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How a panther habitat became a battleground for the state’s environmental groups
About 27 miles inland from Florida’s southwestern coast sit three empty swaths of land among a sea of green. This undeveloped area represents both the future of Florida’s development and the culmination of a 20 year fight between the state’s environmentalists.
“What happens here will change the face of Collier County forever,” April Olson, a researcher at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, told me.
Home to affluent Naples and its fast-growing population of retirees, the county recently approved plans for four new villages to be built in one of Florida’s last undeveloped areas, which is sandwiched between some of the state’s biggest and most important nature reserves. The region hasn’t enjoyed official protection, per se, but it has enjoyed a special status. But with almost half a million people having moved to Florida just last year, and more on the way, the county of 300,000 inhabitants and counting has decided to keep building.
Yet if this sounds like a typical story of developers versus environmentalists, it isn’t. Instead, it has become a unique point of tension among environmental groups in Florida. While one group believes it’s their responsibility to be a part of this conversation and help manage unavoidable development, the other side believes it’s their role to fight against it.
“I’m very surprised environmentalists are taking this pragmatic approach,” said Matthew Schwartz, executive director of the South Florida Wildlands Association. “This isn’t what environmentalists do.”
The result is a rift among the guardians of Florida’s wildlife.
The environmentalists all agree on what they’re trying to protect: the panthers. From a conservation perspective, the region has acted as a corridor for the state’s remaining endangered panthers, of which there are only 120-230 adults left in the wild, to travel.
The area is surrounded by protected nature reserves. To the north is a complex of wildlife, bird sanctuaries, and wetlands; to the northeast are two different wildlife management areas, and to the south is the Florida panther national wildlife refuge, another wildlife management area that is home to bears, a state forest, a state preserve, and a national preserve that ultimately extends into the Everglades.
“This area is a mosaic of habitat types that allows the panther to live,” said Schwartz. “What they are doing essentially fragmented those complexes from one another.”
But to understand how the area has become a battleground of environmentalist groups, you’ll first have to dive into the area’s weird regulatory history.
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The villages being constructed amid this remarkably untouched land are the most recent outcome of a partnership between developers, land owners, and environmental groups. Called the Rural Lands Stewardship Area (RLSA) program, this partnership changed zoning over 20 years ago to allow for more dense development in exchange for environmental protections.
“At the end of the day, the RLSA is a compromise,” said Meredith Budd, who worked on this project when she was a policy director at the Florida Wildlife Federation. (She is now the director of external affairs for the Live Wildly Foundation.)
The RLSA was born way back in 1999, when then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush put a moratorium on development in Collier County. He claimed that urban sprawl in Naples, the state’s fastest growing city at the time, had gotten out of hand and that everyone needed to figure out a better solution for development that preserved agricultural lands and protected the environment.
When the RLSA was first discussed and proposed in 2002, most environmentalist groups, including the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, were on board. The battle that has emerged among these groups has its roots in some imprecise wording from the original proposal that almost tripled the amount of land that developers could build on.
The total area was — and still is — about 198,000 acres. Just over half of the acreage is protected nature reserves, with the rest mostly agricultural land available for development. But there’s a catch. Prior to the RLSA, the zoning only allowed for a single house, called a “ranchette,” to be built every five acres on the developable land. While some of these solitary homes exist today on farms, the majority of the area is still uninhabited, therefore serving as a wildlife corridor as well as porous land to absorb heavy rainfall or storm surges.
That’s where the RLSA was supposed to come in. Published in 2002, it proposed to change the allotment, swapping denser housing for more protected land. It indicated that 16,805 acres of the 98,000 available could be built on if developers earned allowances by restoring other land, although what would count as restoration was a little hazy. The language around these numbers was also very vague, critically leaving room to increase the amount of credits able to be earned and, subsequently, the acres developed. It ultimately increased the amount of land up for development to 45,000 acres. Many of the conservancies didn’t realize this change until the five-year review in 2007.
“We were supportive of RLSA,” said Olson. “But we believe the goals are not being met. The public was promised that 16,000 acres would be developed and that 91% of the area would be preserved.”
But those working with the RLSA think what’s done is done. “There’s no point in going back and figuring out what happened,” said Budd. “The allowable footprint is over 40,000 acres. We have to move forward and figure out whether wildlife connections can be made.”
The intent of the 1999 moratorium was to curb development for the benefit of conservation. The RLSA is still attempting to do that, but it’s a voluntary program, and much of the power lies with the landowners.
But in the past few years, Florida’s real estate market has boomed and land use planning regulations have been weakened. This combination made landowners restless to start building, more able to do so, and more impatient when it comes to making concessions to conservationists. Pro-RLSA environmentalists say playing hardball in negotiations with developers just won’t fly anymore.
“These organizations trying to save habitat by killing these programs aren’t helping, they’re making it worse,” said Elizabeth Fleming, a representative at Defenders of Wildlife, which supports the RLSA.
The four new villages, which are cumulatively known as “The Town of Big Cypress,” are only the most recent developments in the RLSA. The first, called Ave Maria, began building in 2005 but construction paused for a while after the recession. Big Cypress is one of the first cohesive plans out of the RLSA to keep building since then, but six more are in development. Though not nearly finished yet, the website for the Town of Big Cypress promises to fulfill all the expectations of the American dream. “Families strolling along storefronts with ice cream cones in hand … on-street parking for easy access to the hair salon, dog groomer, dry cleaner, and local grocer,” the website says. It promises happiness, community, convenience — even good weather and “responsible growth.”.
Today, both sides agree that no development would be the best way forward. “In a perfect world, I would love to see no more of it developed,” said Budd. “If I was Queen, I would say you no longer have property rights.”
Bradley Cornell, policy associate at the Audubon Society of the Western Everglades, helped make the RLSA a reality. “I’d much rather build a wall at the Georgia line and tell everyone to go home,” he said. “But we’re expected to get another 15 million people in Florida over the next 50 years. All of these people are moving to Florida. Where in the hell are we going to put them without ruining Florida’s nature?”
Between July 2021 and 2022, 444,500 people moved to Florida, according to the Tampa Bay Economic Council. Despite the increase in hurricanes and flooding and the decrease in affordable insurance, Florida is more popular than it has ever been.
Those in favor of the RLSA say that development is going to happen with or without them, and the RLSA allows them a platform to negotiate. “This is the best compromise we could have gotten,” Cornell said.
The primary benefit of the RLSA is that it offers a chance at higher density living with a potentially smaller ecological footprint. The pro-RLSA group, for example, has kept some developments from further encroaching on panther habitat. These conservationists have negotiated underpasses and fencing in three different areas to allow panthers and wildlife to cross roads without getting hit. They have also gotten the county to require bear proof trash cans, lowering lights to avoid light pollution, and smoke easements, which require new tenants to sign off on necessary controlled burns to maintain the environment for the panther preserve. From the Town of Big Cypress alone, the RLSA crediting system requires the developers to permanently preserve 12,000 acres. In this case, they will be restoring the hydrology of a major wetland nearby, according to Cornell.
“We’re just trying to have a seat at the table and ensure that we can get the best conservation outcomes knowing that the landowners have the rights to this land and are permitted to do whatever they want,” said Fleming.
The pro-RLSAers also pushed for more protections than they got. For 10 years, they fought for a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) that would have legally bound the landowners to certain conservation requirements, according to Budd. But pushback from the anti-RLSA groups slowed the process so much that eventually it wasn’t worth the landowners’ time and it was withdrawn in August 2022. Those against the RLSA had many qualms with the HCP and don’t see its withdrawal as a loss.
The other arguments against the RLSA are plentiful.
The anti-RLSA group contends that any development will harm the panthers. “This project would be the nail in the coffin of the panthers,” said Olson.
This side of the debate also thinks that the zoning rules that predated the RLSA, which previously allowed for ranchettes every five acres, were highly unlikely to practically result in development. They argue that implementing the road infrastructure required for such scattered housing would be prohibitively expensive, suggesting that if the RLSA hadn’t been proposed, this area would have been left untouched.
“It’s highly unlikely that they would come in and build five-acre ranchettes,” said Olson. “They would need thousands of miles of new roads. One new 100 mile road was calculated to cost $111 million in 2015.”
Schwartz agreed. “This is completely unpopulated, undeveloped rural land,” he said. “People don’t want to buy a swath of rural land and move into undeveloped lands.”
But pro-RLSA environmentalists think that perspective is naive. “That’s a false argument,” says Fleming. “It’s based in no reality. People are moving here and that area is the least expensive if you want to be near Naples. I see no reason why that wouldn’t continue.”
Budd added that money is not a concern in this area. “Collier County is one of the highest wealth points in the state, if not the whole country,” she said. “So to say this would be too expensive is unreasonable.”
Another area in between Naples and the RLSA, called Golden Gate Boulevard, had the same one-in-five zoning restrictions as the RLSA and has been heavily developed in the last 10 years.
The RLSA plan also does not seem to be taking the changing climate into account. According to Olson, 96% of Collier County is susceptible to storm surge. The inland parts aren’t as vulnerable, but there is still a high threat and the area’s porosity would be lost with these developments. In addition, the RLSA will experience 109 days where the heat index is above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in 2023, and 138 in 2053, according to The Washington Post’s interactive map on heat waves.
County Commissioner Bill McDaniel said that climate change was not a concern in the process of developing The Town of Big Cypress. “There are no stipulations with regard to climate change because it’s such a nebulous discussion point,” he said.
Though the commissioner agreed that many climate-friendly technologies are comparable, if not less expensive to purchase and maintain, the RLSA does not require developers to install permeable concrete, heat pumps, special shade trees for temperature, or solar panels on the houses.
“We recommended numerous policies that would encourage more energy efficient homes and appliances, improve permeability of sidewalks, require complete street designs that all users can use, ease traffic congestion, increase Florida friendly plants that require less water, include stipulations for storm water runoff, etc.” said Olson. “They just ignored it. I have not once heard the County even discuss heat issues or climate issues.”
Budd said that the choice to build inland in itself is a climate-conscious decision. “When looking at this long term and the threats of climate change, the main threat is that people will be moving inland,” she said. “Where we put the development is the most important thing.”
One of the biggest landowners in the area, named for the county’s namesake, Collier Enterprises, echoed Budd’s sentiment in emailed responses. “The Town of Big Cypress is 19 miles from the coast, similar to Babcock Ranch, which did not sustain damage from the recent Hurricane Ian, having one of the largest reported storm surges ever recorded.” He added that most of the national buildings in the area provide options for energy efficiency and smart home technology
Though both sides have very different ideas of how to be involved in development, they are both aware that development is coming to Eastern Collier County and share the same ultimate desires for the region.
“We do know that the RLSA is going to grow,” said Olson. “We know that Collier County is going to grow. We just think it could be done more sustainably.”
Environmentalists everywhere are grappling with how to best save the last bastion of the lands and animals that sustain us. Depending on which side you take in the RLSA fight, it has become a question of cynicism versus hope or pragmatism versus pipe dreams.
Those against the RLSA are still championing its original goal: to preserve the environment and to curb excessive development. “The goal of the program wasn’t to allow each and every landowner to maximize their profit to the greatest extent,” said Nicole Johnson, Director of Governmental Relations at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
The other side has committed to pragmatism. “At the end of the day, the dollar speaks,” said Budd. “And unfortunately it speaks louder than the voices against the project.”
As regulations recede in Florida, the RLSA disagreement signals a philosophical choice environmentalists will increasingly have to make: If we can’t beat them, should we join them?
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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.