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On House drama, the good and bad of solar, and earnings season
Current conditions: Djibouti, eastern Ethiopia, and southern Eritrea are roasting in higher-than-average triple-digit temperatures • Argentina’s brutal cold snap is back after a brief pause, threatening gas infrastructure and freezing crops • Millions of Americans are facing a new round of heat waves from the upper Midwest down to the Gulf.
The Environmental Protection Agency is days away from proposing a rule to rescind the endangerment finding, the 2009 decision that established the federal government’s legal right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. That’s according to a scoop late last night in The New York Times, confirmed hours later by The Washington Post. The finding came in response to the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the nation’s highest court ruled that the danger planet-heating emissions posed to human health made them subject to limits under the same law that restricts other forms of air pollution. The endangerment finding was previously considered so untouchable that the first Trump administration tried to work within the parameters of the rule rather than eliminate it outright.
Revoking the endangerment finding would undo all federal greenhouse gas rules on automobiles, factories, and power plants, fundamentally ending any national policy designed to curb emissions. The proposal will almost certainly face political challenges. It’s unclear how the Supreme Court — now overwhelmingly conservative compared to the bench of 18 years ago — would decide the case today. One “highly unusual” wrinkle in the story: E&E News reports that EPA has been absent from recent meetings the White House has held with industry and environmental groups on the endangerment finding, which “raises questions about who within the Trump administration is leading the effort.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson closed up shop early this week, sending Congress’ lower chamber home until September. In so doing, the Republican leader hoped to halt a push to investigate President Donald Trump’s connections to the disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The move effectively pauses negotiations over energy policy, too. Both chambers of Congress are in the process of setting their budget priorities for the coming year, and President Trump has called for major cuts to programs overseeing clean energy development and deployment. Talks are also set to begin soon over the reauthorization of the Energy Act of 2020, the programs of which largely expire this year, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is scheduled to expire next year. The House going into recess early will shift attention to the Senate, where eyes will be on Republican moderates such as Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both of whom defended clean energy programs in negotiations over the One Big Beautiful Bill.
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Even before Trump took office, the U.S. electric vehicle revolution appeared to be stalling. Now the elimination of the main tax credit to encourage EV sales threatens to zap any remaining momentum. So far at least, that hasn’t halted GM’s EV sales. In its latest quarterly earnings announced Tuesday, the Detroit auto giant reported its EV sales had doubled over the previous three months, thanks in part to the launch of the battery-powered version of the Chevrolet Equinox, an SUV with a starting price of $35,000. GM now claims 16% of the American EV market, placing the company second behind Tesla, which reports its earnings today.
With earnings season is upon us, and dramatic shifts in federal policy and geopolitics promising some notable results, I went through all the companies reporting financial results to Wall Street this week and rounded up the big ones:
On Wednesday:
On Thursday:
On Friday:
The consultancy McKinsey is out with a new report on the effect of varying degrees of tariffs on the energy transition. The results are mixed. The good news: Solar capacity could more than double in the U.S. and the European Union by 2035 under any tariff scenario. The bad news: Strict tariffs could mean 9% less solar installed in the U.S. by 2035, and 7% less in the European Union.
In reality, the outcomes could be even worse. The report did not take into account how Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill pared down tax credits, or how the Trump administration may further limit access to federal incentives through the president’s executive order directing the Internal Revenue Service to restrict eligibility for wind and solar projects.
The Trump administration’s attacks on solar power aren’t changing the favorable economics for photovoltaics just yet. Facebook-owner Meta just inked a deal with energy developer Enbridge to build a 600-megawatt solar farm in Texas to power its data centers. Construction is already underway on the nearly $1 billion facility near San Antonio.
A fire in Oregon. FireSat
A new satellite project resulting from a collaboration between Google, the satellite company Muon Space, and the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance can detect wildfires as small as 5 meters squared in size, giving firefighters a new tool to identify and potentially contain blazes before they erupt into conflagrations. The companies released the first images from the project this morning.
A fire in Ontario, Canada. FireSat
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On Trump’s coal push, PJM’s progress, and PG&E’s spending plan
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is gaining wind intensity this week, bringing flooding rain and storm surge to the southeastern U.S. • Hurricane Humberto, now a Category 4 storm, is passing west of Bermuda, bringing marine hazards to the U.S. East Coast • Typhoon Bualoi is pummeling the Philippines and Vietnam, where it’s already killed a dozen people.
If you were planning to cash in on the $7,500 federal tax credit for buying an electric vehicle, you’d better make moves. Today’s the last day to claim the so-called 30D tax credit. Congress moved the expiration date for the writeoff to September 30 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That doesn’t mean all government incentives for EVs are going away. New York still offers a $2,000 “Drive Clean Rebate” for some vehicles, and California offers up to $7,000 in rebates. Prices for new electric cars are still higher than those for comparable internal combustion vehicles, a frustratingly persistent condition the federal tax credit was meant to help address. Owning an EV has its own rewards, however, including lower fuel and maintenance costs over time. For more on how to go about choosing an EV, here’s Andrew Moseman’s guide from our Decarbonize Your Life series.
Stacks at the Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
The Trump administration is opening more than 13 million acres of federal land to leasing for new coal mines. And it’s providing funding to keep demand for coal roaring. The Department of Energy announced Monday it will offer $625 million to upgrade, reopen, and “modernize” coal-fired power plants across the country.
It’s a sign of the trend Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin clocked in July: “Global coal demand is rising,” he wrote, “and America wants in.” Indeed, in a press release, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright boasted that the new funding would “keep our nation’s coal plants operating” and would ultimately help lower rising electricity prices. “Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” Wright said. “Coal built the greatest industrial engine the world has ever known, and with President Trump’s leadership, it will help do so again.”
The Trump administration is shutting down or shrinking roughly one third of the federal offices that track bird populations after hurricanes, map megafire risks in the Midwest, figure out new ways to fight invasive plants, and prepare communities’ stormwater drains against intense flooding. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers “are expected to drastically wind down and possibly close after Tuesday because of a lack of funds,” The Washington Post reported Monday. The centers in the South Central, Northeast, and Pacific Islands regions, which “collectively cover about one-third of the U.S. population and are funded under the Interior Department,” are potentially facing permanent closure.
The shuttering isn’t linked to a potential government shutdown, and appears planned as part of the Trump administration’s broader cuts to federal research. “We’re not willing to just drop everything and walk away,” Bethany Bradley, the co-director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and a University of Massachusetts professor, told the newspaper. “But the reality is we can’t do this for free.”
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, utility giant Constellation, and power company Talen came together to propose a way to meet electricity needs in the nation’s largest power grid. Under their plan, the PJM Interconnection would allow large power users to volunteer for time-limited periods of reducing electricity demand when the grid is stressed. The proposal also outlines plans for time-limited use of backup generation. If making the load more flexible doesn’t work, PJM would increase the supply of firm power through procurement.
The pitch comes in response to an earlier mandatory curtailment proposal from PJM, which drew fierce blowback from many of the companies that wrote up this alternative. (“Everyone hates it,” Matthew wrote.) As analyst Aniruddh Mohan noted, PJM ultimately withdrew its initial load flexibility proposal.
Pacific Gas & Electric announced plans to spend $73 billion on upgrades to the electrical grid in California to meet the surge in demand from data centers. PG&E, as it’s known, has been deemed responsible for multiple large-scale wildfires in recent years, incurring billions in damages. As the utility told investors on a call Monday, the new investment plan “comes on the heels” of new liability reforms in the state. Under Senate Bill 254, the state expanded its wildfire fund by $18 billion and “acknowledged that the utilities and their customers cannot continue to carry the full burden of climate-driven catastrophic wildfires, especially when the utility has acted prudently,” PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe said, according to Power magazine. The utility had filed a proposal in March to build 700 miles of underground power lines between 2026 and 2028 and complete 500 miles of additional wildfire safety system upgrades by next year.
Fervo Energy, the company using fracking technology to harness the planet’s molten energy, is undeniably leading the race to commercialize next-generation geothermal. But a clear second-place contender emerged Tuesday when XGS Energy released the results from its first commercial test, the company told Heatmap exclusively. The startup’s system outperformed the executives’ expectations, setting the stage for full-scale development. While Fervo’s technology represents what’s known as “enhanced” geothermal system, XGS’ approach is what’s known as “advanced” geothermal systems that rely on closed-loop infrastructure, as Matthew previously explained.
The company is vying to challenge Fervo for leadership in the next-generation geothermal market.
The geothermal startup XGS Energy has now completed four months of tests to see whether its technology can maintain steady production of heat at temperatures above what’s needed to generate energy. Over 3,000 hours, the company monitored the drilling process and checked how heat flowed from its wells, the status of their temperature, and how precisely XGS’ mathematical predictions matched the outcome of the testing.
The results, which the company shared exclusively with Heatmap, were “almost too good,” XGS CEO Josh Prueher told me.
“Had we been within 10% of predictive performance, we would have been pretty happy with the outcome,” Prueher said. “Turns out we were within 2% under a variety of different parameters.”
“It worked like a charm,” he said.
To understand what makes XGS Energy stand out among the geothermal startups racing to commercialize next-generation technology, it helps to compare the company to its fellow Houston-based rival that’s currently leading the sector, Fervo Energy. Unlike Fervo, XGS doesn’t use fracking technology to drill horizontal wells in pursuit of hot, dry rocks from which to harvest energy.
Instead, XGS drills vertical wells and inserts a closed steel pipe with water and fills the gap between the metal and the rock with a patented slurry that conducts heat. Technology like Fervo’s requires pumping cold water over the fractured hot rocks to harvest heat. But with its method, XGS claims, it avoids losing any water.
The testing took place off the US-395 highway in a volcanic field in California’s Mojave desert, sandwiched between the eastern edge of the Sequoia National Park and western border of Death Valley National Park. The geothermal field XGS tapped is already actively producing energy for the Coso Operating Company, which runs a 270-megawatt geothermal power plant on the land. The results, the company said, showed the “unprecedented predictability and active control of field performance” of XGS’ technology “versus other geothermal systems, which are subject to complex and continuously changing subsurface reservoir conditions.”
At least one outside observer agreed. “This is impressive, and something to be proud of,” Advait Arun, an energy analyst and senior associate at the think tank Center for Energy Enterprise who co-authored a recent report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
While the 3,000 hours of testing still falls short of the year’s worth of data Fervo has produced at one of its sites, it’s the longest any other competitor in the space has successfully demonstrated its approach so far, Arun said.
“These guys would be second to Fervo in terms of their ability to prove a commercial-scale performance test,” he added.
XGS is now poised to build a 150-megawatt power plant for Meta’s New Mexico data centers. Even after that’s complete, however, Prueher said the surrounding area has nearly 3 gigawatts of untapped heat. In California, where the company is headquartered and carried out its demonstration project, there’s a growing need for clean power sources that don’t further tax the depleted water table.
“A lot of the historical sensitivities around developing in California — a state where, like many others, water usage for industrial development is kind of a no-no — because we don’t need water, we have some real advantages,” Prueher said.
At a moment when surging demand from data centers is supercharging dealmaking in the electricity sector, Prueher said XGS is looking beyond the boom from the artificial intelligence buildout.
“It’s not about data centers,” he said. “It really is just the fundamental power needs of California. With the restrictions around water usage, we line up really, really well for California.”
For now, the company remains focused on the U.S. But Prueher said XGS is well suited to export its technology to East Asia, as well, where countries along the Pacific Rim have vast geothermal potential and growing electricity demand but limited development. XGS already has ties to the Philippines and “may actually be subsurface” — i.e. digging wells — there by the end of 2026, Prueher told me.
The “big enchilada,” he said, would be establishing a foothold in Japan, where the onsen hotspring industry has long protested geothermal development they say could diminish the resource that makes the ancient bathhouse tradition possible. Prueher told me his technology mitigates concerns over fracking-induced earthquakes, as well.
For now, he said, his main market is in the fast-growing Southwest. The executive compared this moment to 2021, when he worked at a battery company. That February, Winter Storm Uri collapsed the Texas grid as natural gas pipes froze and demand for electricity to heat homes designed to stay cool in a typically arid climate skyrocketed. Back then, he said, batteries were “still a pretty new asset class.”
“People were still uncertain about how it would perform,” Prueher said. But his company was “able to keep our batteries up and operating 100% of the time, no one minute of downtime during that entire episode.”
“From a market perspective, the storm showed that, if you can bring this new type of technology into the market, it can really deliver remarkable value,” he added. “We made 10 years of revenue in six days.”
In a lot of ways, he went on, “this is the same thing.”
“We’ve proven a technology is reliable,” Prueher said. “It works at commercial scale over a period of time. We would regard this as a real pivot point in the industry.”
Voters are mad at Trump over rising bills, but assigning blame is complicated.
Electricity prices are rising and voters are mad about it — two facts that might seem to add up to a political victory for Democrats.
Environmental groups and elected officials alike are gearing up to use electricity prices against Trump, citing the president’s multi-pronged assault on renewables as the problem and promising to immediately bring them down as the solution. “Cheap is clean and clean is cheap,” Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz said at Heatmap House during New York Climate Week, echoing what has become essentially a universal talking point among climate activists.
The problem with that message, however, is that lowering electricity prices is really hard. In reality, the responsibility for high prices can’t be laid that the feet of any one person, party, or governmental body. What’s worse for Democrats: the voters seem to agree.
That’s not to say Trump isn’t giving Democrats a fighting chance.
“What’s interesting politically is that Trump started this term with cost of living being his single strongest issue, and now it’s his weakest,” Democratic political strategist David Shor said at an event hosted by the moderate Democratic group Third Way during New York Climate Week last week.
“A lot of the Democratic attacks trying to blame these energy price increases on Republicans have done well in our testing,” Shor said, and that there was “potential” for such attacks to be effective.
But the public’s views on energy go back further than January 20.
Trump won the 2024 election in part because of public outrage at rising prices across the board. Polling done during the campaign showed that Trump both had an advantage on cost of living issues in general and energy in particular. A Third Way poll conducted early last year showed that Trump had strong advantages on energy production, supporting manufacturing, reducing the cost of energy and gasoline, and the economy in general.
“While Biden was president, energy was one of his biggest vulnerabilities,” Shor said on the panel. “The flip side though, though, is that Democrats aren’t in charge anymore.”
According to polling by Heatmap Pro, voters largely don’t pin the fault for high electricity prices on Washington, D.C. They are more likely to blame “more demand,” their “ electricity utility,” or their “state government,” with roughly equal numbers blaming “the Biden administration and Democrats” and “the Trump administration and Republicans,” with predictable partisan splits.
And while the Trump administration is undoing tax credits for clean energy projects and unleashing regulatory hellfire on existing projects, the electricity price hikes we’re already experiencing are largely due to the cost of the poles and wires that transit and distribute electricity. In some cases, sharply rising demand has played a role, especially in the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest covered by PJM Interconnection.
Because the bulk of high energy costs are due to investments that have already been made — and can likely only be slowed down by new investments in longer-distance transmission — politicians are unlikely to find a way to lower costs, so much as perhaps slow down their increase. “Unfortunately, electricity rates are not going to go down. Our goal here is to minimize how much they go up,” Gretchen Kershaw, vice president of strategy at Grid Strategies, said on the same Climate Week panel as Shor’s.
Any politician running as a challenger can simply say that rising electricity prices are bad and force incumbents to take responsibility for it, even if they don’t have a plan to lower prices in the short term.
However, Democrats are in charge in some places that have seen large price increases, and that has tripped up their ability to make electricity price increases a marquee issue.
New Jersey, for instance, not only has some of the highest retail electricity prices in the nation, it has seen substantial price increases over the last five years as the state’s electricity market, PJM, has faced billions of dollars in new costs for capacity. Just in the past year, retail electricity prices in New Jersey have risen by over 25%, to around 25 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Along with Virginia, New Jersey’s gubernatorial election — held the year after the presidential election, is often considered a kind of mid-mid-term temperature-check for the country as a whole.
New Jersey is a solidly Democratic state, although one that swung considerably towards Trump in 2024. The Democratic nominee in this year’s governor’s race, Mikie Sherrill, is the favorite and should be able to ride the backlash against Trump to Drumthwacket, a.k.a. the New Jersey governor’s mansion. But with electricity prices at the center of the race, she has failed to dominate the polls.
Her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, has tried to pin the price increases on progressive policy, namely support for renewables, especially the troubled offshore wind industry, as well as efforts to prevent new fossil fuel power plants from opening.
One anti-Sherrill ad quotes the congresswoman saying, “We need to move into clean power. It’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’re a good person you’ll do it,” and describes her price freeze plan as just a way to “lock in” already high prices.
Sherrill’s campaign has hit back at the Republican Governors Association, which ran the ad, pointing out that the quote was actually Sherrill explaining how not to talk about climate and energy policy. In other words, Sherrill is getting tagged with the argument that she explicitly says Democrats should reject.
Sherrill has tried to go after utilities specifically in her campaign, and in August proposed a freeze on electricity rate increases.
There’s some indication that voters in New Jersey at least give an edge to Republicans on energy and electricity questions. In a Quinnipiac poll showing Sherrill leading Ciattarelli 49% to 41%, she had just a two-point lead on electricity prices, specifically, with 17% of the respondents not having an opinion.
In short, Sherrill was right to be concerned about how voters perceive Democrats when it comes to electricity prices.
“Democrats have to be very careful,” Shor said. “If you just ask people ‘what party do you trust more to keep energy prices down’? Historically, that’s something that Republicans have massive advantages on.”