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On broken blades, COP29, and the falling price of used electric vehicles
Current conditions: Torrential rain brought flash flooding to Toronto • A wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Kauai has been contained • Parts of southern Spain could hit 111 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
The extreme heat wave over the East Coast may very well break a record in Washington, D.C., today that was set during the 1930s Dust Bowl: the longest stretch of days with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The mercury yesterday hit 104 degrees, after similarly scorching numbers on Monday and Sunday, tying the existing record of three days. The National Weather Service forecasts a high of 98 degrees for Wednesday but The Washington Post said there’s “an outside chance that it hits 100 (or higher).” Either way, with humidity at 55%, it will feel torturously hot, with a potential heat index of 110 degrees. An “Extended Heat Emergency” is in effect in the city through today. Nearly 75 major cities across the Northeast, South, and Southwest are currently facing dangerous heat levels, according to The New York Times.
A different dangerous weather pattern is playing out in the Midwest, where intense storms caused terrible floods. Residents of Nashville, Illinois, were ordered to evacuate due to an “imminent” dam failure. In St. Louis, Missouri, some streets were inundated, and water was seen pouring into the basement of a local fire house.
The Vineyard Wind project, a large-scale commercial offshore wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, has been “shut down until further notice” after debris from a damaged turbine blade began washing up on nearby beaches. One of the project’s 351-foot-long turbine blades reportedly broke off on Saturday, though nobody seems to know why yet. Green and white debris, as well as sharp fragments of fiberglass, have been littering Nantucket beaches, many of which are closed for cleanup. A company notice said debris will be “1 square foot or less,” but some pieces appear significantly larger, like this one spotted by the Nantucket Current:
The U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement is investigating the incident. Vineyard Wind is the second U.S. commercial offshore wind farm and is only partially constructed, though its existing 21 turbines are already sending power to the grid. Once completed, it is expected to produce enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. This incident is more bad news (and bad press) for America’s nascent and struggling offshore wind industry.
The agenda for this year’s COP29 U.N. climate summit is coming into view. This morning the COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev (who is Azerbaijan’s environment minister as well as a former state oil company exec), published a letter outlining the “plan and expectations” for the event, which will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. While the top priority is to agree “a fair and ambitious” New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance, “this is not just our priority,” Babayev wrote, adding: “We all must go the extra mile together to deliver this historic milestone.” The letter urges nations to put forward new National Determined Contributions that are in keeping with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit, submit climate adaptation plans, and finalize Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which sets out “how countries can reduce their emissions using international carbon markets.”
There are several references to Azerbaijan “leading by example” but the underlying message is one of shared responsibility between nations to tackle the climate crisis. The letter includes this rather ominous line: “The multilateral system is under pressure to show it can deliver at the speed and scale needed. COP29 will be a litmus test for the Paris Agreement and global climate action and cooperation.” You can read the full document here.
The U.K. is going to create a state-owned energy company, called Great British Energy, that will be a key pillar of the new Labour government’s promise to decarbonize the nation’s energy sector by 2030. GB Energy will not supply electricity directly to households. Instead, it will receive £8 billion (about $10.4 billion – which will come partly from increased taxes on oil and gas companies) to own and operate clean energy assets alongside the private sector, “financing and helping to build low-carbon infrastructure,” The Guardian explained. It’s not clear yet which projects GB Energy will invest in. Analysis from energy think tank Ember suggests that if the U.K. hits its 2030 decarbonization goal, annual household energy bills could be £300 lower.
Investment growth in fusion energy research and technology is down for the second year in a row, according to the Fusion Industry Association. Overall global investment has risen more than $900 million this year, but that’s less than last year’s $1.4 billion in growth, which was below the 2022 number, marking a downward trend. FIA CEO Andrew Holland called for more support, both private and public. The good news is that public funding in private fusion companies has jumped globally by almost 60%.
Sales of used electric vehicles were up 63% in the U.K. in the first half of 2024 as prices fall to match those of used combustion engine cars.
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A new study from E3 shows big potential cost savings for utilities with smart chargers.
Ditching the combustion engine for an electric vehicle is a good first step for cutting transportation emissions. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that owning an electric car on its own is not enough. When and how you charge the car makes an enormous difference, not only for reducing CO2 emissions, but also for helping the power grid withstand the coming electrification wave.
We know that not all charging is created equal. Location, for example, is an obvious difference-maker. In places with ample renewable energy such as hydro-dominated Washington or solar California, electric vehicles produce vastly less climate pollution over their lifetimes than gasoline cars. In places with fossil-fuel-heavy grid, the climate benefit is still there, but much smaller.
The matter of when to charge is, similarly, about aligning EV charging with the supply of renewable energy. As Heatmap has noted before, it makes sense for solar-heavy states to encourage EV owners to charge at midday when clean energy generation peaks — that would help to level out California’s duck curve rather than make it worse. That’s easier said than done, though, since not everyone’s workplace has electric vehicle chargers. Besides, the simplest form of the EV lifestyle is to plug in upon returning home from work and errands in the evening, the very moment when electricity use spikes and solar energy is dropping off for the day.
Charging’s place and time are both important for maximizing the climate good EVs can do. They are also matters of growing importance for electric utilities that must learn how to balance the coming acceleration in electricity demand without seeing their costs spiral out of control. According to new research by the group Energy and Environmental Economics, smarter ways to optimize the when and the how of EV charging could save them an enormous amount in upgrade costs.
E3’s researchers ran case studies, including one that modeled the EV-heavy territory of Southern California Edison, to find out how different approaches to widespread EV charging affected how much extra costs the utilities incurred. The researchers considered three approaches to charging. In the first, “unmanaged,” drivers plug in as soon as they get home and the vehicle charges until full. In the second, a “passive managed" scenario, the EV doesn’t necessarily charge to full immediately, but instead waits until off-peak hours when the price of electricity drops. The third, “optimized,” used Rhythmos.io’s software to imagine a system wherein a car can detect the exact moments to charge to place the least strain on the grid.
The differences were stark. E3 used California’s official Avoided Cost Calendar to measure the added costs to SCE under each scenario. Whereas unmanaged charging cost the utility $984 per EV added to the system, optimized charging dropped that figure to just $407, a 60% reduction. (The middle-ground scenario came in at $686.)
Much of these savings are attributable to avoiding the wear and tear and possible overloads that electrical transformers would suffer in a world where everyone tries to charge their EVs all at once. (The transformers that form that backbone of the power grid are rated to specific currents and voltages they cannot safely exceed, which is one of the limiting factors on how much the system can handle.) It’s a particularly pressing matter in this age of transformer shortages, when it can take years to get a replacement for a broken or outdated one.
Although the financial and resilience benefits of optimized EV charging are clear in E3’s findings, they’re far from simple to achieve in the complex moment-to-moment reality of the grid. E3 study coauthor Eric Cutter told me it starts with communication — utilities could give EV drivers a forecast a day in advance, for example, telling them when clean energy will be in good supply and prices will be low.
“They could say, ‘Tomorrow is a sunny day, so please charge during the day,’ or, ‘Tomorrow is a cloudy day, and it happens to be very hot and humid, so the air conditioners are going to be ringing, so please don't charge in the evening and charge late at night,’” he says. “And they could make that determination each day as to what's going to be the most beneficial for the system.”
But much of this work will be automatic and algorithmic. For optimized charging to work, all drivers have to do is leave their EV plugged in and be okay with whenever the system decides to send them electricity. The software will decide which cars get which levels of charge, and when, to minimize strain on grid infrastructure.
That raises another question about trust. People who don’t like the local power company — and there’s a lot of them — might not want to allow that entity to decide when their EV gets to charge. They also might not trust that they’ll have enough battery range when they need it. To combat the first issue, Cutter said, perhaps drivers will sign up for a charging management system run through their car’s manufacturer, since drivers often have a better opinion of Honda or Ford than they do of their utility. And to fight the range anxiety problem, he says, some pilot programs have given customers a button to opt out of optimized charging.
“What the programs have found out is that customers want the button, but they never use it. It's very, very rare,” he says.
The number of EVs in America, especially in markets outside California, has yet to reach a point where a smarter way to charge has become a necessity. Although their sales share is rising, EVs accounted for just 8.1% of cars sold in 2024; only California has seen the energy demand from electric vehicles exceed 1 million megawatt-hours, though the numbers are rising fast. Even with EVs and electrification facing stiff political headwinds, utilities across the nation are already at work on plans to handle the influx of EV demand.
“Ten years ago when we were talking to utilities, a lot of them would say, ‘We're not worried about EVs. Come back to me when that's 5% of adoption or 10% of load.’ But not anymore. I don't think utilities anymore are waiting until that level of adoption to start thinking about how they need to plan for them.”
Widespread federal layoffs bring even more uncertainty to the DAC hubs program.
Grant Faber suspected his short tenure as the program manager for the Department of Energy’s direct air capture hubs initiative was up when he saw an article circulating that the department was set to terminate up to 2,000 employees — generally those who were new to their jobs. When he hadn’t received any news by the end of the day on Thursday, February 13, he told me he felt a sense of “anticipatory survivor’s guilt.” But it wouldn’t last long.
“I woke up Friday morning and I was locked out of all my systems, and I had to get my termination letter emailed to my personal email address,” Faber told me. “It more or less just said it’s in the public interest to do away with your job.”
President Trump's campaign to fire federal workers has hollowed out the DOE's nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team, which sits within the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. When Trump first took office there were five employees on the CDR team, which helps to oversee implementation of the $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program, Faber told me. Now, he said, there’s only one left.
Trump’s layoffs targeted probationary employees, i.e. those who had been hired, promoted, demoted, or reassigned within the past one to two years, who enjoy fewer job protections than those with longer tenures. Faber had been at his job for 11 months. His former boss, Rory Jacobson, was also terminated a few weeks ago, as he’d recently been promoted to a new role as director of carbon removal at the DOE. “To my knowledge, this was not about terminating people that were doing DAC work, or climate work, or even CDR work,” Jacobson told me. “This was just a gross termination of federal employees, career federal employees across the federal government that were on probation.”
But the cumulative effect of these layoffs certainly increases the air of uncertainty around the DAC hubs program, which thus far include two large-scale projects — the South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana’s Project Cypress — as well as 19 smaller hubs in earlier stages of feasibility and design development.
The various hubs’ commercial partners, which include universities, oil giants, and DAC startups themselves, were already mired in the limbo created by Trump’s Day One executive order, which froze funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That order also led to an effective communications embargo, which prohibits the DOE from discussing or taking action on things such as contract negotiations or personnel decisions with its external partners. These recent terminations just add to the confusion.
“We’ve had no communications with DOE for three to four weeks now,” the lead of one DAC hub in the feasibility study stage told me. “So we’re kind of just waiting to see what they tell us to do.”
In the meantime, awardees are frustrated and unsure where to turn, Jacobson told me. “Should they reach out to their congressperson and try to get them to advocate on their behalf? Do they send a letter to the White House? What is the next step to try and make things move for their projects?” These doubts pose a big problem for startups with novel technologies trying to build out large infrastructure projects, as they generally have smaller margins, less patient investors, and thus less room for error than industrial stalwarts with proven strategies. “Especially for these first-of-a-kinds, they are working on pretty dire timelines for project finance,” Jacobson said.
The DAC hubs were already off to a slow start, according to Jacobson, who told me that the $1.2 billion from the initial funding opportunity issued at the end of 2022 took much longer to get out the door than anyone hoped for. Project Cypress didn’t see any of its initial $50 million award until March of last year, and the South Texas hub had to wait until September for the same funding. Jacobson chalked up the delays to the fact that the awardees are generally relatively early-stage startups that have yet to build significant infrastructure projects, and that the DOE is unfamiliar with negotiating such large-scale proposals.
Thankfully the DOE’s small CDR division isn’t the only government entity interfacing with the DAC hubs. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is overseeing the buildout of the larger South Texas and Project Cypress hubs. And the National Energy Technology Laboratory is overseeing the implementation of the smaller DAC hubs, which are in the feasibility study and design planning stages. They’ve received a combined total of $121 million so far, though some are still negotiating the size of their awards.
OCED and NETL have also been impacted by the government-wide staffing cuts, however, potentially affecting their ability to pick up the slack from the decimated CDR team, which helped to provide top-level oversight and expertise. As Jacobson told me, his job was to “make a theory of change” that united the DOE’s various carbon removal initiatives, aligning them with the administration’s overall energy strategy, whatever it was. Absent this broader vision and explicit strategic direction, coordination among the various government agencies and implementation partners could suffer.
Day-to-day organizational details also stand to falter, Faber told me. In his role, he primarily provided oversight for the 19 smaller, earlier stage DAC hubs. “A lot of times, progress can come down to literally just things like getting signatures, getting approvals, communicating things to leadership back and forth,” he said. “If you don’t have a team in place coordinating those things at headquarters, everything’s just going to be more difficult.”
All that’s to say that further hold-ups could hit the hubs hard, especially the two large projects, which could eventually receive federal funding of up to $500 million to $600 million, provided the hubs can match that with funding from other sources. “If the DOE tries to back out or withholds funding and there’s uncertainty, then yes, it could severely delay or even kill some of those projects, or just result in massive reductions in their scope,” Faber told me. Perhaps other investors, such as climate tech VCs, would be willing to step in if this were to happen, he added.
Faber noted that one proof point that could give investors and other industry leaders confidence in this tech is the forthcoming large-scale DAC facility called Stratos from developer 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, which is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, Occidental is using the same technology for its South Texas hub — tech that the oil giant brought in-house when it acquired DAC startup Carbon Engineering in 2023. And Heirloom, a DAC company that’s helping to lead Project Cypress, also recently raised a huge $150 million Series B round, showing continued investor confidence in this technology.
The DAC hubs program also still has billions of dollars yet to be awarded. A few months ago, the DOE announced a new $1.8 billion funding opportunity for mid- and large-scale DAC projects. Interested parties have already submitted their required concept papers and pre-applications, with full applications due at the end of July. But the current chaos puts applicants in a tricky spot, as the new administration’s commitment to the program overall is now somewhat of a question mark.
That being said, Jacobson told me there’s no indication that either Trump or Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is necessarily opposed to DAC, or carbon dioxide removal overall. “I still don’t think that we’ve seen a clear signal that this administration is not excited about CDR,” Jacobson said. “I have not heard Secretary Wright say — or other leadership at DOE say — that we are not still very enthusiastic about DAC hubs.”
DAC buildout also has an array of bipartisan benefits, both Jacobson and Faber noted, and hasn’t been a target of right-wing ire in the way that electric vehicles and offshore wind have. On the contrary, Republicans (and oil and gas companies) often argue for it as a way to continue fossil fuel production in a world that’s moving towards lower-emissions sources of energy. Not to mention the fact that these DAC facilities are mainly being built in red states, thus adding jobs and GDP in these regions.
“I thought these kinds of projects would get to keep going,” the DAC hub leader, whose project has had elements halted, told me. “They’re creating jobs, they’re investing in technology. I think they could be well aligned with unleashing America’s energy dominance.”
But these days, few Biden-era initiatives are safe. As Faber told me, if the Trump administration chooses to take a hard line stance against “any and all government funding and regulation, and anything that even has a tinge of being associated with climate,” then DAC is going to have a target on its back, even if some congressional Republicans have previously expressed support for it.
The budget reconciliation process will give us more insight into the specific IRA and BIL funding provisions Trump and other Republicans are looking to axe. That same process will also determine the fate of tax credits such as 45Q, which encourages carbon capture and sequestration. In the near term, Democrats are pushing to get language into the government funding bill (which is separate from the reconciliation bill and must pass in some form by mid-March) that would require Trump to deliver congressionally appropriated money. If that happens, funds would start flowing to the DAC hubs — but don’t bet on it. Republicans are adamant that they won’t stand for such limitations on presidential authority.
DAC grantees, government employees, and implementation partners alike will have to do the wait-and-see thing for a while longer. “I do believe that when we get out of this fog of the first 100 days of the new administration, when they’re just trying to move fast and break things and get big headlines and try to make it seem like they’re keeping campaign promises, maybe things will slow down,” Faber told me. “Maybe they’ll get distracted or just move on to a new issue other than dismantling the federal government.”
Current conditions: Thousands are without power and drinking water in the French Indian Ocean territory of Réunion after Tropical Cyclone Garance made landfall with the strength of a Category 2 hurricane • A severe weather outbreak could bring tornadoes to southern states early next week • It’s 44 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Washington, D.C., where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet with President Trump today to sign a minerals deal.
The 16th United Nations Biodiversity Conference, known as COP16, ended this week with countries agreeing on a crucial roadmap for directing $200 billion a year by 2030 toward protecting nature and halting global biodiversity loss. Developed nations are urged to double down on their goal to mobilize $20 billion annually for conservation in developing countries this year, rising to $30 billion by 2030. The plan also calls for further study on the relationships between nature conservation and debt sustainability. “The compromise proved countries could still bridge their differences and work together for the sake of preserving the planet, despite a fracturing world order and the dramatic retreat of the United States from international green diplomacy and foreign aid under President Donald Trump,” wrote Louise Guillot at Politico. The decision was met with applause and tears from delegates. One EU delegate said they were relieved “about the positive signal that this sends to other ongoing negotiations on climate change and plastics that we have.”
The Trump administration yesterday fired hundreds of workers across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, key agencies responsible for monitoring the changing climate and communicating extreme weather threats. The National Hurricane Center and the Tsunami Warning Center both operate under NOAA, and the layoffs come ahead of the upcoming hurricane season. “People nationwide depend on NOAA for free, accurate forecasts, severe weather alerts, and emergency information,” said Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Purging the government of scientists, experts, and career civil servants and slashing fundamental programs will cost lives.” A federal judge yesterday temporarily blocked the administration’s mass firings of federal workers, so the status of those affected in this latest round is unclear. Somewhat relatedly, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports that the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by NOAA it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding.
The FBI reportedly has been questioning Environmental Protection Agency employees about $20 billion in climate and clean energy grants approved under the Biden administration, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has insisted were issued hastily and without oversight. According toThe Washington Post, the Justice Department has asked several U.S. attorneys to submit warrant requests or launch grand jury investigations, but those efforts have been rejected due to lack of evidence or “reasonable belief that a crime occurred.” “It’s certainly unusual for any case to involve two different U.S. attorney offices declining a case for lack of probable cause and to have the Department of Justice continue to shop it,” Stefan D. Cassella, a former federal prosecutor, told the Post. Several nonprofits said their Citibank accounts holding the funding have been frozen without explanation.
Some Democratic states are apparently freezing out Tesla in response to Elon Musk’s political maneuvers within the Trump administration. Tesla operates on a direct-to-consumer sales model, so it doesn’t have to go through dealerships. More than 25 states ban or restrict direct EV sales in some way. The company has been lobbying to get permission to sell directly in these states, but some Democratic lawmakers are “disgusted” by Musk’s moves in Washington and are rebuffing lobbyists or dropping their support for proposed legislation allowing direct sales.
Apple is in trouble for claiming some of its Apple Watches are “carbon neutral.” A group of customers are suing the company after learning its claims relied on carbon offsetting projects in protected national parks or heavily forested areas, instead of “genuine” carbon reductions. “The carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of Apple’s involvement or the projects’ existence,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “Because Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are predicated on the efficacy and legitimacy of these projects, Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are false and misleading.” The lawsuit seeks damages, as well as an injunction that prevents Apple from using the carbon neutral claim to market its watches. Apple has a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Researchers in Amsterdam have examined the nests of birds known as common coots and discovered plastic items dating back to the 1990s, including a McDonald’s McChicken wrapper from 1996, and a Mars wrapper promoting the 1994 USA FIFA World Cup. “History is not only written by humans,” said Auke-Florian Hiemstra, who led the research. “Nature, too, is keeping score.”
Auke-Florian Hiemstra