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On Cabinent confirmations, NYC’s congestion pricing, and Orsted
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 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
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.
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.”
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:
“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.”
–Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer on how Trump might be about to wreck U.S. oil refineries
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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.