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The Owyhee River watershed is among the country’s largest areas of pristine wilderness. It’s also prime for green development.
On a stormy May evening in 1882, approximately 10 gigawatts of electricity split from the sky above southeastern Oregon and struck a cattleman named Hiram Leslie as he approached his camp on the Owyhee River.
Leslie’s horse died instantly; Leslie did not. Legend has it the pioneer survived for six days after the lightning strike — his brain pulsing and visible through his cleaved-open skull — only to finally expire in his bed back in the boomtown of Silver City, Idaho. Dugout Gulch, an 8-mile canyon near the ranchers’ camp that contains some of the most jaw-dropping scenery in all of Oregon state, was renamed in Leslie’s honor. One can’t help but wonder, though, whether the decision to rechristen also came from some nervous sense of deference to the land.
Today, Silver City is a ghost town, and Leslie’s grisly demise is relegated to a single sentence on a Bureau of Land Management sign lining the way down to a boat ramp that passing F-150s don’t bother braking to read. But the tremendous power and possibility of the Owyhee watershed has never been less in dispute — or, perhaps, more in jeopardy.
The Owyhee (pronounced “oh-why-hee,” an old spelling of “Hawaii” in honor of more doomed explorers) is a 7 million-acre ecoregion that runs through Oregon’s southeasternmost county, Malheur, though it spreads as far east as Idaho and as far south as Nevada. On Google Maps, it looks like a big blank space; the core of the Canyonlands is crossed by just three paved roads. In fact, it’s the largest undeveloped region left in the Lower 48. On a resource management map, the area reveals itself to be a complicated patchwork of BLM, tribal, state, Forest Service, and privately owned lands, as well as a smattering of quasi-protected “Wilderness Study Areas” and “Land with Wilderness Characteristics” that exist at the whims of Congress. The region contains many of the materials and geographic features necessary for the clean energy transition, making one of the most pristine regions in the state also potentially one of its most productive.
But it can’t be both.
In person, it’s easy to see why the area has excited developers. Towering river canyons inspire dreams of pumped storage hydropower. There has been talk of constructing a second geothermal plant in the area, and uranium mining has intermittently returned to the conversation. Gold and silver claims stud the hillsides, a testament to the presence of metals that, amongst other things, are used for making electric vehicle circuit boards and solar panels. Draw a line through the region’s gentler northern sagelands and you’ve plotted the proposed, much-needed Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission route to bring hydropower from Washington state to Boise, one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. And just outside the Owyhee watershed, to the west, is the upper edge of the McDermitt Caldera, a shockingly remote volcanic depression where there is said to be enough concentrated lithium to build 40 million electric vehicles.
Even Leslie Gulch, with its weekend crowds from Boise and recent Instagram Reels virality, is “quietly open to mining,” Ryan Houston, the Bend-based executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, told me when I met him in the Canyonlands last month.
Courtesy of the Oregon Natural Desert Association.
Amid all this frenzy, Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, local Shoshone-Paiute tribal leaders, and a large coalition of regional and national conservation groups are working to close off 1.1 million acres of the most ecologically important land to the development nipping at its edges. Their hope is that Congress will designate four “units” in Malheur County, including the upper and lower Owyhee, as a single federally protected wilderness area — a pipe dream, given the partisan dysfunction of the current House of Representatives. The more realistic alternative is for President Biden to swoop in with the Antiquities Act and make it a new national monument.
Such an action would be in keeping with Biden’s 30x30 executive order to conserve 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030. It could also be perceived as clipping the wings of the kinds of clean energy projects his administration has proudly touted and funded.
Potential land-use conflicts like these are part of why conservation goals and the current green building movement are often portrayed as incompatible, or at least in tension. But “conservation and clean energy build-out aren’t necessarily opposing forces,” Veronica Ung-Kono, an attorney and clean energy transmission policy specialist at the National Wilderness Federation, told me. “They’re just forces that have to figure out how to interact with each other in a way that makes sense.”
No one is more aware of this than the campaigners I spoke with in Oregon. “For us as an organization, something we’re pushing ourselves on is, ‘How do we say yes to where solar and wind should be?’ Rather than just, ‘No, not there, not there, not there,’” Houston, the organizer at ONDA, which is helping to manage the monument campaign, said by way of example. Later, he told me that by setting aside 1.1 million acres for an Owyhee Monument, the conservationists essentially say that the remaining 75% of the local BLM district is open for all other possible uses.
“We’re not closing off vast swaths of the high desert to renewable energy,” he said. “What we’re doing is protecting the best of the best, so we can focus on other types of development — like renewable energy or off-road-vehicle play areas — in places where it’s most appropriate.”
To better understand the land-use issues in Malheur County, I traveled to Boise last month to attend what’s called a lek, when sage grouse gather to perform their mating rituals. The visit was organized by the NWF, which is supporting the monument push with ONDA. On the appointed day, I left my airport hotel at 3:30 a.m., crossed the state line on a two-lane highway during what I later learned was the height of mule deer migration season, and followed a poorly marked gravel road literally off the map on my phone (which, for good measure, had no reception).
It was so dark in the Owyhee that I felt more like I was rattling across the bottom of the ocean than an actual terrestrial landscape. I repeatedly mistook the full moon for oncoming headlights whenever it briefly appeared from behind the hills, and at random intervals, my car would drop into shallow streams I didn’t see coming until I was already in them. As I approached Succor Creek Campground, the designated meeting spot, I became aware that I was being hemmed in by canyon walls — perceptible only as a blackness even blacker than that of the night sky. When I finally spotted the headlamp of Aaron Kindle, NWF’s director of sporting advocacy, my overriding sense of the Owyhee Canyonlands was that they were bumpy.
Needless to say, I had absolutely no idea at the time that I had driven directly beneath what might one day become the Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission line.
The B2H, as it’s known, would be a nearly 300-mile, 500-kilovolt interstate line to send hydroelectric power generated in Washington State down to Boise. The project has become a textbook example of the permitting woes facing transmission projects in America, however. “By the time we build this, B2H is not only going to be old enough to vote, it’s going to be old enough to go to a bar and have a drink,” Adam Richins, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of Idaho Power, the electric utility that serves southern Idaho and eastern Oregon, told me.
Richins likes to joke, but the B2H’s halting progress makes him weary. More than 18 years of environmental reviews, permitting revisions, archeological and cultural studies, siting headaches, and landowner protests have plagued the planning and implementation of the transmission line, which Idaho Power owns jointly with another northwest utility, PacifiCorp. (Set to break ground this fall, B2H recently stalled again due to a scandal involving an affiliated consulting firm’s work on an unrelated project.) Originally conceived as a way to help Idaho Power meet its clean-energy goals during the summer and winter peaks that follow the region’s agricultural calendar, “I will say now that if we don’t get some of these transmission lines permitted on time, it’s possible we’re going to have to look at other resources such as natural gas,” Richins said.
Though some early plans for the B2H would have seen it cut straight through the boundaries of a future Owyhee monument, the current proposal keeps the transmission path safely outside the existing Wilderness Study Areas that surround Lake Owyhee, the reservoir at the center of what could become the “Lower Owyhee Unit.” (Somewhat confusingly, the Owyhee River flows north into the Snake River, meaning its “upper” watershed is actually to the south.)
That’s not a coincidence. The monument proposal almost entirely consists of parcels pre-designated as Lands with Wilderness Characteristics and Wilderness Study Areas, both of which are managed by the BLM and exist in a kind of limbo until Congress decides what to do with them. “If you’re a developer of solar, wind, pump storage, whatever, you’re not going to put your project in an area that’s in a quasi-protected status because that makes it extremely hard to develop,” Houston said. In other words, it’s not that the monument boundaries were drawn to avoid projects like the B2H; they were drawn to “protect the most important areas, and the most important areas have been in this quasi-slash-temporary protected status for a long time.”
Still, the transmission lines wouldn’t be entirely out of sight. The planned B2H route crosses close to the scenic northern mouth of the Owyhee Canyon before it makes its southeast turn toward Succor Creek and the Idaho border, where I’d driven across its path. More to the point, any future monument designation would mean that if permitting reform actually happens and America begins a transmission-building boom, power lines connecting the various substations of the Northwest would have to go around it, requiring diversions of 50 miles or more. Richins told me that as far as Idaho Power goes, though, “I haven’t seen anything [in the monument proposal] that has made me overly concerned.”
So far, Biden’s team hasn’t given any indication of its thinking about an Owyhee Monument, even as it has picked up the pace on conservation efforts elsewhere. Eight other national monument campaigns are also competing for attention from a friendly administration that is by no means guaranteed to remain in office next year; these include efforts to conserve California’s Chuckwalla, which would create a contiguous wildlife corridor between Joshua Tree National Park and the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, and Colorado’s Dolores Canyons, which have both ecological and Indigenous cultural importance. “We have shared with [the administration] our binder of support and all of our petition signatures — we’ve got like 50,000 petition signatures, and hundreds and hundreds of letters — and they have said, ‘Thank you, the Owyhee is on our radar, we’ve known about it for a long time, we are tracking it, we are following it,’” said Houston.
There were rumors in the conservation community before Biden expanded two California monuments just a couple of weeks ago, meaning Owyhee organizers might get a tip-off if or when the administration makes up its mind. But November draws closer every day, and the grapevine has stayed silent. Still, after previously thwarted attempts to protect the Owyhee in 2016, 2019, and 2022, organizers think they’ve negotiated a workable compromise: The monument proposal as it currently stands is less than half the size of an earlier, more contiguous 2.5-million-acre proposal Houston and other conservationists preferred. But it also means that much more land is available for green development.
Even some of the more controversial renewable energy projects in the area have been able to move forward. On the lone stretch of shoreline on Lake Owyhee that doesn’t fall within the monument proposal, Utah-based developers are exploring the construction of a pumped storage hydropower facility. Proponents say the technology is a solution for the intermittency concerns of solar and wind since the facilities pump water from a lower reservoir to a higher one during off-peak hours, then release the water to spin turbines and generate electricity during times of high demand — effectively, a kind of massive hydroelectric battery.
Pumped storage projects require very particular geographic conditions, namely steep slopes of 1,000 feet or more, to give the water enough gravitational potential energy to work. “You have to choose your sites carefully — there are bad places to propose doing pumped storage and there are great places,” Matthew Shapiro, the CEO of rPlus Hydro, the company behind the exploration project, told me.
Lake Owyhee, with its high plateaus, is one of 11 promising sites across the country rPlus Hydro has picked out. “We were looking at a site with about 1,600 feet of vertical drop and a very large existing lower reservoir, meaning we would only have to build an upper,” Shapiro said. The proximity to the existing Midpoint-Hemingway-Summer Line and the future Boardman-Hemingway line is also appealing since it would mean rPlus Hydro would only have to build a short transmission line from the site.
There are environmental concerns about pumped storage, including its possible effect on trout below the Owyhee Dam (which, despite being a Hoover Dam prototype when it was built in 1932, does not produce hydroelectricity but instead stores water for the local irrigation district). While there might be petitions, protests, and siting issues yet, rPlus Hydro’s pumped storage project will “do whatever it does entirely independent” of the Owyhee monument protection efforts, Houston said.
Other strange alliances abound. The local ranching community, for one, is largely on board with the congressional proposal to protect Owyhee — a minor miracle given that this corner of Oregon is also home to the wildlife refuge that was infamously occupied for 41 days by the Bundy brothers in 2016. Both that and the current monument proposal intentionally exclude any lands that would have overflowed into the more combative neighboring jurisdiction, where conservation efforts might have ignited a national-headline-making backlash.
“We don’t want the ranchers to be so pissed off that the first thing they do is go to the Trump administration” to appeal for a reversal, Houston said. The Owyhee monument is designed, in other words, to fly under the radar, lest it become another political tennis ball ricocheting between presidents like Bears Ears.
It’s designed to fly under the radar when it comes to clean energy projects, too. Houston and others were adamant that they don’t oppose the projects encircling the core conservation area — climate change, after all, is one of the biggest threats to the Owyhee, which is one of the fastest warming places in the entire county. Still, it was clear in conversations that the proposals are also spurring some of their urgency. “It’s about protecting what you have left,” is how Kindle, the NWF advocate I met at the Succor Creek Campground, put it to me.
More to the point, Houston told me that the lithium mining abutting what would become the Owyhee Monument’s westernmost unit, Oregon Canyon Mountains, is “a reminder of what can happen” if conservationists don’t act fast enough.
“You can see he is missing like four tail feathers. That one must be a fighter — and got his ass kicked.” Skyler Vold, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife employee with the delightful title of “sage-grouse conservation coordinator,” stepped aside from the scope so I could check out the avian incarnation of Rocky Balboa.
The light was finally coming up over the Owyhee, but it was still so cold that my toes were starting to numb in my boots. That wasn’t what had my attention, though: At one point, Vold counted nearly two dozen sage grouse, all thumping away in the low point between two hills where they’d gathered for the lek. Kindle also spotted a lone elk on a faraway hillside, and we later heard the call of a sandhill crane, but the funny little birds with their spiky agave-leaf tails had us all enraptured.
No single creature better encapsulates the land-use fights in the West than the sage grouse. In 2018, the Trump administration stripped the birds of protections in order to open 9 million acres of the McDermitt Caldera to drilling and mining — mainly for lithium. While the Biden administration is considering new protections for sage grouse, of which there are only about 800,000 left and for whom the caldera is prime habitat, it has also dumped money into building up a domestic lithium supply chain. Sourcing lithium at home, however, will likely require access to McDermitt’s deposits.
Much of the caldera is located in Nevada, but the top rim bumps up into Oregon. It’s in this northernmost crescent that the Australian company Jindalee is considering opening its lithium mine. While the team told me it is still many years (and many environmental reviews) away from actually breaking ground, Jindalee’s executives also stressed that they see themselves as a critical player in America’s clean energy future if or when they do so.
“There’s a huge elephant in the room, which is: Where’s this lithium supply going to come from?” Ian Rodger, the Jindalee Lithium CEO, told me. The answer so far has been mainly from China, where lithium is “processed under really different social and environmental standards,” he said. “Our aspiration for the [Oregon] project is to develop it in the most responsible way.”
Simon Jowitt, an economic geologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told me Rodger’s argument has a lot of merit. Social and environmental conditions are indeed “a lot better here than they would be in other countries,” he said, meaning that if we don’t extract the metals and minerals we’re going to use anyway locally, “then what we’re doing is we’re shipping problems away elsewhere.” There is ongoing discussion and division in the local Paiute and Shoshone Tribe about the economic and environmental pros and cons of mining near their community, as well.
The fact remains, however, that “as a human race, we need these metals and minerals if we want to do something meaningful about climate change mitigation,” Jowitt added. That requires stomaching a potentially sizeable physical footprint, especially in the case of lithium mining.
“If we are all going to go to electric vehicles by 2050,” Jowitt said, then that’s great — but policymakers and the public also “need to realize that there’s a mineral cost of this.”
Conservationists are quick to point out that mining laws in the U.S. — which have barely changed since Hiriam Leslie’s time — are stacked so in favor of the claimants that there is often no chance to get a word in edgewise. “Mining sure as heck trumps a funny chicken that goes ‘womp womp,’” is how Houston put it — a fair description of the sage grouse mating ritual. In the strange game of land-use rock-paper-scissors, mining also trumps cattle, which is why some local ranchers have approached the Protect the Owyhee organizers to unite against the miners. (There are slight differences in protections depending on whether the Owyhee is made a wilderness area by Congress or a monument by Biden; the latter option can’t be as prescriptive about flexible grazing operations for ranchers, which is why, on the whole, the ranching community strongly prefers a legislative route.)
Most of the would-be monument is outside the McDermitt Caldera, but the fear isn’t so much that any one transmission project or hydro facility or lithium mine would “ruin” the Owyhee. “Everyone says, ‘Well, why do you have to protect it? Is there a threat?’” Houston said. “There are potential threats; people have been talking about different things like interstate highways or transmission or new mines. If we wait until those threats are real, then we’ve got a conflict, and then everyone’s going to say, ‘Well, why didn’t you protect it before?’”
Ironically, some fear that a formal monument designation will draw attention from the crowds that are loving to death other popular parks across the West. Standing in Leslie Gulch, where the red blades of rhyolite rock strongly resemble plates on the back of an enormous Stegosaurus, I sympathized with the impulse to gatekeep the landscape; driving from one remarkable site to the next, we’d barely seen another car all day. That’s changing regardless of whether the Owyhee is signposted as a destination in name or not: Chris Geroro, a local fly fisher who’s been guiding on the Owyhee River for 16 years, said he’s gone from “being the only person on the river to being one of the people on the river.”
The landscape certainly leaves an impression. “You go over this hill and then all of a sudden, boom! You’re in this amazing canyon,” he told me, describing the reaction of his out-of-town clients when they visit. “I just watch their jaws drop and the surprise of ‘Where did this come from? This is an hour outside of Boise?’” Those people then go home and post pictures, and more people understandably want to visit. A monument could help address the currently mostly unmanaged recreation.
But if Biden declines to move forward on protecting the Owyhee and an indifferent or actively hostile administration takes office in January, then the Oregon Natural Desert Association will have to switch strategies. Houston told me his team is already considering alternative approaches like pursuing a wilderness designation through the legislative branch. If, in a worst-case scenario, Trump decides to go after the land in the Owyhee, ONDA is prepared to go to court.
As we were leaving Leslie Gulch, Houston told me that he studied to be an evolutionary biologist. “What evolutionary biology is all about is understanding how species evolve based on what they have at that moment. They go forward with what they’ve got,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing in conservation — we’re going forward with what we’ve got.”
When it finally came time for me to return to Boise, I retraced the route I’d taken that morning into Succor Creek. The light was fading, but there was still enough for me to make out the hoodoo rock towers and the rolling sagebrush hills that I’d missed in the dark on my way into the canyon. To my surprise, enormous high-tension transmission towers also came into view; I’d driven beneath them hours before without even realizing it. Now, the silver power lines — future companions of the B2H — looked gossamer in the setting sun.
I parked to take a photo, and when I got out of the car, I felt a staticky tingle, like how a storm might excite the hairs on your arm. It was probably just a Placebo effect of standing under transmission lines and having spent the day thinking about electricity. But at that moment, I would have believed it was the passing ghost of an old cattleman glaring in my direction or perhaps the presence of something yet to come, something buzzing with potential, slung over my head.
I returned to my car and continued on to the highway. Soon, houses and small towns started to reappear, and I followed their lights through the dark back to Boise.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify which version of the proposed federal protections for Owyhee the local ranching community approves.
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Unlike just about every other car sales event, this one has a real — congressionally mandated — end date.
Car salespeople, like all salespeople, love to project a sense of urgency. You know the familiar seasonal rhythm of the TV commercial: Toyotathon is on now — but hurry in, because these deals won’t last. The end of the discount is, of course, an arbitrary deadline invented to juice that month’s sales figures; there’ll be another sale soon.
But in the electric vehicle market there’s about to be a fire sale, and this time it really is a race against the clock.
Federal incentives for EVs and EV equipment were critically endangered the moment Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now, with the passage of the omnibus budget reconciliation bill on the Fourth of July, they have a hard expiration date. Most importantly, the $7,500 federal tax credit for an EV purchase is dead after September 30. Drivers who might want to go electric and dealerships and car companies eager to unload EVs are suddenly in a furor to get deals done before the calendar turns to October.
The impending end of the tax credit has already become a sales pitch. Tesla, faced with sagging sales numbers thanks in part to Elon Musk’s misadventures in the Trump administration, has been sending a steady slog of emails trying to convince me to replace my just-paid-off Model 3 with another one. The brand didn’t take long to turn the impending EV gloom into a short-term sales opportunity. “Order soon to get your $7,500,” declared an email blast sent just days after Trump signed the bill.
On Reddit, the general manager of a Mississippi dealership posted to the community devoted to the Ioniq 9, Hyundai’s new three-row all-electric SUV, to appeal to anyone who might be interested in one of the three models that just appeared on their lot. It’s an unusual strategy, a local dealer seeking out a nationwide group of enthusiasts just to move a trio of vehicles. But it’s not hard to see the economic writing on the wall.
The Ioniq 9 is a cool and capable vehicle, but one that starts at $59,000 in its most basic form and quickly rises into the $60,000s and $70,000s with fancier versions. Even with the discount, the Ioniq 9 costs far more than many of the more affordable gas-powered three-row crossovers. And now the vehicle has come down with a serious case of unlucky timing, with deliveries beginning this summer just ahead of the incentive’s disappearance. As of October 1, the EV could become an albatross that nobody in suburban Memphis wants to drive off the lot.
Over the past year, Ford has offered the Ford Power Promise, an excellent deal that throws in a free home charger plus the cost of installation to anyone who buys a new EV. That deal was supposed to expire this summer. But the Detroit giant has extended its offer until — surprise — Sept. 30, in the hopes of enticing a wave of buyers while the getting is good.
This isn’t the first time EV-makers have been through such a deadline crunch. When the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases first started in 2010, the law was written so that the benefit phased out over time once a car company passed a particular sales threshold. By the time I bought my EV in the spring of 2019, for example, Tesla had already sold so many vehicles that its tax credit was halved from $7,500 to $3,750. We had to rush to take delivery in the last few days of June as the benefit was slated to fall again, to $1,875, on July 1, before it disappeared completely in 2020.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed under President Biden not only reinstated the $7,500 credit but also took away the gradual decline of the benefit; it was supposed to stick around, in full, until 2032. But despite Trump’s on-again, off-again bromance with Elon Musk, the president followed through on his long-term antagonistic rhetoric against EVs by repealing the benefit as part of this month’s disastrous big bill.
Trump, despite his best efforts, won’t kill the EV. The electric horse has simply left the barn — the world has come too far and seen too much of what electrification has to offer to turn back just because the current U.S. president wants it to. But the end of the EV tax credit (until a different regime comes into power, at least) seriously imperils the economic math that allowed EV sales to rise steadily over the past few years.
As a result, now might be the best time for a long time to buy or lease an electric vehicle, with remarkably low lease payments to be found on great EVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Chevy Equinox. Once the tax breaks are gone, lease deals (which got lots of drivers into EVs without them having to worry about long-term ownership questions) are likely to grow less enticing. EVs that would have been cost-competitive with gasoline counterparts when the tax credits taken into account suddenly aren’t.
Plenty of drivers will continue to choose electric even at a premium price because it’s a better product, sure. But hopes of reaching many more budget-first buyers have taken a serious hit. It could be a dream summer to buy an EV, but we’re all going to wake up when September ends.
On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI
Current conditions: Air quality alerts will remain in place in Chicago through Tuesday evening due to smoke from Canadian wildfires • There is a high risk of a tropical depression forming in the Gulf this week • The rain is clearing on the eastern seaboard after 2.64 inches fell in New York’s Central Park on Monday, breaking the record for July 14 set in 1908.
The Trump administration is putting pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “rubber stamp” all new reactors, Politico reports based on conversations with three people at the May meeting where the expectation was relayed. The directive to the NRC’s top staff came from Adam Blake, a representative of the Department of Government Efficiency, who apparently used the term “rubber stamp” specifically to describe the function of the independent agency. NRC’s “secondary assessment” of the safety of new nuclear projects would be a “foregone conclusion” following approval by the Department of Energy or the Pentagon, NRC officials were made to believe, per Politico.
A spokesperson for the NRC pointed to President Trump’s recent executive order aiming to quadruple U.S. nuclear power by 2050 in response to Politico’s reporting. Skeptics, however, have expressed concern over the White House’s influence on the NRC, which is meant to operate independently, as well as potential safety lapses that might result from the 18-month deadline for reviewing new reactors established in the order.
President Trump and Republican Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania will announce a $70 million “AI and energy investment” in the Keystone State at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit today in Pittsburgh. The event is meant to focus on the development of emerging energy technologies. Organizers said that more than 60 CEOs, including executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BlackRock, and Palantir, will be in attendance at the event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. BlackRock is expected to announce a $25 billion investment in a “data-center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a joint venture for increased power generation” at the event, Axios reports.
Ahead of the summit, critics slammed the event as a “moral failure,” with student protests expected throughout the day. Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Bluesky that the summit was a “slap in the face to real clean energy researchers,” and that there is “nothing innovative about propping up the fossil fuel industry.” “History will judge institutions that chose short-term gain over moral clarity during this critical moment for climate action and scientific integrity,” she went on.
On Monday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Threads that the company aims to become “the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online” — an ambitious goal that will require the extensive development of new gas infrastructure, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reports. The first gigawatt-level project, an Ohio data center called Prometheus, will be powered by Meta’s own natural gas infrastructure, with the natural gas company Williams reportedly building two 200-megawatt facilities for the project in Ohio. The buildout for Prometheus is in addition to another Meta project in Northeast Louisiana, Hyperion, that Zuckerberg said Monday could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. “To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts,” Matthew writes. Read his full report here.
BYD
Electric vehicle sales are currently on track to outpace gasoline car sales in China this year, Bloomberg reports. In the first six months of 2025, new battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and extended-range electric cars accounted for 5.5 million vehicles sold in the country (compared to 5.4 million sales of new gasoline cars), and are projected to top 16 million before the end of December — both of which put EVs a hair over their combustion-powered competitors.
By contrast, battery-electric cars only accounted for 28% of new-car sales in China last year, per the nation’s Passenger Car Association. But “sales this year have been spurred by the extension of a trade-in subsidy” as well as the nation’s expansive electrified lineup, including “several budget options” like BYD’s Seagull, Bloomberg writes. “China is the only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF reported last month.
Window heat pumps are an extremely promising answer to the conundrum of decarbonizing large apartment buildings, a new report by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has found. Previously, research on heat pumps had primarily focused on their advantages for single-family homes, while the process of retrofitting larger steam- and hot-water-heated apartment buildings remained difficult and expensive, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explains. But while apartment residents used to have to wait for their building to either install a large central heat pump system for the whole structure, or else rely on a more involved “mini-split” system, newer technologies like window heat pumps proved to be one of the most cost-effective solutions in ACEEE’s report with an average installation cost of $9,300 per apartment. “That’s significantly higher than the estimated $1,200 per apartment cost of a new boiler, but much lower than the $14,000 to $20,000 per apartment price tag of the other heat pump variations,” Emily writes, adding that the report also found window heat pumps may be “the cheapest to operate, with a life cycle cost of about $14,500, compared to $22,000 to $30,000 for boilers using biodiesel or biogas or other heat pump options.” Read Emily’s full report here.
California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023 — the latest year data is available — making it the “largest economy in the world to achieve this milestone,” Governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced this week.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.
Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.
“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.
That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.
As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.
Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)
Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.
But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.
The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.