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:
For the first time in my life I now own a car, and it’s electric.
It took me a few weeks to narrow down my choices to a Hyundai Kona or a Ford Mustang Mach E. After much agonizing comparison, I went with the Kona. While I liked the Mach E’s sporty performance, longer range, and sizable front trunk, ultimately the Kona’s cheaper price, lighter materials, heat pump, and numerous mechanical buttons clinched the deal. After trading in a clapped out 2011 Subaru Impreza, the out-the-door sticker price for the Kona was a bit over $31,000 (though we opted to lease).
Owning and driving an EV has been an instructive experience. I’ve long been a vocal proponent of going electric, but I was honestly surprised by the learning curve. As the automotive journalist Edward Neidermeyer continually points out, an EV simply is not a perfect drop-in replacement for an internal combustion car. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it work, even for long trips, even in fairly bedraggled parts of the country like northeastern Pennsylvania, where I live, and even with a modest battery and range.
First, the buying experience. The nearest Kona for sale I could find was a 70-mile drive away from Wilkes-Barre to Easton, and the dealership let me take it home so my wife could check it out. This led to the first of several comical lessons. The car had only about a 60 percent charge when I left the dealership, and drained down to 33 percent when I got back home. So before going back to sign the lease papers, it would need a top-up.
I searched on Google Maps for chargers and blithely set out to fill up. It turns out Rust Belt cities like the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area are not exactly bursting with EV charging infrastructure. The first one I found was a free employee charger at a charter school. Out of curiosity I plugged it in. It did in fact work — and if I had been willing to sit there stealing 6 kilowatts of power for 10 hours, I could have gotten up to 100 percent. This seemed less than ideal. I then tried another charger around the corner at a used dealership. This one had a credit card reader but it did not work.
Scrolling through Google some more, I discovered that if you poke around in the menus it actually tells you the supposed speed of each charger (rated as slow, fast, very fast, or ultra fast). A 10-minute drive across the river was a non-Tesla fast charger at a Chevy dealership, though irritatingly I had to download an app and connect my Apple pay to make it work instead of just tapping my credit card.
Then I learned that the temperature of the battery matters a great deal. When I first plugged in, the charger delivered a measly 28 kilowatts. But then as the battery warmed up, that nearly doubled to 49 kilowatts (as compared to the Kona’s claimed maximum rate of 100 kilowatts). That isn’t particularly fast — but it also demonstrated another lesson, which is that there are advantages to a smaller battery, at just 65 kilowatt-hours. That fairly pitiful charging speed, topping out at less than a seventh of the maximum at modern stations, was still enough to get me from 28 percent to 75 percent in about 35 minutes. If I had been driving a Hummer EV, it would have been more like two hours.
That lesson was underlined charging at home. My house was built in the 1940s and has no outdoor outlets whatsoever, but in the pinch, I could string an extension cord out the window to use the included level 1 charger … to deliver a pathetic 600 watts, or less than the power supply on my gaming PC. Yet this was still enough to add 10-12 percent of charge per day, or about 30 miles, which is more than we drive on average. If I’d gone with the Mach E, it would be more like 20 miles, thanks to its bigger battery.
I learned a more serious lesson the next day going down to sign the paperwork. My wife had to come with me to the dealership, since she owned the Subaru, and therefore my 2-month-old son had to come along as well. With a 75 percent charge, I figured we’d be fine to make it there and back. When we got to the dealership, the car still had 48 percent — surely more than enough to make it back given my prior trip, right?
But then we had to sit at the dealership for three hours thanks to some incomprehensible financing dispute going on in a back room. By the time we finished, moved the car around several times, and grabbed some food on the way out, it was only about 42 percent by the time we got going. As we headed up Route 33, the Kona’s computer informed us we’d arrive with about 35 miles of range to spare. Since it was already well past the boy’s bedtime and I really, really didn’t want to hunt around in the cold for a charger that might or might not work, I decided to risk it.
But by this point it was well past dark, and the temperature was dropping into the low 40s. Meanwhile, what with wife and baby in the back seat, I had to run the heater much more than I had the first time, when I had left the cabin heater low and just used the seat warmer.
It turns out heating and driving uphill sucks battery power. As the temperature fell further into the low 30s, and the Kona zipped up the long grades at Wind Gap and Tannersville, I watched with increasing alarm as the buffer mileage dropped to 30, then 25, then 20. I told myself I would stop to charge if it got below 10 miles of buffer, but it finally stabilized around 15 miles in the Poconos.
It was a genuine case of range anxiety, no question about it, and my wife was ready to strangle me. But there was one last surprise as we crested the ridge and headed down into the Wyoming Valley. On that long downslope, I alternated between coasting and turning up the regenerative braking around corners, which got back another 14 miles of range. We pulled up with 15 percent battery and 29 miles to spare — not so far off the original estimate after all!
This need for planning is the major difference between electric and gas, at least given the current state of America’s charging infrastructure. With a gas car you can assume that range will not change much depending on the weather, that you can run your tank nearly empty with the sole penalty being another few seconds of standing at the pump, and that even the tiniest settlement is virtually guaranteed to have a gas station.
But on an EV trip of any distance you want to charge early and often, and that means some careful route planning. A theoretical 270 mile range means you have more like 160-220 miles you can realistically use, depending significantly on the temperature, wind, number of passengers, and so on. But unless you are in an exceptionally cold and/or depopulated area, it’s not that big of a deal. Just find some charging stations on the route, ideally with good reviews, and stop every hour or two for 20-30 minutes of charging, or less if your car can take mega voltage like the Ioniq 5. (There are several chargers in East Stroudsburg I could have used, for instance.)
You can’t cannonball to cut the trip time down to the absolute minimum, but you also get a chance to stretch out regularly and cut your risk of deep vein thrombosis. Meanwhile, if you can charge at home, your cost of fuel goes down dramatically. I now spend maybe $3 on a week’s worth of driving electricity.
So yes, there are some tradeoffs that come with the EV lifestyle. But even for an EV with a modest battery, driving in the cold mountains of impoverished Appalachia, they are not remotely insurmountable — and everything will only get easier from here on out. More chargers are being built all the time, and soon Tesla’s network will open up to all. You don’t need a 500-mile range battery, or to carry a backup generator around. It just takes a change in mindset.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Toyota’s new “sweep” system will power a Mazda factory in Japan.
Toyota is helping to build Mazdas. At least, its aging car batteries are.
Cooperation between rivals is nothing new in the car world. Toyota and Subaru have teamed up to build small sports cars and electric vehicles that are, underneath the skin and the logos, essentially the same. GM and Hyundai have signed a memo of understanding to share new vehicles and clean energy tech, while Honda has used GM’s Ultium platform as the basis of its Prologue EV.
In Japan, Toyota and Mazda now say they will work together to deploy Toyota’s Sweep Energy Storage System, a way to reuse old EV batteries. The “sweep” will combine all kinds of old batteries from electric cars and hybrids into a single unit that can store energy to help power Mazda’s Hiroshima car factory. It’s a clever and promising method to give those batteries a second life, where old car parts help to create new cars.
Energy storage systems are among the most interesting answers to the question of what to do with the forthcoming flood of old EV batteries. It’s true that recycling can recover many of the precious metals therein, and a new industry has arisen to do that work. But the process remains dirty and expensive. Stationary energy storage, meanwhile, is a way to extend a battery’s useful life rather than send it to the recycling yard.
Consider a unit from an older EV that has lost half its capacity, diminishing the vehicle’s range from a healthy 250 miles to a paltry 125. That would be an impractically small distance between charges for many drivers, but it doesn’t mean the battery is cooked. It takes a lot of energy to push a car that weighs several thousand pounds, so that old unit still can store plenty of kilowatt-hours for purposes other than propulsion.
Storage systems can use batteries, old or new, to save surplus solar energy during the day to be used overnight, or to stash backup energy that could be fed onto the grid to avoid blackouts in times of shortage. This application gives older batteries a less labor-intensive way to remain useful in their retirement years. The batteries can be daisy-chained together so that even older units with diminished performance can create ample energy storage.
At Mazda’s Hiroshima factory, Toyota’s system connects to 1,500 megawatts of solar capacity installed on the roof — the only power generation system in Japan run by a car company. The sweep battery, currently in a testing phase to see whether it can interface seamlessly with the plant, would help balance out the supply and demand of the renewable energy coming from upstairs.
The real key to Toyota’s system is its versatility. Most battery backup systems, like Tesla’s Powerwall, use identical batteries in the creation of a whole, which cuts down the electrical complexity. The sweep system, however, can use a mishmash of batteries from different vehicles with different capacities or battery chemistries. The technique that gives the “sweep” system its name is the software’s ability to sweep across all the batteries in the series and turn the power supply from any of them off and on within microseconds in order to control the energy output of the whole system.
It matters not whether the units came from a new all-electric car or an old Toyota Prius hybrid. Whether they are lithium-ion, nickel-metal-hydride, or lead-acid makes no difference. As CarBuzz explains, it’s as if you could combine all the extra batteries in your junk drawer and all the half-used ones around the house to seamlessly create one big unit that taps into all their energy. Even old batteries salvaged from car accidents can be used if the batteries themselves are undamaged. Toyota says it integrates the old batteries’ original inverters (the devices that transform DC into AC power) into the system, negating the need to build a new one for the system as a whole.
The giant automaker has already proven the sweep concept: In 2022, it built a sweep system for the Japanese energy giant Jera that, with its battery powers combined, could store more than 1,200 kilowatt-hours. (For a comparison, the battery in the long-range version of the current Tesla Model Y can store 75 kilowatt-hours, while the average American home uses about 900 kilowatt-hours per month.)
Toyota will need to prove that the sweep can scale up to the level of a car factory, and larger. If it can, then it’s a promising way for yesterday’s batteries to help stabilize and manage the green energy of tomorrow. Not bad for a geriatric power pack.
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.”
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
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.”