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Democrats and Republicans both love it. But will they find the money for it?
As the 118th Congress prepares to clear the way for a new set of legislators who will be responsible for confirming cabinet picks, passing tax legislation, and whatever else the President-reelect throws at them, it is also quietly working on bills to ease the development path for the one form of clean, firm power that Republicans and Democrats can peaceably unite around: geothermal.
Geothermal has something to offer for everyone in Washington. “It’s a source of clean energy, which makes it appealing to Democrats,” Aidan Mackenzie, a fellow at the science and technology policy group the Institute for Progress, told me. It can also generate electricity 24 hours a day with no greenhouse gas emissions, thus potentially making it a key part of the decarbonized grid of the future.
For Republicans, it does all this while also employing the people, skills, and sometimes the actual gear of the oil and gas industry to drill deep into pockets of trapped heat, which are often in states Republicans control. For this reason, it “fits very well with ‘drill baby drill’ Republican ethos,” Mackenzie added.
This overlap has opened up space for bipartisan cooperation, especially on tailoring and rewriting permitting rules for the industry. This week, the House passed two bills with essentially unanimous Republican and some Democratic support: the HEATS Act, which exempts some geothermal exploration activity from permitting requirements, and the CLEAN Act, which mandates more geothermal lease sales by the Department of the Interior.
At the same time, a group of moderate Democrats have pressed House and Senate leadership to pass the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, proposed by Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso. That bill includes several policies either borrowed from the Senate’s bipartisan GEO Act or mirroring the new House bills, including measures to exempt some geothermal development from environmental reviews and establish an ombudsman to coordinate permitting. The bill has already passed the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, of which Manchin and Barrasso are the co-chairs, and negotiations to get a bill that could pass the House and a full Senate vote are ongoing.
Traditionally, geothermal has been limited by the availability of the resource, namely extremely hot water or steam trapped in the Earth’s surface, which is then tapped through drilling. Next generation technologies bring fluid to hot rocks underground, vastly expanding the potential of the technology.
“The U.S. electricity market is desperate for 24/7 new power,” Jeremy Harrell, chief executive officer of the conservative environmental group ClearPath, told me. The Department of Energy has estimated that so-called next generation geothermal could provide some 90 gigawatts of continuous clean energy generating capacity by 2050, which could help unlock truly decarbonized grids.
All of this makes the case for bipartisanship pretty clear. The HEATS and CLEAN Act were sponsored by Republicans Young Kim of California and Russ Fulcher of Idaho, while the GEO Act was sponsored by two Republicans, James Risch of Idaho and Mike Lee of Utah, alongside two Democrats, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. Two of those sponsors, Lee and Heinrich, will be the chair and ranking members of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, respectively, in the upcoming Congress.
“Scaling our investments in research, development, and demonstration, and reforming the way we permit geothermal projects on our public lands are bipartisan priorities,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “As we approach the next Congress, I remain committed to putting geothermal projects on an equal footing with oil and gas projects on public lands and accelerating the deployment of advanced geothermal energy systems nationwide.”
Those oil and gas companies are also sometimes investors in geothermal projects, and in the case of enhanced geothermal technology, share workers, drilling techniques, and equipment. Enhanced geothermal startup Fervo, for instance, counts the fracking company Liberty Energy among its investors. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, is Liberty’s CEO.
Something else that may benefit geothermal in the years to come: It received relatively few benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act compared to other clean energy sectors, and therefore isn’t closely associated with a law passed on a partisan basis. “We notoriously got left out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the IRA. That’s well documented,” Jeanine Vany, the co-founder of the closed-loop advanced geothermal company Eavor, told me.
Geothermal did get some money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including $84 million for pilot demonstration projects, Harrell pointed out. But that “wasn’t a ton,” he said, and there’s still a “a need for reasonable but targeted investments.” And while Republicans and Democrats may be able to play nice on reforming regulatory requirements for geothermal, agreeing to spend more money may be more difficult.
“The question is, are the two parties willing to strike a deal?” Mackenzie said. “For Democrats, it’s accepting permitting changes. For Republicans, it’s a question of whether they are willing to spend any money on this.”
Senator Heinrich has called on Senate appropriators to include $100 million for next-generation geothermal demonstration projects, an effort that was notably joined only by his fellow Democrats.
The Institute for Progress and Employ America, an economic policy group, have proposed funding the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to help advance geothermal. The Office has already shelled out billions for advanced nuclear and carbon capture programs.
“It’s a question in an era where there’s a big focus of cutting back and not expanding,” Mackenzie told me. “Is there any actual room to get money out there?”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Employ America is a partner on the proposal for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
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On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
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So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explainedCal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.
Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This is the start of a new series: Shift Key Summer School. It’s a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, we try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s start with the joule. The joule is the SI unit for both work and energy. And the basic definition of energy is the ability to do work — not work in a job, but like work in the physics sense, meaning we are moving or displacing an object around. So a joule is defined as 1 newton-meter, among other things. It has an electrical equivalent, too. A newton is a unit of force, and force is accelerating a mass, from basic physics, over some distance in this case. So 1 meter of distance.
So we can break that down further, right? And we can describe the newton as 1 kilogram accelerated at 1 meter per second, squared. And then the work part is over a distance of one meter. So that kind of gives us a sense of something you feel. A kilogram, right, that’s 2.2 pounds. I don’t know, it’s like … I’m trying to think of something in my life that weighs a kilogram. Rob, can you think of something? A couple pounds of food, I guess. A liter of water weighs a kilogram by definition, as well. So if you’ve got like a liter bottle of soda, there’s your kilogram.
Then I want to move it over a meter. So I have a distance I’m displacing it. And then the question is, how fast do I want to do that? How quickly do I want to accelerate that movement? And that’s the acceleration part. And so from there, you kind of get a physical sense of this. If something requires more energy, if I’m moving more mass around, or if I’m moving that mass over a longer distance — 1 meter versus 100 meters versus a kilometer, right? — or if I want to accelerate that mass faster over that distance, so zero to 60 in three seconds versus zero to 60 in 10 seconds in your car, that’s going to take more energy.
Robinson Meyer: I am looking up what weighs … Oh, here we go: A 13-inch MacBook Air weighs about, a little more than a kilogram.
Jenkins: So your laptop. If you want to throw your laptop over a meter, accelerating at a pace of 1 meter per second, squared …
Meyer: That’s about a joule.
Jenkins: … that’s about a joule.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
If the Senate reconciliation bill gets enacted as written, you’ve got about 92 days left to seal the deal.
If you were thinking about buying or leasing an electric vehicle at some point, you should probably get on it like, right now. Because while it is not guaranteed that the House will approve the budget reconciliation bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday, it is highly likely. Assuming the bill as it’s currently written becomes law, EV tax credits will be gone as of October 1.
The Senate bill guts the subsidies for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, a longstanding goal of the Trump administration. Specifically, it would scrap the 30D tax credit by September 30 of this year, a harsher cut-off than the version of the bill that passed the House, which would have axed the credit by the end of 2025 except for automakers that had sold fewer than 200,000 electric vehicles. The credit as it exists now is worth up to $7,500 for cars with an MSRP below $55,000 (and trucks and sports utility vehicles under $80,000), and, under the Inflation Reduction Act, would have lasted through the end of 2032. The Senate bill also axes the $4,000 used EV tax credit at the end of September.
“Long story short, the credits under the current legislation are only going to be on the books through the end of September,” Corey Cantor, the research director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. “Now is definitely a good time, if you’re interested in an EV, to look at the market.”
The Senate applied the same strict timeline to credits for clean commercial vehicles, both new and used. For home EV chargers, the tax credit will now expire at the end of June next year.
While EVs were on the road well before the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, what the new tax credit did was help build out a truly domestic electric vehicle market, Cantor said. “You have a bunch of refreshed EV models from major automakers,” Cantor told me, including “more affordable models in different segments, and many of them qualify for the credit.”
These include cars produceddomestically by Kia,Hyundai, and Chevrolet. But of course, the biggest winner from the credit is Tesla, whose Model Y was the best-selling car in the world in 2023.
Tesla shares were down over 5.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, though not just because of Congress. JPMorgan also released an analyst report Monday arguing that the decline in sales seen in the first quarter would accelerate in the second quarter. President Trump, with whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an extremely public falling out last month, suggested on social media Monday night that the government efficiency department Musk himself formerly led should “take a good, hard, look” at the subsidies Musk receives across his many businesses. Trump also said that he would “take a look” at Musk’s United States citizenship in response to reporters’ questions about it.
Cantor told me that he expects a surge of consumer attention to the EV market if the bill passes in its current form. “You’ve seen more customers pull their purchase ahead” when subsidies cut-offs are imminent, he said.
But overall, the end of the subsidy is likely to reduce EV sales from their previously expected levels.
Harvard researchers have estimated that the termination of the EV tax credit “would cut the EV share of new vehicle sales in 2030 by 6.0 percentage points,” from 48% of new sales by 2030 to 42%. Combined with other Trump initiatives such as terminating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for publicly funded chargers (currently being litigated) and eliminating California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allowed it to set tighter vehicle emissions standards, the share of new car sales that are electric could fall to 32% in 2030.
But not all government support for electric vehicles will end by October 1, even if the bill gets the president’s signature in its current form.
“It’s important for consumers to know there are many states that offer subsidies, such as New York, and Colorado,” Cantor told me. That also goes for California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico. You can find the full list here.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include a higher cost limit for trucks and SUVs.