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:
The president’s executive order is already too late to save at least one Arizona plant.
The Trump administration is trying to save coal again. But despite the president’s seemingly forceful actions, there’s little indication he’ll be any more successful at it this time than he was the last time around.
Backed by coal miners in hard hats and high visibility jackets, Trump on Tuesday announced a series of executive orders meant to boost “beautiful, clean coal.” The orders lift barriers to extracting coal on public lands, ask the Department of Energy to consider metallurgical coal a critical mineral, push out compliance with some air quality rules by two years, instruct the Department of Energy to use emergency authorities to keep coal plants open, and direct the attorney general to go after state climate laws that Trump claimed “discriminate” against greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources like coal.
What’s not clear is how much these orders will boost the coal industry, let alone save it. It’s not even clear whether the specific plant Trump said he was saving will burn coal again.
During the announcement, Trump said that his administration would keep open the Cholla Generating Station, an Arizona coal plant that began operating in 1962. The plant’s final two units were slated to be retired this year.
“We will ensure our nation’s critical coal plants remain online and operational,” Trump said. “To that end, I’m instructing Secretary Wright to save the Cholla coal plant in Arizona.”
But according to Arizona Public Service, the utility that co-owns the plant, the plant has already stopped generating power. A spokesperson told me the utility was “aware” of the president’s statement and is “evaluating what it means for the plant.” APS plans on preserving the site, possibly for nuclear power and has “procured reliable and cost-effective generation that will replace the energy previously generated by Cholla Power Plant,” the spokesperson said.
The Department of Energy didn’t return a request for comment.
Trump’s orders repeatedly cite Section 202 of the Federal Power Act, which allows the Secretary of Energy “during a continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged or when an emergency exists” to allow energy facilities to continue to operate on a temporary basis that otherwise would not.
In 2017, the first Trump administration used Section 202 to allow two coal plant units in Virginia to continue operating occasionally when necessary for grid reliability, despite their having been due to close to comply with air quality regulations. Two years later, the electricity market PJM told the Department of Energy that a new transmission line had rendered the emergency authorization unnecessary, and the plants closed in 2019.
The executive orders “don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters,” Grid Strategies president Rob Gramlich wrote on X. “Nothing here seems to change the economics, and it’s the economics that have held coal-fired power production down.” (Gramlich is also a Heatmap contributor.)
Of course, the United States has plenty of coal. But many of its uses — including electricity generation — can be easily substituted with other sources, such as natural gas. That’s why U.S. coal production has been falling since 2008.
“Coal is increasingly uncompetitive in deregulated electricity markets,” Seaver Wang, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. That’s because operating a coal-fired power plant comes with all sorts of extra costs that natural gas doesn’t, including the transportation and storage of coal — compare the barges and trains required to move rocks to the neat pipelines gas flows through. The energy research group Energy Innovation has found that nearly all coal plants are more expensive to run than the combinations of wind, solar, and storage that might replace them.
“I don’t see the demand drivers for this to remotely bring coal back. I have no idea who would ever invest as a result of this executive order or related policies,” Wang said.
While existing coal plants may stick around for another few years as a result of heightened demand or relaxed regulatory burdens, that’s a far cry from building new coal plants or opening new coal mines. A large coal plant hasn’t opened in the United States since 2013. In 2024, wind and solar generation surpassed coal generation on the grid, according to Ember.
Some 12.3 gigawatts of coal capacity are scheduled to be retired in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration, making up two-thirds of planned retirements by capacity this year. But coal retirements have also been slowing down, according to EIA data. The 7.5 gigawatts retired last year was the least since 2011.
Jefferies analysts estimated that over 12 gigawatts of coal capacity is due for retirement in 2028. That could be pushed back thanks to the relaxation of the mercury and air toxics rules the president announced Tuesday.
“There is logic to delaying coal retirements to serve incremental high-density load customers like data centers,” the Jefferies analysts wrote. “Not all coal retirements are alike, and the economic-driven transitions will continue to draw support, but the calculus will change with more expensive renewables and natural gas alternatives from tariffs and potential changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.”
This is not the first time a Trump White House has tried to rescue this declining industry. During his first term, then Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed that coal and nuclear plants at risk of closing because of low demand have guaranteed payments, known as cost recovery, in order to stay open. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with a Republican majority, said no to Perry by a vote of 5-0.
Despite the president’s promises throughout his campaign, the coal industry shrunk by a huge degree during his first term, part of a longer trend that brought down coal’s share in the electricity generating sector from about half in 2007 to 16% in 2023. During Trump’s time in office, coal mining jobs declined from 51,000 to 38,000 during the pandemic, and have recovered only to 40,000 today.
When it comes to mines, Wang said, investors would likely be leery of putting money into the sector, given the strong likelihood that a future Democratic administration would be far less friendly to coal. Coal investors “are going to be accounting for the fact that any policy swings are short lived,” Wang told me.
“We all know that lead times for mines are long. Everyone knows this administration only has four years in office. I don’t really expect that this will drive a lot of investment interest,” Wang said.
The critical mineral designation for coal, if it makes it through the Department of Energy’s process, may not change much initially, Wang explained. It could lead to some “beneficial outcomes in terms of agency prioritization,” he said. But much critical minerals policy is still being worked out, and there are few programs that specifically and programmatically target the critical minerals included on lists maintained by either the Department of Energy or the United States Geological Service.
“A lot of the politicking over critical minerals designation is about the expectation of future outcomes that would arise from broad bipartisan interest in critical minerals as a category,” Wang said.
And unlike with other critical minerals, the U.S. is essentially self-sufficient for coal’s industrial and energy uses. We’re not talking about graphite here, let alone praseodymium.
At least so far, the coal industry has not thrilled to having a more friendly figure in the White House, although the share prices of some coal companies are up in afternoon trading. Coal exports in January, the most recent month for which there is data, stood at 7.7 million short tons, compared to 8.4 million short tons a year prior. Central Appalachia coal prices stand at $78 per short ton, compared to $77.35 a year ago.
If nothing else, the announcements provided Trump with the type of photo-op he craves. He even got the opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton. “One thing I learned about the coal miners … they want to mine coal. She was gonna put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cell phones and things,” he told the audience in the White House. Of course, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday touted the “army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” that Trump’s tariffs will also help generate. But no matter what the president says or does, the coal industry may still be screwed.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
It’s already conquered solar, batteries, and EVs. With a $2 billion new turbine factory in Scotland, it may have set its next target.
Batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles. The story of renewable energy deployment globally is increasingly one of China’s fiercely competitive domestic industries and deep supply chains exporting their immense capacity globally. Now, it may be wind’s turn.
The Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced last week that it plans to invest $2 billion in a factory in Scotland. The facility is scheduled to start production in late 2028, churning out offshore wind equipment for use in the United Kingdom, which has over 15 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, as well as for export, likely in Europe.
The deal comes as China finds itself at a kind of domestic clean energy crossroads, in terms of both supply and demand. On the former, the country has launched a campaign aimed at softening the cutthroat domestic competition, overproduction, and price wars that have defined many of its green industries, especially electric vehicles.
At the same time, China is setting out to alter its electricity markets to put renewable energy on a more market-based footing, while also paying coal-fired power plants to stay on the grid, as University of California, San Diego researcher Michael Davidson explained on a recent episode of Shift Key. These changes in electricity markets will reduce payments to solar and wind producers, making foreign markets potentially more attractive.
“We anticipate Chinese original equipment manufacturers will intensify their push toward international expansion, with Mingyang’s planned investment a signal of this trend,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note to clients. “This poses a challenge for Western incumbents, as Chinese players can capitalize on their cost advantages in a market driven by price.”
Ironically, Fulop said, the market changes will make the Chinese market more like Europe’s, which has become more price conscious as the market has matured and reductions in cost have slowed or outright stopped. “The transition is expected to make renewable developers increasingly price-sensitive as they seek to preserve project returns, ultimately weighing on wind turbine manufacturers’ profitability,” he wrote.
There’s a “cliff” coming in Chinese renewable energy deployment, Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, told me. “Overall, the net effect is expected to be a pretty sharp drop, and we’re already starting to see some of the effects of that.”
And turbine manufacturers would not be the first Chinese renewable industry to show up in Europe.
“There’s already an existing model” for Chinese manufacturers to set up shop in Western countries, Chan said. Chinese companies are already planning to manufacture solar modules in France, while Chinese EV maker BYD’s is planning factories in Hungary, Turkey, and potentially Spain.
China as a whole is responsible for over half of all new offshore wind capacity added in 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor, and has been growing at a 41% annual rate for the past five years. The energy intelligence firm Rystad estimates that China will make up 45% of all offshore wind capacity by 2030. Ming Yang itself claims to be behind almost a third of new offshore wind capacity built last year.
Meanwhile, offshore wind projects in the West — especially the United States — have faced the omnicrisis of high interest rates, backed-up supply chains, and Donald Trump. News of Ming Yang’s Scotland factory sent yet another shock through the ailing Western offshore wind market, with shares in the Danish company Vestas down 4% when the market opened Monday.
But with Chinese products and Chinese investment comes controversy and nerves among European political leaders. “There’re questions about tech transfer and job creation,” Chan said. “They also face some security issues and potential political backlash.”
In August, the German asset manager Luxcara announced that it would use Siemens Gamesa turbines for a planned offshore wind project instead of Ming Yang ones after backlash from German defense officials. “We see this as further evidence that a Chinese entry into the European wind market remains challenging,” analysts at Jefferies wrote to clients in August.
They were right to be skeptical — Chinese turbines’ entry into the European market has been long predicted and yet remains unrealized. “China’s increasingly cheap wind turbines could open new markets,” S&P Global Insights wrote in 2022, citing the same cost advantages as Morningstar did in reference to the Ming Yang factory announcement.
“China was already trying to angle into the European market,” Chan told me, seeing it as comparable to the U.S. in size and potentially more open to Chinese investment. “If they were kind of thinking about it before, now it’s gotten a greater sense of commercial urgency because I think the expectation is that their profit margins are really going to get squeezed.”
While China leads the world in building out renewable energy capacity domestically and exporting technology abroad, it has “decided not to decide” on pursuing a rapid, near-term decarbonization, Johns Hopkins University China scholar Jeremy Wallace recently argued in Heatmap.
While that means that the Paris Agreement goals are even farther out of reach, it may be fine for Chinese industries, including wind, as they look to sell abroad.
“Chinese firms have lots of reasons to want to build things abroad: Diversification away from the Chinese market, the zero or negative profits from selling domestically, and geopolitical balancing,” Wallace told me.
“If Brits want to have their citizens making the turbines that will power the country,” Wallace said, “this seems like a reasonable opportunity.”
Current conditions: A major Pacific storm is drenching California and bringing several inches of snow to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming • A tropical storm in the Atlantic dumped nearly a foot of water on South Carolina over three days • Algeria is roasting in temperatures of more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Department of Energy notified workers in multiple offices Friday that they were likely to be fired or reassigned to another part of the agency, E&E News reported Tuesday. Staffers at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of State and Community Energy Programs received notices stating that the offices would “be undergoing a major reorganization and your position may be reassigned to another organization, transferred to another function or abolished.” Still, the notice said “no determination has been made concerning your specific position” just yet.
At least five offices received “general reduction in force notices,” as opposed to official notification of a reduction in force, according to a Latitude Media report. These included the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of State and Community Energy Plans, and the Office of Fossil Energy. Nearly 200 Energy Department employees received direct layoff notices.
Catastrophic floods brought on by the remnants of a typhoon devastated the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk on Sunday. Five months ago, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant intended to protect the community against exactly this kind of extreme flooding, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The grant from the Environmental Protection Agency was meant to stabilize the riverbank on which Kipnuk is built. But in May, the agency yanked back the Biden-era grant, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said was “no longer consistent” with the government’s priorities. In a post on X, Zeldin said the award was part of "wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants,” suggesting the funding was part of an ideological push for diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than a practical infrastructure boost to an Indigenous community facing serious challenges.
Zealan Hoover, a Biden-era senior adviser at the EPA, accused Zeldin of using “inflammatory rhetoric” that misrepresented the efforts in places like Kipnuk. “For decades, E.P.A. has been a partner to local communities,” Hoover said. “For the first time under this administration, E.P.A. has taken an aggressively adversarial posture toward the very people and communities that it is intended to protect.”
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Late last Thursday, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman observed that the status of the 6.2-gigawatt Esmeralda 7, the nation’s largest solar project, had changed on the Bureau of Land Management’s website to “canceled.” The news sent shockwaves nationwide and drew blowback even from Republicans, including Utah Governor Spencer Cox, as I reported in this newsletter. Now, however, the bureau’s parent agency is denying that it made the call to cancel the project. “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Utility Dive. “Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
That means the project could still move forward with a piecemeal approach to permitting rather than one overarching approval, which aligns with what one of the developers involved told Jael last week. A representative for NextEra said that it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and that the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.” Still, the move represents a devastating setback for the solar installation, which may never fully materialize.
Ethane exports are rising as export capacity soars.EIA
U.S. exports of ethane, a key petrochemical feedstock extracted from raw natural gas during processing, are on track for “significant growth” through 2026, according to new analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Overseas sales are projected to grow 14% this year compared to the previous year, and another 16% next year. Ethane is mostly used as a feedstock for ethylene, a key ingredient in plastics, resins, and synthetic rubber. China has been the fastest growing source of demand for American ethane in recent years, rising to the largest single destination with 47% of exports last year.
Spain’s electricity-grid operator shrugged off concerns of another major blackout after detecting two sharp voltage variations in recent weeks. Red Electrica, which operates Spain’s grid, said that what The Wall Street Journal described as “recent voltage swings” didn’t threaten to knock out the grid because they stayed within acceptable limits. But the operator warned that variations could jeopardize the electricity supply if the grid didn’t overhaul its approach to managing a system that increasingly relies on intermittent, inverter-based generating sources such as solar panels. Red, which is 20% owned by the Spanish government, acknowledged that the high penetration of renewables was responsible for the recent fluctuations. Among the changes needed to improve the grid: real-time monitoring, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted in April “is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered.”
It’s not just Spain facing blackouts. New York City will have a power deficiency equivalent to the energy needed to power between 410,000 and 650,000 homes next summer — and that number could double by 2050, the state’s grid operator warned this week in its latest five-year report. “The grid is at a significant inflection point,” Zach Smith, senior vice president of system and resource planning for NYISO, said in a statement to Gothamist. “Depending on future demand growth and generator retirements, the system may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation within the next 10 years.”
Sodium-ion batteries are all the rage, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported yesterday about the commercial breakthrough by the startup Alsym. But a major challenge facing sodium-ion batteries compared to lithium-ion rivals is the stability of the cathode material in air and water, which can degrade the battery’s performance and lifespan. A new study by researchers at Tokyo University of Science found that one ingredient can solve the problem: Calcium. By discovering the protective effects of calcium doping in the batteries, “this study could pave the way for the widespread adoption” of sodium-ion batteries.
Rob talks with the author and activist about his new book, We Survived the Night.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His first book, We Survived the Night, was released this week — it uses memoir, reporting, and literary anthology to tell the story of Native families across North America, including his own.
NoiseCat was previously an environmental and climate activist at groups including 350.org and Data for Progress. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks with Julian about Native American nations and politics, the complexity and reality of Native life in 2025, and the “trickster” as a recurring political archetype.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What were lessons that you took away from the writing of the book, or from the reporting of the book, that changed how you thought about climate or the environment in some way that maybe wasn’t the case when you were working on these issues full time?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: I would say that while I was working on climate issues, I was actually, myself, really changing a lot in terms of my thoughts on how politics worked and did not work. I think I came into my period of my life as a climate activist really believing in the power of direct action, and protest, and, you know, if you get enough people in the streets and you get enough politicians on your side, you eventually can change the laws. And I think that there is some truth to that view.
But I think being in DC for four years, being really involved in this movement, conversation — however you want to put that — around the Green New Deal, around eventually a Biden administration and how that would be shaped around how they might go about actually taking on climate change for the first time in U.S. history in a significant way, really transformed my understanding of how change happens. I got a greater appreciation, for example, for the importance of persuading people to your view, particularly elites in decision-making positions. And I also started to understand a little bit more of the true gamesmanship of politics — that there is a bit of tricks and trickery, and all kinds of other things that are going on in our political system that are really fundamental to how it all works.
And I bring that last piece up because while I was writing the book, I was also thinking really purposefully about my own people’s narrative traditions, and how they get at transformations and how they happen in the world. And it just so happens that probably the most significant oral historical tradition of my own people is a story called a coyote story, which is about a trickster figure who makes change in the world through cunning and subterfuge and tricks, and also who gets tricked himself a fair amount.
And I think that in that worldview, I actually found a lot of resonance with my own observations on how political change happened when I was in Washington, D.C., and so that insight did really deeply shape the book.
Mentioned:
We Survived the Night, by Julian Brave NoiseCat
How Deb Haaland Became the First Native American Cabinet Secretary
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.