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We chatted about U.S. Wind’s project off the coast of Ocean City, oil jobs, and the future of the IRA.
I may have met the future of conservative climate politics on Tuesday, and he was standing next to piles of dead fish.
Larry Hogan, a Republican former governor of Maryland, is campaigning for an open Senate seat in one of the bluest states in the country. He faces an uphill run against Angela Alsobrooks, an acolyte of Vice President Kamala Harris and a Black woman who runs one of the state’s most populous and diverse counties, Prince George’s. Before President Biden dropped out as the Democrats’ nominee for president, internal polls indicated that Hogan had a chance; since Biden’s exit, despite Hogan’s name ID from eight years in Annapolis, his chances for victory now appear uncertain.
So I was surprised when, out of the blue, as Democrats were convening in Chicago around Harris as their nominee, Hogan’s team invited me out to a campaign stop along the Chesapeake Bay. Hogan was going to announce new plans on how he’d fight for protecting the Bay if elected, and I’d get to ask the candidate whatever I wanted about … climate. Not the usual offer from a Republican congressional campaign.
Hogan, however, has a long track record of bucking his party on climate change, and could be regarded as one of the most aggressive Republican governors on the issue in modern American history. In 2017, he signed into law one of the nation’s few state-wide fracking bans. In 2018, after then President Trump began pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, he joined with other states to meet the goals of the accord regardless. Three years later, he oversaw the creation of a plan to reduce Maryland’s emissions 50% by 2030 and achieving “net-zero” by 2045. Those emissions targets happen to be the same ones Alsobrooks has endorsed, too.
I went to his campaign website to see what it says about climate and found almost nothing. Nowhere on Hogan’s website is there a discussion of emissions or energy policy, and climate-related laws like the Inflation Reduction Act barely come up. The only possible reference I can find is one paragraph saying he’d “stand against unaffordable spending and mandates raising [the] cost of energy, food, and basic necessities.”
So I said yes. Not just because I’m a Marylander who deeply cares about the future of the planet, but also because of Hogan’s importance for the future of the IRA. If he somehow found a way to win, he’d be a crucial voice on the future of the landmark climate law, the fate of which will be decided next year as lawmakers look to rewrite tax policy.
That was why, on Tuesday I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove two hours to Tilghman Island, a bucolic enclave popular for fishing and tourism along the eastern shorelines of Maryland. It might’ve been a rural part of the state, but every now and then along my route I’d see an array of solar panels in front of a farm or a house. I arrived at the meeting place to find it was a seafood plant along the water. Hogan arrived right after me in a jet black SUV and exited in attire so casual you’d hardly recognize him as a two-term governor: a simple baseball cap, a dull blue shirt, and, believe it or not, shorts.
I walked alongside Hogan and people who ran the processing plant as they surveyed flats of oyster shells and the guts of catfish I was told were an invasive species in the area. Finally, Hogan and I settled down to chat in an open garage. There are “more Republicans who actually are more environmentally sensitive than you think,” he told me, “but they’re certainly not in the majority, and they’re not the ones getting all the attention. My hope is to try to be a voice to get them to do some of the things we did and focus on.”
Of the IRA himself, he told me, “It concerns me that it was rushed through in a very partisan way without a single Republican vote. I think there are some really good things in it. I think there’s some things that weren’t very well thought out.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Things that are going to have a more harmful effect on the economy and killing jobs,” he said, adding that “we ought to at least look at how to tweak it.”
That statement puzzled me — recent analysis indicates at least 334,000 new jobs have been created since the law was enacted in 2022. But writ large, the transition to clean energy will mean people lose jobs in the oil and gas industry — was that what he was referring to?
“Yeah. I mean, we’re not ready,” Hogan replied. “It was going to shut down existing industries without any transition period when we didn’t have the ability to provide enough energy to accomplish what we wanted. We just gotta figure out a way to make the transition, but you can’t do it too rapidly or it’s going to have the opposite impact.”
The funny thing about Republicans talking about climate and the IRA is that you essentially need a translator to know their positions. Lawmakers will say one thing on the record to a reporter and then the next minute say the exact opposite thing off the record. The truth is — and I know this from many years of covering Capitol Hill — many Republican politicians support the vast majority of this law and will never admit it.
Most voters today still do not know much about the IRA, or even what the Biden administration has done on climate change. That’s unlikely to change soon as Democrats have so far eschewed mentioning the topic much at all, including during their convention in Chicago this week. Congressional Democrats put a lot of time and effort over the last year into messaging the law and their other signature industrial policy achievements. But for now, it seems it’ll be largely absent from the campaign trail.
Should Republicans take full control of Congress and the presidency, the IRA is in legitimate danger from influential coalitions on the furthest flanks of the right-wing. Think the Heritage Foundation. The Freedom Caucus. The Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Jim Jordans and Lauren Boeberts roaming the halls of the Capitol. These power-brokers have proven through fights over the debt ceiling and government funding that they appear willing to put their votes where their mouths are to satisfy a political base of support that cares less about corporations and climate change than sticking it to liberals and the left. Hogan is correct that the IRA was passed entirely by Democrats without a single Republican vote, making it a ripe target for partisan pummeling.
And yet there’s so much in the IRA that Republicans typically should like. Climate policy that’s heavy on carrots for big business and light on penalties for corporate pollution has long been Republicans’ preferred route. Why does the most moderate Republican candidate for Senate in one of the nation’s bluest states have to bash the climate law at all, let alone claim its killing jobs? I’ll be honest, when I went out to the Bay to meet Hogan, I thought I was about to hear the first major Republican endorsement of the IRA.
I asked John Hart, a fellow Marylander who helps run the conservative climate group C3 Solutions, about why Hogan would claim the IRA is killing jobs when there’s no evidence to back that up. Hart authored a campaign messaging book for Republicans trying to talk about climate change and energy policy without denying the existence of the problem, on the one hand, or alienating their own voters on the other.
“It’s an American cultural and political problem,” Hart told me. “You have to be very cognizant of those head-scratching moments, and you have to address that very clearly.”
There’s two reasons why Republicans like Hogan have to bash the IRA even if they might support a lot of the underlying climate provisions, he said: GOP voters instinctually see such ideas as “picking winners and losers,” and the climate law has been lumped in with other policies like auto regulations that Republicans largely oppose.
“Candidates are viewing it not through the narrow lens of what that legislation alone does, but how it fits into a broader agenda,” Hart added. “With the IRA, [it becomes] part of a broader effort. A lot of Republicans do believe that the Biden administration wants to ban trucks.”
Hogan did not develop his approach to climate action overnight. While as governor, he pushed for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% through 2030, he also opposed going any faster than that. (The legislature ultimately enacted the more aggressive plans without Hogan's signature.) The Alsobrooks campaign has attacked him on this, and in a statement to me said that if elected, “Larry Hogan would give [S]enate Republicans the majority they need to gut the IRA and roll back efforts to protect our environment.”
Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for the Hogan campaign, told me Hogan is “glad the [IRA] created clean energy jobs like he did as Governor in Maryland.” His concerns with the law have to do with “some of the new taxes and overspending in the bill [that] has and will contribute to inflation and job loss, and is disappointed that the bill was forced through a party line vote.”
Governor Hogan also loudly backed wind development off the Maryland coast, which is now a contentious issue along the eastern shore.
Ocean City, a popular vacation destination, is now considering legal action against the federal government if it approves efforts by U.S. Wind, a subsidiary of an Italian wind energy company, to actually build turbines off the state’s coastline. It’s a conflict that mirrors other fights waged by beach communities, resort areas, and fishing hubs against offshore wind. These parts of the country are far removed from cities and often Republican-leaning, and the loudest champions of these grievances have also been prominent GOP politicians. Most notable, of course, has been former President Donald Trump, who’s pledged to halt new permits, but Republican policymakers at all levels from New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, among others, have all been making political hay from wind farm projects in their states.
Hogan has made a name for himself in recent years as a bulwark against Trump and his brand of politics. But when I brought up Ocean City’s legal threat, his passionate support of the town led him to interrupt my question.
“They probably will and probably should [sue]. That’s an example where I was very supportive of wind energy and creating a market for that in our state to create jobs and further the production of wind energy. But on that project, there was not very much transparency. They didn’t work with the local community very much. That’s impacting the fishing industry, the tourism industry, and they’re concerned that their entire livelihoods are going to be ruined.”
Heatmap’s own polling shows the political vulnerability renewable energy faces from the environmental impacts of development. Yet earlier in our interview, Hogan had boasted about the jobs wind has brought to the transportation and logistics hub Tradepoint Atlantic in the Port of Baltimore. He spoke effusively about the jobs in industries like welding that wind development creates. (One tidbit: His campaign released an ad a few days ago featuring a Democrat-registered welder in Baltimore who says they’re voting for Hogan, with no mention of the wind industry.)
In my mind, at least, failing to build those turbines could present a bigger risk to Ocean City in the long run than building them. If we didn’t construct them, it would take away an opportunity to dramatically increase the amount of renewable energy available for Maryland to wean off of carbon-based power. Failing to do so would pose a longer-term threat to the town of Ocean City from sea level rise and intensifying extreme weather.
So I told Hogan that while, as a Marylander, I couldn’t imagine wind turbines at Ocean City, I also couldn’t stop thinking about the trade-offs. I asked him, how does he view those tradeoffs?
Hogan stood firm. “I think you can accomplish the goals without putting them on the beach. I think you move them further out. It’s a pretty simple process. The federal government required them to put them in a place that no one wants. There’s no reason for it.”
This began to sound like some sort of Republican party line, trying to sell voters on a vision of the future that derails the energy transition along the way. But as one of my personal favorite Republican-splainers on energy, Sarah Hunt of the Rainey Center, explained to me, this kind of misconstrues how politics ordinarily works.
The normal thing is that constituents go to their representatives and voice their concerns, and a lot of these beach towns and fishing areas just happen to be Republican. In other parts of the country like Louisiana, where the politicians are more open to offshore oil, they’re similarly supportive of offshore wind.
“I think that is individual to Maryland and specific areas of Maryland,” Hunt told me. “I think offshore wind is a wonderful thing. I think it’s legitimate to say it doesn’t belong everywhere, and I think it’s reasonable to have a process for communities to provide input into the placement of such projects.”
After Hogan and I concluded our interview, I drove home in the gas-powered car I inherited from my late grandparents and passed more solar paneling in front of rural homes. Driving over the Chesapeake Bay, I tried to imagine seeing wind turbines on the horizon one day, and a world where Republicans support tax credits for renewables while fighting to make sure those projects adhere to the Clean Water Act. May we live in interesting times, I guess.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Maryland was already a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative when Hogan became governor.
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The saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund takes another turn.
On July 3, just after the House voted to send the reconciliation bill to Trump’s desk, a lawyer for the Department of Justice swiftly sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Once Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the letter said, the group of nonprofits suing the government for canceling the biggest clean energy program in the country’s history would no longer have a case.
It was the latest salvo in the saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, former President Joe Biden’s green bank program, which current Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has made the target of his “gold bar” scandal. At stake is nearly $20 billion to fight climate change.
Congress created the program as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award that $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer low-cost loans to individuals and organizations for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other efforts to reduce emissions. The agency announced the recipients last summer, before its September deadline to get the funds out.
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs.
In early March, buoyed by a covert video of a former EPA employee making an unfortunate and widely misunderstood comparison of the effort to award the funding to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic, Zeldin notified the recipients that he was terminating their grant agreements. He cited “substantial concerns” regarding “program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with agency’s priorities.”
In court proceedings over the decision, the government has yet to cite any specific acts of fraud, waste, or abuse that justified the termination — a fact that the initial judge overseeing the case pointed out in mid-April when she ordered a preliminary injunction blocking the EPA from canceling the grants. But the EPA quickly appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, which stayed the lower court’s injunction. The money remains frozen at Citibank, which had been overseeing its disbursement, as the parties await the appeals court’s decision.
As all of this was playing out, Congress wrote and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The new law rescinds the “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from nearly 50 Inflation Reduction Act programs, including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million.
The Trump administration, however, is arguing in court that the OBBBA doesn’t just recoup that $19 million, but also the billions in awards at issue in the lawsuit. Congress has rescinded “the appropriated funds that plaintiffs sought to reinstate through this action,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth wrote in his July 3 letter, implying that the awards were no longer officially “obligated” and that all of the money would have to be returned. Therefore, “it is more clear than ever that the district court’s preliminary injunction must be reversed,” he wrote.
Roth cited a statement that Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, made on the floor of the Senate in June. She said she agreed with Zeldin’s decision to cancel the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, and that it was Congress’ intent to rescind the funds that “had been obligated but were subsequently de-obligated” — about $17 billion in total. She did not acknowledge that Zeldin’s decision was being actively litigated in court.
On Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs fired back with a message to the court that the reconciliation bill does not, in fact, change anything about the case. They argued that the EPA broke the law by canceling the grants, and that the OBBBA can’t retroactively absolve the agency. They also served up a conflicting statement that Capito made about the fund to Politico in November. “We’re not gonna go claw back money,” she said. “That’s a ridiculous thought.”
Capito’s colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, offered additional evidence on the floor of the Senate Wednesday. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the repeal of the program of $19 million, noting that it was the amount “EPA had remaining to oversee the program” and that “at no point in our discussions with the majority, directly or in our several conversations with the Parliamentarian, was this score disputed.” Whitehouse also called up a previous statement made by Republican Representative Morgan Griffith, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, during a markup of the bill. “I just want to point out that these provisions that we are talking about only apply as far, as this bill is concerned, to the unobligated balances,” Griffith said.
Regardless, it will be up to the D.C. Circuit Court as to whether the lower court’s injunction was warranted. If it agrees, the nonprofit awardees may still, in fact, be able to get the money flowing for clean energy projects.
“Wishful thinking on the part of DOJ does not moot the ongoing litigation,” Whitehouse said.
A renewable energy project can only start construction if it can get connected to the grid.
The clock is ticking for clean energy developers. With the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar developers have to start construction (whatever that means) in the next 12 months and be operating no later than the end of 2027 to qualify for federal tax credits.
But projects can only get built if they can get connected to the grid. Those decisions are often out of the hands of state, local, or even federal policymakers, and are instead left up to utilities, independent system operators, or regional trading organizations, which then have to study things like the transmission infrastructure needed for the project before they can grant a project permission to link up.
This process, from requesting interconnection to commercial operation, used to take two years on average as of 2008; by 2023, it took almost five years, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This creates what we call the interconnection queue, where likely thousands of gigawatts of proposed projects are languishing, unable to start construction. The inability to quickly process these requests adds to the already hefty burden of state, local, and federal permitting and siting — and could mean that developers will be locked out of tax credits regardless of how quickly they move.
There’s no better example of the tension between clean energy goals and the process of getting projects into service than the Mid-Atlantic, home to the 13-state electricity market known as PJM Interconnection. Many states in the region have mandates to substantially decarbonize their electricity systems, whereas PJM is actively seeking to bring new gas-fired generation onto the grid in order to meet its skyrocketing projections of future demand.
This mismatch between current supply and present-and-future demand has led to the price for “capacity” in PJM — i.e. what the grid operator has greed to pay in exchange for the ability to call on generators when they’re most needed — jumping by over $10 billion, leading to utility bill hikes across the system.
“There is definitely tension,” Abe Silverman, a senior research scholar at Johns Hopkins University and former general counsel for New Jersey’s utility regulator, told me.
While Silverman doesn’t think that PJM is “philosophically” opposed to adding new resources, including renewables, to the grid, “they don’t have urgency you might want them to have. It’s a banal problem of administrative competency rather than an agenda to stymie new resources coming on the grid.”
PJM is in the midst of a multiyear project to overhaul its interconnection queue. According to a spokesperson, there are around 44,500 megawatts of proposed projects that have interconnection agreements and could move on to construction. Of these, I calculated that about 39,000 megawatts are solar, wind, or storage. Another 63,000 megawatts of projects are in the interconnection queue without an agreement, and will be processed by the end of next year, the spokesperson said, likely making it impossible for wind and solar projects to be “placed in service” by 2028.
Even among the projects with agreements, “there probably will be some winnowing of that down,” Mark Repsher, a partner at PA Consulting Group, told me. “My guess is, of that 44,000 megawatts that have interconnection agreements, they may have other challenges getting online in the next two years.”
PJM has attempted to place the blame for project delays largely at the feet of siting, permitting, and operations challenges.
“Some [projects] are moving to construction, but others are feeling the headwinds of siting and permitting challenges and supply chain backlogs,” PJM’s executive vice president of operations, planning, and security Aftab Khan said in a June statement giving an update on interconnection reforms.
And on high prices, PJM has been increasingly open about blaming “premature” retirements of fossil fuel power plants.
In May, PJM said in a statement in response to a Department of Energy order to keep a dual-fuel oil and natural gas plant in Pennsylvania open that it “has repeatedly documented and voiced its concerns over the growing risk of a supply and demand imbalance driven by the confluence of generator retirements and demand growth. Such an imbalance could have serious ramifications for reliability and affordability for consumers.”
Just days earlier, in a statement ahead of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission conference, PJM CEO Manu Asthana had fretted about “growing resource adequacy concerns” based on demand growth, the cost of building new generation, and, in a direct shot at federal and state policies that encouraged renewables and discouraged fossil fuels, “premature, primarily policy-driven retirements of resources continue to outpace the development of new generation.”
The Trump administration has echoed these worries for the whole nation’s electrical grid, writing in a report issued this week that “if current retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged, most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks.” So has the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which argued in a 2024 report that most of the U.S. and Canada “faces mounting resource adequacy challenges over the next 10 years as surging demand growth continues and thermal generators announce plans for retirement.”
State officials and clean energy advocates have instead placed the blame for higher costs and impending reliability gaps on PJM’s struggles to connect projects, how the electricity market is designed, and the operator’s perceived coolness towards renewables.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro told The New York Times in June that the state should “re-examine” its membership in PJM following last year’s steep price hikes. In February, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wrote a letter calling for Asthana to be fired. (He will leave the transmission organization by the end of the year, although PJM says the decision was made before Youngkin’s letter.)
That conflict will likely only escalate as developers rush to start projects — which they can only do if they can get an interconnection services agreement from PJM.
In contrast to Silverman, Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, told me that “PJM, internally and operationally, believes that renewables are a drag on the grid and that dispatchable generation, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear, are essential.”
In May, for instance, PJM announced that it had selected 51 projects for its “Reliability Resource Initiative,” a one-time special process for adding generation to the grid over the next five to six years. The winning bids overwhelmingly involved expanding existing gas-fired plants or building new ones.
The main barrier to getting the projects built that have already worked their way through the queue, Repsher told me, is “primarily permitting.” But even with new barriers thrown up by the OBBBA, “there’s going to be appetite for these projects,” thanks to high demand, Repsher said. “It’s really just navigating all the logistical hurdles.”
Some leaders of PJM states are working on the permitting and deployment side of the equation while also criticizing the electricity market. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro has proposed legislation that would set up a centralized state entity to handle siting for energy projects. Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed legislation in May that would accelerate permitting for energy projects, including preempting local regulations for siting solar.
New Jersey, on the other hand, is procuring storage projects directly.
The state has a mandate stemming from its Clean Energy Act of 2018 to add 2,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030. In June, New Jersey’s utility regulator started a process to procure at least half of that through utility-scale projects, funded through an existing utility-bill-surcharge.
New Jersey regulators described energy storage as “the most significant source of near-term capacity,” citing specifically the fact that storage makes up the “bulk” of proposed energy capacity in New Jersey with interconnection approval from PJM.
While the regulator issued its order before OBBBA passed, the focus on storage ended up being advantageous. The bill treats energy storage far more generously than wind and solar, meaning that New Jersey could potentially expand its generation capacity with projects that are more likely to pencil due to continued access to tax credits. The state is also explicitly working around the interconnection queue, not raging against it: “PJM interconnection delays do not pose a significant obstacle to a Phase 1 transmission-scale storage procurement target of 1,000 MW,” the order said.
In the end, PJM and the states may be stuck together, and their best hope could be finding some way to work together — and they may not have any other choice.
“A well-functioning RTO is the best way to achieve both low rates for consumers and carbon emissions reductions,” Evan Vaughan, the executive director of MAREC Action, a trade group representing Mid-Atlantic solar, wind, and storage developers, told me. “I think governors in PJM understand that, and I think that they’re pushing on PJM.”
“I would characterize the passage of this bill as adding fuel to the fire that was already under states and developers — and even energy offtakers — to get more projects deployed in the region.”
On Neil Jacobs’ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floods • More than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon Danas • Mebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.
Neil Jacobs, President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. “If confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,” Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the president’s 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an “influence” on the climate, and said he’d direct NOAA to embrace “new technologies” and partner with industry “to advance global observing systems.”
Jacobs previously served as the acting NOAA administrator from 2019 through the end of Trump’s first term, and is perhaps best remembered for his role in the “Sharpiegate” press conference, in which he modified a map of Hurricane Dorian’s storm track to match Trump’s mistaken claim that it would hit southern Alabama. The NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs and found he had violated the organization’s scientific integrity policy.
The Republican budget reconciliation bill could increase household energy costs by $170 per year by 2035 and $353 per year by 2040, according to a new analysis by Evergreen Action, a climate policy group. “Biden-era provisions, now cut by the GOP spending plan, were making it more affordable for families to install solar panels to lower utility bills,” the report found. The law also cut building energy efficiency credits that had helped Americans reduce their bills by an estimated $1,250 per year. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase wholesale electricity prices almost 75% by 2035, as well as eliminate 760,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Separately, an analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Center for American Progress found that the OBBBA could increase average electricity costs by $110 per household as soon as next year, and up to $200 annually in some states.
EIA
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is in talks with Commonwealth LNG in Louisiana to buy liquified natural gas, Reuters reports. The discussion is reportedly for 2 million tons per year of the facility’s 9.4 million-ton annual export capacity, which would help “cement Aramco’s push into the global LNG market as it accelerates efforts to diversify beyond crude oil exports” and be the “strongest signal yet that Aramco intends to take a material position in the U.S. LNG sector,” OilPrice.com notes. LNG demand is expected to grow 50% globally by 2030, but as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported, President Trump’s tariffs could make it harder for LNG projects still in early development, like Commonwealth, to succeed. “For the moment, U.S. LNG is still interesting,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar focused on natural gas at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told Emily. “But if costs increase too much, maybe people will start to wonder.”
Ford confirmed this week that its $3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan will still qualify for federal tax credits due to eleventh-hour tweaks to the bill’s language, The New York Times reports. Though Ford had said it would build its factory regardless of what happened to the credits, the company’s executive chairman had previously called them “crucial” to the construction of the facility and the employment of the 1,700 people expected to work there. Ford’s battery plant is located in Michigan’s Calhoun County, which Trump won by a margin of 56%. The last-minute tweaks to save the credits to the benefit of Ford “suggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest,” the Times writes.
Italy and Spain are on track to shutter their last remaining mainland coal power plants in the next several months, marking “a major milestone in Europe’s transition to a predominantly renewables-based power system by 2035,” Beyond Fossil Fuels reported Wednesday. To date, 15 European countries now have coal-free grids following Ireland’s move away from coal in 2025.
Italy is set to complete its transition from coal by the end of the summer with the closure of its last two plants, in keeping with the government’s 2017 phase-out target of 2025. Two coal plants in Sardinia will remain operational until 2028 due to complications with an undersea grid connection cable. In Spain, the nation’s largest coal plant will be entirely converted to fossil gas by the end of the year, while two smaller plants are also on track to shut down in the immediate future. Once they do, Spain’s only coal-power plant will be in the Balearic Islands, with an expected phase-out date of 2030.
“Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just can’t come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent — it is time for us all to wake up and fight.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in his 300th climate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.