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Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has been following the administration’s increasingly outlandish efforts to squelch wind projects in her newsletter, The Fight. Last week, discussing the potential redesignation of incidental bird deaths as purposeful under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, she wrote, “It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush.” The move would make operating a wind farm effectively illegal, depriving numerous states of a major source of electricity. “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,” she said.
Until earlier this year, clean-energy finance startup Crux was a digital marketplace exclusively for buying and selling tax credits made available by the Inflation Reduction Act. When Republicans in Congress threatened to eliminate tax credit transferability in March, however, the company moved into debt financing, a market that CEO Alfred Johnson told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham was seven times bigger. Now, in an exclusive interview Katie published yesterday, Crux said it’s expanding yet again into the tax and preferred equity markets. “The tax equity market was a $20 billion market before the IRA, and is now a $32 billion to $35 billion market,” Johnson told Katie, citing numbers from the company’s forthcoming mid-year market intelligence report. That’s a 10% to 20% increase over last year. Crux’s overall goal is to make itself a one-stop shop for project financing.
Australian rooftop solar is roughly half the price of Americans pay. Tesla
Tesla’s energy division released a new white paper warning that U.S. regulations were imposing “death by a thousand cuts” on the rooftop solar industry. In a post on LinkedIn, Tesla’s senior director of residential solar Colby Hastings said the “regulatory landscape slows progress, and we need more than one rule change to solve this.”
“Solar insiders have long lamented that residential deployments in the U.S. are too expensive compared to overseas. With the passage of the OBBB and tax credits expiring, it is imperative that we take a hard look at how the industry will navigate the next decade,” she wrote. “We must ensure that consumers have competitive choices for energy. This means affordable solar and storage at home.” Among the changes she proposed were enacting national code standards “that simplify rules, keep pace with hardware innovation, and limit regional variation.” She also called for reducing tariff on imported components to lower the cost of hardware. “Bottom line — we see an opportunity to cut ~40% from the cost stack, reducing average solar + storage installation from > $5/W today to ~$3/W.”
More than 85 climate scientists signed onto a line-by-line critique of the Department of Energy’s recent report sowing doubt over the severity and causes of rising global temperatures. The analysis pointed out that the federal report was written by a “tiny team of hand-picked contrarians” known for “often writing outside their areas of expertise.” The controversial government study had “no peer review of transparency,” they wrote, “unlike legitimate assessments,” and relied on “cherry-picked evidence and miscitations” to reach a “predetermined outcome.”
It’s far from the only criticism Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is attracting. In a Tuesday post on X, Wright claimed that “if you wrapped the entire planet in a solar panel, you would only be producing 20% of global energy,” arguing that “one of the biggest mistakes politicians can make is equating the ELECTRICITY with ENERGY!” A community note X users appended to the agency chief’s post pointed out that this wildly undercounted the potential to capture energy from the sun, which covers the planet in enough solar potential to meet “3,000x global energy use.” Yet even that failed to capture how “funny and sad” Wright’s “silly and unsophisticated” post really was, said electricity analyst David Fishman. In particular, Fishman noted, Wright seemed to underestimate how much total energy usage worldwide could be converted to electricity. “That's thinking like a guy who spent his whole career drilling for gas, but never learned much about physics, electricity, industry, or energy systems,” he wrote. “Really not what you want to see from someone in such a position.”
The amount of carbon emissions that the world can safely store is just a 10th of industry estimates, according to a Bloomberg writeup of a new study in the journal Nature. Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Imperial College London found “a prudent global limit” of around 1.46 trillion tons of CO2 that can be safely stored in geologic formations. That’s “almost 10 times smaller than estimates proposed by industry that have not considered risks to people and the environment.” Utilizing all the practical areas to store carbon would curb global warming by 0.7 degrees Celsius, compared to industry estimates of 6 degrees Celsius or higher.
Cooling data centers consumes a huge amount of electricity, and nearly half of that energy is lost as low-temperature waste heat that’s simply vented into the air. But a new study from Rice University found a way to close the loops and channel that heat into more electricity. “There’s an invisible river of warm air flowing out of data centers,” Laura Schaefer, the chair of the mechanical engineering program at Rice and co-author of the paper, said in a press release. “Our question was: Can we nudge that heat to a slightly higher temperature with sunlight and convert a lot more of it into electricity? The answer is yes, and it’s economically compelling.”
Before leaving office, the Biden-era EPA finalized awards to eight nonprofits that would “create a national financing network for clean energy and climate solutions across the country.” The move was meant to insulate the program from cuts, but it stirred the new administration’s ire. The Trump EPA called the move a scam to give taxpayer-funded slush funds to nonprofits stacked with former Biden administration appointees. The recipients could still appeal the decision, which experts told Emily could still have significant ramifications. Watch this space.
The country’s largest electrical grid, the PJM Interconnection, put out a conceptual proposal in August for a plan to ask large electricity users such as data centers to voluntarily reduce their power consumption when there’s a shortage of electrons on the grid — and potentially require them to do so if too few step up. The plan is largely in line with what the Data Center Coalition, a trade association representing server companies, recently backed in a legal filing in North Carolina, as this newsletter previously reported. Yet big tech companies balked at the proposal, according to comments submitted in response. Microsoft warned that imposing curtailment undermines investor confidence. Amazon said targeting large power users to cut back on demand is discriminatory. Talen Energy, an independent power producer, said the 13-state-spanning PJM has no authority to make such a rule, and that individual state law governs load. The Data Center Coalition itself criticized the rule’s assumption that big power users have on-site back-up generation as overly broad and not reflective of reality.
The idea itself derives from an influential paper released by Duke University researchers in February that found the U.S. could add gigawatts’ worth of additional demand from new data centers without building out an equivalent amount of power plants if those facilities could curtail electricity usage when demand was particularly high. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin described the strategy as “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid,” boiling down the approach simply as: “Just turn them off sometimes.”
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The Trump administration said it would reconsider the permit for SouthCoast Wind, a Massachusetts offshore wind farm approved last year by the Biden administration, according to legal filings seen by Reuters on Tuesday. In a motion filed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, lawyers at the Department of Justice said the Department of the Interior would review the project’s construction and operations plan.
The move came a week after Trump yanked back approvals for the nearly-complete Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island’s coast. It’s just the latest escalation in what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind.” As I reported yesterday in this newsletter, the Department of Transportation was the most recent agency to join the effort this week, axing $679 million in funding for infrastructure to support offshore wind development. But the Interior Department has led the charge with a witch hunt against policies that favor wind power, the de-designation of millions of acres of federal waters for offshore turbine construction, and a new investigation into bird deaths near windmills. The Department of Commerce tapped in last month by teeing up future tariffs with its own probe into whether imported turbine components pose a national security threat. The assault is prompting pushback. On Monday, the Democratic governors of five Northeastern states called on Trump to “uphold all offshore wind permits already granted.”
The BRICS brothers. Suo Takekuma - Pool/Getty Images
In spite of Trump administration pressure aimed at convincing countries around the world to reject Russian oil, the Kremlin netted an energy deal with the world’s second-most populous nation on Tuesday in a sign of what Russian President Vladimir Putin called an “unprecedentedly high level” of good relations between Moscow and Beijing. Under the new agreement, China will buy Russian gas through a new pipeline from Siberia. Once complete, the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline will carry 50 billion cubic meters of gas through Mongolia to northern China every year.
The deal came at the tail end of a summit in China between Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The trio of hardline leaders, who represent the three biggest economies in the world, came together for a photo depicting a friendly three-way handshake widely interpreted as a show of unity and defiance against Washington’s attempts to impose its will through economic sanctions.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is broadening its effort to remake itself as the testing ground for new American small modular reactors. On Tuesday, the federally-owned utility announced plans to buy 6 gigawatts of reactors from NuScale Power, the first and only SMR developer whose design has won approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Shares of NuScale — which has struggled since the high-profile failure of what was supposed to be the nation’s debut SMR power plant in Utah two years ago — surged nearly 8%.
The TVA had already planned to build the first U.S. units of GE Vernova-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt reactors, and last month became the country’s first utility to sign a power purchase agreement with a fourth-generation reactor developer, the Google-backed Kairos Power. The deals come amid what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called a “nuclear power dealmaking boom.” On Tuesday an industrial standard-setting group that includes Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, Rio Tinto, and IBM launched a new consortium to streamline processes around building advanced nuclear reactors. On Wednesday, Kairos inked a deal with nuclear fuel producer BWXT to work together on producing the rare type of uranium fuel the reactor company needs for its plants.
Wind turbines are notoriously not always recyclable. But they are reusable. Just ask Jos de Krieger, the co-founder of a Dutch company called Blade Made that purchases used turbines and transforms them into sleek, minimalist tiny homes. “Everything in the built environment — everything that you see around you — has an end of life,” Krieger told CNN. “And we need solutions besides waste or landfill, incineration or something without value… Changing that perception is really something that has to happen in the eyes of everyone,” he added, calling for “processes that create stories, instead of waste.”
