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Spinning turbines have it, but solar panels don’t.
Spain and Portugal are still recovering from Monday’s region-wide blackout. The cause remains unknown, but already a debate has broken out over whether grids like Spain’s, which has a well-above-average proportion of renewables, are more at risk of large-scale disruptions.
At the time of the blackout, Spain’s grid had little “inertia,” which renewables opponents have seized on as a reason to blame carbon-free electricity for the breakdown. If the electricity system as a whole is a dance of electrons choreographed by the laws of electromagnetism, then inertia is the system’s brute force Newtonian backup. In a fossil fuel-powered grid, inertia comes from spinning metal — think a gas turbine — and it can give the whole system a little extra boost if another generator drops off the grid.
Solar panels, however, don’t spin. Instead, they produce direct current that needs to be converted by an inverter into alternating current at the grid’s frequency.
“If a power plant goes out, that frequency starts to drop a little bit because there’s an imbalance in the power between supply and demand, and inertia provides a little bit of extra power,” Bri-Mathias Hodge, an electrical and energy engineering professor at the University of Colorado and a former chief scientist at the nearby National Renewable Energy Laboratory, explained to me. Inertia, he said, “just gives a little bit more wiggle room in the system, so that if there are big changes, you can sort of ride through them.”
Of course, blackouts happen on grids dominated by fossil fuels — the 2003 Northeast Blackout in the U.S and Canada, for example, which plunged several states and tens of millions of people into darkness. Even on renewable-heavy grids, blackouts can still come down to failures of fossil fuel systems, as with Texas’ Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when the natural gas distribution system froze up. Much of the state had no electricity for several days amidst freezing temperatures, and over 200 people died.
But Bloomberg’s Javier Blas was nevertheless fair to the Iberian blackout when he bestowed on it the sobriquet, “The first big blackout of the green electricity era.”
Spain has been especially aggressive in decarbonizing its power grid and there’s some initial evidence that the first generators to turn off were solar power. “We started to see oscillations between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the European power grid, and this generally means that there’s a power imbalance — somebody’s trying to export power that they can’t, or import power that they can’t because of the limits on the lines,” Hodge told me. “The reason why people have gone on to say that this is a solar issue is because where they’ve seen some of those oscillations and where they saw some of the events starting, there are a couple large solar plants in that part of southwestern Spain.”
While Spanish grid and government officials will likely take months to investigate the failure, we already know that Spain and Portugal are relatively isolated from the rest of the European grid and rely heavily on renewables, especially solar and wind. Portugal has in the past gone several days in a row generating 100% of its power from renewables; Spain, meanwhile, was boasting of its 100% renewable generation just weeks before the blackout.
Last week, Spanish solar produced over 20,000 megawatts of power, comprising more than 60% of the country’s resource mix. Spain’s seven remaining nuclear reactors — which still provide about a fifth of its electric power — are scheduled to shut down over the next decade (though officials have indicated they might be open to extending their life), while its minimal coal generation is scheduled to be retired this year.
“Spain and Portugal have been relatively early adopters of wind and solar power. The Iberian Peninsula is actually relatively weakly connected to the rest of Europe through France. And so that’s one of the tricky parts here — it’s not as well integrated just because of the geography,” Hodge said.
The disturbances on the grid started on the Spain-France interconnection, but a European power official told The New York Times that transmission issues typically don’t lead to cascading blackouts unless there’s some major disturbance in supply or demand as well, such as a power plant going offline.
Spain’s grid had issues before Monday’s blackout that can be fairly attributed to its reliance on renewables. It often has to curtail solar power production because the grid gets congested when particularly sunny parts of the country where there’s large amounts of solar generation are churning out power that can’t be transmitted to the rest of the country. Spain has also occasionally experienced negative prices for electricity, and is using European Investment Bank funds to help support the expansion of pumped-hydro storage in order to store power when prices go down.
On Monday afternoon, however, solar power dropped from around 18,000 megawatts to 8,000, Reuters reported. At the time the blackout began, the grid was overwhelmingly powered by renewables. Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to pinpoint two large-scale losses of solar power in the southwestern part of the country, according to Reuters.
That a renewables-heavy grid might struggle with maintaining reliability thanks to low inertia is no surprise. Researchers have been studying the issue for decades.
In Texas — which, like Spain, has a high level of renewable generation and is isolated from the greater continental grid — the energy market ERCOT has been monitoring inertia since 2013, when wind generation sometimes got to 30% of total generation, and in 2016 started real-time monitoring of inertia in its control room.
That real time monitoring 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, Hodge said.
As renewables build up on grids, Hodge told me, operators should prepare by having their inverters be what’s known as “grid-forming” instead of “grid-following.”
“Right now, in the power system, almost all of the wind, solar, battery plants, all the inverter-based generation, they just look to the grid for a signal. If the grid is producing at 60 Hertz, then they want to produce 60 Hertz. If it’s producing at 59.9, then they try to match that,” Hodge said. This works when you have relatively low amounts of [renewable generation]. But when [renewables] start to become the majority of the generation, you need somebody else to provide that strong signal for everybody else to follow. And that’s sort of what grid-forming inverters do,” he said.
Grid-forming inverters could hold back some power from the grid to provide an inertia-like boost when needed. Right now, the only sizable grid outfitted with this technology, Hodge said, is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which has a population of around 75,000. Spain, by contrast, is home to nearly 50 million.
The other key technology for grid-forming inverters to provide stability to a power system is batteries. “Batteries are actually the perfect solution for this because if you have a battery system there, you know most of the time it’s not producing or charging and totally full output or input. So the vast majority of time you’re going to have some room to sort of move on in either direction,” Hodge said.
But this requires both technology and market structures that incentivize and allow batteries to always be ready to provide that instantaneous response.
“The entire stability paradigm of the power grid was built around this idea of synchronous machines,” Hodge told me. “And we’re moving toward one that’s more based on the inverters, but we’re not there yet. We have to fix the car while we’re driving it. We can’t turn off the grid for a couple years and figure everything out.”
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Some of the industry’s biggest names are joining forces to keep the momentum moving forward.
Climate tech funding has slowed in the face of federal government pushback — but it has certainly not stopped. As the administration has cranked up its hostilities against everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines, companies and investors are responding by getting strategic, forming new coalitions to map, fund, and shape progress in the absence of public support.
Last month I covered the launch of the Climate Tech Atlas, an interdisciplinary effort that includes venture capitalists, nonprofits, and academics working to map out the most salient climate tech opportunities and help guide external research and funding in the sector. There’s also the All Aboard Coalition, which unites big name investors to help plug the missing middle finance gap. Sector-specific investment vehicles are popping up too, like the Oneworld BEV fund, a partnership between major airlines in the Oneworld Alliance and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to advance the commercialization of sustainable aviation fuels. All three of these new initiatives were announced in September alone.
“We are in a unique moment right now,” Carmichael Roberts, a managing partner at BEV told me via email. “Over the past decade, the climate tech ecosystem has made enormous progress driving innovation across every sector of the economy. That puts us in the position to step back and ask first, what areas are still crying out for urgent innovation?”
This year has also seen a number of climate tech companies struggle at key points in their attempts to scale. Sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy shut down in September, while direct air capture leader Climeworks laid off 22% of its staff in May, citing “current macroeconomic uncertainty” and “shifting policy priorities where climate tech is seeing reduced momentum.” Another direct air capture company, Noya, shuttered this August, while the battery recycling company Li-Cycle filed for bankruptcy in May.
Other startups pursuing emerging technologies — from carbon capture to long-duration battery storage, advanced geothermal, and next-generation nuclear — are looking to avoid the same fate. But while federal funding from places such as the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office once provided an avenue for financing capital-intensive demonstration plants, the Trump administration is now retracting funding, going so far as to cancel contracts with projects previously approved under Biden.
The Oneworld fund, announced in mid-September, is BEV’s first to focus on a specific theme and its first to be backed by an industry coalition. Members of the Oneworld Alliance — which include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, British Airways, and Cathay Pacific — had already committed to using SAF for 10% of their fuel by 2030, while also “playing an active role in the development of SAF at commercial scale.” Now, with alliance members serving as limited partners in the venture fund, they’ll benefit from the technical and commercial expertise of one of the sector’s most influential VC firms.
When I asked the BEV team to what degree the current political and economic uncertainties were making partnerships like this more valuable, Eric Toone, another BEV managing partner, responded with a refrain I’ve become familiar with — that the firm only backs technologies that “can ultimately compete on their own merits.” Yet it’s undeniable that the federal government tore up its decarbonization agenda at a moment when many climate tech firms’ investments are almost ready for deployment, a stage when government support can make all the difference.
“Many promising SAF technologies already exist, but they are stuck between lab success and commercial scale,” Roberts told me. “This is the moment when they most need capital, technical rigor, and committed offtake to bridge that gap.” While the Trump administration did maintain and extend the tax credit for clean fuels, it also reduced the maximum credit amount for SAF from $1.75 per gallon to $1, while private funding for SAF production and distribution infrastructure remains inadequate.
Given this landscape and the urgency airlines face in meeting their clean fuel targets, Toone told me the firm is open to backing companies “that are further along than what a typical BEV fund might pursue.” And while sustainable fuels are the first technology to benefit from this type of thematic focus, Roberts said that BEV is already eyeing other sectors where it plans to apply this same funding model.
As of early September, the firm is also part of the All Aboard Coalition. This elite group of venture firms is aiming to raise a $300 million fund by the end of October that will match investments in later-stage venture rounds, filling a gap known in climate tech circles as the “missing middle.” Assembled by Chris Anderson, an entrepreneur and primary convener of the TED Talks conference — which has featured many inspiring climate visionaries — the group includes 14 members such as Khosla Ventures, Prelude Ventures, DCVC, Gigascale Capital, and Energy Impact Partners.
“One of the consequences of being in the front row seat at TED all these years is you get persuaded of certain things,” he told me. “And I definitely got persuaded that climate is the outstanding, major problem we really have to fix.”
The bulk of the capital for the coalition will come from outside investors, though some members will contribute as well, Anderson told me. The goal is to incentivize these hotshots to co-invest with each other, providing a one-to-one funding match if they do so.
“First-of-a-kind rounds seem out of reach for a lot of people in the chain,” Anderson explained, referring to the network of investors that must come together to help a company fund expensive new infrastructure. At this stage, its tech has progressed beyond the capital-light, early-stage rounds but is still considered too risky for traditional infrastructure investors to take on. Companies might be seeking $100 million or more from venture firms that are used to writing checks for orders of magnitude less. “Really the purpose of the fund is to create a collective belief that there is a pathway to getting these companies funded. If you have that collective belief, then it’s much easier for a lead investor to step forward and to pull a few other people in.”
Anderson acknowledged that a $300 million fund will not go “nearly far enough.”
“It’s a starter fund. It’s a proof of concept,” he told me. “The world needs to make a couple hundred of these bets at some point.”
Other coalitions, such as the Climate Tech Atlas, are working to steer the sector towards the best bets. This group — which also includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures, alongside others such as the nonprofit investment platform Elemental Impact, the consulting firm McKinsey, and Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability — has mapped out the technological milestones it sees as the clearest pathways to decarbonization. The aim is to help investors, founders, policymakers and academics alike direct their energies towards the most relevant and investable opportunities, regardless of political headwinds.
“The scale at which the government participates in the development of these new technologies — or puts a thumb on the scale for technologies in particular — will vary,” Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of the policy firm Energy Innovation, which is also a member of the alliance, told me. “But certainly that has no real bearing on the fundamental fact that innovators are out there right now thinking about these grand challenges, and there are exciting new ideas for technologies that can get to that commercial scale in the coming years.”
And indeed, sometimes the most promising ideas can take shape in moments of deep uncertainty. Some of the biggest success stories of recent tech history — Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, and Square — all got their start during the 2008 financial crisis or its aftermath. “Some of the strongest companies and founders are building in uncertain times,” Dawn Lippert, founder and CEO of Elemental Impact, told me. “That’s very much what we see right now.”
These groups are far from the only private-sector actors coming together to help navigate industry headwinds. When the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew support for the most widely used U.S.-based carbon accounting model for estimating scope 3 emissions, leading emissions accounting platform Watershed partnered with Stanford University’s Sustainable Solutions Lab to launch an initiative that ensures continued access. And recognizing the difficulty that early stage climate tech startups face in securing insurance, the nonprofit GreenRE Coalition and the philanthropic funder Trellis Climate partnered to create a new type of bond tailored to the needs of climate tech startups.
Whether it will all be enough to accelerate or even sustain much-needed momentum in climate tech funding is impossible to predict. But at least the private sector seems to agree that, in this moment, good old teamwork is worth one heck of a try.
His administration has zeroed in on $18 billion of projects that just so happen to be in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’ hometown.
The shutdown punishment has begun, and it’s aimed at New York City.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget announced Wednesday on X that “roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” That includes funding for the Second Avenue Subway extension and the Gateway Program, a proposed rail tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey.
While Vought did not refer to the government shutdown specifically in his announcement, the timing is, shall we say, noteworthy, not least because the Democrats’ two top congressional negotiators — Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer — are both from New York. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy later made the link explicit, clarifying in a statement that the real issue with the two projects was a recently released rule — as in, published on Tuesday — “barring race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grants.”
There would be a review of the two projects “to determine whether any unconstitutional practices are occurring,” Duffy said, and “until USDOT’s quick administrative review is complete, project reimbursements cannot be processed.” Those reviews “will take more time” thanks to the shutdown, he wrote, reaching his denouement, as “without a budget, the Department has been forced to furlough the civil rights staff responsible for conducting this review.”
The politics behind this gambit are obvious. President Trump has consistently threatened to withhold funding from states, cities, and institutions controlled by or connected to his political opponents.
“I think they very much understand the political dynamics of trying to make an example of New York. They understand where Chuck Schumer lives,” Jackson Moore-Otto, transportation fellow at the Center for Public Enterprise, told me.
The White House wasn’t exactly running away from the political implications of the denial of funding on Wednesday.Vice President J.D. Vance arched a metaphorical eyebrow during a press conference, saying that “I'm sure that Russ is heartbroken about the fact that he is unable to give certain things to certain constituencies.”
Trump has also specifically threatened federal funding for New York City if Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the upcoming mayoral election.
Duffy himself could not have been any more obvious about what he is trying to achieve by slowing down this funding. “This is another unfortunate casualty of radical Democrats’ reckless decision to hold the federal government hostage to give illegal immigrants benefits,” his statement said, while also specifically calling out the two Democratic congressional leaders, saying that the delayed review was “thanks to the Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies [sic] shutdown.”
The legality of this — and its legitimate connection to the shutdown — is not so clear.
“It’s pure political maneuvering if you read the statement closely,” David Super, a law professor at Georgetown, told me. “They’re trying to blame the shutdown for slowing their review, but they’re also effectively saying that they’re considering New York in violation of their standards.”
Super also flagged several constitutional and legal issues with the action.
“The funding allocated through laborious means to the Hudson tunnel and Second Avenue Subway is a property right that entities in New York have,” he told me. “The idea that that can be interfered with because someone wants to do an investigation is a blatant violation of due process.”
While it is possible that purported civil rights violations could lead to funding being blocked, “that would have to be established through procedure, not suspicions that they’re doing something wrong,” Super said.
The new rule Duffy referenced addresses a specific set of programs established under the Small Business Act that are designed to give organizations controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,” i.e. “women and members of certain racial and ethnic groups,” a shot at winning government contracts.
The DOT argues that under these programs, “two similarly situated small business owners may face different standards for entering the program, based solely on their race, ethnicity, or sex,” and that the rules and legislation defining them violate equal protection as set out in recent federal court decisions and Trump executive orders.
The rule that Duffy cites as justification for his actions is itself constitutionally suspect, Super said. “The Administrative Procedure Act requires public comment on new rules, subject to limited exceptions,” which this did not have.
The slapdash way the rule has been rolled out could open up the DOT to lawsuits, whether from the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees the New York City subway, or another entity involved with the Hudson tunnel project.
“Courts throughout history have insisted public comment is important,” Super said. The DOT is “violating procedures for issuing this policy and violating due process in the way they apply it.”
Moore-Otto also pointed out that the DOT release makes no specific claim that these projects are violating the rule.
“What they’re saying, it appears to me, is, New York might be doing this thing that we’ve just decided is illegal and we’re going to cut off your funding and it’s going to take longer because our lawyers aren’t being paid,” he said.
And there are broader issues around infrastructure policy at play beyond the obvious political gamesmanship, Moore-Otto pointed out. Duffy’s announcement links the supposedly unconstitutional women and minority contracting practices to the high costs that plague American infrastructure projects, saying they’re a “waste of taxpayer resources.”
But, Moore-Otto argued, what really ails U.S. infrastructure projects are extensive administrative reviews and the start-stop nature of project development.
“I think people would broadly agree the U.S. takes too much time and money to deliver infrastructure projects, and they are trying to invoke this as a pretext,” Moore-Otto said. “What strikes me as noteworthy is that when we look at why the U.S. does, in fact, take so long and use so much money building, while the rest of the world builds faster and cheaper, is that there’s a lot of stopping and starting of these infrastructure projects.”
“Assuming it’s a prolonged delay, it’s going to probably drive up costs — even though they’re saying it is a cost saving measure,” Moore-Otto added. “I think that should not be lost on anybody.”
On a potential deregulatory slowdown, community solar’s dimming, and Pope Leo on climate
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is set to gain intensity this week and whip the southeastern U.S. with soaking rain and storm surge • Frigid night air is forecast across northern New England • Typhoon Bualoi is flooding broad swaths of Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.
The federal government is closed.Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
The federal government shut down at 12:01 a.m. this morning after President Donald Trump and Republicans failed to reach a deal with Democrats in Congress on a bill to keep its funding flowing. That could slow the Environmental Protection Agency’s deregulatory effort, E&E News reported Tuesday. “The political crisis that threatens to shutter much of the federal bureaucracy at midnight comes as Administrator Lee Zeldin is racing to unravel high-profile rules on things like climate science, vehicle pollution, power plants, oil and gas wells, and carbon emissions reporting,” reporter Jean Chemnick wrote. An abrupt halt to the agency’s activities would at the very least set back Zeldin’s reform effort, including an agency reorganization set to begin this month.
The Department of the Interior, meanwhile, sent employees an email Tuesday warning that the agency “has contingency plans in place for executing an orderly shutdown of activities that would be affected by any lapse in appropriations forced by Congressional Democrats.” Neither Interior nor the EPA had published updated shutdown plans taking into account staff reductions under the current Trump administration as of Tuesday.
When the Department of Defense bought a 15% stake in MP Materials, the continent’s only active rare earths mine, The Economist called it the most significant entry by the federal government into a private market since the railroads were nationalized in World War I. (Biden administration officials were admittedly jealous, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported.) Now the Trump administration has taken another share of a major mineral project. The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office said Tuesday that it had renegotiated a multi-billion-dollar loan to back construction of Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada. The project, on track to become the Western Hemisphere’s largest lithium producer by 2028, will transform a remote stretch of high Nevada desert into a lithium clay mine, harvesting from one of the world’s richest known deposits.
Under the new deal, the federal government will take a 5% equity stake in Lithium Americas and an additional 5% ownership of the company’s joint venture with General Motors. The Energy Department called its stakes “part of the overall collateral package on a loan, helping to reduce repayment risk for taxpayers.” But the announcement said the “revised agreement” includes “robust loan amendments,” notably “more than $100 million of new equity.”
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Community solar installations are plunging. After a record-breaking 2024, installations of new panels in small-scale cooperative or community solar projects dropped 36% in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed the cumulative five-year outlook for community solar by 8% compared to the outlook before the legislation repealed vast chunks of the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s according to a new analysis from Wood Mackenzie.
Yet Jeff Cramer, the chief executive of the Coalition for Community Solar Access, said states are stepping up “with historic expansions like New Jersey’s 3,000 megawatts and Massachusetts’ 900 megawatts.” He added: “These bright spots show what’s possible when policymakers work to unlock capacity. At the same time, this report makes clear the challenges ahead — from federal uncertainty to interconnection delays and program caps — that must be addressed to realize the full potential of community solar and deliver the resilient, affordable power communities are asking for.”
Most Americans say that rising electricity prices have at least “a decent amount” of impact on household finances. “Still, for about 40% of the country, those high prices are more a pinch than a pain,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote. That’s the finding of a new Heatmap Pro poll on rising rates. The results had some predictable outcomes, including that more than 70% of voters with household incomes below $50,000 said rising bills were a problem with “a lot of" impact on spending. Upward of 62% of voters earning less than $100,000 described similar issues, as did 59% of white voters without a college degree.
It’s been difficult for “Vatican-watchers” to pin down Pope Leo XIV’s views on most issues. But “on climate change,” The New York Times wrote on Tuesday, “it is clear that he is moved by the topic, and particularly its disproportionate harm to poor and vulnerable people.” The world is about to get a lot more clarity on his views. On Wednesday, the Pontiff is scheduled to give his first address on climate change at a conference taking place at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo.
The remarks come on the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document written by the late Pope Francis that overhauled the Catholic Church’s teachings on climate change. The 2015 encyclical was widely credited with pushing forward carbon-cutting negotiations at the global climate summit in Paris that year.
Africa's biggest petrostate is having a solar boom. Nigeria became Africa’s second-largest importer of solar panels over the past year by overtaking Egypt. The imports total 1.7 gigawatts. “It is a response to a problem … You can’t rely on a 24/7 grid in most parts of Nigeria at the moment,” Ashvin Dayal, senior vice-president of power at Rockefeller Foundation, which backed the mini-grid project, told the Financial Times. “Demand is booming for reliable, affordable electricity both for inside the home, but also to run small businesses, to run agricultural appliances, to increase productivity and incomes.”