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Current conditions: July was China’s hottest month since official record-keeping began in 1961 • Chile also experienced a month for the books as its capital, Santiago, had its first rainless July since records began in the 1950s • One death has been reported as multiple fires blaze in central and northern Colorado.
Recent retirements of coal- and gas-fired plants have left a gap in the generating fleet for PJM — the country’s largest regional transmission organization, spanning 13 states and Washington, D.C. — that wind and solar plants (many stuck in permitting and interconnection delays) have yet to fill. Add to that a projected 2% increase in peak demand, analysts say, and you’ve got a recipe for high prices.
To that end, PJM will offer record-high payments to power plant operators for the capacity they agree to maintain next delivery year. Producers across the region can expect to earn $269.92 per megawatt if they commit to being available during predetermined times, with prices in certain locations reaching as high as $466.35 per megawatt-day. Grid operators hope this will encourage the construction of new generating assets.
PJM’s quagmire is also a warning to other transmission organizations and independent system operators navigating a clean energy transition in the face of rising electricity demand. The bottom line? “PJM didn’t prepare for an energy transition we all saw coming,” said Jon Gordon, the director of clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United.
Starting today, Badger State residents can officially take advantage of federal rebates to make their homes less dependent on fossil fuels. Wisconsin is the second state after New York to launch a program to fund home energy improvements with money from the Inflation Reduction Act. To participate, residents will first have to get an energy audit by an approved contractor, who will then model potential energy savings from different courses of action, like new insulation, windows, doors, or even a new heating and cooling system. Depending on their income level and how much energy they save from the project, Wisconsinites will be eligible for up to $10,000 in rebates. But the program may see a slow start — there are currently only 13 approved contractors in the entire state.
The IRA’s home energy rebates programs are among those that are likely to be targeted first by a potential Trump administration. To date, the Department of Energy has provided funding to launch rebate programs in just approved applications from 10 of the 22 states that have applied.
“Hydrogen-ready” has become a popular moniker for utilities and developers constructing new natural gas plants in an era of climate concern. A new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggests that the term — meant to convey the infrastructure’s capability to transition to carbon-free hydrogen when the fuel becomes more available — may be little more than hot air. It identifies three major barriers: a lack of hydrogen supply, a lack of hydrogen-capable pipelines, and a lack of storage capacity. The authors highlight Duke Energy’s plan to build a “hydrogen-ready” gas turbine at an existing coal plant in Roxboro, North Carolina — a plan that wouldn’t introduce hydrogen into the pipeline until 2035, and even then would start with a mix of just 1% hydrogen to 99% methane.
Claims of hydrogen readiness, the report concludes, are “little more than marketing designed to obscure the myriad shortcomings and unanswered questions associated with using hydrogen in methane-fired turbines.”
On the back of a record year for coal consumption driven by demand in Asia, climate advocates are searching for new ways to hasten the decline of the carbon-intensive fuel. One problem that has long bedeviled effort: Shutting down a coal plant prematurely means forfeiting years of profit. This amounts to a premium of $310 million for a five-year premature retirement, according to one estimate.
A group of financial institutions led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore is exploring a new financial tool to get around that barrier. The idea is to allow people and companies to purchase “transition credits” like they purchase carbon offsets. The money from these purchases would reimburse coal plant operators for the money they stand to lose by shutting down their plants. Some big banks see transition credits as a growth market. “We would also like to see how these can be traded, as creating a liquid secondary market should help support the primary markets too,” Patrick Lee, Standard Chartered’s chief executive officer for Singapore and ASEAN, told Bloomberg.
Offshore wind is driving a surge in demand for undersea cables, with backlogs reaching up to 12 years. That’s bad news for utilities but good news for Europe’s three biggest manufacturers — Nexan, Prysmian, and NKT — which have all seen their stock more than triple in the past five years. A single kilometer of one of these cables can, according to Bloomberg, weigh as much as 50 Ford F-150 trucks, and cost more than $1.1 million. The specialized equipment required to produce such an item is a hurdle to any new companies trying to enter the market.
European regulators have long suspected the manufacturers of cartel behavior, and both the German and French governments are currently investigating them for price-fixing. Meanwhile, a Japanese manufacturer has begun construction on a new assembly plant in Scotland, which is slated to start production in 2026.
Residents of Budapest were treated to an unusual sight on Thursday, as around 60 farmers paraded camels through the Hungarian capital to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change on agriculture. A drought cost the country’s agricultural sector $2.7 billion in 2022, according to Hungary’s farm ministry.“
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.