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:
Fuel is out. Supply chains are in.
It was not long ago that the combination of “hydrogen” and “automakers” would bring to mind fuel cells, a technology that has already fallen out of favor as buyers flock to electric cars. In its wake, though, green hydrogen is catching the eye of automakers for another reason: It could allow them to decarbonize one of their trickiest supply chains.
In the last two years, major car companies have committed to integrating green or recycled steel, made with hydrogen, into their vehicles. At the forefront of this effort is Volvo, which aims to be the first automaker to use fossil-free steel in its cars. If successful — and, given where the company is in the process, that’s a big if — the Swedish automaker’s efforts could provide a template for how to decarbonize other challenging parts of industrial supply chains.
Steelmaking is responsible for roughly 8% of global energy demand and 2.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year, a total higher than all of the European Union’s emissions in 2021. Steelmakers use fossil fuels — and especially highly polluting coal — to process iron ore and produce the alloy. At present, there aren’t any surefire paths to reduce these emissions, given how crucial a role steel plays in modern manufacturing.
But green steel has real promise. Hydrogen made using renewable energy can be used to replace coal in steelmaking with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The market for green steel is still small, though, in part because there is simply not a lot on offer. In 2019, just 8% of the world’s steel mills had even begun committing to zero-carbon technology, according to the green energy non-profit RMI.
This is largely because the supply of green hydrogen — the ingredient that gives green steel its name and a hot commodity among investors — is itself constrained. Creating the fuel is incredibly energy intensive. To produce 550 million metric tons of green hydrogen annually, the world would need 18 times more solar capacity than it has installed today, according to the Hydrogen Council.
As of 2020, the world demanded 90 million metric tons of hydrogen for refining and industrial applications, which were produced almost entirely by fossil fuels. Of that, just 30,000 metric tons were produced using renewable energy.
For Volvo, the first step of the enormous undertaking of steel decarbonization was to assess the carbon footprint of a car, specifically its first electric vehicle. It found its XC40 Recharge would emit 27 metric tons of carbon dioxide over its lifetime even if it were charged entirely using renewable energy. Of that total, 18% of the materials-related emissions came from the steel used to build the car.
According to Jonas Otterheim, who was until recently the head of climate action for the Swedish automaker (though he is temporarily on leave), this realization drove home that finding suppliers of low- or no-emissions steel would be “critical” to reach the company’s goal of supply chain-wide carbon neutrality by 2040.
Volvo turned to its steel suppliers, namely SSAB, the manufacturer that has long provided the company’s conventional steel. In June 2021, the two partnered to explore developing fossil-free steel for use in its cars as well.
It may seem that substituting green steel for conventional is straightforward, especially given that, per SSAB, “the only difference in the process is that the energy used will be exclusively fossil-free electricity and other fossil-free fuels.” However, with an operation as complicated as auto manufacturing, any material change requires exhaustive testing.
And that’s where Volvo is today. The automaker aims to integrate green steel into its vehicles in 2026, which is when SSAB intends to have its fossil-free plant up and running. In the meantime, Volvo is evaluating “part-by-part” which components of its manufacturing process can safely be replaced with green steel.
“This is [a] very big job over a number of years, before the material can be put into any car,” said Otterheim. The two companies are evaluating whether the switch to green steel will require retooling its plants, which “are built specifically for every car and every material quality we have,” he added.
Otterheim said the deal initially was just exploratory in nature: an opportunity for both companies to explore whether it’s possible to make fossil-free versions of all the different grades of steel that are necessary to build a car, and potentially use it in a concept car.
However, his colleague Stina Klingvall, who is Volvo’s acting head of climate action in Otterheim’s absence, said that things have developed to the point where Volvo is actively starting to prepare to produce components with the new steel.
One promising development has come already from within the Volvo ecosystem. In August 2021, SSAB shipped a batch of green steel made at a pilot plant with renewable electricity and hydrogen to Volvo’s truck-making arm (separate from Volvo Cars), which was then integrated the steel into a dump truck prototype. (SSAB produced this steel under its Hybrit initiative, a collaboration with mining company LKAB and power company Vattenfall.)
One big outstanding question is how much automakers and other green steel buyers will have to pay to use the more sustainable metal.
RMI’s analysis found that hydrogen-based steel production can result in a 20% cost premium, but also that the premium disappears when electricity prices are in the range of $15-$20 per megawatt-hour or lower. This remains out of reach across most of the U.S., though a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that the country is on track for solar costing $22 per MWh hour on average by 2035 (down from $34 per MWh in 2020).
Meanwhile, Otterheim said that he hopes that Volvo’s work will “help drive down costs'' to be more in line with the status quo for steel, and that it will push more automakers to make commitments of their own. This represents the most crucial knock-on effect of a single company’s dipping a toe into greener materials: peer pressure.
“Due to the scarcity of these materials over the short-term period, other premium car makers are also starting to act to secure volumes for their supply,” Otterheim said. “The race for such materials is naturally good, creating an even stronger signal to other steel suppliers to follow.”
Volvo may have made the first green steel purchase commitment, but several automaker competitors have followed suit, including BMW and General Motors. While the pool of customers for steel is a big one (and includes the renewables industry), transportation is a particularly big fish in that pool, responsible for 12% of global steel consumption, per the World Steel Association.
When it comes to urging heavy industry to decarbonize, there is strength in numbers. Materials like steel, cement, and chemicals are integral parts of countless other supply chains, which means it’s hard for a single customer to have much sway. As a consequence, heavy industrial companies lack the incentive to innovate, said former New York Times journalist Justin Gillis, who recently published a book on how to push for climate action. There are few market signals “that clean products are going to be favored,” he said.
But some companies are trying to change that dynamic. The First Movers Coalition was formed last year explicitly to create markets for nascent sectors like green steel and carbon dioxide removal. With a market cap of $8.5 trillion between the more than 50 companies involved, their collective pledges to procure climate-friendly products despite the higher price tag offers market certainty. When Ford joined the coalition in May, the company pledged that at least 10% of its steel and aluminum would have near-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Ultimately, companies that have committed to cleaning up their supply chains have a choice of how to decide to define that supply chain, and how much pressure to put on their suppliers with hard-to-abate emissions.
“How many steps back in the supply chain do you go? The further back you go, the less responsibility any one consumer-facing company can have,” Gillis said. “I do think these companies can play a role by sending market pressure, but they need to be willing to pay a price premium for cleaner supplies or materials.”
If you enjoyed this article, sign up for Heatmap Daily to receive our top articles delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday:
Editor's note: This article was updated at 12:23 pm ET to clarify part of the steelmaking process.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.