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Current conditions: A fire in New Jersey’s Ocean County has grown to 8,500 acres, prompting thousands of evacuations • Parts of South Africa are bracing for “damaging thunderstorms” • It will be almost 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Moscow today — nearly 30 degrees above average.
Tesla’s profits dropped 71% year-over-year, and its automotive revenue dropped 20% over the same period, the company reported Tuesday. CEO Elon Musk subsequently assured investors and analysts that he plans to spend more time focused on the automaker, reducing his time in Washington to “a day or two per week” for the duration of Donald Trump’s presidency. Tesla sales are down “because of intense competition from Chinese carmakers like BYD, a lack of new models, and Mr. Musk’s support of far-right causes,” The New York Times writes, although the company remains the most valuable car maker in the world by market capitalization. Tesla declined to give a specific growth outlook for the rest of the year.
There may, however, be further trouble ahead for the company’s fastest-growing business: its energy storage products. Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja admitted that “the impact of the tariffs on the energy business will be outsized” since it sources battery cells from China. This comes as Tesla’s “energy segment — which includes the company’s battery energy storage businesses for residences (Powerwall) and for utility-scale generation (Megapack) — has recently been a bright spot for the company, even as its car sales have leveled off and declined,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin writes.
That’s if the tariffs last. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday he anticipates a “de-escalation” with China in the “very near future,” and President Trump added, “We’re going to be very nice and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.”
The White House denied reports that it is considering revoking the tax-exempt status of environmental nonprofits, E&E News reported. Despite rumors that the administration would issue an executive order as soon as Tuesday, an official confirmed to the publication that “no such orders are being drafted or considered at this time.”
I spoke to Jillian Blanchard, the vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, earlier on Tuesday about such a hypothetical move by the administration. “The president doesn’t have that authority,” she told me, noting that “there’s an actual law against them directing Treasury to pull tax status.” But Blanchard said that while it isn’t accurate that an executive order could, with the stroke of a pen, take away environmental groups’ tax-exempt status, “part of the process here is trying to fear-monger and get people afraid to give money to 501(c)(3)s.” She suggested nonprofit groups prepare for whatever may be ahead by staying informed, potentially seeking pro bono assistance from groups like Lawyers for Good Government, and getting their tax documentation in order — just in case.
David McNew/Getty Images
Fuel cell cars and space heating are “among the least promising” applications of hydrogen, according to a new study published Tuesday by Nature. The research, which explored the “realistic roles” for hydrogen in the energy transition, found that it should be “deployed strategically in areas where it seems likely to have greatest potential for cost and sustainability benefits” — primarily in industry, long-duration energy storage, and long-haul transport. Other conclusions the researchers made include:
Read the full report at Nature.
New York City created just 2,184 new “green” jobs in 2023, per a new report covered by Inside Climate News. The number significantly undermines claims by Democratic Mayor Eric Adams that the green economy would create 400,000 jobs in the city by 2040.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation has estimated that 40% of the city’s green jobs would come from the decarbonization and electrification of buildings. But as Inside Climate News points out, “If the implementation of Local Law 97, which limits city building emissions, is muted, or renewable energy investments suffer due to the choices made at the federal level, green job growth could be much slower than planned.”
Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, and other major oil companies are offshoring specialized jobs, such as engineering, geology, and environmental science, to countries like India, where they can pay workers a third or a fourth of what they pay their U.S. counterparts, The Wall Street Journal reports. Chevron, for example, has announced plans to cut as many as 8,000 jobs worldwide while simultaneously expanding its global center in India by 600 jobs. “Many managers have told me comments like, ‘Our remote operations are typically 90% as efficient, but 70% of the cost, so it’s a great deal for us,’” Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom explained to the Journal. In the U.S., oil and gas jobs have declined by almost 15% since mid-2019.
“You’re looking at potentially no growth from U.S. oil this year.” —Matthew Bernstein, a senior analyst of upstream research at Rystad Energy, in comments to the Financial Times about how Trump’s tariffs are “one of the biggest headwinds” the shale industry has faced in a long time.
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And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.
The Bureau of Land Management says it will be heavily scrutinizing transmission lines if they are expressly necessary to bring solar or wind energy to the power grid.
Since the beginning of July, I’ve been reporting out how the Trump administration has all but halted progress for solar and wind projects on federal lands through a series of orders issued by the Interior Department. But last week, I explained it was unclear whether transmission lines that connect to renewable energy projects would be subject to the permitting freeze. I also identified a major transmission line in Nevada – the north branch of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – as a crucial test case for the future of transmission siting in federal rights-of-way under Trump. Greenlink would cross a litany of federal solar leases and has been promoted as “essential to helping Nevada achieve its de-carbonization goals and increased renewable portfolio standard.”
Well, BLM has now told me Greenlink North will still proceed despite a delay made public shortly after permitting was frozen for renewables, and that the agency still expects to publish the record of decision for the line in September.
This is possible because, as BLM told me, transmission projects that bring solar and wind power to the grid will be subject to heightened scrutiny. In an exclusive statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me via e-mail that a secretarial order choking out solar and wind permitting on federal lands will require “enhanced environmental review for transmission lines only when they are a part of, and necessary for, a wind or solar energy project.”
However, if a transmission project is not expressly tied to wind or solar or is not required for those projects to be constructed… apparently, then it can still get a federal green light. For instance in the case of Greenlink, the project itself is not explicitly tied to any single project, but is kind of like a transmission highway alongside many potential future solar projects. So a power line can get approved if it could one day connect to wind or solar, but the line’s purpose cannot solely be for a wind or solar project.
This is different than, say, lines tied explicitly to connecting a wind or solar project to an existing transmission network. Known as gen-tie lines, these will definitely face hardships with this federal government. This explains why, for example, BLM has yet to approve a gen-tie line for a wind project in Wyoming that would connect the Lucky Star wind project to the grid.
At the same time, it appears projects may be given a wider berth if a line has other reasons for existing, like improving resilience on the existing grid, or can be flexibly used by not just renewables but also fossil energy.
So, the lesson to me is that if you’re trying to build transmission infrastructure across federal property under this administration, you might want to be a little more … vague.