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On mass coronal ejections, China tariffs, and the Panama Canal
Current conditions: Central Florida could see severe storms today • The cicadas are out in St. Louis • Kenya’s president declared today a public holiday to mourn the 238 people who have died in recent flooding.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center has issued a rare “severe geomagnetic storm watch” due to intense explosions on the sun that are spewing solar material toward Earth. This week a “large sunspot cluster” that’s about 16 times the diameter of Earth has produced at least five mass coronal ejections, huge bursts of plasma and magnetic fields that can damage satellites and disrupt electrical grids. They will start to hit Earth today and could continue to do so through the weekend. NOAA is advising operators of satellites and grids to prepare. On the plus side, the event could mean people as far south as Alabama will be able to see the Northern Lights.
NOAA
NOAA
Looking ahead to next week: On Tuesday, President Biden is expected to announce new China tariffs targeting “strategic sectors” including electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, according to Bloomberg. Existing levies will remain in place. Biden wants to “contrast his approach” with that of former President Trump heading into the November election, Reuters added. Trump has proposed sweeping tariff hikes on China that some analysts say would boost inflation. But both candidates no doubt want to be seen as tough on China, which largely dominates in global EV sales and is a major producer of cheap solar and battery tech. The Biden administration is worried “that Chinese dominance of the global market for these essential technologies would harm the U.S. economy and national security,” as Somini Sengupta explained for The New York Times.
Earlier this week, climate envoy John Podesta sat down with his Chinese counterpart Liu Zhenmin to discuss climate issues ahead of COP29 later this year. No word yet about what came out of those talks…
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And speaking of Trump, a bombshell Washington Post report details the goings on at a Mar-a-Lago dinner where the former president rubbed shoulders with oil executives and lobbyists last month. Unnamed sources say Trump told the wealthy attendees to raise $1 billion to help him take back the White House, and in return, he promised to:
Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa told the Post that “Donald Trump is selling out working families to Big Oil for campaign checks. It’s that simple.”
Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported recently on how allies of Big Oil pumped more than $6.4 million into Trump’s joint fundraising committee in just the first three months of 2024 — on pace to surpass the $6.9 million the industry contributed in all of 2023.
Water levels are rising in the lake that supplies the Panama Canal, and authorities say they expect the passage to be back to its full operating capacity by early 2025. The canal is one of the world’s biggest shipping routes, moving some $270 billion worth of cargo every year. But a record prolonged drought in the region has reduced the number of daily crossings over the last year or so. Increased rainfall means the drought is beginning to ease, and authorities will start slowly permitting more traffic over the coming months.
As Reuters reported, U.S. liquified natural gas exporters are jostling for some of those additional slots, and the canal’s administrator Ricaurte Vasquez is exploring how to reasonably accommodate them. “They have very big aspirations in which they would like to have a canal dedicated to them,” Vasquez said, “but that is not possible, since this is a canal that should be open to every type of commerce internationally.”
The canal authorities have been exploring ways to safeguard against future droughts brought by a warming climate. One suggestion involves creating a “dry canal” that would move cargo using existing infrastructure like roadways, railways, and ports. The president-elect Jose Raul Mulino this week said he would speed up permitting for building new water reservoirs by 2030.
The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere jumped in March, marking the biggest year-over-year increase ever recorded. According to UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the global average concentration of CO2 in March was 4.7 parts per million (ppm) higher than in March last year, which is a greater leap than the previous highest increase of 4.1 ppm recorded in 2016. “We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at the institute. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.”
The unusual jump is due partly to the El Niño event and an “unusual dip” in March 2023. But the records show that the rate of growth is generally increasing as we continue to burn fossil fuels. Keeling added that a very high growth rate could continue for several more months. “This recent surge shows how far we still need to go to stabilize the climate system,” he said. “Stabilization will require that CO2 levels start to fall. Instead, CO2 is rising faster than ever.” Back in 2022, NOAA confirmed that modern CO2 concentration levels match those not seen since 4 million years ago, when “sea levels were between 5 and 25 meters higher than today, high enough to drown many of the world’s largest modern cities.”
“Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.” –Kevin Williams writing for Inside EVs about his trip to the Beijing Auto Show, where he realized just how advanced China’s EVs really are.
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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.