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Last time around they were bulwarks for climate action. This time is different.
This story is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
Following Donald Trump’s election in November, climate advocates self-soothed with the conviction that cities and states would continue carrying the banner in the absence of federal climate action. That’s what happened during Trump’s first presidency, after all. When he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, hundreds of local governments declared they were “still in” on climate, and a new wave of state and local climate policies swept the country.
By the time Biden stepped into the White House four years later, many of these communities had climate plans either in place or in progress. When his administration passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, setting aside billions of dollars for emissions reduction and climate adaptation projects, they were in a prime position to apply for funding. By November 2024, with most of that money doled out, it was easy to imagine how climate-forward cities could forge ahead, seeded by grants, regardless of what Trump did.
Except then Trump did the thing that many assumed he would not — because he legally could not — do. He froze and is now trying to claw back congressionally appropriated, contractually obligated funds. And in so doing, he has thrown the prospects for cities as a last line of defense into question.
“In this administration, it’s a lot more chaotic,” Barbara Buffaloe, the mayor of Columbia, Missouri, told me. “There’s a lot more happening than I feel like there was in 2017, right at the get-go. Nobody knows what the universe is right now.”
Columbia was among those that joined the “still in” campaign in 2017. It adopted emissions reduction goals in 2018, and passed a climate action and adaptation plan in 2019. The Biden administration awarded the city more than $28 million across three separate federal grants to build electric vehicle charging stations, make electrical upgrades that would allow it to charge electric buses, and redesign its central business loop to be more walkable, bikeable, and safe.
All three of those grants are now up in the air. Buffaloe said she was told by state partners that the $2.1 million business loop planning grant from the Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities program was paused. Columbia was the only city in Missouri to get a Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant from the DOT, with the $3.6 million supposed to help pay for EV chargers at the library and the airport. The city is moving ahead with initial activities like environmental reviews and preliminary engineering in the hope that funds to build the actual stations will be unfrozen by the time it’s ready to break ground. Regarding the $23 million bus infrastructure grant, part of a separate DOT program, she said the city hasn’t heard from its grant managers in about a month.
“We don’t know whether or not to continue on the projects,” she told me. “It’s that feeling of uncertainty and trepidation that is causing us the most anxiety. Our construction window is not year-round in Columbia, and because we’re a public institution, it takes a lot longer for us to put out bids and to start projects. We need to know if we have this budget or not.”
It’s not just the funding freeze leaving Columbia in a holding pattern. The city has a municipally-owned electric utility that had been looking to take advantage of “direct pay,” an option for nonprofit entities with no tax liability to collect federal renewable energy incentives as direct subsidies, to help it build more solar farms. But now Republicans in Congress are considering eliminating direct pay.
The funding freeze has put a lot of cities in this position where time-sensitive decisions are stalled. Hundreds of communities were awarded grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture program to fund tree-planting for carbon mitigation and shade creation, for example. Some recipients have been told their grants were canceled altogether, others are still in the dark — their federal grant managers have been fired and no one is responding to their emails.
“They’re kind of at this point of, hey, do we put in the order for trees? We need to plant at certain times of the year,” Laura Jay, the deputy director of Climate Mayors, a national network of mayors working to address climate change, told me. “For a lot of these cities and programs, there’s key decisions that they have to be making, and when there’s uncertainty around it, it puts the city at a huge risk.” There’s financial risk, she said, in terms of spending money without knowing if it will get reimbursed, but also planning risks. A number of cities were awarded grants to purchase electric school buses, for example, and they need to make sure they are going to have enough to get kids to school.
As a larger, wealthier city, Columbia is in a better position than others. It collects revenue through a capital improvement tax that Buffaloe said could be used for climate projects. “We’ll do as much as we can,” she told me.
But in more rural areas, these grants represented a rare opportunity to modernize and build more equitable access to infrastructure.
“We’re in Southeast Ohio, which traditionally has been left behind when it comes to larger infrastructure projects,” Andrew Chiki, the deputy service-safety director in Athens, Ohio, told me. “We don’t have an interstate highway.”
Chiki helped lead a regional effort to apply for a Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant, the same program Columbia won funding from that is now frozen. He and his partners were awarded $12.5 million to build a corridor of electric vehicle chargers in 16 communities between Athens and Dayton. “One of our attempts with this was to answer the question, if EV adoption takes off the way that we are envisioning, how do we allow an on-ramp for communities that are already disadvantaged to be able to adopt?”
Chiki said they were still waiting to hear whether they could move forward with the project or not. Athens passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency in 2020, and adopted a target to reduce emissions by 50% over 10 years. The city has made some strides, Chiki said, by making buildings more energy efficient and installing solar on city-owned facilities. “We are still committed to doing as much as we can,” he told me.
But if the EV charging grant falls through, the smaller villages and towns between Athens and Dayton that don’t have the staff resources or capacity to apply for these types of grants will lose out, he said. “We would probably look at other types of funding sources, but it would make it incredibly difficult and not be nearly as broad as we want.”
There are some pots of money for local climate projects that have flown under the Trump administration’s radar. Last year, the South Florida ClimateReady Tech Hub, a consortium of local governments, schools, labor groups, and companies working to accelerate the development of climate technologies, won a $19.5 million grant from the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. The money came from the Biden-era CHIPS and Science Act, a law that Trump is pushing Congress to scrap but that Republicans have thus far defended. Tech Hub will use the funds to scale low-emissions cement that can be used for adaptation projects, energy efficiency, and workforce development, among other things.
Francesca Covey, the chief innovation and economic development officer for Miami-Dade County and regional innovation officer for the Tech Hub, told me the group has continued to have quarterly check-ins with federal partners and haven’t gotten any signal that the funding is in jeopardy. “It’s really been more business as usual,” she said. Covey also mentioned two pilot projects to build artificial reefs and seawalls in the area that had funding from the Department of Defense and were moving forward.
Still, the Tech Hub has adjusted its language to stay competitive in the new political environment. The group changed its name to the Risk and Resilience Tech Hub two weeks ago, Covey told me. “We wanted to underscore the economic imperative of the work,” she said, when I asked what motivated the name change. “Right now we’re finding that where we are getting the best traction with the private and public community is around risk. We wanted to make sure we were couching it in the right way.”
Ithaca, New York, on the other hand, which passed its own Green New Deal in 2019, is committed to its climate and equity-centric messaging. “We are not intending to change the narrative around what we’re doing,” Rebecca Evans, the city’s sustainability director, told me. “It’s still clean energy, and it is still because climate change is a threat to human existence. We are still going to prioritize black and brown populations and populations that experience poverty at various levels because they are most vulnerable to climate change.”
About 85% of Evans’ Green New Deal budget comes from federal sources, and at first she worried that was all at risk. In 2022 and 2023, Ithaca had received funding from what’s called “congressional directed spending,” or “earmarks,” in two federal appropriations bills, meaning that New York state lawmakers fought to get money set aside for the city. The first grant, worth $1 million, was for a hydrogen production and fueling project. The second, worth $1.5 million, was for a wide-ranging program to decarbonize the school system and enhance a local workforce development program to include new energy efficiency certifications. Both programs included explicit diversity, equity, and inclusion-related objectives, so Evans assumed they would be targeted by the Trump administration.
But on Tuesday, she was told by federal partners on the hydrogen grant that congressionally directed spending was not subject to Trump’s executive orders and got the greenlight to move into the next phase. Evans still hasn’t heard back from her federal partners on the second grant, but she’s more hopeful now that it will move forward.
Back when I first spoke to Evans, when things were more up in the air, she told me she worried that the Trump administration’s actions would cause advocates to lose hope. “I think anger can be a positive thing, but it’s the loss of hope, even if it’s marginal, that is truly, truly dangerous to this movement.”
Perhaps that’s why Evans, like all of the other local leaders I spoke with, projected optimism when I asked what they could accomplish over the next four years without federal support. She was already trying to find the money elsewhere, she said. “We can’t do all of the amazing things that we wanted to do, but we can still make progress,” she said.
“Cities are incredibly nimble and innovative,” Jay, of Climate Mayors, told me. “I think that they’re eager to and committed to keeping the work going. What that looks like, I think, is hard to figure out right now, because everyone’s kind of caught in the chaos of trying to figure out if they still have this funding or not. But they’re fully committed to making sure that this work is continuing.”
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And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.
Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.
The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.
“This is something that we’re just starting to see,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s one thing for environmentalists to support wind and solar projects if the idea is that those projects will eventually replace coal power plants. But it’s another thing if those projects are purely being built to meet incremental demand from data centers.”
We’ve started to see evidence of this backlash in certain resort towns fearful of a new tech industry presence and the conflicts over transmission lines in Maryland. But it is most prominent in Virginia, ground zero for American hyperscaler data centers. As we’ve previously discussed in The Fight, rural Virginia is increasingly one of the hardest places to get approval for a solar farm in the U.S., and while there are many reasons the industry is facing issues there, a significant one is the state’s data center boom.
I spent weeks digging into the example of Mecklenburg County, where the local Board of Supervisors in May indefinitely banned new solar projects and is rejecting those that were in the middle of permitting when the decision came down. It’s also the site of a growing data center footprint. Microsoft, which already had a base of operations in the county’s town of Boydton, is in the process of building a giant data center hub with three buildings and an enormous amount of energy demand. It’s this sudden buildup of tech industry infrastructure that is by all appearances driving a backlash to renewable energy in the county, a place that already had a pre-existing high opposition risk in the Heatmap Pro database.
It’s not just data centers causing the ban in Mecklenburg, but it’s worth paying attention to how the fight over Big Tech and solar has overlapped in the county, where Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter has worked locally to fight data center growth with a grassroots citizens group, Friends of the Meherrin River, that was a key supporter of the solar moratorium, too.
In a conversation with me this week, Tim Cywinski, communications director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter, told me municipal leaders like those in Mecklenburg are starting to group together renewables and data centers because, simply put, rural communities enter into conversations with these outsider business segments with a heavy dose of skepticism. This distrust can then be compounded when errors are made, such as when one utility-scale solar farm – Geenex’s Grasshopper project – apparently polluted a nearby creek after soil erosion issues during construction, a problem project operator Dominion Energy later acknowledged and has continued to be a pain point for renewables developers in the county.
“I don’t think the planning that has been presented to rural America has been adequate enough,” the Richmond-based advocate said. “Has solar kind of messed up in a lot of areas in rural America? Yeah, and that’s given those communities an excuse to roll them in with a lot of other bad stuff.”
Cywinski – who describes himself as “not your typical environmentalist” – says the data center space has done a worse job at community engagement than renewables developers in Virginia, and that the opposition against data center projects in places like Chesapeake and Fauquier is more intense, widespread, and popular than the opposition to renewables he’s seeing play out across the Commonwealth.
But, he added, he doesn’t believe the fight against data centers is “mutually exclusive” from conflicts over solar. “I’m not going to tout the gospel of solar while I’m trying to fight a data center for these people because it’s about listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then not telling them what to say but trying to help them elevate their perspective and their concerns,” Cywinski said.
As someone who spends a lot of time speaking with communities resisting solar and trying to best understand their concerns, I agree with Cywinksi: the conflict over data centers speaks to the heart of the rural vs. renewables divide, and it offers a warning shot to anyone thinking AI will help make solar and wind more popular.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is one signature away from becoming law and drastically changing the economics of renewables development in the U.S. That doesn’t mean decarbonization is over, experts told Heatmap, but it certainly doesn’t help.
What do we do now?
That’s the question people across the climate change and clean energy communities are asking themselves now that Congress has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would slash most of the tax credits and subsidies for clean energy established under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Preliminary data from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project (led by Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins) forecasts that said bill will have a dramatic effect on the deployment of clean energy in the U.S., including reducing new solar and wind capacity additions by almost over 40 gigawatts over the next five years, and by about 300 gigawatts over the next 10. That would be enough to power 150 of Meta’s largest planned data centers by 2035.
But clean energy development will hardly grind to a halt. While much of the bill’s implementation is in question, the bill as written allows for several more years of tax credit eligibility for wind and solar projects and another year to qualify for them by starting construction. Nuclear, geothermal, and batteries can claim tax credits into the 2030s.
Shares in NextEra, which has one of the largest clean energy development businesses, have risen slightly this year and are down just 6% since the 2024 election. Shares in First Solar, the American solar manufacturer, are up substantially Thursday from a day prior and are about flat for the year, which may be a sign of investors’ belief that buyer demand for solar panels will persist — or optimism that the OBBBA’s punishing foreign entity of concern requirements will drive developers into the company’s arms.
Partisan reversals are hardly new to climate policy. The first Trump administration gleefully pulled the rug from under the Obama administration’s power plant emissions rules, and the second has been thorough so far in its assault on Biden’s attempt to replace them, along with tailpipe emissions standards and mileage standards for vehicles, and of course, the IRA.
Even so, there are ways the U.S. can reduce the volatility for businesses that are caught in the undertow. “Over the past 10 to 20 years, climate advocates have focused very heavily on D.C. as the driver of climate action and, to a lesser extent, California as a back-stop,” Hannah Safford, who was director for transportation and resilience in the Biden White House and is now associate director of climate and environment at the Federation of American Scientists, told Heatmap. “Pursuing a top down approach — some of that has worked, a lot of it hasn’t.”
In today’s environment, especially, where recognition of the need for action on climate change is so politically one-sided, it “makes sense for subnational, non-regulatory forces and market forces to drive progress,” Safford said. As an example, she pointed to the fall in emissions from the power sector since the late 2000s, despite no power plant emissions rule ever actually being in force.
“That tells you something about the capacity to deliver progress on outcomes you want,” she said.
Still, industry groups worry that after the wild swing between the 2022 IRA and the 2025 OBBBA, the U.S. has done permanent damage to its reputation as a business-friendly environment. Since continued swings at the federal level may be inevitable, building back that trust and creating certainty is “about finding ballasts,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director for Advanced Energy United’s federal priorities team, told Heatmap.
The first ballast groups like AEU will be looking to shore up is state policy. “States have to step up and take a leadership role,” he said, particularly in the areas that were gutted by Trump’s tax bill — residential energy efficiency and electrification, transportation and electric vehicles, and transmission.
State support could come in the form of tax credits, but that’s not the only tool that would create more certainty for businesses — considering the budget cuts states will face as a result of Trump’s tax bill, it also might not be an option. But a lot can be accomplished through legislative action, executive action, regulatory reform, and utility ratemaking, Godfrey said. He cited new virtual power plant pilot programs in Virginia and Colorado, which will require further regulatory work to “to get that market right.”
A lot of work can be done within states, as well, to make their deployment of clean energy more efficient and faster. Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, pointed to Texas’ “connect and manage” model for connecting renewables to the grid, which allows projects to come online much more quickly than in the rest of the country. That’s because the state’s electricity market, ERCOT, does a much more limited study of what grid upgrades are needed to connect a project to the grid, and is generally more tolerant of curtailing generation (i.e. not letting power get to the grid at certain times) than other markets.
“As Texas continues to outpace other markets in generator and load interconnections, even in the absence of renewable tax credits, it seems increasingly plausible that developers and policymakers may conclude that deeper reform is needed to the non-ERCOT electricity markets,” Norris told Heatmap in an email.
At the federal level, there’s still a chance for, yes, bipartisan permitting reform, which could accelerate the buildout of all kinds of energy projects by shortening their development timelines and helping bring down costs, Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap. “Whether you care about energy and costs and affordability and reliability or you care about emissions, the next priority should be permitting reform,” he said.
And Godfrey hasn’t given up on tax credits as a viable tool at the federal level, either. “If you told me in mid-November what this bill would look like today, while I’d still be like, Ugh, that hurts, and that hurts, and that hurts, I would say I would have expected more rollbacks. I would have expected deeper cuts,” he told Heatmap. Ultimately, many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits will stick around in some form, although we’ve yet to see how hard the new foreign sourcing requirements will hit prospective projects.
While many observers ruefully predicted that the letter-writing moderate Republicans in the House and Senate would fold and support whatever their respective majorities came up with — which they did, with the sole exception of Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick — the bill also evolved over time with input from those in the GOP who are not openly hostile to the clean energy industry.
“You are already seeing people take real risk on the Republican side pushing for clean energy,” Safford said, pointing to Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the new excise tax on wind and solar added to the Senate bill, which earned her vote after it was removed.
Some damage has already been done, however. Canceled clean energy investments adds up to $23 billion so far this year, compared to just $3 billion in all of 2024, according to the decarbonization think tank RMI. And that’s before OBBBA hits Trump’s desk.
The start-and-stop nature of the Inflation Reduction Act may lead some companies, states, local government and nonprofits to become leery of engaging with a big federal government climate policy again.
“People are going to be nervous about it for sure,” Safford said. “The climate policy of the future has to be polycentric. Even if you have the political opportunity to make a big swing again, people will be pretty gun shy. You will need to pursue a polycentric approach.”
But to Godfrey, all the back and forth over the tax credits, plus the fact that Republicans stood up to defend them in the 11th hour, indicates that there is a broader bipartisan consensus emerging around using them as a tool for certain energy and domestic manufacturing goals. A future administration should think about refinements that will create more enduring policy but not set out in a totally new direction, he said.
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, was similarly optimistic that tax credits or similar incentives could work again in the future — especially as more people gain experience with electric vehicles, batteries, and other advanced clean energy technologies in their daily lives. “The question is, how do you generate sufficient political will to implement that and defend it?” he told Heatmap. “And that depends on how big of an economic impact does it have, and what does it mean to the American people?”
Ultimately, Fishman said, the subsidy on-off switch is the risk that comes with doing major policy on a strictly partisan basis.
“There was a lot of value in these 10-year timelines [for tax credits in the IRA] in terms of business certainty, instead of one- or two- year extensions,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The downside that came with that is that it became affiliated with one party. It was seen as a partisan effort, and it took something that was bipartisan and put a partisan sheen on it.”
The fight for tax credits may also not be over yet. Before passage of the IRA, tax credits for wind and solar were often extended in a herky-jerky bipartisan fashion, where Democrats who supported clean energy in general and Republicans who supported it in their districts could team up to extend them.
“You can see a world where we have more action on clean energy tax credits to enhance, extend and expand them in a future congress,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The starting point for Republican leadership, it seemed, was completely eliminating the tax credits in this bill. That’s not what they ended up doing.”