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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, and cajoling, 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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The new climate politics are all about affordability.
During the August recess, while members of Congress were back home facing their constituents, climate and environmental groups went on the offensive, sending a blitz of ads targeting vulnerable Republicans in their districts. The message was specific, straightforward, and had nothing to do with the warming planet.
“Check your electric bill lately? Rep. Mark Amodei just voted for it to go up,” declared a billboard in Reno, Nevada, sponsored by the advocacy group Climate Power.
“They promised to bring down prices, but instead our congressman, Derrick Van Orden, just voted to make our monthly bills go up,” a YouTube ad told viewers in Wisconsin’s 3rd district. “It removes clean energy from the electric grid, creating a massive rate hike on electricity,” the voiceover says, while the words “VAN ORDEN’S PLAN: ELECTRICITY RATE HIKE” flash on screen. The ad, paid for by Climate Power, the League of Conservation Voters, and House Majority Forward, a progressive campaign group, was shown more than a million times from August 13 to 27, according to Google’s ad transparency center.
Both were part of a larger, $12 million campaign the groups launched over the recess in collaboration with organizations including EDF Action and Climate Emergency Advocates. Similar billboards and digital ads targeted Republicans in more than a dozen other districts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. There were also TV spots, partnerships with Instagram influencers, bus stop posters, and in-person rallies outside district offices — all blaming Republicans in Congress for the increasing cost of food, healthcare, and energy.
Courtesy of Climate Power
As others have observed, including Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin back in March, rising utility rates and the broader cost of living crisis are becoming a political liability for Republicans and President Trump. Clean energy advocates are attempting to capitalize on that, trying to get Americans to connect the dots between their mounting electricity bills and their representatives in Congress who voted to cut support for renewable energy.
Some of this is run-of-the-mill politicking, but it’s not only that. It also represents a strategic shift in how the climate movement talks about the energy transition.
It’s not new for green groups to make the argument that renewable energy can save people money. Relying on “free” wind and sun rather than fuels that are subject to price volatility has always been part of the sell, and the plummeting cost of solar panels and wind turbines have only made that pitch more compelling.
But it is new for the affordability argument to come first — above job creation, economic development, reducing pollution, and, of course, tackling climate change.
For most of the past four years, the climate movement has gone all in on trying to build an association in the American mind between the transition to clean energy and jobs. “When I think of climate change, I think of jobs,” then-candidate Joe Biden said during one of his 2020 campaign speeches.
It made sense at the time, Daniel Aldana Cohen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. Just two years earlier, the Sunrise Movement had emerged as a political force with a headline-grabbing rally in Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding “green jobs for all.” The group was joined by then-newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who soon introduced her framework for a Green New Deal that would offer a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers, ensuring them a place in the new clean energy economy.
The fossil fuel industry had seeded divisions between labor and environmental groups for decades by arguing that regulations kill jobs, and Democrats would have to upend that narrative if they wanted to make progress on climate. But the rationale was also more pressing: Unemployment was skyrocketing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and whoever won the presidency would be responsible for rebuilding the U.S. workforce.
Fast forward to the end of Biden’s first year in office, however, and the unemployment rate had snapped back to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, inflation was rising fast. Even though the Democrats managed to name their climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the administration and the climate movement continued talking about it in terms of jobs, jobs, jobs.
Cohen co-directs the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think-tank founded in 2020, and admitted that “from the very start, we would just model every policy with jobs numbers,” partly because modeling the effects of policies on cost of living was a lot more complicated. Now he sees two issues with that approach. For one, it was always going to take time for new manufacturing jobs to materialize — much longer than an election cycle. For another, when unemployment is low, “everybody experiences inflation, but extremely few people experience a good new green job,” Cohen said.
During a recent panel hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, Ben Beachy, who was a special assistant to Biden for climate policy, expressed some regret about the jobs push. “It wasn't addressing one of the biggest economic concerns of most people at that point, which was the rent is too damn high,” he said. But Beachy also defended the strategy, noting that all of the policies addressing cost of living in Biden’s big climate bill, like money for housing, public transit, and childcare, had been stripped out to appease West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. “So we were left without a strong policy leg to stand on to say, this is going to lower your costs.”
When the moderator asked what message Beachy thinks climate candidates should run on today, Beachy replied, “affordability, affordability, affordability.”
Jesse Lee, a senior advisor at Climate Power who also worked as a senior communications advisor in the Biden White House, echoed Beachy’s account of what went wrong post-IRA. The cost of living crisis makes it almost impossible to talk about anything else now, he told me. “If you don't start off talking about that, you’ve lost people before you’ve even begun,” he said.
Average U.S. electricity rates jumped 10% in just the year from 2021 to 2022, and have continued to rise faster than inflation. All evidence suggests the trend will continue. Utilities have already requested or received approval for approximately $29 billion in rate increases this year, according to the nonprofit PowerLines, compared to roughly $12 billion by this time last year. And these increases likely don’t reflect the expected costs associated with ending tax credits for wind and solar, hobbling wind and solar development, and keeping aging, expensive coal plants online.
In mid-July, Climate Power issued a strategy document advising state and local elected officials how to talk about clean energy based on the group’s polling. A post-election poll found that “more than half of Americans (51%) say the main goal of US energy policies should be to lower energy prices,” and that 85% “believe policymakers should do more to lower energy costs.” A more recent poll found that telling voters that “cutting clean energy means America produces less energy overall, and that means families will pay even more to keep the lights on,” was the most persuasive among a variety of arguments for clean energy.
This tracks with our own Heatmap Pro opinion polling, which found that the top perceived benefit of renewables in the U.S. is “lower utility bills” — though while 75% of Democrats believe that argument, only 56% of Republicans do. An affordability frame also aligns with academic research on clean energy communication strategies, which has found that emphasizing cost savings is a more effective and enduring message than job creation, economic development, or climate change mitigation.
The pivot to affordability isn’t just apparent in district-level campaigns to hold Republicans accountable. Almost every press release I’ve received from the climate group Evergreen Action this month has mentioned “soaring power bills” or “Trump’s energy price hike” in reference to various actions the administration has taken to hamstring renewables. Even clean energy groups, which at first attempted to co-opt Trump’s “energy dominance” frame, can no longer parrot it with a straight face. After Trump issued a stop work order on Orsted’s offshore Revolution Wind project, which is 80% built, the American Clean Power Association accused the administration of “raising alarms about rising energy prices while blocking new supply from reaching the grid.”
Several people I spoke to for this story pointed to the example of Mikie Sherill, the Democrat running for governor in New Jersey, who last week vowed to freeze utility rates for a year if elected. She immediately followed that statement with a promise to “massively expand cheaper, cleaner power generation,” including solar and batteries.
Dan Crawford, the senior vice president of Echo Communications Advisors, a climate-focused strategy firm, declared in a recent newsletter that Democrats should “become the party of cheap electricity.” He mused that we may be at an inflection point “where the old politics of clean-vs.-polluting makes way for a new debate of cheap-vs.-expensive.”
Debate is probably too tame a term — the claim to affordability is becoming a full-on messaging war. Last week, President Trump took to social media to declare that states that get power from wind and solar “are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS,” — a claim that has no basis in reality. The Trump administration is leaning heavily on affordability arguments to justify keeping coal plants open. In defense of canceling Revolution Wind, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox News that “this is part of our drive to make sure we’ve got affordable, reliable energy for every American … These are the highest electric prices in the country coming off of these projects.” On Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted a news story about his agency rescinding a loan for an offshore wind transmission project, writing that “taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for projects that raise electricity prices and ultimately don't work.”
Clean energy proponents aren’t just going up against Trump — the fossil fuel industry has leaned on affordability as a rhetorical strategy for a long time, Joshua Lappen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame studying the energy transition, told me. Lappen, who lives in California, said cost has been at the forefront of conflicts over climate policy in the state for a while. At the moment, it’s driving a fight over oil refinery closures that threaten to drive up gas prices even more. “I took a trip over the weekend and drove through the Central Valley,” Lappen told me, “and there are placards zip-tied to every gas pump at Chevron stations that are highlighting that state climate policy is increasing the cost of gas.”
I asked Lee, of Climate Power, how the climate movement could make a convincing case when clean energy has become so politically charged. He’s not worried about that right now. “I don’t think we necessarily need to win a debate about what’s cheaper,” he said. “All we have to do is say, Hey, we're in favor of more energy, including wind and solar, and it's nuts, nuts to be taking wind and solar and batteries off the table when we have an energy crisis and when utility rates have gone up 10%.”
That may work for now, at least at the national level. Americans tend to blame whoever is in office for the economic pains of the moment, even though presidents have little influence on prices at the pump and it can take years for policy changes to make their way into utility rates.
But there’s a difference between defensively blaming rising energy costs on the administration’s efforts to block renewables, and making a positive case for the energy transition on the same grounds. While there is an argument for the latter, it’s a lot harder to convey.
The factors pushing up energy prices, such as necessary grid modernization and disaster-related costs, likely aren’t going away, whether or not we build offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, the savings that large-scale wind and solar projects offer won’t be experienced as a reduction in rates — they won’t be experienced at all because they’re measured against a counterfactual world where renewables don’t get built. That’s a lot trickier to communicate in a pithy campaign. People may end up blaming the wind farms either way.
This dilemma is a hallmark of the so-called “mid-transition,” Lappen told me. The term was coined by his advisor, the energy engineer and sociologist Emily Grubert, and Sara Hastings-Simon, a public policy professor at the University of Calgary. The two argue that the mid-transition is a period where fossil fuel systems persist alongside the growing clean energy sector.
“Comparisons of the new system to the old system are likely to rest on experience of a world less affected by climate change, such that concerns about lower reliability, higher costs, and other challenges might be perceived as inherent to zero-carbon systems, versus energy systems facing consequences of climate change and long-term underinvestment,” they write.
To Cohen, advocates need to go a lot further than rhetoric to link clean energy with affordability. “We need to rebuild the brand and then rebuild the investment priorities of climate action so that working class communities see and literally touch direct, tangible benefits in their life,” he said. He described a “green economic populism” with much more public investment in helping renters access green technologies that will lower their bills, for example, or in fixing up homes that have deferred maintenance so that they can eventually make energy efficiency improvements.
It’s not about abandoning industrial policy or research and development, Cohen told me, but rather about a shift in emphasis. He pointed to Sherill’s approach. “She's not just saying, oh, clean energy will automatically lower bills if you just unleash it. She's like, I'm going to assertively use the government to guarantee a price freeze, and then I’m going to backfill that with clean energy policies to bring down prices over time.”
To be fair, the IRA did contain policies that would have produced more tangible benefits. The $7 billion Solar for All program would have delivered the benefits of residential solar — i.e. energy bill savings — to low-income households all over the country. The remainder of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, of which Solar for All was a part, was set to make a range of other green home upgrades more accessible to the working class, and the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program would have done the same for low-income housing developments and senior living centers. Electric school bus grants and urban tree-planting programs would have brought cleaner, cooler air to communities.
These were big, ambitious programs that were never going to produce results in the span of two years, and now the Trump administration has made every effort to ensure they never do. Whether they would have paid political dividends eventually, we’ll never know. But a successful energy transition may depend on giving it another shot.
On fusion’s big fundraise, nuclear fears, and geothermal’s generations uniting
Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to propose a new Clean Water Act rule that would eliminate federal protections for many U.S. waterways, according to an internal presentation leaked to E&E News. If finalized, the rule would establish a two-part test to determine whether a wetland received federal regulations: It would need to contain surface water throughout the “wet season,” and it would need to be touching a river, stream, or other body of water that flows throughout the wet season. The new language would require fewer wetland permits, a slide from the presentation showed, according to reporter Miranda Willson. Two EPA staffers briefed on the proposal confirmed the report.
The new rule follows the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA, which said that only waterways “with a ‘continuous surface connection’ to a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water” fell under the Clean Water Act’s protections, according to E&E News. What “relatively permanent” means, however, the court didn’t say, nor did Biden’s EPA. The two EPA staffers, who were granted anonymity to avoid retribution, “said they believed the proposal was not based in science and could worsen pollution if finalized,” Willson wrote.
Investors are hot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff promising to make fusion energy a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems netted an eye-popping $863 million in its latest fundraising round. In a press release Thursday, the company said that its “oversubscribed round of capital is the largest amount raised among deep tech and energy companies since” its $1.8 billion financing deal in 2021. Commonwealth Fusion will use the funds to complete its demonstration project and further develop its proposed first power plant in Virginia. To date, the company said, it has raised close to $3 billion, “about one-third of the total capital invested in private fusion companies worldwide.” It’s a sign that investors recognize Commonwealth Fusion “is making fusion power a reality,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said.
The fusion industry has ballooned over the past six years. “It is finally, possibly, almost time” for the technology to arrive, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, noting: “For the ordinary optimist, fusion energy might invoke a cheerful Jetsons-style future of flying cars and interplanetary colonization. For the cynic, it’s a world-changing moment that’s perpetually 30 years away. But investors, nuclear engineers, and physicists see it as a technology edging ever closer to commercialization and a bipartisan pathway towards both energy security and decarbonization.”
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A record 75 gigawatts of new generating capacity hooked up to the U.S. power grid last year, a 33% surge from the previous year, thanks to new federal regulations aimed at streamlining the process. That’s according to new data from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie published Thursday. The report found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2023, issued in July 2023, along with other reforms by independent system operators, have had a “considerable impact on processing interconnection agreements, by driving improvements through reducing speculative projects and clearing queue backlogs.” While connections increased, regional grid operators received 9% fewer new project entries and saw a 51% uptick in non-viable projects since 2022.
Solar and storage technologies made up 75% of all interconnection agreements in 2024, equaling about 58 gigawatts. Wood Mackenzie projected that the sectors will retain a similar market share in 2025. Natural gas saw an increase in interconnection requests since 2022, adding 121 gigawatts of capacity. New gas applications are already breaking annual records this year. But overall the number of gas projects that successfully hook up to the grid is down 25% since 2022.
Almost 200 people have left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, according to new estimates published Thursday in the Financial Times. Of the 28 officials in senior leadership positions, nearly half are working in an “acting” capacity, and only three of the five NRC commissioner roles are filled. “It is an unprecedented situation with some senior leaders having been forced out and many others leaving for early retirement or worse, resignation,” Scott Morris, the former NRC deputy executive director of operations, who retired in May, told the newspaper. “This is really concerning for the staff and is one of the factors causing many key staff and leaders to leave the agency they love ... creating a huge brain drain of talent.”
The exodus comes as Trump is pressing the agency to dramatically overhaul and speed up its review and approval process for new reactors. Supporters of the president’s effort say the NRC has stymied the nuclear industry for decades, and a future buildout of new reactors requires clearing house. But skeptics of the burn-it-all-down approach warn that the atomic energy industry’s success in avoiding major accidents since the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island is owed to NRC oversight, and that the agency’s processes have actually protected nuclear developers by avoiding frivolous lawsuits and not-in-my-backyard types.
Geothermal giant Ormat has reigned over the global industry of harvesting energy from hot underground reservoirs for the past 60 years. Now a new generation of companies is promising to tap the Earth’s heat even in places without water by using fracking technology to drill much deeper, vastly expanding the potential for geothermal. And Ormat has placed a big bet on one. On Thursday, the company inked a strategic partnership with Houston-based Sage Geosystems. As part of the deal, Sage will build its first commercial power plant at an existing Ormat facility in Nevada or Utah, significantly speeding up the timeline for the debut generating station. Sage CEO Cindy Taff told me the plant could be online by next year. “Ormat’s chosen a winner,” Yakov Feygin, a researcher at the Center for Public Enterprise who co-authored a report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
A majority of U.S. voters are still unfamiliar with geothermal power, according to a new poll from Data for Progress I reported on this week. When exposed to details about how the technology works, however, support grows among voters across the political spectrum. Republicans in particular are supportive.
A recent poll shows a lack of familiarity with geothermal.Data for Progress
The Grammy- and Oscar-award winning New Orleans jazz and funk singer Jon Batiste released a new song to mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the catastrophic storm that flooded his home city. Dubbed “Petrichor,” a word that describes the scent of earth after rain, the lyrics unfold like a haunting hymn over a driving beat. “Help me, Lord / They burning the planet down / No more second linin' in the street / They burning the planet down, Lord / Help me, Lord / No more plants for you to eat.” In an interview published in The Guardian, Batiste said the song was meant to be a statement. “You got to bring people together. People power is the way that you can change things in the world,” he said. “It’s a warning, set to a dance beat.”
How the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could become the administration’s ultimate weapon against wind farms.
The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to strictly enforcing a migratory bird protection law in a way that could cast a legal cloud over wind farms across the country.
As I’ve chronicled for Heatmap, the Interior Department over the past month expanded its ongoing investigation of the wind industry’s wildlife impacts to go after turbines for killing imperiled bald and golden eagles, sending voluminous records requests to developers. We’ve discussed here how avian conservation activists and even some former government wildlife staff are reporting spikes in golden eagle mortality in areas with operating wind projects. Whether these eagle deaths were allowable under the law – the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act – is going to wind up being a question for regulators and courts if Interior progresses further against specific facilities. Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of wind energy, it’s extremely likely that a federal government already hostile to wind power will use the law to apply even more pressure on developers.
What’s received less attention than the eagles is that Trump’s team signaled it could go even further by using the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a separate statute intended to support bird species flying south through the U.S. from Canada during typical seasonal migration periods. At the bottom of an Interior press release published in late July, the department admitted it was beginning a “careful review of avian mortality rates associated with the development of wind energy projects located in migratory flight paths,” and would determine whether migratory birds dying because of wind farms qualified as “‘incidental’ takings” – harm or death – under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
While not stated explicitly, what this means is that the department appears to be considering whether to redefine these deaths as intentional under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to Ben Cowan, a lawyer with the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke.
I reached out to Cowan after the eagle investigation began because his law firm posted a bulletin warning that developers “holding active eagle permits” might want to prepare for “subpoenas that may be forthcoming.” During our chat earlier this month, he told me that the eagle probe is likely going to strain financing for projects even on private lands that wouldn’t require any other forms of federal sign-off: “Folks don’t want to operate if they feel there’s a significant risk they might take an eagle without authorization.”
Cowan then voiced increasing concern about the migratory bird effort, however, because the law on this matter could be a quite powerful – if legally questionable – weapon against wind development.
Unlike the Endangered Species Act or the eagle protection law, there is currently no program on the books for a wind project developer to even obtain a permit for incidental impacts to a migratory bird. Part of the reason for the absence of such a program is the usual federal bureaucratic struggle that comes with implementing a complex statute, with the added effect of the ping-pong of federal control; the Biden administration started a process for permitting “incidental” impacts, but it was scrapped in April by the Trump team. Most protection of migratory birds under the law today comes from voluntary measures conducted by private companies and nonprofits in consultation with the federal government.
Hypothetically, hurting a migratory bird should be legally permissible to the federal government. That’s because the administration loosened implementation of the law earlier this year with an Interior Department legal opinion that stated the agency would only go after harm that was “intentional” – a term of art under the statute.
This is precisely why Cowan is fretting about migratory birds, however. Asked why the wind industry hasn’t publicly voiced more anxiety about this potential move, he said industry insiders genuinely hope this is “bluster” because such a selective use of this law “would be so beyond the pale.”
“It’s basically saying the purpose of a wind farm is to kill migratory birds, which is very clearly not the case – it’s to generate renewable electricity,” Cowan told me, adding that any effort by the Interior Department would inevitably result in lawsuits. “I mean, look at what this interpretation would mean: To classify it as intentional take would say the purpose of operating a wind farm would be to kill a bird. It’s obviously not. But this seems to be a way this administration is contemplating using the MBTA to block the operation of wind farms.”
It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush. Is the federal government actually going to decide that any operating wind farm could be illegal? That would put entire states’ power supplies – including GOP-heavy states like Iowa – in total jeopardy. Not to mention it would be harmful overall to take operating capacity offline in any fashion at a moment when energy demand is spiking because of data centers and artificial intelligence. Even I, someone who has broken quite a few eye-popping stories about Trump’s war on renewables, struggle to process the idea of the government truly going there on the MBTA.
And yet, a door to this activity is now open, like a cleaver hanging over the industry’s head.
I asked the Interior Department to clarify its timeline for the MBTA review. It declined to comment on the matter. I would note that in mid-August, the Trump administration began maintenance on a federal dashboard for tracking regulations such as these and hasn’t updated it since. So we’ll have to wait for nothing less than their word to know what direction this is going in.