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At the end of the day, there will always be politics.
Today’s internet is inundated with “AI slop,” and mocking the often bizarre outputs produced of language models (recall the Google AI that recommended making pizza with glue) has become an online pastime. Yet artificial intelligence advocates have not been deterred from their claims of a utopian future made possible by AI. Whatever problems we face — including climate change — one day, we are told, they will be solved by the magical power of computing. The breathless headlines have been around for years: “How artificial intelligence can tackle climate change”; “How AI could power the climate breakthrough the world needs”; “Here are 10 ways AI could help fight climate change”; “9 ways AI is helping tackle climate change.”
Like much of the hype around AI, the specifics aren’t necessarily wrong. AI could help us understand the impacts of climate change more comprehensively, and can be used to locate solutions to particular challenges in technology and manufacturing. But as the extraordinary energy demands AI will impose on our system are coming into focus, and as some of the most important corporate AI leaders join hands with what could be the most anti-environment administration in history, the big picture problem becomes even clearer. Artificial intelligence can’t solve climate change because doing so will always require passing through the bottleneck of politics.
For those hoping to bring us to a glorious future guided by superintelligent computers, claiming that AI will solve climate change has become more urgent as the energy demands of the technology increase. Google reported last summer that since 2019, its emissions have increased by 48% because of its use of AI. The International Energy Agency projects that by 2026, AI will consume 1,000 terawatt-hours of electricity, as much as the entire nation of Japan, the world’s fourth-largest economy. Countries around the world are rushing to develop their own AI systems (the surprising capabilities of a new Chinese system called DeepSeek just sent the stock market tumbling), any of which could entail the same scale of energy demand as the ones created by American tech giants.
But imagine if we could snap our fingers and make that problem disappear? That’s what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested in a recent interview with Bloomberg. “Fusion’s going to work,” he said when asked about AI’s energy demands, going on to say that “quickly permitting fusion reactors” is the answer — particularly those made by Helion Energy, a company whose executive chairman is, you guessed it, Sam Altman.
Of course, Helion has no fusion reactors to permit yet because no one does. Fusion’s promise of essentially limitless clean energy at low cost is tantalizing, which is why billions of public and private dollars have been invested in fusion research. But while technological gains are being made, there is still a great deal of uncertainty about how long it will take until fusion can reach commercial scale. It might be 10 years, or 20, or 50 or 100 — no one knows for sure.
But blithely insisting that incredibly complex problems will be solved easily and quickly is a specialty of tech barons. And if AI itself finds the solution to our energy problems? Even better.
There’s no question that AI is improving at a rapid pace, even if there are some things it’s still terrible at. And when it comes to climate, over time it will probably help produce incremental gains across a wide number of areas, from manufacturing efficiency to urban planning. But the more dramatic and consequential any idea is — whether it comes from AI or not — the more likely it is that it will have to move through the political process in order to be implemented.
And that’s where AI can’t help. A machine learning system can’t tell you the precise formula to please a recalcitrant senator or navigate a hundred city councils with different ideas about what kinds of clean energy projects they’ll allow in their towns. Politics is about people — their goals, their incentives, their fears, their prejudices — and it’s far too messy to be solved with numeric calculation, even by the most powerful AI system imaginable.
Let’s say that a year from now, an AI came up with both an entirely new way to design a fusion reactor and a revolutionary battery design that offered longer and denser storage, together solving so many of the problems scientists and engineers struggle with today. How would the fossil fuel industry react to this development? Would it say, “Oh well, oil and gas had a pretty good run, but now the world can move on”?
Of course not. It would use its extraordinary resources to battle against their competition, just as they always have. That’s what it did in the last election cycle, when it spent $450 million on campaigns and lobbying to preserve the industry and the riches it generates.
And while many hoped that the Republican Party would moderate its views on climate, at the moment it looks more like it is going backward — not just looking to undo every bit of progress made under the Biden administration, but also undermining renewable energy wherever it can. President Trump seems determined to destroy wind energy in America, which has been growing rapidly in recent years. Whether he succeeds will be up to the political system, not the inherent usefulness of a millennium-old technology.
In politics, good ideas don’t always win out. Who has power and what they are after will always matter a great deal, as Trump and the people he is bringing into the federal government are showing us right now.
AI can be a tool that helps us reduce emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change; the fact that its boosters regularly offer absurdly optimistic timelines for societal transformation doesn’t mean the underlying technology isn’t remarkable. But “solving” climate change isn’t merely a technological problem. It will always be a political one as well, and even the smartest piece of software won’t solve it for us.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.