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It was a good week to be a Wyomingite. As of Thursday, the 98,000-square-mile rectangle was the only state in the contiguous U.S. to have somehow avoided both heat index warnings and air quality alerts.
If you live anywhere other than Wyoming, well, I sympathize. Summer has only just begun, but America’s topsy-turvy climate season has most definitely arrived.
Plenty of places around the country experienced relatively “normal” conditions this week: Most of Maine and Vermont dodged the heat and smoke, as did large swaths of Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington State. But you were more likely to have experienced extreme weather than not. Roughly 54% of Americans — about 180 million, by Axios’ estimate — were under alerts for either the smoke or extreme heat during the final week of June.
Let’s start with the heat dome, which human-caused climate change made “at least five times more likely,” according to researchers at Climate Central. Some 91 major cities had “dangerous levels of heat” in their forecast as of Thursday, with nearly a third of the U.S. population under alerts that stretched from northern Florida to New Mexico. Dallas, New Orleans, Nashville, and parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama could still see heat index readings potentially as high as 120 — when anything over 103 is considered dangerous.
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Although Californians are used to being on the frontlines of climate change, their relatively quiet spring led to some bristling when New Yorkers, being New Yorkers, made the recent wildfire smoke event all about them. But summer is kicking off in the Golden State with a vengeance: Much of the coast is now staring down a heat wave that could push “readings toward record territory,” The Washington Post reports. A separate event from the Southern heat dome, the triple-digit weekend weather in California looks like it will stretch from Los Angeles up through the Central Valley, but at least it won’t come with the humidity that is often the culprit behind heat-related deaths.
Then there is the Canadian wildfire smoke, which continues to drop by unannounced like an overly exuberant neighbor. Though there isn’t likely to be a repeat of the “perfect storm” that ushered in the worst smoke pollution in recorded American history, we are experiencing a “stuck weather pattern” in which air quality relief only comes with “sweltering air from the south,” The Washington Post reports. While it can be tricky to tie wildfires directly to greenhouse gas emissions, we do know that “human-caused climate change causes more situations where weather patterns” such as these “stall.”
More importantly, nowhere is seemingly safe from the smoke. Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee had the worst air quality in the world earlier this week. On Thursday, Washington, D.C., replaced them in the top spot. And while the West Coast has enjoyed relatively clean air this spring, its wildfire season doesn’t typically begin until the late summer and early fall. If the Canadian wildfires are finally brought to heel, it might only be in time for the West Coast fires — and smoke events — to begin.
If there is slim good news, it is that El Niños, like the one we’re in now, typically suppress Atlantic hurricane activity. But even that wisdom might be in flux: Warm water, like that in the Atlantic, usually helps storms to intensify. This year has already seen the formation of Tropical Storm Bret, one of the earliest named storms on record, which at one point looked like it might turn into a fully fledged hurricane — even though on average, hurricanes aren’t expected to form in the Atlantic until mid-August. Ultimately, there is too much uncertainty to say whether or not this will be a bad hurricane year, but the worst-case scenarios are frightening.
Even Wyoming might not be able to sit out the excitement for much longer. Climate change is forecasted to bring to the state “harsher summer droughts, longer wildfire seasons, and a whole host of new threats to the Wyoming way of life,” the Casper Star-Tribune warns.
We’re only eight days into summer. What will happen next?
Read more about the wildfire smoke:
How to Stay Safe from the Wildfire Smoke Indoors
Jeva is a founding staff writer at Heatmap. Her writing has also appeared in The Week, where she formerly served as executive editor and culture critic, as well as in The New York Daily News, Vice, and Gothamist, among others. Jeva lives in New York City.
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Introducing a new Heatmap Plus newsletter focused on the battles around renewable energy projects
Welcome to The Fight, I’m your punk rock climate journalist host Jael Holzman. I’ve dedicated my entire career in journalism to understanding how and why people oppose projects crucial to decarbonization. Now, every week, I’ll be delivering must-read exclusive scoops and analysis on the local battles and national trends shaping the future of climate action as part of Heatmap Plus, a new side of the site launching today that will go even deeper into the projects, politics, and people shaping the energy transition.
As part of Heatmap Plus, you’ll get high-level analysis of our proprietary polling and forecasting data, in-depth case studies exploring why projects succeed or fail, exclusive interviews with leading policymakers, developers, and activist groups, and my weekly newsletter — The Fight — that will offer a comprehensive weekly snapshot of the battles being waged over renewable energy projects across the country, plus a lot of original reporting.
A little bit about me: For years, I reported on the transition by writing about mining – one of the dirtiest businesses central to renewable energy, vehicle electrification, and industrial decarbonization. As I covered those topics, it was evident that climate activists, policymakers, and investors alike were all quietly torn up by the reality that building things meant some pretty shocking knock-on effects for the environment and society. I also found the threat of those consequences became a useful tool for shaping public opinion against the energy transition, a practice best described as “trade-off denial.”
Earlier this year, I joined Heatmap after being approached with an opportunity: how would I like to investigate conflicts over individual renewables and battery projects in places where a hollowed-out local media left no reporters available to ask the tough questions? On top of that, I’d get to take a wide-angle lens, sussing out what national policy trends, forces, and industries were driving opposition and the hurdles to projects getting built. I could give Heatmap readers all the information they’d need, project by project, accompanied by exclusive data and regular Q&A sessions with readers.
So after months of investigating various projects and their opponents, I’m excited to debut the first edition of The Fight. I’ve got to tell you, these stories might bother you. In our inaugural send, for example, you’ll hear about how a fight against a California battery storage project might impact permitting nationwide, the ways a few activists can manipulate emotional fears to create real roadblocks to construction, and the wide gulf between what regulators and developers want versus the individuals most likely to sue to stop a project.
This won’t always be fun — in fact, sometimes it might be a bummer. But over the span of this newsletter, by talking to all sides involved and providing an airing of grievances, it’s my hope we’ll use well-intentioned journalism to inform you on how the things we need to ditch fossil fuels can be built faster and get community buy-in.
This newsletter will go out exclusively to subscribers of Heatmap Plus. If you want to get it, you can join Plus here — for a limited time, you can take $50 off by using the code FIGHTLAUNCH at checkout.
But enough small talk. Let’s get started.
New data provided exclusively to Heatmap shows just how complicated it is to get money where it needs to go.
By the numbers, a new federal program designed to give low-income communities access to renewable energy looks like a smashing success. According to data provided exclusively to Heatmap, in its first year, the Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program steered nearly 50,000 solar projects to low-income communities and tribal lands, which are together expected to produce more than $270 million in annual energy savings.
But those topline numbers don’t say anything about who will actually see the savings, or how much the projects will benefit households that have historically been left behind. In reality, the majority of the projects — about 98% — were allocated funding simply for being located in low-income communities, with no hard requirement to deliver energy or financial savings to low-income residents.
A closer look at the data reveals a more complicated success story. While the program did make some clear strides in bridging the solar inequality gap, other factors — including the language in the law that created it — are also holding it back.
The Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program came out of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022. Though the goal is to increase solar access for low-income households, it’s not actually a tax credit for low income households. It’s for small wind and solar developers — and beginning in 2025, developers of other types of clean energy — whose projects meet certain criteria.
The law caps the total amount of energy the program can support at 1.8 gigawatts per year, and developers have to apply and get their project approved in order to claim funds. To be eligible, a project must produce less than 5 megawatts of power and fall under one of four categories: It must be located in a low-income community, be built on Indian land, be part of an affordable housing development, or distribute at least half its power (and guaranteed bill savings) to low-income households. The first two categories qualify for a 10% credit; the second two, which stipulate that at least some financial benefits go to low-income residents, qualify for 20%. In both cases, the credit can be stacked on top of the baseline 30% tax credit for clean energy projects that meet labor standards, meaning it could slash the cost of building a small solar or wind farm in half.
Each of these provisions has the potential to address at least some of the barriers disadvantaged communities face in accessing clean energy. Low-income homeowners may not have the money for a down payment for rooftop solar or the credit to find financing, for instance. But by giving developers a tax credit for projects located in low-income communities, solar leasing programs, in which homeowners lease panels from a third party in exchange for energy bill savings, now have an incentive to expand into these neighborhoods, and potentially offer lower lease rates. The program helped fund nearly 48,000 residential solar projects in the first year.
Tribal lands, meanwhile, account for more than 5% of solar generation potential in the U.S., but are still a largely untapped resource, for reasons including lack of representation in utility regulatory processes, complex land ownership structures, and limited tribal staff capacity. The program gives outside developers additional incentive to work through the challenges, and it also earmarks funds for tribe-owned development. Crucially, the IRA also opened the door for tribes, as well as other tax-exempt entities, to utilize clean energy incentives and receive a direct payment equal to the tax credits. The program supported 96 solar projects on tribal lands in the first year.
The third category attempts to overcome the famous “split incentive” problem for low-income renters whose landlords have little reason to spend money on a solar project that primarily benefits tenants. The program helped finance 805 solar projects on low-income residential buildings, where the developers are required to distribute at least 50% of the energy savings equitably among tenants.
Lastly, while renters in some states can subscribe to community solar projects, which offer utility bill credits in exchange for a small subscription fee, the subscriptions can be scooped up by wealthier customers if there’s no low-income requirement. The program sponsored 319 community solar projects where at least half the capacity had to go to low-income residents and offer at least 20% off their bills.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo declared the program a success. “These investments are already lowering costs, protecting families from energy price spikes, and creating new opportunities in our clean energy future,” he said.
Despite overwhelming demand during the four-month application period, however, the program ended up with capacity to spare. Although applications totaled more than 7 gigawatts, ultimately, the Department approved just over 49,000 projects equal to about 1.4 gigawatts, or roughly enough to power 200,000 average households. All of it was solar.
The gap between applications and awarded projects has to do with the program’s design. The Treasury divided the 1.8 gigawatt cap between the four categories, setting maximum amounts that could be awarded for each one. Within the four categories, the awards were further divided, with half set aside for applicants that met additional ownership or geographic criteria, such as tribal-owned companies, tax-exempt entities, or projects sited in areas with especially high energy costs relative to incomes.
For example, 200 megawatts were earmarked for Indian lands, with half reserved for applicants meeting those additional criteria, but only 40 megawatts were awarded. The fourth category, meanwhile, which was designed to encourage community solar development, was oversubscribed.
Since tax data is confidential, the Treasury Department could not share much detail about these projects, including where, exactly, they were, who developed them, or who will benefit from them. A map overview shows a concentration of awards across the sunbelt, with Illinois, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico also seeing a lot of uptake.
IRS, RAAS, Statistics of Income, August 2024
I reached out to more than a dozen nonprofits, tribal organizations, and other groups who advocate for or develop clean energy projects benefiting low-income communities to find examples of what the program was actually funding. The first person I was connected with was Richard Best, the director of capital projects and planning for Seattle Public Schools, who got a 10% tax credit for solar arrays on two new schools under construction in low-income neighborhoods. While the school system already planned to put solar on these schools, Best said the tax credits helped offset increased construction costs due to supply chain interruptions, preventing them from having to make compromises on design elements like classroom size.
“It's not insignificant,” he told me. “The solar array at Rainier Beach High School is in excess of a million dollars — just the rooftop solar array. That's $400,000 [in tax credits]. So these are significant dollars that we're receiving, and we're very appreciative.”
Jody Lincoln, an affordable housing development officer for the nonprofit ACTION-Housing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, got a 10% tax credit to add solar to a former YMCA that the group recently converted to a 74-unit apartment building. The single room occupancy rental units serve men who are coming out of homelessness or incarceration. Lincoln told me the building operates “in the gray,” and that any cost saving measures they can make, including the energy savings from the solar array, enable it to continue to operate as affordable housing. When I asked if they could have built the solar project without access to the IRA’s tax credits, she didn’t hesitate: “No.”
These two examples show the program has potential to deliver benefits to low-income communities, even in cases where the energy savings aren’t going directly to low-income residents.
I also spoke with Alexandra Wyatt, the managing policy director and counsel at the nonprofit solar company Grid Alternatives. She told me Grid partnered with for-profit solar developers, such as the national solar company SunRun, who were approved for the tax credit bonus for rooftop solar lease projects on low-income single-family homes. In these cases, Grid helped pull together other sources of funding like state incentives for projects in disadvantaged communities to pre-pay the leases so that the homeowners could more fully benefit from the energy bill savings.
It’s unlikely that all of the nearly 48,000 residential rooftop solar projects in low-income communities that were approved for the credit in the first year had such virtuous outcomes. It’s also possible that projects installed on wealthier homeowners’ roofs in gentrifying neighborhoods were subsidized. In an email to me, a Treasury spokesperson said the Department recognizes that “simply being in a low-income community does not mean low-income households are being served,” and that it was required by statute to include this category. It was still the agency’s decision, however, to allocate such a large portion of the awards, 700 megawatts, to this category — a decision that some public comments on the program disagreed with.
Wyatt applauded the Treasury and the Department of Energy, which oversees the application process, for doing “an admirable job on a tight timeframe with a challenging program design handed to them by Congress.” She’s especially frustrated by the 1.8 gigawatt cap, which none of the other renewable energy tax credits have, and which changes it into a competitive grant that’s more burdensome both for developers and for the agencies. It adds an element of uncertainty to project finance, she said, since developers have to wait to see if their application for the credit was approved.
Wendolyn Holland, the senior advisor for policy, tax and government relations at the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy told me there was tons of interest among indigenous communities and tribal clean energy developers in taking advantage of the IRA programs, but it wasn’t really happening. Holland cited challenges for tribes reaching the stage of “commercial readiness” required to apply for federal funding. Tribal developers have also said they are limited by the lack of transmission on tribal lands. When I asked the Treasury about the paltry number of projects on Indian Lands, a spokesperson said it was not for lack of trying. The Department and other federal agencies have conducted webinars and other forms of outreach, they said, through which they’ve heard that many tribes are struggling to access capital for energy projects, and that development on Indian lands has “unique challenges due to the history of allotment of Indian lands and status of some land as federal trust land.”
Holland is optimistic that things will change — in December, Biden issued an executive order committing to making it easier for tribes to access federal funding. The Alliance also recently petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to address barriers for tribal energy development in its new rules that are supposed to get more transmission built.
The unallocated capacity from 2023 was carried over to the next year’s round of funding, so it wasn’t lost. But a dashboard tracking the second year of the program looks like it's following a similar pattern. While the community solar-oriented category, which was increased to allow for 900 megawatts, is nearly filled up, the tribal Lands category, which kept its 200 megawatt cap, has received applications to develop less than a sixth of that.
Wyatt said that so far, she does think the bonus credit has been successful in spurring good projects that might not otherwise have happened. Still, it will probably take a few years before it will be possible to assess how well it’s working. The good news is, as long as it doesn’t get repealed, the program could run for up to eight more years, leaving plenty of time to improve things. It’s already set to change in one key way. Beginning in 2025, it becomes tech-neutral, meaning that developers of small hydroelectric, geothermal heating or power, or nuclear projects, will be able to apply. (When asked why no wind projects were approved to date, a spokesperson for the Treasury said taxpayer privacy rules meant it couldn’t comment on applications, but they added that wind projects tend to be larger than 5 megawatts and take longer to develop.)
One thing is for sure, despite the heavy administrative burden of screening tens of thousands of applications, the agencies involved are clearly committed to implementing the program.
“I’m definitely pleased that they managed to get the program up and running as quickly as they did,” Wyatt told me. “I mean, it's kind of lightning speed for the IRS.”
How an embattled energy storage project in Acton, California, is threatening faster federal permits.
One hour north of Los Angeles, the small town of Acton is experiencing a battery energy storage buildout — and quickly becoming the must-watch frontline in the backlash against lithium-ion energy storage systems. The flashpoint: wildfires.
Like many parts of California, Acton has hot summers with heavy winds, putting it at elevated risk of the kind blaze that makes national headlines. Battery storage fires, while rare, are a unique threat, with relatively little data available about them to help regulators or the public understand the risk. People in Acton wondered: Would they really be safe if a wildfire engulfed a battery storage site, or if a battery failure sparked a new conflagration?
When L.A. County blessed the first battery energy storage system project in Acton last year, developers and local fire officials said they were doing everything in their power to ensure the batteries would meet safety standards. Residents were far from convinced.
“This will turn our community into industrial hell and it’ll erase us from the face of the Earth,” Jacqueline Ayer, a member of Acton’s town council, told me. Ayer is helping lead the local fight against the projects.
I’ve now spent more than a month researching the fight in Acton. In the process, I’ve learned how much — or little — we know about when battery energy storage and wildfires mix. We’ll get to that later in this story. To be honest, debunking battery fire risk wasn’t why I spent a month on Acton. It was what happened when the fears took hold.
Feeling they’d been failed by both the regulatory approval process and the court system, the Acton project’s opponents turned to their representative in Washington, House Republican Mike Garcia. Though Garcia can’t do anything to stop this particular project, he can severely hinder future ones: As Heatmap can exclusively report, after lobbying from Acton, Garcia inserted language into the annual funding bill for the Department of Energy that would block it from implementing a new rule designed to expedite permits for federally funded battery projects.
“What we’re hoping is that [with Garcia] being at the federal level, he’ll shed some light to the people at the top,” said Ruthie Brock of the activist group Acton Takes Action, “because if the top becomes informed, it’ll trickle down to local governments.”
This is why the Acton fight is so important — it demonstrates the risk of failing to obtain community buy-in, which can ricochet in ways no one intended. The political and media environments are quick to sensationalize the downsides of renewable energy, creating a tinderbox atmosphere in which small local fights can quickly become national ones.
On some level, a fight over battery fires going national was inevitable. Across the country, from New York to Washington state, communities are revolting against battery energy storage sites coming to their backyards. Often, those opposed cite the feared threat of fires or explosions.
Fires in battery energy storage systems, a.k.a. BESS, are quite rare. According to what data is available, the number of fires has stayed relatively flat even as deployment has grown drastically. There were fewer than 10 failure events in the U.S. in 2023, and there have been even fewer so far this year.
But when a fire does happen, experts say it can be quite difficult to put out. In some cases, there’s nothing a community can do other than let the blaze run.
“There’s a lack of consensus. There’s a lot of experts out there providing guidance, and that’s something we’re trying to work on with training throughout the country,” Victoria Hutchinson, an engineer with the Fire Protection Research Foundation, told me. “[It’ll] instill some fear in the meantime we figure out the best approach.”
Information on BESS and wildfires is even less available. Guillermo Rein, a professor of fire science and the editor-in-chief of the journal Fire Technology, told me the matter has not really been studied.
“When I say [BESS are] new, I mean really new,” Rein said. “We hardly know how it works when it gets [on] fire and we don’t have many technologies that are proven to work. We have technologies that we wish will work, but proven technologies that work are very rare. That means we have a new hazard we are struggling to understand and in the meantime, we don’t know how to protect against it.”
Los Angeles County approved Acton’s first battery storage system — Humidor, a 300 megawatt project by Hecate Energy — last summer through an expedited “ministerial” process, the local equivalent of a “categorical exclusion” under the National Environmental Policy Act. Ministerial reviews and categorical exclusions are used by regulators to skip the drawn out process of an environmental review because they can reasonably predict a lack of significant impact. Joseph Horvath, a spokesperson for L.A. County Planning, gave me a statement defending the approval and stating BESS projects must meet all local and state zoning and fire codes to receive a ministerial approval.
California had identified the Acton community back in 2021 as a potential site for energy storage to protect against future power shut offs. Acton made sense because it’s close to the SoCal Edison Vincent substation, making it well positioned to connect to the grid. There was also a real sense of urgency: To achieve its goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, the state estimates it will need to install a projected 52,000 megawatts or more of battery storage. Humidor is the first of what appears to be multiple projects being planned for the area, including two more Hecate facilities according to materials on the company’s website.
Convinced that a battery boom could mix poorly with extreme fire risk, and that the county moved far too fast to approve Humidor, Acton residents sued. The county, they argued, had little reason to conclude the facility would have an insignificant impact on the environment — so few BESS projects have been approved that the county used the standards from a different kind of project — an electrical substation — to draw that conclusion. L.A. County Planning told me they chose this comparison for reasons including the “purpose of BESS and its connection to the larger network for distributive purposes.”
Rein told me that at least when it comes to the fire risk, this isn’t an accurate comparison, and that there’s not actually enough data to claim such a facility would have an insignificant impact. “I would put great efforts into making sure this facility is safe,” he said. “They can’t just say, I met the regulation, I did enough. Because it’s a new hazard.”
Many of those in Acton opposed to the project believe the approval was rushed, and claim that little information was made available to the public as it was going through the county’s process. Furious residents have told county planners that the Acton town council was not notified in advance that an approval was on its way. They testified before the county board of supervisors that Hecate held only a single public meeting to discuss what it intended to build, with little notice given to potentially concerned citizens.
In my experience as a journalist reporting on large energy projects with serious community impacts, transparency is key to getting local buy-in to build a project. For years I covered the mining industry, where innumerable decades of toxic waste spills and labor scandals have forced companies to really innovate and spend serious dough on obtaining “social license to operate,” a term developers and investors use to describe acceptance to a company’s business practices.
This, of course, differs from the YIMBY school of thought that companies and governments should eschew frustrated municipalities to pursue the overriding net good of climate action. There are certainly merits to this argument, especially when it comes to communities that won’t take yes for an answer, and we’ll be exploring case studies supporting that view in future editions of The Fight.
I’m on the fence about whether Acton is one of those cases, though. Ayer, an environmental engineer by trade, told me she supports decarbonization and wants to see climate action happen. She just wants to feel assured the technology is safe.
If it wasn’t a lithium-ion battery storage facility “I would feel comfortable,” she said. “We will shoulder some of the weight. But it isn’t right that we shoulder all of the weight.”
When I tried to talk to Hecate about Acton’s wildfire concerns and how the company had engaged with the community, a company spokesperson, Bobby Howard, declined to make anyone available for an interview citing “ongoing litigation related to the subject.” Howard provided a factbook that said only that Humidor would “meet or exceed” local and state fire codes — without specifying which codes — and detailed some of the outreach the company did, including the public meeting as well as mailers to “thousands of individuals throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including civically engaged individuals throughout Acton.”
Howard declined to answer questions requesting more information about the company’s public outreach and wildfire planning. He did tell the Los Angeles Times earlier this year that Humidor would have “seismic bracing, safety zones around the perimeter, substantial setbacks from parcel boundaries, gravel breaks and a masonry wall around the facility.”
Stanford University senior research scholar and legal energy expert Michael Wara explained to me that in cases like these, having buy-in from the community is important to avoiding litigation and social blowback. “That is losing,” Wara said. “You have not served your client if you end up in litigation.”
“Having a process by which people are informed about a project and have an opportunity to provide input is important for buy-in for all kinds of projects related to the energy transition if you want to build in a democratic society,” he said. “Is it really the fire risk the community is concerned about?”
When it comes to the Acton battery fight, it’s the fears of fire that scare me the most, not the fire itself.
I sought reasons to be optimistic about putting battery energy storage in areas like Acton that are prone to wildfire because, well, California is essentially one big fire risk zone. James Campbell, a wildfire policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, told me that battery energy storage decreases net wildfire risk compared to gas storage tanks and pipelines. “If we consider the whole-climate trade-offs, battery systems are much safer,” he said.
On its end, Hecate claimed in a letter to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors that a BESS fire has never traveled off-site, and that because the fires are fueled by flammable gasses, there is minimal risk of embers traveling elsewhere and igniting grass or bushes. The company pointed me to this letter when I reached out for comment.
“Nothing about fire risk mitigation is about certainty. It’s more, risk mitigation and fire is kind of like wearing a seatbelt,” Wara told me. “If you’re going 120 miles an hour down the highway and you get in a high-speed collision, your seatbelt will not save you. [But] there’s rapid advances in how these systems work.”
In the end, he added, meeting California’s carbon emissions targets will “probably mean building somewhere that there is non-trivial wildfire risk.”
What’s happening to offshore wind should be a cautionary tale for developers considering whether sinking time and money into community relations is really worth it: Last year, coastal fishermen and beach town mayors in New Jersey joined forces with fossil fuel funding and right-wing agitators to foment a conspiracy-infused campaign against offshore wind that has truly rattled the future of the industry.
Part of that offshore wind backlash grew out of New Jersey Republicans in Congress using the pulpit of their offices and filing amendments to legislation. As Garcia takes up Acton’s cause, I do wonder whether battery energy storage might be next. November’s election makes it less likely his language hindering expedited approvals for BESS projects will make it into the final funding bill, and Garcia’s office did not respond to requests to discuss its prospects.
But regardless, it’s an ember that could become a fire of its own.