You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Last summer was the hottest in two millennia. We won’t get any relief this year.
An overwhelming majority of Americans will experience above-average heat this summer, and temperatures in more than half of the contiguous United States are expected to top the historical average by at least 2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to AccuWeather. New York is expected to endure twice as many 90-plus-degree days as last year; Boston could experience up to four times as many.
Americans got a taste of what’s to come this week, with a blistering heat wave that began in the Southwest and has scorched the East Coast for the past three days. That heat may have come early based on the historical averages, but considering more recent trends, it’s right on track.
“The biggest changes that we have seen in recent decades is that the heat wave season has been expanding, starting earlier in the late spring and ending later into early fall, on average,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson told Heatmap.
The northern Rockies, Great Lakes, and the Northeast are areas of particular concern, Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather’s Lead Long-Range Forecaster, told Heatmap. Those regions will likely experience less precipitation and more intense heat this summer compared to their historical average. “The Northern Plains and Upper Midwest are tricky,” Pastelok said. “Right now, this area is getting rain, but this could cut off by the very end of June into July, and turn around to dryness with the heat following.”
While temperatures will most likely peak in the interior Southwest — Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico — by early July, the region can expect temperatures between 112 and 118 degrees until then. Monsoon season, which brings warm winds and rainfall inland, will likely arrive in late July instead of the usual late June, Pastelok said. Peak heat could come much later — anytime between July and September — for those in the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and the Northeast.
The biggest “warm anomalies” are expected in the Southwest and central Rockies, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley and the Northeast, according Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “We are looking at anomalies for the entire summer of +4 degrees (F) which is pretty significant over a 3 month period,” Kines wrote in an email to Heatmap.
Heat won’t be the only extreme weather this season. Drought could be severe, particularly in the Southwest — including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where rainfall could come in below 50% of the historical average. That dry spell could intensify over the northern Plains, Great Lakes, and the Northeast later in the summer. The Gulf Coast, meanwhile, can anticipate a staggering 22 to 36 inches of rain this season — compared to its usual 15 to 24 inches — which will likely make flooding an issue.
After a wetter winter, meteorologists anticipated a slow start to the wildfire season in California and the Southwest. In fact, the number of wildfires this year is expected to come in below average: AccuWeather meteorologists predict 35,000 to 50,000 wildfires this year, compared to a historical average of about 69,000. Yet the fires in California also seem to have picked up speed a little earlier than normal. Last week saw more than two dozen fires in the state, perhaps heralding increased fire activity to come.
So how will we deal with all this? Northern cities, especially, tend to be less equipped to deal with extreme summer heat. In Boston, temperatures reached a record-breaking 98 degrees on Wednesday, a day after Mayor Michelle Wu declared a heat emergency. The city opened cooling centers this week in an attempt to minimize the number of heat-related medical emergencies.
Boston Green New Deal Director Oliver Sellers-Garcia told Heatmap that the city is bringing more government agencies into the heat management effort. The Fire and Parks departments plan to set up misting stations, and the city will continue to provide extra pop-up cooling centers in coordination with Boston’s Centers for Youth and Families. Those strategies, Sellers-Garcia said, “can have an instant benefit for someone, whether it’s just a super hot day and they have to get to work or it’s a declared heat wave.”
In Florida, people are used to chronic heat, Miami-Dade County’s Chief Heat Officer Jane Gilbert told Heatmap. Last year the county had 42 heat advisories (which happens when the thermometer reaches 105) and 70 warnings (110), Gilbert said, and this season is already proving more intense: May was the warmest ever on record in the state. To protect residents, the county has established a comprehensive public awareness campaign that targets those most affected by the heat, including outdoor workers, children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with chronic illnesses. It also runs more than 30 cooling centers.
According to Gilbert, the goal is to educate people about the extent of heat impacts so they can make better choices — drink more water, find shade, limit physical activity — and protect their health. “We haven’t fully appreciated, historically as a community, how it impacts our lives,” she said.
Here’s what’s happened so far ...
June 24: On Juneteenth, over 82 million Americans were under active National Weather Service extreme heat alerts — but, due to the national holiday, many publicly operated cooling centers were closed. While Boston had opened 14 new facilities in partnership with the Centers for Youth and Families, for instance, none of them stayed open Wednesday.
The same thing happened in New York, where more than 200 cooling centers were closed for the holiday, most of them libraries. While other heat preparedness measures were still in place — Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free admission for state parks — residents counting on a facility near home had to change plans last minute. On Sunday, New York turned 45 public schools into cooling centers, this time because the public libraries were closed due to budget cuts.
In Chicago, only one cooling center was open during the holiday. The lack of cooling spaces available sparked action from homelessness advocates, who are urging the city to offer more cooling centers that are open 24/7 and also to make those facilities available when the heat index is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because cooling centers are often multi-purpose spaces, data on their usage is limited. In Boston, 245 people visited cooling centers from June 18 to 20, the mayor’s office told me. New York City’s Department of Emergency Management could only say that six people visited four of the schools open Sunday.
June 21: Communities from Kansas to Maine experienced record-breaking temperatures, with heat indices above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. Cities including Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Burlington, Vermont opened cooling centers, and Boston and New York activated heat emergency plans. Schools in Buffalo, New York moved to half-day schedules for the week in response to temperature advisories.
The heat wave was expected to hold into the weekend, increasing the risk of emergencies. But ensuring that at-risk residents are aware of public services and heat mitigation strategies is often more difficult than simply providing amenities like cooling centers and air conditioners, Benjamin Zaitchik, a professor of climate dynamics at Johns Hopkins University, told Heatmap. “Preventing heat deaths — in principle, at least — is easy,” Zaitchik said. “It just requires good planning, good communication, good networks.”
The same heatwave afflicted much of the Southwestern United States the week before. Temperatures in Phoenix and Las Vegas exceeded 110 degrees, breaking records and prompting cities to issue heat advisories covering tens of millions of people. At a Trump rally in Las Vegas, 24 people received treatment for heat-related complications and six were hospitalized, The Guardian reported.
June 14-19: More than 1,000 people died during the sacred Muslim pilgrimage known as the hajj as extreme heat gripped Saudi Arabia in mid-June. In Mecca, where temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, worshippers gripped umbrellas and water bottles to combat the heat. A study from 2019 predicted that hajj conditions would exceed an “extreme danger heat threshold” more frequently in the coming decades, especially when the pilgrimage — which is scheduled according to the lunar calendar — coincides with the warmer months of the year.
The death toll was about five times higher than last year, according to CNN.
June 10: Passengers on a Qatar Airways flight passed out from heat as their plane sat on the tarmac at Athens International Airport. Flight 204, which was delayed for three hours with passengers stuck inside, experienced a malfunction in its air conditioning. Two days later, authorities shut down the Acropolis for five hours due to the 102 degree weather, which marked Greece’s earliest heat wave on record. Many schools were also closed for the day, and several air-conditioned spaces were opened to the public. Greece’s Health Ministry advised older people and those with chronic illnesses to stay indoors.
The intense weather continued throughout the weekend, and at least five tourists were reported to have died due to extreme heat.
Other parts of Southern Europe, such as Cyprus and Turk, have also suffered through heat waves this year. During the second week of June, temperatures in Cyprus exceeded 104 degrees every day and classes ended early. On June 14, some areas experienced their hottest June day ever, reaching 113 degrees. That same week, Turkey also battled record temperatures — they were 8 to 12 degrees higher than the average for the season.
May and June: Both Mexico and India faced extreme temperatures during national elections.
Record-breaking heat waves have scorched Mexico since late March, causing blackouts, wildfires, heat strokes, and animal deaths. On May 25, Mexico City set a new heat record, with the temperature there surpassing 94.4 degrees, while other cities in the country registered even higher temperatures — well above 115 degrees. As of June 12, at least 125 deaths had been attributed to the heat, which has been made worse by an intense drought linked to El Niño. With reservoirs at less than 27% capacity, millions could run out of water by the end of this month.
World Weather Attribution, a research group that analyzes the degree to which climate change is causing extreme weather events, estimated that global warming has made extreme temperatures in the region 35 times more likely. “These trends will continue with future warming and events like the one observed in 2024 will be very common” in a world where average temperatures are 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, the group stated in a release.
Despite sweltering conditions, about 100 million voters elected Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, on June 2. In her victory speech, Sheinbaum, a climate scientist with a focus on energy engineering, said she will work to maintain the country’s energy sovereignty. While Sheinbaum has vouched to expand the country’s renewable energy, she has also been criticized for her support of Pemex, the state-owned oil company.
Two days later, on June 4, India re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a third term during the country’s longest-ever heatwave. By the time the weeks-long voting process wrapped, extreme heat had killed more than 100 people. In Uttar Pradesh, at least 33 poll workers died in a single day, CNN reported. In response, local governments have imposed measures to prevent water waste and protect construction workers. Yet, according to analysis by the Centre for Policy Research found in 2023, most of India’s heatwave policies are underfunded and fail to target the country’s most vulnerable groups.
More extreme weather hammered Mexico beginning June 20 as tropical storm Alberto brought torrential rain and flooding to the country’s east. AccuWeather meteorologists said the storm is just the start of a predicted intense hurricane season in the area. Most of India is still under heatwave alerts, but the weather is set to improve in the next few days as the monsoon finally advances after a week-long delay.
May: Scarce rainfall and soaring heat have led to drought conditions that are threatening China’s food production and water supply. The provinces of Shandong and Henan — crucial to the country’s wheat production — are some of the most affected, and the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters has dispatched two disaster relief guidance teams. New technology, such as multi-functional seeders, and multiple reservoirs have been deployed to ameliorate conditions.
Also on Wednesday, the China Meteorological Administration reported that several regional weather stations recorded the highest temperatures ever in mid-June. Conditions are expected to worsen, as some Chinese provinces are expected to reach 111 degrees this week.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The new climate politics are all about affordability.
During the August recess, while members of Congress were back home facing their constituents, climate and environmental groups went on the offensive, sending a blitz of ads targeting vulnerable Republicans in their districts. The message was specific, straightforward, and had nothing to do with the warming planet.
“Check your electric bill lately? Rep. Mark Amodei just voted for it to go up,” declared a billboard in Reno, Nevada, sponsored by the advocacy group Climate Power.
“They promised to bring down prices, but instead our congressman, Derrick Van Orden, just voted to make our monthly bills go up,” a YouTube ad told viewers in Wisconsin’s 3rd district. “It removes clean energy from the electric grid, creating a massive rate hike on electricity,” the voiceover says, while the words “VAN ORDEN’S PLAN: ELECTRICITY RATE HIKE” flash on screen. The ad, paid for by Climate Power, the League of Conservation Voters, and House Majority Forward, a progressive campaign group, was shown more than a million times from August 13 to 27, according to Google’s ad transparency center.
Both were part of a larger, $12 million campaign the groups launched over the recess in collaboration with organizations including EDF Action and Climate Emergency Advocates. Similar billboards and digital ads targeted Republicans in more than a dozen other districts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. There were also TV spots, partnerships with Instagram influencers, bus stop posters, and in-person rallies outside district offices — all blaming Republicans in Congress for the increasing cost of food, healthcare, and energy.
Courtesy of Climate Power
As others have observed, including Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin back in March, rising utility rates and the broader cost of living crisis are becoming a political liability for Republicans and President Trump. Clean energy advocates are attempting to capitalize on that, trying to get Americans to connect the dots between their mounting electricity bills and their representatives in Congress who voted to cut support for renewable energy.
Some of this is run-of-the-mill politicking, but it’s not only that. It also represents a strategic shift in how the climate movement talks about the energy transition.
It’s not new for green groups to make the argument that renewable energy can save people money. Relying on “free” wind and sun rather than fuels that are subject to price volatility has always been part of the sell, and the plummeting cost of solar panels and wind turbines have only made that pitch more compelling.
But it is new for the affordability argument to come first — above job creation, economic development, reducing pollution, and, of course, tackling climate change.
For most of the past four years, the climate movement has gone all in on trying to build an association in the American mind between the transition to clean energy and jobs. “When I think of climate change, I think of jobs,” then-candidate Joe Biden said during one of his 2020 campaign speeches.
It made sense at the time, Daniel Aldana Cohen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. Just two years earlier, the Sunrise Movement had emerged as a political force with a headline-grabbing rally in Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding “green jobs for all.” The group was joined by then-newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who soon introduced her framework for a Green New Deal that would offer a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers, ensuring them a place in the new clean energy economy.
The fossil fuel industry had seeded divisions between labor and environmental groups for decades by arguing that regulations kill jobs, and Democrats would have to upend that narrative if they wanted to make progress on climate. But the rationale was also more pressing: Unemployment was skyrocketing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and whoever won the presidency would be responsible for rebuilding the U.S. workforce.
Fast forward to the end of Biden’s first year in office, however, and the unemployment rate had snapped back to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, inflation was rising fast. Even though the Democrats managed to name their climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the administration and the climate movement continued talking about it in terms of jobs, jobs, jobs.
Cohen co-directs the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think-tank founded in 2020, and admitted that “from the very start, we would just model every policy with jobs numbers,” partly because modeling the effects of policies on cost of living was a lot more complicated. Now he sees two issues with that approach. For one, it was always going to take time for new manufacturing jobs to materialize — much longer than an election cycle. For another, when unemployment is low, “everybody experiences inflation, but extremely few people experience a good new green job,” Cohen said.
During a recent panel hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, Ben Beachy, who was a special assistant to Biden for climate policy, expressed some regret about the jobs push. “It wasn't addressing one of the biggest economic concerns of most people at that point, which was the rent is too damn high,” he said. But Beachy also defended the strategy, noting that all of the policies addressing cost of living in Biden’s big climate bill, like money for housing, public transit, and childcare, had been stripped out to appease West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. “So we were left without a strong policy leg to stand on to say, this is going to lower your costs.”
When the moderator asked what message Beachy thinks climate candidates should run on today, Beachy replied, “affordability, affordability, affordability.”
Jesse Lee, a senior advisor at Climate Power who also worked as a senior communications advisor in the Biden White House, echoed Beachy’s account of what went wrong post-IRA. The cost of living crisis makes it almost impossible to talk about anything else now, he told me. “If you don't start off talking about that, you’ve lost people before you’ve even begun,” he said.
Average U.S. electricity rates jumped 10% in just the year from 2021 to 2022, and have continued to rise faster than inflation. All evidence suggests the trend will continue. Utilities have already requested or received approval for approximately $29 billion in rate increases this year, according to the nonprofit PowerLines, compared to roughly $12 billion by this time last year. And these increases likely don’t reflect the expected costs associated with ending tax credits for wind and solar, hobbling wind and solar development, and keeping aging, expensive coal plants online.
In mid-July, Climate Power issued a strategy document advising state and local elected officials how to talk about clean energy based on the group’s polling. A post-election poll found that “more than half of Americans (51%) say the main goal of US energy policies should be to lower energy prices,” and that 85% “believe policymakers should do more to lower energy costs.” A more recent poll found that telling voters that “cutting clean energy means America produces less energy overall, and that means families will pay even more to keep the lights on,” was the most persuasive among a variety of arguments for clean energy.
This tracks with our own Heatmap Pro opinion polling, which found that the top perceived benefit of renewables in the U.S. is “lower utility bills” — though while 75% of Democrats believe that argument, only 56% of Republicans do. An affordability frame also aligns with academic research on clean energy communication strategies, which has found that emphasizing cost savings is a more effective and enduring message than job creation, economic development, or climate change mitigation.
The pivot to affordability isn’t just apparent in district-level campaigns to hold Republicans accountable. Almost every press release I’ve received from the climate group Evergreen Action this month has mentioned “soaring power bills” or “Trump’s energy price hike” in reference to various actions the administration has taken to hamstring renewables. Even clean energy groups, which at first attempted to co-opt Trump’s “energy dominance” frame, can no longer parrot it with a straight face. After Trump issued a stop work order on Orsted’s offshore Revolution Wind project, which is 80% built, the American Clean Power Association accused the administration of “raising alarms about rising energy prices while blocking new supply from reaching the grid.”
Several people I spoke to for this story pointed to the example of Mikie Sherill, the Democrat running for governor in New Jersey, who last week vowed to freeze utility rates for a year if elected. She immediately followed that statement with a promise to “massively expand cheaper, cleaner power generation,” including solar and batteries.
Dan Crawford, the senior vice president of Echo Communications Advisors, a climate-focused strategy firm, declared in a recent newsletter that Democrats should “become the party of cheap electricity.” He mused that we may be at an inflection point “where the old politics of clean-vs.-polluting makes way for a new debate of cheap-vs.-expensive.”
Debate is probably too tame a term — the claim to affordability is becoming a full-on messaging war. Last week, President Trump took to social media to declare that states that get power from wind and solar “are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS,” — a claim that has no basis in reality. The Trump administration is leaning heavily on affordability arguments to justify keeping coal plants open. In defense of canceling Revolution Wind, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox News that “this is part of our drive to make sure we’ve got affordable, reliable energy for every American … These are the highest electric prices in the country coming off of these projects.” On Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted a news story about his agency rescinding a loan for an offshore wind transmission project, writing that “taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for projects that raise electricity prices and ultimately don't work.”
Clean energy proponents aren’t just going up against Trump — the fossil fuel industry has leaned on affordability as a rhetorical strategy for a long time, Joshua Lappen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame studying the energy transition, told me. Lappen, who lives in California, said cost has been at the forefront of conflicts over climate policy in the state for a while. At the moment, it’s driving a fight over oil refinery closures that threaten to drive up gas prices even more. “I took a trip over the weekend and drove through the Central Valley,” Lappen told me, “and there are placards zip-tied to every gas pump at Chevron stations that are highlighting that state climate policy is increasing the cost of gas.”
I asked Lee, of Climate Power, how the climate movement could make a convincing case when clean energy has become so politically charged. He’s not worried about that right now. “I don’t think we necessarily need to win a debate about what’s cheaper,” he said. “All we have to do is say, Hey, we're in favor of more energy, including wind and solar, and it's nuts, nuts to be taking wind and solar and batteries off the table when we have an energy crisis and when utility rates have gone up 10%.”
That may work for now, at least at the national level. Americans tend to blame whoever is in office for the economic pains of the moment, even though presidents have little influence on prices at the pump and it can take years for policy changes to make their way into utility rates.
But there’s a difference between defensively blaming rising energy costs on the administration’s efforts to block renewables, and making a positive case for the energy transition on the same grounds. While there is an argument for the latter, it’s a lot harder to convey.
The factors pushing up energy prices, such as necessary grid modernization and disaster-related costs, likely aren’t going away, whether or not we build offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, the savings that large-scale wind and solar projects offer won’t be experienced as a reduction in rates — they won’t be experienced at all because they’re measured against a counterfactual world where renewables don’t get built. That’s a lot trickier to communicate in a pithy campaign. People may end up blaming the wind farms either way.
This dilemma is a hallmark of the so-called “mid-transition,” Lappen told me. The term was coined by his advisor, the energy engineer and sociologist Emily Grubert, and Sara Hastings-Simon, a public policy professor at the University of Calgary. The two argue that the mid-transition is a period where fossil fuel systems persist alongside the growing clean energy sector.
“Comparisons of the new system to the old system are likely to rest on experience of a world less affected by climate change, such that concerns about lower reliability, higher costs, and other challenges might be perceived as inherent to zero-carbon systems, versus energy systems facing consequences of climate change and long-term underinvestment,” they write.
To Cohen, advocates need to go a lot further than rhetoric to link clean energy with affordability. “We need to rebuild the brand and then rebuild the investment priorities of climate action so that working class communities see and literally touch direct, tangible benefits in their life,” he said. He described a “green economic populism” with much more public investment in helping renters access green technologies that will lower their bills, for example, or in fixing up homes that have deferred maintenance so that they can eventually make energy efficiency improvements.
It’s not about abandoning industrial policy or research and development, Cohen told me, but rather about a shift in emphasis. He pointed to Sherill’s approach. “She's not just saying, oh, clean energy will automatically lower bills if you just unleash it. She's like, I'm going to assertively use the government to guarantee a price freeze, and then I’m going to backfill that with clean energy policies to bring down prices over time.”
To be fair, the IRA did contain policies that would have produced more tangible benefits. The $7 billion Solar for All program would have delivered the benefits of residential solar — i.e. energy bill savings — to low-income households all over the country. The remainder of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, of which Solar for All was a part, was set to make a range of other green home upgrades more accessible to the working class, and the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program would have done the same for low-income housing developments and senior living centers. Electric school bus grants and urban tree-planting programs would have brought cleaner, cooler air to communities.
These were big, ambitious programs that were never going to produce results in the span of two years, and now the Trump administration has made every effort to ensure they never do. Whether they would have paid political dividends eventually, we’ll never know. But a successful energy transition may depend on giving it another shot.
On fusion’s big fundraise, nuclear fears, and geothermal’s generations uniting
Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to propose a new Clean Water Act rule that would eliminate federal protections for many U.S. waterways, according to an internal presentation leaked to E&E News. If finalized, the rule would establish a two-part test to determine whether a wetland received federal regulations: It would need to contain surface water throughout the “wet season,” and it would need to be touching a river, stream, or other body of water that flows throughout the wet season. The new language would require fewer wetland permits, a slide from the presentation showed, according to reporter Miranda Willson. Two EPA staffers briefed on the proposal confirmed the report.
The new rule follows the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA, which said that only waterways “with a ‘continuous surface connection’ to a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water” fell under the Clean Water Act’s protections, according to E&E News. What “relatively permanent” means, however, the court didn’t say, nor did Biden’s EPA. The two EPA staffers, who were granted anonymity to avoid retribution, “said they believed the proposal was not based in science and could worsen pollution if finalized,” Willson wrote.
Investors are hot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff promising to make fusion energy a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems netted an eye-popping $863 million in its latest fundraising round. In a press release Thursday, the company said that its “oversubscribed round of capital is the largest amount raised among deep tech and energy companies since” its $1.8 billion financing deal in 2021. Commonwealth Fusion will use the funds to complete its demonstration project and further develop its proposed first power plant in Virginia. To date, the company said, it has raised close to $3 billion, “about one-third of the total capital invested in private fusion companies worldwide.” It’s a sign that investors recognize Commonwealth Fusion “is making fusion power a reality,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said.
The fusion industry has ballooned over the past six years. “It is finally, possibly, almost time” for the technology to arrive, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, noting: “For the ordinary optimist, fusion energy might invoke a cheerful Jetsons-style future of flying cars and interplanetary colonization. For the cynic, it’s a world-changing moment that’s perpetually 30 years away. But investors, nuclear engineers, and physicists see it as a technology edging ever closer to commercialization and a bipartisan pathway towards both energy security and decarbonization.”
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
A record 75 gigawatts of new generating capacity hooked up to the U.S. power grid last year, a 33% surge from the previous year, thanks to new federal regulations aimed at streamlining the process. That’s according to new data from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie published Thursday. The report found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2023, issued in July 2023, along with other reforms by independent system operators, have had a “considerable impact on processing interconnection agreements, by driving improvements through reducing speculative projects and clearing queue backlogs.” While connections increased, regional grid operators received 9% fewer new project entries and saw a 51% uptick in non-viable projects since 2022.
Solar and storage technologies made up 75% of all interconnection agreements in 2024, equaling about 58 gigawatts. Wood Mackenzie projected that the sectors will retain a similar market share in 2025. Natural gas saw an increase in interconnection requests since 2022, adding 121 gigawatts of capacity. New gas applications are already breaking annual records this year. But overall the number of gas projects that successfully hook up to the grid is down 25% since 2022.
Almost 200 people have left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, according to new estimates published Thursday in the Financial Times. Of the 28 officials in senior leadership positions, nearly half are working in an “acting” capacity, and only three of the five NRC commissioner roles are filled. “It is an unprecedented situation with some senior leaders having been forced out and many others leaving for early retirement or worse, resignation,” Scott Morris, the former NRC deputy executive director of operations, who retired in May, told the newspaper. “This is really concerning for the staff and is one of the factors causing many key staff and leaders to leave the agency they love ... creating a huge brain drain of talent.”
The exodus comes as Trump is pressing the agency to dramatically overhaul and speed up its review and approval process for new reactors. Supporters of the president’s effort say the NRC has stymied the nuclear industry for decades, and a future buildout of new reactors requires clearing house. But skeptics of the burn-it-all-down approach warn that the atomic energy industry’s success in avoiding major accidents since the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island is owed to NRC oversight, and that the agency’s processes have actually protected nuclear developers by avoiding frivolous lawsuits and not-in-my-backyard types.
Geothermal giant Ormat has reigned over the global industry of harvesting energy from hot underground reservoirs for the past 60 years. Now a new generation of companies is promising to tap the Earth’s heat even in places without water by using fracking technology to drill much deeper, vastly expanding the potential for geothermal. And Ormat has placed a big bet on one. On Thursday, the company inked a strategic partnership with Houston-based Sage Geosystems. As part of the deal, Sage will build its first commercial power plant at an existing Ormat facility in Nevada or Utah, significantly speeding up the timeline for the debut generating station. Sage CEO Cindy Taff told me the plant could be online by next year. “Ormat’s chosen a winner,” Yakov Feygin, a researcher at the Center for Public Enterprise who co-authored a report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
A majority of U.S. voters are still unfamiliar with geothermal power, according to a new poll from Data for Progress I reported on this week. When exposed to details about how the technology works, however, support grows among voters across the political spectrum. Republicans in particular are supportive.
A recent poll shows a lack of familiarity with geothermal.Data for Progress
The Grammy- and Oscar-award winning New Orleans jazz and funk singer Jon Batiste released a new song to mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the catastrophic storm that flooded his home city. Dubbed “Petrichor,” a word that describes the scent of earth after rain, the lyrics unfold like a haunting hymn over a driving beat. “Help me, Lord / They burning the planet down / No more second linin' in the street / They burning the planet down, Lord / Help me, Lord / No more plants for you to eat.” In an interview published in The Guardian, Batiste said the song was meant to be a statement. “You got to bring people together. People power is the way that you can change things in the world,” he said. “It’s a warning, set to a dance beat.”
How the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could become the administration’s ultimate weapon against wind farms.
The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to strictly enforcing a migratory bird protection law in a way that could cast a legal cloud over wind farms across the country.
As I’ve chronicled for Heatmap, the Interior Department over the past month expanded its ongoing investigation of the wind industry’s wildlife impacts to go after turbines for killing imperiled bald and golden eagles, sending voluminous records requests to developers. We’ve discussed here how avian conservation activists and even some former government wildlife staff are reporting spikes in golden eagle mortality in areas with operating wind projects. Whether these eagle deaths were allowable under the law – the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act – is going to wind up being a question for regulators and courts if Interior progresses further against specific facilities. Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of wind energy, it’s extremely likely that a federal government already hostile to wind power will use the law to apply even more pressure on developers.
What’s received less attention than the eagles is that Trump’s team signaled it could go even further by using the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a separate statute intended to support bird species flying south through the U.S. from Canada during typical seasonal migration periods. At the bottom of an Interior press release published in late July, the department admitted it was beginning a “careful review of avian mortality rates associated with the development of wind energy projects located in migratory flight paths,” and would determine whether migratory birds dying because of wind farms qualified as “‘incidental’ takings” – harm or death – under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
While not stated explicitly, what this means is that the department appears to be considering whether to redefine these deaths as intentional under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to Ben Cowan, a lawyer with the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke.
I reached out to Cowan after the eagle investigation began because his law firm posted a bulletin warning that developers “holding active eagle permits” might want to prepare for “subpoenas that may be forthcoming.” During our chat earlier this month, he told me that the eagle probe is likely going to strain financing for projects even on private lands that wouldn’t require any other forms of federal sign-off: “Folks don’t want to operate if they feel there’s a significant risk they might take an eagle without authorization.”
Cowan then voiced increasing concern about the migratory bird effort, however, because the law on this matter could be a quite powerful – if legally questionable – weapon against wind development.
Unlike the Endangered Species Act or the eagle protection law, there is currently no program on the books for a wind project developer to even obtain a permit for incidental impacts to a migratory bird. Part of the reason for the absence of such a program is the usual federal bureaucratic struggle that comes with implementing a complex statute, with the added effect of the ping-pong of federal control; the Biden administration started a process for permitting “incidental” impacts, but it was scrapped in April by the Trump team. Most protection of migratory birds under the law today comes from voluntary measures conducted by private companies and nonprofits in consultation with the federal government.
Hypothetically, hurting a migratory bird should be legally permissible to the federal government. That’s because the administration loosened implementation of the law earlier this year with an Interior Department legal opinion that stated the agency would only go after harm that was “intentional” – a term of art under the statute.
This is precisely why Cowan is fretting about migratory birds, however. Asked why the wind industry hasn’t publicly voiced more anxiety about this potential move, he said industry insiders genuinely hope this is “bluster” because such a selective use of this law “would be so beyond the pale.”
“It’s basically saying the purpose of a wind farm is to kill migratory birds, which is very clearly not the case – it’s to generate renewable electricity,” Cowan told me, adding that any effort by the Interior Department would inevitably result in lawsuits. “I mean, look at what this interpretation would mean: To classify it as intentional take would say the purpose of operating a wind farm would be to kill a bird. It’s obviously not. But this seems to be a way this administration is contemplating using the MBTA to block the operation of wind farms.”
It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush. Is the federal government actually going to decide that any operating wind farm could be illegal? That would put entire states’ power supplies – including GOP-heavy states like Iowa – in total jeopardy. Not to mention it would be harmful overall to take operating capacity offline in any fashion at a moment when energy demand is spiking because of data centers and artificial intelligence. Even I, someone who has broken quite a few eye-popping stories about Trump’s war on renewables, struggle to process the idea of the government truly going there on the MBTA.
And yet, a door to this activity is now open, like a cleaver hanging over the industry’s head.
I asked the Interior Department to clarify its timeline for the MBTA review. It declined to comment on the matter. I would note that in mid-August, the Trump administration began maintenance on a federal dashboard for tracking regulations such as these and hasn’t updated it since. So we’ll have to wait for nothing less than their word to know what direction this is going in.