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Why geothermal has been a non-starter there for decades.
In 1881, King David Kalakaua of Hawaii and his entourage paid a late evening visit to Thomas Edison in New York. The king was unsure about electricity — he didn’t think the technology was reliable enough to light up Honolulu’s streets just yet — but after marveling at a chandelier buzzing with electric light, the group started bantering about how Hawaii could generate power. What about putting boilers atop a volcano? There was enough energy up there, a companion to the king mused, that it could illuminate the entire United States. He appeared to be joking, but Edison took the notion seriously. Nice idea, he told his visitors, but an undersea cable carrying power to the mainland would be far too expensive.
Honolulu got its new streetlights a few months later — powered, in the end, by a hydroelectric dam. The volcano thought would wait a century longer.
In the 1970s, geologists began drilling into the eastern rift of the Big Island’s Kilauea volcano, resulting, in 1993, in Hawaii’s first geothermal power plant, which is today called the Puna Geothermal Venture, or PGV. The 38-megawatt facility straddles the most active rift of Hawaii’s most active volcano and is, to this day, the state’s only geothermal plant, supplying just 3% of the islands’ energy. That status quo puzzles geothermal advocates elsewhere. The obvious comparison is to a volcanic sibling like Iceland, where the Earth’s radiant heat supplies 25% of the country’s consumer electricity needs and more than 70% of its overall energy.
“It’s been talked about for ages that at some point, Hawaii needs to have a reset on geothermal,” Mark Glick, Hawaii’s Chief Energy Officer, told me. “That time is now.” So far, that reset involves the governor’s office directing discretionary COVID relief funds with the aim of getting an essentially moribund industry off the ground. Five million dollars will go toward a drilling program to explore the geology of promising areas of heat, hopefully with results that encourage potential developers to make their own, bigger investments. Site selection is underway, with Maui and the Big Island at the top of the list, and Glick said local outreach will begin in the next few months.
That the vast underground heat resources of a place like Maui are only now getting even basic attention is “mind-boggling,” Glick said. But it’s also a reflection of decades of turmoil over all things geothermal in the state — clashes with neighbors, toxic incidents, failed dreams of grandiose infrastructure. That has to change, he added, if the state is serious about ditching its dirtiest forms of power generation quickly. Hawaii has committed to reaching a 100% clean energy portfolio by 2045, but was still producing as much as 80% of its electricity from burning petroleum by last year.
Like other states endowed with abundant heat, Hawaii was previously inspired to consider geothermal energy during the 1970s oil crisis. The state was dependent on imported fuel, and the regularly lava-spewing Kilauea, in particular, looked like “a no-brainer” for geothermal development, explains Roland Horne, director of the Stanford Geothermal Program and a noted historian of the industry.
Hawaii’s problem is that, in addition to being an island chain, it’s also a chain of separate electric grids. With no power lines connecting the Big Island — home to 14% percent of the state’s population — to any others, Kilauea’s energy was marooned. Initially, the state imagined unifying its disparate grids in parallel with geothermal development. But Edison, it turns out, was right about undersea cables, even relatively short ones. After a decade of planning and testing that included laying prototype wires across the 6,100-feet deep, 30-mile wide ‘Alenuihaha Channel between the Big Island and Maui found that such a project was technically feasible but would be far too expensive.
Meanwhile, oil prices fell, and so did interest in hunting for hot rock elsewhere. Although a statewide survey that began in the 1970s found most of the islands could harbor geothermal resources — even older, geologically colder islands like Oahu and even Kauai — nobody followed up. “It led to almost nothing for three decades,” said Nicole Lautze, a geologist at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who is overseeing the state’s current exploratory projects. Instead, the state remained dependent on imported oil.
Other problems were more island-specific. Drilling into an active volcano is fairly unusual for geothermal prospectors and presents unique challenges, given the proximity of lava and abundance of toxic gasses. The work on Kilauea was controversial from the start, with nearby residents and Native Hawaiian spiritual practitioners calling the project not just unsafe but sacrilegious. A release of hydrogen sulfide during construction in 1991 only added to the controversy.
Toxic emissions, including sulfur, from geothermal facilities are generally minuscule compared with fossil fuel plants—and part of the everyday dangers of living on a volcanic slope, Horne told me. “They were coming out of the ground long before Puna was ever built,” he said. But PGV’s reputation as a danger to the community was hard to shake. When geothermal has made headlines in the state over the years since, the story has generally been PGV’s uneasy relationship with the volcano — most notably during Kilauea’s 2018 eruption, during which the plant was totally surrounded by lava flows. Neighbors remained fiercely opposed to the plant when it reopened two years later.
In 2014, when Lautze was tapped for a new survey of that state’s geothermal resources, the word “geothermal” was so taboo that she was reluctant to tell anyone locally her line of work. But she had funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, thanks to the federal government’s resurgent interest in geothermal as a source of clean, firm energy. Popular perception in Hawaii held that the Earth’s heat could only be tapped on the Big Island, where magma was breaching the surface, but Lautze was intrigued by the possibility of finding resources on islands that are less geologically volatile and home to more people. She set about developing new simulations for subsurface heat across the state, followed by on-the-ground experiments.
On islands like Lanai and Maui, Lautze said her team received a warmer welcome than expected. Certain benefits of geothermal had become much more clear amidst the state’s rush to adopt renewable energy — among them, that geothermal power would take a fraction of the land required to produce the same electricity from wind turbines or solar panels, in addition to providing continuous power, regardless of the weather. “Hawaii is realizing that they’re not going to get to 100 percent renewable from solar and wind alone,” said Lautze. Plus, she added, “the cost of energy is going up and up and up.”
The next step toward tapping that heat is what’s known as “slim hole” drilling, using bits less than 7 inches wide to descend more than a kilometer down. Even promising hotspots can be duds, and developers are often hesitant even in well-mapped places, which Hawaii isn’t. Before the state tries to sell geothermal companies on the idea of coming to Hawaii, officials want to be sure of what they’re selling. “There’s an absolute dearth of information on the volcanically older islands,” Lautze said.
Mike Kaleikini, head of Hawaii affairs for Ormat, which owns PGV, told me he’s been heartened to see the state turning its attention to basic research. Developers could very well get excited about places like Maui, he said, with some initial exploration already done and if they feel they can navigate permitting and potential concerns from the public. “Hawaii is not the easiest place to do business,” he added.
Among the better prospects for new development is on Big Island land owned by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, an agency that works to redistribute homes and land to Native Hawaiians. Located on the more docile slopes of Mauna Kea, the project’s backers say it could both power DHHL’s housing developments and generate royalties that help finance more home building.
Whatever heat developers strike there will remain marooned on the Big Island, at least for now. Channeling the dream of near-endless volcanic energy, Glick’s office proposed tying the Big Island’s geothermal production to a regional hydrogen hub so that the energy could be shipped offshore, but the DOE ultimately passed on funding the plan. Lautze still dreams of wires strung across the unruly Hawaiian channels. People still talk about the idea, she noted, even if it elicits smirks and eyerolls from people who lived through its past failures. The state is still a far cry from achieving the king’s dream. But the only way to get there is to start drilling.
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On Alaskan oil, CCS, and ‘zombie plants’
Current conditions: Flights have resumed to and from Sicily after Mt. Etna’s most powerful eruption in four years on Monday • There have already been almost half as many wildfire ignitions in the U.S. in 2025 as there were in all of 2024 • More than 700 people are feared dead in central Nigeria after heavy rains and flash floods.
USGS
The Department of the Interior announced Monday that it plans to rescind President Biden’s 2024 ban on drilling in more than half of the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The reserve holds an estimated 8.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but it is also some of the “last remaining pristine wilderness in the country,” The New York Times writes.
“Congress was clear: the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska was set aside to support America’s energy security through responsible development,” Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement announcing the proposed rule, further arguing that Biden’s ban had “ignored that mandate, prioritizing obstruction over production and undermining our ability to harness domestic resources at a time when American energy independence has never been more critical.” While the department’s announcement — which Burgum shared on Sunday at a heritage center in Utqiagvik, the largest city of the North Slope — was greeted with applause by attendees, Alaska’s senior manager for the Wilderness Society, Matt Jackson, said, “Everyone who cares about public lands and is concerned about the climate crisis should be outraged by this move to exploit America’s public lands for the benefit of corporations and the president’s wealthy donors.”
Applications for carbon capture and storage projects fell by 50% in the first quarter of the year as compared to last year, with no new permits having been approved since President Trump took office, the Financial Times reports. Industry experts blamed the uncertainty over the fate of federal grants and tax credits for the lowest application submissions since 2022 — a concern that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, since the Energy Department canceled nearly $4 billion in clean energy grants last week, including carbon capture and sequestration projects proposed by Heidelberg Materials and Calpine, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported. By BloombergNEF’s projections, an estimated 35% of the 152 million metric tons of announced carbon capture capacity expected to come online by 2035 will be canceled before then.
The Department of Energy has ordered Constellation Energy to continue operating its Eddystone power plant through the end of the summer to prevent potential electricity shortfalls on the mid-Atlantic grid, the Associated Press reports. The oil and gas plant, located south of Philadelphia, had been scheduled to shut down its last remaining units this weekend, before Constellation received the DOE’s emergency order.
Late last month, the DOE similarly ordered a coal-fired plant in Michigan to continue operating past its planned May 31 shutdown date, although the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission said at the time that no energy emergency existed, Bloomberg reports. By contrast, the decision to order Eddystone’s continued operation followed PJM Interconnection expressing concerns about summer grid reliability; the operator has since voiced support for the DOE’s order. But the move also has its critics: “The Department of Energy’s move to keep these zombie plants online will have significant public health impacts and increase electricity costs for people in Michigan and Pennsylvania,” argued Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The European Union’s climate science advisers have warned the bloc against softening its 2040 emission goals, arguing that such a move could “undermine domestic value creation by diverting resources from the necessary transformation of the EU’s economy.” The European Commission is set to propose a binding target for member nations to cut emissions by 90% by 2040 from 1990 levels, but it is also considering allowing countries to set lower targets for their domestic industries and make up the gap using carbon credits, Reuters reports. The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, which issued its warning against the carbon credit loophole on Monday, described the original 90% emission reduction goal as achievable and necessary for both the health of Europeans as well as improving security by limiting the bloc’s reliance on foreign fossil fuel sources.
Oregon-based battery energy storage system integrator Powin has filed a notice with the state warning that it could lay off 250 employees and shut down operations by the end of July. Per the notification, the layoffs would include the company’s chief executives, and “it is presently contemplated that the affected employees will be permanently terminated.”
Powin has the third most gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in the U.S. and the fourth most worldwide. Still, turbulence due to tariffs and the Inflation Reduction Act incentives has reverberated through the industry, Latitude notes. In a statement provided to the publication, Powin described “navigating a period of significant financial challenge, reflective of ongoing headwinds in the broader energy storage industry.”
The partial shading of Colorado grasslands by solar arrays could decrease water stress and increase plant growth during dry years by 20% or more, a new study in Environmental Research Letters has found.
Or, why developers may be loading up on solar panels and transformers.
As the Senate gets to work on the budget reconciliation bill, renewables developers are staring down the extremely real possibility that the tax credits they’ve planned around may disappear sooner than expected. In the version of the bill that passed the House, most renewables projects would have to begin construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be “placed in service” — i.e. be up and running — by the end of 2028 to qualify for investment and production tax credits.
But that’s tax law language. The reconciliation bill will almost certainly mean grim tidings for the renewable industry, but it will be Christmas for the tax attorneys tasked with figuring out what it all means. They may be the only ones involved in the energy transition to come out ahead, David Burton, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright — “other than the lobbyists, of course,” he added with a laugh.
If the timeline restrictions on the investment and production tax credits make it to the final law, within 60 days after it’s enacted, developers will likely have to demonstrate that they’ve done some kind of physical work on a project — or spent a serious amount of money to advance it — in order to qualify for the tax credits.
The IRS has a couple of existing tests and guidelines: the 5% safe harbor and the physical work test.
The 5% harbor rule is the most common way to demonstrate a construction start, Burton told me. But it’s not cheap. That 5% refers to the total cost of a project, meaning that a company would have to shell out a lot of money very quickly to keep hold on those tax credits. For example, a 100-megawatt solar project that costs $1.25 per watt — about the average cost for a utility-scale project according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — would cost a developer $6.25 million in initial outlays just to prove they’ve started construction to the satisfaction of the IRS.
There are any number of things to spend that money on. “For solar, the most common thing is modules. But it could be inverters, it could be racking,” Burton said.
Right now there’s a particular rush to get transformers, the electrical equipment used to step up voltage for the transmission of electricity from a generator, Burton added. That’s because transformers also fall under the second construction guideline, the “physical work test.” Developers can say they’ve started construction “when physical work of a significant nature begins, provided that the taxpayer maintains a continuous program of construction,” according to the law firm Leo Berwick.
This “significant physical work” can be split into onsite and offsite work. The former is what one might logically think of as “construction” — something along the lines of pouring foundations for wind turbines or building a road to bring in equipment.
Then there’s offsite. Ordering equipment qualifies as offsite work, Burton explained. But it has to be something that’s not held in inventory — this is why modules for a solar project don’t qualify, Burton said — the equipment must be built to order. Transformers are custom designed for the specific project, and can run into the millions of dollars.
“The guidance says expressly that step-up transformers qualify for this,” Burton told me. “It’s the only thing that guidance expressly states qualifies.”
This all adds up to a likely rush for transformer orders, adding more pressure onto a sector that’s been chronically under-supplied.
“The transformer manufacturers’ phones are ringing off the hook,” Burton said. “If I were the CFO of a transformer manufacturer, I would be raising my prices.”
While these tax rules may seem bewildering to anyone not a lawyer, they’re hardly obscure to the industry, which is well aware of how developers might react and is positioning itself to take advantage of this likely rush to start projects.
PV Hardware, which makes a type of solar equipment called a tracker that allows solar panels to track the movement of the sun, sent out a press release last week letting the world know that “it has the capacity to immediately Safe Harbor 5GW of tracker product, offering solar developers a critical opportunity to preserve eligibility for current clean energy tax credits amid legislative uncertainty.” Its trackers, the release said, would help developers meet the “thresholds quickly, mitigating risk and preserving the long-term viability of their project.”
The prospect of tariffs has also been an impetus to get construction work started quickly, Mike Hall, chief executive of the solar and storage data company Anza, told Heatmap. “There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated, and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects,” Hall said.
But for projects that haven’t started, complying with the rules may be more tricky.
“For projects that are less far along in the pipeline and haven’t had any outlays or expenditures yet, those developers right now are scrambling,” Heather Cooper, a tax attorney at McDermott Will and Emery, told Heatmap. “I’ve gotten probably about 100 emails from my clients today asking me questions about what they can do to establish construction has begun on their project.”
And while developers of larger projects will literally have to do — or spend — more to qualify for tax credits under the new rule, they may still have an advantage.
“It’s increasingly clear to us that large-scale developers with the balance sheet and a pre-existing safe harbor program in place,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote to clients last week, “are easily best positioned to keep playing the game.”
Additional reporting by Jael Holzman
In defense of “everything bagel” policymaking.
Writers have likely spilled more ink on the word “abundance” in the past couple months than at any other point in the word’s history.
Beneath the hubbub, fed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling new book, lies a pressing question: What would it take to build things faster? Few climate advocates would deny the salience of the question, given the incontrovertible need to fix the sluggish pace of many clean energy projects.
A critical question demands an actionable answer. To date, many takes on various sides of the debate have focused more on high-level narrative than precise policy prescriptions. If we zoom in to look at the actual sources of delay in clean energy projects, what sorts of solutions would we come up with? What would a data-backed agenda for clean energy abundance look like?
The most glaring threat to clean energy deployment is, of course, the Republican Party’s plan to gut the Inflation Reduction Act. But “abundance” proponents posit that Democrats have imposed their own hurdles, in the form of well-intentioned policies that get in the way of government-backed building projects. According to some broad-brush recommendations, Democrats should adopt an abundance agenda focused on rolling back such policies.
But the reality for clean energy is more nuanced. At least as often, expediting clean energy projects will require more, not less, government intervention. So too will the task of ensuring those projects benefit workers and communities.
To craft a grounded agenda for clean energy abundance, we can start by taking stock of successes and gaps in implementing the IRA. The law’s core strategy was to unite climate, jobs, and justice goals. The IRA aims to use incentives to channel a wave of clean energy investments towards good union jobs and communities that have endured decades of divestment.
Klein and Thompson are wary that such “everything bagel” strategies try to do too much. Other “abundance” advocates explicitly support sidelining the IRA’s labor objectives to expedite clean energy buildout.
But here’s the thing about everything bagels: They taste good.
They taste good because they combine ingredients that go well together. The question — whether for bagels or policies — is, are we using congruent ingredients?
The data suggests that clean energy growth, union jobs, and equitable investments — like garlic, onion, and sesame seeds — can indeed pair well together. While we have a long way to go, early indicators show significant post-IRA progress on all three fronts: a nearly 100-gigawatt boom in clean energy installations, an historic high in clean energy union density, and outsized clean investments flowing to fossil fuel communities. If we can design policy to yield such a win-win-win, why would we choose otherwise?
Klein and Thompson are of course right that to realize the potential of the IRA, we must reduce the long lag time in building clean energy projects. That lag time does not stem from incentives for clean energy companies to provide quality jobs, negotiate Community Benefits Agreements, or invest in low-income communities. Such incentives did not deter clean energy companies from applying for IRA funding in droves. Programs that included all such incentives were typically oversubscribed, with companies applying for up to 10 times the amount of available funding.
If labor and equity incentives are not holding up clean energy deployment, what is? And what are the remedies?
Some of the biggest delays point not to an excess of policymaking — the concern of many “abundance” proponents — but an absence. Such gaps call for more market-shaping policies to expedite the clean energy transition.
Take, for example, the years-long queues for clean energy projects to connect to the electrical grid, which developers rank as one of the largest sources of delay. That wait stems from a piecemeal approach to transmission buildout — the result not of overregulation by progressive lawmakers, but rather the opposite: a hands-off mode of governance that has created vast inefficiencies. For years, grid operators have built transmission lines not according to a strategic plan, but in response to the requests of individual projects to connect to the grid. This reactive, haphazard approach requires a laborious battery of studies to determine the incremental transmission upgrades (and the associated costs) needed to connect each project. As a result, project developers face high cost uncertainty and a nearly five-year median wait time to finish the process, contributing to the withdrawal of about three of every four proposed projects.
The solution, according to clean energy developers, buyers, and analysts alike, is to fill the regulatory void that has enabled such a fragmentary system. Transmission experts have called for rules that require grid operators to proactively plan new transmission lines in anticipation of new clean energy generation and then charge a preestablished fee for projects to connect, yielding more strategic grid expansion, greater cost certainty for developers, fewer studies, and reduced wait times to connect to the grid. Last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took a step in this direction by requiring grid operators to adopt regional transmission planning. Many energy analysts applauded the move and highlighted the need for additional policies to expedite transmission buildout.
Another source of delay that underscores policy gaps is the 137-week lag time to obtain a large power transformer, due to supply chain shortages. The United States imports four of every five large power transformers used on our electric grid. Amid the post-pandemic snarling of global supply chains, such high import dependency has created another bottleneck for building out the new transmission lines that clean energy projects demand. To stimulate domestic transformer production, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council — including representatives from major utilities — has proposed that the federal government establish new transformer manufacturing investments and create a public stockpiling system that stabilizes demand. That is, a clean energy abundance agenda also requires new industrial policies.
While such clean energy delays call for additional policymaking, “abundance” advocates are correct that other delays call for ending problematic policies. Rising local restrictions on clean energy development, for example, pose a major hurdle. However, the map of those restrictions, as tracked in an authoritative Columbia University report, does not support the notion that they stem primarily from Democrats’ penchant for overregulation. Of the 11 states with more than 10 such restrictions, six are red, three are purple, and two are blue — New York and Texas, Virginia and Kansas, Maine and Indiana, etc. To take on such restrictions, we shouldn’t let concern with progressive wish lists eclipse a focused challenge to old-fashioned, transpartisan NIMBYism.
“Abundance” proponents also focus their ire on permitting processes like those required by the National Environmental Policy Act, which the Supreme Court curtailed last week. Permitting needs mending, but with a chisel, not a Musk-esque chainsaw. The Biden administration produced a chisel last year: a NEPA reform to expedite clean energy projectsand support environmental justice. In February, the Trump administration tossed out that reform and nearly five decades of NEPA rules without offering a replacement — a chainsaw maneuver that has created more, not less, uncertainty for project developers. When the wreckage of this administration ends, we’ll need to fill the void with targeted permitting policies that streamline clean energy while protecting communities.
Finally, a clean energy abundance agenda should also welcome pro-worker, pro-equity incentives like those in the IRA “everything bagel.” Despite claims to the contrary, such policies can help to overcome additional sources of delay and facilitatebuildout.
For example, Community Benefits Agreements, which IRA programs encouraged, offer a distinct, pro-building advantage: a way to avoid the community opposition that has become a top-tier reason for delays and cancellations of wind and solar projects. CBAs give community and labor groups a tool to secure locally-defined economic, health, and environmental benefits from clean energy projects. For clean energy firms, they offer an opportunity to obtain explicit project support from community organizations. Three out of four wind and solar developers agree that increased community engagement reduces project cancellations, and more than 80% see it as at least somewhat “feasible” to offer benefits via CBAs. Indeed, developers and communities are increasingly using CBAs, from a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island to a solar park in California’s central valley, to deliver tangible benefits and completed projects — the ingredients of abundance.
A similar win-win can come from incentives for clean energy companies to pay construction workers decent wages, which the IRA included. Most peer-reviewed studies find that the impact of such standards on infrastructure construction costs is approximately zero. By contrast, wage standards can help to address a key constraint on clean energy buildout: companies’ struggle to recruit a skilled and stable workforce in a tight labor market. More than 80% of solar firms, for example, report difficulties in finding qualified workers. Wage standards offer a proven solution, helping companies attract and retain the workforce needed for on-time project completion.
In addition to labor standards and support for CBAs, a clean energy abundance agenda also should expand on the IRA’s incentives to invest in low-income communities. Such policies spur clean energy deployment in neighborhoods the market would otherwise deem unprofitable. Indeed, since enactment of the IRA, 75% of announced clean energy investments have been in low-income counties. That buildout is a deliberate outcome of the “everything bagel” approach. If we want clean energy abundance for all, not just the wealthy, we need to wield — not withdraw — such incentives.
Crafting an agenda for clean energy abundance requires precision, not abstraction. We need to add industrial policies that offer a foundation for clean energy growth. We need to end parochial policies that deter buildout on behalf of private interests. And we need to build on labor and equity policies that enable workers and communities to reap material rewards from clean energy expansion. Differentiating between those needs will be essential for Democrats to build a clean energy plan that actually delivers abundance.