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On adaptation funding, plastic pollution, and LNG
Current conditions: A California wildfire burned some 400 acres near the site of the Hell’s Kitchen Lithium Extraction Project • Storm Bert in the U.K. killed at least five people and triggered 150 flood warnings • Many parts of the U.S. could see their coldest weather of the season on Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
The UN COP29 climate summit came to a close Sunday – two days behind schedule – after delegates reached a deal on a sum for a new climate finance goal. Developed countries pledged to give at least $300 billion annually by 2035 to help poorer countries adapt to climate change and transition away from fossil fuels. That’s up from the previous goal, set in 2009, of $100 billion, but well below the $1 trillion economists say will be needed. That a deal was reached at all was seen as a success after two weeks of stalemate. But many from developing nations found it insufficient. Here are some reactions:
Beyond the climate finance deal, the summit did not result in a clear plan for how countries will transition away from fossil fuels, as pledged at last year’s COP28, nor details on tripling renewable energy capacity.
As one UN summit winds down, another begins. This week delegates from 175 countries will gather in Busan, South Korea, with a goal of cementing a global treaty on reducing plastic pollution. Some nations want to tackle the problem by curbing plastic production, while others – especially petrostates and representatives from the chemicals industry – want to focus on ways to reuse and recycle plastics. Researchers say that without a treaty, plastic pollution will double by 2050. Already the world produces half a billion tons of the stuff every year, and most of that ends up being dumped. A few months ago, the U.S. signalled it would back a treaty to curb production, but experts think Donald Trump’s election win makes such a move less likely.
This fifth round of talks on an international plastics treaty is meant to be the last. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency estimated that this year one-fifth of the world’s oil will go toward industrial and chemical sectors. As the energy transition ramps up, major oil and gas producers see the plastics market as a “plan B.” Indeed, the Financial Times reported today that “the biggest takeover deal in Europe so far this year” – oil company Adnoc’s €15 billion ($15.7 billion) purchase of German polymers producer Covestro – is being driven by a projected growth in demand for plastics.
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One to watch for this week: The Department of Energy’s analysis on the environmental and economic impacts of natural gas exports could be released in the next few days, E&E News reported. It’s likely to conclude that U.S. LNG shipments are worse for the climate than coal in some countries where those shipments wind up, and that they drive up domestic prices. “The assumption is that a good time to release such a report would be the Friday after Thanksgiving,” one energy lobbyist told the outlet.
Tesla’s massive EV production plant in Austin, Texas, spewed environmental toxins into the surrounding air and water for months back in 2022, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal. The hazards were not addressed even after managers were made aware of them, and employees felt pressured by CEO Elon Musk to put production goals ahead of regulatory compliance. “Across his business empire, Musk’s companies show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again, federal and state government filings and documents show,” the Journal said. It noted that as co-head of the new “Department of Government Efficiency” under the Trump administration, Musk is likely to try to cut environmental regulations that apply to his own companies.
A recent report finds that the cost of replacing an EV battery pack will soon be lower than the cost of replacing an internal combustion engine. The analysis comes from Recurrent, a startup focused on helping buyers understand battery health in used EVs. (As CNBC explained earlier this year, “Recurrent aims to do for electric vehicle batteries what odometers do for fuel-powered cars: show the wear and tear on the battery and its future value.”) While it’s unlikely that an EV driver would need to replace a battery, this possibility remains a nagging concern, especially among those who might consider buying a used EV. The report found that, as the price of lithium-ion batteries falls, so will the cost of replacing them. By 2030, the cost will be at parity with that of replacing an ICE, and at the same time, used batteries could be sold on. “The takeaway? It will no longer be the case that a 10+ year old EV is worthless,” the report said. “It will be very feasible for someone to buy an inexpensive EV and replace the battery pack for a few thousand dollars.”
Recurrent
The toxic pollution that shrouds India’s north costs the country’s economy $95 billion each year, or about 3% of GDP.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.