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For those looking forward to bidding good riddance to a hot July, I have some bad news for you: Get ready for hot August..
If you thought it couldnât possibly get hotter than July â the month that set a new record for warmest day ever â think again. Forecasters predict August will be just as extreme â and that those records wonât last long.
âIt is something that can't be ruled out, especially over the next week as we deal with the typical peak of summer,â Tyler Roys, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, told me.
According to Roys, the melting glaciers around the Arctic in particular have contributed to the intense heat this summer. As bright glaciers give way to darker land, the Earth absorbs more heat, trapping that energy within the atmosphere instead of bouncing it back out into space.
âThe more areas that are dealing with above the historical average for temperatures, the more likely you are to see the global temperature average record be set,â Roys explained. âFor some areas that have seen prolonged heat this summer, especially in the West in the United States and across southeastern Europe, the heat can create a nasty feedback loop that is extremely hard to break.â
In a well-timed announcement, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres released a call to action last week for countries to respond to extreme heat by investing in low-carbon cooling systems, worker protections, and improved heat-related mortality data, beyond a focus on phasing out fossil fuels. âClimate change is delivering a hotter and more dangerous world for all of us. And we are not prepared,â the report reads.
A wildfire that started in Northern California on Wednesday has grown into one of the largest in the stateâs recent history. The Park Fire prompted evacuations in parts of Butte and Tehama county. Since then, Plumas and Shasta counties have also been affected by evacuations. As of this morning, more than 360,000 acres had burned, and only 12% of the fire had been contained. Almost 5,000 personnel and 33 helicopters are currently attempting to put out the fire.
Climate scientist Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles called the fireâs behavior âextraordinaryâ in a Thursday live briefing. In less than 24 hours, the fire had scorched through 40 to 50 miles of land. âCalifornia, until very recently, was not really at the epicenterâ of wildfire activity this summer, Swain said. The Park Fire has just changed the game.
Another concern is smoke traveling to other states. In Nevada, which will see minor to moderate extreme heat risk this week, the smoke might impact air quality and visibility. On the other hand, the smoke could also lower temperatures by blocking sunlight. Las Vegas could hit up to 110 degrees on Thursday and Friday â which, while scorching, is still lower than recent temperatures in the city.
Those in the Midwest and eastern Southwest can prepare for an especially sweaty week. Oklahoma, New Mexico, and northern Texas can expect the worst of it until Wednesday, when the heat will move east into Mississippi. Kansas could see temperatures ranging from 100 to 109 degrees on Wednesday, according to Brian Berg, a meteorologist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationâs Kansas office meteorologist. Wichita could come close to breaking its record of 109 degrees, set in 1934.
On Friday, the heat will be concentrated in the Southeast, but the heat risk will also go back to increasing in the Pacific Northwest.
Cities across Japan can expect temperatures above 100 degrees to persist this week. The number of heat strokes in Japan has been growing consistently since 1995, The Guardian reported, and the countryâs meteorological agency has warned that this yearâs summer temperatures might be even higher than in 2023 â Japanâs hottest summer on record. The data is particularly concerning considering Japanâs large senior population. As of last year, almost 30% of the countryâs population is over 65 years old â the group is more vulnerable to heat illnesses and other health complications brought by extreme temperatures.
Iran was forced to shut down government offices and commercial institutions on Sunday due to extreme temperatures. Over 200 people were hospitalized due to heat strokes. The day before, the government had cut working hours short in its agencies. In Tehran, temperatures went up to 107 degrees, but other provinces in the country saw up to 121 degrees. On Tuesday, Iranâs total energy consumption reached 78,106 megawatts, a record, and the closures were intended to conserve energy in addition to protecting workers. While some clouds and rain are expected today, temperatures will continue at extreme levels.
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A renewable energy project can only start construction if it can get connected to the grid.
The clock is ticking for clean energy developers. With the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar developers have to start construction (whatever that means) in the next 12 months and be operating no later than the end of 2027 to qualify for federal tax credits.
But projects can only get built if they can get connected to the grid. Those decisions are often out of the hands of state, local, or even federal policymakers, and are instead left up to utilities, independent system operators, or regional trading organizations, which then have to study things like the transmission infrastructure needed for the project before they can grant a project permission to link up.
This process, from requesting interconnection to commercial operation, used to take two years on average as of 2008; by 2023, it took almost five years, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This creates what we call the interconnection queue, where likely thousands of gigawatts of proposed projects are languishing, unable to start construction. The inability to quickly process these requests adds to the already hefty burden of state, local, and federal permitting and siting â and could mean that developers will be locked out of tax credits regardless of how quickly they move.
Thereâs no better example of the tension between clean energy goals and the process of getting projects into service than the Mid-Atlantic, home to the 13-state electricity market known as PJM Interconnection. Many states in the region have mandates to substantially decarbonize their electricity systems, whereas PJM is actively seeking to bring new gas-fired generation onto the grid in order to meet its skyrocketing projections of future demand.
This mismatch between current supply and present-and-future demand has led to the price for âcapacityâ in PJM â i.e. what the grid operator has greed to pay in exchange for the ability to call on generators when theyâre most needed â jumping by over $10 billion, leading to utility bill hikes across the system.
âThere is definitely tension,â Abe Silverman, a senior research scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former general counsel for New Jerseyâs utility regulator, told me.
While Silverman doesnât think that PJM is âphilosophicallyâ opposed to adding new resources, including renewables, to the grid, âthey donât have urgency you might want them to have. Itâs a banal problem of administrative competency rather than an agenda to stymie new resources coming on the grid.â
PJM is in the midst of a multiyear project to overhaul its interconnection queue. According to a spokesperson, there are around 44,500 megawatts of proposed projects that have interconnection agreements and could move on to construction. Of these, I calculated that about 39,000 megawatts are solar, wind, or storage. Another 63,000 megawatts of projects are in the interconnection queue without an agreement, and will be processed by the end of next year, the spokesperson said, likely making it impossible for wind and solar projects to be âplaced in serviceâ by 2028.
Even among the projects with agreements, âthere probably will be some winnowing of that down,â Mark Repsher, a partner at PA Consulting Group, told me. âMy guess is, of that 44,000 megawatts that have interconnection agreements, they may have other challenges getting online in the next two years.â
PJM has attempted to place the blame for project delays largely at the feet of siting, permitting, and operations challenges.
âSome [projects] are moving to construction, but others are feeling the headwinds of siting and permitting challenges and supply chain backlogs,â PJMâs executive vice president of operations, planning, and security Aftab Khan said in a June statement giving an update on interconnection reforms.
And on high prices, PJM has been increasingly open about blaming âprematureâ retirements of fossil fuel power plants.
In May, PJM said in a statement in response to a Department of Energy order to keep a dual-fuel oil and natural gas plant in Pennsylvania open that it âhas repeatedly documented and voiced its concerns over the growing risk of a supply and demand imbalance driven by the confluence of generator retirements and demand growth. Such an imbalance could have serious ramifications for reliability and affordability for consumers.â
Just days earlier, in a statement ahead of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission conference, PJM CEO Manu Asthana had fretted about âgrowing resource adequacy concernsâ based on demand growth, the cost of building new generation, and, in a direct shot at federal and state policies that encouraged renewables and discouraged fossil fuels, âpremature, primarily policy-driven retirements of resources continue to outpace the development of new generation.â
The Trump administration has echoed these worries for the whole nationâs electrical grid, writing in a report issued this week that âif current retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged, most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks.â So has the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which argued in a 2024 report that most of the U.S. and Canada âfaces mounting resource adequacy challenges over the next 10 years as surging demand growth continues and thermal generators announce plans for retirement.â
State officials and clean energy advocates have instead placed the blame for higher costs and impending reliability gaps on PJMâs struggles to connect projects, how the electricity market is designed, and the operatorâs perceived coolness towards renewables.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told The New York Times in June that the state should âre-examineâ its membership in PJM following last yearâs steep price hikes. In February, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wrote a letter calling for Asthana to be fired. (He will leave the transmission organization by the end of the year, although PJM says the decision was made before Youngkinâs letter.)
That conflict will likely only escalate as developers rush to start projects â which they can only do if they can get an interconnection services agreement from PJM.
In contrast to Silverman, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizenâs energy program, told me that âPJM, internally and operationally, believes that renewables are a drag on the grid and that dispatchable generation, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear, are essential.â
In May, for instance, PJM announced that it had selected 51 projects for its âReliability Resource Initiative,â a one-time special process for adding generation to the grid over the next five to six years. The winning bids overwhelmingly involved expanding existing gas-fired plants or building new ones.
The main barrier to getting the projects built that have already worked their way through the queue, Repsher told me, is âprimarily permitting.â But even with new barriers thrown up by the OBBBA, âthereâs going to be appetite for these projects,â thanks to high demand, Repsher said. âItâs really just navigating all the logistical hurdles.â
Some leaders of PJM states are working on the permitting and deployment side of the equation while also criticizing the electricity market. Pennsylvaniaâs Shapiro has proposed legislation that would set up a centralized state entity to handle siting for energy projects. Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed legislation in May that would accelerate permitting for energy projects, including preempting local regulations for siting solar.
New Jersey, on the other hand, is procuring storage projects directly.
The state has a mandate stemming from its Clean Energy Act of 2018 to add 2,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030. In June, New Jerseyâs utility regulator started a process to procure at least half of that through utility-scale projects, funded through an existing utility-bill-surcharge.
New Jersey regulators described energy storage as âthe most significant source of near-term capacity,â citing specifically the fact that storage makes up the âbulkâ of proposed energy capacity in New Jersey with interconnection approval from PJM.
While the regulator issued its order before OBBBA passed, the focus on storage ended up being advantageous. The bill treats energy storage far more generously than wind and solar, meaning that New Jersey could potentially expand its generation capacity with projects that are more likely to pencil due to continued access to tax credits. The state is also explicitly working around the interconnection queue, not raging against it: âPJM interconnection delays do not pose a significant obstacle to a Phase 1 transmission-scale storage procurement target of 1,000 MW,â the order said.
In the end, PJM and the states may be stuck together, and their best hope could be finding some way to work together â and they may not have any other choice.
âA well-functioning RTO is the best way to achieve both low rates for consumers and carbon emissions reductions,â Evan Vaughan, the executive director of MAREC Action, a trade group representing Mid-Atlantic solar, wind, and storage developers, told me. âI think governors in PJM understand that, and I think that theyâre pushing on PJM.â
âI would characterize the passage of this bill as adding fuel to the fire that was already under states and developers â and even energy offtakers â to get more projects deployed in the region.â
On Neil Jacobsâ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floods âą More than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon Danas âą Mebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.
Neil Jacobs, President Trumpâs nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. âIf confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,â Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the presidentâs 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an âinfluenceâ on the climate, and said heâd direct NOAA to embrace ânew technologiesâ and partner with industry âto advance global observing systems.â
Jacobs previously served as the acting NOAA administrator from 2019 through the end of Trumpâs first term, and is perhaps best remembered for his role in the âSharpiegateâ press conference, in which he modified a map of Hurricane Dorianâs storm track to match Trumpâs mistaken claim that it would hit southern Alabama. The NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs and found he had violated the organizationâs scientific integrity policy.
The Republican budget reconciliation bill could increase household energy costs by $170 per year by 2035 and $353 per year by 2040, according to a new analysis by Evergreen Action, a climate policy group. âBiden-era provisions, now cut by the GOP spending plan, were making it more affordable for families to install solar panels to lower utility bills,â the report found. The law also cut building energy efficiency credits that had helped Americans reduce their bills by an estimated $1,250 per year. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase wholesale electricity prices almost 75% by 2035, as well as eliminate 760,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Separately, an analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Center for American Progress found that the OBBBA could increase average electricity costs by $110 per household as soon as next year, and up to $200 annually in some states.
  EIA
Saudi Arabiaâs state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is in talks with Commonwealth LNG in Louisiana to buy liquified natural gas, Reuters reports. The discussion is reportedly for 2 million tons per year of the facilityâs 9.4 million-ton annual export capacity, which would help âcement Aramcoâs push into the global LNG market as it accelerates efforts to diversify beyond crude oil exportsâ and be the âstrongest signal yet that Aramco intends to take a material position in the U.S. LNG sector,â OilPrice.com notes. LNG demand is expected to grow 50% globally by 2030, but as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported, President Trumpâs tariffs could make it harder for LNG projects still in early development, like Commonwealth, to succeed. âFor the moment, U.S. LNG is still interesting,â Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar focused on natural gas at Columbia Universityâs Center on Global Energy Policy, told Emily. âBut if costs increase too much, maybe people will start to wonder.â
Ford confirmed this week that its $3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan will still qualify for federal tax credits due to eleventh-hour tweaks to the billâs language, The New York Times reports. Though Ford had said it would build its factory regardless of what happened to the credits, the companyâs executive chairman had previously called them âcrucialâ to the construction of the facility and the employment of the 1,700 people expected to work there. Fordâs battery plant is located in Michiganâs Calhoun County, which Trump won by a margin of 56%. The last-minute tweaks to save the credits to the benefit of Ford âsuggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest,â the Times writes.
Italy and Spain are on track to shutter their last remaining mainland coal power plants in the next several months, marking âa major milestone in Europeâs transition to a predominantly renewables-based power system by 2035,â Beyond Fossil Fuels reported Wednesday. To date, 15 European countries now have coal-free grids following Irelandâs move away from coal in 2025.
Italy is set to complete its transition from coal by the end of the summer with the closure of its last two plants, in keeping with the governmentâs 2017 phase-out target of 2025. Two coal plants in Sardinia will remain operational until 2028 due to complications with an undersea grid connection cable. In Spain, the nationâs largest coal plant will be entirely converted to fossil gas by the end of the year, while two smaller plants are also on track to shut down in the immediate future. Once they do, Spainâs only coal-power plant will be in the Balearic Islands, with an expected phase-out date of 2030.
âClimate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just canât come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent â it is time for us all to wake up and fight.â â Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in his 300th climate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.
Some of the Loan Programs Officeâs signature programs are hollowed-out shells.
With a stroke of President Trumpâs Sharpie, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law, stripping the Department of Energyâs Loan Programs Office of much of its lending power. The law rescinds unobligated credit subsidies for a number of the officeâs key programs, including portions of the $3.6 billion allocated to the Loan Guarantee Program, $5 billion for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, $3 billion for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, and $75 million for the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
Just three years ago, the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged LPO, originally established in 2005 to help stand up innovative new clean energy technologies that werenât yet considered bankable for the private sector, expanding its lending authority to roughly $400 billion. While OBBBA leaves much of the officeâs theoretical lending authority intact, eliminating credit subsidies means that it no longer really has the tools to make use of those dollars.
Credit subsidies represent the expected cost to the government of providing a loan or a loan guarantee â including the possibility of a default â and thus how much money Congress must set aside to cover these potential losses. So by axing these subsidies, Congress is effectively limiting the amount of lending that the LPO can undertake, given that many third-party lenders would be reluctant to finance riskier, more novel, or larger projects in the absence of federal credit support.
âThe LPO is statutorily allowed to take loans on its books to finance these projects in these categories, but it has no credit subsidy by which to take the risk required to do so,â Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me.
The particular programs that have been eliminated support new and improved energy technologies, clean energy infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and help native communities access energy project financing. The long-running Loan Guarantee Program and the advanced vehicles program in particular are behind some of the best known LPO efforts, supporting companies such as Tesla, Ford, and NextEra Energy, and projects such as Georgiaâs Vogtle nuclear reactors, the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and Shepherdâs Flat, one of the worldâs largest wind farms.
The Loan Guarantees Program is âthe big Kahuna,â Arun told me. âThis is the longest-standing program of the LPO. So to see this defunded is like, youâre decapitating the LPOâs crown jewel.â
The program only has about $11 million left over in credit subsidies, consisting of funding that it received prior to the IRAâs appropriations. That wonât be enough to make any meaningful loans, Arun said, and is more likely to be used to âkeep a skeleton crew onlineâ for any remaining administrative tasks.
Then thereâs the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, which the IRA stood up with a whopping $250 billion in lending authority to transition and transform existing fossil fuel infrastructure for clean energy purposes. Now, OBBBA has axed the programâs remaining $5 billion in credit subsidies and replaced it with $1 billion in new subsidies for projects that âretool, repower, repurpose, or replaceâ existing energy infrastructure, with a focus on expanding capacity and output as opposed to decarbonizing the economy. It also refashioned the program as the predictably-named âEnergy Dominance Financingâ initiative.
The new-old program â which the law extended through 2028 â no longer requires LPO-funded infrastructure to reduce or sequester emissions, broadening the officeâs lending authority to include support for fossil fuel and critical minerals projects. It also adds language encouraging the LPO to âsupport or enable the provision of known or forecastable electric supply,â which Arun fears is a âbackend way of penalizing the addition of renewable energyâ on previously developed land.
âUnder the Trump administrationâs direction, [the LPO] can use that term, âknown and forecastable,â to actually just say, well, guess what? Renewables are not known or forecastable because they are intermittent due to the weather,â Arun told me. So while government and private industry were once excited about, say, turning sites originally developed for coal mining or coal ash disposal into solar and battery facilities, those days are probably over.
Carbon capture in particular stands to suffer from this reprogramming, Arun said, explaining that while the Biden LPO saw potential in adding carbon capture to natural gas and coal plants, its current incarnation will no longer allocate funding in any meaningful amount âbecause reducing emissions is no longer part of the LPOâs mandate.â Some policymakers and clean energy developers had also hoped that excess renewable energy would make it economically feasible to power the production of hydrogen fuel with renewable energy. But with this law â and really each passing day under Trump â a mass buildout of solar and wind seems less and less likely, making it doubtful that green hydrogen will move down the cost curve.
As bleak as this looks, itâs better than it could have been. There was no guarantee that Trump would keep the LPO around at all. Even in this denuded state, the office can still fund the expansion of existing nuclear projects, and perhaps even the buildout of transmission lines or battery projects on brownfield sites, Arun said, depending on how LPOâs leadership ends up interpreting what it means to âincrease the capacity output of operating infrastructure.â
But in many ways, what happened with the LPO looks like another instance of the Trump administration picking winners and losers: Yes to clean, firm energy and fossil fuels, no to solar, wind, and electric vehicles.
Take the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, for example. OBBBA nixed both its credit subsidies and its tens of billions of dollars in lending authority. Thatâs hardly a surprise, given that the Bush administration created the program in 2007 explicitly to support the domestic development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles and components. But it means that unlike the LPO programs for which lending authority still stands, even if Congress wanted to, it could not redesign the advanced vehicles program to serve a more Trump-aligned purpose. Safer, I suppose, to cut off any opening for funding EVs and hybrids.
The latest LPO rescissions add to the growing list of reasons the private sector has to be wary of the consistently inconsistent landscape for federal funding, Arun told me. He worries that slashing the LPOâs authority at the same time as thereâs so much uncertainty around tax credit eligibility will lead some companies to forgo federal funding opportunities altogether.
âWeâll see if private developers even want to play around with the LPO,â Arun told me, âgiven the uncertainty around the rest of the federal landscape here.â