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Current conditions: Two people are missing after torrential rains in Catalonia • The daily high will be over 115 degrees Fahrenheit every day this week in Baghdad, Iraq • The search for victims of the Texas floods is paused due to a new round of rains and flooding in the Hill Country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the Federal Emergency Management Agency after The New York Times reported it failed to answer nearly two-thirds of the calls placed to its disaster assistance line by victims of the Central Texas floods. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Noem repudiated reports by the Times and Reuters that her requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, as well as the deployment of other critical resources, created bottlenecks during the crucial hours after the floodwaters receded. “Those claims are absolutely false,” she said.
Noem additionally denied reports that FEMA’s failure to renew the contracts of call-center contractors created a slowdown at the agency. Per the Times’ reporting, FEMA allowed its call center contract extension to expire on the night of July 5, in the midst of the unfolding disaster. During the day on July 5, FEMA answered the calls of 99.7% of survivors seeking one-time assistance for their immediate needs, the Times’ reporting shows; after FEMA failed to renew the contracts and hundreds of contractors were fired, the answer rate dropped to just 35.8% on July 6, and 15.9% on July 7. “Those contracts were in place, no employees were off of work,” Noem told Meet the Press. (Reuters reports that an internal FEMA document shows Noem approved the call center contracts as of July 10.)
At least 120 people died in the flash floods in Texas’ Hill Country over the Fourth of July weekend, with more than 160 people still missing. FEMA has fired or bought out at least 2,000 full-time employees since the start of the year, though since the floods, the Trump administration has reframed its push to “abolish” FEMA as “rebranding” FEMA, instead.
The Trump administration last week fired the final handful of employees who worked at the Office of Global Change, the division of the State Department that focused on global climate negotiations. Per The Washington Post, the employees were the final group at the department working on issues of international climate policy, and were part of bigger cuts to the agency that will see nearly 3,000 staffers out of work. “The Department is undertaking a significant and historic reorganization to better align our workforce activities and programs with the America First foreign policy priorities,” the State Department told the Post in a statement about the shuttering of the office.
Grand Canyon Lodge employees pictured on July 20, 1930. NPS/George Grant
The historic Grand Canyon Lodge burned down in the nearly 6,000-acre Dragon Bravo Fire in Arizona over the weekend. The rustic lodge, located on the Canyon’s remote North Rim, had stood since 1937, when it was rebuilt after a kitchen fire, and was the only hotel located inside the boundaries of the national park.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs called for an investigation into the National Park Service’s handling of the fire, which destroyed an additional 50 to 80 structures on the park’s North Rim. “An incident of this magnitude demands intense oversight and scrutiny into the federal government’s emergency response,” she said, adding that “Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.” The Dragon Bravo Fire is one of two wildfires burning on the park’s north side and began after a lightning strike on July 4. The famous Phantom Ranch, located inside the canyon, and popular Bright Angel Trail and Havasupai Gardens, were also closed to hikers as of Sunday due to the fires.
Late last week, the local government of Nantucket reached a settlement with GE Vernova for $10.5 million to compensate for the tourism and business losses that resulted from the July 2024 turbine failure at Vineyard Wind 1. The town will use the money to establish a Community Claims Fund to provide compensation to affected parties.
The incident involved a 350-foot blade from a GE Vernova turbine that split off and fell into the water during construction of Vineyard Wind. Debris washed up onshore, temporarily closing some of the Massachusetts island’s iconic beaches during the height of tourist season. “The backlash was swift,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported at the time. “Nantucket residents immediately wrote to Nantucket’s Select Board to ask the town to stop the construction of any additional offshore wind turbines.” Though significant errors like blade failures are incredibly rare, as my colleague Jael Holzman has also reported, the disaster could not have come at a worse time for Vineyard Wind, which subsequently saw its expansion efforts stymied by the Trump administration.
Nineteen states and the territory of Guam moved last week to intervene in a May lawsuit claiming the Trump administration has violated young people’s right to good health and a stable environment. The original complaint was filed in May by 22 plaintiffs represented by Our Children’s Trust — the same Oregon group that brought Held v. Montana, which successfully argued that the state violated young people’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, as well as the groundbreaking climate case Juliana v. United States, which the Supreme Court declined to hear this spring.
In the new Montana-led move, the coalition of states represented by their respective attorneys general is seeking to join the lawsuit as defendants. Per Our Children’s Trust, the plaintiffs will file a formal response to the motion to intervene in the coming weeks.
More than half of all the soybean oil produced in the United States next year will be used to make biofuel, according to a new outlook by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the current state of the youth climate lawsuit.
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Governors, legislators, and regulators are all mustering to help push clean energy past the starting line in time to meet Republicans’ new deadlines.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act put new expiration dates on clean energy tax credits for business and consumers, raising the cost of climate action. Now some states are rushing to accelerate renewable energy projects and get as many underway as possible before the new deadlines take effect.
The new law requires wind and solar developers to start construction by the end of this year in order to claim the full investment or production tax credits under the rules established by the Inflation Reduction Act. They’ll then have at least four years to get their project online.
Those that miss the end-of-year deadline will have another six months, until July 4, 2026, to start construction, but will have to meet complicated sourcing restrictions on materials from China. Any projects that get off the ground after that date will face a severely abbreviated schedule — they’ll have to be completed by the end of 2027 to qualify, an all-but-impossibly short construction timeline.
Adding even more urgency to the time crunch, President Trump has directed the Treasury Department to revise the rules that define what it means to “start construction.” Historically, a developer could start construction simply by purchasing key pieces of equipment. But Trump’s order called for “preventing the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility and by restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built,” an ominous sign for those racing to meet already accelerated deadlines.
While the changes won’t suppress adoption of these technologies entirely, they will slow deployment and make renewable energy more expensive than it otherwise would have been. Some states that have clean energy goals are trying to lock in as much subsidized generation as they can to lessen the blow.
There are two ways states can meet the moment, Justin Backal Balik, the state program director at the nonprofit Evergreen Action, told me. Right now, many are trying to address the immediate crisis by helping to usher shovel-ready projects through regulatory processes. But states should also be thinking about how to make projects more economical after the tax credits expire, Balik said. “Green states can play a role in tilting the scale slightly back in the direction of some of the projects being financially viable,” he said, “even understanding that they’re not going to be able to make up all of the lost ground the incentives provided.”
In the first category, Colorado Governor Jared Polis sent a letter last week to utilities and independent power producers in the state committing to use “all of the Colorado State Government to prioritize deployment of clean energy projects.”
“Getting this right is of critical importance to Colorado ratepayers,” Polis wrote. The nonprofit research group Energy Innovation estimates that household energy expenses in Colorado could be $170 higher in 2030 than they would have been because of OBBB, and $310 higher in 2035. “The goal is to integrate maximal clean energy by securing as much cost-effective electric generation under construction or placed in service as soon as possible, along with any necessary electricity balancing resources and supporting infrastructure,” Polis continued.
As for how he plans to do that, he said the state would work to “eliminate administrative barriers and bottlenecks” for renewable energy, promising faster state reviews for permits. It will also “facilitate the pre-purchase of project equipment,” since purchasing equipment is one of the key steps developers can take to meet the tax credit deadlines.
Other states are looking to quickly secure new contracts for renewable energy. In mid-July, two weeks after the reconciliation bill became law, utility regulators in Maine moved to rapidly procure nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of wind and solar — for context, that’s about 13% of the total energy the state currently generates. They gave developers just two weeks to submit proposals, and will prioritize projects sited on agricultural land that has been contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the chemicals known as PFAS. (When asked how many applications had been submitted, the Maine Public Utilities Commission said it doesn't share that information prior to project selection.)
Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is eyeing a similar move. During a public webinar in late July, the agency said it was considering an accelerated procurement of zero-carbon resources “before the tax increase takes effect.” The office put out a request for information to renewable energy developers the next day to see if there were any projects ready to go that would qualify for the tax credits. Officials also encouraged developers to contact the agency’s concierge permit assistance services if they are worried about getting their permits on time for tax credit eligibility. Katie Dykes, the agency’s commissioner, said during the presentation that the concierge will engage with permit staff to make sure there aren’t incomplete or missing documents and to “ensure smooth and efficient review of projects.”
New York’s energy office is planning to do another round of procurement in September, the outlet New York Focus has reported, although the solicitation is late — it had originally been scheduled for June. The state has more than two dozen projects in the pipeline that are permitted but haven’t yet started construction, according to Focus, and some of them are waiting to secure contracts with the state.
Others are simply held up by the web of approvals New York requires, but better coordination between New York agencies may be in the works. “I assembled my team immediately and we are trying to do everything we can to expedite those [renewable energy projects] that are already in the pipeline to get those the approvals they need to move ahead,” Governor Kathy Hochul said during a rally at the State University of New York’s Niagara campus last week. The state’s energy research and development agency has formed a team “to help commercial projects quickly troubleshoot and advance towards construction,” according to the nonprofit Evergreen Action. (The agency did not respond to a request for more information about the effort.)
States and local governments are also planning to ramp up marketing of the consumer-based credits that are set to expire. Colorado, for example, launched a new “Energy Savings Navigator” tool to help residents identify all of the rebate, tax credit, and energy bill assistance programs they may be eligible for.
Consumers have even less time to act than wind and solar developers. Discounts for new, used, and leased electric vehicles will end in less than two months, on September 30. Homeowners must install solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and any other clean energy or efficiency upgrades before the end of this year to qualify for tax credits.
Many states offer additional incentives for these technologies, and some are re-tooling their programs to stretch the funding. Connecticut saw a rush of demand for its electric vehicle rebate program, CHEAPR, after the OBBB passed. Officials decided to slash the subsidy from $1,500 to $500 as of August 1, and will re-assess the program in the fall. “The budget that we have for the CHEAPR program is finite,” Dykes said during the July webinar. “We are trying to be good stewards of those dollars in light of the extraordinary demand for EVs, so that after October 1 we have the best chance to be able to provide an enhanced rebate, to lessen the significant drop in the total level of incentives that are available for electric vehicles.”
As far as trying to address the longer-term challenges for renewables, Balik highlighted Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s proposal to streamline energy siting decisions by passing them through a new state board. “One of the big things states can do is siting reform because local opposition and lawsuits that drag forever are a big drag on costs,” Balik told me.
A bill that would create a Reliable Energy Siting and Electric Transition Board, or RESET Board, is currently in the Pennsylvania legislature. (New York State took similar steps to establish a renewable siting office to speed up deployment in 2020, though so far it’s still taking an average of three years to permit projects, down from four to five years prior to the office’s establishment.) Connecticut officials also discussed looking at ways to reduce the “soft costs” of permitting and environmental reviews during the July webinar.
Balik added that state green banks can also play a role in helping projects secure more favorable financing. Their capacity to do so will be significantly higher if the courts force the federal government to administer the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
When it comes to speeding up renewable energy deployment, there’s at least one big obstacle that governors have little control over. Wind and solar projects need approval from regional transmission operators, the independent bodies that oversee the transmission and distribution of power, to connect to the grid — a notoriously slow process. The lag is especially long in the PJM Interconnection, which governs the grid for 13 mid-Atlantic States, and has generally favored natural gas over renewables. But governors are starting to turn up the pressure on PJM to do better. In mid July, Shapiro and nine other governors demanded PJM give states more of a say in the process by allowing them to propose candidates for two of PJM’s board seats.
“Can we use this moment of crisis to really impress the urgency of getting some of these other things done — like siting reforms, like interconnection queue fixes, that are all part of the economics of projects,” Balik asked. These steps may help, but lengthy federal permitting processes remain a hurdle. While permitting reform is a major bipartisan priority in Congress, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, a deal that’s good for renewables might require an about-face from the president on wind and solar.
The Danish government is stepping in after U.S. policy shifts left the company’s New York offshore wind project in need of fresh funds.
Orsted is going to investors — including the Danish government — for money it can’t get for its wind projects, especially in the troubled U.S. offshore wind market.
The Danish developer, which is majority owned by the Danish government, told investors on Monday that it would seek to raise over $9 billion, about half its valuation before the announcement, by selling shares in the company.
Publicly traded companies do not typically raise money by selling stock, which is more expensive for the company, tending instead to finance specific projects or borrow money.
But the offshore wind business is not any industry.
In normal times, Orsted and other wind developers will conduct “farm-downs,” selling stakes in projects in order to help finance the next ones. Due to “recent material adverse development in the U.S. offshore wind market,” however, the early-morning announcement said, “it is not possible for the company to complete the planned partial divestment and associated non-recourse project financing of its Sunrise Wind offshore wind project on the terms which would provide the required strengthening of Orsted’s capital structure” — a long way of explaining that it can’t find a buyer at an acceptable price. Hence the new equity.
While the market had been expecting Orsted to raise capital in some form, the scale of the raise is about twice what was anticipated, according to Bloomberg’s Javier Blas.
About two-thirds of the stock sale will be used to continue financing Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt planned offshore wind project off the coast of Long Island, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Construction began last summer, just days after Orsted took full ownership of the project by buying out a stake held by the utility Eversource.
Despite all the sound and fury around offshore wind in the United States, the company said in its earnings report, also released Monday, that “we successfully installed the first foundations at Sunrise Wind, following completion of the wind turbine foundation installation at Revolution Wind,” a 704-megawatt project off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. “Construction of our offshore U.S. assets is progressing as expected and according to plan,” the company said.
But the report also said Orsted took a hit of over a billion Danish kroner in the first half of this year due to tariffs and what it gingerly refers to as “other regulatory changes, particularly affecting the U.S.,” a.k.a. President Donald Trump.
The president and his appointees have been on a regulatory and financial campaign against the wind sector, especially offshore wind, attempting to halt work on another in-construction New York project, Empire Wind, before Governor Kathy Hochul was able to reach a deal to continue. All future lease sales for new offshore wind areas have been canceled.
Even before Trump came back into office, the offshore wind industry in the U.S. had been hammered by high interest rates, which raised the cost of borrowed money necessary to fund projects, and spiraling supply chain costs and project delays, which also increased the need for the more expensive financing.
“Because of the sharp rise in construction costs and interest rates since 2021, all the projects turned out to be value-destructive,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note about the Orsted share issue. The company took large losses on scuttled projects in the U.S. and already cancelled its dividend and announced a plan to partially divest many other projects in order to shore up its balance sheet and fund future projects.
While the start-and-stop Empire Wind project belongs to Equinor, Orsted’s Scandinavian neighbor (majority-owned by the Norwegian government), Orsted management told analysts on its conference call that “the issues surrounding Empire Wind's stop-work order from April 2025 had negatively impacted financing conditions for Sunrise,” according to Jefferies analyst Ahmed Furman.
Equinor, too, has had to take a bigger share of Empire Wind, buying out the stake held by BP in January of this year. BP had bought 50% stakes in three Equinor wind projects in 2020, but last year wrote down its investment in the offshore wind sector in the U.S. by over $1 billion.
Why could Orsted not simply pull out of Sunrise Wind? “Orsted and our industry are in an extraordinary situation with the adverse market development in the U.S. on top of the past years’ macroeconomic and supply chain challenges,” Rasmus Errboe, who took over as the company’s chief executive earlier this year, said in a statement. “To deliver on our business plan and commitments in this environment, we’ve concluded that a rights issue is the best solution for Orsted and our shareholders.”
The Danish government will maintain its 50.1% stake in the company, putting the small Scandinavian country with its low-boiling trade and territorial conflicts against the Trump administration in direct capitalist conflict with the American president and his least favorite form of electricity generation.
In the immediate wake of the announcement, Jefferies analyst Ahmed Farman wrote to clients that the deal would “obviously de-risk the [balance sheet], but near-term dilution risk seems substantial,” citing the unexpected magnitude of the raise and no sign pointing to new growth. “As a result, we expect the initial stock reaction to be quite negative.”
And so it has been: The stock closed down almost 30%, its biggest-ever single-day drop and below the price at which it went public in 2016, according to Bloomberg data.
A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.