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The end has been coming for a while. With the EPA’s new power plant emissions rules, though, it’s gotten a lot closer.
There’s no question that coal is on its way out in the U.S. In 2001, coal-fired power plants generated about 50% of U.S. electricity. Last year, they were down to about 15%.
On Thursday, however, the Biden administration arguably delivered a death blow. New carbon emission limits for coal plants establish a clear timeline by which America’s remaining coal generators must either invest in costly carbon capture equipment or close. With many of these plants already struggling to compete with cheaper renewables and natural gas, it’s not likely to be much of a choice. If the rule survives legal challenges, the nation’s coal fleet could be extinct by 2039.
Coal plant retirement presents a two-pronged problem: Utilities have to figure out how to replace lost power generation, and the surrounding community must reckon with the lost tax revenue and jobs from the power plants and the coal mines that supplied them.
From the beginning, Biden has promised to help revitalize the economies of the communities left in coal’s wake. “We’re never going to forget the men and women who dug the coal and built the nation,” he said when he laid out his energy transition plan just a week after entering office. “We’re going to do right by them.”
Economic revitalization doesn’t happen overnight, of course, or even in the span of a four-year term. But money is already rolling out in the form of targeted investments in new energy sources, businesses, and jobs in coal communities, and there’s more to come.
It’s the proactive planning aspect, however, that remains underresourced and scattershot.
Emily Grubert, a civil engineer and sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, told me there are few plants that are expected to make it past 2039 regardless, due to their age and the economics of operating them. The emissions rule’s real potential, then, is to bring about a more orderly — and potentially less painful — exit.
A Heatmap analysis of Energy Information Administration data found that of the nation’s roughly 230 remaining coal plants, 38 are scheduled to fully shut down by 2032. These plants won’t have to make any changes under the new rule. An additional five will shutter by 2039. These will be required to reduce their emissions in the interim, beginning in 2030, by replacing some of the coal they burn with natural gas. That leaves about 190 plants with either partial retirement plans or no plans at all that will be forced to make a decision between carbon capture and shutting down.
Grubert told me that many of these plants have, in fact, communicated informal plans to shut down that are not recorded in the federal data. That aside, she called it “amazing” how many have no retirement plans at all.
For surrounding communities, an impending coal transition can look really different in different places, depending on geography and how diverse the local economy is. Still, the first step should be the same everywhere. “What you need to do, really practically, is figure out what that plant is supporting,” Grubert told me. “What needs to be replaced, for whom, and by when?
It’s a lot more concrete than it seems: It’s some specific number of people, it’s some specific amount of tax revenue. It’s much easier to move forward once you actually know what those are.”
How much of that work has been done so far depends, in part, on the state. Some, like Colorado, New Mexico, and Illinois, have established new positions or entirely new offices dedicated to helping communities transition off fossil fuels. But other states, like Wyoming and Ohio, have advanced measures to keep coal plants open as long as possible.
Successful planning also depends on how clearly a retirement date is articulated and stuck to, Jeffrey Jacquet, an associate professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University who leads a multidisciplinary research project on coal communities there, told me. Some communities have been told one date and then been blindsided when a plant has been forced to shut down years earlier for economic reasons. He noted one success story in Shadyside, Ohio, where the local school board was able to negotiate a deal to slowly step down its tax collections over four years after learning the RE Burger coal plant was going to close. “Had they not weaned us off losing that tax revenue, we would have been in terrible shape,” a school board administrator told a student on Jacquet’s project. “Fiscally we’re pretty good on solid ground now, but at one point it was an extremely bleak time.”
The new power plant rule could help address some of these problems by putting the entire country on the same set timeline, forcing plant operators to put retirement dates in writing. There’s still a risk some will fail early, in unforeseen ways, but at least communities will have been put on notice.
Those who go looking for help will find ample resources. When I started looking into all of the programs that exist to bring investment into coal communities, or otherwise help them diversify their economies, I was surprised at how much investment in coal communities had already been set in motion:
This list is far from comprehensive. In fact, there are so many programs, it’s kind of a problem.
“So much of it comes down to the local capacity to take advantage of these opportunities,” Jacquet told me. “A lot of these communities are losing population, they’re facing out-migration. Community leaders are already overworked and overstressed.” (Possible case in point: I reached out to several local groups doing coal transition work in West Virginia and Kentucky for this story, and wasn’t able to get anyone on the phone.)
This isn’t a new problem, per se. The federal government had dozens of programs and pots of money set aside for rural economic development before the Biden administration came into the White House, but they were scattered across different agencies and departments within those agencies, making it difficult for any overworked, overstressed town manager to know where to start.
Jeremy Richardson, a manager of the carbon-free electricity program at the think tank RMI, told me he was involved in a group that pitched policies to the incoming president that would help ease the process. “It shouldn’t be on the community to navigate the entire federal bureaucracy to figure out what they qualify for,” he said.
Biden took the note. In his first climate executive order, he established the Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, which is building tools to help companies and local governments identify funding opportunities. Its “getting started guide,” which Richardson called a “fantastic piece of work,” walks communities and workers through 10 concrete steps, from identifying needs to developing a transition strategy to finding funding and implementing a project, with curated resources for each step. The group also established four “rapid response” teams to provide more targeted assistance to communities in areas with the highest loss of coal assets.
Jacquet summed up the group’s work as “hand holding,” stressing that it still required people at the local level that were willing and able to take advantage of these services. “I think we’re sort of seeing this phenomenon where the communities that are already best positioned to take advantage of these are going to be the ones that take advantage of it,” he said.
There are other limitations to the broader suite of federal assistance programs. For instance, even if a community is able to attract a big manufacturing project, there may be a several-years gap between the coal plant closing and the new job opportunities and local tax revenue manifesting.
That’s why the coordination efforts in states like Colorado, which was the first to establish an Office of Just Transition in 2019, are so promising. The office has a small staff of six, and a meager budget of $15 million, but is making progress by focusing on highly targeted assistance. In the town of Craig, two nearby coal-fired power plants are scheduled to retire over the next four years and four coal mines will shutter by 2030, taking with them 900 jobs and about 45% of the county’s tax revenue. A new “transition navigator” hired in January will help match the town’s needs with federal and state funding opportunities and serve as a central point of contact for coal workers and their families seeking connection to services.
“I think it’s been really helpful,” said Richardson. “They’ve had long conversations — several years of conversations — with those communities in northwest Colorado that are facing closures soon.” The office was controversial at first. Republicans called it “Orwellian” and unanimously opposed it. But in the years since, some of its staunchest critics have become its biggest champions. “To me that says that they’re doing some good work and they’re making some inroads.”
There’s progress on the energy side, too. RMI is pushing a model called “clean repowering,” enabled by a suite of IRA incentives that offer tax credits and loan guarantees for clean energy projects in fossil fuel communities. The idea is that renewable energy projects can get around the yearslong bottleneck of connecting to the grid by building in close proximity to existing fossil fuel plants. A lot of these plants have “spare” interconnection rights that a solar or wind farm could use to connect a lot sooner.
RMI found 250 gigawatts of spare rights available — which is more than the capacity of the entire existing coal fleet. “If you can build a renewable facility alongside where that fossil plant is, maybe you use the fossil plant a little less because it’s cheaper to generate from the renewables, but you know, you don’t have to close it immediately,” said Richardson.
As Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future, told me, even though the coal transition has been in motion for decades, it’s still early. There hasn’t been enough research. Much of the funding and programs are new. No one really knows yet what’s working, or what could work better.
The only thing that’s clear, he said, is that if these communities are going to develop alternative economic futures, they really need to begin that process now.
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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 told me.
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 renewable, 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 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 solar — i.e. energy bill savings — to low-income residents 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 huge new 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.