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On campaign finance, offshore nuclear reactors, and research satellites.
Current conditions: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a disaster declaration across 88 counties as flooding there continues • 48 people have died in China after record rainfall caused a landslide that swept away part of a highway • Louisville is forecast to see a brief dry spell during the Kentucky Derby, but rain ahead of the race could still leave the track muddy.
Individuals who’ve gotten wealthy from the oil and gas industry funneled more than $6.4 million into Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee, the Trump 47 Committee, in the first three months of 2024, nearly equaling the $6.9 million the industry contributed during all of 2023, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported. Some of that money has gone toward covering the former president’s legal fees, via a political action committee that has mainly been used for legal spending and has paid 70 different lawyers and law firms. The committee has prioritized directing the funds toward the PAC ahead of the Republican National Committee (though these donations are still subject to the $5,000 annual individual contribution limit).
Fossil fuel interests “have made it super clear that they are willing to help pay Trump’s legal defense to help keep him out of jail,” Alex Witt, senior advisor on oil and gas for the strategic communications group Climate Power, told Lange.
Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry is also pouring money into other federal campaigns, Capital & Main reported. The candidate who has received the most oil and gas money so far this election cycle is August Pfluger, a Republican from Texas, who represents the 11th congressional district in the central part of the state. Pfluger is not in a tight reelection race but has been a consistent ally of the industry, including by challenging the Biden administration’s suspension of new liquefied natural gas export licenses. So far this election cycle, oil and gas interests have contributed seven times more money to Republicans and conservatives than to Democrats and liberals, campaign finance data from Open Secrets shows. The renewable energy sector has contributed nearly twice as much to Democrats as to Republicans over the same period.
Capital & Main asked the American Petroleum Institute, a major political contributor, why it favored GOP candidates. Scott Lauermann, an API spokesperson, responded: “API supports leaders from both parties who align with our policy priorities and recognize the importance of the U.S. natural gas and oil in supporting millions of American jobs, meeting demand for affordable and reliable energy, and reducing emissions through cleaner fuels.”
Pfluger in the U.S. Capitol. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Treasury Department and the Department of Energy finalized rules that determine which EVs are eligible for the $7,500 consumer tax credit and $4,000 used vehicle tax credit on Friday. More specifically, the rules govern what percentage of battery components and critical minerals have to be sourced from the U.S. or our trade allies, how to determine whether those components were made by a “foreign entity of concern,” and how manufacturers must document their sourcing to the government. The administration made only minor adjustments to the initial guidance released last year, such as a requirement to conduct more detailed critical mineral supply chain tracing beginning in 2027.
This is important news for automakers, who will have a more complete picture moving forward of the investments they’ll need to make in new supply chains and domestic manufacturing to ensure their vehicles qualify. For consumers, though, it won’t change much. The administration isn’t anticipating any immediate changes in the number of eligible vehicles, and buyers will still be able to claim the tax credit as a rebate off the listing price at the dealership, a program that started at the beginning of this year.
China is taking steps toward putting floating nuclear reactors in the South China Sea, the Washington Post reported. Chinese state media has said that the reactors would power military facilities there, according to U.S. officials, and though the reactors are likely still several years away from being built, the plan is ringing alarm bells. “Our concern is that the closer they get to deploying floating nuclear power plants, the faster they’ll use them for purposes contrary to the national security of the United States and broader security in the region,” an unnamed senior State Department official told the Post.
Many countries are working on floating reactor designs, but most such projects are still in development. International standards have not been established for the reactors’ construction or safe operation.
The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday approved oil giant Exxon Mobil’s acquisition of Permian Basin extraction company Pioneer Natural Resources — but only if the latter company’s founder and CEO, Scott Sheffield, refrained from taking a seat on the board. In doing so, the FTC accused Sheffield of colluding with OPEC, the organization that sets output levels for many of the world’s biggest oil producers. The goal of his cooperation, the agency said, was to “reduce output of oil and gas, which would result in Americans paying higher prices at the pump, to inflate profits for his company.” Pioneer issued a statement saying it was surprised by the FTC’s claim and disagreed with its contention, but that it would not take any steps to prevent the merger from closing.
The first of two NASA satellites that will study the relationship between Earth’s poles and climate change could launch as soon as May 22, according to Space.com. Each roughly the size of a shoebox and equipped with a temperature sensor, the satellites that make up the PREFIRE mission — that’s Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment — will measure the amount of thermal energy that escapes via the poles.
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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.