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:
There are two kinds of people who work on climate solutions: Those who still believe in the promise of carbon markets, and those who think the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.
In the first category, you have people like McGee Young, the CEO of a company called WattCarbon. Young is aware of the ways carbon markets can be a race to the bottom — enabling companies to buy cheap certificates that say they used clean energy or reduced their carbon footprint, when in reality their purchase had little effect on the environment or the energy system.
And yet, there’s all this money out there for the taking! Companies want to green their image! Tackling climate change is expensive! There must be a way to funnel corporate sustainability budgets to where they can make a real impact!
To Young, the solution is a matter of better data and greater transparency. “We need a record-keeping system that allows us to raise the bar,” he told me.
Young launched his vision for that record-keeping system on Wednesday — the WattCarbon Energy Attribute Tracking System, or WEATS. It functions similarly to other environmental credit registries: Owners of clean energy assets can sign up to generate credits known as Environmental Attribute Certificates, or EACs, which buyers can then purchase to count toward their own clean energy or carbon goals.
WEATS has two main features that differentiate it. First, it will include credits from small-scale distributed energy resources like residential solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps — clean energy solutions that haven’t really been able to participate in carbon markets until now. Second, each EAC will include granular information about where and when the power was generated, in the case of solar, or the carbon savings incurred, in the case of heat pumps, down to the hour.
The first feature is part of what motivated Young to start WattCarbon. “The clean energy transition is more than just wind and solar, it’s more than just generation,” he told me. But it’s the second that Young said is key to improving the credibility of claims that companies are “using 100% clean energy,” or “achieving net-zero.”
Today, many companies simply buy enough clean energy credits to match their annual energy use, regardless of where or when the energy was generated. But researchers have shown that this strategy can have little to no impact on emissions. For example, if a company is only buying solar credits, but it is using energy at night, its carbon footprint from that nighttime energy could surpass any environmental benefits of the solar it bought.
To solve this, some energy buyers have embraced a concept called “24/7 carbon-free energy,” which means that “every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumption is met with carbon-free electricity sources, every hour of every day, everywhere,” in the words of a United Nations-led initiative to promote the concept. “It is both the end state of a fully decarbonized electricity system,” according to the UN, “and a transformative approach to energy procurement, supply, and policy design that is critical to accelerating its arrival.”
If you’ve followed the recent debate about the green hydrogen tax credit, you might be familiar with the idea. In December, the Treasury Department proposed that hydrogen producers will have to match their electricity consumption with the purchase of local clean electricity generation on an hourly basis to prove their hydrogen is clean enough to qualify for the full value of the tax credit. That means producers can either hook up directly to a solar farm or wind farm or geothermal power plant and operate only when it is generating power, or, it can buy renewable energy credits or EACs that correspond to the hours that it operates.
WattCarbon’s marketplace is one of the first to enable this by requiring sellers to include data about exactly where and when each EAC was produced. It also include the carbon intensity of the grid in the place and time when that unit of power was produced. For example, 1 megawatt-hour of solar power in West Virginia, where the grid is supplied by a lot of coal-fired power plants, would likely reduce emissions far more than 1 megawatt-hour of solar power in California, where the main fossil fuel burned for power is natural gas. Similarly, 1 megawatt-hour of solar generated in the afternoon in California will not do as much to reduce emissions as if that unit of power were stored in a battery and then dispatched at night. On other markets, all of these credits might simply be advertised as 1 megawatt-hour of solar power, and the buyer would be none the wiser.
So what does this new carbon trading marketplace look like in practice? There are a lot of possibilities, but here’s one scenario. WattCarbon partners with a company that helps homeowners electrify their heating or install and manage their solar and battery systems. That third party company can then say to their customers, “As an extra incentive to do this, we can help you sell the environmental benefits it provides to third parties through the WattCarbon marketplace,” and those extra payments are what convinces the homeowner to go for it.
Independent experts I spoke with were cautiously optimistic about what this new marketplace could do. “We need to deploy on the order of a billion machines, in the U.S. alone — and not over a century, but on the order of a decade,” said Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, whose research focuses on heat pumps and other distributed energy resources. “So there’s a lot that needs to be done, and just connecting people to money to do the work is really important.”
Wilson Ricks, a PhD candidate at Princeton University whose research informed the Treasury’s proposal for the hydrogen tax credit, said that having a platform where hydrogen companies can procure clean energy from a variety of projects, and with time and location data, would be very useful. He was also intrigued by WattCarbon’s attempt to create EACs tied to batteries because energy storage systems are one of the few resources that can produce clean power when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
But both Ricks and Kircher warned there are a number of ways this system of credits could fall into the same traps that ensnare many carbon offset projects and reduce their credibility. For one, it’s really hard to get the math right. That’s especially true for a project like a heat pump, where the carbon savings are based on a counterfactual situation where the homeowner would have kept their gas heater. You have to basically estimate how often they would have run it, which opens the door to sloppiness at best and fraud at worst.
Another key criterion — a concept called additionality — is very hard to assess. Would the household that switches to a heat pump have done so regardless of whether they were getting extra revenue from selling EACs? If the answer is unequivocally yes, the credits are meaningless and serve to give corporate emitters an excuse to keep emitting.
Young acknowledged to me that this was likely going to be true in some cases, but still felt that heat pump owners deserved to be paid for the environmental benefits they were providing. “We provide environmental subsidies for large-scale wind and solar, and we don't do that for the things that we're putting into our buildings and our communities. And to me, there’s an inherent inequality in the way that we treat and value clean energy that needs to be addressed.”
That didn’t quite make sense to me — the government provides subsidies for all kinds of clean energy resources, including distributed energy resources, I countered. The Treasury will give you $2,000 for a heat pump and a 30% discount on rooftop solar.
“That’s true,” Young said. “But we don’t have enough money in all of our government programs to truly scale those.”
I couldn’t argue with that. But the real challenge is helping low-income homeowners with the upfront capital to install these devices — after-the-fact payments are not enough. Young said he had plans to create a way for companies to procure EACs in advance from groups of homeowners. The deals would be similar to the power purchase agreements that big electricity consumers like Google and Walmart make with large-scale renewable energy developers, helping to finance those projects by reducing the risk.
“This is a necessary but not sufficient step,” Young said of the version of the marketplace that launched Wednesday. “Without this, we can’t do that. But this by itself would be inadequate for the market to be able to reach its fullest potential.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.
On America’s new crude record, coal costs, and Hungary’s SMR deal
Current conditions: Coastal storms are pushing water levels on New England’s shores two feet above normal levels • Japan just set a new temperature record of more than 106 degrees Fahrenheit • A cold front is settling over South Africa, bringing gale-forces to KwaZulu-Natal on the east coast.
The Department of Energy issued a report on Tuesday calling into question the global consensus on climate change and concluding that global warming poses less economic risk than previously believed. “The rise of human flourishing over the past two centuries is a story worth celebrating. Yet we are told — relentlessly — that the very energy systems that enabled this progress now pose an existential threat,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “Climate change is real, and it deserves attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity.” But scientists whose work appeared in the 151-page report decried an analysis they said “fundamentally misrepresents” their research. I rounded up some comments they’ve made over the past couple of days:
A pumpjack in the Permian Basin.Joe Raedle / Getty Images
U.S. crude oil production surged to a record 13.49 million barrels per day in May, despite concerns about oversupply driving prices down to four-year lows, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The milestone represents a win for President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly urged the industry to “drill, baby, drill,” even as rival producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries increased output to maintain market share, making profits difficult to turn in the U.S.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has rescinded its designated areas for offshore wind development in federal waters. The move de-designated more than 3.5 million acres off the continental shelf in the Gulf of Maine, the New York Bight, California, Oregon, the Central Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico for potential wind development.
The agency said it was acting in accordance with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s order this week to weed out any policies that give preferential treatment to wind and solar. While the de-designation will not affect existing leases, the decision makes permanent the temporary pause on offshore wind leases Trump issued via an executive order on his first day in office in January.
In May, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order directing the utility Consumers Energy to keep Michigan’s J.H. Campbell coal plant operating for another 90 days, through August 20, to meet surging electricity demand on the Midwest’s grid. In a public filing as part of its quarterly earnings announced Thursday, Consumers Energy named the price of complying with the administration's order so far: $29 million. And that’s just the cost of operating the plant through June 30. The company said it plans to recoup the cost from ratepayers. The filing did not indicate what the total cost would be for the full three-month period.
Even before Trump returned to office, coal plant retirements were slowing. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last year, “Coal and gas were being retired so steadily over the past 20 years not just because plants were aging, but also because power use was essentially flat from the early 2000s through, essentially, yesterday. This meant that older plants — especially dirty coal plants — became uneconomic to run, especially as natural gas prices began to fall.” Coal plant retirements dropped last year to their lowest level since 2011, according to the Energy Information Administration, though at least as of February they were projected to increase this year again by 65%.
Of all the small modular reactors competing for a shot in the West’s ballyhooed nuclear renaissance, GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt model is among the most promising. Ontario’s public utility just broke ground on what could be the world’s first BWRX-300s. The Tennessee Valley Authority has plans to build the second set. And Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and Poland are all considering buying their own. Add Hungary to that list. Piggybacking off the Polish project, Hungary on Wednesday signed a letter of intent with Poland’s Synthos Green Energy to back construction of up to 10 BWRX-300 reactors, the U.S. Embassy in Hungary announced. “This is American engineering at its best — the kind of trusted technology that reflects the strength, reliability, and excellence of the American industrial base,” Chargé d’Affaires Robert Palladino said in a speech at the signing event.
The move comes as the U.S. looks to broaden its grip on Europe’s nuclear sector. Westinghouse, the legendary American nuclear developer behind the only two new reactors built from scratch in a generation in the U.S., is building Poland’s first atomic power station. Earlier this week, Slovakia skipped its competitive bidding process and picked Westinghouse to construct its next nuclear plant. But after struggling to build its own reactors at home, the U.S. has to prove it can deliver on the deals.
“Wind farms: Loud, ugly, harmful to nature. Who says that? These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels, rising up out of the ocean like a middle finger to CO2,” Samuel L. Jackson says in a new minute-long TV commercial from Swedish wind giant Vattenfall advertising seaweed snacks from aquatic crops grown on the artificial reefs around the behemoth turbine foundations. It may be one of the most defiant, if expletive-laden, defenses made yet of the industry the Trump administration is bent on drowning.