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On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: Typhoon Wipha is barrelling through southern China, making its way across the mainland after pummeling Hong Kong with heavy rain • More than 60 million Americans are facing heat alerts as temperatures surge • The unusually warm 21-degree Fahrenheit temperature recorded at Summit Station in Greenland is just a few degrees off a record high.
EPA Administrator Lee ZeldinKevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency announced plans on Friday afternoon to shut down its research arm and fire hundreds of biologists, chemists, toxicologists, and other scientists whose work helps determine safe pollution levels for regulations. The announcement comes after months of denials from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin that he planned to close the division in question, the Office of Research and Development, which studies the threat from climate change, toxic chemicals, and air and water pollution on human health, and funds university research programs.
The closure comes as part of deep job cuts at the agency. In a statement on Friday, Zeldin said the more than 500 layoffs — which, combined with voluntary buyouts, will slash the EPA’s workforce by nearly one-quarter compared to January’s numbers — would save taxpayers nearly $750 million. The nation’s biggest chemical manufacturers’ lobby agreed, arguing to NPR that the cuts would “ensure American taxpayer dollars are being used efficiently and effectively.” But environmentalists warned that the cuts would “not only cripple EPA’s ability to do its own research, but also to apply the research of other scientists.”
Shares in non-Chinese producers of graphite surged on Friday after the Trump administration slapped new anti-dumping duties of 93.5% on imports of the key mineral for batteries, the Financial Times reported. Combined with existing tariffs on Chinese materials, the new trade levies total more than 160%, according to the consultancy Benchmark Minerals. In response, the stock price for Australia-listed Syrah Resources, the world’s largest non-Chinese graphite miner and the developer behind a key Inflation Reduction Act-funded project in Louisiana, shot up 22%. Canada’s Nouveau Monde Graphite spiked 26%. The dual-listed Australian-U.S. producer Novonix surged 15%.
Not all of President Donald Trump’s mineral tariffs are causing excitement for U.S. allies. Earlier this month, the White House announced 50% tariffs on copper to begin in August, but it has yet to clarify whether those tariffs will apply to refined metal, semi-refined products, or copper ore. The uncertainty is causing “anxiety,” Máximo Pacheco, the chairman of Chile’s state-owned copper miner, told the FT. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote when the tariffs were first announced, they have the potential to “provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place.”
Regulators in Virginia last week ordered electricity and natural gas provider Dominion to lay out a clearer blueprint for meeting the state’s legally-enshrined carbon-free electricity targets. But the State Corporation Commission still accepted the monopoly utility’s plans to build out more fossil fuel generation, Canary Media reported.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act, passed in 2020, requires Dominion to generate 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. The accepted plan runs up to 2039, leaving just six years to sort out the details of decarbonization. The regulators cautioned that “acceptance does not express approval.” While the statement stopped short of calling into question a proposed 944-megawatt gas complex just south of Richmond, Virginia’s capital, the commission said it would debate plans for another roughly 5 gigawatts of gas-burning power plants before approving construction..
British energy giant BP is selling off its U.S. onshore wind business as the Trump administration appears ready to smother the industry. On Friday, New York-based developer LS Power said it agreed to buy BP’s share of 10 wind projects totaling 1,700 megawatts of capacity. As part of the deal, LS Power plans to fold the wind projects into its renewable energy subsidiary, Clearlight Energy, increasing its fleet to 4,300 megawatts.
BP’s exit comes as the Trump administration has vowed to crack down on the expansion of wind and solar power in the U.S. Trump has long personally opposed wind energy, dating back to his unsuccessful fight against turbines erected near his golf course in Scotland before entering politics. Last week, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported on a memo from the Department of the Interior calling for political reviews of essentially all solar and wind developments in the U.S. This would at minimum stretch out the already challenging development timeline for projects, a problem especially as developers rush to qualify for federal tax credits.
Mercedes-Benz is pumping the brakes on U.S. production of its EQ line of electric vehicles as the Trump administration winds down federal tax credits to support purchases of battery-powered cars. The German automaker told InsideEVs that, by the start of September, it planned to temporarily pause assembly lines of all variants of its EQE and EQS sedans and SUVs that are either located in the U.S. or producing vehicles bound for the American market. The manufacturer is no longer taking orders from dealers for the cars.
Reviewers had criticized the EQ models for lacking the quality and sophistication of similar gas-powered lines of Mercedes vehicles. Even before Republicans in Congress rolled back the federal government’s landmark $7,500 tax credit for EVs, Mercedes faced trouble finding buyers. Sales of the EQS sedan and EQS SUV were down 52% in the U.S. in 2024 compared to the previous year. China’s biggest electric automakers, meanwhile, are racing to build factories in Brazil, the largest car market in South America.
Like tiny winged Magellans measuring barely an inch in size, the Bogong moth of Australia regularly travels more than 600 miles using celestial navigation, according to a new study in Nature. “The moths really are using a view of the night sky to guide their movements,” a researcher told Euronews.
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On fusion’s big fundraise, nuclear fears, and geothermal’s generations uniting
Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to propose a new Clean Water Act rule that would eliminate federal protections for many U.S. waterways, according to an internal presentation leaked to E&E News. If finalized, the rule would establish a two-part test to determine whether a wetland received federal regulations: It would need to contain surface water throughout the “wet season,” and it would need to be touching a river, stream, or other body of water that flows throughout the wet season. The new language would require fewer wetland permits, a slide from the presentation showed, according to reporter Miranda Willson. Two EPA staffers briefed on the proposal confirmed the report.
The new rule follows the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA, which said that only waterways “with a ‘continuous surface connection’ to a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water” fell under the Clean Water Act’s protections, according to E&E News. What “relatively permanent” means, however, the court didn’t say, nor did Biden’s EPA. The two EPA staffers, who were granted anonymity to avoid retribution, “said they believed the proposal was not based in science and could worsen pollution if finalized,” Willson wrote.
Investors are hot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff promising to make fusion energy a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems netted an eye-popping $863 million in its latest fundraising round. In a press release Thursday, the company said that its “oversubscribed round of capital is the largest amount raised among deep tech and energy companies since” its $1.8 billion financing deal in 2021. Commonwealth Fusion will use the funds to complete its demonstration project and further develop its proposed first power plant in Virginia. To date, the company said, it has raised close to $3 billion, “about one-third of the total capital invested in private fusion companies worldwide.” It’s a sign that investors recognize Commonwealth Fusion “is making fusion power a reality,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said.
The fusion industry has ballooned over the past six years. “It is finally, possibly, almost time” for the technology to arrive, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, noting: “For the ordinary optimist, fusion energy might invoke a cheerful Jetsons-style future of flying cars and interplanetary colonization. For the cynic, it’s a world-changing moment that’s perpetually 30 years away. But investors, nuclear engineers, and physicists see it as a technology edging ever closer to commercialization and a bipartisan pathway towards both energy security and decarbonization.”
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A record 75 gigawatts of new generating capacity hooked up to the U.S. power grid last year, a 33% surge from the previous year, thanks to new federal regulations aimed at streamlining the process. That’s according to new data from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie published Thursday. The report found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2023, issued in July 2023, along with other reforms by independent system operators, have had a “considerable impact on processing interconnection agreements, by driving improvements through reducing speculative projects and clearing queue backlogs.” While connections increased, regional grid operators received 9% fewer new project entries and saw a 51% uptick in non-viable projects since 2022.
Solar and storage technologies made up 75% of all interconnection agreements in 2024, equaling about 58 gigawatts. Wood Mackenzie projected that the sectors will retain a similar market share in 2025. Natural gas saw an increase in interconnection requests since 2022, adding 121 gigawatts of capacity. New gas applications are already breaking annual records this year. But overall the number of gas projects that successfully hook up to the grid is down 25% since 2022.
Almost 200 people have left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, according to new estimates published Thursday in the Financial Times. Of the 28 officials in senior leadership positions, nearly half are working in an “acting” capacity, and only three of the five NRC commissioner roles are filled. “It is an unprecedented situation with some senior leaders having been forced out and many others leaving for early retirement or worse, resignation,” Scott Morris, the former NRC deputy executive director of operations, who retired in May, told the newspaper. “This is really concerning for the staff and is one of the factors causing many key staff and leaders to leave the agency they love ... creating a huge brain drain of talent.”
The exodus comes as Trump is pressing the agency to dramatically overhaul and speed up its review and approval process for new reactors. Supporters of the president’s effort say the NRC has stymied the nuclear industry for decades, and a future buildout of new reactors requires clearing house. But skeptics of the burn-it-all-down approach warn that the atomic energy industry’s success in avoiding major accidents since the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island is owed to NRC oversight, and that the agency’s processes have actually protected nuclear developers by avoiding frivolous lawsuits and not-in-my-backyard types.
Geothermal giant Ormat has reigned over the global industry of harvesting energy from hot underground reservoirs for the past 60 years. Now a new generation of companies is promising to tap the Earth’s heat even in places without water by using fracking technology to drill much deeper, vastly expanding the potential for geothermal. And Ormat has placed a big bet on one. On Thursday, the company inked a strategic partnership with Houston-based Sage Geosystems. As part of the deal, Sage will build its first commercial power plant at an existing Ormat facility in Nevada or Utah, significantly speeding up the timeline for the debut generating station. Sage CEO Cindy Taff told me the plant could be online by next year. “Ormat’s chosen a winner,” Yakov Feygin, a researcher at the Center for Public Enterprise who co-authored a report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
A majority of U.S. voters are still unfamiliar with geothermal power, according to a new poll from Data for Progress I reported on this week. When exposed to details about how the technology works, however, support grows among voters across the political spectrum. Republicans in particular are supportive.
A recent poll shows a lack of familiarity with geothermal.Data for Progress
The Grammy- and Oscar-award winning New Orleans jazz and funk singer Jon Batiste released a new song to mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the catastrophic storm that flooded his home city. Dubbed “Petrichor,” a word that describes the scent of earth after rain, the lyrics unfold like a haunting hymn over a driving beat. “Help me, Lord / They burning the planet down / No more second linin' in the street / They burning the planet down, Lord / Help me, Lord / No more plants for you to eat.” In an interview published in The Guardian, Batiste said the song was meant to be a statement. “You got to bring people together. People power is the way that you can change things in the world,” he said. “It’s a warning, set to a dance beat.”
How the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could become the administration’s ultimate weapon against wind farms.
The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to strictly enforcing a migratory bird protection law in a way that could cast a legal cloud over wind farms across the country.
As I’ve chronicled for Heatmap, the Interior Department over the past month expanded its ongoing investigation of the wind industry’s wildlife impacts to go after turbines for killing imperiled bald and golden eagles, sending voluminous records requests to developers. We’ve discussed here how avian conservation activists and even some former government wildlife staff are reporting spikes in golden eagle mortality in areas with operating wind projects. Whether these eagle deaths were allowable under the law – the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act – is going to wind up being a question for regulators and courts if Interior progresses further against specific facilities. Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of wind energy, it’s extremely likely that a federal government already hostile to wind power will use the law to apply even more pressure on developers.
What’s received less attention than the eagles is that Trump’s team signaled it could go even further by using the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a separate statute intended to support bird species flying south through the U.S. from Canada during typical seasonal migration periods. At the bottom of an Interior press release published in late July, the department admitted it was beginning a “careful review of avian mortality rates associated with the development of wind energy projects located in migratory flight paths,” and would determine whether migratory birds dying because of wind farms qualified as “‘incidental’ takings” – harm or death – under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
While not stated explicitly, what this means is that the department appears to be considering whether to redefine these deaths as intentional under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to Ben Cowan, a lawyer with the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke.
I reached out to Cowan after the eagle investigation began because his law firm posted a bulletin warning that developers “holding active eagle permits” might want to prepare for “subpoenas that may be forthcoming.” During our chat earlier this month, he told me that the eagle probe is likely going to strain financing for projects even on private lands that wouldn’t require any other forms of federal sign-off: “Folks don’t want to operate if they feel there’s a significant risk they might take an eagle without authorization.”
Cowan then voiced increasing concern about the migratory bird effort, however, because the law on this matter could be a quite powerful – if legally questionable – weapon against wind development.
Unlike the Endangered Species Act or the eagle protection law, there is currently no program on the books for a wind project developer to even obtain a permit for incidental impacts to a migratory bird. Part of the reason for the absence of such a program is the usual federal bureaucratic struggle that comes with implementing a complex statute, with the added effect of the ping-pong of federal control; the Biden administration started a process for permitting “incidental” impacts, but it was scrapped in April by the Trump team. Most protection of migratory birds under the law today comes from voluntary measures conducted by private companies and nonprofits in consultation with the federal government.
Hypothetically, hurting a migratory bird should be legally permissible to the federal government. That’s because the administration loosened implementation of the law earlier this year with an Interior Department legal opinion that stated the agency would only go after harm that was “intentional” – a term of art under the statute.
This is precisely why Cowan is fretting about migratory birds, however. Asked why the wind industry hasn’t publicly voiced more anxiety about this potential move, he said industry insiders genuinely hope this is “bluster” because such a selective use of this law “would be so beyond the pale.”
“It’s basically saying the purpose of a wind farm is to kill migratory birds, which is very clearly not the case – it’s to generate renewable electricity,” Cowan told me, adding that any effort by the Interior Department would inevitably result in lawsuits. “I mean, look at what this interpretation would mean: To classify it as intentional take would say the purpose of operating a wind farm would be to kill a bird. It’s obviously not. But this seems to be a way this administration is contemplating using the MBTA to block the operation of wind farms.”
It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush. Is the federal government actually going to decide that any operating wind farm could be illegal? That would put entire states’ power supplies – including GOP-heavy states like Iowa – in total jeopardy. Not to mention it would be harmful overall to take operating capacity offline in any fashion at a moment when energy demand is spiking because of data centers and artificial intelligence. Even I, someone who has broken quite a few eye-popping stories about Trump’s war on renewables, struggle to process the idea of the government truly going there on the MBTA.
And yet, a door to this activity is now open, like a cleaver hanging over the industry’s head.
I asked the Interior Department to clarify its timeline for the MBTA review. It declined to comment on the matter. I would note that in mid-August, the Trump administration began maintenance on a federal dashboard for tracking regulations such as these and hasn’t updated it since. So we’ll have to wait for nothing less than their word to know what direction this is going in.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Santa Fe County, New Mexico – County commissioners approved the controversial AES Rancho Viejo solar project after months of local debate, which was rendered more intense by battery fire concerns.
2. Nantucket, Massachusetts – The latest episode of the Vineyard Wind debacle has dropped, and it appears the offshore wind project’s team is now playing ball with the vacation town.
3. Klickitat County, Washington – Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson is pausing permitting on Cypress Creek Renewables’ Carriger solar project despite a recommendation from his own permitting council, citing concerns from tribes that have dogged other renewables projects in the state.
4. Tippecanoe County, Indiana – The county rejected what is believed to have been its first utility-scale solar project, flying in the face of its zoning staff.
5. Morrow County, Oregon – This county is opting into a new state program that purports to allow counties more input in how they review utility-scale solar projects.
6. Ocean County, New Jersey – The Jersey shoreline might not get a wind farm any time soon, but now that angst is spreading to battery storage.
7. Fairfield County, Ohio – Hey, at least another solar farm is getting permitted in Ohio.