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The PJM Interconnection can’t seem to figure out supply and demand anymore, which could be good news for natural gas.
Here’s a dilemma: Large chunks of fossil fuel-powered energy generation are scheduled to fall off the U.S. electric grid in the next decade thanks to economic and regulatory pressures. Even larger chunks of renewable energy generation have not yet been approved to connect to the grid and may not be for years, if ever. Meanwhile, data centers and electrification have kicked off the first notable demand growth for electricity markets in over 20 years. On top of all that, the grid has become increasingly vulnerable to climate change-fueled disruptions, whether from solar power being knocked out by hail or natural gas lines freezing in an ice storm.
In some parts of the country, the solution to this dilemma is relatively simple. In much of the Southeast and -west, large utilities that own power plants are simply building more natural gas power plants. In California, regulators are mandating that utilities procure enormous amounts of energy storage, and have rejiggered residential solar rules to encourage more combinations of solar panels and batteries. And Texas is planning to lend billions of dollars at low interest rates to help finance natural gas plant construction.
Then there’s the PJM Interconnection, the 13-state electricity market serving much of the East Coast and Midwest, run by the country’s largest regional transmission organization. Despite PJM’s constant warnings about natural gas and coal generation retiring, it has not been able to bring new generating resources online in a reasonable timeframe. The grid operator — technically a non-profit — has neither the regulatory muscle nor the financial firepower to shape new energy generation to its preferences; its interconnection queue got so long, it instituted a two-year pause on reviewing new applications.
While many of PJM’s problems are unique to its particular circumstances, they’ve gotten so severe in recent months, it calls into question whether the decades-long project of structuring electricity generation, transmission, and distribution into something like a market is even working anymore.
“The whole premise is that a capacity market is about efficient entry and efficient exit,” Abe Silverman, an assistant research scholar at Johns Hopkins and former New Jersey utility regulatory official, told me. “We’re squeezing the tube on the entry side and letting very few new entrants in.”
According to PJM’s independent market monitor, at the end of last year, there were just over 7 gigawatts of natural gas projects in the queue, about half of which it expected to go into service eventually, while some 24 gigawatts to 58 gigawatts of coal and natural gas is expected to retire by 2030. There were over 200 gigawatts of renewables projects in the queue, the market monitor said, but only around 30 gigawatts that’s expected to go into service, and for the purpose of a capacity auction, only about 11 would count.
But for power market observers, the sirens really started going off at the end of July, when PJM held what’s called a capacity auction, which determines the price companies get paid to supply energy-generating capacity over and above forecasted peak demand in order to avoid blackouts. By the end of the five-day process, the cost of that capacity came out almost 10 times higher for than the previous PJM capacity auction — $14.7 billion, compared to just over $2 billion in 2022 — a signal that supply, demand, and reliability dynamics within PJM are seriously imbalanced.
That almost certainly means rate increases for consumers. In Maryland specifically, some residential electricity bills could rise anywhere from 2% to 24%, a monthly change of $4 to $18, according to the state’s Office of People’s Counsel.
What that almost certainly does not mean is a huge amount of new generation coming online. “In an efficient capacity market structure, the market starts sending higher price signals and generators start coming on-line,” Silverman told me. “Usually when you see high prices, you would expect more of a response from the supply side.”
In PJM, however, “new generation cannot come online quickly,” according to a letter from a group of consumer advocates in PJM states, therefore “the high capacity market prices are not an effective signal for new entry but instead a windfall for the owners of existing generation.”
Ironically, the high prices were due, in part, to PJM applying a formula it typically reserves for renewables to coal and gas plants, which “derates” the capacity they’re able to offer in times of stress, e.g. during a winter storm. Historically, coal and gas got high ratings because high winds and cold temperatures was considered unlikely to disrupt their production, while solar and wind scored much lower. But after 2022's Winter Storm Elliott, during which natural gas lines froze and caused a mass blackout, PJM knocked down the rating for combined cycle gas plants — the most efficient kind of gas plant, which recaptures heat exhaust to produce more power — from 96% to 79%, and for combustion turbine natural gas plants from 90% to 62%. Wind got a bump, while solar was rated down.
In other words, “PJM doesn’t view all these megawatts as reliably as they did before Elliott,” Nicolas Freschi, a senior associate at Gabel Associates, which does energy and environmental consulting for federal agencies, told me. That meant some 26 gigawatts of projected coal and gas capacity disappeared from the auction, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.
The environmental activist community has long argued that gas is less reliable than utilities and the public seem to think it is, and that this should be taken into account with grid planning. The gas derating was “a good thing,” Claire Lang-Ree of the Natural Resources Defense Council told me, “because that means what we're paying for in this auction is actually reliable. It's a truing-up of the system.”
At the same time, she acknowledged, the auction result was “a bad thing insofar as it was the driving cause of the price spike,” which also means huge payouts for power companies.
“Despite the decrease in capacity credit, the higher capacity prices will impact the capacity revenue received for projects in PJM, generally increasing it,” S&P analysts wrote in August. By way of example, S&P looked at one natural gas plant in Ohio and found that its project per-megawatt-hour net revenue in 2026 would increase by 40%.
Morgan Stanley estimated that major power producers such as Texas-based Vistra and Maryland’s Constellation Energy would see a boost to their earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization of $700 million to $800 million each.
And yet in both Texas and PJM, many analysts (not to mention the gas industry) still see gas as the solution to a shortfall exacerbated by gas’s documented vulnerability. That’s due to its ability — at least on paper — to generate large amounts of power at any time of day.
So far, however, only one power producer with a large natural gas fleet, Calpine, has publicly indicated that it will aggressively pursue development in PJM. Calpine operates a 76-facility fleet that includes 66 fossil fuel-fired plants from California to Massachusetts. “The PJM market needs and values reliable, dispatchable, non-duration-limited power” the company said in a press release. (These are all industry code words for natural gas.) Calpine said it was “accelerating its PJM electricity generation development program following market signals indicating higher demand for reliable power,” and that it was looking at “multiple new locations in the PJM region, particularly in Ohio and Pennsylvania.”
Other companies have been more cautious. “It is only one auction, of course, and not long enough out in the future to be starting a new project,” Vistra chief executive Jim Burke said in an August earnings call. Morgan Stanley analysts noted that because the next auction is in December, “we don't foresee enough time to build significant new generation capacity. There are only 18 months between the auction and the start of the delivery year, which doesn’t leave time for permitting, interconnection queue timing, and construction because they are behind.”
S&P forecast that only one natural gas project under construction in Ohio could possible bid into the next auction. And while stock and bond analysts are more focused on the prospects for new natural gas plants, they are not particularly optimistic they’ll come online any time soon. “Merchant newbuilds remain marginal under our assumptions, indicating price signals may need to improve further to incent merchant new entry,” Guggenheim analyst Shahriar Pourreza wrote in a note.
Todd Snitchler, the head of the independent power generator trade group Electric Power Supply Association, noted to me that the July auction price was “coming off a record low,” and that the “abnormally” low prices in the previous two auctions — which were then followed by a lengthy delay — “suggested that assets should be leaving, and not coming on” — a trend PJM and other electricity market overseers have been warning about for years.
“One auction does not make a trend make,” Snitchler said.
If prices stay high, however, some analysts think power producers will eventually start trying to build new natural gas plants in PJM. “Investors don’t want to start building extremely expensive projects until they’re sure this price environment is sustainable,” Freschi told me.
Instead of beckoning new gas construction, clean energy and ratepayer advocates want PJM to focus on interconnection reform so that its existing queue — which is overwhelming renewables — can finally make its way onto the grid.
In a statement to Heatmap, PJM said its new system of evaluating projects in groups instead of on a first-come, first-served basis will lead to 230,000 megawatts being processed over the next three years. The PJM spokesperson also pointed to Calpine's announcement as a sign that the capacity auction was bringing new investment.
“We need investment in real projects that can get connected to the grid quickly, as opposed to the speculative projects that have clogged the queue in the past,” the spokesperson said. “Our reformed interconnection process encourages projects with the best chance of being built, and we are weeding out some of those that have been hanging on for years past receiving an interconnection agreement from PJM and who have not moved to construction.”
“Generators should submit their new project queue positions today,” the spokesperson added.
But like so many projects clogging the queue, these reforms are speculative, and in the end the restructured market, where new supply supposedly responds to high prices, simply may not work on its own terms. Some of this is due to policy in PJM states — you’re unlikely to be able to build a new natural gas plant in Democratic-controlled states like Maryland, New Jersey, or Illinois, and Guggenheim’s Pourreza wrote that “any new gas generation will be clustered in [Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia],” which could both lead to lower capacity prices in some areas and a more unbalanced market as new gas capacity becomes concentrated geographically.
But even in areas that are famously friendly to fossil fuels and have less complicated market and interconnection processes, demand for new gas has not smoothly resulted in gas plant construction. In Texas, which has closest thing to a free electricity market that exists in the United States, the state has had to turn to a multibillion low interest rate financing program to entice developers to build new natural gas plants.
May that be a warning to regional transmission planners everywhere. As S&P analysts wrote, “High prices signal the need for new generation, but do not guarantee it.”
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Between the budget reconciliation process and an impending vote to end California’s electric vehicle standards, a lot of the EV maker’s revenue stands to go poof.
It’s shaping up to be a very bad week for Tesla. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s draft budget proposal released Sunday night axes two of the primary avenues by which the electric vehicle giant earns regulatory credits. Congress also appears poised to vote to revoke California’s authority to implement its Zero-Emission Vehicle program by the end of the month, another key source of credits for the automaker. The sale of all regulatory credits combined earned the company a total of $595 million in the first quarter on a net income of just $409 million — that is, they represented its entire margin of profitability. On the whole, credits represented 38% of Tesla’s net income last year.
To add insult to injury, the House Ways and Means committee on Monday proposed eliminating the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 consumer EV tax credit, the used EVs tax credit, and the commercial EVs tax credit by year’s end. The move comes as part of the House’s larger budget-making process. And while it will likely be months before a new budget is finalized, with Trump seeking to extend his 2017 tax cuts and Congress limited in its spending ability, much of the IRA is on the chopping block. That is bad news for clean energy companies across the spectrum, from clean hydrogen producers to wind energy companies and battery manufacturers. But as recently as a few months ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was sounding cavalier.
After aligning himself with Trump during the election, Musk came out last year in support of ending the $7,500 consumer EV tax credit, along with all subsidies in all industries generally. He wrote on X that taking away the EV tax credit “will only help Tesla,” presumably assuming that while his company could withstand the policy headwinds, it would hurt emergent EV competitors even more, thus paradoxically helping Tesla eliminate its competition.
While it looks like Musk will get his wish, he probably didn’t account for a small but meaningful carveout in the Ways and Means committee proposal that allows the tax credit to stand through the end of 2026 for companies that have yet to sell 200,000 EVs in their lifetime. While Tesla’s sales figures are orders of magnitude beyond this, the extension will give a boost to its smaller competitors, as well as potentially some larger automakers with fewer EV sales to their credit.
A number of other provisions in the Ways and Means committee’s proposal spell bad news for Tesla and EV automakers on the whole. These include the elimination of the $4,000 tax credit for used EVs as well as the $7,500 tax credit for commercial EVs — which leased cars also qualify for. This second credit, often referred to as the “leasing loophole,” allows consumers leasing EVs to redeem the full tax credit even if their vehicle doesn’t meet the domestic content requirements for the buyer’s credit. The committee also wants to phase out the advanced manufacturing tax credit by the end of 2031, one year earlier than previously planned. While not a huge change, this credit incentivizes the domestic production of clean energy components such as battery cells, battery modules, and solar inverters — all products Tesla is heavily invested in.
The domestic regulatory credits that comprise such an outsize portion of Tesla’s profits, meanwhile, come from a mix of state and federal standards, all of which are under attack. These are California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle program, which sets ZEV production and sales mandates, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas emissions standards.
While the mandates differ in their ambition and implementation mechanisms, all three give automakers credits when they make progress toward EV production targets, fuel economy standards, or emissions standards; exceed these requirements, and automakers earn extra credits. Vehicle manufacturers can then trade those additional credits to carmakers that aren’t meeting state or federal targets. Since Tesla only makes EVs, it always earns more credits than it needs, and many automakers rely on buying these credits to comply with all three regulations.
It’s unclear as of now whether lawmakers have the authority to eliminate the federal fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards via budget reconciliation. A Senate stricture known as the Byrd Rule mandates that provisions align with the basic purpose of the reconciliation process: implementing budgetary changes; those with only “incidental” budgetary impacts can thus be deemed “extraneous” and excluded from the final bill. It’s yet to be seen how the standards in question will be categorized. At first blush, fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards are a stretch to meet the Byrd Rule, but that determination will take weeks, or even potentially months to play out.
What’s for sure is that California’s ZEV program cannot be eliminated through this process, as the program derives its authority from a Clean Air Act waiver, which was first granted to the state by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1967. This waiver allows California to set stricter emissions standards than those at the federal level because of the “compelling and extraordinary circumstances” the state faces when it comes to air quality in the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles basin. California’s latest targets — which require all model year 2035 cars sold in the state to be zero emissions — have been adopted by 11 other states, plus Washington D.C.
These increasingly ambitious goals would presumably cause the tax credits market — and thus Tesla’s profits — to heat up as well, as most automakers would struggle to fully electrify in the next 10 years. But the House voted at the beginning of the month to eliminate California’s latest EPA waiver, granted in December of last year. Now, it’s up to the Senate to decide whether they want to follow suit.
To accomplish this task, Republicans have called upon a legislative process known as the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn newly implemented federal rules. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, for one, has been vocal about using the process to end California’s so-called “EV mandate,” writing in the Wall Street Journal last week that “it’s time for the Senate to finish the job.” And yet other Senate Republicans are reluctant to attempt to roll back California’s waiver. The Government Accountability Officeand the Senate Parliamentarian have both determined that the regulatory allowance ought not to be subject to the Congressional Review Act as it’s an EPA “order” rather than a “rule.” Going against this guidance could thus set a precedent that gives Congress a broad ability to gut executive-level rules.
During his first term, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stood in firm opposition to efforts to roll back fuel efficiency standards. But lately, as the administration has started turning its longstanding anti-EV rhetoric into actual policy, Trump’s new best friend has been relatively quiet. Tesla’s stock is down about 25% since Trump took office, as investors worry that Musk’s political preoccupations have kept him from focusing on his company’s performance. Not to mention the fact that Musk's enthusiastic support for Trump, major role in mass federal layoffs, and, well, whole personality have alienated his liberal-leaning customer base.
So while Musk may have staged a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn in March, awing the President with the ways in which “everything’s computer,” he’s presumably well aware of exactly how Trump’s policies — and his own involvement in them — stand to deeply hurt his business. Whether Tesla will make it through this regulatory onslaught and self-inflicted brand damage as a profitable company remains to be seen. But with Musk planning to slink away from the White House and back into the boardroom, and with House leaders hoping to complete work on the reconciliation bill by Memorial Day, we should start to get answers soon enough.
On gutting energy grants, the Inflation Reduction Act’s last legs, and dishwashers
Current conditions: Eighty of Minnesota’s 87 counties had red flag warnings on Monday, with conditions expected to remain dry and hot through Tuesday • 15 states in the South and Midwest will experience “extreme” humidity this week • It will be 99 degrees Fahrenheit today in Emerson, Manitoba. The municipality hit 100 last weekend — the earliest in the year Canada has ever recorded triple digits.
Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released their draft budget proposal on Sunday night, and my colleague Matthew Zeitlin dove into its widespread cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy and environment programs. Among the rescissions — clawbacks of unspent money in existing programs — and other proposals, Matthew highlights:
Those are just a few of the cuts, which the Sierra Club estimates would add up to $1.6 billion for programs related to decarbonizing heavy industry alone. You can read Matthew’s whole analysis here.
Republicans on the Committee on Energy and Commerce weren’t the only ones who’ve been busy. On Monday, the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, proposed overhauling clean energy tax credits. Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo took a look at those proposals, including:
There’s much more, which Emily gets into here.
In response to President Trump’s executive order last week ordering the Energy Department to “eliminate restrictive water pressure and efficiency rules” for appliances, the DOE published a list of 47 regulations on Monday that it has targeted as “burdensome and costly.” Appliances regulated by the DOE’s list include cook tops, dishwashers, compressors, and microwave ovens, with the agency claiming the deregulation effort would cut 125,000 words from the Code of Federal Regulations and “save the American people an estimated $11 billion,”The New York Timesreports. By the government’s own accounting, though, efficiency standards saved the average American household about $576 on energy and gas bills in 2024, and reduced energy spending for households and businesses by $105 billion in total. “If this attack on consumers succeeds, President Trump would be raising costs dramatically for families as manufacturers dump energy- and water-wasting products into the market,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, said in a statement. “Fortunately, it’s patently illegal, so hold your horses.”
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin said Monday that the Trump administration plans to target stop-start technology in cars. According to the EPA’s website, start-stop technology saves fuel “by turning off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop and automatically starting it back up when you step on the accelerator,” improving fuel economy by 4% to 5%, especially in conditions like stop-and-go city driving. Zeldin, though, characterized the technology as when “your car dies at every red light so companies get a climate participation trophy. EPA approved it, and everyone hates it, so we’re fixing it.” Neither Zeldin nor the EPA offered further details on what that might entail.
More than 2,100 climate adaptation companies generated a combined $1 trillion in revenue last year by offering products and services mitigating the risks of climate change, a new study by London Stock Exchange Group found. “One question that we are getting a lot at the moment is: ‘With the Trump administration in office, what does that mean for the green economy?,’” Jaakko Kooroshy, LSEG’s global head of sustainable investment research, told Bloomberg in an interview about the report. The answer is “this thing is now so big and so robust, it’s not going to implode just like that,” he added.
The analysis looked at 20,000 companies worldwide and “found that adaptation-related revenues last year accounted for roughly a fifth of the $5 trillion global green economy,” with green buildings and water-related infrastructure being the most significant contributors, Bloomberg adds. LSEG further noted that if all companies related to the “green economy” were considered their own industry group, they’d have had the best performance of any equity sector over the past decade.
Thermasol
Wellness company Thermasol has introduced the first off-grid, solar-powered sauna in the U.S., which can reach 170 degrees Fahrenheit in about half an hour.
Rob and Jesse digest the Ways and Means budget bill live on air, alongside former Treasury advisor Luke Bassett.
The fight over the Inflation Reduction Act has arrived. After months of discussion, the Republican majority in the House is now beginning to write, review, and argue about its plans to transform the climate law’s energy tax provisions.
We wanted to record a show about how to follow that battle. But then — halfway through recording that episode — the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee dropped the first draft of its proposal to gut the IRA, and we had to review it on-air.
We were joined by Luke Bassett, a former senior advisor for domestic climate policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and a former senior staff member at the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. We chatted about the major steps in the reconciliation process, what to watch next, and what to look for in the new GOP draft. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s come back to this as a negotiation. This is the first salvo from the House. What does this tell you about where we go from here? Is this a floor? Could it get worse? Is it likely to get better as the lobbying kicks off in earnest by various industries threatened by these changes, and they try to peel things back? What do you think happens next?
Luke Bassett: If you run with the horror movie analogy here, this is scary. I think a lot of people, especially in any energy startups or folks who have been penciling out deals, to start really lining up new projects — or even folks looking for a new EV to buy are suddenly going to have to totally rethink what the next few years look like.
And, you know, whether or not they want to build a factory, buy a car, or have to switch from an electric heat pump to a whale oil burning stove. Who knows? That said, there are champions for each of these in very different ways in the Senate. There are lobbyists who —
Jenkins: — in the House, too.
Bassett: Exactly. There will be lobbyists weighing in. And I think it matters to really think through … I think we’ve been faced with gigantic uncertainty since January. And there’s a part where companies all across the energy sector are looking at this text as we speak and thinking, whoa, I didn’t sign up for this. And to combine this with tariffs, to combine it with the cuts to other federal programs in the other committees’ jurisdictions, it is just a nearly impossible outlook for building new projects. And I bet a bunch of people, CEOs and otherwise, are thinking, I wish Joe Manchin were back in the Senate. But you know, it is what it is.
Robinson Meyer: I will say that it could get worse from here because they will be negotiating with the House Freedom Caucus and with various other conservative House members. And they’ll also be negotiating against the president’s wishes, which is that this move and get done as soon as possible. And so when I talked to Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, who’s a supporter of the IRA, or wants to see it extended in large part, and I asked him questions like, what happens if Republicans really go to work in the House on the IRA and then it gets sent to the Senate? One dynamic we’ve already seen during this Congress is that te House Republican Caucus in this Congress is unusually functional and unusually strategic, and has been unusually good at passing relatively extreme and aggressive policy and then jamming the Senate with it.
And unlike what has happened in the past, which is the House Republican Caucus can’t really do anything, so the Senate passes a far more moderate policy, sends it to the House and dares the House to shut things down. This time the House, if folks remember back in March, the House passed a fairly aggressive budget and kicked it to the Senate and then dared the Senate to shut down the government, and ultimately the Senate decided to keep the government open.
I asked Curtis what happens if they do the same with the IRA. What happens if they really go to task on the IRA? They pass fairly aggressive cuts to it and they send it to the Senate. And his answer was, well, I don’t think the House is going to do that. I don’t think a bill that really savages the IRA could pass the House.
We’ll see, but I just don’t think there’s any floor here. I think there’s no floor for how bad this gets. And I think I just don’t, you know … Before we went into the administration, there was a lot of confidence that the Trump administration and the new Republican majority and the Congress was not going to do anything to substantially make the business environment worse. We’ve discovered there does seem to be a degree of tariffs that will make them squeal and pull back, but we actually haven’t found that in legislature yet.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.