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From the source to the registers.
The term “heat pump” refers to any system that can extract heat from a colder space and transfer it to a warmer one. For example, refrigerators use heat pumps to remove heat from inside the fridge and expel it into your kitchen. Air conditioners use heat pumps to remove heat from inside the house and dump it outside. In this guide, the phrase “heat pump” refers specifically to HVAC equipment that is capable of both heating
and cooling the air inside a home. In other words, we’re talking about air conditioners that can also run in reverse, pulling heat from outside on a winter day and pumping it inside.
We’ve created this guide because when it comes to getting off fossil fuels, it does matter what you replace them with. Climate advocates tout electric heat pumps because they can create two to three times more heat per unit of energy than other heating equipment. Electric resistance heating, by contrast, is extremely wasteful, and if people start installing those systems en masse, that could actually increase emissions in the near term and make it more difficult to decarbonize the economy in the long term. By getting a heat pump, you won’t just be cutting emissions, you’ll be reducing the cost of cleaning up the electric grid because we’ll need less electricity overall.
That said, a poorly designed or installed system can negate many of the benefits that heat pumps have to offer. Whether you’re reading because you want to cut emissions, or save money on energy, or take advantage of the steady, quiet comfort heat pumps provide, it’s essential to do your homework and find a good contractor to work with. In this guide, we’ll cover how to know when it’s the right time to get heat pumps, the basics of understanding what your options are, common misconceptions about heat pumps, how to find and vet contractors, and more.
Larry Waters is the founder and president of Electrify My Home, a heating and air conditioning contractor in Northern California that specializes in heat pumps. Waters has worked in the HVAC industry for more than 40 years.
D.R. Richardson is the co-founder of Elephant Energy, a Boulder, Colorado-based startup that helps homeowners in Colorado and Massachusetts electrify by using building science and proprietary software to ensure good system design, and by managing all aspects of the project.
Jake Marin is the senior emerging opportunities manager for VEIC, a clean energy nonprofit that administers Vermont and D.C.’s energy efficiency programs among other decarbonization work across the country. Marin ran VEIC’s HVAC program for nearly 8 years and was recently given a “Champion of Energy Efficiency” award for his pioneering work bringing heat pumps to Vermont.
There are many, many kinds of electric heat pumps used for space heating and cooling. At a high level, there are two main categories that homeowners can typically choose from:
Within each of these are a handful of installation options:
The above designs aren’t mutually exclusive. You can install a system that’s fully ducted, fully ductless, or a combination of both. You can also combine a heat pump system with a fuel-burning furnace or boiler, known as a dual-fuel system. If aesthetics are important to you, there are also companies like Quilt that offer versions that can better integrate into the look of your home.
“Ductwork in unfinished space is easy. Ductwork in finished space is so expensive and hard that we typically don't recommend it,” said Richardson.
Heat pumps also come in models with different “speeds” or “stages”:
There are also some technical specifications to be aware of, such as seasonal efficiency ratings:
The highest rated SEER2 device may have a lower HSPF2 rating, while the highest rated HSPF2 device may have a lower SEER2 rating.
Finally, heat pumps also come in many different sizes. Having a properly sized system is one of the most important factors for ensuring your heat pumps run efficiently and last a long time.
A good contractor will be able to walk you through different system designs and equipment options to find the answer that’s best suited to your house, your goals, and your budget.
“There’s a lot of companies out there that offer just what they have in the catalog and their salespeople can’t sell anything outside of that,” Waters told me. “That means the customer is going to get matched with that cookie cutter option if they go with that company. So how to choose a contractor is one of the most important things.”
Many people are used to setting their HVAC systems to different temperatures at different times of day — one temp for the morning and evening, another for when they leave for work, and another for bedtime. This makes sense with many furnaces and air conditioners because they’re usually designed to cycle on, blast hot or cold air at full capacity until they achieve the temperature you want, and then turn off, so turning down the system when you’re not home can save a lot of energy. But the most efficient “variable speed” heat pumps work differently — they use a lot of energy to reach a certain temperature, but once they hit it, they sip small amounts of energy to maintain it. Experts say a “set it and forget it” approach will give you the most efficient performance and the most consistent energy bills.
“Don’t worry about the number,” says Marin. “Just find your comfortable temperature, and then leave it alone, forget it’s even there.”
This topic can be divisive among HVAC experts, but in most of the continental U.S., you should be able to find a heat pump solution that will heat your home efficiently on the coldest winter days. The key is that the system has to be sized correctly. Richardson’s company, Elephant Energy, works in Colorado, where he says they’ve had two years in a row with days that got down to -13 degrees Fahrenheit, “and our fleet of hundreds of heat pumps have cranked out heat to keep homes nice and warm on those coldest days.”
There still may be scenarios where you
want to keep your furnace as a back-up, even if it’s not strictly necessary.
If you’re switching from fuel oil, propane, or electric resistance heating, you’re pretty much guaranteed to save money on your bills with heat pumps. But if you’re switching from natural gas, it really depends on where you live.
Richardson says that for a lot of his customers in Colorado, making the switch from gas to inverter heat pumps is cost neutral — they end up paying a bit more for heating in the winter but less for cooling in the summer, since the heat pump is often more efficient than whatever air conditioning they were replacing. At the same time, those who don't have air conditioning to start with could end up paying a bit more year-round.
Do you…
Short answer: Hold off on a heat pump, invest in weatherization.
Long answer: You may have arrived at this guide because you’re interested in decarbonizing your home, but if you have a relatively new heating and/or cooling system, it could actually be worse, emissions-wise, to replace it, due to the embedded carbon that went into manufacturing that equipment. Unless you’re really desperate to replace your existing system for comfort or financial reasons (if you have electric resistance heaters, for example, switching to heat pumps could save you a lot of money, since they use about a third of the electricity), we recommend getting a bit more life out of it first.
In the meantime, put your enthusiasm for decarbonization into making your home more efficient. Insulating and air sealing your home before you get heat pumps will help you save money in the near term and get you the best results from heat pumps later on.
Short answer: Consider a dual fuel system
Long answer: If you really need a new air conditioning system but your heater still has a lot of life left in it, consider installing a heat pump to work alongside your existing furnace or boiler. That way, you’ll get efficient cooling capacity that will save you money in the summer, and you’ll also be able to cut down on your fossil fuel consumption in the winter. You can set the heat pump to warm your home until it gets down to a certain temperature outside, at which point your furnace or boiler will kick in. (Many heat pump models can operate in very cold temperatures, so having a backup heating system like this is not necessary, but it may be a good intermediate step in certain cases.)
Short answer: It’s the perfect time to think about heat pumps!
Long answer: HVAC equipment typically lasts for 15 to 20 years, so 10 years is probably the earliest you would want to start thinking about a replacement. It’s probably safe to wait a few years longer, but you definitely don’t want to wait until your existing system breaks to start your heat pump journey. A heat pump retrofit can be a months-long process, from finding contractors, to evaluating quotes, to refining your plan, to getting permits and scheduling the work. If you’re in an emergency situation where your boiler broke and you really need heat, you could be forced to settle for a less-than-ideal solution. At the very least, start your research now and consider weatherization upgrades.
Short answer: Get a mini-split!
Long answer: Ductless mini-split heat pumps are a no-brainer to provide heating and cooling to a single room or zone. They can be very affordable — and in some cases free — with rebates and tax credits. If you want to retrofit the rest of your home to use heat pumps down the line, this will help you get familiar with the technology and will not preclude you from adding more later — though it is helpful to tell your contractor that now so they can take it into account.
Heat pumps can be a major investment. If you just want to add heating or cooling capacity to one or two rooms, it can cost $5,000 to $7,000 per room, on average, before incentives, Richardson told me. A whole-home solution averages $20,000 to $30,000 before incentives, but depending on the home and the system design can go much higher.
Do you have some rooms that are hotter in the summer or colder in the winter than others and you want to make your home more comfortable overall? Or is your goal to get better air filtration and ventilation? Or do you simply want to get off fossil fuels? It will be helpful to think through what you want to achieve and communicate that to your contractor so they can take that into account when they design your system.
The federal government offers a 30% tax credit for heat pumps, up to $2,000, not including labor, for certain energy efficient models. (Note that you can only get the full tax credit if you have $2,000 or more in tax liability the year you install the heat pumps.) The credit can’t be rolled over to the next tax year, but you can claim it in multiple years. Your state energy office, city, or utility may offer additional tax credits or rebates.
It’s important to learn about what’s available in your area before reaching out to contractors because some rebate programs require you to work only with approved partners. Also, the contractors you reach out to might not always be up to date on the latest incentive programs, so it’s a good idea to do some independent research and make sure you find someone who knows how to help you take advantage. There is, unfortunately, not yet any single directory where you can enter your zip code and find out about every possible rebate opportunity everywhere in the country, so it’s best to check multiple sources of information:
As with all home renovation projects, we strongly recommend getting at least three quotes from different contractors.
Heat pumps are common in some parts of the country, but in others it might be difficult to find a contractor who really knows their stuff. Dip your toes in a heat pump Reddit forum and you’ll find scores of homeowners asking what to do after a contractor told them that heat pumps don’t work and they should just stick with gas. Here are a few strategies for finding high quality heat pump contractors, in order of what we recommend:
Finding the right contractor is probably the most important decision you’ll make in this entire process, and it’s not uncommon to get quotes with wildly different recommendations. Here are some questions you can ask to help you get a sense of who really knows what they are talking about and is willing to go the whole nine yards to make sure you get a properly designed system:
Manual J is a formula that helps a contractor identify the right size HVAC system for your home. It requires taking detailed measurements throughout the building, inspecting your home’s insulation and other elements that will affect airflow and heat retention, and performing tests such as the “blower door” to assess how leaky your building’s envelope is. If you’re interested in using your ductwork or installing new ductwork, they should also perform a “Manual D” calculation. Waters told me that despite these calculations being industry standards, very few contractors actually go through the trouble of doing them. “What this does, it tells us exactly what size system I need for heating and cooling, and exactly how much air goes into each room,” he said.
Richards agreed, adding that you may want to ask what technology they use to size the system. “You need somebody who has a technology-driven tool that can actually measure the heating and cooling requirements of your home,” he says. “Are you doing a true Manual J, or are you sort of sticking your finger up in the air?”
If your contractor only works with one brand of equipment, you’re more likely to get a solution that’s convenient for them rather than one that’s custom designed for you.
Waters told me the registers — the vents that release air into a given room — are critical for occupant comfort. If your existing ductwork is designed to distribute air from a furnace, your registers may be designed to push air into the middle of the room. But with heat pumps, you want the air either pushed up toward the ceiling if the vents are down low or across the ceiling if they are up high, so that the house doesn’t feel drafty and you get proper circulation.
If you’re starting with heat pumps but you eventually want to electrify your stove, your clothes dryer, or your car, your home may need an electric panel upgrade or an electric service upgrade from the utility. What you don’t want is to put in heat pumps that eat up the rest of your home’s capacity and then have to deal with pricey upgrades down the line.
The Building Performance Institute and North American Technician Excellence are two organizations that train and certify contractors, auditors, and technicians in the latest building science and best practices. A certification doesn’t guarantee you’ve found the right contractor — it could mean they know a lot about installing heat pumps but still don’t know much about the models that work in the coldest climates, for instance. But it’s a helpful data point that shows they are investing in training.
After you’ve found a contractor or company to work with, settled on a system design, and secured financing, your installer is going to need to secure permits for the work. Then you’ll need to schedule the installation, which, depending on how busy your contractor is, can take several weeks to several months. The actual work should take one to three days, depending on how complicated it is.
Also — talk to your contractor about maintenance. Be sure to clean the filters regularly and do anything else they recommend to get the best performance and longest life out of your equipment.
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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.”
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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.