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Why the grid of the future might hinge on these 10 projects.
The energy transition happens one project at a time. Cutting carbon emissions is not simply a matter of shutting down coal plants or switching to electric cars. It calls for a vast number of individual construction projects to coalesce into a whole new energy system, one that can generate, transmit, and distribute new forms of clean power. Even with the right architecture of regulations and subsidies in place, each project must still conquer a series of obstacles that can require years of planning, fundraising, andcajoling, followed by exhaustive review before they can begin building, let alone operating.
These 10 projects represent the spectrum of solutions that could enable a transition to a carbon-free energy system. The list includes vastly scaled up versions of mature technologies like wind and solar power alongside the traditional energy infrastructure necessary to move that power around. Many of the most experimental or first-of-a-kind projects on this list are competing to play the role of “clean firm” power on the grid of the future. Form’s batteries, Fervo’s geothermal plants, NET Power’s natural gas with carbon capture, and TerraPower’s molten salt nuclear reactor could each — in theory — dispatch power when it’s needed and run for as long as necessary, unconstrained by the weather. Others, like Project Cypress, are geared at solving more distant problems, like cleaning up the legacy carbon in the atmosphere.
But they do not all have a clear path to success. Each one has already faced challenges, and many of them are likely to face a great number more. We call these the make-or-break energy projects because it's still unclear what the clean energy system of the future is going to look like, but the projects from this list are likely to play a big part in it — if, that is, they get there.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Type of project: Solar farm
Developer: Intersect Power
Location: Desert Center, Riverside County, California.
Size: 400 megawatts of generation and 650 megawatts of storage
Operation date: Possibly 2025
Cost: $990 million
Why it matters: Facing opposition from local retirees angered by the large number of projects popping up in the area, as well as from conservation-focused groups — such as Basin and Range Watch, which opposes many utility-scale energy projects in desert areas — Easley will be a test of whether California’s reforms to limit the timeframe of appeals to the state’s environmental reviews can actually work in getting a project approved and online faster.
The early signs are promising. A nearby solar project by the same developer, Intersect Power, recently went into operation after getting approved by the Bureau of Land Management in January 2022. Easley could be operational “as early as late 2025,” according to a Plan of Development prepared for Intersect Power.
Easley is also an example of what’s increasingly becoming standard in California, at both the residential and utility-scale level: pairing solar with storage. The California grid increasingly relies on batteries to keep the lights on as solar ramps up and down in the mornings and, especially, the evenings. The state has procured a massive amount of storage and has adjusted how utilities pay for rooftop solar in a way that encourages pairing battery systems with rooftop solar panels. This both stabilizes the grid and helps further decarbonize it, as batteries that are physically close to intermittent renewables are more likely to abate carbon emissions.
Heatmap Illustration/Form Energy
Type: Energy storage
Developer: Form Energy and Great River Energy
Location: Cambridge, Minnesota
Size: 150 megawatt hours
Operation date: End of 2025
Cost: Unknown; Goal of less than 1/10th cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries per megawatt hour
Why it matters: Form Energy first made waves in 2020 when it announced a contract with Great River Energy, a Minnesota electric utility, to build a battery that could store 100 hours’ worth of electricity, which was simply unheard of. Other energy storage companies were just trying to break the 4-hour limitation of lithium-ion, aiming for 8 hours or, at most, 12. Days-long energy storage would be a game changer for maintaining reliability during extreme weather events, storing renewable energy for stretches of cloudy days or windless nights or kicking in when demand peaks. At first, Form’s project was shrouded in mystery. How, exactly, would it do this? But a year later, the company revealed the secret chemistry behind its breakthrough: iron and oxygen. The batteries are filled with iron pellets that, when exposed to oxygen, rust, releasing electrons to the grid. They “charge” by running in reverse, using the electrical current from the grid to convert the rust back to iron.
Since then, the hype has continued to build. Form has raised nearly $1 billion from venture capital and been awarded tens of millions more ingovernment grants. It has signed contracts with six utilities to deploy projects in California, New York, Virginia, Georgia, and Colorado, in addition to Minnesota. All this, despite not having completed a single project yet.
The Great River Energy Project is set to be the first to come online. Originally, the company said it would be operating by the end of 2023; now it’s expected to start construction later this year and begin operating in early 2025, Vice President of Communications Sarah Bray told Heatmap. First, the company has to complete construction of its first factory in Weirton, West Virginia, where it will be producing all of the batteries. Bray said it expects to start high-volume production later this year.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Type: Onshore wind
Developer: Pattern Energy
Location: Lincoln, Torrance, and San Miguel Counties, New Mexico, with transmission into Arizona
Size: 3,500 megawatts
Operation date: 2026
Cost: The project’s developer, Pattern Energy, has secured $11 billion in financing for the wind and associated transmission project. The cost of the project is estimated to be $8 billion.
Why it matters: This would be the biggest wind project in the country and a test case for a variety of energy policy objectives at both the state and federal level. For California, it would be a key step in decarbonizing its grid, as the state right now imports a large amount of its power, not all of which is carbon-free. For the federal government, it meets several goals — using public lands for carbon-free energy development, plus long-distance transmission to spur energy development across the country and link clean power resources in rural areas to major load centers.
It would also mean an ambitious project could overcome long and concerted opposition. The project was first proposed in 2006, and its transmission line cleared environmental review back in 2015, but it has been mired in lawsuit after lawsuit. Most recently, a coalition of conservation groups and Indian tribes sued to halt construction on the power line portion of the project in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley, claiming that their cultural rights had not been adequately respected. In April, a judge allowed construction to continue, ruling that those claims were barred by the existing federal approvals, which had taken years to attain.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Type: Offshore wind
Developer: Equinor
Location: South of Long Island, New York
Size: 810 megawatts
Operation date: 2026
Cost: Not available, but an earlier estimate for developing two wind farms was $3 billion. Costs have since risen, but the second farm, Empire Wind 2, is no longer under contract.
Why it matters: The Northeast, and especially New York State, have aggressive aims for decarbonization, with a goal of 70% of the state’s electricity coming from renewables by 2030. The Biden administration also has a specific goal for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, and New York has a goal of 9 gigawatts by 2035. These types of high-capacity projects will be essential for the Northeast to decarbonize. The windy coast of the Atlantic Ocean is the most potent large-scale renewable resource in the region, and many of the region’s large load centers, such as New York City and Boston, are on the coast.
Offshore wind, while expensive, can present less permitting hassle and local opposition than onshore wind or utility-scale solar. Empire Wind 1 (along with Sunrise Wind) matters tremendously for New York’s offshore wind program, which has been in development for years but has faced escalating costs and project cancellations. Only one offshore wind project is actually operational in the state, South Fork Wind, which was contracted outside the NYSERDA process and has around 130 megawatts of capacity. If Empire manages to get steel in the water and electrons flowing to the coast, it will be a sign that the Northeast’s — and thus the country’s — decarbonization goals are at least somewhat attainable.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Type: Transmission
Developers: Transmission Developers, which is owned by the Blackstone Group
Size: 339 miles / 1,250 megawatts
Operation date: 2026
Cost: $6 billion
Why it matters: The Champlain Hudson Power Express, often referred to as CHPE (affectionately pronounced “chippy”) will deliver 1,250 megawatts of hydropower from Quebec into the New York City grid, which is currently about 90% powered by fossil fuels. It is “the most powerful project you’ll never see,” according to its developers, as it is the largest transmission line in the country to be installed entirely underground and underwater.
The project is essential to New York’s goal to build a zero-emission electricity system by 2040. The line will supply an always-available source of clean power to supplement intermittent wind and solar generation and maintain a reliable grid. It has already overcome a number of barriers, including nearly a decade of environmental reviews, uncertainty over whether New York would buy its power, and opposition from conservation advocates concerned about the negative impacts of hydroelectric dams on the environment and on Native communities in Canada.
When it begins operating, New Yorkers won’t just get cleaner power — they should also see air quality benefits almost immediately. The new line is expected to cut air pollution equivalent to that released by 15 of the city’s 16 fossil fuel-fired peaker plants.
Heatmap Illustration/Fervo
Developer: Fervo
Type: Geothermal
Location: Beaver County, Utah
Size: 400 megawatts
Operation date: 2026, although the project isn’t expected to be finished until 2028
Cost: Not disclosed, but Fervo raised $244 million and said that the cash “will support Fervo’s continued operations at Cape Station.”
Why it matters: This enhanced geothermal project is not the first one for Fervo. The company’s Nevada site, Project Red, began providing power for Google data centers in Nevada in November 2023. This planned site, however, will be far bigger: Fervo currently has authorization from the Bureau of Land Management for up to 29 exploratory wells, while the Project Red site had just two. Cape Station broke ground in September 2023, and in the first six months of drilling, Fervo said it reduced costs from drilling by 70% compared to its Project Red wells.
As the grid decarbonizes and major power consumers like technology companies insist on having clean power for their operations, there will be massive and growing demand for so-called “clean firm” power, carbon-free power that is available all the time. Conventional wind and solar is intermittent, and existing battery technology only allows for limited output over time. Fervo’s “enhanced geothermal” technology uses techniques borrowed from the oil and gas industry to be able to produce geothermal power essentially anywhere where there are hot enough rocks underneath the surface of the Earth, as opposed to conventional geothermal, which depends on locating hot enough fluid or stream.
If Fervo can demonstrate that it can produce power at scale at costs comparable to existing conventional geothermal projects, it can expect a massive market for it and demand for more projects.
Heatmap Illustration/TerraPower
Type: Nuclear
Developer: TerraPower
Location: Kemmerrer, Wyoming
Size: 345 megawatts
Operation date: Not available, but the company said in 2021 that it plans to be operational “in the next seven years.” Updated to the 2024 application, that would put it on track for a 2030 completion date.
Cost: Not available, but TerraPower has raised around $1 billion and the federal government has pledged around $2 billion to support the project, which TerraPower has said it will “match … dollar for dollar.”
Why it matters: TerraPower is just one of many companies flogging designs for advanced nuclear reactors, which are smaller and promise to be cheaper to build than America’s existing light-water nuclear reactor fleet. The construction permit application the company submitted in March was a first for a commercial advanced reactor. TerraPower matters as much for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as it does for anyone else, as it’s a test of whether the NRC can meet Congress and the White House’s preference for a more accelerated approval process for advanced nuclear power.
TerraPower’s design, if successful, would be a landmark for the American nuclear industry. The reactor design calls for cooling with liquid sodium instead of the standard water-cooling of American nuclear plants. This technique promises eventual lower construction costs because it requires less pressure than water (meaning less need for expensive safety systems) and can also store heat, turning the reactor into both a generator and an energy storage system.
While there are a number of existing advanced nuclear designs, several of which involve liquid sodium, Natrium could potentially play well with a renewable-heavy grid by providing steady, unchanging output like a current nuclear reactor as well as discharging stored energy in response to renewables falling off the grid.
Heatmap Illustration/Hy Stor Energy
Type: Hydrogen
Developer:Hy Stor Energy
Location: Project components located throughout Mississippi, with some in Eastern Louisiana
Size: Goal of 340,000 metric tons per year (phase one)
Operation date: 2027
Cost: Initially reported as $3 billion; recently reported as more than $10 billion. (In response to an inquiry from Heatmap, the company replied that it “will be in the multiple billions of dollars.”
Why it matters: Truly carbon-free hydrogen could unlock big emissions reductions across the economy, from fertilizer production, to steelmaking, to marine shipping. But few companies are going to the lengths that Hy Stor is gto ensure its product is really clean. The company is building the first off-grid hydrogen production facility powered entirely by wind and solar. That means Hy Stor will have no problem claiming the new hydrogen production tax credit, which requires companies to match their operations with clean energy sources by the hour — a provision that’s been contested by large portions of the hydrogen industry.
For a company that has never built anything before, the scale of Hy Stor’s Mississippi project is ambitious. The company has acquired about 70,000 acres across Mississippi and Louisiana, along with 10 underground salt domes — mounds of salt buried beneath the Earth’s surface that can be dissolved to form cavernous, skyscraper-sized storage facilities for hydrogen. Those salt domes are the key to Hy Stor’s approach, and what enables the company to rely on intermittent renewables. By storing vast amounts of hydrogen, the company will be able to deliver a steady supply to customers and will also have a backup source of energy for its own operations when wind and solar are less available.
Chief Commercial Officer Claire Behar told Heatmap the company has obtained many of the necessary permits, including for its salt caverns and the plant’s water use. It plans to begin construction at the beginning of 2025, and to have the first phase of the project “in service at scale” by 2027. Hy Stor recently announced a deal to purchase its electrolyzers, devices that split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, from a Norwegian company called Nel Hydrogen. It has also signed up a few customers, including a local port and a green steel company.
Heatmap Illustration/Project Cypress
Type: Carbon removal
Developers: Climeworks, Heirloom, and Battelle
Location: Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana
Size: Goal of capturing 1 million metric tons per year
Operation date: About 2030
Cost: Total project cost unknown; eligible for up to $600 million from the Department of Energy for its Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs Program.
Why it matters: Project Cypress might be the most ambitious project to remove carbon from the atmosphere under development in the world. It is a collaboration by two leading direct air capture companies, Heirloom Carbon Technologies and Climeworks, which were among the first to demonstrate their ability to capture carbon directly from the air and store it at commercial scale. Now, the two will be attempting to scale up exponentially, from capturing a few thousands tons per year to a combined million.
Last August, the Department of Energy selected Project Cypress to be one of four direct air capture hubs it will support with $3.5 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. In March, the project was awarded its first infusion of $50 million, but the developers will have to do extensive community engagement to continue receiving funding. Battelle, the project developer, told Heatmap the project has also received an additional $51 million in private investment.
Between financing, permitting challenges, renewable energy sourcing, and community opposition, the project is sure to face a bumpy road ahead. The project and its developers have no ties to the oil and gas industry, but that hasn’t done much to win over the support of environmental justice advocates, who see the project as a dangerous distraction from cutting emissions and pollution in Louisiana. But if Project Cypress is successful, it will show the world what direct air capture looks like at climate-relevant scales.
Heatmap Illustration/NET Power
Type: Carbon capture
Developer: NET Power
Location: Ector County, Texas
Size: 300 megawatts
Operation date: Late 2027 or early 2028
Cost: About$1 billion
Why it matters: Oil and gas CEOs love to say that the problem is not fossil fuels, the problem is emissions. NET Power’s technology — a natural gas power plant with zero emissions, carbon or otherwise — could prove to be the ultimate vindication of that statement. In short, NET Power’s system recycles most of the CO2 it produces and uses it to generate more energy. It also utilizes pure oxygen, unlike typical natural gas plants that take in regular air, which is mostly nitrogen. This means that any remaining CO2 not recycled in the plant is relatively pure and easy to capture.
NET Power opened a 50 megawatt demonstration plant in La Porte, Texas, in 2018, and is developing a 300 megawatt commercial plant in Ector County, Texas, in partnership with Occidental Petroleum, Baker Hughes, and Constellation Energy. On a recent earnings call, CEO Danny Rice said the project was “expected to have a lower levelized cost per kilowatt hour than new nuclear, new geothermal, and new hydro.”
The company generated a lot of excitement among energy experts in the fall of 2021 when it announced that its La Porte project had successfully delivered power to the Texas grid. It also raised a lot of money when it went public last summer. But things have been somewhat rocky since. During a December earnings call, NET Power’s president told investors that its first commercial plant would be delayed by at least a year due to supply chain challenges. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company also applied for funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations last year, but was not selected. It has not yet found any third parties to license its technology or offtakers to buy energy from the Ector County plant, and noted in its recent filings that while the La Porte pilot project delivered electricity to the grid, it did not, in fact, deliver “net” power — meaning that it used more power than it generated.
A spokesperson for the company told Heatmap the La Porte facility was solely intended to “prove the technical viability of the NET Power Cycle” and not intended to produce net power. So everything’s now riding on Project Permian.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct a typographical error in the amount of private investment Project Cypress has received.
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Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “super soaker” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the super soaker collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the super soaker collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the super soaker, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
On tough questioning from the Senate, LA’s fires, and EV leases
Current conditions: Odd weather has caused broccoli and cauliflower plants to come up far too early in the UK • Another blast of Arctic air is headed for the Midwest • An air quality alert has been issued in Los Angeles due to windblown dust and ash.
Firefighters in Los Angeles are scrambling to make progress against the ongoing wildfires there before dangerous winds return. The Palisades and Eaton fires have now been burning for almost a week, charring nearly 40,000 acres, damaging more than 12,000 structures, and leaving at least 24 people dead. They are 13% and 27% contained, respectively. Residents who lost their homes are desperately trying to find new properties to rent or buy in a tight market, with reports of intense bidding wars as landlords hike rents. The economic toll of this disaster is estimated to be between $135 billion and $150 billion. Red flag warnings are in effect today, with critical fire conditions and extreme wind gusts forecast through Wednesday.
Red fire retardant on pool furniture. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A few updates on the incoming administration: President-elect Donald Trump tapped Ed Russo to run an advisory environmental task force. Trump said Russo will oversee “initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of CLEAN AIR and CLEAN WATER. Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” Russo is a longtime Trump loyalist who served as an environmental consultant to the Trump Organization and wrote a book titled “Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero”.
Trump also announced his deputies for some key environmental and energy Cabinet positions over the weekend, including:
More than a dozen of Trump’s Cabinet nominees face Senate confirmation hearings this week. Doug Burgum, who is up for interior secretary, has a hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources tomorrow. Energy secretary nominee Chris Wright has one on Wednesday. EPA nominee Lee Zeldin has one with the Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday.
Affordable EV leases are “the car market’s hottest deal,” according toThe Wall Street Journal. Car companies are changing the way they pitch EVs to buyers, offering short-term leases with low monthly payments. These deals are attractive to first-time EV shoppers who are still a little bit hesitant to commit, as well as people on a tighter budget. Roughly 45% of EV transactions at the end of 2024 were leases, much higher than the auto industry as a whole. And a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act means leased cars can more easily qualify for the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit. “The proliferation of lease deals has made EVs more accessible to buyers who couldn’t afford their higher sticker prices,” the Journal said. “For the automakers, it is helping get more EVs into customers’ hands after a choppy start for their electric-car operations.”
Wind power could overtake coal in Europe for electricity generation for the first time this year, according to the energy think tank Ember. At the end of 2024, wind power was closing in on coal, coming in at just 4% below the fossil fuel in power generation as the continent’s coal plants close. “That output gap could easily be made up over the course of 2025 by an increase in regional wind generation capacity or by higher average wind speeds at turbine level, or by some combination of both,” Reutersreported. Last year wind power accounted for 20% of electricity consumed in the EU, and the goal is to get that up to 50% by 2050. But as Electreknoted, the same problems plaguing projects in the U.S. – permitting delays and connection bottlenecks – are slowing things down. The EU accounts for 4.6% of global power sector emissions.
The World Health Organization’s European Centre for Environment and Health has issued a callout for “examples of interventions to protect and promote mental health in the face of climate change.” The group wants to take stock of these interventions so that it can identify gaps in mental health care and share some best practices. The callout is aimed at Europe only, but it is indicative of a growing awareness of how the worsening climate crisis is taking a toll on mental health worldwide.
“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going around, and I would just try to emphasize that this is a really complex problem. We have lots of different responsible parties. To me, what has happened requires more of a rethink than a blame game.” –Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, speaking to Heatmap about the spread of misinformation around the LA fires