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Current conditions: A storm lurking off the coast of Australia could soon become a tropical cyclone • Bangkok's 11 million workers have been told to stay home today to avoid harmful air pollution • Washington, D.C., could see up to four inches of snow this weekend – or none at all.
Car sellers sold more than 25,000 tax credit-eligible electric vehicles between January 1 and February 6, according to new Treasury data. That’s an average of more than 675 EVs sold at a government-sponsored discount per day, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo calculated. To put that in perspective, about 1.08 million cars were sold in total in the month of January, according to Cox Automotive, or about 34,840 per day. So the tax credit-supported EVs were only about 2% of the total cars sold. But 25,000 discounted EVs is nothing to scoff at considering that fewer models are eligible now than last year. Also, the Treasury said it has paid approximately $135 million in advance payments to dealers for about 19,000 of the EVs sold this year. “So even with fewer options available, buyers are still taking advantage of the new instant rebate and finding vehicles that work for them,” Pontecorvo said.
The Department of Energy (DoE) yesterday announced it was making an additional $63 million available to speed up the adoption of residential heat pumps across the country. This is on top of the $169 million in federal funding announced in November of last year. The goal is to boost manufacturing of heat pump systems, but with this new influx of cash, it seems the DoE also wants to wake Americans up to the benefits of using a heat pump to heat and cool water. Its announcement notes that heat pump water heaters can be up to three times more energy efficient than conventional water heaters. “Basically, the federal funding is aiming to nix the use of gas in a home wherever possible,” wrote Matt Simon at Wired. Ali Zaidi, assistant to the president and national climate adviser, told Simon that “we’re really seeing, I think, a sea change across the country in terms of how people heat and cool their homes.” Data shows that in 2023, heat pumps outsold furnaces for the second year in a row.
Google is teaming up with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to help track methane emissions from space. The MethaneSAT – a satellite developed specifically to monitor methane emissions – will launch into orbit next month. Google will use artificial intelligence to create a map of oil and gas infrastructure locations across the world. “Once we have that map, then we can overlay methane data,” said Yael Maguire, head of Google’s Geo Sustainability team. This will offer a “far better understanding of the types of machinery that contributes most to methane leaks.”
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that’s far more warming than carbon dioxide. But it breaks down in the atmosphere more quickly that CO2, so slashing it is seen as “one of the cheapest, fastest ways to curb global warming in the short term,” explainedBloomberg. Fossil fuel operations tend to dramatically underreport their methane releases, so the hope is that more transparency about emissions will encourage reduction efforts from producers, but reductions “can increase costs in the short term and slow output,” Bloomberg noted.
India wants to take its relationship with one of the world’s leading energy authorities to the next level. The country has applied to become a full member of the International Energy Agency (IEA), joining 31 other member countries, and ministers are deciding whether or not to say yes. India is already an “association country,” but full membership would boost its role in tackling climate change. It could also help the IEA “strengthen cooperation in Asia to stabilize energy supplies,” as the region emerges as a key source of new global energy consumption, The Nikkeireported. The IEA noted that energy demand is expected to grow more in India than in any other country over the next 30 years. “The world cannot plan for its energy future without India at the table,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.
The latest development in the enduring quest to create a meat substitute that people will actually eat is “beef rice.” Yes, you read that right. Researchers in South Korea have grown rice grains in a lab that contain cow muscle and fat cells. The beef rice is pink, firm, and high in protein and fat. Unlike some other meat alternatives, it uses ingredients that are widely available, affordable, and have a lower carbon footprint per gram of protein than beef, leading its creators to declare it “a novel food ingredient that can overcome humanity’s food crisis.” But the proof will be in the (rice) pudding: “A critical test is around public appetite for these sorts of lab-developed foods,” Neil Ward, an agri-food and climate specialist and professor at the University of East Anglia, told CNN.
America’s 16,000 golf courses soak up 1.5 billion gallons of water per day.
Editor's note: This article has been changed to correct the number of EVs Americans are buying each day.
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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.