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Three important things, plus one very unimportant thing
Hello from Dubai, where the United Nations’ annual climate conference — that is, COP28 — officially began today.
This was an enormous day for climate and environmental news around the world. Not only did COP28 begin with a surprising (and important) accomplishment, but the Environmental Protection Agency proposed cracking down on lead pipes, one of the biggest remaining sources of water pollution in the United States. Tesla is also set to release — and announce a price for — its gargantuan Cybertruck today, one of the most contentious electric vehicles launches in history.
So let’s get down to it.
1. COP28 officially began. This afternoon, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — or COP28 — officially began. It will run here at Expo City at the southern end of Dubai until December 12.
It was not, technically, the only climate conference that started in Dubai today: Technically, three conferences kicked off. That is because since the world adopted the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 — which is the big, arching UN treaty to do something about climate change— countries have stacked other agreements on top of it. So today was also the beginning of CMP18 (the 18th Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol) and CMA5 (the fifth Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement).
2. The conference launched the loss and damage fund. This was a welcome surprise. For years, countries have debated over “loss and damage” — essentially, what richer countries that are responsible for most global warming so far owe to poorer countries that are dealing with its consequences. Last year at the COP in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, countries agreed to establish a loss and damage fund for the first time. They’ve been hammering out the details over the past year — at the insistence of the U.S. and Europe, the fund will be hosted first by the World Bank — and today the fund was officially launched, or in UN parlance, operationalized.
Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates all gave money to the fund. The U.S. donated the second smallest amount, after Japan.
3. The World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2023 will be the hottest year in human history. Since temperatures in July, August, and September destroyed all-time records, this sad milestone has been more or less expected. But today the World Meteorological Organization, a UN-associated weather body, confirmed that 2023 will be the hottest year ever measured.
Tomorrow, a subsection of COP — the World Climate Action Summit (!) — will begin. This is the part of COP where various world leaders come and speak to the negotiators.
This year sports a perhaps underwhelming set of world leaders. Neither President Joe Biden nor President Xi Jinping will be attending. The highest profile elected leaders will probably be President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom. King Charles III is also coming.
Following this event, but also overlapping with it, will be a period with lots of big announcements. Investors will announce new projects and investments. Companies will announce new voluntary climate-action coalitions. Countries and cities will announce new coalitions of voluntary action. It will be fairly hard to tell which of these actually matter in the moment, but some of them probably will.
Then there will probably be a news lull for a few days. Finally, at the end of the conference, negotiators will hash out the details of this year’s joint statement.
Even though COP officially starts today, it was largely uneventful here in Dubai. No world leaders spoke; the only big news was the loss and damage fund. Many news articles heralded that COP has begun in Dubai!, without saying what, exactly, that means or how people are spending their time.
Let me decipher it for you. While COP is an international media spectacle, it’s also an enormous in-person conference — and it is subject to some irreducible geometric challenges. This year, those challenges exist on a new scale: With more than 80,000 people attending the Dubai proceedings, this is by far the largest COP ever. (For comparison, about 50,000 people attended the Paris COP in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted.)
Here is what I mean: Today, everyone had to pick up their conference badges and lanyards. That is what happened at COP today. A small suburb’s worth of people — including me —waited in a line to go through security and show a chipper UN employee our registration papers and get our photo taken. The line was about 1.2 kilometers long (literally— I corroborated that with my Apple Health data) but it was run efficiently and cheerfully.
According to a forensic reconstruction of my activities, compiled chiefly from an Uber receipt and the timestamp on some iPhone photos, I arrived at the conference center at 12:25pm and had a name badge almost exactly two hours later. I began keeping a journal when I realized that I was unlikely to get to the front of the line any time soon.
12:25 p.m. I arrive at Expo 2020, the nearest dropoff to the conference center. A man with a UN badge tells me to join a line without providing any details. I decide to follow the late Soviet rule that if you see a long line, you should just get in it.
12:35 p.m. A quasi-status system immediately makes itself clear. Some people have green lanyards, which entitle them to enter the Green Zone, the “trade show” part of the COP, which is governed by the U.A.E. Others have blue lanyards, which let them the Blue Zone, the official UN part of the conference.
1:14 p.m. We are handed aluminum Aquafina cans, a thoughtful gesture. Many of the people near me in line seem to be in their 50s and 60s, and the subtropical sun is hot and unrelenting. They must be starting to lose it out here.
1:18 p.m. Studying the can, I notice it is labeled “Still Drinking Water.” I find the “still” to be ontologically reassuring. It is good to know that this is still drinking water. Thank goodness I am not losing it like all these middle-aged people around me.
1:35 p.m. A 30-something man in line is wearing a t-shirt with the words “Dinosaur Facts” on it. Highlight of my COP so far.
1:46 p.m. I dimly realize that Sydney, Australia, (where it is 8:46pm) is closer to Dubai time than New York is.
1:51p.m. It strikes me that COP and Disney World are plagued by the same problem: very long lines. But if this were Disney World, we would have encountered several entertaining animatronics by now.
2:19 p.m. I finally reach through security and waiting in the final room: to receive my pass. As soon as I get through, I realize I have been silently standing in line next to a very famous environmental justice academic for an hour. With that opportunity already squandered, my COP begins.
Read Robinson Meyer’s last dispatch from COP28:
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A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.
Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.
The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.
“This is something that we’re just starting to see,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s one thing for environmentalists to support wind and solar projects if the idea is that those projects will eventually replace coal power plants. But it’s another thing if those projects are purely being built to meet incremental demand from data centers.”
We’ve started to see evidence of this backlash in certain resort towns fearful of a new tech industry presence and the conflicts over transmission lines in Maryland. But it is most prominent in Virginia, ground zero for American hyperscaler data centers. As we’ve previously discussed in The Fight, rural Virginia is increasingly one of the hardest places to get approval for a solar farm in the U.S., and while there are many reasons the industry is facing issues there, a significant one is the state’s data center boom.
I spent weeks digging into the example of Mecklenburg County, where the local Board of Supervisors in May indefinitely banned new solar projects and is rejecting those that were in the middle of permitting when the decision came down. It’s also the site of a growing data center footprint. Microsoft, which already had a base of operations in the county’s town of Boydton, is in the process of building a giant data center hub with three buildings and an enormous amount of energy demand. It’s this sudden buildup of tech industry infrastructure that is by all appearances driving a backlash to renewable energy in the county, a place that already had a pre-existing high opposition risk in the Heatmap Pro database.
It’s not just data centers causing the ban in Mecklenburg, but it’s worth paying attention to how the fight over Big Tech and solar has overlapped in the county, where Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter has worked locally to fight data center growth with a grassroots citizens group, Friends of the Meherrin River, that was a key supporter of the solar moratorium, too.
In a conversation with me this week, Tim Cywinski, communications director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter, told me municipal leaders like those in Mecklenburg are starting to group together renewables and data centers because, simply put, rural communities enter into conversations with these outsider business segments with a heavy dose of skepticism. This distrust can then be compounded when errors are made, such as when one utility-scale solar farm – Geenex’s Grasshopper project – apparently polluted a nearby creek after soil erosion issues during construction, a problem project operator Dominion Energy later acknowledged and has continued to be a pain point for renewables developers in the county.
“I don’t think the planning that has been presented to rural America has been adequate enough,” the Richmond-based advocate said. “Has solar kind of messed up in a lot of areas in rural America? Yeah, and that’s given those communities an excuse to roll them in with a lot of other bad stuff.”
Cywinski – who describes himself as “not your typical environmentalist” – says the data center space has done a worse job at community engagement than renewables developers in Virginia, and that the opposition against data center projects in places like Chesapeake and Fauquier is more intense, widespread, and popular than the opposition to renewables he’s seeing play out across the Commonwealth.
But, he added, he doesn’t believe the fight against data centers is “mutually exclusive” from conflicts over solar. “I’m not going to tout the gospel of solar while I’m trying to fight a data center for these people because it’s about listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then not telling them what to say but trying to help them elevate their perspective and their concerns,” Cywinski said.
As someone who spends a lot of time speaking with communities resisting solar and trying to best understand their concerns, I agree with Cywinksi: the conflict over data centers speaks to the heart of the rural vs. renewables divide, and it offers a warning shot to anyone thinking AI will help make solar and wind more popular.