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Current conditions: California’s Sierra Nevada range is expecting another snowstorm • Dangerous smog has settled on Vietnam’s capital of Hanoi • Drought-stricken Sicily has declared a state of emergency.
This week marks the end of an era in climate diplomacy: John Kerry, the first special presidential envoy for climate, is leaving government. On Wednesday he’ll hand the reins to White House senior advisor John Podesta, though Kerry plans to stay involved in the global fight against climate change on a less formal level. “The reason that I’ve decided to transition from this job is not because we’re finished,” he told the Financial Times. “But as U.S. envoy, I’m presently responsible for the U.S. position, for what we’re doing here. If I’m out there as a citizen, I’m able to work with whoever I choose to work with in order to help accelerate this [transition away from fossil fuels].” Specifically, he plans to focus on securing more funding for the energy transition, having expressed frustration about paltry commitments from the U.S. toward climate funds.
Texas’ Smokehouse Creek fire continued to burn over the weekend, and attempts to bring it under control were hampered by warm temperatures and strong winds. It has so far burned more than 1 million acres and is the largest fire in the state’s history. Two people are known to have died in the blaze. On top of the threat to human life is the danger posed to the millions of cattle that graze in the Texas Panhandle. The fire has scorched grassland and left farmers without food or water for their herds.
A scorched utility pole in TexasScott Olson/Getty Images
According to Climate Central, a nonprofit that researches the effects of climate change, the record winter heat the Panhandle endured on the day the fire ignited was made at least three times more likely due to human-caused climate change. “The more climate changes, the more these risks grow: including the risk of winter heatwaves and wildfire,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and professor at Texas Tech.
Chinese carmaker BYD released a new version of its best-selling EV today at a price that’s nearly 12% lower than the final sale price of its predecessor, according to Reuters. In China, the new Yuan Plus crossover (known overseas as the Atto 3) will cost 119,800 yuan, or about $16,644. “That price puts the compact SUV at around the same price as [internal combustion engine] rivals including the Honda XR-V, the Buick Envision Plus, and the Volkswagen T-Cross,” Jennifer Mossalgue noted at Electrek. Last week Stella Li, CEO of BYD Americas, said the company wasn’t interested in entering the U.S. market, but major price cuts by the world’s biggest seller of EVs will ripple through the global market, and the Biden administration knows it: Last week President Biden announced an investigation into security threats posed by Chinese EVs, a sign that “the backlash to Chinese EVs has begun in earnest in the U.S.,” wrote Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer.
ESG is out. “Transition investing” is in. A new Wall Street Journal report explains how BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is carefully continuing a climate investing strategy while simultaneously attempting to sidestep ESG backlash. The company has stopped trying to change how companies behave, talking about social issues, or fussing over criteria for responsible investing. Instead it’s betting on clean-energy infrastructure projects that will speed the transition away from fossil fuels, a strategy it calls “transition investing.” ESG was too vague, sources said, and failed to outpace the market or prove good for the planet. Meanwhile, private renewable-energy and broad energy-sector investment funds have raised nearly $500 billion over the last five years “and dwarfed the amount raised for traditional fossil-fuel funds,” the Journal reported. “The mega infrastructure projects are the new ESG,” said Peter McKillop, a former spokesman at BlackRock. “Energy-transition infrastructure — Wall Street loves this because it’s real.”
A satellite that will monitor methane leaks from space is set to hitch a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base this afternoon. MethaneSAT was developed by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to detect methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is released in large quantities from power plants and factories. The washing-machine-sized craft will orbit Earth 15 times each day and observe 80% to 90% of global oil and gas infrastructure using a high-resolution infrared sensor. It can see how much methane is leaking, where it’s coming from, and whether a leak is getting better (or worse) over time. The team will analyze the data using cloud computing and Google-developed AI technology, and then release the findings to the public, with the hopes of fostering greater accountability from the offenders. But, “there’s no guarantee that this information leads to a change in behavior,” Drew Shindell, an earth-science professor at Duke University, told The New York Times. You can watch the launch here.
Not a single traffic death incident has been reported in Hoboken, New Jersey, since 2017, which is roughly when the city began removing parking spaces near intersections.
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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.