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Counties that veered from Obama in 2008 to Trump in 2016 are more likely to oppose renewables development.
In Texas, the Oak Run Solar Project would have been a slam dunk.
Developers would install 800 megawatts of solar panels — enough to power 800,000 homes — across nine square miles of unused land. It would devote some of its acreage to new farming practices that incorporate solar panels. And it would sell its electricity cheaply — and profitably — because it was near the state capital and because it could take advantage of a pre-existing onsite connection to the regional power grid.
But Oak Run wasn’t proposed in Texas. It was proposed in Ohio, and that means it has faced enormous opposition. Ohio has some of the country’s strictest restrictions on solar development, and 10 counties have blocked solar development outright.
Although Madison County, where Oak Run was proposed, is not one of them, the blowback to the project cost a local Republican county commissioner his job. Oak Run was eventually approved by the state’s power siting board earlier this year, but its opponents are now appealing that decision in the state’s Supreme Court.
Madison County, Ohio, also illustrates the political transformation that has revolutionized the upper Midwest. The predominantly rural county near the state’s capital, Columbus, has favored Republicans since the 1960s. But in recent decades it has swung hard to the right. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 40% of the county’s vote. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton picked up just 27%.
These two facts may seem like they have little to do with each other. But they point to one of the biggest trends in clean energy development across the country: The counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and then Donald Trump in 2016 are some of the worst places in the country to permit and build renewable projects.
The size of a county’s swing from 2008 to 2016 is one of the biggest predictors of whether a proposed wind or solar project will be contested or blocked, according to a new Heatmap Pro analysis of more than 8,500 projects and local policies around the country.
The magnitude of that swing is by far the most important political variable to emerge from Heatmap Pro’s analysis of more than 60 risk factors influencing community support or opposition to renewable projects. It is more strongly associated with a given project’s success than whether a county votes for Democratic or Republican candidates overall.
The only variables that are more closely correlated than the 2008-to-2016 swing are fundamental measures of a region’s population or local economy, such as its median income, racial demographics, or dominant industries. Towns and regions that heavily depend on farming, for instance, have become particularly reluctant to accept new solar projects in recent years.
Heatmap Pro’s analysis focused not only on whether a county’s residents support wind or solar projects in theory, but also on whether renewable projects proposed in the area are canceled, contested, or exposed to political turbulence. It surveyed more than 7,000 wind and solar projects proposed and built across the United States since the 1990s.
Many of the counties with the largest Obama-to-Trump swings have passed proposals meant to limit renewable development. Vermillion County in Indiana — where more than a quarter of voters swung from Obama to Trump — has an extensive set of restrictions on new solar projects. Solar projects in Elk County, Pennsylvania, which saw a similar swing, have also turned out against solar projects using up “prime farmland.”
There are a few reasons why the Obama-to-Trump swing might be associated with more opposition to renewables.
In 2008, solar and wind were still frontier technologies and were not price-competitive with fossil fuels. Although vaguely associated with Democrats, politicians on both sides of the aisles championed wind and solar so as to wean the country off foreign oil.
But in the following decade, the U.S. increased its solar capacity by roughly 100-fold, while it has more than doubled its installed wind capacity.. Today, solar and wind energy are major features of the electricity system, and many Republicans have openly embraced fossil fuels and cast doubt on the value of cleaner alternatives.
To be sure, the Obama-to-Trump swing was influenced by other social and economic factors, as well as a state’s specific political environment. Leah Stokes, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist who has studied the growing local opposition to wind farms, told me that the correlation with Obama-Trump voters may originate from Trump’s dominance of the upper Midwest in 2016. Because a small group of anti-renewable advocates can change an entire region’s policies, that could lead to more opposition to renewables in one part of the country or another.
“Is there a person, or a network of people, who are going place by place pushing these anti-solar and wind local laws? That would lead to a geographic concentration,” she said.
Even within individual counties, the electorate wasn’t the same in 2016 as it was in 2008. Throughout the 2010s, tens of millions of Americans moved around the country, with the largest net change moving from the Northeast to the South. Cities became younger on average, while rural areas and suburbs became older.
Even within counties, a different set of voters showed up to the polls in each election. One reason why the 2012 election might not be correlated with opposition to renewables is that many voters who voted for Obama in 2008 skipped the next cycle. Those same voters — many of whom were white and working class — showed back up in 2016 and backed Trump.
What is driving the opposition to renewables? Perhaps a county’s swing against renewable energy is happening precisely because voters there are persuadable. From 2008 to 2016, many voters in these counties changed their minds about which candidate or political party to support. As they shifted their stance to the right, they also adopted more seemingly Republican views about wind and solar development. Donald Trump has distinguished himself by his embrace of fossil fuels and climate change skepticism — perhaps as voters come to support him, they also adopt his positions.
What’s interesting, however, is that deep red counties that have not seen a political shift — places that backed, say, McCain and Romney by roughly the same margin as they backed Trump in 2016 — continue to build wind and solar at a good clip. Texas, for instance, is the No. 1 state for renewable deployment. A county’s partisanship, in other words, is not as good a predictor of its opposition to renewables as its swinginess.
Edgar Virguez, an energy systems engineer at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, has studied what drives opposition to renewables in North Carolina. He told me that some of the same factors that predict a county’s Trump support — such as its population density and education level — also predict whether that county has enacted a local restriction on renewable energy.
When he and his colleagues studied local policies in North Carolina, they found that lower density and less educated counties “had significantly higher reductions in the land available for solar development” when compared with denser or more educated counties, he said. Once a county has fewer than 35 people per square mile, or when less than 20% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, the number of restrictions on local land use shot up. That’s a problem for decarbonization, he added, because less dense counties also usually have the best and most affordable land available for solar development.
That finding may not hold true in other states. Heatmap, for instance, has found that whiter and more educated counties are more likely to oppose renewables. And to some degree, less dense counties are exactly where you’d expect to see more solar and wind projects get built — and thus more local policies restricting them pop up. But it is nonetheless not great news for advocates, given that a couple of America’s political institutions — namely, the Senate and the Electoral College — favor rural voters or Midwestern states. If the trend takes root, then it could eventually curtail renewable development across the country. That question — and many others — will partly be decided in this week’s presidential election.
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The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.