reference to Gevo, a sustainable aviation fuel producer, which told Heatmap that it declined its awarded grant due to changed business priorities. It has also been update to include the Union of Concerned Scientists’ revenue estimate.
Chaos, uncertainty, “we don’t know yet.” These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter.
That’s not to say there haven’t already been real-world impacts. Trump has gutted the staff of key agencies dealing with climate policy and science, and shut multiple offices focused on environmental justice. His administration has taken offline thousands of web resources related to climate change and shut down a $5 billion offshore wind project that had just started construction. And then there’s the fact that now everyone, no matter what side of the energy transition they fall on, is talking about “energy dominance.”
With on-again-off-again tariffs, court-challenged funding freezes, “because I said so” regulatory rollbacks, and hazy threats to clean energy tax credits, it’s still hard to know what of Trump’s early actions back in office will stick. The long-term effects of Trump’s initial actions on the climate economy are still just estimates; projections. But I wanted to see what we could say definitively about Trump’s second first 100 days. What does the data tell us?
By the end of Trump’s first first 100 days, he had signed 24 executive orders, total. As of today, Trump has signed 20 executive orders related to environmental policy alone, out of more than 100 total.
This is partially a volume play. Trump stated in the run-up to the inauguration that he would sign 100 executive orders on his first day. He didn’t, but clearly quantity is part of the point.
Some executive orders are more potent than others. Legal experts say his order directing the attorney general to “stop the enforcement” of state climate programs is unlikely to go anywhere. It’s also not clear that his “reinvigoration of the clean coal industry” is more than wishful thinking. But he’s also terminated environmental justice programs and positions throughout the government, and ordered agencies to expand timber production and fishing, as well as to expedite fossil fuel development and deep-sea mining.
Trump’s tariff strategy is still shifting by the day, making it hard to pin down exactly how it will affect the clean energy transition. If global tariffs on steel and aluminum remain in place, everything — fossil fuels and renewables, internal combustion cars and EVs — will feel the pain. Tariffs on China and other East Asian countries will be tough for battery and solar companies, but they could also hurt liquified natural gas companies hoping to sell into those markets.
What we do know is that markets have been hanging on Trump’s every word, and that every utterance of “tariff” has sparked a crash. Even after Trump pulled back his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs, the economy still appears to be bracing for a recession.
Fears of a global recession have also tanked oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil, a common benchmark for oil prices, has traded below $65 since April 4, shortly after Trump’s global tariff announcement. Oil companies have said that $65 a barrel is the minimum price they need to profitably drill new wells.
But the trade war isn’t the only headache for U.S. producers. The same day Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, the international oil cartel OPEC+ declared that it would boost production, and will flood the market with more than 400,000 barrels per day in May. Ironically, despite his “drill, baby, drill” agenda, Trump may view both cases as a victory. He has been pushing OPEC and domestic producers alike to bring down the price of oil.
The weekly rig count, a common metric for the health of the oil industry, declined after the tariff announcement, dropping from 489 to 480 from April 4 to 11. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s the largest drop recorded since June 2023, according to Baker Hughes. (And a reminder that the U.S. produced more oil under President Biden than ever before.) Producers don’t appear to be making rash changes on the oil patch just yet, but if prices remain low, experts expect production to plateau, or even decline.
Perhaps the most difficult question to suss out in the data is the extent to which Trump’s initial actions have caused clean energy projects to collapse.
A recent report from Clean Investment Monitor, a project of the Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, found that the first quarter of this year saw the biggest loss of investment in clean manufacturing from project cancellations and closures of the past several years. The data is stark and implies that Trump is to blame, but a closer look at the projects complicates that narrative.
For example, American battery manufacturer KORE Power announced in February that it was cancelling plans to build a $1.25 billion factory in Buckeye, Arizona, but the company had quietly put its production site on the market in mid-January and is now trying to revive the plan as a factory retrofit rather than a new build. Freyr Battery cancelled a $2.6 billion plan to manufacture battery cells in Newnan, Georgia, but the company cited “rising interest rates, falling battery prices, a change in company leadership and a shift in its goals,” according to the Associated Press — Freyr has decided to produce solar panels instead. The closure of two of Solar4America’s manufacturing sites in California and South Carolina, first reported by PV Magazine, were likely due to waning sales in 2024.
Every example I found seemed to present a similarly muddled picture. It’s possible, and even likely, that Trump has spooked clean manufacturing companies and affected demand projections for things like batteries. But companies don’t seem to be citing federal policy explicitly in their decisions — at least not yet.
Investment in new projects also appears to be continuing alongside these cancellations. The Clean Investment Monitor report found that $9.4 billion worth of projects were announced in the first quarter of this year. That's more than the end of last year, but 23% below the first quarter of 2024.
Clean energy generation is another story, presenting cases where there’s no question Trump has played a role in killing projects. On his first day in office, Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum pulling approvals for the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, a project that would have created more than 700 jobs during construction, 20 permanent jobs, and brought millions in tax revenue into the state, but that faced intense local opposition. The developer behind Lava Ridge, LS Power, quietly took the project off its portfolio map.
But here, too, there’s shades of gray. Many solar farms were set to receive loans from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for example, but are in limbo as the fate of the program gets battled out in the courts. Some may not survive the time it takes for that process to play out, but if the program is ultimately salvaged, other projects could take their place.
The real moment of truth for clean manufacturing and energy generation projects is coming up in Congress, which is working on a “big, beautiful” budget bill to enact Trump’s tax cut agenda. If Republicans decide to kill the tax credits that are crucial to these factories and power plants, there’ll be no question about what happens next — or what’s to blame.
The AI-powered startup aims to provide home-level monitoring and data to utilities.
In theory at least, an electrified household could play a key role in helping stabilize the grid of the future, alleviating times of peak electricity demand by providing power back to the grid and giving utilities timely warnings about hardware that may be failing. But devices used to measure and monitor power demand today, such as smart meters, aren’t advanced enough to do this type of orchestrated power management and fault detection at a granular level — thus leaving both financial and grid efficiency savings on the table.
Enter Utilidata, which just raised a $60 million Series C funding round to get its artificial intelligence-powered software module into smart meters and other pieces of grid infrastructure. This module acts as the brains of a device, and can provide utilities with localized insights into things like electricity usage levels, the operations of distributed energy resources such as home solar and batteries, anomalies in voltage data, and hardware faults. By forecasting surges or lulls in electricity demand, Utilidata can optimize power flow, and by predicting when and where faults are likely to occur, it empowers utilities to strategically upgrade their grid infrastructure, or at least come up with contingency plans before things fail.
The company’s AI system enables all of this analysis to happen at the grid edge — the point at which the electricity system enters a customer’s home — as opposed to in a centralized cloud, which reduces bandwidth needs and allows for immediate responses.
“There's enough capability at that node to optimize multiple complex decisions and create a better holistic outcome for the customer on the grid,” Utilidata CEO Josh Brumberger told me. The company did a trial recently with the Electricity Power Research Institute that showed promising cost savings and reduced grid strain. “We were able to reduce the customer’s bill by 12.5% and shave peak [usage] by 25%,” he told me.
Utilidata’s series C was led by the clean energy investor Renown Capital Partners, with support from strategic investors such as the electricity infrastructure company Quanta and Nvidia, which Utilidata partnered with to create its AI platform.
It will still be a while before Utilidata-powered smart meters allow for automated load management down to the household level, Brumberger told me, calling this the “Holy Grail” of grid operations. That’s because making load adjustments across interconnected systems is a complex task that needs to be perfectly coordinated, often with strict regulatory oversight and opt-in from participating customers. Utilities are famously cautious about adopting new technologies such as this one, as a mishap leading to a blackout can have catastrophic consequences.
A nearer term use case, Brumberger explained, would be detecting local power glitches more quickly, or forecasting when these failures might occur. For example, a new electric vehicle in the neighborhood could potentially overload local electrical distribution equipment. Utilidata could allow the utility to replace the equipment before anything goes wrong, thus enhancing grid resiliency. Insights such as this, Brumberger said, are “going to have value immediately.”
Already Utilidata has partnered with Aclara, a large manufacturer of smart meters, to install its AI module. One day, Brumberger told me, he wants to see the tech in other grid infrastructure such as transformers, EV chargers, or automatic circuit breakers known as reclosers.
Naturally, Brumberger is also excited about the potential of integrating Utilidata’s technology into data centers, telling me he sees opportunities to deploy the company’s AI modules “at the server level, at the rack level, and at the row level, all the way up to that interconnection point,” in order to help data centers run more efficiently. As the AI boom drives data center electricity demand through the roof, Utilidata is a classic example of AI helping to ameliorate the very problem it’s created.
“Every watt of energy that does not go towards compute because it's either lost or is going towards cooling is a wasted watt,” Brumberger told me. “And so the more granular and distributed your visibility and controls are, the more efficient and valuable a system you'll have.”