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Vermont’s natural gas company is selling heat pumps and rebranding itself a “thermal service provider.”
On a recent Friday morning, I sat down to watch a webinar about a natural gas utility and unexpectedly found myself glued to the screen.
The video featured Morgan Hood, the new product development manager at a small utility once called Vermont Gas Systems, now known simply as VGS, that serves about 55,000 customers in its titular state. For 80 minutes Hood described how the company was working to reinvent itself as a “thermal solutions provider.” As part of that mission, it had recently started selling and leasing electric heat pump water and space heaters to its customers to help them reduce their gas use.
As a reporter who has covered natural gas utilities’ expansion plans and the industry’s all-out war on electrification, I was stunned. The programs alone were unusual, but what surprised me more was the way Hood talked about them.
“If we want to continue to serve our customers, which we do, significant changes are necessary,” she said, describing a “dramatic shift” in public sentiment toward natural gas in Vermont. “We know we're not going to be expanding our customer base with natural gas customers in the future.”
It’s hard to overstate how different Hood’s tone and message were from that of the average gas utility executive, who tends to highlight their product’s popularity and make a case for its role in a low-carbon future. Consider the remarks of Kim Greene, the CEO of the much larger Southern Company Gas, at a conference I attended in November. “Natural gas is foundational to America's clean energy future," she told an audience of state regulators. Without ever once acknowledging that natural gas contributes to climate change, she went on to describe it as a “magical molecule” that was important to the company’s decarbonization strategy.
When I later probed climate advocates in Vermont about VGS, I learned that many dismiss the company’s image change as greenwashing, or are at least skeptical of its plans. They pointed to a highly contested $165 million pipeline the company recently built, and a controversial plan to replace the fuel in its pipelines with biogas and hydrogen.
But my initial impressions also weren’t unfounded. The company does in fact seem to be unique in the way it has actively started leaning into the shift that science, policy, and economics are all driving toward — a transition to all-electric buildings.
“VGS is among the most progressive gas utilities in the country, there's no question about that,” Ben Walsh, the climate and energy program director at the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, and a longtime critic of VGS, told me.
The company still has a lot to figure out. Hood was remarkably transparent in acknowledging that the new products VGS is offering aren’t nearly as profitable as selling natural gas. But its recent past and its uncertain future make it a revealing case study of the challenges gas companies face in trying to stay viable as they try to decarbonize.
The webinar, titled “A Gas Utility Goes Electric,” was organized by a Portland, Oregon-based advocacy group called Electrify Now. Its co-founder Brian Stewart told me he initially had some reservations about featuring a gas utility in their event series, but he and his partners were impressed with the company’s interest in engaging with an electrification group. They hoped the talk might reveal a model that other utilities could follow — particularly Northwest Natural, their local gas utility in Oregon.
“They're doing the exact opposite of what VGS is at least attempting to do,” Stewart said. “Northwest Natural is still denying the idea that electrification is even better from an emissions standpoint.”
In fact, Northwest Natural is not just denying it — it’s reportedly putting millions of dollars into opposing electrification. In February, the Oregon city of Eugene passed an ordinance banning gas hookups in new residential buildings. Northwest Natural responded by spending more than $900,000 to get a measure to overturn the gas ban on the city’s November ballot, according to campaign finance records reviewed by The Washington Post. And it’s just getting started. The Post obtained audio indicating that the gas industry plans to spend $4 million on the Eugene referendum.
The strategy has been widely adopted by the gas industry. Last year, a utility in Southern California, SoCalGas, was fined $10 million for spending ratepayer funds to fight stronger building efficiency standards that would have reduced natural gas demand. New York Focus reported last week that National Fuel, a gas utility in Western New York, is spending hundreds of thousands of ratepayer dollars to lobby against a statewide push to reduce natural gas use.
VGS, on the other hand, first signaled it was reading the writing on the wall for natural gas in 2019, when it announced a new strategy to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
That was around the time state leaders were contemplating a new climate law called the Global Warming Solutions Act, which passed the following year. VGS hired a new CEO, Neale Lunderville, who reorganized the company, creating new positions focused on decarbonization, including Hood’s role. Richard Donnelly, who spent a decade working for a nonprofit utility dedicated to energy efficiency joined VGS as its Director of Energy Innovation.
“The creation of that job was a clear signal to me that they were investing in the right things,” Donnelly told me.
VGS rolled out its first electrification program in early 2022, offering customers the option to lease or buy heat pump water heaters. The company was in a fairly unique position to do this, as it already had a sales and leasing program for gas equipment and an in-house team trained to install heating equipment.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, VGS launched an electric space heating program, offering central heat pumps that utilize the same ductwork as a homeowner’s existing furnace. For now, the company is installing these as dual fuel systems, meaning recipients keep their gas furnaces as a back-up source of heat. While heat pumps designed for cold climates don’t require this, they do lose efficiency in the coldest temperatures. Customers can decide when they want the system to switch over to gas, and the company developed a calculator that shows them how much carbon they can save, and what the anticipated costs will be, depending on where they set the switchover point.
The space heating systems are only available to a portion of the company’s customers — about 40% — because most have boilers and radiators with no ductwork. Hood said they hope to offer electric options for those homes in the future.
Dylan Giambatista, director of public affairs for VGS, told me the program is already taking off. Two weeks after it launched, they had well over 100 inquiries, he said. The water heaters, on the other hand, have had a pretty slow start. Only about 6% — or 48 total — of the water heaters the company has installed since January 2022 were heat pumps. “I don't think that folks are yet aware of that technology,” he said. “We expect heat pump water heater use will increase over time as incentives and consumer awareness increase,” he added in an email later.
Electrification isn’t the company’s only strategy to meet Vermont’s emissions goals.
It’s trying to reduce customers’ total energy usage through weatherization and other home efficiency improvements.
It’s also investing in alternative fuels, like renewable natural gas and hydrogen, to pump through its pipelines to any remaining gas customers. Nearly two-thirds of the gas that VGS sells is delivered to commercial and industrial customers, not all of whom may be able to fully electrify their operations. But local climate advocates have a lot of concerns about that aspect of the plan. Renewable natural gas, which typically comes from decomposing waste or dairy manure, is a lot more expensive than fossil gas. There’s also research indicating that it doesn’t necessarily have the climate benefits that proponents claim.
While Walsh, of the Public Interest Research Group, acknowledged how unique VGS’ electrification programs were, he said it's way too early to give the company the benefit of the doubt.
“There are some strategies that a gas utility could implement, that on the surface look good, but ultimately don't serve Vermont,” he said. “I think it's incumbent on all of us that are focused on cutting carbon pollution and cutting energy costs for Vermonters to watchdog their efforts very closely as they unfold.”
Others discount VGS’ heat pump programs because the company also continues to market and sell gas equipment and hook up new gas customers. Annette Smith, who runs a group called Vermonters for a Clean Environment sent me a screenshot of a VGS Facebook ad from May 8 offering people $500 to switch to natural gas.
Jim Dumont, a lawyer who has represented opponents of VGS in regulatory cases and lawsuits for years, said the first thing the company has to do to win public trust is come clean. “They have to tell the public that burning gas to heat your homes is helping push us over the climate cliff,” he told me. “They can sell heat pumps, but it's a competing message.”
VGS doesn’t deny that natural gas contributes to climate change. Lunderville, the CEO, told Vermont officials in a 2021 letter that the company recognizes “that its principal product today — fossil gas — has significant climate impacts.”
But the message stings with irony to Dumont, who has spent the last decade fighting a 41-mile gas pipeline the company built prior to its come-to-Jesus moment. Back in 2013, when VGS was first seeking approval for the pipeline from regulators, it argued that the project would cut energy costs and carbon emissions in the state. Most Vermonters did, and still do, heat their homes with fuel oil, propane, or wood — and gas can be a cleaner and often cheaper option. But opponents argued that cold climate heat pumps that were coming on to the market would be more affordable and effective.
Cold climate heat pumps were still pretty new at the time, and certainly weren’t being adopted in Vermont yet. The idea was sidelined, and while the scale of the pipeline was ultimately reduced, its cost ballooned from $86 million to $165 million. And now that it's completed, VGS is marketing heat pumps.
To Dumont, that’s not only ironic, it’s worrisome. The way gas utilities like VGS pay for big pipeline projects is to recover the costs over decades through customer bills. But if VGS helps people go electric, the residual costs of the pipeline are going to fall on fewer and fewer customers. As VGS leans into electrification, it could also be barreling toward a scenario referred to as the utility death spiral: the cost of gas will increase, driving more people to get off it.
“Is the public going to be asked to bail out the company, or will the company be responsible for its own bad judgment and will its sole shareholder have to swallow the loss?” Dumont asked. “If there are no consequences for making a bad investment, then effectively it's not a regulated utility, it's effectively a taxpayer-funded business.”
This is a problem that all gas utilities are facing or will likely face, whether or not they embrace a transition to electric buildings. Mike Henchen, a principle in the carbon-free buildings program at RMI, a national nonprofit, said this was “the elephant in the room” around the country.
“How to deal with all the customers hooked up to this fossil fuel system looms large on the horizon,” he said. “There's not going to be an easy way to tackle that.”
I reached out to Énergir, the Canadian company that owns VGS, to find out whether it had any concerns about VGS’ financial future. “Énergir has always believed in the complementarity of different energy solutions and in accelerating electrification where it makes sense,” Éric Lachance, president and CEO of Énergir said by email, adding that “Énergir strongly supports VGS’s approach.”
Though heat pumps aren’t as profitable as natural gas, the company does see opportunities for growth. It can sell and lease the water heaters to residents outside its existing customer base. It’s also exploring the potential to build and manage geothermal heating networks, where entire neighborhoods could be heated by underground pipes carrying nothing but water.
“The market opportunity is huge,” said Donnelly, the Director of Energy Innovation. For now, the company is primarily limited by staffing, and is being careful not to create more demand than it can fulfill. He estimated VGS was looking at “hundreds of installs over the next couple of years and growing that part of our business quite rapidly, hopefully, within the next five years.”
VGS also sees potential for these programs to become more profitable thanks to a law passed by the state legislature earlier this month called the Affordable Heat Act that directs the state’s utility regulators to design a clean heat standard. The company could eventually earn credits for its electrification programs and sell them to other fuel providers in the state that need to comply with the standard.
As policy and technology continue to evolve, it makes sense that VGS doesn’t know exactly what the future holds. But faced with similar uncertainty, most gas utilities have responded by putting their heads in the sand or fighting tooth and nail against change.
What makes VGS remarkable is that it’s at least trying to find its place in a post-gas world.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article understated the length of a VGS pipeline. It is 41 miles, not 27 miles. The article has been corrected. We regret the error.
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The new climate politics are all about affordability.
During the August recess, while members of Congress were back home facing their constituents, climate and environmental groups went on the offensive, sending a blitz of ads targeting vulnerable Republicans in their districts. The message was specific, straightforward, and had nothing to do with the warming planet.
“Check your electric bill lately? Rep. Mark Amodei just voted for it to go up,” declared a billboard in Reno, Nevada, sponsored by the advocacy group Climate Power.
“They promised to bring down prices, but instead our congressman, Derrick Van Orden, just voted to make our monthly bills go up,” a YouTube ad told viewers in Wisconsin’s 3rd district. “It removes clean energy from the electric grid, creating a massive rate hike on electricity,” the voiceover says, while the words “VAN ORDEN’S PLAN: ELECTRICITY RATE HIKE” flash on screen. The ad, paid for by Climate Power, the League of Conservation Voters, and House Majority Forward, a progressive campaign group, was shown more than a million times from August 13 to 27, according to Google’s ad transparency center.
Both were part of a larger, $12 million campaign the groups launched over the recess in collaboration with organizations including EDF Action and Climate Emergency Advocates. Similar billboards and digital ads targeted Republicans in more than a dozen other districts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. There were also TV spots, partnerships with Instagram influencers, bus stop posters, and in-person rallies outside district offices — all blaming Republicans in Congress for the increasing cost of food, healthcare, and energy.
Courtesy of Climate Power
As others have observed, including Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin back in March, rising utility rates and the broader cost of living crisis are becoming a political liability for Republicans and President Trump. Clean energy advocates are attempting to capitalize on that, trying to get Americans to connect the dots between their mounting electricity bills and their representatives in Congress who voted to cut support for renewable energy.
Some of this is run-of-the-mill politicking, but it’s not only that. It also represents a strategic shift in how the climate movement talks about the energy transition.
It’s not new for green groups to make the argument that renewable energy can save people money. Relying on “free” wind and sun rather than fuels that are subject to price volatility has always been part of the sell, and the plummeting cost of solar panels and wind turbines have only made that pitch more compelling.
But it is new for the affordability argument to come first — above job creation, economic development, reducing pollution, and, of course, tackling climate change.
For most of the past four years, the climate movement has gone all in on trying to build an association in the American mind between the transition to clean energy and jobs. “When I think of climate change, I think of jobs,” then-candidate Joe Biden said during one of his 2020 campaign speeches.
It made sense at the time, Daniel Aldana Cohen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. Just two years earlier, the Sunrise Movement had emerged as a political force with a headline-grabbing rally in Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding “green jobs for all.” The group was joined by then-newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who soon introduced her framework for a Green New Deal that would offer a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers, ensuring them a place in the new clean energy economy.
The fossil fuel industry had seeded divisions between labor and environmental groups for decades by arguing that regulations kill jobs, and Democrats would have to upend that narrative if they wanted to make progress on climate. But the rationale was also more pressing: Unemployment was skyrocketing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and whoever won the presidency would be responsible for rebuilding the U.S. workforce.
Fast forward to the end of Biden’s first year in office, however, and the unemployment rate had snapped back to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, inflation was rising fast. Even though the Democrats managed to name their climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the administration and the climate movement continued talking about it in terms of jobs, jobs, jobs.
Cohen co-directs the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think-tank founded in 2020, and admitted that “from the very start, we would just model every policy with jobs numbers,” partly because modeling the effects of policies on cost of living was a lot more complicated. Now he sees two issues with that approach. For one, it was always going to take time for new manufacturing jobs to materialize — much longer than an election cycle. For another, when unemployment is low, “everybody experiences inflation, but extremely few people experience a good new green job,” Cohen said.
During a recent panel hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, Ben Beachy, who was a special assistant to Biden for climate policy, expressed some regret about the jobs push. “It wasn't addressing one of the biggest economic concerns of most people at that point, which was the rent is too damn high,” he said. But Beachy also defended the strategy, noting that all of the policies addressing cost of living in Biden’s big climate bill, like money for housing, public transit, and childcare, had been stripped out to appease West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. “So we were left without a strong policy leg to stand on to say, this is going to lower your costs.”
When the moderator asked what message Beachy thinks climate candidates should run on today, Beachy replied, “affordability, affordability, affordability.”
Jesse Lee, a senior advisor at Climate Power who also worked as a senior communications advisor in the Biden White House, echoed Beachy’s account of what went wrong post-IRA. The cost of living crisis makes it almost impossible to talk about anything else now, he told me. “If you don't start off talking about that, you’ve lost people before you’ve even begun,” he said.
Average U.S. electricity rates jumped 10% in just the year from 2021 to 2022, and have continued to rise faster than inflation. All evidence suggests the trend will continue. Utilities have already requested or received approval for approximately $29 billion in rate increases this year, according to the nonprofit PowerLines, compared to roughly $12 billion by this time last year. And these increases likely don’t reflect the expected costs associated with ending tax credits for wind and solar, hobbling wind and solar development, and keeping aging, expensive coal plants online.
In mid-July, Climate Power issued a strategy document advising state and local elected officials how to talk about clean energy based on the group’s polling. A post-election poll found that “more than half of Americans (51%) say the main goal of US energy policies should be to lower energy prices,” and that 85% “believe policymakers should do more to lower energy costs.” A more recent poll found that telling voters that “cutting clean energy means America produces less energy overall, and that means families will pay even more to keep the lights on,” was the most persuasive among a variety of arguments for clean energy.
This tracks with our own Heatmap Pro opinion polling, which found that the top perceived benefit of renewables in the U.S. is “lower utility bills” — though while 75% of Democrats believe that argument, only 56% of Republicans do. An affordability frame also aligns with academic research on clean energy communication strategies, which has found that emphasizing cost savings is a more effective and enduring message than job creation, economic development, or climate change mitigation.
The pivot to affordability isn’t just apparent in district-level campaigns to hold Republicans accountable. Almost every press release I’ve received from the climate group Evergreen Action this month has mentioned “soaring power bills” or “Trump’s energy price hike” in reference to various actions the administration has taken to hamstring renewables. Even clean energy groups, which at first attempted to co-opt Trump’s “energy dominance” frame, can no longer parrot it with a straight face. After Trump issued a stop work order on Orsted’s offshore Revolution Wind project, which is 80% built, the American Clean Power Association accused the administration of “raising alarms about rising energy prices while blocking new supply from reaching the grid.”
Several people I spoke to for this story pointed to the example of Mikie Sherill, the Democrat running for governor in New Jersey, who last week vowed to freeze utility rates for a year if elected. She immediately followed that statement with a promise to “massively expand cheaper, cleaner power generation,” including solar and batteries.
Dan Crawford, the senior vice president of Echo Communications Advisors, a climate-focused strategy firm, declared in a recent newsletter that Democrats should “become the party of cheap electricity.” He mused that we may be at an inflection point “where the old politics of clean-vs.-polluting makes way for a new debate of cheap-vs.-expensive.”
Debate is probably too tame a term — the claim to affordability is becoming a full-on messaging war. Last week, President Trump took to social media to declare that states that get power from wind and solar “are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS,” — a claim that has no basis in reality. The Trump administration is leaning heavily on affordability arguments to justify keeping coal plants open. In defense of canceling Revolution Wind, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox News that “this is part of our drive to make sure we’ve got affordable, reliable energy for every American … These are the highest electric prices in the country coming off of these projects.” On Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted a news story about his agency rescinding a loan for an offshore wind transmission project, writing that “taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for projects that raise electricity prices and ultimately don't work.”
Clean energy proponents aren’t just going up against Trump — the fossil fuel industry has leaned on affordability as a rhetorical strategy for a long time, Joshua Lappen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame studying the energy transition, told me. Lappen, who lives in California, said cost has been at the forefront of conflicts over climate policy in the state for a while. At the moment, it’s driving a fight over oil refinery closures that threaten to drive up gas prices even more. “I took a trip over the weekend and drove through the Central Valley,” Lappen told me, “and there are placards zip-tied to every gas pump at Chevron stations that are highlighting that state climate policy is increasing the cost of gas.”
I asked Lee, of Climate Power, how the climate movement could make a convincing case when clean energy has become so politically charged. He’s not worried about that right now. “I don’t think we necessarily need to win a debate about what’s cheaper,” he said. “All we have to do is say, Hey, we're in favor of more energy, including wind and solar, and it's nuts, nuts to be taking wind and solar and batteries off the table when we have an energy crisis and when utility rates have gone up 10%.”
That may work for now, at least at the national level. Americans tend to blame whoever is in office for the economic pains of the moment, even though presidents have little influence on prices at the pump and it can take years for policy changes to make their way into utility rates.
But there’s a difference between defensively blaming rising energy costs on the administration’s efforts to block renewables, and making a positive case for the energy transition on the same grounds. While there is an argument for the latter, it’s a lot harder to convey.
The factors pushing up energy prices, such as necessary grid modernization and disaster-related costs, likely aren’t going away, whether or not we build offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, the savings that large-scale wind and solar projects offer won’t be experienced as a reduction in rates — they won’t be experienced at all because they’re measured against a counterfactual world where renewables don’t get built. That’s a lot trickier to communicate in a pithy campaign. People may end up blaming the wind farms either way.
This dilemma is a hallmark of the so-called “mid-transition,” Lappen told me. The term was coined by his advisor, the energy engineer and sociologist Emily Grubert, and Sara Hastings-Simon, a public policy professor at the University of Calgary. The two argue that the mid-transition is a period where fossil fuel systems persist alongside the growing clean energy sector.
“Comparisons of the new system to the old system are likely to rest on experience of a world less affected by climate change, such that concerns about lower reliability, higher costs, and other challenges might be perceived as inherent to zero-carbon systems, versus energy systems facing consequences of climate change and long-term underinvestment,” they write.
To Cohen, advocates need to go a lot further than rhetoric to link clean energy with affordability. “We need to rebuild the brand and then rebuild the investment priorities of climate action so that working class communities see and literally touch direct, tangible benefits in their life,” he said. He described a “green economic populism” with much more public investment in helping renters access green technologies that will lower their bills, for example, or in fixing up homes that have deferred maintenance so that they can eventually make energy efficiency improvements.
It’s not about abandoning industrial policy or research and development, Cohen told me, but rather about a shift in emphasis. He pointed to Sherill’s approach. “She's not just saying, oh, clean energy will automatically lower bills if you just unleash it. She's like, I'm going to assertively use the government to guarantee a price freeze, and then I’m going to backfill that with clean energy policies to bring down prices over time.”
To be fair, the IRA did contain policies that would have produced more tangible benefits. The $7 billion Solar for All program would have delivered the benefits of residential solar — i.e. energy bill savings — to low-income households all over the country. The remainder of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, of which Solar for All was a part, was set to make a range of other green home upgrades more accessible to the working class, and the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program would have done the same for low-income housing developments and senior living centers. Electric school bus grants and urban tree-planting programs would have brought cleaner, cooler air to communities.
These were big, ambitious programs that were never going to produce results in the span of two years, and now the Trump administration has made every effort to ensure they never do. Whether they would have paid political dividends eventually, we’ll never know. But a successful energy transition may depend on giving it another shot.
On fusion’s big fundraise, nuclear fears, and geothermal’s generations uniting
Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to propose a new Clean Water Act rule that would eliminate federal protections for many U.S. waterways, according to an internal presentation leaked to E&E News. If finalized, the rule would establish a two-part test to determine whether a wetland received federal regulations: It would need to contain surface water throughout the “wet season,” and it would need to be touching a river, stream, or other body of water that flows throughout the wet season. The new language would require fewer wetland permits, a slide from the presentation showed, according to reporter Miranda Willson. Two EPA staffers briefed on the proposal confirmed the report.
The new rule follows the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA, which said that only waterways “with a ‘continuous surface connection’ to a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water” fell under the Clean Water Act’s protections, according to E&E News. What “relatively permanent” means, however, the court didn’t say, nor did Biden’s EPA. The two EPA staffers, who were granted anonymity to avoid retribution, “said they believed the proposal was not based in science and could worsen pollution if finalized,” Willson wrote.
Investors are hot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff promising to make fusion energy a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems netted an eye-popping $863 million in its latest fundraising round. In a press release Thursday, the company said that its “oversubscribed round of capital is the largest amount raised among deep tech and energy companies since” its $1.8 billion financing deal in 2021. Commonwealth Fusion will use the funds to complete its demonstration project and further develop its proposed first power plant in Virginia. To date, the company said, it has raised close to $3 billion, “about one-third of the total capital invested in private fusion companies worldwide.” It’s a sign that investors recognize Commonwealth Fusion “is making fusion power a reality,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said.
The fusion industry has ballooned over the past six years. “It is finally, possibly, almost time” for the technology to arrive, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, noting: “For the ordinary optimist, fusion energy might invoke a cheerful Jetsons-style future of flying cars and interplanetary colonization. For the cynic, it’s a world-changing moment that’s perpetually 30 years away. But investors, nuclear engineers, and physicists see it as a technology edging ever closer to commercialization and a bipartisan pathway towards both energy security and decarbonization.”
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A record 75 gigawatts of new generating capacity hooked up to the U.S. power grid last year, a 33% surge from the previous year, thanks to new federal regulations aimed at streamlining the process. That’s according to new data from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie published Thursday. The report found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2023, issued in July 2023, along with other reforms by independent system operators, have had a “considerable impact on processing interconnection agreements, by driving improvements through reducing speculative projects and clearing queue backlogs.” While connections increased, regional grid operators received 9% fewer new project entries and saw a 51% uptick in non-viable projects since 2022.
Solar and storage technologies made up 75% of all interconnection agreements in 2024, equaling about 58 gigawatts. Wood Mackenzie projected that the sectors will retain a similar market share in 2025. Natural gas saw an increase in interconnection requests since 2022, adding 121 gigawatts of capacity. New gas applications are already breaking annual records this year. But overall the number of gas projects that successfully hook up to the grid is down 25% since 2022.
Almost 200 people have left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, according to new estimates published Thursday in the Financial Times. Of the 28 officials in senior leadership positions, nearly half are working in an “acting” capacity, and only three of the five NRC commissioner roles are filled. “It is an unprecedented situation with some senior leaders having been forced out and many others leaving for early retirement or worse, resignation,” Scott Morris, the former NRC deputy executive director of operations, who retired in May, told the newspaper. “This is really concerning for the staff and is one of the factors causing many key staff and leaders to leave the agency they love ... creating a huge brain drain of talent.”
The exodus comes as Trump is pressing the agency to dramatically overhaul and speed up its review and approval process for new reactors. Supporters of the president’s effort say the NRC has stymied the nuclear industry for decades, and a future buildout of new reactors requires clearing house. But skeptics of the burn-it-all-down approach warn that the atomic energy industry’s success in avoiding major accidents since the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island is owed to NRC oversight, and that the agency’s processes have actually protected nuclear developers by avoiding frivolous lawsuits and not-in-my-backyard types.
Geothermal giant Ormat has reigned over the global industry of harvesting energy from hot underground reservoirs for the past 60 years. Now a new generation of companies is promising to tap the Earth’s heat even in places without water by using fracking technology to drill much deeper, vastly expanding the potential for geothermal. And Ormat has placed a big bet on one. On Thursday, the company inked a strategic partnership with Houston-based Sage Geosystems. As part of the deal, Sage will build its first commercial power plant at an existing Ormat facility in Nevada or Utah, significantly speeding up the timeline for the debut generating station. Sage CEO Cindy Taff told me the plant could be online by next year. “Ormat’s chosen a winner,” Yakov Feygin, a researcher at the Center for Public Enterprise who co-authored a report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
A majority of U.S. voters are still unfamiliar with geothermal power, according to a new poll from Data for Progress I reported on this week. When exposed to details about how the technology works, however, support grows among voters across the political spectrum. Republicans in particular are supportive.
A recent poll shows a lack of familiarity with geothermal.Data for Progress
The Grammy- and Oscar-award winning New Orleans jazz and funk singer Jon Batiste released a new song to mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the catastrophic storm that flooded his home city. Dubbed “Petrichor,” a word that describes the scent of earth after rain, the lyrics unfold like a haunting hymn over a driving beat. “Help me, Lord / They burning the planet down / No more second linin' in the street / They burning the planet down, Lord / Help me, Lord / No more plants for you to eat.” In an interview published in The Guardian, Batiste said the song was meant to be a statement. “You got to bring people together. People power is the way that you can change things in the world,” he said. “It’s a warning, set to a dance beat.”
How the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could become the administration’s ultimate weapon against wind farms.
The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to strictly enforcing a migratory bird protection law in a way that could cast a legal cloud over wind farms across the country.
As I’ve chronicled for Heatmap, the Interior Department over the past month expanded its ongoing investigation of the wind industry’s wildlife impacts to go after turbines for killing imperiled bald and golden eagles, sending voluminous records requests to developers. We’ve discussed here how avian conservation activists and even some former government wildlife staff are reporting spikes in golden eagle mortality in areas with operating wind projects. Whether these eagle deaths were allowable under the law – the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act – is going to wind up being a question for regulators and courts if Interior progresses further against specific facilities. Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of wind energy, it’s extremely likely that a federal government already hostile to wind power will use the law to apply even more pressure on developers.
What’s received less attention than the eagles is that Trump’s team signaled it could go even further by using the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a separate statute intended to support bird species flying south through the U.S. from Canada during typical seasonal migration periods. At the bottom of an Interior press release published in late July, the department admitted it was beginning a “careful review of avian mortality rates associated with the development of wind energy projects located in migratory flight paths,” and would determine whether migratory birds dying because of wind farms qualified as “‘incidental’ takings” – harm or death – under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
While not stated explicitly, what this means is that the department appears to be considering whether to redefine these deaths as intentional under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to Ben Cowan, a lawyer with the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke.
I reached out to Cowan after the eagle investigation began because his law firm posted a bulletin warning that developers “holding active eagle permits” might want to prepare for “subpoenas that may be forthcoming.” During our chat earlier this month, he told me that the eagle probe is likely going to strain financing for projects even on private lands that wouldn’t require any other forms of federal sign-off: “Folks don’t want to operate if they feel there’s a significant risk they might take an eagle without authorization.”
Cowan then voiced increasing concern about the migratory bird effort, however, because the law on this matter could be a quite powerful – if legally questionable – weapon against wind development.
Unlike the Endangered Species Act or the eagle protection law, there is currently no program on the books for a wind project developer to even obtain a permit for incidental impacts to a migratory bird. Part of the reason for the absence of such a program is the usual federal bureaucratic struggle that comes with implementing a complex statute, with the added effect of the ping-pong of federal control; the Biden administration started a process for permitting “incidental” impacts, but it was scrapped in April by the Trump team. Most protection of migratory birds under the law today comes from voluntary measures conducted by private companies and nonprofits in consultation with the federal government.
Hypothetically, hurting a migratory bird should be legally permissible to the federal government. That’s because the administration loosened implementation of the law earlier this year with an Interior Department legal opinion that stated the agency would only go after harm that was “intentional” – a term of art under the statute.
This is precisely why Cowan is fretting about migratory birds, however. Asked why the wind industry hasn’t publicly voiced more anxiety about this potential move, he said industry insiders genuinely hope this is “bluster” because such a selective use of this law “would be so beyond the pale.”
“It’s basically saying the purpose of a wind farm is to kill migratory birds, which is very clearly not the case – it’s to generate renewable electricity,” Cowan told me, adding that any effort by the Interior Department would inevitably result in lawsuits. “I mean, look at what this interpretation would mean: To classify it as intentional take would say the purpose of operating a wind farm would be to kill a bird. It’s obviously not. But this seems to be a way this administration is contemplating using the MBTA to block the operation of wind farms.”
It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush. Is the federal government actually going to decide that any operating wind farm could be illegal? That would put entire states’ power supplies – including GOP-heavy states like Iowa – in total jeopardy. Not to mention it would be harmful overall to take operating capacity offline in any fashion at a moment when energy demand is spiking because of data centers and artificial intelligence. Even I, someone who has broken quite a few eye-popping stories about Trump’s war on renewables, struggle to process the idea of the government truly going there on the MBTA.
And yet, a door to this activity is now open, like a cleaver hanging over the industry’s head.
I asked the Interior Department to clarify its timeline for the MBTA review. It declined to comment on the matter. I would note that in mid-August, the Trump administration began maintenance on a federal dashboard for tracking regulations such as these and hasn’t updated it since. So we’ll have to wait for nothing less than their word to know what direction this is going in.