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How Biden can enlist the armed forces to build power lines and fix America’s electric grid
After a summer of extreme heat, deadly wildfires, flash floods, and other foreboding harbingers of a warming planet, President Biden is once again facing pressure to (officially) declare a climate emergency. Activists have pressed him to unlock emergency powers to reinstate a ban on crude oil exports and suspend offshore drilling leases, among other measures.
But there’s another, less remarked emergency lever Biden could pull that may prove even more consequential for our clean energy transition: empowering the military to help expedite the construction of electrical grid infrastructure we need to rapidly decarbonize.
The grid is the foundation of our strategy to take on climate change. The plan is to “electrify everything” — from cars, to homes, to factories — and to run everything on electricity generated from clean energy sources like wind and solar instead of fossil fuels. But that means we’ll need to upgrade the grid to meet increased demand for electricity, and build more transmission lines to carry clean energy from the windiest and sunniest parts of the country to major population centers.
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We’re in trouble on both fronts. Our antiquated grid has too little capacity to accommodate all of the wind and solar energy facilities we need. That has left many proposed renewable projects in a lurch waiting years to come online, while those that can connect contend with “congestion” from an overloaded system. Plus, a gauntlet of permits and multistate regulatory approvals means that building new large transmission lines can take a decade or more. A new transmission line to carry primarily renewable energy from New Mexico to California and Arizona just got the okay to start building from the Bureau of Land Management this spring, seventeen years after it was first proposed.
We need to build out the grid — and do so quickly — if we have any hope of meeting our climate goals. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invested billions to modernize the grid, but Congress has done little to address the regulatory roadblocks that make building so arduous. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is pursuing regulatory action to help.
However, a surprising source of emergency power could bolster the administration’s tools to ready the electrical grid for the new green energy era. A 1982 law called the Military Construction Codification Act states that when the president declares a national emergency “that requires use of the armed forces, the Secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects … not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces.”
This authority could be used to improve and expand the electrical grid, according to a law review article by Professor (and former Navy commander) Mark Nevitt at Emory University School of Law. Climate-related natural disasters have increasingly required the use of the military for rescue and relief operations: in 2022 alone, half of all National Guard members were involved in lifesaving responses in the wake of wildfires, storms, and floods. And extreme weather and grid instability are a threat to military operations: military bases don’t have their own power plants, and draw energy from the grid like everyone else. Bases have gone dark and been damaged by floods and wildfires in recent years, and many have been running drills to prepare for extended power outages from climate disasters. A stronger, climate-resilient grid is necessary for a military summoned to respond to the ravages of climate change.
This gives the administration “credible but untested authority,” Nevitt told me, to invoke a military need to enhance our electrical grid under a climate emergency. That authority could be used, for example, to upgrade sections of the grid directly adjacent to the country’s 450 domestic military installations.
Because each state has at least one military installation, the Biden administration would have ample flexibility in picking strategic locations to make grid upgrades. While building far-flung power lines with little connection to a military site may stretch the bounds of the law, the interconnected nature of the grid should give the administration some leeway — for instance, to help build a transmission line that feeds into a military-adjacent portion of the grid to provide that base with more secure and abundant access to power. By way of example, the Continental Connector — a proposed 500-mile transmission line that aims to unite two grid systems by linking Kansas with New Mexico by the 2030s — could help shore up energy reliability for nearby military sites like Kirtland Air Force Base, and thereby could warrant emergency military construction assistance.
While the primary purpose would be to improve grid reliability for the military, those upgrades would of course also benefit the surrounding communities. That in turn would help strengthen our overall capacity for clean energy deployment.
This emergency construction authority was most notoriously invoked by President Trump in an attempt to build his border wall. In 2019, Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border, and instructed the Defense Department to use emergency military construction authority to begin building several sections of a border wall. This order was ultimately rejected in court on the grounds that the border wall — which was to be located hundreds of miles away from the closest military base — was not necessary to support the use of the armed forces, and was not truly a military-related project.
It’s possible that Biden’s green grid may too run into a buzzsaw in the federal courts. But building energy infrastructure that will be used by the military seems much more tethered to the spirit of the law than constructing a distant anti-immigrant barricade. Moreover, military prerogatives to address a legitimate need for a reliable energy supply ought to get deference from the courts. Biden could also opt for a narrower emergency declaration less sweeping than climate change but more likely to survive in the courts, like grid resilience — an emergency that is particularly salient in the wake of the devastating Maui fires.
Biden also could turbocharge emergency grid construction by bypassing normal regulatory requirements. The Military Construction Codification Act empowers the Defense Department to act “without regard to any other provision of law,” giving it authority to overcome other impediments in federal, state, and local law (much like similar preemptive language in the Defense Production Act that I’ve written about). After Trump’s border wall order, the Defense Department issued a memorandum initiating construction “without regard to any other provision of law that could impede such expeditious construction in response to the national emergency,” including “the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, ... [and] the Clean Water Act.” Taking the same tack could expedite grid construction, but Biden would face major pressure from political allies to forgo this power. Yet at minimum, an emergency declaration would streamline the NEPA process and trigger waivers and exemptions under other environmental laws.
We can’t electrify our way to net-zero emissions without a grid up to the task. So building that grid is one of the most pressing tasks we face. If Biden does take the step of formally declaring a climate emergency, putting the might of the U.S. military toward that critical mission would be an awfully good response.
Read more about the electric grid:
An Eye-Opening Projection About America’s Clean Energy Future
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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images