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Climate advocates have never met a solution they couldn’t argue about.
The end of 2024 marks the end of four of the busiest years the climate and clean energy community has seen to date. I think it's safe to say the energy transition is in full swing (despite certain opinions to the contrary), even if it's not yet on a glide path to a future that would avoid devastating climate impacts.
But with progress comes a new kind of conflict: infighting. Which climate solutions are the best climate solutions? How can we implement them the right way? When should other priorities, like affordability and national security, come first, if they should at all? Are those trade-offs even real? Or are they fossil fuel propaganda?
In a fantastic piece for Heatmap last year, researcher Joshua Lappen drew attention to this increasingly combative undercurrent in the climate coalition, inflamed by the debate over whether a compromise on permitting reform would be better for the climate in the long run than no reform at all. That fight — along with the related question of whether conservationists are slowing climate action — continued into 2024. But it wasn’t the only thing climate advocates fought about. Here are four debates that dominated the discourse this year that I think will continue into 2025.
Biden ignited a firestorm of controversy in January when he paused approvals of new liquefied natural gas export terminals until the Department of Energy could re-evaluate LNG’s potential economic and environmental impacts. The move followed protests from environmental groups that had named these facilities their number one climate bogeyman, arguing that new terminals would, as Bill McKibben put it, “install our reliance on fossil fuels for decades to come.”
What followed was much back and forth about whether growing U.S. LNG exports would help or hurt efforts to stop climate change. To be sure, producing and burning natural gas releases planet-warming emissions. But past government and academic studies have found that exporting U.S. natural gas could result in lower global emissions overall by helping other countries replace dirtier fuels such as coal or natural gas from Russia, where the industry has much higher methane emissions. Environmentalists pushed back on that narrative, citing a study by Robert Howarth, a Cornell scientist, which found that producing and transporting LNG could be worse for the climate than coal. Critics then pounced on Howarth's study, accusing him of using flawed assumptions about upstream methane emissions, LNG tanker size, and shipping route distances.
Ultimately, calculating the emissions impact of increased LNG exports requires making a lot of assumptions. How can we know, for example, whether creating a cheap supply of natural gas will displace coal or deter adoption of renewables? As Arvind Ravikumar, an expert in energy emissions modeling, told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin, “There’s no right answer. It depends on who buys, what time frame, which country, and how are they using LNG.”
A week before Christmas, the Biden administration finally put out its long-awaited study. It modeled a number of different scenarios, but found that approving additional LNG exports beyond what’s already in the pipeline would likely produce at least a small increase in emissions by 2050 in all of them. The report also found that demand from U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere would be met by projects that have already been approved, making additional plants “neither sustainable nor advisable,” as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm wrote.
The natural gas industry and its supporters were quick to question the results, and they’re about to have a much more sympathetic ear in the Trump administration. But the report gives activists a considerable weapon to use in future lawsuits if Trump tries to put LNG approvals on the fast track.
I checked my phone after dinner one evening in August to find the members of climate X (formerly known as climate Twitter) suddenly at each other's throats over a provocative essay published in Jacobin titled “Obsessing Over Climate Disinformation Is a Wrong Turn.” Written by the environmental sociologist Holly Buck, the essay argues that too much focus on the oil and gas industry’s disinformation campaigns risks dismissing or overlooking legitimate concerns people have about the energy transition. “Fighting disinformation becomes a cheap hack for the hard work of listening to people and learning from them,” wrote Buck. “We have to put resources into a different sort of public engagement with climate change, one that sees publics as competent and nuanced rather than as susceptible marks for memes.”
The message struck a nerve. While many praised the essay, a number of prominent climate activists and journalists with large online followings attacked it, defending the urgency of combating disinformation and accusing Buck of setting up a false dichotomy between this work and public engagement. Aaron Regunberg, a former Rhode Island state representative and lawyer for the nonprofit Public Citizen, wrote a response in Jacobin charging Buck with “arguing with a straw man” and not understanding how insidious the oil industry’s disinformation strategies are.
Buck tried to clarify her view in a followup piece, asserting that she was not denying that disinformation was a “serious obstacle to climate action,” but rather that the act of “fighting disinformation” won’t solve what she sees as underlying problems working against the energy transition: the absence of an engagement apparatus that helps regular people understand their options, and a media ecosystem that “profits from our hate and division.”
What’s clear moving forward is that with a clean energy opponent entering the White House and a mega-billionaire who, with X, literally owns a chunk of the media ecosystem standing by his side, both disinformation and the framework that supports it will stay in the spotlight.
After remaining basically flat for two decades, U.S. electricity demand is set to grow by an average of 3% per year over the next five years, according to the latest forecast from the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies. Domestic manufacturing will drive some of the demand, it predicts, but the majority will come from the buildout of data centers, “supercharged” by the rise of artificial intelligence.
On one hand, many of the companies building data centers have ambitious clean energy goals. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have signed landmark deals with advanced nuclear and geothermal power companies, helping to get first-of-a-kind deployments of these technologies financed. If those projects are successful, they could pave the way for cheaper, cleaner, 24/7 power for the rest of us.
But energy-hungry AI is already causing those tech giants to fall behind on their targets and driving major investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin has chronicled how electricity demand growth is making it harder to close natural gas and coal plants . In the states that data centers are flocking to, such as Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas, utilities are revising their integrated resource plans to increase the amount of natural gas generation they expect to deliver. Exxon and Chevron are gearing up to build natural gas generation “behind the meter,” i.e. serving data centers directly, so they can meet demand more quickly than if they had to hook up to the grid. The gas pipeline company Williams is also planning a Southeast expansion to serve data center demand. Energy equipment manufacturer GE Vernova is seeing orders for natural gas turbines skyrocket.
There are layers to this debate. Should policymakers require hyperscalers to bring online new sources of clean energy to power their data centers, or will that prove counterproductive and “dampen investment in new industries” — a trade-off familiar to anyone following the back-and-forth over clean hydrogen? And is it possible that all the fuss about data center demand is overblown? Is there even a business case for AI that supports this buildout?
The incoming Trump administration has promised to “unleash U.S. energy dominance” and “make America the AI capital of the world,” so it’s likely this will continue to be one of the top questions for climate hawks for the foreseeable future.
The debate over the state of electric vehicle sales didn’t start in 2024, but headlines this year continued to sow confusion over whether or not EVs are catching on in the way climate advocates — and carmakers — hoped.
Each of the big three automakers, as well as most of the remaining companies serving North America, revised down their EV production plans this year, citing a waning market. In July, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said the company wasn’t going to hit its goal of producing a million EVs per year in North America by 2025. “We’re seeing a little bit of a slowdown here,” she said on CNBC. “The market just isn’t developing. But we will get there.” Ford cancelled plans to produce an electric three-row SUV, delayed its release of an electric medium-sized pickup truck until 2027, and paused production of the F-150 Lightning, and has decided to shift its near-term focus to selling hybrids.
Among non-U.S. automakers, Stellantis delayed the release of a new EV Ram pickup truck and will put out a hybrid version instead. Volkswagen delayed the North America release of an electric sedan. Several luxury automakers, including Aston Martin and Bentley, delayed the release of their first EVs until 2027. Mercedes-Benz once strived to have EVs make up 50% of its sales in 2025 — now it’s trying to hit that mark in 2030. Tesla sales also slowed significantly in the first half of the year. CEO Elon Musk cancelled plans to build a new low-cost EV.
But while sales numbers may not have met individual automakers’ expectations, overall sales continued to grow. “For every sign of an EV slowdown, another suggests an adolescent industry on the verge of its next growth spurt,” Bloomberg reported mid-way through the year. During the third quarter, GM saw record EV sales. Honda’s debut EV, the Prologue, jumped up the charts to become one of the top-selling offerings on the market. After looking at third quarter numbers, Cox Automotive analysts opined that “a 10% [market] share is well within reach.”
We’ll have to see how Trump’s plans to eliminate consumer subsidies for EVs changes that outlook, but expect there to be plenty more fodder for debate.
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Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
By all outward appearances, the green hydrogen industry is in a state of arrested development. The hype cycle of project announcements stemming from Biden-era policies crashed after those policies took too long to implement. A number of high profile clean hydrogen projects have fallen apart since the start of the year, and deep uncertainty remains about whether the Trump administration will go to bat for the industry or further cripple it.
The picture may not be as bleak as it seems, however. On Wednesday, the green hydrogen startup Ecolectro, which has been quietly developing its technology for more than a decade, came out with a new plan to bring the tech to market. The company announced a partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing, a sort of manufacturing incubator that helps startups optimize their products for U.S. fabrication, to build their first units, design their assembly lines, and eventually begin producing at a commercial scale in a Re:Build-owned factory.
“It is a lot for a startup to create a massive manufacturing facility that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars when they’re pre-revenue,” Jon Gordon, Ecolectro’s chief commercial officer, told me. This contract manufacturing partnership with Re:Build is “massive,” he said, because it means Ecolectro doesn’t have to take on lots of debt to scale. (The companies did not disclose the size of the contract.)
The company expects to begin producing its first electrolyzer units — devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — at Re:Build’s industrial design and fabrication site in Rochester, New York, later this year. If all goes well, it will move production to Re:Build’s high-volume manufacturing facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania next year.
The number one obstacle to scaling up the production and use of cleaner hydrogen, which could help cut emissions from fertilizer, aviation, steelmaking, and other heavy industries, is the high cost of producing it. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a suite of policies designed to kick-start the industry, including an $8 billion grant program and a lucrative new tax credit. But Biden only got a small fraction of the grant money out the door, and did not finalize the rules for claiming the tax credit until January. Now, the Trump administration is considering terminating its agreements with some of the grant recipients, and Republicans in Congress might change or kill the tax credit.
Since the start of the year, a $500 million fuel plant in upstate New York, a $400 million manufacturing facility in Michigan, and a $500 million green steel factory in Mississippi, have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed.
The outlook is particularly bad for hydrogen made from water and electricity, often called “green” hydrogen, according to a recent BloombergNEF analysis. Trump’s tariffs could increase the cost of green hydrogen by 14%, or $1 per kilogram, based on tariff announcements as of April 8. More than 70% of the clean hydrogen volumes coming online between now and 2030 are what’s known as “blue” hydrogen, made using natural gas, with carbon capture to eliminate climate pollution. “Blue hydrogen has more demand than green hydrogen, not just because it’s cheaper to produce, but also because there’s a lot less uncertainty around it,” BloombergNEF analyst Payal Kaur said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent summit in New York City. Blue hydrogen companies can take advantage of a tax credit for carbon capture, which Congress is much less likely to scrap than the hydrogen tax credit.
Gordon is intimately familiar with hydrogen’s cost impediments. He came to Ecolectro after four years as co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a startup building hydrogen-powered planes that shut down last summer after burning through its cash and failing to raise more. By the end, Gordon had become a hydrogen skeptic, he told me. The company had customers interested in its planes, but clean hydrogen fuel was too expensive at $15 to $20 per kilogram. It needed to come in under $2.50 to compete with jet fuel. “Regional aviation customers weren’t going to spend 10 times the ticket price just to fly zero emissions,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me, and I don’t think it was clear to our prospective investors, how the cost of hydrogen was going to be reduced.” Now, he’s convinced that Ecolectro’s new chemistry is the answer.
Ecolectro started in a lab at Cornell University, where its cofounder and chief science officer Kristina Hugar was doing her PhD research. Hugar developed a new material, a polymer “anion exchange membrane,” that had potential to significantly lower the cost of electrolyzers. Many of the companies making electrolyzers use designs that require expensive and supply-constrained metals like iridium and titanium. Hugar’s membrane makes it possible to use low-cost nickel and steel instead.
The company’s “stack,” the sandwich of an anode, membrane, and cathode that makes up the core of the electrolyzer, costs at least 50% less than the “proton exchange membrane” versions on the market today, according to Gordon. In lab tests, it has achieved more than 70% efficiency, meaning that more than 70% of the electrical energy going into the system is converted into usable chemical energy stored in hydrogen. The industry average is around 61%, according to the Department of Energy.
In addition to using cheaper materials, the company is focused on building electrolyzers that customers can install on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel. Its first customer was Liberty New York Gas, a natural gas company in Massena, New York, which installed a small, 10-kilowatt electrolyzer in a shipping container directly outside its office as part of a pilot project. Like many natural gas companies, Liberty is testing blending small amounts of hydrogen into its system — in this case, directly into the heating systems it uses in the office building — to evaluate it as an option for lowering emissions across its customer base. The equipment draws electricity from the local electric grid, which, in that region, mostly comes from low-cost hydroelectric power plants.
Taking into account the expected manufacturing cost for a commercial-scale electrolyzer, Ecolectro says that a project paying the same low price for water and power as Liberty would be able to produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kilogram — even without subsidies. Through its partnership with Re:Build, the company will produce electrolyzers in the 250- to 500-kilowatt range, as well as in the 1- to 5-megawatt range. It will be announcing a larger 250-kilowatt pilot project later this year, Gordon said.
All of this sounded promising, but what I really wanted to know is who Ecolectro thought its customers were going to be. Demand for clean hydrogen, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces to scaling, after cost. Of the roughly 13 million to 15 million tons of clean hydrogen production announced to come online between now and 2030, companies only have offtake agreements for about 2.5 million tons, according to Kaur of BNEF. Most of those agreements are also non-binding, meaning they may not even happen.
Gordon tied companies’ struggle with offtake to their business models of building big, expensive, facilities in remote areas, meaning the hydrogen has to be transported long distances to customers. He said that when he was with Universal Hydrogen, he tried negotiating offtake agreements with some of these big projects, but they were asking customers to commit to 20-year contracts — and to figure out the delivery on their own.
“Right now, where we see the industry is that people want less hydrogen than that,” he said. “So we make it much easier for the customer to adopt by leasing them this unit. They don’t have to pay some enormous capex, and then it’s on site and it’s producing a fair amount of hydrogen for them to engage in pilot studies of blending, or refining, or whatever they’re going to use it for.”
He expects most of the demand to come from industrial customers that already use hydrogen, like fertilizer companies and refineries, that want to switch to a cleaner version of the fuel, or hydrogen-curious companies that want to experiment with blending it into their natural gas burners to reduce their emissions. Demand will also be geographically-limited to places like New York, Washington State, and Texas, that have low-cost electricity available, he said. “I think the opportunity is big, and it’s here, but only if you’re using a product like ours.”
On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.
Rob and Jesse go deep on the electricity machine.
Last week, more than 50 million people across mainland Spain and Portugal suffered a blackout that lasted more than 10 hours and shuttered stores, halted trains, and dealt more than $1 billion in economic damage. At least eight deaths have been attributed to the power outage.
Almost immediately, some commentators blamed the blackout on the large share of renewables on the Iberian peninsula’s power grid. Are they right? How does the number of big, heavy, spinning objects on the grid affect grid operators’ ability to keep the lights on?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob dive into what may have caused the Iberian blackout — as well as how grid operators manage supply and demand, voltage and frequency, and renewables and thermal resources, and operate the continent-spanning machine that is the power grid. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: So a number of people started saying, oh, this was actually caused because there wasn’t enough inertia on the grid — that Spain kind of flew too close to the sun, let’s say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid. Some issue happened and it wasn’t able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that is?
Jesse Jenkins: So I don’t think it’s plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.
So let me break that down: When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there’s an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on just in Spain. They’re connected to this continen- scale grid, and so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France, and it drops a little bit in Latvia and all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time.
Once the system in Iberia disconnected from France, though, now it’s operating on its own as an actual island, and there it has very little inertia because the system operator only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non-inertia-based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn’t seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event.
Something — we don’t know what yet — caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we’ve observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency in Spain before all this happened. And we don’t know exactly what that disturbance was.
There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That’s possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system that manages the automatic response to changes in frequency — they were measuring the wrong thing, and they started to speed up or slow down, or something went wrong. That happened in the past, in the case of a generator in Florida that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong, and that causes caused oscillations of the frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection — as far away as North Dakota, which is like 2,000 miles away, you know? So these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.