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On the IEA’s latest report, wildfires in North Carolina, and EV adoption
Current conditions: A wildfire in New Jersey’s Wharton State Forest has burned 2,300 acres • An ancient Roman bridge collapsed in central Spain after extreme rainfall from four consecutive storms • Los Angeles could see record-breaking March heat today with temperatures nearing 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
The ballooning price tag of President Trump’s tax cut wishlist and preliminary budget negotiations on the Hill are pointing toward a budgetary showdown in which many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s benefits could become fiscal casualties. D.C. veterans, including former GOP Hill staff, tell Heatmap that even the most bipartisan parts of the IRA could be sacrificed in the budget reconciliation process in order to make room for Trump’s biggest legislative priorities, including extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security, and removing the cap on the state and local tax liability deductions.
The Congressional Budget Office, as well as third-party groups like the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, have estimated that an extension of the 2017 tax cuts would cost between $3.7 and $4.5 trillion through 2034. If all of Trump’s additional proposed tax cuts were enacted, the cost would jump to $6.8 trillion, according to Penn Wharton. Congress is still at the beginning of the reconciliation process. The next step is for the House and Senate to negotiate a topline number and issue instructions to the committees that will write the final bill on the levels of spending they’re allowed to include.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman explain, the dollar amount assigned to each committee is a ceiling, and it’s calculated on a net basis. So if the Ways and Means committee, which oversees tax legislation, is assigned a $4.5 trillion deficit ceiling, as it was in the version of the reconciliation instructions that recently passed the House, it’s going to have to find several trillion dollars worth of spending programs to cut. Fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits — which, according to new modeling from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, would raise about $850 billion — will start to look harder to avoid.
Major wildfires erupted in the Carolinas over the weekend, burning more than 4,000 acres and threatening some areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Helene six months ago. Debris from hurricanes makes already battered areas more vulnerable to fires, Colleen Hagerty wrote for Heatmap in the aftermath of Helene. And as Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote more recently, researchers are pointing to the South as a new area of wildfire concern.
South Carolina’s governor declared a state of emergency Saturday as the Table Rock fire spread to cover 300 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, prompting evacuations. In North Carolina, several large fires are raging out of control in Polk County, southeast of Ashville, where last year’s Hurricane Helene brought devastating floods and debris. Much of Polk County is enduring drought conditions. High winds, dry vegetation, and low humidity are fueling the fires, but response efforts are also hampered by steep terrain and hurricane debris that has yet to be cleared. Mandatory evacuations were in effect for some parts of Polk County.
A home destroyed in a fire in North Carolina.Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Global energy demand rose by 2.2% last year, faster than the average pace seen over the past decade or so, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review 2025 report. The rise was led mostly by the power sector as record warmth meant greater need for air conditioning, especially in emerging and developing countries. “Nearly all of the rise in electricity demand was met by low-emissions sources,” the report said, with renewables and nuclear providing 80% of the growth in global electricity generation. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose last year (by 0.8%) but at a slower rate than in 2023. “The global increase of 300 million tonnes of CO2 was influenced by record high temperatures,” the report said. “If weather in 2024 had remained consistent with 2023, itself the second-hottest year on record, about half of the increase in global emissions would have been avoided.”
In case you missed it: We now know which grants the Environmental Protection Agency has canceled. A document the EPA shared with the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives. Here’s the full list of grants, by program.
A new study finds that political views remain a key factor in determining whether someone chooses to buy an electric vehicle. The report, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined new EV registration data at a county level between 2012 and 2023 and found that during those years, the scale of the EV market expanded, yet nearly half of all sales were in the 10% most Democratic counties. Researchers controlled for other factors, such as income and gas prices, and still, the strong correlation between political ideology and EV adoption remains. And it hasn’t decreased over time. “We find little evidence that the U.S. EV market has broadened across the political spectrum from 2012 to 2023,” the researchers say. There were some exceptions, though: EV trucks and vans are “significantly less concentrated” in left-leaning counties compared to electric cars and SUVs.
California now has nearly 50% more EV chargers than it does gas pumps. According to the California Energy Commission, there are roughly 178,000 EV chargers in the state, compared with approximately 120,000 gas nozzles.
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On record-breaking temperatures, oil prices, and Tesla Robotaxis
Current conditions: Wildfires are raging on the Greek island of Chios • Forecasters are monitoring a low-pressure system in the Atlantic that could become a tropical storm sometime today • Residents in eastern North Dakota are cleaning up after tornadoes ripped through the area over the weekend, killing at least three people.
A dangerous heat wave moves from the Midwest toward the East Coast this week, and is expected to challenge long-standing heat records. In many places, temperatures could hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit and feel even warmer when humidity is factored in. “High overnight temperatures will create a lack of overnight cooling, significantly increasing the danger,” according to the National Weather Service. Extreme heat warnings and advisories are in effect from Maine through the Carolinas, across the Ohio Valley and down into southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana. “It’s basically everywhere east of the Rockies,” National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Gehring told The Associated Press. “That is unusual, to have this massive area of high dew points and heat.”
AccuWeather
Regional grid operator PJM Interconnection, which covers 13 states, issued an energy emergency alert for today. The alert urges power transmission and generation owners to delay any planned maintenance so that no grid sources are out of commission as temperatures soar. A heat wave of this nature is rare this early in the summer. The last time temperatures hit 100 degrees in June in New York City, for example, was in 1995, according to AccuWeather. Heat waves are becoming more frequent and more intense as the climate warms. Here’s a look at how these events have changed over the past 60 years or so:
Oil markets are jittery this morning after Iran’s parliament endorsed a measure to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. About 20% of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas shipments travel through the shipping route, and as The Wall Street Journalexplains, the supplies “dictate prices paid by U.S. drivers and air travelers.” Oil prices rose to five-month highs this morning on the news. Tehran has long threatened to close the strait, but such a move is seen as unlikely because it would disrupt Iran’s own energy exports, which are its “sole global energy revenue stream,” one analyst told the Journal.
A handful of climate-related provisions in the GOP’s reconciliation bill are in limbo after the Senate parliamentarian advised that the policies violated the “Byrd Rule,” i.e. were deemed extraneous to budgetary matters, and thus were subject to a 60-vote threshold instead of the simple majority allowed for reconciliation. The provisions include:
The Senate Finance Committee is set to meet with the parliamentarian today.
In case you missed it: The Supreme Court on Friday gave the green light for fuel producers to challenge a Clean Air Act waiver issued by the EPA that lets California set tougher vehicle emissions standards than those at the federal level. A lower court rejected the lawsuit from Diamond Alternative Energy and other challengers last year, but as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, California’s ambitious Zero-Emission Vehicle Program is hurting fuel producers, so they have standing to sue. The vote was 7 to 2, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has explained, if the EPA waiver is eliminated, Tesla could take a big financial hit. That’s because the zero-emissions vehicle program lets automakers earn credits based on the number and type of ZEVs they produce, and since Tesla is a pure-play EV company, it has always generated more credits than it needs. “The sale of all regulatory credits combined earned the company a total of $595 million in the first quarter [of 2025] on a net income of just $409 million,” Brigham reported. “That is, they represented its entire margin of profitability. On the whole, credits represented 38% of Tesla’s net income last year.”
Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, over the weekend. A small number of rides were doled out to hand-picked influencers and retail investors, and a Tesla employee sat in the front passenger seat of each autonomous Model Y to monitor safety. The rollout was “uncharacteristically low-key,” Bloombergreported, but CEO Elon Musk said the company is being “super paranoid about safety.” San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Antonio are rumored to be the next cities slated for Robotaxi service. “Tesla is still behind Waymo, by several years,” wrote Jameson Dow at Electrek. “But Waymo has also not been scaling particularly quickly, and certainly both are slower than a lot of techno-optimists would have liked. So we’ll have to see which tortoise wins this race.” The stakes are pretty high: Investment management firm ARK Invest projected that Robotaxis could bring in $951 billion for Tesla by 2029 and make up 90% of the company’s earnings.
A new report from energy think tank Ember concludes that in the world’s sunniest cities, it’s now possible (and economically viable) to get at least 90% of the way to constant solar electricity output for every hour of the day, 365 days a year.
A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.