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On China’s export pause, BrightDrop demand, and fighting wildfires
Current conditions: More than 28 million people in the Ohio Valley are at risk of severe thunderstorms today • Intense heat in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City may be behind dozens of cases of food poisoning linked to street vendors • Parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula could see up to 10 inches of snow by late Tuesday.
Manufacturers dependent on critical minerals and magnets are bracing for shortages and production delays after China suspended exports last week, in apparent retaliation for tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. The pause comes as China implements a new regulatory system, although it is expected to cut off shipments to some U.S. companies indefinitely, The New York Times reports.
China produces nearly all of the world’s heavy rare earth metals and rare earth magnets, which are crucial components for electric car motors, as well as drones, missiles, and spacecraft. But while rare earth magnets make up a small portion of China’s exports and the pause will cause “minimal economic pain” to Beijing, there is “potential for big effects in the United States and elsewhere,” the Times writes. Emergency stockpiles of heavy rare earth metals and magnets vary by company, but many American manufacturers have historically kept little to no extra inventory on hand.
GM announced Friday that it is pausing production of its electric Chevrolet BrightDrop delivery van through October, citing “market demand and rebalancing inventory.” The decision will see the automaker temporarily lay off 1,200 workers at its assembly plant in Ontario, Canada, with a permanent reduction of 450 workers expected when production resumes at lower levels in the fall. “This is a crushing blow,” Lana Payne, the president of Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, said in a statement. Last year, the Ontario plant produced 3,500 BrightDrop vans, of which GM sold 1,529; this year, it has sold just 247. The Detroit Free Presscites the vehicle’s $74,000 price tag as a reason for lagging sales, while Electrekpoints to the uncertainty of Trump’s tariffs for “causing companies like GM to expect more pain in the near term.”
The Trump administration is reportedly considering an executive order calling for creating a new wildland fire agency focused on the “immediate” suppression of wildfires. While many organizations and industry insiders have long awaited reforms in how the federal government combats wildfires — including pushing for the creation of a National Wildland Fire Service — the news was also met by concerns that the order could loosen certain requirements, especially for aerial firefighting.
Washington State’s Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove warnedThe Spokesman-Review in a statement that “If the draft is implemented as currently written it will, among other things, eliminate critical safety measures that protect aerial firefighters,” including independent inspections of tankers and planes that perform surveillance by the Forest Service. The Trump administration has responded to speculation over the EO by saying, “The media should stop reporting on ‘drafts’ with unknown origins.”
Michele Della Vigna, the head of natural resources research at Goldman Sachs, told CNBC that investors should consider including oil and gas stocks as a “cornerstone” of their ESG portfolios. While fossil fuel companies have traditionally been excluded from investments focused on “environmental, social, and governance” factors, Della Vigna likened a reappraisal of oil and gas to the way that some ESG funds have started to shift to include defense stocks. “This energy transition will be much longer than expected,” he said, adding that fossil fuel companies are major investors in low-carbon technologies and “we will not have affordable energy” otherwise.
The White House has singled out law firms with a focus on ESG and promoted support of coal and oil, but despite the pressures, others who spoke to CNBC remained skeptical of Della Vigna’s argument. “We can see the negative impacts of oil and gas,” Ida Kassa Johannesen, the head of commercial ESG at Saxo Bank, said, adding, “I mean, why would we want to see more fossil fuels? Most ESG investors would not.”
Franklin Jacome/Getty Images
Center-right President Daniel Noboa won reelection in Ecuador on Sunday, earning a full four-year term after taking power in snap elections in November 2023. While Ecuador has been an international leader on environmental issues, famously recognizing the legal rights of nature in its 2008 constitution, Noboa has a more mixed record, with critics claiming he has prioritized the nation’s economy over proposals for emissions reductions. Noboa notably has welcomed an anticipated $42 billion in foreign investment in oil production over the next five years, even as a 2024 national referendum blocked the government’s plan to restart drilling in Yasuní National Park. (Noboa has said he’s considering a moratorium on that referendum.) The impacts of a warmer climate have been immediately felt in Ecuador, however; the nation endured blackouts last year due to the impacts of a drought on the nation’s hydroelectric plants, and Noboa has pledged rainwater harvesting and storage projects during his second term.
On Friday, 63 nations — including China, Brazil, and much of Europe, but excluding the United States — voted to approve a first-of-its-kind tax on greenhouse gas emissions by ships in the shipping industry.
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On solar growth, Hornsea 4, and Rivian deliveries
Current conditions: The first cicada broods have begun to emerge in the Southeast as soil temperatures hit 64 degrees Fahrenheit• Hail and even snow are possible across parts of Spain today • Forecasters have identified a risk zone for tropical storm development in the Atlantic basin, with potential for the first named storm of the year to form by mid-May.
1. Global solar market expected to slow in 2025
The global solar market is expected to grow only 10% in 2025, down from 33% growth in 2024 and 87% growth in 2023, according to a new report by SolarPower Europe. The firm’s “most realistic scenario” accounts for the natural slowdown in development after a boom caused by high energy prices in 2022 and 2023, as well as the “uneven distribution of solar market growth” worldwide, with China accounting for 55% of the market share, lending to the dip in overall solar as it implements reforms this summer in how its renewables are priced and traded.
Speaking at the opening of the Intersolar 2025 conference in Munich on Wednesday, Abigail Ross Hopper, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, echoed some of the uncertainty expressed in SolarPower Europe’s report. “I don’t think any of us could be in this business if we weren’t optimistic,” she said, adding, “I think we’re going to weather through this storm, but it is going to be a bit rocky for a few years.” SolarPower Europe’s report, meanwhile, anticipates “likely” growth from 2 terawatts of global installed solar capacity at the end of 2024 to 7.1 terawatts of total installed capacity by 2030, which would meet “nearly two-thirds of the 11 terawatt renewable energy target set at COP28.” Under ideal conditions, solar could even quadruple capacity to more than 8 terawatts by the decade’s end. Read the full report here.
2. Orsted cancels 2.4-gigawatt offshore wind project in the UK, citing rising costs
The Danish energy company Orsted announced this week that it is canceling its Hornsea 4 offshore wind project in the UK due to rising supply chain costs and other “adverse macroeconomic developments,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Hornsea 4 was expected to become one of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world, with a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts once it was completed. (Equinor’s recently paused Empire Wind I project, south of New York’s Long Island, would have had an 810-megawatt capacity by comparison.)
Orsted warned it would take a hit from the cancellation, with breakaway costs estimated to be between $533 million and $685 million. Nevertheless, “Orsted said the project no longer made economic sense, even with a contract to sell power at government-guaranteed prices for 15 years,” Bloomberg writes. Significantly, the canceled project will also hurt the UK’s efforts to add more renewables to its power grid.
3. ICYMI: Rivian lowered its delivery estimate by as much as 15% due to tariffs
Rivian beat Wall Street’s first quarter estimates, the automaker shared in its earnings letter to investors on Tuesday, but lowered its target for 2025 vehicle deliveries on account of tariffs, CNBC reports. Though the company builds all its electric vehicles in Illinois, “The current global economic landscape presents significant uncertainty, particularly regarding evolving trade regulation, policies, tariffs, and the overall impact these items may have on consumer sentiment and demand,” Rivian said by way of explanation. While it previously estimated it would deliver between 46,000 and 51,000 units in 2025, the revised outlook anticipates 40,000 to 46,000 deliveries. Last year, the company delivered just over 51,500 vehicles, Inside EVs notes.
The company also said it expects to take on “a couple thousand dollars” in additional expenses per vehicle due to the trade policies, though founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe said it’s not planning to increase the $45,000 starting price of the R2 as a result. Despite the continued uncertainty, Rivian said it still expects to achieve a “modest positive gross profit” in 2025.
4. Republicans sneak sale of public lands into reconciliation bill
Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources added an eleventh-hour amendment to their portion of the budget package late Wednesday night, calling for the sale of thousands of acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah. Introduced by Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah, the provision capitalized on longtime aspirations by Republicans to privatize Bureau of Land Management acreage in the West.
As I wrote on Wednesday, the Republicans’ maneuver, “which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency,” and critics had little time to comb through the extent of the proposal. While early reviews of the bill estimated the sell-off of about 11,000 acres of land, much of it apparently near cities — in keeping with Republican Senator Mike Lee’s aspirations to use BLM land for suburban sprawl — the Wilderness Society informed me last night that the accounting may end up as high as 500,000 acres or more. That’s consequential not just for public land advocates, but also because “turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner,” I note in my piece. Moreover, “Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development.”
5. Thinning forests to reduce wildfire danger could also mitigate droughts: study
Thinning forests is a favorite idea of Republicans, who’ve rebuked blue states over forestry practices they claim exacerbate the dangers of wildfires. Now, a new study from researchers at the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources at the University of Nevada, Reno looking at the hydrology of the Sierra Nevadas has found that the practice — along with prescribed fires — could also have potential upsides during drought years, including generating more mountain runoff.
According to the findings published in the journal Water Resources Research, water yields in forests thinned to densities closer to those of a century ago can be increased by 8% to 14% during drought years. That water would be “particularly valuable … to farmers and cities in central California and northern Nevada who rely on Sierra [Nevada] snowpack for much of their water supply,” according to a press release about the research. Significant flooding risks did not appear to increase with the water yields. As earlier researchers have found, however, the results of forest thinning treatments also depend on how, where, and to what extent the treatments are applied. Not all landscapes would necessarily benefit from such regimes. For example, while President Trump blamed the January fires in Los Angeles on poor forest management in California, the blazes were in chaparral, not in forests where thinning could be applied.
Riverside Clean Air Carshare
University of California, Riverside announced Wednesday that it is launching the nation’s only hydrogen-powered carshare program in a partnership with city and state agencies. Participants can rent Toyota Mirai sedans through a smartphone app and pay hourly rates competitive with Uber and Lyft fees.
Republicans Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced the measure late Tuesday night.
Late last week, the House Committee on Natural Resources released the draft text of its portion of the Republicans’ budget package. While the bill included mandates to open oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, increase logging by 25% over 2024’s harvest, and allow for mining activities upstream of Minnesota’s popular Boundary Waters recreation area, there was also a conspicuous absence in its 96 pages: an explicit plan to sell off public lands.
To many of the environmental groups that have been sounding the alarm about Republicans’ ambitions to privatize federal lands — which make up about 47% of the American West — the particular exclusion seemed almost too good to be true. And as it turned out in the bill’s markup on Tuesday, it was. In a late-night amendment, Republican Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced a provision to sell off 11,000 acres in their states.
The maneuver, which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency. “The rushed and last-minute nature of this amendment introduction means little to no information is available,” including “maps or parcel information, amendment text, CBO Score, etc.,” the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said in a statement Wednesday.
House lawmakers appeared still to be at odds during a Wednesday morning press conference to announce the creation of a Bipartisan Public Lands Caucus. Rather than putting on the united front suggested by the working group’s name, former Secretary of the Interior and Montana Republican Ryan Zinke argued in defense of the amendment, saying, “A lot of communities are drying up because they’re looking to public land next door and they can’t use it.” Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell then took the mic to say, “I would urge all of us that the hearings — it’s not done in the dead of night, and that we have good, bipartisan discussions with everybody impacted at the table.”
Despite the cloak-and-dagger way Republicans introduced the amendment, there are several clues as to what exactly Amodei and Maloy are up to. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has aggressively pushed for the sell-off of public lands, including introducing the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act, which would “make small tracts of [Bureau of Land Management] land available to communities to address housing shortages or affordability.” Critics of the bill have called it the “McMansion Subsidy Act” and have argued — as the Center for Western Priorities’ Kate Groetzinger, does — that it would “do little to address housing issues in major metros like Salt Lake City and the fact that the current housing shortage is due largely to a lack of home construction, not land.” The Center for Western Priorities also contends that it “contains very few restrictions on what can be built on federal public lands that are sold off under the program.” Notably, Lee and Maloy have worked closely together in the past on transferring federal land in Utah to private ownership.
The land singled out in the Tuesday amendment includes BLM and Forest Service parcels in six counties in Utah and Nevada that “had already been identified for disposal by the counties,” Outdoor Life notes. While some land would be sold with “the express purpose of alleviating housing affordability,” the publication notes that “other parcels, including those in southern Utah, don’t have a designated purpose.” As Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, warned E&E News, it’s in this way that the bill appears to set “dangerous precedent that is intended to pave the way for a much larger scale transfer of public lands.”
While many Republicans contend that states can better manage public lands in the West than the federal government can (in addition, of course, to helping raise the $15 billion of the desired $2 trillion in deficit reductions across the government to offset Trump’s tax cuts), such a move could also have significant consequences for the environment. Turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner.
Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development; in Utah, the agency has identified some 5 million acres of public land, in addition to 11.8 million acres in Nevada, for solar development. While there are admittedly questions about how much renewable permitting will make it through the Trump BLM, it’s also true that solar development wouldn’t necessarily be the preference of private landowners if the land were transferred.
Tuesday’s markup ultimately saw the introduction of more than 120 amendments, including a Democratic provision that would have prohibited revenue from this bill from being used to sell off public lands, but was easily struck down by Republicans. In the end, Amodei and Maloy’s amendment was the only one the committee adopted. Shortly afterward, the lawmakers voted 26-17 to advance the legislation.
Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
By all outward appearances, the green hydrogen industry is in a state of arrested development. The hype cycle of project announcements stemming from Biden-era policies crashed after those policies took too long to implement. A number of high profile clean hydrogen projects have fallen apart since the start of the year, and deep uncertainty remains about whether the Trump administration will go to bat for the industry or further cripple it.
The picture may not be as bleak as it seems, however. On Wednesday, the green hydrogen startup Ecolectro, which has been quietly developing its technology for more than a decade, came out with a new plan to bring the tech to market. The company announced a partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing, a sort of manufacturing incubator that helps startups optimize their products for U.S. fabrication, to build their first units, design their assembly lines, and eventually begin producing at a commercial scale in a Re:Build-owned factory.
“It is a lot for a startup to create a massive manufacturing facility that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars when they’re pre-revenue,” Jon Gordon, Ecolectro’s chief commercial officer, told me. This contract manufacturing partnership with Re:Build is “massive,” he said, because it means Ecolectro doesn’t have to take on lots of debt to scale. (The companies did not disclose the size of the contract.)
The company expects to begin producing its first electrolyzer units — devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — at Re:Build’s industrial design and fabrication site in Rochester, New York, later this year. If all goes well, it will move production to Re:Build’s high-volume manufacturing facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania next year.
The number one obstacle to scaling up the production and use of cleaner hydrogen, which could help cut emissions from fertilizer, aviation, steelmaking, and other heavy industries, is the high cost of producing it. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a suite of policies designed to kick-start the industry, including an $8 billion grant program and a lucrative new tax credit. But Biden only got a small fraction of the grant money out the door, and did not finalize the rules for claiming the tax credit until January. Now, the Trump administration is considering terminating its agreements with some of the grant recipients, and Republicans in Congress might change or kill the tax credit.
Since the start of the year, a $500 million fuel plant in upstate New York, a $400 million manufacturing facility in Michigan, and a $500 million green steel factory in Mississippi, have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed.
The outlook is particularly bad for hydrogen made from water and electricity, often called “green” hydrogen, according to a recent BloombergNEF analysis. Trump’s tariffs could increase the cost of green hydrogen by 14%, or $1 per kilogram, based on tariff announcements as of April 8. More than 70% of the clean hydrogen volumes coming online between now and 2030 are what’s known as “blue” hydrogen, made using natural gas, with carbon capture to eliminate climate pollution. “Blue hydrogen has more demand than green hydrogen, not just because it’s cheaper to produce, but also because there’s a lot less uncertainty around it,” BloombergNEF analyst Payal Kaur said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent summit in New York City. Blue hydrogen companies can take advantage of a tax credit for carbon capture, which Congress is much less likely to scrap than the hydrogen tax credit.
Gordon is intimately familiar with hydrogen’s cost impediments. He came to Ecolectro after four years as co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a startup building hydrogen-powered planes that shut down last summer after burning through its cash and failing to raise more. By the end, Gordon had become a hydrogen skeptic, he told me. The company had customers interested in its planes, but clean hydrogen fuel was too expensive at $15 to $20 per kilogram. It needed to come in under $2.50 to compete with jet fuel. “Regional aviation customers weren’t going to spend 10 times the ticket price just to fly zero emissions,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me, and I don’t think it was clear to our prospective investors, how the cost of hydrogen was going to be reduced.” Now, he’s convinced that Ecolectro’s new chemistry is the answer.
Ecolectro started in a lab at Cornell University, where its cofounder and chief science officer Kristina Hugar was doing her PhD research. Hugar developed a new material, a polymer “anion exchange membrane,” that had potential to significantly lower the cost of electrolyzers. Many of the companies making electrolyzers use designs that require expensive and supply-constrained metals like iridium and titanium. Hugar’s membrane makes it possible to use low-cost nickel and steel instead.
The company’s “stack,” the sandwich of an anode, membrane, and cathode that makes up the core of the electrolyzer, costs at least 50% less than the “proton exchange membrane” versions on the market today, according to Gordon. In lab tests, it has achieved more than 70% efficiency, meaning that more than 70% of the electrical energy going into the system is converted into usable chemical energy stored in hydrogen. The industry average is around 61%, according to the Department of Energy.
In addition to using cheaper materials, the company is focused on building electrolyzers that customers can install on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel. Its first customer was Liberty New York Gas, a natural gas company in Massena, New York, which installed a small, 10-kilowatt electrolyzer in a shipping container directly outside its office as part of a pilot project. Like many natural gas companies, Liberty is testing blending small amounts of hydrogen into its system — in this case, directly into the heating systems it uses in the office building — to evaluate it as an option for lowering emissions across its customer base. The equipment draws electricity from the local electric grid, which, in that region, mostly comes from low-cost hydroelectric power plants.
Taking into account the expected manufacturing cost for a commercial-scale electrolyzer, Ecolectro says that a project paying the same low price for water and power as Liberty would be able to produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kilogram — even without subsidies. Through its partnership with Re:Build, the company will produce electrolyzers in the 250- to 500-kilowatt range, as well as in the 1- to 5-megawatt range. It will be announcing a larger 250-kilowatt pilot project later this year, Gordon said.
All of this sounded promising, but what I really wanted to know is who Ecolectro thought its customers were going to be. Demand for clean hydrogen, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces to scaling, after cost. Of the roughly 13 million to 15 million tons of clean hydrogen production announced to come online between now and 2030, companies only have offtake agreements for about 2.5 million tons, according to Kaur of BNEF. Most of those agreements are also non-binding, meaning they may not even happen.
Gordon tied companies’ struggle with offtake to their business models of building big, expensive, facilities in remote areas, meaning the hydrogen has to be transported long distances to customers. He said that when he was with Universal Hydrogen, he tried negotiating offtake agreements with some of these big projects, but they were asking customers to commit to 20-year contracts — and to figure out the delivery on their own.
“Right now, where we see the industry is that people want less hydrogen than that,” he said. “So we make it much easier for the customer to adopt by leasing them this unit. They don’t have to pay some enormous capex, and then it’s on site and it’s producing a fair amount of hydrogen for them to engage in pilot studies of blending, or refining, or whatever they’re going to use it for.”
He expects most of the demand to come from industrial customers that already use hydrogen, like fertilizer companies and refineries, that want to switch to a cleaner version of the fuel, or hydrogen-curious companies that want to experiment with blending it into their natural gas burners to reduce their emissions. Demand will also be geographically-limited to places like New York, Washington State, and Texas, that have low-cost electricity available, he said. “I think the opportunity is big, and it’s here, but only if you’re using a product like ours.”