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On weekend protests, Trump’s new energy council, and Iditarod
Current conditions: It’s 111 degrees Fahrenheit in Rio de Janeiro today, the highest recorded temperature in the Brazilian city since 2014 • India’s national winter games have been postponed due to a lack of snow • At least 13 people have died across the Ohio Valley due to severe flooding triggered by a winter storm over the weekend. Another band of bad weather is on the way.
We’ll start today with a little summary of news from Washington that you might have missed going into the long weekend:
President Trump on Friday signed an executive order setting up an energy council tasked with advising him on ways to “achieve energy dominance.” Dubbed the National Energy Dominance Council, the group is helmed by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and will prioritize fossil fuels, though the executive order also mentions biofuels, geothermal, and hydro. No mention of solar or wind. As E&E News noted, “the U.S. is currently producing more oil and natural gas than any country in history. Much of that is exported.”
Meanwhile, nearly 400 “probationary” EPA employees were fired on Friday, about 2,700 people from the Interior Department have opted to accept the administration’s offer of resigning with full pay through September, and somewhere between 1,200 and 2000 workers from the Department of Energy were also cut. There were firings at the Department of Agriculture, said to number in the thousands. Earlier in the week, 3,400 employees from the U.S. Forest Service were also given their marching orders.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright slammed national net-zero goals yesterday in comments made via video at a London conference. “Net Zero 2050 is a sinister goal,” Wright said. “It's a terrible goal. The aggressive pursuit of it – and you're sitting in a country that has aggressively pursued this goal – has not delivered any benefits, but it's delivered tremendous costs.” He went on to say his job within the Trump administration was to “get out of the way” of fossil fuel production, and claimed that the world does not “have replacements” for hydrocarbons. This is false, and there are many examples of clean energy sources crowding out their dirtier predecessors. To wit: Already 78 economies across the globe have displaced fossil fuel-power with clean energy, and many did so while energy consumption rose. On a global scale, renewables are expected to surpass coal for electricity generation as soon as this year. Since 2019, wind and solar have displaced one-fifth of fossil fuel power generation in the European Union. Last month the Energy Information Administration put out a report concluding that new solar power installations would be the main driver of U.S. power generation over the next two years, and “generating capacity for most other energy sources will remain mostly unchanged in 2025 and 2026.”
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A series of protests took place over the weekend at Tesla showrooms across the country, with participants railing against CEO Elon Musk and his move into U.S. politics. Musk has become part of President Trump’s inner circle, overseening the firing of thousands of federal employees as leader of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” aka DOGE. His incursion has rattled many Americans, including experts who say attempts by Musk, who is not an elected official, to gain access to sensitive government data and payment systems are unconstitutional. “Every Tesla sale that you prevent, every dollar not spent servicing a Tesla, not charging at the Supercharger, these further degrade the business,” Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, told the Financial Times from a protest in Portland. “It’s not easy, it’s not guaranteed, but we do have the opportunity to wipe out a huge amount of Elon Musk’s wealth.” It is too soon to know to what extent the anti-Musk sentiment is impacting Tesla, but sales have been dropping in some key markets including California, where registrations fell by about 12% last year. “It’s clear that the perception of Tesla may now be forever damaged,” wrote Kevin Williams at InsideEVs. “Let’s hope that won’t extend to EVs as a whole.”
Anti-Elon protester in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Japan has approved a new climate plan aimed at curbing greenhouse emissions and transitioning to clean energy. It is one of only a handful of countries to finish its updated nationally determined contribution (NDC), as required under the Paris Agreement. The NDC outlines a plan to cut emissions by 60% by 2035 compared to 2013 levels, and 73% by 2040. When the plan was first pitched at the end of last year, climate experts and advocates said it wasn’t in line with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. To align with this target, the country would need to curb emissions by 66% by 2035. Japan is the world’s fifth-biggest emitter.
This year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race will start in Fairbanks, Alaska, instead of the more southern village of Willow, “due to the absence of snowfall since January 31st” and no snow in the forecast. This is the fourth time the route of the famous 1,000-mile race has had to be changed because of low snow conditions. The organizers announced the news yesterday after some of the mushers expressed concerns that parts of the original route were lacking snow and too dangerous for their teams. “The decision throws a wrench into top competitors’ race strategies,” reported the Anchorage Daily News. “Drop bags full of supplies had already been packed up according to a race map that is now partially irrelevant.” Photos from snowmobile racers showed portions of the trail are just exposed grass and dirt:
Facebook/Hetteen Heritage Racing
Almost a third of the suggestions outlined in Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page blueprint for reshaping America – have already been implemented or are in progress.
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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.