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The results of Heatmap’s very first insiders survey.
Most climate insiders don’t expect the Inflation Reduction Act to get repealed. They don’t foresee the world’s temperature rising more than 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, and they are bullish on hot rocks and geothermal.
Those are the findings from our exclusive — and highly unscientific — survey of climate and decarbonization insiders. Over the past few weeks, Heatmap has queried more than 30 climate insiders across policy, science, technology, and economics, including high-profile energy entrepreneurs, high-rolling “climate tech” venture capitalists, and some high-ranking (and very-soon-to-be-former) Biden officials.
We wanted to know what they’re thinking about the era to come — and about how they would handle some of the biggest questions that plagued climate policy during the Biden era: Will Congress pass permitting reform? Is there a trade-off between developing artificial intelligence and decarbonizing the power grid? And how would you balance China’s dominance over certain clean technologies — and the need for the American economy, and the American military, to stay competitive? We got a lot of answers. Here’s what they told us…
Folks were bullish about geothermal, hot rocks, and batteries. Five respondents mentioned Fervo, the advanced geothermal company that borrows techniques (and workers) from the fracking industry. Three said Form Energy, which makes cheap iron-air batteries for the power grid; several mentioned Rondo or Antora, which produce thermal batteries that can store and release huge amounts of heat. “The real answer I can't disclose yet, but there is the one,” said a prominent climate tech investor. Get real, replied a policy researcher: The only “climate tech” company today with a claim to be the most important is Chinese EV juggernaut BYD.
Really good heat pumps, said the most respondents, tied with any way to make chemicals, liquid fuels, or plastics in a low-carbon way. A close second: Virtually anything that could be used to decarbonize apartment or multifamily residential buildings. “From the perspective of an apartment-dweller in a large shared building, it seems almost impossible to get buy-in for building decarbonization,” said one climate scientist. “I know ‘convince a landlord/co-op/condo board to do something’ doesn't have a technological solution, but it's the biggest stumbling block.”
Brown hydrogen, green hydrogen, blue hydrogen — it doesn’t matter, throw them all out. Sixteen percent of respondents, including an energy researcher and a climate tech VC, wanted to ditch “the hydrogen rainbow.” “Tipping points,” said one climate scientist. Another climate scientist told us: “Climate crisis, climate emergency, global heating: anything that implies the primary impediment to cutting emissions is scientists using the wrong word.” “Three pillars,” said a former Biden official. “Levelized cost of energy, or LCOE,” said a climate entrepreneur. “It so oversimplifies the way the grid actually works and how electricity is valued that it does more harm than good.” “Carbon accounting, carbon footprint, and anything else that makes us think our current emissions are the most important thing to our future success,” said another VC.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents, spanning every field we queried, said that AI and data center growth isn’t hindering decarbonization … yet. And among the 35% of insiders who answered yes, most also framed their concerns in future terms. “Perhaps not at present, nor over the last few years, but the trajectory is alarming and I do believe they could derail emissions goals at scale within the next 5 years,” said one climate scientist. “Seems like there are plenty of reports of new gas capacity being added,” agreed another researcher. “On the other hand … we would need so much more capacity for hydrogen, electrification of transport and homes, etc., so I'm not sure why we are so worried about AI in the scheme of all the new and upcoming needs for electricity.” “Hot take: AI isn't worried about energy, but energy is worried about AI,” interjected a climate tech VC.
Exactly half of our insiders said: Nope, this tradeoff almost never actually exists. Among the other half, insiders said policymakers should be pragmatic, and only a few said that they should focus on cutting emissions at all costs. “They should do whatever is required to maintain and accelerate political ambition on climate,” said a climate philanthropist. “They should have prioritized social justice issues less,” said one climate tech CEO. “It is never a fair commercial fight with China since our companies are always up against the Chinese state,” said a former U.S. government official. “But it would be a big mistake to allow China to dominate green tech and supply chains — as they would like to do — since that would create an untenable dependence on a country that never hesitates to weaponize its economic advantage. But the imperative to decarbonize is massively important.”
Forty-five percent of respondents said that yes, we should let the EV imports rip. A few researchers and former Biden officials added a twist: “Yes, but only if they are made in the USA.” Others thought that the U.S. should import the cars, but only with a carbon adjustment tariff and a huge investment in U.S. EV manufacturing. “If there were CBAM and other tariffs meant to reflect the imbalance of environmental and labor regulations, then yes,” said one VC. “But then the cars wouldn’t be that competitive.” Almost everyone else said no.
NOPE, said 68% of the insiders. (About 17% said yes, and 15% weren’t sure or thought a minority of the grants might get clawed back.) “I expect it will go after some provisions, but there is quite a bit in the IRA that will be very difficult to repeal since large-scale clean energy investments have been made, and a majority of those in red states whose politicians will not want to give them up,” said one former U.S. official. “A lot of money has already gone out, so I'm guessing the money for EJ initiatives and communities is most at risk,” said a climate researcher. One Biden official threw down the gauntlet: “None of the measures will get repealed. Even unspent money will largely be safe.”
YES, said 59% of insiders. NO, said 41%. “I hope not. That bill sucked,” said a researcher.
“Europe pushing ahead with nuclear energy. Paradigm shifts are possible,” said one energy researcher. “Trump's picks for Energy and Interior could have been much worse,” said another. A former Biden official said that the American Petroleum Institute’s decision to back the IRA was a good sign — and an economist noted the dozen House Republicans opposing repeal encouraged him, too. “Corporates’ willingness to procure clean electrons at a ‘green premium’ for their AI energy demands,” said a climate tech VC.
“Oh dear,” said one researcher. The average of insiders’ answers were 2.8 degrees Celsius, with the highest guesses going up to 3.5 degrees Celsius. A few respondents said 2 degrees Celsius, but only because they thought humanity will have the ability to modulate temperatures by then.“If we don't do anything, I think 3 to 4 degrees,” said another. “We will be able to control global temperatures before we achieve net zero, so by 2100 if civilization is still healthy we will have settled at some optimal temperature,” said another VC.
Some experts believe that the world’s biggest polluter has already hit peak greenhouse gas emissions. Our panelists weren’t so sure: 30% of respondents each said that China’s pollution would peak in the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s, respectively. The remainder would look to 2050 or beyond.
Unlike China, America’s emissions have already peaked. (They did that more than a decade ago, around the Great Recession.) So U.S. policy makers now plan for the arrival of net zero, the hypothesized future date when the American economy will emit roughly as much climate pollution as it absorbs. While respondents were split on when that might happen, most see it emerging in the 2050s or 2060s.
It’s time to focus on climate impacts, which are coming regardless of what happens with emissions, said many. “In the age of Trump, we need to think more about resilience. Preparing ourselves to deal with the weather variability we are seeing already (e.g., California fires, Florida hurricanes, Colorado River drought years) will put us in a much better position to deal with climate change,” a climate scientist added. “I think 2025 is a year that we will start to see adaptation technologies/approaches and solar geoengineering start playing much larger roles in the climate response policy portfolio,” one researcher-activist told us.
But the climate tech industry is upbeat: “It's an optimistic time for climate tech,” one climate tech CEO said. “The return of climate-tech funding in the last 5 years has allowed a lot of ideas to be tried, and there is now enough data on what is working and what is not. The good news is that there is more than enough in the ‘working’ column to move full speed ahead.” And a climate VC agreed: “The second Trump administration will see more acceleration for industrial climate tech than the Biden years.” “The United States has better technology than any country in the world,” said a Biden official. “Biden’s policies combined with America First messaging will forever dispel the myth that China has any sort of technology lead by 2028 … emissions will go down faster during the Trump administration than they did in the Biden administration because deployment has been positioned to reach all time highs starting in 2026.”
Yet some saw risks for the world ahead. “The most important stories for climate action in 2025 have less to do with climate and more to do with geoeconomic competition,” said one public policy expert. Trade fragmentation may drive prices up and slow innovation, greatly delaying technology diffusion and deployment. And there is a major risk of continued or worsened conflict — the greatest risk being China's positioning vis a vis the Pacific and Taiwan.”
OUR PANEL INCLUDED… Gavin Schmidt, British climatologist | Jennifer Wilcox, University of Pennsylvania chemical engineering professor and former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy and Carbon Management | Kim Cobb, coral scientist and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society | Tim Latimer, chief executive of Fervo Energy | Clay Dumas, founding partner at Lowercarbon Capital | Holly Jean Buck, environment professor at University at Buffalo | J. Mijin Cha, environmental studies professor at UC Santa Cruz | Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist | Ken Caldeira, senior scientist emeritus at Carnegie Science | Apoorv Bhargava, chief executive at Weavegrid | Todd Stern, former U.S. special envoy for climate change | Jigar Shah, U.S. Loan Programs Office director | Jesse Jenkins, energy systems professor at Princeton | Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial | Amy Francetic, managing general partner at Buoyant Ventures | Jane Flegal, executive director at Blue Horizons Foundation | Shuchi Talati, executive director at the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering… and many more …
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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.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
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.
Then again, there are reasons why he’d want to focus on existing generation.
Just how big is the data center boom, really? How much is electricity demand going to expand over the coming decades? Business plans, government policy, and alarming environmental forecasts are all based on the idea that we’re on an unrelenting ride upwards in terms of electricity use, especially from data centers used to power artificial intelligence.
It’s one reason why the new Trump administration declared in the first days of its return to power that the country was in an “energy emergency,” and hasbeen used as a justification for its attempted revival of the coal industry.
But one mildly dissenting voice came from a perhaps-unexpected corner: the power industry.
Constellation Energy’s Chief Executive Officer Joseph Dominguez spent a portion of the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday throwing lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections, even as the company looks to profit from increased demand for the power that its over 30,000-megawatt, largely nuclear fleet serves.
Dominguez told his audience of investors and analysts that utilities and their power customers have been telling Constellation that “the same data center need is being considered in multiple jurisdictions across the United States at the same time, just like fishing. If you’re a fisherman, you put a bunch of lines in the water to try to catch fish, and the data center developers are doing exactly the same thing.”
This means that different electricity markets or utility territories could report the same future data center demand, when ultimately the developer will pick just one site.
Tallying the demand growth projections from a few large power markets — namely MISO, which largely serves the Midwest; PJM, which largely serves the East Coast; and ERCOT, the Texas energy market — which together “account for less than half” of U.S. power demand, Dominguez said, Constellation finds that they project “notably higher” demand growth than many third-party consultants and analysts foresee for the country as a whole.
“It’s hard not to conclude that the headlines are inflated,” Dominguez said. He further claimed that Constellation had “done the math,” and that “if Nvidia were able to double its output and every single chip went to ERCOT, it still wouldn’t be enough chips to support some of the load forecasts.”
He argued that utilities tend to overstate load growth — an observation backed up by research from the Rocky Mountain Institute. “We get it,” he said. “Utilities have to plan to ensure that the system is reliable.” That frequently means erring on the side of having more generation and transmission to serve future demand as opposed to being caught short.
Dominguez is hardly the first voice to call into question load growth forecasts. Energy industry consultant Jonathan Koomey told Heatmap more than a year ago that “everyone needs to calm the heck down” about AI-driven load growth. Data center developers, chipmakers, and AI companies would likely find efficiencies to get more computing power out of less electric power, he predicted, similar to how the original data center buildout avoided catastrophic predictions of imminent power shortages and spiking electricity prices in the early 2000s.
Since then, demand growth projections have done nothing but rise. But even just a few weeks ago, Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, told Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, “It is simultaneously true that I think this is going to be a really large demand driver and that we have bubble-like characteristics in terms of the amount of stuff that people are trying to get done.”
Now, to be clear, Dominguez has a reason to talk down expectations of future demand growth — and with it the expectation that there needs to be massive investment in new power plants. Constellation owns and operates a fleet of nuclear power plants, and is bringing on a gas-heavy fleet with its planned acquisition of Calpine.
Dominguez also said that new natural gas and renewables were likely to prove expensive to build.
“The cost of new entry, whether that be for combined cycle machines or solar with storage, has gone up substantially, as has the time to build and site these assets,” Dominguez said. “Now, at the end of the day, in a tightening market, we compete with the cost of new entry.”
This is halfway consistent with what other big players in the energy industry have been saying. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra, which has a large renewables development business,has been telling anyone who will listen that the way to meet urgent load growth is with renewables and batteries, as they can be built cheaper and faster than natural gas, let alone nuclear.
Dominguez’s take, however, is that it’s all quite expensive and lengthy considering the likely level of need.
“When I listen to some of the comments on these calls, I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here.”
On defending wind, Russian gas, and NREL layoffs
Current conditions: A state of emergency is in effect in Manitoba, Canada, due to multiple wildfires • 17 million people in the south-central U.S. are at risk of severe storms on Tuesday • The Interior Department has reportedly suspended air quality monitoring for National Parks, including California’s Joshua Tree, where the AQI today is moderate.
Attorneys general from 17 Democratic states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging President Trump’s executive order pausing approvals, permits, and loans for onshore and offshore wind projects. The lawsuit argues that Trump exceeds his authority with the indefinite pause, which threatens “thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments, and … is delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet,” in the words of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition.
In a response to the lawsuit, a White House spokesperson told The Associated Press that “the American people voted for the president to restore America’s energy dominance, and Americans in blue states should not have to pay the price of the Democrats’ radical climate agenda.” As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written, however, state climate goals “become nearly impossible if no additional [wind] projects are able to get through the permitting process until at least 2029,” with New York state’s especially in jeopardy after the administration ordered the halt of construction on the fully permitted Empire Wind project south of Long Island.
The European Union plans to announce on Tuesday a 2027 deadline for companies to end any remaining energy contracts with Russia, the Financial Times reported Monday. Though the EU’s use of Russian oil and coal virtually ended with sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe still bought 49.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas through pipelines in 2024, and another 24.2 billion transported on ships as liquified natural gas, per Rystad Energy (though some of that LNG was resold). Another way of looking at it: “The EU purchased a total of [$26 billion] in Russian energy in 2024, exceeding its military assistance to Ukraine last year,” Bloomberg writes, with imports accounting for about 19% of the bloc’s total gas purchases.
The proposed measures will need to be approved by a majority of EU member states and the European Parliament before they can be adopted, according to FT. Without Russian LNG, Europe is expected to turn to the U.S. to meet its energy needs.
Share of European Union gas demand met by Russian supply, 2001-2024
IEA
More than 100 employees at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory lost their jobs in a round of layoffs on Monday, Mother Jones reports. The cuts included non-probationary employees, or those who’ve worked at the Department of Energy division for over two years.
Though NREL has more than 3,000 employees on staff, sources who spoke with Mother Jones described the cuts as “rather haphazard and unorganized,” while others stressed that “if I am suddenly the only person on my team, I can’t handle that work.” The layoffs also notably come after President Trump’s “skinny” budget proposed $15 billion in cuts to Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding. The White House Office of Management and Budget has said that the budget aims to reorient the Department of Energy’s funding away from “unreliable renewable energy” and “toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to end door-to-door survivor outreach in disaster areas for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire seasons, Wired reported Monday, based on a FEMA memo dated May 2. Previously, the agency would canvass disaster survivors to inform them about how to register for federal aid, a policy that one emergency management coordinator told Wired was critical given how many survivors don’t get adequate information about recovery resources otherwise. Instead, FEMA’s memo said the agency will “focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues.”
Last year, Republicans on the Oversight Committee singled out FEMA’s outreach program over alleged “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” in the wake of Hurricane Milton. The White House’s budget has also cited FEMA for supposedly “skipping over homes when providing aid.” But the Trump administration has also sought to pare back the agency aggressively: Earlier this year, it denied a request for federal aid from Arkansas’ Republican Governor and former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders after severe tornadoes that left more than 40 people in the region dead, arguing the disaster was not “beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies” to address.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
The Los Angeles Dodgers have faced calls from activists and fans to end their sponsorship deal with Phillips 66’s 76 gas station brand — but the partnership might face a natural end due to the Olympics coming to L.A. in 2028, Legal Planet reports. Dodger Stadium will be an official Olympic venue during the summer games, and its 76 gas ads will violate the Olympic Charter prohibiting “commercial installations and advertising signs … in the stadia, venues or other sports grounds.”
The Dodgers are under mounting pressure to drop the Phillips 66 partnership even earlier. There are 76 gasoline ads “plastered throughout the ballpark, from the visiting team’s bullpen to the ribbon board screens lining the stands … Even the on-deck circles on the field, where batters prepare to hit, are orange-and-blue 76 logos,” the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth wrote last year in a column calling for the team to break up with the oil company. As of November, the Houston-based energy company was facing six counts of violating the U.S. Clean Water Act by illegally discharging 790,000 gallons of wastewater from its Carson refinery into the L.A. County sewer system. “The lead up to the 2028 Olympic games period would seem to be a natural time for the Dodgers to reset a marquee sponsor for years to come — and to do so on their own terms — or else be forced to by Olympic rules,” Legal Planet writes.
“C’mon Ford, c’mon GM, c’mon Chrysler, let’s roll again/Build something useful that people need, build us a safe way for us to be/Build us something that won’t kill our kids, that runs real clean, that runs real clean.” —Lyrics to Neil Young’s new single “Let’s Roll Again.”