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On an important endorsement, Ford’s earnings report, and tree bark
Current conditions: Typhoon Gaemi made landfall in Taiwan with the force of a Category 3 major hurricane • Large hailstones pelted Verona, Italy • Tropical Storm Bud formed in the Eastern Pacific, but is expected to dissipate by the weekend.
The blade that snapped off an offshore turbine at the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts on July 13 broke due to a manufacturing defect, according to GE Vernova, the turbine maker and installer. During GE’s second quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Scott Strazik and Vice President of Investor Relations Michael Lapides said the company had identified a “material deviation” at one of its factories in Canada and would “re-inspect all of the blades that we have made for offshore wind.” At a public meeting in Nantucket last night, Roger Martella, GE Vernova’s chief sustainability officer, said there were two issues at play. The first was the manufacturing issue — basically, the adhesives applied to the blade to hold it together did not do their job. The second was quality control. “The inspection that should have caught this did not,” he said. Two dozen turbines have been installed as part of the Vineyard Wind project so far, with 72 blades total. GE Vernova has not responded to requests for clarification about how many of them originated at the Canada facility, reported Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. Nantucket representatives are going to meet with Vineyard Wind next week to negotiate compensation for the costs incurred as a result of the accident.
Vice President Kamala Harris got a little boost for her 2024 presidential bid yesterday with an endorsement from the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238. The group is the largest Environmental Protection Agency union – of the 750,000 government employees it represents, about 8,000 of them are with the EPA, accounting for just under half the agency’s permanent workforce. Last month the union issued its first-ever political endorsement, for President Biden’s re-election, saying he “supports and values the work of federal employees who are working tirelessly to face the climate emergency.” Shifting support to Harris “reaffirms” that endorsement. Former President Donald Trump rolled back many EPA rules during his time in office, including emissions regulations and environmental protections. He also gutted workplace protections for federal workers. Judging by the infamous Project 2025 playbook, Trump would seek to dramatically “restructure” and “streamline” the EPA to “reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government,” and many workers reportedly fear their jobs will be on the line if he wins.
Ford’s stock is down about 13% in pre-market trading after yesterday’s disappointing Q2 earnings report. The automaker reported adjusted earnings of 46 cents per share, far below analysts’ expectations of 68 cents per share. The company cited unforeseen costs for repairing problems on slightly older vehicles that are still under warranty. But its EV losses grew, too, reaching $2.5 billion through the first half of 2024. CEO Jim Farley remained bullish in the earnings call, telling investors the company is committed to reducing the losses on EVs but basically said the market has been tough and turbulent, and Ford is honing its strategy. That includes expanding its hybrid portfolio and prioritizing smaller, more affordable EVs. He said Ford “must do a much better job in educating our customers” about the advantages of owning an EV. “Overall, the EV journey has been humbling,” he said, “but it has forced us to get even more fit as a company.”
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Firefighters are battling hundreds of wildfires in Canada’s Alberta province, one of which is nearing a crucial oil pipeline. The Trans Mountain Pipeline carries 890,000 barrels of oil per day from Edmonton to Vancouver. Its operator is reportedly using sprinklers to protect the pipeline, which was still operating normally yesterday. Some oil producers with operations in Canada’s Fort McMurray oil sands region have pulled staff as a precaution and reduced production. “While wildfires have already forced some producers to curtail production, these fires still threaten a large amount of supply,” ING Group analysts said.
Microbes living in tree bark are surprisingly effective at removing methane from the atmosphere, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Up until now, soil was the only known “terrestrial sink” for methane, a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas that’s responsible for about one third of the global warming since the pre-industrial age. But the research suggests tree bark may be just as effective as soil when it comes to methane removal. Trees are already climate champions because of their ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the authors think these new findings boost their overall climate contribution by about 10%. Another fun tidbit from the study is that, if all the bark from all the trees on Earth were laid flat, it would cover the planet’s entire land surface.
The Irvine Police Department is adding Tesla’s Cybertruck to its fleet. The vehicle reportedly won’t be sent out on patrols, but will instead be used for “community relations.”
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.