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Current conditions: Minneapolis is expecting snow tonight. Less than a month ago it was 65 degrees Fahrenheit in the Twin Cities • More than 100 people were evacuated from the small Australian town of Borroloola ahead of severe flooding • It is cloudy in Copenhagen where global climate leaders are meeting to hash out a plan for COP29.
The Biden administration announced final new emissions standards for cars yesterday, significantly curtailing both the carbon dioxide and the toxic soot and chemicals that spew from the tailpipes of the nation’s light- and medium-duty vehicles. The rules tighten pollution limits gradually over six years, and are slightly watered down compared to the version released last April: While automakers will still have to achieve the same emissions standard by 2032 as what was originally proposed, they will now be able to transition more slowly, explained Emily Pontecorvo and Robinson Meyer at Heatmap. Administration officials argue that giving automakers, dealers, and labor unions more time in the near-term will make for a sturdier rule, and that the cumulative emissions benefits of the final standard converge with the original proposal. The EPA now estimates that EVs may make up anywhere between 30% and 56% of new light-duty sales from model years 2030 to 2032, and by 2032, the light-duty fleet on offer from automakers will emit half as much carbon as vehicles on the market in 2026.
A group of senior Republican lawmakers penned a letter to Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, accusing the group of “undermining energy security” and being a cheerleader for the “energy transition” (quotes theirs). The letter suggests the IEA has lost its credibility as a reliable and objective source of information on fossil fuel markets, and has focused too heavily on clean energy developments and too little on “the things that matter most to policymakers.” The letter is signed by House energy committee chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers and Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate energy panel, among others.
As Axiosnoted, the attack “has real-world stakes. The agency's work is constantly cited by policymakers, academics, journalists and civil society groups.” The IEA’s forecasts that oil demand could peak by 2030 have perturbed fossil fuel producers. OPEC sees growth continuing at least through 2045. Earlier this week the CEO of Saudi Aramco called a fossil fuel phase-out a “fantasy.”
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The names Otis and Dora have been retired from the list of potential hurricane names because of their links to devastating extreme weather events. The World Meteorological Organization has six lists of names for northeast Pacific hurricanes that it uses over and over again, so it’s not uncommon for two different storms occurring years apart to have the same name. But a name is removed if a storm is “so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for obvious reasons of sensitivity.” Hurricane Otis struck Acapulco in October last year, killing 51 people and causing $3 billion in damage. Dora played an “indirect meteorological role” in Maui’s massive wildfires, which killed more than 100 people and caused at least $4 billion in damages. Otis and Dora will be replaced with the names Otilio and Debora. Climate change is warming the oceans, resulting in stronger hurricanes.
The smell of smoke lingered over Washington, D.C., yesterday, and the air quality dropped as haze from brush fires burning in Virginia and Maryland drifted over the region. Strong winds and dry weather made for ideal fire conditions, and the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for the area in the evening. This photo, apparently taken in the Bergton area of Virgina, shows thick smoke coming from the fires:
The Biden administration wants to hold another offshore wind auction in the Gulf of Mexico as it pushes ahead with its goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade. Yesterday the Interior Department proposed the sale – which would be the second auction in the region – for sometime this year, though the date hasn’t been nailed down. More than 400,000 acres would be up for grabs for development, paving the way for enough wind energy to power 1.2 million homes. The first sale, held last year, resulted in just one lease, “underscoring the middling interest in building wind farms in the region, where wind gusts aren’t very powerful and electricity is already cheap from prolific oil and gas production,” as E&E Newsexplained. The administration plans to hold four sales in the Gulf this year.
“While changes in governments may well affect the pace of energy transitions — accelerating them in some cases, slowing them in others — they won’t alter the fundamental direction of travel.” –IEA executive director Fatih Birol writing in the Financial Times
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.