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Facing a fossil energy crisis, voters in this oil-producing state have some decisions to make.
When you think of climate change, you think of Alaska whether you realize it or not.
With its pipelines, polar bears, and dramatic, calving glaciers, the state has contributed an outsized amount of stock footage to global warming montages over the years. Combined with a nearly unbroken record of backing Republican presidential candidates and an increasingly young and diverse voting-age population, there’s a popular impression — among outsiders, anyway — of the state as a front line in the battle between continued fossil fuel dependence and a clean-energy future.
Somewhat ironically, Alaskans themselves don’t typically view things that way. Though no fewer than four utility board elections and the Anchorage mayoral race this spring will help to shape the energy future of the Railbelt, the electrical grid that runs from Fairbanks through Anchorage and out to the Kenai Peninsula and serves 70% of the state’s population, locals are debating the stakes in terms of cost.
“Literally nobody who is pitching renewables [on the campaign trail] is pitching them as a solution to climate change,” Nathaniel Herz, an independent Anchorage-based reporter who covers energy, environment, and government issues in the state for his newsletter Northern Journal, told me. Rather, the selling point is that wind, solar, and tidal power could be the way out of an urgent gas shortage.
The energy crisis touched off in earnest last May when the region’s largest natural gas producer, Hilcorp, informed the four Railbelt utilities that it doesn’t have access to enough deliverable gas in Cook Inlet to guarantee new contracts going forward. Though a gas shortage in the aging basin was a long time coming, the urgency of the situation still came as a shock; the Railbelt utilities get about 80% of their energy from natural gas. Demand could outpace supply as soon as 2027, the state has warned.
Billy J. Roberts, NREL, for DOE
Homer Electric Association was the first utility to face the consequences, with a contract that expired this year. As a stopgap, it signed a one-year contract with Enstar, the local private gas utility that gets 90% of its supply from Hilcorp (and also supplies gas for heating homes and businesses) at a higher price. The rest of the Railbelt co-ops’ contracts are set to expire by 2028.
Proposed solutions to the crisis range from new drilling in Cook Inlet — which is risky, expensive, and laden with permitting hurdles, making it unappealing to investors — to building an 800-mile, $43 billion pipeline from the oil-rich North Slope. More realistically, the Railbelt seems headed toward importing liquified natural gas from British Columbia, at least in the short term.
That option is “really unpalatable to many Alaskans,” Satchel Pondolfino, the lower Kenai Peninsula organizer for Cook Inletkeeper, a Homer-based environmental non-profit, told me. “We’re an energy state: It’s inconceivable for a lot of people that we have to bring in fuel from other places.”
It’s also expensive. Importing LNG could result in 50% higher costs for the utilities. That, in turn, would mean up to a 15% hike in consumers’ already-steep utility bills, and likely “even more than that for heating bills,” as Herz has reported — no small thing in a place where it is dark and cold for half the year. One independent analysis Herz cites found that the 80% renewable portfolio standard proposed by the state’s Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy would save $6.7 billion in fuel costs over the next 35 years compared to an estimated $3.2 billion investment in the projects. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s latest assessment likewise found that a large clean-energy build-out would be “more affordable than relying on imported natural gas.”
Critically, then, the spring elections in Alaska will help decide both what the long-term solution will be and how quickly it should be implemented. The Anchorage mayoral runoff set for this coming Tuesday — a choice between incumbent Dave Bronson, a self-described “center-right kind of guy” who favors new Cook Inlet drilling, and Suzanne LaFrance, a Lead Locally-endorsed climate candidate pushing for a renewable mix — is perhaps the marquee race, albeit one with a more limited say over the future energy mix.
“Utilities have control over specifically where they get their energy from, and the legislature has a lot of control over how we tax different energy producers,” Jenny-Marie Stryker, the political director at The Alaska Center, the state’s largest conservation advocacy organization, told me. But while there is not “one turnkey thing that we’re looking for the mayor to do,” Stryker added, it’s instead the “many, many steps” LaFrance has promised to follow in the city’s climate action plan that would mark an improvement over Bronson. (LaFrance’s campaign did not respond to Heatmap’s request for comment.)
Bronson, who was elected during the pandemic when Alaskans were bristling against perceived government overreach, ignored his predecessor’s climate action plan and established the Southcentral Mayors’ Energy Coalition to address the Railbelt energy crisis — a move Stryker told me was a “pretty big waste of time,” since it’s something the 11-mayor group has “no control over.” Bronson defended his decision to me in an emailed statement, arguing that any climate action plan is by necessity secondary to addressing Southcentral Alaska’s immediate energy concerns.
“It is easy to say, ‘Let’s build a massive solar plant, let’s invest in tidal energy, let’s investigate geothermal,’” he wrote. “However, there are grid transmission upgrades that need to be made” before that can be a reality. Additionally, while the assumption is that building out new renewables is “easy,” the “permitting process alone can take 2-3 years, and in some cases, 5-6 years,” he stressed. (New LNG import terminals, meanwhile, might not be online until 2030.)
Herz, the reporter, told me earlier that renewable project developers “would be looking at capital expenditures that were 80% to 90% higher than they would be to develop utility-scale renewable projects in the Lower 48.” In an oil state, there is also an “inherent skepticism about some of the renewable technology and economic viability that you might not find elsewhere in the United States because there aren’t really big utility-scale projects that have been built here.” The ones that are on the board — including a possible and intriguing tidal energy project — fall more firmly into the purview of the local co-ops.
The utility board elections, then, have a more immediate hand in shaping the Railbelt’s future energy mix. Two of those elections have already taken place: for the board of the Matanushka Electric Association, where both climate candidates lost (albeit one by just 41 of 3,246 votes), and for the Homer Electric Association, where a climate candidate was re-elected and a challenger lost, maintaining the board’s ideological status quo. Chugach Electric Association, which represents Anchorage and is the largest provider in the state, will go next, with voting ongoing and ending May 17. That board is currently held by a pro-renewable majority that has advanced utility-scale wind and solar projects, with pro-gas challengers vying to take back control.
Finally, Fairbanks’ Golden Valley Electric Association ballots are due June 4, with Gary Newman, a pro-renewable Democrat, attempting to hold off Harmony Tomaszewski, who helped block a local climate action plan last year. Fairbanks has been hit especially hard by the energy crisis, burning coal and diesel to compensate for LNG shortfalls and polluting its air. A rate hike of about $29 more per month for households has also brought unusually high levels of public interest to the co-op election.
While “on paper” the current GVEA board is “pretty conservative,” Eleanor Gagnon, the energy justice organizer with the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, told me, its annual meeting in April featured a lot of talk about diversifying its energy portfolio — a conversation that would have been shocking even a few years ago. “They really seem to have come to the realization that more renewables are necessary because of these rate hikes, and because the rate hikes are due to the instability of natural gas sources,” she said.
I’ve spoken with organizers before about how policies with positive climate benefits are often economic issues at heart — ones that sometimes override environmental motivations — and that seems especially true in Alaska. “The urgency of Cook Inlet gas not meeting our demands by 2027 — folks are throwing climate out the window,” Pondolfino, the Cook Inletkeeper organizer, said. “They’re like, ‘We just need energy security and we need to be able to afford it.’”
The math shows that having a diversified renewable mix would be better economically than importing expensive LNG. That doesn’t mean it will be an easy transition, or a quick one, but it gives activists and advocates a clear goal to keep working toward on every ballot.
“Most people in the Lower 48 do not have any way to voice their opinion about the direction their utility should move in, or to vote for representatives,” Pondolfino said. “It is a privilege to vote in elections that have a really direct impact on people’s lives and their ability to afford to live here.”
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Then again, there are reasons why he’d want to focus on existing generation.
Just how big is the data center boom, really? How much is electricity demand going to expand over the coming decades? Business plans, government policy, and alarming environmental forecasts are all based on the idea that we’re on an unrelenting ride upwards in terms of electricity use, especially from data centers used to power artificial intelligence.
It’s one reason why the new Trump administration declared in the first days of its return to power that the country was in an “energy emergency,” and hasbeen used as a justification for its attempted revival of the coal industry.
But one mildly dissenting voice came from a perhaps-unexpected corner: the power industry.
Constellation Energy’s Chief Executive Officer Joseph Dominguez spent a portion of the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday throwing lukewarm water on the most aggressive load growth projections, even as the company looks to profit from increased demand for the power that its over 30,000-megawatt, largely nuclear fleet serves.
Dominguez told his audience of investors and analysts that utilities and their power customers have been telling Constellation that “the same data center need is being considered in multiple jurisdictions across the United States at the same time, just like fishing. If you’re a fisherman, you put a bunch of lines in the water to try to catch fish, and the data center developers are doing exactly the same thing.”
This means that different electricity markets or utility territories could report the same future data center demand, when ultimately the developer will pick just one site.
Tallying the demand growth projections from a few large power markets — namely MISO, which largely serves the Midwest; PJM, which largely serves the East Coast; and ERCOT, the Texas energy market — which together “account for less than half” of U.S. power demand, Dominguez said, Constellation finds that they project “notably higher” demand growth than many third-party consultants and analysts foresee for the country as a whole.
“It’s hard not to conclude that the headlines are inflated,” Dominguez said. He further claimed that Constellation had “done the math,” and that “if Nvidia were able to double its output and every single chip went to ERCOT, it still wouldn’t be enough chips to support some of the load forecasts.”
He argued that utilities tend to overstate load growth — an observation backed up by research from the Rocky Mountain Institute. “We get it,” he said. “Utilities have to plan to ensure that the system is reliable.” That frequently means erring on the side of having more generation and transmission to serve future demand as opposed to being caught short.
Dominguez is hardly the first voice to call into question load growth forecasts. Energy industry consultant Jonathan Koomey told Heatmap more than a year ago that “everyone needs to calm the heck down” about AI-driven load growth. Data center developers, chipmakers, and AI companies would likely find efficiencies to get more computing power out of less electric power, he predicted, similar to how the original data center buildout avoided catastrophic predictions of imminent power shortages and spiking electricity prices in the early 2000s.
Since then, demand growth projections have done nothing but rise. But even just a few weeks ago, Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, told Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, “It is simultaneously true that I think this is going to be a really large demand driver and that we have bubble-like characteristics in terms of the amount of stuff that people are trying to get done.”
Now, to be clear, Dominguez has a reason to talk down expectations of future demand growth — and with it the expectation that there needs to be massive investment in new power plants. Constellation owns and operates a fleet of nuclear power plants, and is bringing on a gas-heavy fleet with its planned acquisition of Calpine.
Dominguez also said that new natural gas and renewables were likely to prove expensive to build.
“The cost of new entry, whether that be for combined cycle machines or solar with storage, has gone up substantially, as has the time to build and site these assets,” Dominguez said. “Now, at the end of the day, in a tightening market, we compete with the cost of new entry.”
This is halfway consistent with what other big players in the energy industry have been saying. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra, which has a large renewables development business,has been telling anyone who will listen that the way to meet urgent load growth is with renewables and batteries, as they can be built cheaper and faster than natural gas, let alone nuclear.
Dominguez’s take, however, is that it’s all quite expensive and lengthy considering the likely level of need.
“When I listen to some of the comments on these calls, I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here.”
On defending wind, Russian gas, and NREL layoffs
Current conditions: A state of emergency is in effect in Manitoba, Canada, due to multiple wildfires • 17 million people in the south-central U.S. are at risk of severe storms on Tuesday • The Interior Department has reportedly suspended air quality monitoring for National Parks, including California’s Joshua Tree, where the AQI today is moderate.
Attorneys general from 17 Democratic states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging President Trump’s executive order pausing approvals, permits, and loans for onshore and offshore wind projects. The lawsuit argues that Trump exceeds his authority with the indefinite pause, which threatens “thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments, and … is delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet,” in the words of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition.
In a response to the lawsuit, a White House spokesperson told The Associated Press that “the American people voted for the president to restore America’s energy dominance, and Americans in blue states should not have to pay the price of the Democrats’ radical climate agenda.” As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written, however, state climate goals “become nearly impossible if no additional [wind] projects are able to get through the permitting process until at least 2029,” with New York state’s especially in jeopardy after the administration ordered the halt of construction on the fully permitted Empire Wind project south of Long Island.
The European Union plans to announce on Tuesday a 2027 deadline for companies to end any remaining energy contracts with Russia, the Financial Times reported Monday. Though the EU’s use of Russian oil and coal virtually ended with sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe still bought 49.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas through pipelines in 2024, and another 24.2 billion transported on ships as liquified natural gas, per Rystad Energy (though some of that LNG was resold). Another way of looking at it: “The EU purchased a total of [$26 billion] in Russian energy in 2024, exceeding its military assistance to Ukraine last year,” Bloomberg writes, with imports accounting for about 19% of the bloc’s total gas purchases.
The proposed measures will need to be approved by a majority of EU member states and the European Parliament before they can be adopted, according to FT. Without Russian LNG, Europe is expected to turn to the U.S. to meet its energy needs.
Share of European Union gas demand met by Russian supply, 2001-2024
IEA
More than 100 employees at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory lost their jobs in a round of layoffs on Monday, Mother Jones reports. The cuts included non-probationary employees, or those who’ve worked at the Department of Energy division for over two years.
Though NREL has more than 3,000 employees on staff, sources who spoke with Mother Jones described the cuts as “rather haphazard and unorganized,” while others stressed that “if I am suddenly the only person on my team, I can’t handle that work.” The layoffs also notably come after President Trump’s “skinny” budget proposed $15 billion in cuts to Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding. The White House Office of Management and Budget has said that the budget aims to reorient the Department of Energy’s funding away from “unreliable renewable energy” and “toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to end door-to-door survivor outreach in disaster areas for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire seasons, Wired reported Monday, based on a FEMA memo dated May 2. Previously, the agency would canvass disaster survivors to inform them about how to register for federal aid, a policy that one emergency management coordinator told Wired was critical given how many survivors don’t get adequate information about recovery resources otherwise. Instead, FEMA’s memo said the agency will “focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues.”
Last year, Republicans on the Oversight Committee singled out FEMA’s outreach program over alleged “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” in the wake of Hurricane Milton. The White House’s budget has also cited FEMA for supposedly “skipping over homes when providing aid.” But the Trump administration has also sought to pare back the agency aggressively: Earlier this year, it denied a request for federal aid from Arkansas’ Republican Governor and former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders after severe tornadoes that left more than 40 people in the region dead, arguing the disaster was not “beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies” to address.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
The Los Angeles Dodgers have faced calls from activists and fans to end their sponsorship deal with Phillips 66’s 76 gas station brand — but the partnership might face a natural end due to the Olympics coming to L.A. in 2028, Legal Planet reports. Dodger Stadium will be an official Olympic venue during the summer games, and its 76 gas ads will violate the Olympic Charter prohibiting “commercial installations and advertising signs … in the stadia, venues or other sports grounds.”
The Dodgers are under mounting pressure to drop the Phillips 66 partnership even earlier. There are 76 gasoline ads “plastered throughout the ballpark, from the visiting team’s bullpen to the ribbon board screens lining the stands … Even the on-deck circles on the field, where batters prepare to hit, are orange-and-blue 76 logos,” the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth wrote last year in a column calling for the team to break up with the oil company. As of November, the Houston-based energy company was facing six counts of violating the U.S. Clean Water Act by illegally discharging 790,000 gallons of wastewater from its Carson refinery into the L.A. County sewer system. “The lead up to the 2028 Olympic games period would seem to be a natural time for the Dodgers to reset a marquee sponsor for years to come — and to do so on their own terms — or else be forced to by Olympic rules,” Legal Planet writes.
“C’mon Ford, c’mon GM, c’mon Chrysler, let’s roll again/Build something useful that people need, build us a safe way for us to be/Build us something that won’t kill our kids, that runs real clean, that runs real clean.” —Lyrics to Neil Young’s new single “Let’s Roll Again.”
House Republicans’ new plan to transform NEPA, explained
A powerful House Republican committee has proposed shaking up one of the country’s key permitting laws as part of the ongoing process to write President Trump’s tax bill.
A new bill, drafted by the House Natural Resources Committee would transform the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Under NEPA as it stands today, the government must study the environmental impact of any “major” federal action. Any time a federal agency adopts a new policy, builds a new project, spends federal dollars, or issues a license or permit, that choice gets a full environmental review.
Crucially, this also means that the federal government must study the environmental impact even of privately developed projects that require some kind of federal sign-off. But the new bill would quicken this process and likely shield it from court review.
The law represents a “big step” for permitting reform, Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, told us. “It’s creative and extremely aggressive.” If it passes, Republicans’ budget measure could speed up the construction of energy projects around the country. But it could also reduce local or environmental groups’ ability to sue to slow down or block development.
The bill would allow companies to pay a fee to access a faster, more streamlined NEPA process that would not be reviewable by the courts, according to the bill. That means environmental groups would likely have a harder time suing the government for failing to account for various environmental maladies in their study.
Under the draft legislation, companies would pay 125% of the cost of preparing the report to get an expedited review. But avoiding a lengthy court fight is so valuable that many companies would likely take advantage of this new process, Bagley told us.
“You can read it as effectively creating a price for a litigation shield — the federal government is allowing developers to buy themselves out of litigation risk with a flat fee,” he said.
It would change the status quo in two important ways.
First, many federal agencies already require project sponsors to pay the full cost of preparing a NEPA report for a private project, such as a solar farm or geothermal well. The House Republican proposal would increase this cost by just 25% on the front end.
Second, under the law today, agencies take more than four years on average to prepare a NEPA report, which can regularly stretch into the hundreds of pages. Congress has periodically tried to impose tighter deadlines and shorter page limits on the NEPA process — including in a 2023 debt ceiling law — but it hasn’t been successful.
That’s because the threat of lawsuits ultimately drives the NEPA process, Bagley said. Civil servants write lengthy, meticulous NEPA reports not because statute requires them to do so, but because they’re afraid of losing their work in a lawsuit, he said.
“The thing driving lengthy timelines is litigation risk,” Bagley told us. “Unless and until you correct for the threat of judicial review, NEPA reform isn’t going to go that far.” This proposal is the first modern NEPA report to offer protection from judicial review.
The proposal could help speed up all types of energy projects.
But it could help some more than others. Certain fossil fuel projects — especially those involving fracking — have already received some form of exemption from the NEPA process. But renewables and clean energy projects broadly don’t have such a carve-out. Neither do some other types of natural gas infrastructure, such as pipelines and export terminals. These projects could benefit from a faster and less court-reviewable NEPA process.
This is the big question. To comply with the strictures of what’s known as the “Byrd Rule,” provisions in reconciliation must be primarily budgetary in nature, i.e. related to taxing and spending.
Provisions that have a budgetary effect but are “merely incidental” to their non-budgetary components can be ruled by the Senate Parliamentarian to be “extraneous” and excluded from the bill.
Parliamentarian rulings helped shape — and narrow — Democratic proposals in 2021 and 2022, including stripping out immigration provisions and minimum wage hikes from various bills that were working their way through the reconciliation process.
So where does overhauling NEPA fit in? The 125% fee makes the provisions of the House language arguably germane to the budgetary purposes of the reconciliation package. Supporters of the language will cite a precedent in the Inflation Reduction Act that waived judicial review for the program’s negotiation of drug prices in Medicare.
One way the parliamentarian will try to answer this question is by asking, “‘Is that big policy change necessary in order to achieve the budgetary impact?’ That’s the place where this could fail,” Thomas Hochman, the director of infrastructure policy at the Foundation of American Innovation, told us.
NEPA isn’t the only law that requires the government to study the environmental or cultural impact of its decisions. A handful of other laws — including the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, or the Clean Water Act — mandate their own permitting process, which can also be lengthy.
Many of these laws impose substantive obligations on government decisions. The NHPA, for instance, requires the government to study whether any decisions will affect Native American cultural sites and to reach an agreement about how to mitigate that impact. These decisions can then be reviewed by the courts — NHPA was at the heart of the Dakota Access pipeline and SunZia cases.
Under the law today, the government often satisfies its duties under these laws as part of a broader “NEPA process,” with one agency essentially handling the paperwork for all the federal permitting laws that matter to a project together.
The House Republican proposal wouldn’t weaken or affect any of these laws, Hochman and Bagley told us. The government would still need to satisfy its obligations under all other federal permitting laws, and the courts could still review those decisions. It’s unclear how those laws would fit into the new streamlined NEPA process.
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia led two efforts during the Biden years to pass permitting reform legislation through the conventional lawmaking process. The bills tended to combine policy asks from Republicans and Democrats — that is, oil and gas interests as well as green energy and transmission developers — in an effort to build a broad consensus in favor of policy change.
What that looked like in practice was specific carveouts designed to facilitate the building of long-range transmission lines alongside, say, changes in schedules for leases for extracting fossil fuels on public lands.
This time, Republicans alone are driving the permitting reform process, because the reconciliation bill is expected to be approved (or not) on party lines.
The reconciliation language says nothing specific about transmission, for example, but it includes specific provisions favored by the oil and gas industry like mandating lease sales on a quarterly basis. The American Petroleum Institute praised the bill, and the Sierra Club said that “the only way it could be friendlier to Big Oil CEOs would be if they wrote it themselves.”
But the reform to how NEPA is — and isn’t — litigated is a genuine breakthrough in years of drawing up failed permitting reform plans.
“We haven’t yet seen one bipartisan bill on permitting that broadly amends judicial review,” Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told us.
“One of the difficulties in doing permitting reform is that there isn’t just one problem that needs solving. There are a bunch of things that all add up to a really difficult process that takes a long time and has massive degrees of uncertainty,” Fishman said.
To the extent clean energy projects face sometimes fatal delays due to the specific rigors of the NEPA process, the bill would remove a barrier to their development.
NEPA has proven to be a significant barrier to solar development. About two thirds of solar projects that were assessed under NEPA between 2010 and 2018 faced litigation, as well as almost one third of pipelines and 38% of wind projects, according to Stanford researchers Michael Bennon and Devon Wilson.
Even when agencies win court cases — which can be filed up to six years after a federal agency decision — “litigation overwhelmingly functions as a form of delay,” according to Breakthrough Institute research.
It’s unclear whether the House Republican proposal will ultimately speed up federal energy project approvals, or whether litigants will shift to opposing projects under other permitting laws, such as the Endangered Species Act or NHPA. But permitting reform advocates agree that the proposal nonetheless represents a big step.
“It would be a pretty good shield for persnickety criticisms of [environmental reviews] that are now de rigueur, but it might not provide complete protection from the full run of environmental objections waged against a project,” Bagley said.
“I am firmly convinced that NEPA is a big problem for helping to create and reinforce defensiveness on the part of agency officials. But it’s part of a big web of accountability run maybe too amok,” he said. “One answer is to start clipping parts of the web — it doesn’t fix the whole problem, but it might help you see what else becomes salient.”