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Heatmap Turns 1

A look back at a year of distinct climate and energy coverage.

A slice of Heatmap cake.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

I can’t quite believe it: Today is the one-year anniversary of Heatmap. And what a year it’s been.

When I left my old job as editor of The Week, climate change had a reputation among journalists as being the one scary subject that nobody wanted to read. It was too depressing, too technical, too boring to sustain dedicated coverage. That misperception is finally ending — and I like to think Heatmap put some nails in the coffin.

Heatmap’s mission is to tell the inside story of the race to fix the planet. We think this is the most important and interesting issue of our time, so we strive to make Heatmap punchy and personable as well as informative and trustworthy. It’s why you’ll find that Heatmap’s writers follow the facts where they lead and tell you — in hopefully engaging, elevated ways — what they see and hear.

Heatmap is also a bet that readers want to go deep into the nuances and tradeoffs at the heart of the energy transition. We love works in progress — how policymakers are thinking about a particularly thorny problem, how a geothermal company is trying to bring down costs fast, why a community is skeptical of a wind farm. It can be upsetting. It can be inspiring. We hope it’s always fascinating and helpful. After all, this is how the planet gets fixed.

But I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re reading this note, you are probably shaping the future of the planet yourself, whether through your work or the choices you make at home or both. I hope we’ve helped you understand what’s actually happening and make more informed decisions.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll be hearing from our writers about some of their favorite stories to get a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind them.

I hope you’ll also consider supporting our work if you haven’t already. Paid subscribers get full access to our two daily newsletters, our weekly podcast, and all the original reporting we publish on the site every day. They also receive the unending gratitude of our newsroom. (As a party favor for our birthday, you can also get 20% off an annual subscription with the code ANNIVERSARY.)

We know there are other outlets covering climate and energy, and we don’t take your trust or interest for granted. Thank you for your continued support.

Nico Lauricella
Founder and editor in chief

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Climate Tech

If Natron Couldn’t Make Batteries in the U.S., Can Anyone?

The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.

An out of business battery pack.
Heatmap Illustration/Natron, Getty Images

When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.

But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.

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They may not refuel as quickly as gas cars, but it’s getting faster all the time to recharge an electric car.

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Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A family of four pulls their Hyundai Ioniq 5 into a roadside stop, plugs in, and sits down to order some food. By the time it arrives, they realize their EV has added enough charge that they can continue their journey. Instead of eating a leisurely meal, they get their grub to go and jump back in the car.

The message of this ad, which ran incessantly on some of my streaming services this summer, is a telling evolution in how EVs are marketed. The game-changing feature is not power or range, but rather charging speed, which gets the EV driver back on the road quickly rather than forcing them to find new and creative ways to kill time until the battery is ready. Marketing now frequently highlights an electric car’s ability to add a whole lot of miles in just 15 to 20 minutes of charge time.

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The White House.
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Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.

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