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The city is caught between its energy past and future.
There’s a reason decarbonization advocates talk so much about power lines. Without them, the fruits of non-carbon-emitting forms of electricity generation, which are often located far away from population centers or are only available when it’s sunny and windy, can’t be fully harvested in the form of electrons flowing to customers when they need them.
The New York state electricity system operator said in a report released Friday that New York City specifically is at risk of a shortfall of 446 megawatts — about enough to power over 350,000 homes — of transmission for nine hours on an especially hot summer day in 2025 when demand for electricity is at its peak.
To those that follow New York state energy planning specifically or, like me, have the sickness that is reading reports from grid operators across the country all the time, the result was not surprising.
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The New York Independent System Operator (New York ISO) chalked up the shortfall to a combination of planned shutdowns of some natural gas plants, called peakers, that switch on when demand is high and can’t be supplied with existing resources, as well as expected growth in electricity demand from both economic growth as well as increased used of electricity for building heat and vehicles.
So far, peakers generating just over 1,000 megawatts have either shut down or reduced their operation, and another almost 600 megawatts of New York City peakers are scheduled to do so in less than two years. This has been a deliberate policy choice by the state. Two plants in the New York City area had their plans for upgrades rejected in 2021; state regulations on nitrous oxide emissions have effectively made several of these types of plants uneconomic to run.
“With the additional peakers unavailable, the bulk power transmission system will not be able to securely and reliably serve the forecasted demand in New York City,” according to New York ISO.
While this may seem like an issue of generation (i.e. producing the power) as opposed to transmission (moving it around), New York ISO projects that this shortfall “is expected to improve” in 2026, when the long awaited and under construction Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE), a transmission line that would bring hydropower from Quebec to downstate New York, is scheduled to come into operation.
New York City is caught between its energy past and energy future, and like many areas that are aggressively promoting renewables and retiring existing fossil fuel generation, there is a worry that reliability may suffer in the interim.
The plan is to build out a combination of renewable energy and storage to meet downstate’s needs. This includes massive installations of wind power which will hopefully both directly provide electricity as well as charge batteries which can be used to dispatch power when generation is otherwise falling short. The shortfall between New York's decarbonization goals and its ability to produce carbon-free electricity was exacerbated by the shutdown of Indian Point nuclear power plant in the Hudson River between 2019 and 2021, which corresponded to an immediate uptick in fossil fuel emissions.
Regulators and grid operators across the country have echoed New York ISO regularly, voicing concern about reliability as the renewable buildout runs into barriers of inadequate transmission and delays, while fossil fuel plant shutdowns happen quickly.
But this doesn’t mean that every state or region trying to decarbonize its electricity grid is doomed to blackouts. California is facing a massive heat wave and, at least so far, its grid operator is not expecting any major issues, partially thanks to plentiful hydropower and its massive buildout of energy storage. (It also will likely keep some gas-fired power plants in operation past their original decommissioning date).
And in New England, the grid operator concluded that an expensive terminal for importing liquefied natural gas could probably close in 2025 without imperiling the electricity system (although this depended on there being ample supply of oil for power plants to run in the winter when natural gas is used for heat). Overall, New England, which has been fretting about its energy reliability for years, has turned more optimistic, thanks in part to a substantial buildout of rooftop solar, which reduces demand on the gird.
But the report does raise the question of just how fast the grid can get away from gas in any region in the midst of the energy transition. For example, there are still plans for a new peaker plant in Peabody, Massachusetts, despite a state law with the goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 and reaching net zero in 2050.
The 2019 rules which are responsible for the peaker shutdowns envision up to four years of extensions “if the generator is designated by the NYISO or by the local transmission owner as needed to resolve a reliability need until a permanent solution is in place.” Whether transmission, wind power, and storage can be built by then is the challenge New York faces.
Read more about power lines:
The Canadian Wildfires Ominously Messed Up a Clean Energy Power Line
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.