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Current conditions: Tropical storm Filipo will make landfall on Mozambique’s coast today • Morel season has begun in parts of the Midwest • It is cold and cloudy in Stockholm, where police forcibly removed climate activst Greta Thunberg from the entrance to parliament.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Climate and energy ‘figure prominently’ in Biden’s budget
President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget yesterday, and his “climate and energy promises figured prominently,” reportedE&E News. Biden requested $17.8 billion for the Interior Department to help with climate resilience, national parks, wildfire management, tribal programs, ecosystem restoration, and water infrastructure in the west. He wants $11 billion for the EPA and $51 billion for the Department of Energy to tackle climate change and help fund the energy transition. The proposal calls for funding toward expanding the “Climate Corps.” Biden also asked Congress to put $500 million into the international Green Climate Fund in 2025, and then more in the following years. And he wants to make this spending mandatory. The budget would also “cut wasteful subsidies to Big Oil and other special interests,” Biden said. As Morning Brewnoted, the budget proposal has “about as much chance of getting passed by Congress as a bill guaranteeing each American a pet unicorn, so it’s mostly a statement of Biden’s priorities.”
2. U.S. EV prices drop 13% year-over-year
EV prices in the U.S. have dropped by about 13% in the last year, according to Kelley Blue Book. The drop “has been led in part by the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, the two most popular EVs in the U.S.,” explained Michelle Lewis at Electrek. However, EVs are still more expensive than “mainstream non-luxury vehicles,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Industry Insights at Cox Automotive.
3. Report: BYD struggles to ramp up overseas EV sales
Chinese EV maker BYD has reportedly hit a speed bump on the road to international expansion. Having dominated the Chinese market and established itself as the top-selling EV maker in the world, BYD set an internal goal of selling 400,000 cars overseas this year. But a global slowdown in EV sales growth has hampered that effort, reported The Wall Street Journal. “As of the end of last year, more than 10,000 BYD passenger cars were waiting in warehouses in Europe,” the Journal added, “and the certificates authorizing them to be sold in the European Union are set to expire soon, meaning it may not be possible to sell them in Europe.” At the same time, quality control issues have been cropping up in some vehicles, and higher prices in Europe are making it more difficult for the company to compete with better-known brands.
4. U.K. emissions hit 145-year low
Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK fell last year to their lowest level since 1879, according to analysis from Carbon Brief. The decline is attributed mainly to a drop in gas demand thanks to higher electricity imports and warmer temperatures. As recently as 2014, the power sector was the UK’s largest source of emissions, but now it has been eclipsed by transportation, buildings, industry, and agriculture. “Transport emissions have barely changed over the past several decades as more efficient cars have been offset by increased traffic,” Carbon Brief explained. Remarkably, coal use in the country is at its lowest level since the 1730s, “when George II was on the throne.” The emissions drop is good news but “with only one coal-fired power station remaining and the power sector overall now likely only the fifth-largest contributor to UK emissions, the country will need to start cutting into gas power and looking to other sectors” to meet net zero by 2050. Meanwhile, the British government today announced a plan to build new gas plants.
5. Seaside town’s $500K new protective sand dune washes away in 3 days
Residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, last week finished building a $500,000 sand dune meant to protect their beachside homes from rising tides and repeated storms. Three days later, the barrier, made of 14,000 tons of sand, washed away when a storm brought historic high tides to the seaside town. “We got hit with three storms – two in January, one now – at the highest astronomical tides possible,” said Rick Rigoli, who oversaw the project. The sea level off the Massachusetts coast has risen by 8 inches since 1950, and is now rising by about 1 inch every 8 years.
THE KICKER
On average, installing a heat pump in your home could cut between 2.5 to 4.4 tons of carbon during the equipment’s lifespan, meaning widespread adoption could result in a 5% to 9% drop in national economy-wide emissions.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress
Georgia is arguably the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act economy. The state has been a magnet for manufacturing companies seeking to supply batteries, electric cars, and solar cells in order to capture the law’s generous tax credits for domestically built green technology.
While some of the power that supplies these facilities (not to mention data centers also flocking to the state) is clean — the only new U.S. nuclear reactors built this decade are in Georgia, and 38% of electricity generation for the state’s largest utility, Georgia Power, came from non-carbon-emitting sources in 2024 — the state is now planning to bolster its natural gas and coal fleets to support its enormous projected load growth.
Georgia Power released its 2025 Integrated Resource Plan on Friday, laying out to state regulators its forecasts for electricity demand and how it intends to bolster and adjust its fleet to meet the new usage. These exercises almost always feature eye-popping demand estimates and corrections and addendums to older plans to account for even more electricity growth than had been previously projected.
This time around, Georgia Power says it expects 8,200 megawatts of load growth through the end of 2030, which is already about 2,000 megawatts more than what it expected during its last planning exercise, when it updated its 2022 plan in 2023. To get a sense of the scale of this growth, the new Vogtle nuclear reactors have a little over 1,000 megawatts of capacity each. Together, they took 11 years and over $30 billion to build.
That new power won’t just be powering data centers. It will also run much of the green economy that the Biden administration tried to build up.
“New and expanding economic development projects in Georgia have progressed more rapidly and on a larger scale than in previous years,” Georgia Power said in its filing. “Growth in emerging industries such as electric transportation (‘ET’), data centers, and solar manufacturing have accelerated since 2021.”
The report also said that by the middle of last year, “the manufacturing sector led in both investment and job creation in Georgia, representing 53% of job growth and 54% of capital investment in the state.”
Hyundai opened a plant making electric SUVs outside of Savannah in 2024, while Kia makes electric SUVs near the Alabama border after making a $200 million investment in the plant. Also last year, the Korean solar company Qcells started making solar panels in Dalton, Georgia and other components in Cartersville; another Korean company, SK Group, has plants in Commerce that make batteries for Volkswagen and Ford. And in the final days of the Biden administration, Rivian got a $6.6 billion Energy Department loan for its planned plant between Atlanta and Athens.
One reason manufacturers come to Georgia is for the power, Tim Echols, the vice-chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, argued in an Atlanta Journal Constitution op-ed Thursday: “Southern Co. and Georgia Power have a reputation for reliability,” he wrote.
And for the foreseeable future that Georgia Power plans for, that means some of its most polluting and carbon-emitting power plants will stay open.
In the update to its previous IRP, Georgia Power extended the life of a coal plant operated by its sister utility Mississippi Power and proposed adding 1.4 gigawatts of generators that could run on natural gas or oil.
Compared to 2022, “the Company now projects capacity needs that necessitate both the extension of existing coal and gas-steam units along with the procurement of new capacity resources,” Georgia Power said in its IRP Friday.
Georgia Power’s parent company, Southern Company, still has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, but said in the filling that “the feasibility of continued progress toward a low-carbon future, including a net-zero future, is highly dependent on the continued use of natural gas and continued technological advancements that will facilitate a reliable and economic low-carbon electricity supply.”
The utility also wants to upgrade existing gas-fueled and hydroelectric plants, as well as acquire an additional 1,100 megawatts of new renewables, adding up to 4,000 megawatts of procurements. Georgia Power’s previous update to its 2022 IRP called for the construction of new oil and gas plants, which were approved by regulators last year.
"Georgia Power's 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) includes adding up to 4,000 megawatts of new renewable energy resources by 2035, including 1,000 MW by 2032, and more than 1,000 miles of new transmission lines. Clean energy resources and transmission solutions are vital to reducing customer costs and maintaining the high level of reliability Georgians have grown accustomed to,” Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, said in a statement.
Donald Trump reemphasized on Friday that he intends to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico beginning February 1, and while that date is rapidly approaching, the details remain sparse. Although the president has suggested the duties will be sweeping, covering everything from cars to lumber to oil, their impact on one key commodity — electricity — is very much in question.
The U.S. imports thousands of gigawatt hours of electricity from Canada every year, worth in the billions of dollars. While electricity from Canada makes up less than 1% of our nationwide power consumption, it’s a significant and growing source of low-cost, low-carbon power for some regions, especially the Northeast. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has threatened to cut off power exports into the U.S. entirely in retaliation for the tariffs. But even if he doesn’t, if the tariffs apply to electricity imports, then power flows across the border would still likely decline. That’s because domestic natural gas-fired power would suddenly become much more economical.
“Electricity from Canada competes against natural gas power plants,” Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a professor at the University of Montreal’s business school who studies electricity markets, told me. “The gas power plants would be so happy to have these tariffs.”
But whether the tariffs would or could apply to the trade of electricity is still a big open question. While it would be technically and administratively feasible to tax imports of electricity, Pineau told me, there’s no system set up to do that right now. “Electricity doesn’t go through customs,” he said.
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The U.S. International Trade Commission, the federal agency that advises on international trade and tariffs, told me it was not “able to speculate on tariffs being applied to electricity or how that would be done.” The public affairs officer sent me a report from the Commission, however, which confirmed that it would be unprecedented. It states that “imports of electrical energy are not considered to be subject to the tariff laws of the United States.”
Regardless, officials in Maine and Massachusetts began warning about the impacts of potential tariffs on electricity last week. Governor of Massachusetts Maura Healey told business leaders that tariffs could increase electricity costs by $100 million to $200 million statewide, as approximately 5% to 10% of the electricity New England consumes comes from Canada. (I reached out to the Independent System Operator for New England, but the grid operator had no more clarity on whether or how tariffs on power imports would work. “We do not have expertise in international trade, and we’d be looking for guidance if or when a tariff is implemented. Beyond that, we’re not able to speculate at this time.”)
The U.S. generally imports electricity from Canada in two different ways. Some of it is part of a “firm contract.” For example, the New York grid operator has a contract with Hydro-Quebec, a Canadian hydropower company, through 2030, to import up to 900 megawatts of capacity at a fixed rate. Hydro-Quebec also has an agreement with Vermont to supply about 25% of its annual electricity needs through 2038. John-Thomas Bernard, an energy economist at the University of Ottawa, told me that for those contracts, if the 25% tax applied, it would be passed directly onto customers.
But most of the electricity the U.S. consumes from Canada is purchased in a daily or hourly market, where U.S. grid operators just buy whatever is cheapest. Tariffs would essentially force Canadian producers out of that market, Bernard said. “The bulk of what would have to be replaced on the U.S. side will come from gas.”
Whether this would produce a noticeable cost increase for consumers would largely depend on the price of natural gas. In 2023, imports to New York from Quebec dropped precipitously because a drought reduced hydropower capacity, but natural gas prices were also especially low, so electricity prices were not significantly higher.
Low natural gas prices are not guaranteed in the long term, of course. “Natural gas prices are very market driven, and the more we are reliant on natural gas in the northeast, the more demand you put on that supply, the more those prices are going to go up,” Daniel Sosland, president of the New England-based environmental nonprofit the Acadia Center, told me.
And if the tariffs remained in effect in 2026, New Yorkers would be hit much harder. That’s when the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a power line that will deliver 1,200 megawatts of Canadian hydropower into New York City, is expected to be completed. The line will supply some 20% of New York City’s electricity demand.
“I don’t know what the point of all this is,” Sosland told me. Electricity trade between the U.S. and Canada brings mutual benefits, he said. “The idea of tariffs and trying to create a fence along the system is going to be very destructive to customer cost, to clean air, to power reliability, because it’s going to foreclose all these other options that are on the table right now that provide benefits on both sides.”
The exception to all of this is a small population of about 58,000 ratepayers in the state of Maine who live near the border and get virtually all of their electricity from New Brunswick, Canada. William Harwood, the public advocate for Maine, estimates these communities could see an increase of $6 to $7 per month on their electricity bills. Harwood didn’t have any additional insight into whether the tariffs would or could apply to electricity — he was merely looking into the impacts on constituents if they did. “They are electrically part of Canada,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story originally misstated a unit of energy when referring to Canada’s energy exports. It’s gigawatt hours, not gigawatts. It’s been corrected.
This story also has been updated to reflect Trump’s continued emphasis that tariffs will begin February 1.
Current conditions: Flowers are blooming in Moscow as parts of Russia experience unseasonally warm weather • The UK is being battered by yet another storm after Éowyn and Herminia brought back-to-back flooding events • An atmospheric river is expected to soak Northern California this weekend.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Burgum confirmed as Interior secretary
The Cabinet confirmations continue. Doug Burgum was confirmed yesterday as the new secretary of the Interior Department, where he will be in charge of executing President Trump’s plans to “drill, baby, drill.” He’ll also oversee the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Land Management. One of his first priorities will be to carry out the president’s executive order pausing new offshore wind leasing and permitting. During his confirmation hearings, Burgum suggested that “clean coal” could help with decarbonization, backed up Trump’s disdain for wind power, and dodged questions seeking reassurance about his commitment to protecting federal lands. More than half of the Senate Democrats voted for Burgum’s confirmation.
President Trump is reportedly considering ways to cancel New York City’s congestion pricing. The tolling program – the first in the nation – came into effect in early January and has produced “undeniably positive results,” according to Janno Lieber, CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It has prevented some 1 million vehicles from entering lower Manhattan, significantly reduced congestion and commuting times, and made bus services more efficient. Weekday ridership on some bus routes has increased by nearly 15%, and subway ridership has grown by 7.3%. “Better bus service, faster drive times, and safer streets are good for all New Yorkers,” Lieber said.
MTA
3. DOT moves to eliminate ‘climate change’ policies
The Department of Transportation this week moved to carry out some of President Trump’s executive orders aimed at eliminating all Biden-era policies that “reference or relate in any way” to climate change, “greenhouse gas” emissions (quotes are theirs), and environmental justice. A memorandum from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy gave all administrations and agencies operating under DOT purview 10 days to produce a written report listing any policies relating to these climate issues and then another 10 days to terminate those policies. Duffy’s order also canceled a 2023 DOT policy that required all agencies to consider climate change adaptation and resilience in planning. The DOT employs 55,000 people across various bureaus including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, and many others.
4. Orsted ousts Mads Nipper as CEO
Mads Nipper is out as CEO of the world’s largest offshore wind developer. Orsted is replacing Nipper tomorrow with the company’s current deputy chief executive and chief commercial officer, Rasmus Errboe. The decision comes just 10 days after Orsted announced a $1.7 billion write-down in the U.S., which it blamed on challenging economic conditions like high interest rates and general uncertainty about the offshore wind industry. Nipper’s departure isn’t all that surprising – he held on after the company announced huge impairments from abandoning some U.S. projects in 2023. The latest write-downs were the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” one source told the Financial Times. In a statement, Errboe acknowledged the “headwinds” facing the industry, and said “offshore wind remains crucial for the green transition, and we’re deeply committed to pursuing our vision of a world that runs entirely on green energy.”
5. World invested $2 trillion in energy transition last year
More than $2 trillion was invested in the global energy transition last year, according to BloombergNEF’s annual energy Transition Investment Trends report. That’s 11% more than was spent in 2023, and a new record. But … investment growth seems to be slowing, and it still falls short of the $5.6 trillion that experts say will be needed each year between now and 2030 to have a shot at reaching net zero by 2050. The report contains lots of interesting statistics. For example:
Decarbonizing transportation received the largest amount of investment at $757 billion. Renewable energy came in second at $728 billion, followed by power grids at $390 billion.
Investment in “emerging tech” like carbon capture, hydrogen, nuclear, and clean shipping fell by 23%, while investment in “proven, commercially scalable” technologies grew by nearly 15% “despite hindrance from policy decisions, higher interest rates and expected slower consumer purchasing.”
About 60% of the total investment in the supply chain went to batteries.
Climate tech fundraising was down 40% year-over-year.
THE KICKER
“If Trump makes good on his threats to tariff oil imports from Canada and Mexico, then he will cost the American oil and gas industry tens of billions of dollars while causing gasoline prices to rise across much of the country.”
MTA