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Low-flow shower heads have improved since Jerry Seinfeld was on TV.
You can take the real estate magnate out of development, but becoming a politician hasn’t made Donald Trump less invested in dishwashers and water flow. Here’s what he’s gotten right and wrong about at-home energy efficiency on the campaign trail.
All I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.” [Jan. 5, 2024]
Fact check: Trump made this comment while discussing electric catapults and magnetic elevators on aircraft carriers. While there have certainly been problems with the roll-out of these advanced systems on the ships, none involved water-damaged magnets. Magnets are waterproof, and therefore their performance does not suffer from water damage.
“They want to talk about your dishwashers and how much water you’re going to have in your dishwasher, even though they don’t work and all of the other things that you have that were so precious and dear and that you never really appreciated until now because they want to take them away.” [December 2, 2023]
Fact check: As someone who lives in a New York City apartment, I would absolutely describe my dishwasher as “precious and dear,” so that part is true. It is also true that, as I explained last year, rules proposed by the Biden administration call for new dishwashers imported and made in the U.S. to use 34% less water, or no more than 3.3 gallons, during their default cycles by 2027. But it is not true that those dishwashers don’t work.
Energy-efficient dishwashers can take a long time to clean your dishes; many cycles last more than two hours and some up to three. The reason for this is pretty straightforward: In order to achieve the same level of cleanliness as old, water- and energy-inefficient dishwashers, new water- and energy-efficient dishwashers need to swish around longer.
But the “default cycles” are the only dishwasher mode the government restricts; “short cycle” modes, which require more water and take less time, are still allowed on dishwashers sold in the U.S. and aren’t regulated by the new rules. That fast mode just can’t be the default. As Wirecutter writes, “crappy cleaning performance and long cycles aren’t an inevitable outcome of efficiency standards,” and “if your dishwasher is slow and sucks (and a better detergent doesn’t fix the problem), blame the company that built it.”
“Now their new thing is your heating systems in the house. They don’t want you to have a modern-day heating system. They want you to use a heating system that will cost you at least $10,000 to buy and won’t work very well.” [August 24, 2023]
Fact check: It’s really gas furnace systems that are, technically speaking, dated. Gas furnaces were considered state-of-the-art in the 1920s and 1930s, while heat pump technology — which works by transferring, rather than generating, heat from indoors to outdoors and vice versa — took off in the 1970s as a response to surging oil prices. Heat pumps can be up to five times more efficient than fossil-fuel furnaces, according to electrification advocacy group Rewiring America, which means that at least 70% of people could save money on their energy bills by switching from fossil fuel heaters, the group estimates.
The cost of a heat pump itself varies widely depending on size (how much house it has to heat), type (geothermal vs. air source), and efficiency, then when you add in factors like the cost to refit you existing HVAC system and the cost of labor, well, it adds up. While heat pumps aren’t cheap, they do at least serve as both a furnace and an air conditioner, two appliances for the price of one, an investment that can pay back over time, Rewiring America said.
“You want to wash your beautiful hair. And you stand under a shower and the suds never go — the water comes out very slowly. I’m sure you’ve seen this. It usually takes place in new hotels and new homes.” [August 24, 2023]
Fact check: This might have been true when Seinfeld was on the air, but it hasn’t been for quite a while. Modern low-flow shower heads are specifically designed to “push out water that feels like a higher pressure even with a lower flow rate,” U.S. News and World Report writes.
When Trump was on his way out of the White House, his administration reinterpreted a 2013 regulation about how much water can flow out of a showerhead. “Manufacturers [had not demanded] the rollback,” The Washington Post writes. “Instead, the call for more powerful showers came from Trump himself, who complained that the conservation standards led to low water pressure and a dissatisfying shower experience.” With four or five or more nozzles, as Trump had allowed, “you could have 10, 15 gallons per minute powering out of the showerhead, literally probably washing you out of the bathroom,” Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the energy conservation group Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told PBS.
Biden restored the old water flow regulations.
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On the worsening transformer shortage, China’s patent boom, and New York’s nuclear embrace
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Erin is still intensifying as it approaches the Caribbean • Rare August rainstorms are deluging the Pacific Northwest with a month’s worth of precipitation in 24 hours, threatening floods • Hong Kong has issued its highest-level “black” rainstorm warning multiple times this month as Tropical Storm Podul lashes southern China.
President Donald Trump’s order to keep large fossil-fueled power stations scheduled to retire between now and 2028 operating indefinitely will cost ratepayers across the United States $3.1 billion per year, according to new research from the consultancy Grid Strategies on behalf of four large environmental groups. If the Department of Energy expands the order to cover all 54 fossil fuel plants slated for closure in the next three years, the price tag for Americans whose rates fund the subsidies to keep the stations running would rise to $6 billion per year.
The problem may only grow. The agency’s existing mandates “perversely incentivize plant owners to claim they plan to retire so they can receive a ratepayer subsidy to remain open,” the report points out.
With electricity consumption hitting new records in the U.S., demand for transformers is surging. The years-long supply shortage for power and distribution transformers is now set to hit a deficit below demand of 30% and 10%, respectively, in 2025, according to a new report from the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Complicating matters further for manufacturers scrambling to ramp up supply, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is throwing clean-energy projects into jeopardy and sending mixed signals to factories on what kinds of transformers to produce. At the same time, tariffs are raising the price of materials needed to make more transformers.
“The U.S. transformer market stands at a critical juncture, with supply constraints threatening to undermine the nation's energy transition and grid reliability goals,” Ben Boucher, a senior supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “The convergence of accelerating electricity demand, aging infrastructure and supply chain vulnerabilities has created constraints that will persist well into the 2030s.”
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For years, China was known for ripping off the West’s technology and patenting cheaper but more easily manufactured copies. Not anymore. China applied for twice as many high-quality clean energy patents as the U.S. in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of the most recently available public data. The European Patent Office, which supplied data to the Times, defines a “high quality” patent as one that has been filed in two or more countries, indicating that the company or individual involved has a strong competitive interest in protecting its idea.
The growth in China’s intellectual property ambitions is a sign that Beijing’s strategic push to ramp up academic research and industrial innovation is maturing. “It is the opposite of an accident,” said Jenny Wong Leung, an analyst and data scientist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which created a database of global research on technologies that are critical to nations’ economic and military security, including clean energy.
In June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, to support the construction of the state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s. Albany has plenty to sort out between now and the 15-year deadline for completing the project, including selecting a site, picking from one of the many new reactor designs, and finding a private partner. But one thing isn’t a problem, at least for now: Public support.
New Siena polling I covered in my Substack newsletter yesterday shows that 49% of registered voters in New York support the effort, with just 26% opposed. Both sides of the political spectrum are largely in lockstep, with Republican support outpacing that of Democrats by a margin of 55% to 49%. That’s lucky for Hochul, who will need support from the more politically conservative upper reaches of the state where the facility is likely to be built. For more on the technical and political considerations in play, here’s Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin on the plan.
It seems like everyone is abandoning their net zero goals. But not insurer Aviva. The company’s chief executive, Amanda Blanc, said the British giant remained committed to its carbon-cutting goals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, The Guardian reported. With rising profits propelling shares in the company to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, Blanc said, “extreme weather conditions, climate change, and the impact that that has on our insurance business that actually insures properties” meant Aviva needed to “remain committed to our ambition.”
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.