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Current conditions: Storm Herminia could bring fresh flooding to England and Wales, just days after Storm Éowyn • A giant iceberg is on a collision course with the island of South Georgia in the Atlantic Ocean • Phoenix, Arizona, might see rain today for the first time in 156 days.
President Trump signed an executive order establishing a review council to assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and said the agency needs to be “drastically” improved. The council will have no more than 20 members, and will include department heads as well as people from outside the government that are appointed by Trump himself. “These non-Federal members shall have diverse perspectives and expertise in disaster relief and assistance, emergency preparedness, natural disasters, Federal-State relationships, and budget management,” the order states. This new council will be tasked with scrutinizing the agency’s disaster relief efforts and making recommendations for improvement. Trump has slammed FEMA and the prior administration for their responses to recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Helene and the wildfires in Los Angeles. Misinformation and conspiracy theories – often floated by Republican politicians and rightwing figureheads – spread quickly in the wake of both emergencies. The executive order insists there are “serious concerns of political bias in FEMA.” While touring hurricane damage in North Carolina a few days ago, Trump suggested “getting rid of” FEMA altogether, although that would require some help from Congress. The Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation has recommended that FEMA be removed from the Department of Homeland Security, and that programs like the National Flood Insurance Program be privatized.
Rainstorms have prompted flooding alerts in parts of Los Angeles that have been left charred by recent large wildfires. The downpours are helping firefighters get a handle on the blazes that remain, with the Palisades, Eaton, and Huges fires all more than 90% contained. But the city is on edge: Too much rain could trigger landslides and flooding around burn scars. A flood advisory is in effect around the Palisades fire burn scar, and areas surrounding the Eaton fire burn scar are also on high alert. The rain could also bring “toxic runoff” – rainwater laced with the chemicals leftover from burned objects like cars and furniture. Workers have been putting improvised filters over storm drains to try to trap pollutants. The worst of the rain was expected Sunday night and Monday.
In case you missed it: The Department of Interior issued an order suspending the ability of its staff, except a few senior officials, to permit new renewables projects on public land. The document suspended the authority of “Department Bureaus and Offices” over a wide range of regular actions, including issuing “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.” The suspension lasts for 60 days and can only be overridden by “a confirmed or Acting official” in a number of senior roles in the Department, including the secretary. “This step will restrict energy development, which will harm consumers and fail to meet growing electricity demand,” Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for American Clean Power, the clean energy trade group, told Heatmap in an email. “We need an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy, not just a ‘some-of-the-above’ approach.”
President Trump has also requested that the Supreme Court pause all pending litigation on environmental cases, including one focusing on California’s EPA waiver to set and enforce its own vehicle emissions standards. Sources told Reuters the administration has also reassigned four Justice Department attorneys that focus on environmental issues, so that the government “speaks with one voice.”
U.S. power generation growth will be led mostly by new solar power additions over the next two years, according to the Energy Information Agency. It expects 26 gigawatts of solar to be added in 2025, down from 37 GW in 2024. Wind power additions are expected to increase by about 8 GW this year, but honestly, who knows. Meanwhile, 6% of coal generating capacity will be removed this year as coal plants are retired. U.S. energy consumption is expected to continue growing at its current rate of about 2% per year through 2026, which would mark the first three years of consecutive growth since the early 2000s.
Energy Information Agency
Here’s a little bit of good news to start the week: Trade group data suggests that air-source heat pump sales outpaced those of gas furnaces by 37% in the U.S. last year – or at least through November. If confirmed, that would be the widest margin recorded, much bigger than last year’s 21%. “The data comes with a notable caveat,” Canary Media cautioned. “Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces, but that doesn’t necessarily mean more households are choosing heat pumps over gas heating; homes often need multiple heat pump units to replace a single fossil fuel-fired appliance.”
“We spend a lot of time talking about short-term financials, but we’re building a business for the next few decades. So, eh, who cares? It’s going to be a little more challenging the next couple of years.”
–Rivian founder and CEO R.J. Scaringe speaking to InsideEVs about whether Trump’s policies will affect his EV company
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.