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The small hydrogen plant at the Port of Stockton illustrates a key challenge for the energy transition.
Officials at the Port of Stockton, an inland port in the Central Valley of California, were facing a problem. Under pressure from California regulators to convert all port vehicles to zero-emissions models over the next decade or so, they had made some progress, but had hit a wall.
“Right now we only have one tool, and that is to electrify everything,” Jeff Wingfield, the port’s deputy director, told me. The Port of Stockton has actually been something of a national leader in electrifying its vehicles, having converted about 40% of its cargo-handling equipment from diesel-powered to battery-electric machines to date. But there aren’t electric alternatives available for everything yet, and the electric machines they’ve purchased have come with challenges. Sensors have malfunctioned due to colder weather or moisture in the air. Maintenance can’t be done by just any mechanic; the equipment is computerized and requires knowledge of the underlying code. “We’ve had a lot of downtime with the equipment unnecessarily. And so when we’re trying to sell that culture change, you know, these things can set back the mindset and just the overall momentum,” said Wingfield.
The port also needs its tenant companies to make the switch, but according to Wingfield, they are hesitant to invest in the electric truck models available today. They’re more interested in hydrogen fuel-cell trucks, he said, which are also zero-emissions, and there’s even a vendor selling them right down the street. The problem was there was no source of hydrogen within an hour and a half of the port.
It was these conditions that got Wingfield and his colleagues excited about BayoTech, a company that wanted to build a new hydrogen plant there — even though BayoTech was going to make hydrogen from methane, the main component of natural gas, in a carbon emissions-intensive process. Hydrogen fuel-cell powered trucks don’t release any of the carbon or toxic pollutants that diesel trucks release, but the process of making the hydrogen fuel can still be dirty.
While the port was considering BayoTech’s proposal, California leadership was committing the state to building out a climate-friendly hydrogen industry. In July, the Biden administration awarded California $1.2 billion for a $12.6 billion plan to build new, zero-emissions hydrogen supply chains. “California is revolutionizing how a major world economy can clean up its biggest industries,” Governor Gavin Newsom said. “We’re going to use clean, renewable hydrogen to power our ports and public transportation – getting people and goods where they need to go, just without the local air pollution.”
Nonetheless, the port approved the fossil fuel-based hydrogen plant in August.
The case illustrates the complexities of this moment in the energy transition. At its center is a question: Should we gamble with higher emissions today on the premise that it could help lower emissions in the future? It’s a gamble that many climate advocates, guided by warnings from scientists about the consequences of continued fossil fuel use, fear will do more harm than good.
The port, which was the lead agency for the environmental review process, estimated that if all of the fuel BayoTech produced was used as a replacement for diesel, it would result in a net decrease in emissions of 4,317 metric tons of CO2 per year, which is like taking 1,000 cars off the road. Still, the plant will emit about 18 kilograms of carbon for every kilogram of hydrogen it produces — more than four times higher than the Department of Energy’s standard for “clean” hydrogen.
Climate and environmental groups in Stockton oppose the project. They’ve raised a number of concerns about it and the conditions under which it was approved, but one is the missed opportunity. “At a time when incentives are lining up for cleaner production methods,” Davis Harper, the carbon and energy program manager at the local group Restore the Delta, told me, “and at a time when the state in particular is really trying to transition away from methane, to approve a new steam methane reforming project in a community that’s already suffering from so many cumulative impacts of industrial pollution — it’s a major regression.”
Between operations at the port, highways, warehouses, and other industrial activity, Stockton ranks in the 96th percentile for pollution burden in California, and in the 100th percentile for cases of asthma. In addition to carbon dioxide, the BayoTech plant will release nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter. Harper and other local advocates want the community to have more of a say in shaping regional economic development and defining what its hydrogen future looks like. “I think it puts a stain on what the opportunity for hydrogen might be in the community,” he said.
But Wingfield told me it wasn’t an either/or scenario. “I mean, nobody was approaching us with a green hydrogen project,” he said. Even if someone was, Wingfield said green hydrogen was still too expensive and that no one would buy it. The port is supporting state-wide efforts to develop a more sustainable supply of hydrogen in the future, he said, “but it is slow, and for us, we need something now.”
There’s a chicken-and-egg challenge to getting a clean hydrogen economy going. In addition to a new supply of fuel, it will require investments in new vehicles, fueling stations, and modes of delivering the gas — and that’s just for trucking. Decarbonization experts also see potential to use hydrogen for cargo ships, steelmaking, and aviation. “I agree, you know, don’t wait around for the green projects that are being planned to come online,” Lew Fulton, the director of the energy futures research program at the U.C. Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, told me. “There’s a whole bunch of things we need to learn by doing. And so from that point of view, you could argue, well, in the first few years, it doesn’t matter that much what kind of hydrogen it is.”
When I asked Catharine Reid, BayoTech’s chief marketing officer, what brought the company to Stockton, she told me California is a key market and the San Joaquin Valley is currently a dead-zone for the fuel. The Regional Transit District recently purchased five new fuel-cell buses, but to fuel them, it will have to truck in hydrogen from other parts of the state. BayoTech’s business model is designed to address this kind of local need. The company builds small, modular plants and sites them as close to the point of consumption as possible to avoid the cost and emissions associated with transporting the fuel. The project in Stockton will produce just 2 tons of hydrogen per day, or enough to fill the tanks of about 50 trucks. By contrast, the average hydrogen plant in California, which mostly delivers the gas to oil refineries and fertilizer plants, produces closer to 200 tons per day. “We anticipate that that demand will be snapped up quickly,” said Reid.
The port approved the plant using an abbreviated environmental review process — another aspect that troubled the advocates I spoke to — which required BayoTech to mitigate some of its most significant impacts. To reduce pollution, the company will install equipment that cuts the plant’s nitrogen oxide emissions. It has also committed to using zero-emissions vehicles for at least 50% of deliveries. But the biggest pollutant that will come out of the plant is carbon dioxide — just over 12,000 metric tons of it per year. That’s not much compared to the average hydrogen plant. The smallest existing hydrogen plant in California, Air Products’ Sacramento facility, has the capacity to produce more than twice as much hydrogen as BayoTech will, but emitted nearly four times as much carbon in 2021, according to state data. One of BayoTech’s selling points is its technology’s efficiency.
The company has also committed to developing a community benefits plan, which is still in the works, though BayoTech has already signed an agreement to use local union labor and committed to donate $200,000 over the next four years to the community.
Part of BayoTech’s agreement with the port is that it will lower its emissions by purchasing carbon credits from producers of so-called “renewable natural gas,” or RNG, which can mean methane captured from landfills or from cow manure pits. It’s considered low-carbon because the methane would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, where it would warm the planet far more than carbon dioxide. In theory, credit sales help finance systems to capture the gas and use it for energy instead.
I asked Reid why, when there was so much focus on and funding available for clean hydrogen, like California’s $12.6 billion initiative and lucrative new federal tax credits, the company was investing in the fossil-fueled kind. She suggested that once the federal tax credit rules are finalized, the plant may in fact be eligible for the subsidies. That’s because the guidelines might allow hydrogen plants that buy RNG credits to qualify. “It’s a well established system that’s validated,” Reid said of the credits, “and the environmental benefits are there.”
It’s true that this system of RNG credits is well-established. It’s already written into California climate policy. The state has a low carbon fuel standard designed to drive down the average carbon intensity of transportation fuels over time. When it comes to calculating the carbon intensity of hydrogen for the regulations, there’s a workaround. If the hydrogen is made from natural gas, but the supplier purchases RNG credits, they can report their hydrogen as having a very low or even negative carbon intensity.
But the environmental benefits of these credits are the subject of much debate. Notably, fuel producers can buy credits from all over the country, and they don’t have to prove that their purchase had an additional effect on emissions beyond what might have happened otherwise. Though these credits may have some environmental benefit, they are certainly not causing carbon to be removed from the atmosphere, as implied by a negative carbon intensity. In an op-ed for Heatmap, scholars Emily Grubert and Danny Cullenward urged the Treasury Department not to adopt this same carbon accounting scheme for the federal tax credit, writing that it “would undermine the tax credit’s entire purpose.” They estimate that a fossil hydrogen project could qualify as zero-emissions by offsetting just 25% of its natural gas use. This could make it much harder for truly green hydrogen — like the kind made from electricity and water — to compete.
Interestingly, California’s new $12.6 billion clean hydrogen initiative appears to renounce RNG credits. A frequently asked questions page for the plan says that it “will not include the use of plastics, dairy biogas, or fossil methane paired with biomethane credits.”
Still, the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development praised the BayoTech project in public comments, writing that it would “contribute to achieving California’s ambitious climate and pollution reduction goals.”
The letter seemed to be mistaken about what it was supporting, however, noting that the facility would “utilize woody biomass, helping to address two needs — utilization of a waste stream and production of renewable hydrogen.” When I reached out to the governor’s office, spokesperson Willie Rudman told me the reference to woody biomass was an accident, “resulting from a mix-up with another project.” Still, the office supports the project, he said, due to “commitments made by the developer to utilize renewable natural gas as the feedstock, which can be transported to the production facility via existing natural gas pipelines.”
When I noted that this, too, was a mix-up, and that BayoTech would be buying RNG credits, not using the fuel directly, Rudman responded that this was a cost-effective and perfectly acceptable practice under California’s low-carbon fuel standard.
If you view BayoTech’s plant as a bridge to get the hydrogen economy underway, Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, told me, it’s important to know how to get to the other side. “Is this just a lifeline for the oil and gas industry, to give them another product that they can sell, which those profits then go back into drilling more oil and gas?” He said he wasn’t categorically opposed to the idea of using natural gas to produce hydrogen for now, as long as there were built-in mechanisms to convert the facility to zero-emissions down the line.
Wingfield of the Port of Stockton asserted that BayoTech’s plant would become cleaner over time, but the port has no such commitment in writing, and it’s also not entirely clear how. BayoTech’s Reid was not sure whether the Stockton plant would find a local source of RNG. She said the company was looking, but that it was rare to find alignment between BayoTech’s business model — putting hydrogen production very close to demand — and RNG suppliers. The only other route to cleaner production, other than completely replacing the plant with one that runs on electricity, would be to install carbon capture equipment. But Reid said the amount of carbon the plant produces will be so small that it may not justify the expense. “We continue to talk to players in the industry and evaluate what they’re bringing out commercially to see if there’s a match with our production units,” she said.
Construction on the plant will begin in a few months, Reid told me, and won’t take long. BayoTech expects to be delivering hydrogen in 2025.
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Republicans Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced the measure late Tuesday night.
Late last week, the House Committee on Natural Resources released the draft text of its portion of the Republicans’ budget package. While the bill included mandates to open oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, increase logging by 25% over 2024’s harvest, and allow for mining activities upstream of Minnesota’s popular Boundary Waters recreation area, there was also a conspicuous absence in its 96 pages: an explicit plan to sell off public lands.
To many of the environmental groups that have been sounding the alarm about Republicans’ ambitions to privatize federal lands — which make up about 47% of the American West — the particular exclusion seemed almost too good to be true. And as it turned out in the bill’s markup on Tuesday, it was. In a late-night amendment, Republican Representatives Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced a provision to sell off 11,000 acres in their states.
The maneuver, which came at nearly midnight, left many Democrats and environmental groups deeply frustrated by the lack of transparency. “The rushed and last-minute nature of this amendment introduction means little to no information is available,” including “maps or parcel information, amendment text, CBO Score, etc.,” the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said in a statement Wednesday.
House lawmakers appeared still to be at odds during a Wednesday morning press conference to announce the creation of a Bipartisan Public Lands Caucus. Rather than putting on the united front suggested by the working group’s name, former Secretary of the Interior and Montana Republican Ryan Zinke argued in defense of the amendment, saying, “A lot of communities are drying up because they’re looking to public land next door and they can’t use it.” Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell then took the mic to say, “I would urge all of us that the hearings — it’s not done in the dead of night, and that we have good, bipartisan discussions with everybody impacted at the table.”
Despite the cloak-and-dagger way Republicans introduced the amendment, there are several clues as to what exactly Amodei and Maloy are up to. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has aggressively pushed for the sell-off of public lands, including introducing the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act, which would “make small tracts of [Bureau of Land Management] land available to communities to address housing shortages or affordability.” Critics of the bill have called it the “McMansion Subsidy Act” and have argued — as the Center for Western Priorities’ Kate Groetzinger, does — that it would “do little to address housing issues in major metros like Salt Lake City and the fact that the current housing shortage is due largely to a lack of home construction, not land.” The Center for Western Priorities also contends that it “contains very few restrictions on what can be built on federal public lands that are sold off under the program.” Notably, Lee and Maloy have worked closely together in the past on transferring federal land in Utah to private ownership.
The land singled out in the Tuesday amendment includes BLM and Forest Service parcels in six counties in Utah and Nevada that “had already been identified for disposal by the counties,” Outdoor Life notes. While some land would be sold with “the express purpose of alleviating housing affordability,” the publication notes that “other parcels, including those in southern Utah, don’t have a designated purpose.” As Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, warned E&E News, it’s in this way that the bill appears to set “dangerous precedent that is intended to pave the way for a much larger scale transfer of public lands.”
While many Republicans contend that states can better manage public lands in the West than the federal government can (in addition, of course, to helping raise the $15 billion of the desired $2 trillion in deficit reductions across the government to offset Trump’s tax cuts), such a move could also have significant consequences for the environment. Turning over public lands to states — or to private owners — could ease the way for expansive oil and gas development, especially in Utah, where there are ambitions to quadruple exports of fossil fuels from the state’s northeastern corner.
Reducing BLM land could also limit opportunities for solar, wind, and geothermal development; in Utah, the agency has identified some 5 million acres of public land, in addition to 11.8 million acres in Nevada, for solar development. While there are admittedly questions about how much renewable permitting will make it through the Trump BLM, it’s also true that solar development wouldn’t necessarily be the preference of private landowners if the land were transferred.
Tuesday’s markup ultimately saw the introduction of more than 120 amendments, including a Democratic provision that would have prohibited revenue from this bill from being used to sell off public lands, but was easily struck down by Republicans. In the end, Amodei and Maloy’s amendment was the only one the committee adopted. Shortly afterward, the lawmakers voted 26-17 to advance the legislation.
Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
By all outward appearances, the green hydrogen industry is in a state of arrested development. The hype cycle of project announcements stemming from Biden-era policies crashed after those policies took too long to implement. A number of high profile clean hydrogen projects have fallen apart since the start of the year, and deep uncertainty remains about whether the Trump administration will go to bat for the industry or further cripple it.
The picture may not be as bleak as it seems, however. On Wednesday, the green hydrogen startup Ecolectro, which has been quietly developing its technology for more than a decade, came out with a new plan to bring the tech to market. The company announced a partnership with Re:Build Manufacturing, a sort of manufacturing incubator that helps startups optimize their products for U.S. fabrication, to build their first units, design their assembly lines, and eventually begin producing at a commercial scale in a Re:Build-owned factory.
“It is a lot for a startup to create a massive manufacturing facility that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars when they’re pre-revenue,” Jon Gordon, Ecolectro’s chief commercial officer, told me. This contract manufacturing partnership with Re:Build is “massive,” he said, because it means Ecolectro doesn’t have to take on lots of debt to scale. (The companies did not disclose the size of the contract.)
The company expects to begin producing its first electrolyzer units — devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity — at Re:Build’s industrial design and fabrication site in Rochester, New York, later this year. If all goes well, it will move production to Re:Build’s high-volume manufacturing facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania next year.
The number one obstacle to scaling up the production and use of cleaner hydrogen, which could help cut emissions from fertilizer, aviation, steelmaking, and other heavy industries, is the high cost of producing it. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a suite of policies designed to kick-start the industry, including an $8 billion grant program and a lucrative new tax credit. But Biden only got a small fraction of the grant money out the door, and did not finalize the rules for claiming the tax credit until January. Now, the Trump administration is considering terminating its agreements with some of the grant recipients, and Republicans in Congress might change or kill the tax credit.
Since the start of the year, a $500 million fuel plant in upstate New York, a $400 million manufacturing facility in Michigan, and a $500 million green steel factory in Mississippi, have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed.
The outlook is particularly bad for hydrogen made from water and electricity, often called “green” hydrogen, according to a recent BloombergNEF analysis. Trump’s tariffs could increase the cost of green hydrogen by 14%, or $1 per kilogram, based on tariff announcements as of April 8. More than 70% of the clean hydrogen volumes coming online between now and 2030 are what’s known as “blue” hydrogen, made using natural gas, with carbon capture to eliminate climate pollution. “Blue hydrogen has more demand than green hydrogen, not just because it’s cheaper to produce, but also because there’s a lot less uncertainty around it,” BloombergNEF analyst Payal Kaur said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent summit in New York City. Blue hydrogen companies can take advantage of a tax credit for carbon capture, which Congress is much less likely to scrap than the hydrogen tax credit.
Gordon is intimately familiar with hydrogen’s cost impediments. He came to Ecolectro after four years as co-founder of Universal Hydrogen, a startup building hydrogen-powered planes that shut down last summer after burning through its cash and failing to raise more. By the end, Gordon had become a hydrogen skeptic, he told me. The company had customers interested in its planes, but clean hydrogen fuel was too expensive at $15 to $20 per kilogram. It needed to come in under $2.50 to compete with jet fuel. “Regional aviation customers weren’t going to spend 10 times the ticket price just to fly zero emissions,” he said. “It wasn’t clear to me, and I don’t think it was clear to our prospective investors, how the cost of hydrogen was going to be reduced.” Now, he’s convinced that Ecolectro’s new chemistry is the answer.
Ecolectro started in a lab at Cornell University, where its cofounder and chief science officer Kristina Hugar was doing her PhD research. Hugar developed a new material, a polymer “anion exchange membrane,” that had potential to significantly lower the cost of electrolyzers. Many of the companies making electrolyzers use designs that require expensive and supply-constrained metals like iridium and titanium. Hugar’s membrane makes it possible to use low-cost nickel and steel instead.
The company’s “stack,” the sandwich of an anode, membrane, and cathode that makes up the core of the electrolyzer, costs at least 50% less than the “proton exchange membrane” versions on the market today, according to Gordon. In lab tests, it has achieved more than 70% efficiency, meaning that more than 70% of the electrical energy going into the system is converted into usable chemical energy stored in hydrogen. The industry average is around 61%, according to the Department of Energy.
In addition to using cheaper materials, the company is focused on building electrolyzers that customers can install on-site to eliminate the cost of transporting the fuel. Its first customer was Liberty New York Gas, a natural gas company in Massena, New York, which installed a small, 10-kilowatt electrolyzer in a shipping container directly outside its office as part of a pilot project. Like many natural gas companies, Liberty is testing blending small amounts of hydrogen into its system — in this case, directly into the heating systems it uses in the office building — to evaluate it as an option for lowering emissions across its customer base. The equipment draws electricity from the local electric grid, which, in that region, mostly comes from low-cost hydroelectric power plants.
Taking into account the expected manufacturing cost for a commercial-scale electrolyzer, Ecolectro says that a project paying the same low price for water and power as Liberty would be able to produce hydrogen for less than $2.50 per kilogram — even without subsidies. Through its partnership with Re:Build, the company will produce electrolyzers in the 250- to 500-kilowatt range, as well as in the 1- to 5-megawatt range. It will be announcing a larger 250-kilowatt pilot project later this year, Gordon said.
All of this sounded promising, but what I really wanted to know is who Ecolectro thought its customers were going to be. Demand for clean hydrogen, or the lack thereof, is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry faces to scaling, after cost. Of the roughly 13 million to 15 million tons of clean hydrogen production announced to come online between now and 2030, companies only have offtake agreements for about 2.5 million tons, according to Kaur of BNEF. Most of those agreements are also non-binding, meaning they may not even happen.
Gordon tied companies’ struggle with offtake to their business models of building big, expensive, facilities in remote areas, meaning the hydrogen has to be transported long distances to customers. He said that when he was with Universal Hydrogen, he tried negotiating offtake agreements with some of these big projects, but they were asking customers to commit to 20-year contracts — and to figure out the delivery on their own.
“Right now, where we see the industry is that people want less hydrogen than that,” he said. “So we make it much easier for the customer to adopt by leasing them this unit. They don’t have to pay some enormous capex, and then it’s on site and it’s producing a fair amount of hydrogen for them to engage in pilot studies of blending, or refining, or whatever they’re going to use it for.”
He expects most of the demand to come from industrial customers that already use hydrogen, like fertilizer companies and refineries, that want to switch to a cleaner version of the fuel, or hydrogen-curious companies that want to experiment with blending it into their natural gas burners to reduce their emissions. Demand will also be geographically-limited to places like New York, Washington State, and Texas, that have low-cost electricity available, he said. “I think the opportunity is big, and it’s here, but only if you’re using a product like ours.”
On coal mines, Energy Star, and the EV tax credit
Current conditions: Storms continue to roll through North Texas today, where a home caught fire from a lightning strike earlier this week • Warm, dry days ahead may hinder hotshot crews’ attempts to contain the 1,500-acre Sawlog fire, burning about 40 miles west of Butte, Montana• Severe thunderstorms could move through Rome today on the first day of the papal conclave.
The International Energy Agency published its annual Global Methane Tracker report on Wednesday morning, finding that over 120 million tons of the potent greenhouse gas were emitted by oil, gas, and coal in 2024, close to the record high in 2019. In particular, the research found that coal mines were the second-largest energy sector methane emitter after oil, at 40 million tons — about equivalent to India’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Abandoned coal mines alone emitted nearly 5 million tons of methane, more than abandoned oil and gas wells at 3 million tons.
“Coal, one of the biggest methane culprits, is still being ignored,” Sabina Assan, the methane analyst at the energy think tank Ember, said in a statement. “There are cost-effective technologies available today, so this is a low-hanging fruit of tackling methane.” Per the IEA report, about 70% of all annual methane emissions from the energy sector “could be avoided with existing technologies,” and “a significant share of abatement measures could pay for themselves within a year.” Around 35 million tons of total methane emissions from fossil fuels “could be avoided at no net cost, based on average energy prices in 2024,” the report goes on. Read the full findings here.
Opportunities to reduce methane emissions in the energy sector, 2024
IEA
The Environmental Protection Agency told staff this week that the division that oversees the Energy Star efficiency certification program for home appliances will be eliminated as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing cuts and reorganization, The Washington Post reports. The Energy Star program, which was created under President George H.W. Bush, has, in the past three decades, helped Americans save more than $500 billion in energy costs by directing them to more efficient appliances, as well as prevented an estimated 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere since 1992, according to the government’s numbers. Almost 90% of Americans recognize its blue logo on sight, per The New York Times.
President Trump, however, has taken a personal interest in what he believes are poorly performing shower heads, dishwashers, and other appliances (although, as we’ve fact-checked here at Heatmap, many of his opinions on the issue are outdated or misplaced). In a letter on Tuesday, a large coalition of industry groups including the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in defense of Energy Star, arguing it is “an example of an effective non-regulatory program and partnership between the government and the private sector. Eliminating it will not serve the American people.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that the electric vehicle tax credit may be on its last legs, according to an interview he gave Bloomberg on Tuesday. “I think there is a better chance we kill it than save it,” Johnson said. “But we’ll see how it comes out.” He estimated that House Republicans would reveal their plan for the tax credits later this week. Still, as Bloomberg notes, a potential hangup may be that “many EV factories have been built or are under construction in GOP districts.”
As we’ve covered at Heatmap, President Trump flirted with ending the $7,500 tax credit for EVs throughout his campaign, a move that would mark “a significant setback to the American auto industry’s attempts to make the transition to electric vehicles,” my colleague Robinson Meyer writes. That holds true for all EV makers, including Tesla, the world’s most valuable auto company. However, its CEO, Elon Musk — who holds an influential position within the government — has said he supports the end of the tax credit “because Tesla has more experience building EVs than any other company, [and] it would suffer least from the subsidy’s disappearance.”
Constellation Energy Corp. held its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, announcing that its operating revenue rose more than 10% in the first three months of the year compared to 2024, beating expectations. Shares climbed 12% after the call, with Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez confirming that Constellation’s pending purchase of natural gas and geothermal energy firm Calpine is on track to be completed by the end of the year, and that the nuclear power utility is “working hard to meet the power needs of customers nationwide, including powering the new AI products that Americans increasingly are using in their daily lives and that businesses and government are using to provide better products and services.”
But as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Dominguez also threw some “lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections,” telling investors that “it’s not hard to conclude that the headlines are inflated.” As Matthew points out, Dominguez also has some reason to downplay expectations, including that “there needs to be massive investment in new power plants,” which could affect the value of Constellation’s existing generation fleet.
The Rockefeller Foundation aims to phase out 60 coal-fired power plants by 2030 by using revenue from carbon credits to cover the costs of closures, the Financial Times reports. The team working on the initiative has identified 1,000 plants in developing countries that would be eligible for the program under its methodology.