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On modernizing permitting, IRA funds, and a revolt at BP
Current conditions: Central and northeast New Mexico will face “extremely critical fire conditions” over the next two days • Thousands of Iraqis are suffering from respiratory problems caused by a severe sandstorm • Temperatures could hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Balochistan, Pakistan, during a heat wave this week.
On Tuesday, President Trump signed a memorandum ordering the “maximum use of technology in environmental review and permitting process for infrastructure projects of all kinds.” The order also directed the Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, to put together a process for modernizing technology in environmental reviews. Thomas Hochman, the director of infrastructure policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, celebrated the move by the Trump administration, writing on Twitter “it’s high time to eliminate paper-based reviews, modernize permitting technology (which is often as old as the laws themselves), and experiment with different permitting tools.”
In February, Trump also signed an executive order that gutted CEQ’s authority to oversee NEPA, a move Sierra Club’s senior attorney Nathaniel Shoaff called “rash, unlawful, and unwise.” As my colleague Katie Brigham has written, in theory that order would expedite “projects such as solar farms and clean energy manufacturing facilities; in reality, under the Trump administration, the benefits could redound to fossil fuel infrastructure first and foremost.”
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to immediately lift its freeze on billions of dollars tied to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In her ruling, Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, a Trump appointee, called the pause “arbitrary and capricious,” and added that federal agencies such as the White House’s Office of Management and Budget “do not have unlimited authority to further a president’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration.”
The lawsuit was brought by conservation and nonprofit groups that had received grants under the two laws, although McElroy’s order will apply to all frozen IRA and IIJA grants in the country. “Today’s ruling marks a crucial victory for the rule of law and ensures these vital resources will flow to the people and projects Congress intended to support,” Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
A group of BP shareholders, including UK pension provider National Employment Savings Trust and the financial services company Legal & General, announced they will vote in opposition to the re-election of the company’s chairman, Helge Lund, later this week. The move follows BP’s retreat from its goal of dramatically cutting oil and gas production after the company recorded its highest profits ever.
“While it’s disappointing to see BP rowing back on their climate pledges, what’s particularly worrying is they haven’t gone back to shareholders and given us a chance to vote on such a significant decision,” Diandra Soobiah, NEST’s head of responsible investment, told The Guardian last year. L&G, a 1.8% stakeholder in BP, added that it is “deeply concerned” about the retreat toward oil and gas and away from renewables investment. The decision to oppose Lund is, however, “largely symbolic,” Net Zero Investor writes, noting that the chairman has already announced plans to step down next year. BP’s annual general meeting will be held on Thursday.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Tuesday that the EPA is launching a probe into the geoengineering startup Making Sunsets, citing alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The small South Dakota-based company uses balloons to release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in order to reflect the sun and offset warming caused by carbon dioxide; it finances the operation by selling credits for each gram of released SO2. Geoengineering — and Making Sunsets more specifically — remain highly controversial, with many environmental experts calling it a “bad idea.” But Daniele Visioni, a climate scientist specializing in aerosols, wrote on Bluesky that while Making Sunsets’ “stunt was silly … I won’t enjoy seeing them attacked by a government that, at the same time, pretends ‘clean coal’ is a thing while pearl-clutching about ‘polluting our air’ with 10 grams of sulfate.”
The United States’ exports of petrochemical feedstocks to China are at risk due to the trade war touched off by President Trump — “yet another example of how Trump’s second term could prove ironically disastrous for the oil and gas industry,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote for Heatmap yesterday. The U.S. exported 83 million barrels of the natural gas product ethane to China in 2024, which the country processes into plastics that are often exported back to the United States. But “U.S. energy flows to China are done unless Beijing and D.C. come to an agreement,” Gregory Brew, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, told Zeitlin. “China is already looking to buy more crude from OPEC states to make up for losing U.S. [imports]” — and natural gas liquids, including ethane, “are sure to follow.”
ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
Humans have observed a colossal squid in its natural habitat for the first time ever. Though science has known about Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni’s existence since discovering arm fragments in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1925, researchers captured the first images of a foot-long juvenile in its home waters nearly 2,000 feet below the surface of the southern Atlantic Ocean.
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On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.
A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.