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Climate

Interior Memo Complicates Race to Qualify for Wind, Solar Subsidies

On an Interior Department memo, unstoppable wind and solar, and a lawsuit

Interior Memo Complicates Race to Qualify for Wind, Solar Subsidies
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Invest 93 could develop into a tropical depression and dump 3 to 6 inches of rain on southern Louisiana between now and this weekendWestern and central Massachusetts face a small tornado risk this afternoon and evening Spain attributes more than 1,100 deaths this spring and summer to extreme heat. 

THE TOP FIVE

1. ‘Drastic’ Interior memo adds further bottleneck for construction of wind, solar

A new secretarial order from the Department of the Interior’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Gregory Wischer, states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Wischer’s and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s respective offices. My colleague Jael Holzman, who reviewed the document, explains that the new layer of review would apply to “essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction,” creating a further bottleneck for projects that need to be underway to qualify for federal tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists 68 different activities that will now come under this extra level of review. In sum, the order is “so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage,” Jael writes. “In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.” Read her full report here.

2. Solar, wind ‘unstoppable’ despite the OBBBA: report

Solar and wind are “economically unstoppable,” even without tax credits, a new report on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act from the Columbia Business School found. According to the report, solar photovoltaic prices have decreased by approximately 80% over the past decade, wind by approximately 70%, and lithium-ion battery by approximately 90%. As a result, gas combined cycle power plants are now more expensive than both solar and wind. Still, given the 2026 phaseout of production tax credits, “we will likely see a brief spike in projects for the next 18 months as they race to be placed while still eligible, then a deceleration,” Columbia Business School found. Additionally, while the OBBBA offers a “silver lining” for renewable projects like nuclear, geothermal, and carbon capture, cuts to Department of Energy research and development funding will mean “the United States will only fall further behind in the global clean energy race,” the report continues.

3. 20 states sue FEMA over elimination of natural disaster mitigation grants

A coalition of 20 Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston on Wednesday against the Federal Emergency Management Agency over its elimination of a natural disaster mitigation grant program, The New York Times and Associated Press report. The lawsuit, which follows near-record rains in New York and New Jersey, as well as the catastrophic floods in Texas, claims that terminating the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program is unlawful because it wasn’t done with the approval of Congress. The Trump administration’s shutdown of the grant is “making it much harder for communities across our state to protect themselves against future extreme weather events and putting lives at risk,” New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, said in a statement.

Initially established by law in 2000, BRIC’s roughly $4.5 billion grants have helped fund nearly 2,000 resiliency and mitigation projects around the country. FEMA justified its decision to terminate the program as part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

4. Governors pen letter to PJM demanding operator restore its ‘legitimacy’ by appointing ‘widely respected leaders’

A bipartisan group of governors representing nine of the 13 states in which PJM operates issued an open letter on Wednesday demanding the grid operator appoint “widely respected leaders” to its two open board seats to “restore PJM’s legitimacy.” The letter specifically cited a lack of confidence in PJM due to its “multi-year inability to connect new resources to its grid efficiently and to engage in effective long-term transmission planning,” as well as the termination of two members of its Board of Managers and the upcoming departure of its CEO. The governors further requested a meeting with PJM’s nominating committee to share its proposed slate of candidates who “understand the concerns of ratepayers facing rising costs and who will be ready to collaborate with the incoming CEO to instill a new, more collaborative and more effective ethos at PJM.”

As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has reported, though many states in PJM’s service area on the Mid-Atlantic have ambitious decarbonization goals, the operator is “actively seeking to bring new gas-fired generation onto the grid to meet its skyrocketing projections of future demand.” But while PJM has blamed permitting woes and the retirements of power plants for its challenges, “state officials and clean energy advocates have instead placed the blame for higher costs and impending reliability gaps on PJM’s struggles to connect projects, how the electricity market is designed, and the operator’s perceived coolness towards renewables,” Matthew goes on.

5. Netherlands to cut offshore wind goal by 40%

The Netherlands will cut its offshore wind goals by as much as 40%, claiming its aim of 50 gigawatts of generation capacity by 2030 is “not realistic,” Bloomberg reports. The new target will be in the range of 30 to 40 gigawatts, adjusted to consider both the high cost of development and lagging power demand growth. The announcement comes as part of a larger slowdown in offshore wind globally. The International Renewable Energy Agency has stated that to meet global targets of tripling renewable energy use by 2030, offshore wind capacity would need to grow to 494 gigawatts by 2030, up from 73 gigawatts currently.

THE KICKER

  Tesla

Tesla teased the launch of a six-seat version of its Model Y, the Model YL, on Wednesday. The car will be available in China in the fall, and appears to be a strategic move by the automaker to “boost its sales amid rising competition from BYD and other domestic manufacturers,” The Verge reports.

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A heat dome.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.

Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.

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AM Briefing: Congress Saves Energy Star

On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans

Congress Balks at Trump’s Bid to Shoot Down Energy Star
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.


THE TOP FIVE

1. Congress pushes back on Trump’s plan to kill Energy Star

In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”

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Climate

The West Is Primed for a Megafire

Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.

The Cram fire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Jefferson County Sheriff's Office

What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.

By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.

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