You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Kneecapping demand from clean energy is a funny way to boost supply.
The technology that undergirds decarbonization requires a lot of minerals, and those minerals are often found or processed overseas — really often in China. The Biden administration thought this was a problem, so as it subsidized the domestic use and manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery-electric vehicles and the deployment of green energy, it also tried to nudge the critical mineral industry mining and refining industries to be more American, with subsidies for battery plants and loan guarantees for lithium mines.
The Trump administration halfway agrees with its predecessors: It wants to see an American minerals industry, but it isn’t so much interested in the renewable energy part. During his Day One fusillade of executive orders, the president hammered the wind industry, scrapped the Biden administration’s goals for vehicle electrification, and encouraged faster permitting for nearly every type of energy generation other than wind, solar, and storage.
While new clean energy projects won’t disappear overnight, the growth trajectory of the sector may be imperiled, which in turn means that incremental future demand for critical minerals in the United States has likely diminished. Demand certainty is incredibly important for the mining sector — it takes an estimated 29 years from resource discovery to production in the United States, according to S&P — as exploration is a highly uncertain and expensive process. Because of this, the industry as a whole is already incentivized to undersupply the market, explained Arnab Datta, the managing director of policy implementation at Employ America.
“If there’s uncertainty about demand, it will hold back investment,” Datta told me. “If you under-invest, you get suboptimal profits. If you over-invest, the risk is bankruptcy.”
Many minerals projects the Biden administration greenlit and supported were closely tied to downstream decarbonization goals. The nearly $1 billion loan guarantee for the Ioneer Rhyolite Ridge refining project for lithium mined in Nevada, for instance, would “finance the on-site processing of lithium carbonate that would support production of lithium for more than 370,000 EVs each year,” the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office said in an announcement on January 17.
In December, the LPO issued a $750 million conditional loan guarantee for a synthetic graphite facility in Tennessee that was “expected to produce 31,500 metric tonnes per year of synthetic graphite, which can support the production of lithium-ion batteries for approximately 325,000 EVs each year.”
And America’sfirst graphite processing plant, which supplies Tesla’s battery-making operations from Vidalia, Louisiana, does so with help from a $100 million Department of Energy loan.
The Trump approach to stimulating investment is still evolving — the Department of Energy doesn’t yet have a confirmed secretary — but it appears to focus largely on permitting mining and refining projects with a focus on the defense industrial base.
The executive order “Unleashing American Energy” asks agencies to “identify all agency actions that impose undue burdens on the domestic mining and processing of non-fuel minerals and undertake steps to revise or rescind such actions.” Trump also asked the secretaries of the interior and energy to make “efforts to accelerate the ongoing, detailed geologic mapping of the United States,” and “ensure that critical mineral projects, including the processing of critical minerals, receive consideration for Federal support.”
Many of the minerals used for renewables and clean energy projects also have defense applications. The most obvious exampleare the suite of minerals found in batteries — lithium, cobalt, graphite — which are as key for powering electric vehicles as they are for building drones.
“If you’re going to make a Venn diagram of what critical minerals you need for sustainable energy technologies, battery technologies, solar cells, and electricity infrastructure, that circle of critical minerals sits inside of the circle of critical minerals that you need for defense purposes,” explained Catrina Rorke, the senior vice president for policy and research at the Climate Leadership Council.
But renewable energy applications can quickly outpace defense. According to the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang, “In many cases the business for these projects would be difficult to sustain on the defense applications alone unless DOD is throwing tons of money to make those projects too big to fail.”
The F-35 fighter jetuses around 900 pounds of rare earth elements, and the Pentagon is looking at maintaining a fleet of about 2,400. A single offshore wind turbine, meanwhile, can use up to thousands of pounds. To get a sense of how much rare earth metal even a modestly sized offshore wind operation requires, you’d have to look at something like a destroyer, which needs over 5,000 pounds of them.
Not all analysts see a strong tension between the Trump administration’s renewable energy policy and its critical minerals policy, however. Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute and a public policy professor at the Colorado School of Mines, told me that it was “simplistic” to say “you need supply and demand to meet somewhere.”
“There’s still going to be a need for copper whether or not the U.S. builds a lot of transmission lines,” Bazilian said. “There’s still going to be the need for light and heavy rare earths, and there’s a need for tellurium and nickel on global markets. The problem is not robust demand in the United States, which is one piece of the pie.”
No matter what these minerals are used for or where their ultimate destination is, the United States is desperately looking for any foothold in mining and processing in order to compete with China, which dominates many sectors of the industry.
“What we need to do now is to get some domestic mining and processing going,” Bazilian said. The U.S. “doesn’t have to be dominant or be the biggest producer of these things. We need to get on the map a little bit. We have precious little going on.”
Even if U.S. demand slows, “I don’t think it will stop,” Bazilian said. “I don’t see that in itself kneecapping anything.”
Regardless of the level of demand, it will need mines and processing facilities to meet it, which requires permitting and financing. What investors and companies looking to open mines and refining facilities need is not just assurance of demand over the long term, Rorke explained, but also the go-ahead to build.
“If you’re only focused on the demand side,” Rorke said, “you’re really investing in a long-term problem because you are not matching it with the supply that can come on to satisfy that demand over the long term.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct Datta’s affiliation and title.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
At a conference in New York, solar and wind developers warn of spiking electricity prices if IRA tax credits are cut.
As the renewable energy industry fights for relief from the House reconciliation bill’s harsh tax credit phaseouts, its members have coalesced around a dire and pragmatic message: America needs electricity, we’re the only ones who can provide it quickly, this bill will make that harder — and it’s electricity consumers who will have to pay the price.
“Now we have a different paradigm,” Jim Murphy, the chief executive officer of the energy developer Invenergy said Thursday at a conference hosted by the renewables trade group ACORE. Whereas in previous decades renewables largely replaced retiring fossil plants on the grid, today, “we need it all, and we need it all as fast as we can get.”
Even if customers want gas-fired power plants, the developers that build them likely can’t get them up and running until near the end of the decade. “We’re getting a lot of customer inquiries for gas-fired, as well,” Murphy said. “We can’t deliver that immediately the way we can deliver renewables immediately. 90% of what we have in the queue is renewables. Gas projects won’t be ready until the end of the decade.”
Sitting beside Murphy on the same panel, Sandhya Ganapathy, chief executive of EDP Renewables North America, described renewable deployment in the coming years as “not about ideology,” or even “one technology being better than the other.” Instead, “this is about pragmatism,” she said. “What does it take for the economy to be resilient? What does it take for the economy to be dominant out there?”
The answer, Ganapathy said, was whatever pushed electrons onto the grid fastest.
I heard the same idea repeated over and over on the panels I attended and from the people I spoke to: What makes renewables matter is how they serve the grid’s needs now, not how they help reduce emissions.
“For 25 years, what has happened in this industry is the retirement of coal plants, and to a lesser extent gas plants, and then the replacement of that capacity by renewables. That’s really the industry that we’ve all been part of,” Ted Brandt, the chief executive of Marathon Capital, said on Wednesday. “Right now we’re at an inflection point where we’re running out of retirements.”
The big buyer is a large technology company looking to power its data centers, Brandt said, and it’s willing to pay up.
“What hyperscalers really believe is that the acute constraint to AI and cloud is all about power,” Brandt said.
Though demand is high, there are roadblocks and costs that developers have to deal with even before worrying about the future of the Inflation Reduction Act — tariffs, high demand for scarce components such as transformers, interconnection and permitting delays. With tax credits of at least 30% (and often higher) possibly going away, the only way to solve the equation between high demand and high development costs is prices going up, Debbie Harrison, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, told me.
One might wonder, then, exactly what the developers are so worried about. After all, if there’s rising demand for your product, why do you need a subsidy?
When I put this question to ACORE Chief Executive Ray Long, he emphasized that such a long pipeline of projects in response to demand from technology companies and utilities has accumulated in less than three full years since the IRA’s enactment.
“We have a two-and-a-half-year-old set of policy that was passed by the House and the Senate, signed by the president, that enabled and said to investors — and developers, and manufacturers, and everybody else — use these tax credits because we want you to come in and build and invest in everything that you’re doing,” Long told me.
“We need to be in a place in the United States where policy actually means something, that the people who are spending the money and doing all this can rely on,” Long went on. “The IRA is going to change. Everybody knows that if it’s going to change. It needs to be done in a responsible and balanced way that does not just discard all the investment.”
In the near term, moving up the deadline to qualify for clean energy tax credits to 60 days after the signing of the bill, as proposed in the House version, could cause a rush of construction starts. But that’s a thin silver lining, industry executives and analysts argued. Many projects simply may not happen at all.
Projects that would be eligible for tax credits “currently make up the vast majority of planned U.S. utility-scale electricity capacity additions,” analysts from Evercore wrote in a separate report released Wednesday. If the credits are “both rapidly terminated and rendered unworkable,” first by early phaseout and then by foreign entity of concern provisions (more on those in a minute), it would mean that many projects no longer pencil out economically, thus endangering “the United States’ ability to affordably meet growing electricity demand from data centers and other end users.”
Citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Evercore analysts estimated that over 80% of the planned capacity additions could be eligible for clean energy tax credits, with 150 gigawatts of solar, battery, and wind projects planned but not yet under construction.
The foreign entity of concern provisions require tax credit recipients to isolate their business relationships and supply chains from a handful of U.S. adversaries, most notably China. This “introduces massive complexity” and is “very likely unworkable,” the Evercore analysts said. The FEOC provisions “would throw ongoing projects into uncertainty around post-2028 credit eligibility.”
The requirement to eliminate not just all Chinese companies, but also all Chinese “influenced” companies from the renewables supply chain would create numerous points of potential noncompliance for denying tax credits. And unlike the foreshortened timelines for starting construction on new projects in the House bill, the FEOC rules could mean “immediate uncertainty” around whether existing generation will remain eligible for credits they’d planned to claim through 2028 and beyond.
Executives at the ACORE conference were properly alarmed.
“FEOC is written so broadly because of components and subcomponents,” Murphy said Thursday. “The supply chain can not support that, and won’t be able to support that for several years. It’s just an unworkable provision.”
On Musk vs. Trump, tech emissions, and V2G charging
Current conditions: Polar air could deliver Australia’s most widespread snowfall in years this weekend • Toronto and Montreal have some of the worst air quality in the world going into Friday due to smoke from the Manitoba fires • Global average concentrations of CO2 exceeded 430 parts per million in May, the highest level in millions or possibly tens of millions of years.
Elon Musk’s criticisms of the Republican reconciliation bill triggered a very public falling out with President Trump on Thursday. Earlier this week, just days after his Oval Office send-off from the government, Musk took to Twitter to slam Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” bill, which he claimed would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” By Thursday, Musk was calling for Congress to kill the bill, and his criticisms had escalated: “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” he tweeted. Trump responded by telling reporters on Thursday afternoon that “Elon and I had a great relationship — I don’t know if we will anymore,” touching off a back-and-forth on social media that culminated in Musk claiming Trump is “in the Epstein files,” a reference to Jeffrey Epstein.
The conflict also sent “the value of Tesla shares into a freefall,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in his accounting of the breakup. The company’s stock was down 14% by the time the dust settled, erasing $153 billion from Tesla’s market value in the company’s biggest one-day drop on record. “The whole thing is idiotic,” Wayne Kaufman, the chief market analyst at Phoenix Financial Services, said, per Bloomberg. “People in these kinds of positions should know better than to act like kids in junior high.”
Indirect emissions from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta rose 150% in the three years between 2020 and 2023 due to the energy demands of artificial intelligence, a new report by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union found. Amazon saw the most significant jump in emissions, up 182% in 2023 compared to 2020, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145%, and Alphabet at 138% over the same periods. In total, 166 digital companies reviewed by the report contributed just under 1% of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.
Indirect emissions, also called scope 2 emissions, account for those from “purchased electricity, steam, heating, and cooling consumed by the company.” However, the report also found that nearly half of the companies it examined have committed to achieving net-zero emissions goals, with 51 companies setting ambitious deadlines of 2050 or earlier. Twenty-three of the companies in the report already operated on 100% renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022. You can read the full report here.
Renault Group
Renault Group announced Thursday that the Dutch city of Utrecht is officially the first in Europe to debut a vehicle-to-grid car-sharing service. The program, called Utrecht Energized, was announced last fall, with Renault supplying an initial 500 electric models featuring V2G bidirectional charging technology, allowing the cars to charge using clean energy and also feed power back into the grid during times of high demand.
Utrecht was already one of Europe’s “most progressive renewable-energy cities,” per the announcement, with 35% of its roofs equipped with solar panels. “To manage the grid with a high proportion of renewables requires a system that quickly adapts to the changes in energy generation and consumption,” Renault wrote in its announcement, adding that the bidirectional cars in the program can deliver 10% of the flexibility to balance Utrecht’s wind-and-solar-generated electricity during peak times. Although the program is the first of its kind in Europe, similar programs are also underway in China, Japan, and Australia, Autoevolution writes.
Battery cell maker Envision Automotive Energy Supply Co. announced a work stoppage on Thursday of the construction of its manufacturing plant near Florence, South Carolina. “AESC has informed the state of South Carolina and our local partners that due to policy and market uncertainty, we are pausing construction at our South Carolina facility at this time,” spokesman Brad Grantham said in a statement, per the South Carolina Daily Gazette. The pause jeopardizes 1,600 new jobs and a planned $1.6 billion investment in the facility by the Japan-based company. The state’s Republican Governor Henry McMaster, a Trump ally, acknowledged that “the tariffs are going up and down” and some projects are “being paused,” but added, “Let things play out, because all of these changes are taking place. So, I’d say, relax if you can.”
Record-fast snowmelt in the western United States could be cueing up a particularly severe fire season, The Guardian reports. Despite some states, including California, seeing above-average snowfall this winter, all western states already have below-normal snowpacks, indicative of a rapid melt rate that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described in a recent special notice as “not normal.” Additionally, a third of the states in the West are in “severe” drought or worse, the highest proportion in more than two years. Combined with a forecast for above-average summer temperatures, the “quickly depleting mountain snows will limit summertime water availability in streams and rivers throughout the West, and may kick off a potential feedback loop that could intensify and expand the current drought,” The Guardian writes, singling out the Pacific Northwest as especially vulnerable to wildfires as a result.
A Ginko tree at the Miaoying Temple in Beijing. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
A study of 50,000 trees in China found that thousands of endangered varieties have been preserved for centuries within the walls of religious sites and temples. “The researchers found that the density of ancient trees inside the temples was more than 7,000 times higher than those outside temples and in the wild,”Nature writes. Eight of the tree species identified by the researchers can only be found on temple grounds.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.