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An interview with science writer Melissa L. Sevigny about Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
In late June 1938, three small boats pushed off from the banks of Green River, Utah, with plans to run the raging Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, all the way to Lake Mead. In addition to Grape Nuts, a bottle of Four Roses whiskey, and the latest USGS survey maps tied up with a “lucky string,” the boats carried something rather unusual on board: women.
At the time that Elzada Clover and her assistant, Lois Jotter, set out to become the first botanists to catalog the Grand Canyon, rumors still swirled that prehistoric creatures might lurk in its labyrinthine side canyons. Only 12 non-native expeditions had made the trip down the Colorado River since John Wesley Powell’s inaugural 1869 trip, and almost all of those rafters were men (the only woman to have attempted the journey vanished without a trace, along with her husband).
Though Clover and Jotter had serious work ahead of them, the contemporary coverage focused almost exclusively on the fact that the pair were women. Clover and Jotter weren’t much better respected by the men accompanying them; in addition to their significant scientific duties, they served as cooks for the crew on the entire 43-day journey. Even in spite of the distractions, though, Clover and Jotter’s catalog of over 400 species, including four previously unknown cactus species, remains the botanical ur-text of the region: “There was simply no other comprehensive plant list [of the Grand Canyon] published prior to the closure of Glen Canyon Dam,” explains science writer Melissa L. Sevigny’s Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, an excellent new book about the river expedition. “Anyone who wanted to understand how the vegetation had changed — because of dams, exotic species, or any of the other human and natural influences at work on ecosystems in the past half-century — had to refer to Clover and Jotter’s work.”
Sevigny aimed to do Clover and Jotter justice by restoring them to their rightful place in science — and remembered history. But her book is also a rollicking, keep-you-up-at-night adventure story, told in utterly enveloping and immediate prose. Happily, Sevigny is earning her accolades; the book has received a rare triple-crown of early starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist.
Brave the Wild River is out on May 23. Ahead of its publication, I had the chance to speak with Sevigny about Clover and Jotter, her writing process, and the continued uphill battle of women in the sciences today. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It was the fact that they were female scientists that drew me in. I always wanted to be a scientist; I wanted to be a geologist when I was a kid. I stayed on that path for quite a while and then I became a writer. I feel myself drawn to those stories because I suspect they might have changed things for me if I had known more stories about women in science when I was on that path.
I was surprised that I had never heard of these two women before, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter. I’ve lived in Arizona all my life. I thought I knew a lot about its history, and yet somehow their names had never come up. Something about that really compelled me and the more I looked, the more I realized I couldn’t find what I was looking for, which was the story of the botanical work that they did. If I wanted to know that story, I was going to have to write it myself.
I was lucky enough right from the start to have the diaries of both of these women. A diary is such an immersive document, you really do feel like you’re in their heads. They’re writing things down that maybe they wouldn’t say out loud to anyone. And so I got to know them first through their diaries, which were wonderfully descriptive, and through letters, which are another really intimate form of communication. They had friends and family that they were very close with and that they would write these letters to on the trip. Whenever they could stop and post a letter, they would do that.
But I also had to do some other things to get into their heads and one of them was raft the Grand Canyon myself. I was incredibly nervous. I’d never done a whitewater rafting trip before. But I knew I was going to need to do that.
I went with a botany crew; we were tasked with weeding out an invasive species of grass. I wanted to do that so I could get a sense of what it was like to actually have to work as a botanist on the river. It was a small group: We had three boats and six people, just like they did. Of course, a lot of things have changed since 1938 about river rafting, but it did feel like a very immersive experience. I remember at one point, turning around to watch the boat behind me come through a rapid and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s Lorin Bell.’ That is a character from 1938 in my book; it was not, in fact, Lorin Bell. Time, it feels different down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And sometimes I did forget that it wasn’t 1938.
I’m grateful to them for having the foresight to keep the materials because while they were alive, people often told them — or gave them the impression — that what they did wasn’t that important. And if they had listened to those people, they wouldn’t have kept these materials. The fact that they saved their diaries, they saved their letters, they saved the newspaper clippings, and they donated them to these archives shows a lot of foresight and a lot of courage. I couldn’t have written this book if they hadn’t felt that way.
I did keep my own diary. I made sure I wrote in it every night. I also had a waterproof river map with me and I made notes on it before the trip of things I wanted to make sure I looked at. Because there would be a moment in the diaries where they would say, like, “We looked up and we saw the Desert View watchtower.” That would be the whole description. And so I knew, okay, stop and look up here so that you can describe what they were seeing.
When I got home, I typed up little bits of description out of my diary and I printed them out and I cut them up with scissors and then I actually would tape them into my draft and work at integrating them in.
That’s a direct quote from something that Lois Jotter said. I found out pretty quickly that both these women wanted to be remembered as botanists and they struggled because people wanted to talk about them as if they were the first women to succeed at rafting the Grand Canyon. Elzada Clover actually pushed back against that for a very specific reason: She would refer to herself as the first non-native woman to raft the Grand Canyon. She knew that the region had a long Indigenous history — Navajo and Hopi both have stories of running this river long before a white person came along and did it. Elzada knew that and so that was one reason she pushed back against that label.
But the second reason was that she did want to be remembered as a scientist, as a botanist, and I don’t think that really happened for her during her lifetime. But it’s difficult to center a story on science when the fact that they were women shaped so much of their experience. When I first dove into writing this book, I wanted to stay on the science and I really thought the sexism that they experienced would be a smaller thread — I thought it would be there, but I didn’t want it to center it. But as I was writing, it was impossible to ignore all of the obstacles they faced because they were women, so I hope I managed to strike the right balance and do justice to their story. It was a frustration for them when they were alive and it was a difficulty for me when I was writing, like “How can we tell this as a science story when they’re constantly being told that they shouldn’t be scientists?”
I think that’s absolutely right. And I’m glad you said you were shocked by that because I was fairly shocked too, and then I was embarrassed for being shocked. I expected going into it — this is embarrassing to admit — I really expected the sexism would almost be kind of funny, you know, it would be like, “Look at how those people acted in the 1930s!” And it is funny, but it’s a much darker humor than I expected because women are still facing all of these things today.
Maybe not to the same degree — it might be a little more hidden or subtle now — but all of the same things that [Clover and Jotter] experienced: struggle getting a job, struggle getting a promotion, struggle to be taken seriously, to have a seat at the table. Smaller things too, like people fixating on their physical appearance, telling them to smile. All of those things still happen to women today. I wasn’t expecting to write as much about that going into this book as I did, but I knew I had to because it was a very real part of their story and an extremely relevant part of their story.
It’s become only more relevant as time goes on. Clover and Jotter were the only people to make a formal plant list published in a Western scientific journal before Glen Canyon Dam went up. Today, there’s been a shift in thinking about the Colorado River. In their era, it was a given that people were going to build dams and they were going to harness this river. But today, a lot of people want to figure out how we can undo some of that damage, how we can protect the rivers, cultural values, and environmental values. And in that discussion, it’s hard to know how to do that if you don’t know what the river used to look like.
Clover and Jotter’s plant lists are just one part of that story. There’s also Indigenous wisdom about the plants along the river. There are other pre-dam records, but together it creates a picture of how this place used to look. Not saying that we can make it look like that again, but it gives us a way to pin our baselines in place so as we move forward, we can understand what kind of processes we need to restore this river. How do we want to protect it?
Yeah, so many things. Gosh. I was lucky to be able to track down some of their relatives and some of their former students and had really wonderful interviews with them. But there’s always questions, like, did you get it quite right?
There’s a key moment in the book where [Clover and Jotter] lose part of their plant collection and all I have are these little scraps and I don’t know exactly how that happened. Like, what were you planning? Who did you give that collection to, who was entrusted with it, and then what happened? I’d love to fill in those kinds of details.
I’d also like to ask them how they feel about how their botanical work has been used today. So many things changed from the 1930s to the present day and they lived through those changes, but because I don’t have as detailed records later in their life, I don’t know how they felt about what happened to the Colorado River, how they felt about how their work was used or ignored or misused over that time. I would just love to sit and talk with them about that. That’s one of many, many questions I would have.
This was a story about two ordinary women. I mean, I think they were remarkable, I wrote a whole book about them. But sometimes when we tell stories about science, we focus on the lone genius in the laboratory discovering a new element or breaking the laws of physics. Most science actually gets done in a much more incremental fashion. It’s about ordinary people who are passionate about some part of the natural world and they go out and they chase that curiosity and they move our knowledge forward. Just a little step. That’s what [Clover and Jotter] did and I think that’s how science works.
I started this conversation by saying that I wanted to be a scientist, right? I hope that young people or people of any age who are interested in science will see that it’s not something done by geniuses locked away in laboratories. Anybody can be a scientist.
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A conversation with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman about life after the endangerment finding.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal on Tuesday to reverse its own conclusion that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare. Known as the “endangerment finding,” this 2009 determination initially compelled the agency to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles under the Clean Air Act. But the agency has since used it as the basis for many of its efforts to tackle climate change, including emissions limits on power plants, oil and gas operations, and aviation.
If the reversal is finalized as written — and survives court challenges — the EPA will no longer have the legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide from the tailpipes of cars or trucks, invalidating the vehicle standards issued by the Biden administration last year.
While other greenhouse gas regulations wouldn’t automatically disappear, the agency could easily use the same arguments to repeal them. Indeed, the agency said that it has already initiated or intends to initiate “separate rulemakings that will address any overlapping issues” related to other sources of greenhouse gas emissions, such as power plants.
EPA’s primary justification for reversing course, detailed in a 302-page document, is that the Clean Air Act is designed to target air pollution that endangers public health “through local or regional exposure,” and therefore that it cannot be used to rein in greenhouse gases “based on global climate change concerns.” Richard Revesz, a professor of law at New York University and former Biden official, told me this was “breathtakingly broad,” and said that it was “inconsistent with 55 years of regulation under the Clean Air Act. That limitation was never understood to be there.”
The EPA also put forth a host of other legal and scientific arguments, “basically throwing the kitchen sink at this issue,” Revesz said. The proposal asserts that the EPA should have considered the downstream costs of making the finding, as well as weighed the potential benefits of a warmer climate. In a section entitled “Alternative Rationale for Proposed Rescission,” the agency attempts to poke holes in the scientific evidence that climate change is a threat to public health, concluding that the research is uncertain. It cites a report from the Department of Energy, also released Tuesday, that says the warming caused by greenhouse gases is not as bad for the economy as people once thought, and that regulating such emissions will have “undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate.”
The proposal cherry-picks data and misinterprets scientific findings. For example, it says that recent evidence suggests that the temperature projections EPA used to make the endangerment finding were “unduly pessimistic,” citing a 2020 paper by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. But Hausfather has already posted on social media that this is wrong — his paper supported the EPA’s 2009 temperature projections.
My inbox is currently full of statements from legal experts, scientists, and activists adamant that the administration’s arguments are baseless. The agency will be taking public comments on the proposal through September 21, and hold at least two public hearings on August 19 and 20. To get a sense of what to expect over the coming months and years as a result of this move, I called up Jody Freeman, the director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard and a former White House counsel for the Obama administration. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What will EPA have to do in order to finalize this proposal?
What they do is put it out for public comment. There’ll be a huge reaction to this, and so they’ll have a very big set of comments that they’re going to have to go through, which then will take them several months at a minimum. And they’re not necessarily going to be in a rush, right? At a minimum, we’re going to be getting into 2026 before we’d see a final rule. And then the lawsuits would start.
Other than just responding to the public comments, are there certain things that they would have to demonstrate to finalize this determination?
The normal process is you have to respond to the most serious and relevant comments. So if the comment says, The claims you’re making about the science are wrong, they’d have to respond to that. The normal course is they come back with a final rule that explains why they’re doing what they’re doing, and why they either didn’t agree with the comments, or they do agree with some of them, and they’ve adapted the proposal.
And as you said, then the lawsuits would start.
It doesn’t take effect for 30 days after it’s final. But yes, at that point, they get sued. These rules go to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals because that’s what the Clean Air Act says, and usually it would take about a year or so for a D.C. Circuit decision to happen. So now you’re in 2027. You can see the timeline on this stretching out. And if you ultimately think this could go to the Supreme Court, you can imagine that’s another year away. So basically, for the rest of President Trump’s term, you really shouldn’t expect to see enforcement or action on federal climate rules.
Even if the EPA hadn’t taken this step, wouldn’t that still have been the case, since the Trump administration is fighting the power plant rules and the vehicle emissions rules?
Well, you could see them dragging their feet enforcing these standards. Of course, they would get sued if they weren’t enforcing vehicle emission standards against the auto industry. There would be efforts to force them to enforce. But it’s more serious and more long term damage for them to try to rescind the underlying endangerment finding because depending on what the Supreme Court does with that, it could knock out a future administration from trying to bring it back. Now that would be the nuclear option. That would be their best case scenario. I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s possible.
At a minimum, let’s say they don’t win everything, but the court says they can do this for now — they have the discretion, the flexibility not to make this finding. Another administration can come back and make it and restore the rules. But that would take, again, several years. So even if they lose, they win.
If they do finalize this, would the other lawsuits that are going on around the power plant rules and the vehicle emissions rules automatically be dropped?
There are a few lawsuits that were challenging the Biden-era rules, but the Trump administration asked the courts to hold them in abeyance because they said, We’re going to go revisit all those rules and replace them. So those lawsuits aren’t moving forward anyway at the moment. It would probably be true that the administration, in taking this action, wants to set up a situation where it can go back into court and say, Well, now all these challenges are moot. We don’t have any authority to regulate anyway. But for now, they’re all on hold.
Are there other regulations this will affect besides those for vehicles and power plants?
The methane rule for oil and gas facilities is more of a question mark because they don’t seem to be announcing they’ll eliminate it. It’s possible they push off compliance. It’s possible they make the rule weaker. But there are a couple reasons why they might not rescind that.
One is that there’s a very complicated history of this rule. Congress disapproved of a weaker methane rule the first time around in the Trump administration, and because of that congressional action, there’s a barrier there. They can’t easily just rescind that methane rule. They’ve got more legal hurdles to jump through.
The other reason is there are some good reasons to regulate methane that have to do with ozone pollution and pollution that isn’t just about climate change. And the third reason is the oil and gas industry might actually want a methane rule. They might want a weak one, but they might want one federally. So that’s a bit separate, and you have to be on the lookout for them handling methane differently.
Could a future EPA just develop stronger pollution standards for other pollutants that would indirectly reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
It’s true that when you set toxics standards, for example, for power plants to control their toxic pollution, a side benefit is those power plants become more efficient, and that means they control their carbon pollution, too. But this is more around the margins. This is not taking big bites out of power plant greenhouse gas emissions or big bites out of car and truck emissions. It would be a much, much, much weaker version of what you can do with the endangerment finding.
So if the endangerment finding is reversed, is the only path for future regulation for Congress to explicitly tell EPA that it must regulate greenhouse gases?
That’s one option, but it may not necessarily be the only one. It depends on where this lands after it moves through the courts. If the Supreme Court said, You, Trump EPA, you can rescind this finding, but another administration could bring it back, then another administration can say, Well, we think the science is clear, and we’re going to make the finding again and issue these rules. So it all depends on how far the court goes. If it’s going to agree with EPA, how much will it agree? But if the court were to essentially say, this agency has no authority now and forever to make this finding, well then yes, you need new law.
Will the overturning of the Chevron doctrine also play into this?
That’s another interesting one. So what they have to do now is argue that greenhouse gases might be pollutants, but we don’t have to regulate them. And when they argue that we don’t have to regulate them, they’re going to be asking for a lot of deference. And so in that sense, they’re kind of asking for what Chevron used to give you — deference. But they don’t have Chevron anymore, so they’re going to have to say to the court, You should agree with our reading of this law. This is the best reading of this law, that we don’t have to regulate. They no longer can just say, you ought to defer to us under Chevron.
In that scenario, is it left to the court to decide?
It’s left to the court to say, your reading of the law is right. You have flexibility here, and you can decide you don’t need to regulate. The court would have to agree with their reading of the Clean Air Act.
Isn’t the endangerment finding more of a scientific question than a legal one?
Well, in making that scientific decision about what constitutes a danger to human health, there’s a lot of judgment in there. How do we interpret the science? Is it okay for us to say, well, there are a lot of good things that happen because of climate change? This is what they might do, right? They might say, The EPA, long ago, they ignored all the good stuff about climate change, and we think that’s really important. They might say some ludicrous stuff that leading scientists would think is completely wrong. But there’s some discretion in there about how you count the science and what you weigh, and they’re going to try to get the court to agree that they have a lot of flexibility in what method they use. That means the court will have to agree with them on how they read the law.
So they might say, We have flexibility to interpret the science, and the court might say, No, you don’t, the science is really clear. Then they might say, Okay, well even so, the U.S. contribution is so infinitesimally small that we don’t consider it a contribution to the problem. Now there, the court might say, Okay, you have discretion there. So it’s a little bit of a moving target, where at every opportunity they’re going to say, We have flexibility, don’t you agree?, and hope the court bites on one of those.
More than $30 billion of clean energy investments are now on ice since Trump took office, according to new data from Wellesley College’s Big Green Machine.
America’s EV factory building boom is beginning to falter.
Since President Donald Trump took office, at least 34 factories or mineral refineries — totaling more than $30 billion in investment — have been paused, delayed, or canceled, according to a new report from researchers at Wellesley College who track the country’s clean energy manufacturing base.
“When you look at the projects that are slowing down, it’s all up and down the supply chain,” Jay Turner, an environmental studies professor who leads the database, told me.
Electric vehicle manufacturing projects are now being delayed or canceled at six times the rate that they were during the same period last year, he said.
The database, called the Big Green Machine, has data on EV and mineral factory activity going back to 2010, and has been actively tracking investment in the EV supply chain since 2022.
The news is not entirely bleak for the EV buildout, however. Another 68 projects have progressed in the past six months, according to Turner’s data. Those projects represent $24 billion in investment and more than 33,000 jobs.
At the same time, more than two dozen new projects have been announced in the past six months, but they are of a much smaller scale, the report finds. Taken together, the projects in this new wave add up to only $3 billion in investment — one-tenth of the $30 billion in projects that have been paused, delayed, or cancelled.
The Big Green Machine
The new data likely does not capture recent setbacks for the EV industry. Earlier this month, President Trump signed Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill, which will terminate all tax credits for buying or leasing an electric vehicle on September 30.
Turner told me that the slowdown was the predictable outcome of the Trump administration’s turn away from electric cars.
“In some ways, it’s exactly what we expected,” he said. “As concerns about the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law began last fall, we started to see projects slowing down. Since Trump was elected, those closures, cancellations, and delays have just ballooned.”
Particularly hard hit are projects located in distressed or fossil-fuel-dependent communities, as defined by the terms set out in the Inflation Reduction Act, he added. Facilities that depended on some kind of federal support or loan guarantee have also been especially likely to pause, he added.
The slowdowns have struck across the EV supply chain. Some battery factories have switched from producing lithium ion cells for vehicles to making large-scale batteries for the power grid. The new budget law, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, maintained tax incentives for installing grid-scale battery storage.
Mineral producers have also been affected. Li-Cycle paused work on mineral recycling plants in April, Turner said. A Canadian rare earth processing facility — one of the few such factories in North America — scaled back its ambitions this month. (“The data in our report is just the U.S., but when you add in Canada it’s more shocking how sharp the downturn has been,” Turner said.)
That follows other delays from last year. The Chicago-based company Anovion has continued to pause work on an $800 million facility in southwest Georgia that was slated to make synthetic graphite, which is essential for lithium ion battery anodes.
Last year, the chemicals company Albemarle delayed $1.3 billion in plans to build the country’s largest lithium refinery in South Carolina. “The economics just aren't there to build that plant,” Kent Masters, Albemarle’s CEO, told Reuters in May. China controls roughly three-quarters of the world’s lithium and synthetic graphite supply chains.
Despite its antagonism toward electric cars, the Trump administration has sought to prioritize some mineral projects. Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced a complex deal to invest in — and guarantee a buyer for the output of — a rare earths mine and processing facility on the California-Nevada border.
Whatever the cause of the slowdown, it isn’t limited to just electric cars. Total private manufacturing investment in the United States has leveled off and slightly fallen since October 2024.
On abandoning Antarctica, an EV milestone, and this week’s big earnings
Current conditions: Heavy rainfall in China has left at least 30 dead as forecasters predicts more days of downpours ahead • Severe thunderstorms are hitting the Midwest as a cold front suppresses the heat dome • The wildfires blazing across Canada are stretching into Alaska, with dozens of fires raging in the foothills of the Brooks Range.
Last year, oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP either abandoned their decarbonization goals or dialed down investments in green energy. Last week, the Financial Times also reported that the oil industry had put its effort to establish a net-zero emissions standard on pause as major companies quit the initiative. But at least one oil titan is doubling down on clean energy. On Monday, the Italian oil giant Eni said it expects its green business to rival revenues from oil and gas within a decade.
By 2035, CEO Claudio Descalzi told the FT, the operating profit “created by our new companies will balance what is coming from oil and gas, and in 2040 it will be more.” It’s a bullish bet. Earnings from Eni’s oil and gas business are still more than 10 times those from the biofuels and renewables divisions. While the company’s stock dipped by a little over 1% on Monday after the company reported its latest earnings, which beat analysts’ expectations and promised a $1.8 billion buyback, shares in Eni are up nearly 6% over the past month.
This is a big earnings week, with lots of upcoming announcements relevant for Heatmappers:
Tuesday:
Carrier
DTE Energy
Stellantis
Wednesday:
Microsoft
Meta
Rio Tinto
Hess
Entergy
Thursday:
Amazon
Shell
Southern Company
Air Products and Chemicals
TC Energy
Exelon
Xcel
Cameco
First Solar
ArcelorMittal
U.S. Steel
AES
Friday:
ExxonMobil
Chevron
Enbridge
Dominion
Brookfield Renewable Corporation
American researchers in Antarctica in 1955 set off across the ice from the icebreaker, USS Burton Island. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
In a shock to polar scientists, the National Science Foundation plans to cease operations of the United States’ only research ship capable of braving the farthest reaches of Antarctica in the Southern Ocean, the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, Science magazine reported. Doing so would end 60 years of continuous operations of American icebreakers in Antarctica. More than 170 researchers sent a letter to the head of the NSF and Congress asking for the agency to reconsider.
The move comes amid heightened tensions on both poles as climate change brings radical changes to the planet’s ice caps. The Trump administration has taken a keen interest in the race to dominate the trade routes, military outposts, and natural resources becoming newly accessible in the Arctic, going as far as to pressure NATO ally Denmark to cede sovereignty of semi-autonomous Greenland the U.S. While the geopolitics of the uninhabited Antarctic have garnered less attention, similar dynamics are arising. China is boosting its investments in Antarctica and just opened its fifth research station. Russia has undermined attempts to inspect its bases there, which violates the Antarctica Treaty, an international agreement meant to ensure that no country can militarize the continent. China and Russia have also teamed up to tank new international protections on marine life.
The U.S. is on track to add 16,700 public fast-charging ports by the end of this year, according to InsideEVs. The effort — led by Tesla, ChargePoint, and EVgo — would represent 2.4 times the number of ports added in 2022. If the pace continues, the U.S. could have 100,000 public fast-charging ports by 2027. That’s nearing the 145,000 gas stations the U.S. operates for refueling internal combustion engine vehicles.
The milestone comes as EV sales are surging ahead of the September 30 deadline phasing out the $7,500 tax credits for electric cars Republicans set in President Donald Trump’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill. U.S. Even though Tesla sales dropped, U.S. EV sales overall surged 10% in the last quarter, led by GM’s new offerings.
The State of New York announced its first bulk solicitation for energy storage, putting out a bid for 3 gigawatts of batteries. The projects will be “credited and compensated based on the operational availability they achieve in each month over the course of” contracts ranging from 15 to 25 years. Governor Kathy Hochul said the bid highlighted “New York’s ongoing commitment to strengthening our grid, ensuring the state continues to have a more affordable and reliable electricity system now and well into the future.”
It’s just the latest big energy announcement from the state. Last month, Hochul ordered the New York Power Authority — the nation’s second-biggest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority — to build the state’s first new nuclear power station since the 1980s. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin pointed out, the project mirrors the atomic ambitions of other government-owned utilities. Ontario plans to build what could be the nation’s first small modular reactors, using GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s design. The TVA is slated to build the second set of those same reactors. But as I reported over the weekend for New York Focus, one of the state’s biggest utilities is lobbying Albany to consider the same kind of large-scale reactors that were just completed in Georgia, the Westinghouse AP1000.
Last month, solar panels delivered the largest share of the European Union’s electricity for the first time, narrowly eclipsing nuclear power, according to data from Ember. Yet this month, industry projections put the bloc on track for the first decline in solar growth since 2015. The EU is set to deploy 64.2 gigawatts this year, down from 65.1 gigawatts in 2024. The installations are set to help the bloc exceed the European Commission’s 2025 solar target of 400 gigawatts, bringing the total to 402 gigawatts by the end of the year.
But if the trend continues, Europe may fall roughly 4% short of its 2030 goal of 750 gigawatts of solar, installing just 723 gigawatts. That may not sound like a lot, but Dries Acke, the deputy chief executive of SolarPower Europe, said “the symbolism is big. Market decline, right when solar is meant to be accelerating, deserves EU leaders’ attention.” The industry group blamed the downturn on declines in residential solar as feed-in tariff schemes waned in Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. But corporate deals for solar power also dropped 41% between the first and second quarters of this year. Over the weekend, meanwhile, the EU signed a major trade deal with the Trump administration, promising to ramp up purchases of liquified natural gas and oil.
Scientists at the University of California at Davis used artificial intelligence to engineer proteins to boost the immune systems of plants, helping the flora fight off bacterial threats. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Plants, opens the door to new ways of protecting crops such as tomatoes and potatoes from disease. “Bacteria are in an arms race with their plant hosts,” Gitta Coaker, the study’s lead author and a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, said in a press release.