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I’m not normally concerned about having the perfect home — though I’m also not normally interviewing Mr. Christmas Tree himself from my living room, with a scraggly, disco-lit Nordmann fir in the background of my Zoom shot.
A high-quality tree should have “up-turning branches, so they’re not drooping,” he was telling me. “They have really nice dark green needles” and “what I would consider to be a uniform density, all the way to the top of the tree.” Ashe talked, my eyes slid to the corner of my computer screen, where I noticed that the topper on my rather limp and gappy specimen was also crooked.
But in the true spirit of the holiday season, Gary Chastagner — a plant pathologist at Washington State University whose extensive research on ornamental holiday conifers has earned him his jolly nickname — was generous. He added that there’s also a robust market for imperfect “Charlie Brown” Christmas trees, to the point that growers will actually avoid culling arboreal oddballs that might attract people like, well, me.
Soon, they may not have much choice. The normally cold and rainy Pacific Northwest is the Christmas tree-growing capital of the U.S., producing more than 5.4 million trees every holiday season, many of which get exported to places like New York, where I procured mine from a sidewalk lot. But back in 2021, a heat dome pushed temperatures in the Northwest to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The event killed the year’s seedlings and browned new growth on older trees — the consequences of which we’re already seeing in the form of patchy trees and shortages, and will continue to feel for years to come.
Unlike most farmed products, Christmas trees grow slowly; it can take seven to 12 years for a seedling to reach 8 feet tall, depending on the species. To ensure a consistent stock of Christmas trees for the years ahead, most growers plant the same number of seedlings each season with the expectation that there will be some amount of loss along the way.
But the heat dome was exceptional; it “killed off virtually every seedling that was planted on farms in 2021, plus some from the year before,” Sheila McKinnon, a former grower and representative of the Puget Sound Christmas Tree Association, in Washington state, told me over email. One dismayed grower told CNN at the time, “There are literally fields with hundreds of acres of dead seedlings. Just 100% mortality across the entire field.”
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Because the heat dome occurred in early summer, young trees as well as the new shoots and buds on older trees had not yet “hardened,” and were therefore especially vulnerable to the high temperatures. Additionally, prevailing drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 limited the available groundwater to rehydrate the superheated plants. “They just shut down because they couldn’t get enough water; they literally just cooked,” Judith Kowalski, a researcher in the Christmas tree program at Oregon State University, explained to me.
Not all trees — or tree farms — were affected equally. Nordmann, Turkish, and some Noble firs mature later in the season than Douglas firs, so their tissues were softer and “just fried,” Kowalski said. Regional differences mattered, too. For example, it didn’t get quite as hot in the southern Willamette Valley in Oregon, and trees there faired a little better. But even microclimates could mean the difference between life and death. “On a hill, where there was a breeze, it made a lot of difference,” Kowalski said. By that same token, so did “a little valley, where trees didn’t get any air circulation.”
Some unlucky growers lost as much as 90% of the year’s seedlings; by one estimate, 70% of the Noble fir seedlings planted in Oregon in 2021 died. McKinnon sounded fatalistic when she described the damage. “There is no way to recover from this loss,” she said. “Some folks tried to buy more seedlings the following year,” but “instantly doubling the supply wasn’t possible.”
Call them the Ghosts of Christmas Yet to Come — because conifers take so long to mature, the effects of the 2021 heat dome will cascade into the future, causing shortages of certain trees at certain heights for a decade or more. If the typical Noble fir takes roughly 10 years to grow 8 feet, for example, then the 2021 heat dome could cause shortages of 9-foot-tall Nobles that won’t be felt until 2032.
The good news is, customers don’t usually shop for a specific species and height of Christmas tree; they just want something that looks good (or, in my case, passable) in their living room. While there might be a 9-foot-tall Noble tree shortage in 2032, customers in the market for a large tree that year will probably switch to buying a Douglas fir or some other variety, instead. Unless a grower depends heavily on one specific type of tree that was widely killed off by the heat dome, the impacts of 2021 can “kind of get absorbed” by the other stock, Kowalski said.
Of course, all that assumes that there is only one bad year.
“The heat dome is part of a pattern that we’re seeing of increased frequency of very high temperatures, much more than normal,” Chastagner told me. “2022 was one of the driest summers on record. We only had half of an inch of precipitation during the summer. And unlike other areas, the growers in the Pacific Northwest generally do not irrigate trees.”
Chastagner’s research indicates that trees in the Pacific Northwest have been so stressed by the region’s dry summers that it’s making them vulnerable to diseases like armillaria, a root rot caused by a fungus, “which we normally didn’t see.” And high temperatures don’t just affect a tree’s growth; warmer autumns also lead to worse needle retention once the tree is cut, meaning more needles on your floor in mid-December. And while one summer of extreme temperatures might lead to shortages that other stock can absorb, that stops being true when there are back-to-back heat domes. As Tom Norby, the president of Oregon Christmas Tree Growers Association, told The Oregonianafter the 2021 heat dome, “One year is not a catastrophe. Two years becomes a big problem. Three years, it’s a catastrophe.”
With that in mind, Chastagner and his team at WSU — as well as Kowalski and the researchers at OSU — are exploring everything from introducing irrigation to farms (which is complicated and expensive, but also effective) to determining what conifer varieties will be better suited to a hotter future in the region. Already, the makeup of tree farms in the West is changing: In 2017, native Noble firs made up about 54% of the trees grown in the Pacific Northwest, with Nordmann and Turkish firs (which are native to Turkey and Georgia) only making up about 4%. Now, more and more growers are planting exotic Nordmann and Turkish firs due to their drought tolerance.
But don’t worry: Charlie Brown Christmas trees aren’t going anywhere. Heat or no, there will always be evergreens that require aggressive pruning or otherwise turn out a little bit, well, special. “When I get asked to give talks on what the perfect Christmas tree is,” Chastagner said with — did I only imagine it? — a kindly glance over my shoulder, “I say it’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
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The project from Google’s internal incubator program aims to help speed approvals to get more renewables on the grid.
The country’s largest electricity market, PJM, has a problem: It’s facing a slew of retiring fossil fuel resources just as electricity demand is ramping, largely thanks to AI data centers. Meanwhile, PJM has a years-long waitlist full of wind and solar projects seeking permission to connect to the grid that are languishing in no small part due to its slow approval process.
Enter Tapestry, the so-called “moonshot for the electric grid,” as Page Crahan, Tapestry’s general manager, put it on a press call Wednesday. The initiative is a part of Google’s internal project incubator, known simply as X. Today, the tech company and the grid operator announced a partnership that will use artificial intelligence to develop a unified model of the grid’s electricity network, bringing in data from dozens of disparate tools into one simplified “Google Maps for electrons,” as Crahan put it.
The model will give grid operators and project developers the ability to toggle on and off different layers of grid information — a vast improvement over the technical boondoggle grid planners face today. As Crahan explained, they might use one software program that tracks where grid equipment is located, another that models power flow, another that measures the equipment’s thermal capacity, and yet another that runs an economic impact analysis. Then, Crahan said, “each of these software programs will generate a file which creates its own unique model of the grid. And every time a change is made to that one model, it needs to be applied to all of the other models in consideration.” Overall, the siloed nature of these different programs makes it a headache to keep information consistent and up to date across the entire system.
This convoluted process is partially at fault for PJM’s backlogged queue, which in recent years has seen a deluge in new interconnection requests, largely for renewable energy projects. Due to this system overwhelm, PJM put a pause on reviewing applications in 2022, initially expected to last for two years. Now, it’s expected to lift at the end of next year.
Aftab Khan, an executive vice president at PJM, said on the press call that the grid operator knows there’s still more work to be done. “Even though we've made significant progress with tools and automation to manage large numbers of projects in an interconnection cycle, it’s still, end-to-end, about a two-year process,” he said. To expedite this, Tapestry plans to deliver solutions that PJM can start rolling out this year. The two entities will work together to develop new processes “over the next several quarters “ and “perhaps even the next several years,” Crahan said.
Tapestry was formed in 2017 with the mission to “bring the grid out of the industrial age and into the age of intelligence.” In addition to creating a coordinated model of PJM, Tapestry is also developing an AI tool that automates much of the review process for grid interconnection applications, thereby helping to more efficiently validate the feasibility of proposed projects. It’s as simple as dropping a PDF into Tapestry’s AI analytics tool, which can then automatically check the data in the application against other reliable sources.
“By automating and improving the data verification process for things like land rights, equipment and grid impacts, we aim to reduce the burden on the PJM planning team and the energy developers,”Crahan said. She said this will help “reduce the time it takes to evaluate these projects so that capacity can come online faster.”
All of this work builds on previous projects and pilots that Tapestry has been running both domestically and abroad. For example, Tapestry has partnered with the U.S.-based utility and power company AES to develop a vision for the digital, AI-powered grid of the future. And in Chile, Tapestry worked with the national grid operator to deploy planning tools that enable speedy, long-term simulations, allowing operators to make informed decisions about energy needs decades into the future.
“We have been able to take a process that took the planners several days and turn it into a few hours,” Crahan said of the Tapestry’s work expediting grid simulations in Chile. Though she couldn’t cite specific targets for speeding up PJM’s grid interconnection process, “we're looking for significant order of magnitude improvement to support the PJM planners,” Crahan said.
The administration is doubling down on an April 20 end date for the traffic control program.
Congestion pricing has only been in effect in New York City for three months, but its rollout has been nearly as turbulent as the 18-year battle to implement it in the first place.
Trump’s Department of Transportation escalated its threat this week to retaliate against New York if the state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, does not shut down the tolling program by April 20.
The federal agency reposted a CBS New York story on social media that purported it had agreed to allow congestion pricing to remain in place through October, calling the story “a complete lie.”
“Make no mistake — the Trump Administration and USDOT will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal in response to non-compliance later this month,” the agency said in the post.
The post did not say what those tools might be, but a previous post from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on March 20 made a veiled threat to withhold funding from the state if it did not shut down the tolling program. “The billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check,” he said.
Duffy notified the MTA on February 19 that he was rescinding federal approval of its congestion pricing program, which charges a $9 fee for drivers who enter New York City’s central business district. The toll had only just gone into effect in early January, but there was already evidence that it was reducing traffic. The MTA immediately filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging Duffy’s actions.
The CBS New York story reported on a joint letter that the MTA and USDOT submitted to the presiding judge mapping out a timeline for the case to proceed. The MTA agreed to file an amended complaint by April 18, and the DOT agreed to respond to it by May 27. Following that, the timeline allows for the back-and-forth over evidence leading up to a ruling to potentially stretch until late October. Both parties called for the judge to reach a decision based on written arguments, without a formal trial.
Despite agreeing to this timeline for the case — the whole point of which is to determine the legality of DOT’s order to terminate congestion pricing — the DOT maintains that New York City must stop charging drivers by April 20.
The MTA refuses to do so. “Congestion pricing is in effect,” Regina Kaplan, the attorney for the MTA, said during a pretrial conference call on Wednesday. “We believe it's working, and as we stated in our complaints, we don't intend to turn it off unless there's an order from your honor that we need to do so.”
In response, Dominika Tarczynska, from the U.S. attorney’s office, told the judge that Duffy is “still evaluating what DOT’s options are if New York City does not comply, and there has been no final decision as to, what, if anything will occur on April 20.”
The president’s executive order is already too late to save at least one Arizona plant.
The Trump administration is trying to save coal again. But despite the president’s seemingly forceful actions, there’s little indication he’ll be any more successful at it this time than he was the last time around.
Backed by coal miners in hard hats and high visibility jackets, Trump on Tuesday announced a series of executive orders meant to boost “beautiful, clean coal.” The orders lift barriers to extracting coal on public lands, ask the Department of Energy to consider metallurgical coal a critical mineral, push out compliance with some air quality rules by two years, instruct the Department of Energy to use emergency authorities to keep coal plants open, and direct theattorney general to go after state climate laws that Trump claimed “discriminate” against greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources like coal.
What’s not clear is how much these orders will boost the coal industry, let alone save it. It’s not even clear whether the specific plant Trump said he was saving will burn coal again.
During the announcement, Trump said that his administration would keep open the Cholla Generating Station, an Arizona coal plant that began operating in 1962. The plant’s final two units were slated to be retired this year.
“We will ensure our nation’s critical coal plants remain online and operational,” Trump said. “To that end, I’m instructing Secretary Wright to save the Cholla coal plant in Arizona.”
But according to Arizona Public Service, the utility that co-owns the plant, the plant has already stopped generating power. A spokesperson told me the utility was “aware” of the president’s statement and is “evaluating what it means for the plant.” APS plans on preserving the site, possibly for nuclear power and has “procured reliable and cost-effective generation that will replace the energy previously generated by Cholla Power Plant,” the spokesperson said.
The Department of Energy didn’t return a request for comment.
Trump’s orders repeatedly cite Section 202 of the Federal Power Act, which allows the Secretary of Energy “during a continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged or when an emergency exists” to allow energy facilities to continue to operate on a temporary basis that otherwise would not.
In 2017, the first Trump administration used Section 202 to allow two coal plant units in Virginia to continue operating occasionally when necessary for grid reliability, despite their having been due to close to comply with air quality regulations. Two years later, the electricity market PJM told the Department of Energy that a new transmission line had rendered the emergency authorization unnecessary, and the plants closed in 2019.
The executive orders “don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters,” Grid Strategies president Rob Gramlich wrote on X. “Nothing here seems to change the economics, and it’s the economics that have held coal-fired power production down.” (Gramlich is also a Heatmap contributor.)
Of course, the United States has plenty of coal. But many of its uses — including electricity generation — can be easily substituted with other sources, such as natural gas. That’s why U.S. coal production has been falling since 2008.
“Coal is increasingly uncompetitive in deregulated electricity markets,” Seaver Wang, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. That’s because operating a coal-fired power plant comes with all sorts of extra costs that natural gas doesn’t, including the transportation and storage of coal — compare the barges and trains required to move rocks to the neat pipelines gas flows through. The energy research group Energy Innovation has foundthat nearly all coal plants are more expensive to run than the combinations of wind, solar, and storage that might replace them.
“I don’t see the demand drivers for this to remotely bring coal back. I have no idea who would ever invest as a result of this executive order or related policies,” Wang said.
While existing coal plants may stick around for another few years as a result of heightened demand or relaxed regulatory burdens, that’s a far cry from building new coal plants or opening new coal mines. A large coal plant hasn’t opened in the United States since 2013. In 2024, wind and solar generation surpassed coal generation on the grid, according to Ember.
Some 12.3 gigawatts of coal capacity are scheduled to be retired in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration, making up two-thirds of planned retirements by capacity this year. But coal retirements have also been slowing down, according to EIA data. The 7.5 gigawatts retired last year was the least since 2011.
Jefferies analysts estimated that over 12 gigawatts of coal capacity is due for retirement in 2028. That could be pushed back thanks to the relaxation of the mercury and air toxics rules the president announced Tuesday.
“There is logic to delaying coal retirements to serve incremental high-density load customers like data centers,” the Jefferies analysts wrote. “Not all coal retirements are alike, and the economic-driven transitions will continue to draw support, but the calculus will change with more expensive renewables and natural gas alternatives from tariffs and potential changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.”
This is not the first time a Trump White House has tried to rescue this declining industry. During his first term, then Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed that coal and nuclear plants at risk of closing because of low demand have guaranteed payments, known as cost recovery, in order to stay open. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with a Republican majority, said no to Perry by a vote of 5-0.
Despite the president’s promises throughout his campaign, the coal industry shrunk by a huge degree during his first term, part of a longer trend that brought down coal’s share in the electricity generating sector from about half in 2007 to 16% in 2023. During Trump’s time in office, coal mining jobs declined from 51,000 to 38,000 during the pandemic, and have recovered only to 40,000 today.
When it comes to mines, Wang said, investors would likely be leery of putting money into the sector, given the strong likelihood that a future Democratic administration would be far less friendly to coal. Coal investors “are going to be accounting for the fact that any policy swings are short lived,” Wang told me.
“We all know that lead times for mines are long. Everyone knows this administration only has four years in office. I don’t really expect that this will drive a lot of investment interest,” Wang said.
The critical mineral designation for coal, if it makes it through the Department of Energy’s process, may not change much initially, Wang explained. It could lead to some “beneficial outcomes in terms of agency prioritization,” he said. But much critical minerals policy is still being worked out, and there are few programs that specifically and programmatically target the critical minerals included on lists maintained by either the Department of Energy or the United States Geological Service.
“A lot of the politicking over critical minerals designation is about the expectation of future outcomes that would arise from broad bipartisan interest in critical minerals as a category,” Wang said.
And unlike with other critical minerals, the U.S. is essentially self-sufficient for coal’s industrial and energy uses. We’re not talking about graphite here, let alone praseodymium.
At least so far, the coal industry has not thrilled to having a more friendly figure in the White House, although the share prices of some coal companies are up in afternoon trading. Coal exports in January, the most recent month for which there is data, stood at 7.7 million short tons, compared to 8.4 million short tons a year prior. Central Appalachia coal prices stand at $78 per short ton, compared to $77.35 a year ago.
If nothing else, the announcements provided Trump with the type of photo-op he craves. He even got the opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton. “One thing I learned about the coal miners … they want to mine coal. She was gonna put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cell phones and things,” he told the audience in the White House. Of course, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday touted the “army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” that Trump’s tariffs will also help generate. But no matter what the president says or does, the coal industry may still be screwed.