You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The founder of Zero Emissions Northwest talks about furloughing his staff — and about the farmers he serves, who are also paying a price.
As President Donald Trump has thrown funding for a broad swath of energy-related federal programs into disarray, Heatmap has been tracking the tangible impacts. On Friday I got the chance to talk with David Funk, founder and president of Zero Emissions Northwest, who had to furlough his three employees this week after Trump’s executive order “Unleashing American Energy” paused the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for up to 90 days.
ZEN’s staff — and the rural Pacific northwest farmers and small business owners that it serves — rely on grants from the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program. As Funk explained in a LinkedIn post on Thursday, the organization has secured 67 grants in its 15 months of operation, each one representing a specific renewable energy- or energy efficiency-related project for a rural customer — think solar installations, heat pumps, better refrigeration, or even agricultural spray drones. But Funk told me that the majority of these projects have yet to be completed, and now their future is in question.
“I do think that we are a canary in a coal mine right now, and we are a leading indicator of impacts that are going to be much larger than what we’re seeing with our program and our company,” Funk told me.
I asked Funk about the work ZEN does, the confusion around learning that its funding was affected, and how he and the customers he serves have responded. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Get the best of Heatmap in your inbox daily.
What led you to start Zero Emissions Northwest?
I’ve been in energy for coming up on two decades, so I’ve got experience in the space. Then the second thing that happened was I married a farmer’s daughter outside of Spokane — so a 10,000-acre wheat farm — and that got me a lot closer to agriculture than I had ever been. And the last thing, about four years ago, I looked at my father in law’s shop and said, there’s got to be a grant for a farmer to put solar on their shop. I found the Rural Energy for America Program, wrote him a grant, successfully won it, and then about six of his neighbors came by and said, “Hey, how’d you get him money? I want money to go and improve my farm.” So then I was the most experienced person in eastern Washington. And the USDA launched a contract called the Technical Assistance contract, which we won in Idaho and Washington. And that's when I quit my job and started ZEN.
In rough numbers, our projects have won about $4 million worth of grant support, and that $4 million worth of grant support is matched by private capital. And then those projects are going to save $20 million over their useful life. So call it $30 million of total investment in rural communities, because the money saved on these farms doesn’t go to anything other than fertilizer for next year’s crop, and seed, wheat, and maintenance and mechanics. All of this gets reinvested in making that farm better or making that business better.
How did you learn that ZEN would be impacted by Trump’s executive order?
We talked to people in the government, and they have repeatedly told us that obligated grants have never been removed. So we were operating on the understanding that once a project is obligated, we can then start working and helping that farmer execute on that project. So Trump takes office, we’re still heads down doing what we’re doing — and we do have this belief that the work that we’re doing is exactly the work that Trump wants to see.
We get paid roughly about four times a year, so basically a quarterly invoice. So we haven’t been paid since October. We submitted an invoice in early January for our normal operating procedures, and the USDA processed that in the first week of the Trump administration, and said, “Cool. They’ve done everything, press pay,” and it didn’t go through. We were told verbally that there were back-end restrictions.
We thought it was all tied to this OMB thing. On Tuesday night, [the OMB memo] was blocked, and then on Wednesday, it was rescinded. And all of that’s happening in real time with everybody in the country — not just us citizens, but employees as well. Bureaucrats going, we’re learning about this by tweet, too! And then on Wednesday, we learned in real time with our partners that [the pause in funding] was actually from an executive order, not from the OMB memo. We made the decision that day to furlough our employees. If this goes for 90 days, it’ll be six months of us not getting paid on our largest source of revenue.
Have the farmers and small businesses that you work with had to halt their in-process projects?
It varies for each project. We have a handful of solar projects that are up, and we’re just waiting on a utility interconnection. So those projects we’re finishing. We’ve got equipment like new washing machines en route to a rural laundromat. That’s going to still happen, because he’s already bought them, but his second invoice is going to become due when those show up on site. So he doesn’t really know what’s going on and how to pause that. But if you haven’t started on your project, we’re advising people to not take on more risk by spending money and [instead] just pausing [their projects].
I know it’s only been a few days, but what efforts have you made thus far to get in touch with the federal government?
I’ve got a long list of people that we’re trying to get in touch with. I’ve told all of our customers — many of whom are in the GOP in eastern Washington and northern Idaho — to call their representatives, as well as if they have Twitter, tweet at Donald Trump. So we’re trying to empower our customers to really advocate for their projects, and that’s our main focus.
I’m sure a majority of our customers voted for Donald Trump and voted for the GOP representatives, and we just want them to really explain how this is damaging their business and their farm.
Given that many of your customers support President Trump, what has their reaction to this funding freeze been like?
Everybody expected that funding would continue. That was the message that we were getting from the USDA — the obligated funds have been obligated, the government has signed a contract. So everybody was surprised about that. But I’ll be honest, their reactions are mixed. Some farmers are furious. They have spent this money. They have taken on a risk. They did so with the expectation that the government would honor their contract. So that’s one category. We have another category of farmer that kind of lumps this into weather — things they can’t control. There’s much more understanding if you did vote for Donald Trump. We have had a farmer say, “Maybe they’ll find some waste and it’ll filter through, and we’ll eventually get paid. We can’t control that, but this might be a good thing for our country.” To which I replied, I want the filter first, not second!
But nobody thinks that their project doesn’t fit this mold of unleashing American energy. Nobody is really doubting that they might eventually get paid, because this is aligned with what everybody wants. We’re helping farmers take control of their costs, generate onsite power, or conserve energy through upgrades that really benefit their bottom line and really improve their own farm. We’re helping them reinvest in themselves through the process. We prioritize Made in America equipment wherever possible. We want to see these tax dollars and these incentives stay in the country. So we’ve actually never had a farmer choose to go with a non-Made in America solar system.
Even if this funding pause ends soon, how do you think about the future of your organization given President Trump’s apparent antipathy toward renewable energy and energy efficiency projects — or at least language that highlights any sustainability-related benefits?
If we’re going to go and apply for more contracts to the USDA, one of my big concerns right now is if we’re talking about [renewable energy and energy efficiency], are we going to get blacklisted from doing the work that we do in rural Washington? We have always been, with our customer base, really focused on finance, cost savings, practicality — and then all of the decarbonization benefits of this stuff is very secondary for all of our projects.
When I named the company, all of those things were also in question, right? I called a farmer and said, “Hi, it’s David Funk from Zero Emissions Northwest.” And they said, “What? You don’t fart?” And he hung up on me. We think about, how are we being viewed by our customers? And with the politicalization of language, are we losing out on a market segment that we could be helping, just because somebody looks at our name and says, well, I’m not gonna work with them? It’s an active discussion always, how we present ourselves on paper.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
While they’re getting more accurate all the time, they still rely on data from traditional models — and possibly always will.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has had a bruising few weeks. Deep staffing cuts at the hands of Elon Musk’s efficiency crusaders have led to concerns regarding the potential closure of facilities critical to data-gathering and weather-forecasting operations. Meteorologists have warned that this could put lives at risk, while industries that rely on trustworthy, publicly available weather data — from insurance to fishing, shipping, and agriculture — are bracing for impact. While reliable numbers are difficult to come by, the agency appears to have lost on the order of 7% to 10% of its workforce, or more than 1,000 employees. NOAA’s former deputy director, Andrew Rosenberg, wrote that Musk plans to lay off 50% of the agency, while slashing its budget by 30%.
Will that actually happen? Who the heck knows. But what we can look at are the small cracks that are already emerging, and who could step in to fill that void.
One thing that’s certain is that the National Weather Service, a division of NOAA, announced last week that it is suspending operations at a weather balloon launch site in Alaska, due to staffing shortages. The data gathered at this remote outpost helped inform the agency’s weather forecasts, which are relied upon by hundreds of millions of people, as well as many of the world’s largest companies and public agencies.
Perhaps to Musk’s department, this looks like a prime opportunity for the private sector to step up and demonstrate some nimble data gathering prowess — and indeed a startup that I’ve covered before, WindBorne, has already offered its services. The company, which makes advanced weather balloons, has offered to provide NOAA with data from its own Alaska launches for six months, at no cost. WindBorne is also one of a number of private companies creating AI-based weather models that have outperformed NOAA’s traditional, physics-based models on key metrics such as temperature, wind speed and direction, precipitation, humidity, and pressure.
All this raises the question, though, of what kind of role the private sector could and should play in the weather forecasting space overall. If the architects of Project 2025 have their way, NOAA would be “broken up and downsized,” and its National Weather Service division would “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.” If the Trump administration achieves these goals, “the Weather Service would cease to function in a way that it could meet its mandate to protect American life and property,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told me.
But given that heavyweights like Google, Huawei, and Nvidia are already in the AI-based weather prediction game, along with startups such as WindBorne and Brightband, which is making weather predictions tailored to the needs of specific industries such as insurance, agriculture, or transportation, it wasn’t clear to me whether, if NOAA were to crumble, the accuracy of weather forecasts necessarily would, too. I thought that perhaps Musk, the White House’s most notorious AI enthusiast, might be thinking the same thing. So I asked around.
“There’s actually a very good argument that I think would be very uncontroversial to expand the role of the private sector, even to offload certain parts of the workflow to the private sector,” Swain told me, with regards to NOAA and its adoption — or lack thereof — of AI-based weather forecasting. But what nobody wanted was to get rid of free, publicly available government forecasts completely.
“I don’t want to have to figure out what company to trust. I just want to be able to go and open the National Weather Service and know what’s going on,” John Dean, the CEO and co-founder of WindBorne, told me.
Julian Green, the CEO and co-founder of Brightband, agreed. “The government doesn’t just forecast the weather, but it gives people alerts. And there’s regulation around whether [it tells you that] you should evacuate, or shut your factory down, or so on.” It’s not hard to imagine the ethical quandaries that could arise from a private company with a profit motive deciding who can access potentially life-saving forecasts, and for how much.
WindBorne’s and Brightband’s AI models, as well as those from tech giants such as Google, are significantly less computationally intensive to operate than those from NOAA or the other leading weather forecasting agency, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. These traditional models rely on supercomputers crunching complicated atmospheric equations based on the laws of physics to make their predictions.
But this doesn’t mean the physics-based models are getting replaced by AI now, or potentially ever. Government data and traditional forecasts still make up the backbone of advanced AIs, which are trained on decades of data largely gathered by NOAA satellites, weather balloons, and radar systems, and then interpreted through the lens of standard physics-based models. After training is complete, the AI models can predict what weather patterns will develop, much like ChatGPT predicts the next word in a sequence, but only after being fed a snapshot of initial weather conditions — also pulled from traditional physics-based models.
Essentially, these AI forecasts are built on the backs of the giants, and while their outcomes are hugely promising, they could not exist without that solid foundation. While one day, it might be possible to operate AI forecasting models without relying on traditional models, Dean and Green told me that physics-based models might always be critical for training the AI. So while their companies’ respective models have yielded impressive results, both Dean and Green nixed the idea that their companies could wholly replace the predictions made by the National Weather Service.
All of this is in flux of course, but as Green put it to me in an email, “a good mechanic doesn't throw away good older tools just because you get new tools.” Plus, as Dean explained, there are still conditions under which physics-based models tend to outperform AI, such as “really small-scale and high-res phenomena — let’s say convective events, let’s say severe thunderstorms in the Plains, or tornado formation.”
Even Project 2025’s authors point out that private industry forecasters rely on publicly available NOAA data, though it doesn’t make any reference to AI models or physics models. The document simply says that the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services” and the “efficient delivery of accurate, timely, and unbiased data to the public and to the private sector.”
There are also questions around whether AI models, trained on data from the past, will be able to predict the types of unusual and extreme weather events that are becoming more and more common in a warming world, Swain told me. “Does it fully capture those?” he asked. “There’s a lot of evidence that the answer is no.”
Lastly, NOAA’s weather model, the Global Forecast System, is simply measuring much more than the AI models do today. “It predicts so many different phenomena, like different types of snow, hail, mixing ratios, turbulence,” Dean said. “We’re building up over time to add more and more variables. But for both WindBorne and other models, it’s not the same currently as what GFS does.”
So while the Heritage Foundation might want to delegate all forecasting responsibilities to private companies, the vision I heard from the startups I talked to looked more like a mutually beneficial arrangement than the full commercialization of weather prediction, or even a clean division of labor. “It’s not privatized weather, it’s a public-private partnership,” Dean said of his ideal future, “where you get freely available forecasts from a public institution like NOAA, but they work with our industry to iterate faster and to drive more innovation.”
What everyone seems to want is simply for the government to forecast better, and today that means moving quickly to build AI-based models. NOAA has taken some steps forward, prototyping some models, bolstering its computing capabilities, and even recently partnering with Brightband to optimize its observational data to train AI models. But it remains behind other agencies in this regard. “The Chinese government and the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts have done a far better job at adopting AI-based weather forecasts than NOAA has,” Dean told me. “So something does need to change at NOAA to get them to move faster.”
Indiscriminately laying off hundreds of the agency’s employees may not be the best place to start. But if there’s anything we know Musk loves, it’s AI and private sector ingenuity. So maybe, just maybe, this administration will be able to forge the kind of partnerships that can supercharge federal forecasting, while keeping NOAA’s weather predictions free and open for all. Or maybe we’ll all just be paying the big bucks to figure out when a hurricane is going to hit.
On energy transition funds, disappearing butterflies, and Tesla’s stock slump
Current conditions: Australians have been told to prepare for the worst ahead of Cyclone Alfred, and 100,000 people are already without power • Argentina’s Buenos Aires province has been hit by deadly flooding • Critical fire conditions will persist across much of west Texas through Saturday.
Many foreign aid programs have reportedly received a questionnaire from the Trump administration that they must complete as part of a review, presumably to help the government decide whether or not the groups should receive any more federal funds. One of the questions on the list, according toThe New York Times, is: “Can you confirm this is not a climate or ‘environmental justice’ project or include such elements?” Another asks if the project will “directly impact efforts to strengthen U.S. supply chains or secure rare earth minerals?” President Trump issued an executive order freezing foreign aid on his first day back in office. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that aid must be released. The Times notes that “many of the projects under scrutiny have already fired their staff and closed their doors, because they have received no federal funds since the review process ostensibly began. … Within some organizations, there are no staff members left to complete the survey.”
The United States has withdrawn from a global financing program aimed at helping poorer nations ditch fossil fuels and shift to clean energy. A spokesperson from the Treasury Department said the Just Energy Transition Partnership does not align with President Trump’s vision of American economic and environmental values. The program was launched in 2021 and has 10 donor nations, including many European countries. Its first beneficiaries were Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa, and Vietnam. The U.S. had committed more than $3 billion to Indonesia and Vietnam and nearly $2 billion to South Africa under the initiative. “The U.S. withdrawal is regrettable,” said Rachel Kyte, the U.K.’s climate envoy. “The rest of the world moves on.” In January, the Trump administration canceled $4 billion in pledges to the Green Climate Fund. “We have to plan for a world where the U.S. is not transfusing funds into the green transition,” Kyte added.
Butterfly populations in the U.S. are rapidly declining due to a combination of climate change, habitat loss, and pesticide exposure, according to a “catastrophic and saddening” new study published in the journal Science. “Butterflies are vanishing from the face of the earth,” one of the study’s co-authors told The Washington Post. The research analyzed data from 77,000 butterfly surveys and found that butterfly numbers have fallen by 22% in just 20 years across the entire country. Of the 342 butterfly species that could be analyzed for trends, 107 plummeted by more than 50% and 22 by more than 90%. Just nine species saw their numbers rise. The researchers say these numbers are likely an underestimate.
The findings underscore the crisis facing all the small, underappreciated insects that pollinate flowers and crops, control pests, maintain soil health, and play a vital role in the food chain. According to the World Wildlife Fund, up to 40% of the world’s insect species may disappear by the end of the century. The study’s lead author, ecologist Collin Edwards, said there is some hope. “Butterflies have fast life cycles,” he said. “At least one generation per year, often two or three. And each of those generations lays a ton of eggs. This means that if we make the world a more hospitable place for butterflies, butterfly species have the capacity to respond very quickly and take advantage of all our efforts.”
The Government Accountability Office yesterday said that Congress can’t review (or repeal) the Environmental Protection Agency’s waiver that lets California set its own vehicle emissions standards. The decision derails plans being spearheaded by Republicans and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to use the congressional review process to overturn the waiver. California’s aggressive emissions standards, which have been adopted by many other states, would effectively end the sale of fully gas-powered cars by 2035. Republicans are mulling their next move.
Tesla’s stock price has been taking a beating as resentment grows around CEO Elon Musk’s political meddling. The company’s valuation soared from around $800 billion to $1.5 trillion in December, when it became clear Musk would become the president-elect’s right hand man. Since that moment, the company’s value has fallen by more than $600 million, effectively erasing the bump in Tesla’s market cap. Shares fell by 5.6% yesterday alone, and sales are cratering abroad and in key U.S. markets like California.
As Andrew Moseman explains for Heatmap, a big drop in sales could be a double-whammy for Tesla revenue. “Recall that the company’s most reliable revenue stream is not really its sales of electric cars, but rather the carbon credits generated by those EVs under California’s auto emissions regulatory scheme, which it can sell to other automakers who’ve yet to meet their emissions targets,” Moseman says. “Tesla’s tumbling sales in the wake of Musk’s antics could reduce the amount of credits it could sell to others, since the credits are tied to sales of low-emissions vehicles.” There was more bad news for Musk today: A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a test flight, sending flaming debris flying across a large area and disrupting air traffic in Florida.
A new report shows that a year after London expanded its low-emissions zone, air quality in the city has improved, with nitrogen dioxide levels across 2024 down significantly:
State legislatures are now a crucial battleground for the future of renewable energy, as Republican lawmakers seek massive restrictions and punitive measures on new solar and wind projects.
Once a hyperlocal affair, the campaign to curtail renewable energy development now includes state-wide setbacks, regulations, and taxes curtailing wind and solar power. As we previously reported, Oklahoma is one of those states – and may as soon as this year enact mandatory setback requirements on wind power facilities, despite getting nearly half its electricity from wind farms. According to a Heatmap Pro analysis, these rules would affect 65 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.
Oklahoma is far from alone in potentially restricting land use. In Arizona, the State House last month passed legislation that according to one analysis would lock wind developers off more than 90% of all land in the state. Roughly half of the remaining available acreage would be on Native tribal lands and in or near national parks, which are especially tough areas to build wind turbines. The bill is currently pending before the state Senate. There isn’t much wind energy in Arizona but utilities, who’ve been mostly mum on the legislation so far, have been trying to build more wind and solar in order to wean off coal and gas power. Unfortunately, according to the Arizona Republic, this legislation was reportedly prompted by the backlash to a specific new wind project: Lava Run, a 500-megawatt wind project in the state’s White Mountains opposed by nearby residents.
When asked if the project would ultimately be built, Repsol – Lava Run’s developer – simply told me the company “believes that wind energy in Arizona represents an opportunity to benefit local communities and the state as a whole.”
Republican states have passed legislation to restrict renewables development in certain areas before, so this isn’t exactly a novel development. Florida last year banned all offshore wind projects, and in Ohio, a recent law empowering localities to block solar and wind projects has significantly curtailed industry investment in the state. Wisconsin Republicans are trying to enact similar legislation as soon as this year.
But the sweeping quickness of this legislative effort is striking – and transcends land use rules. Elsewhere, development restrictions may come in the form of tax increases, like in Idaho where the chief revenue committee in the state House has unanimously approved legislation that would institute a per-foot excise tax on individual wind turbines taller than 100 feet without local approval. (The average wind turbine is 320-feet tall.) In Missouri, Republican state legislators are advancing legislation that would create additional taxes for building solar projects on agricultural land, a proposal that echoes an effort underway in the U.S. Congress to strip tax benefits from such projects. And Ohio Republicans have introduced plans to axe all existing state subsidies for solar project construction and operation.
Then there’s the situation in Texas, where state Republican lawmakers are expected to revive a bill requiring solar and wind projects to get express approval from the Public Utilities Commission – a process that fossil fuel projects do not have to go through. The state is the nation’s top producer of renewable energy, generating over 169,000 gigawatt-hours last year.
The legislation passed one legislative chamber in the previous session and environmental activists are starting to sound the alarm that it could get even greater traction this go-around. Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment America’s Texas division, told me that if it becomes law, it would likely undermine investor confidence in developing solar and wind in Texas for the foreseeable future. “It’s very unclear if they could get a permit” under the bill, Metzger said. “If some wealthy Texans didn’t want a solar farm near their ranch, they could convince the PUC to reject their permit.”
Metzger said he is also worried that Texas acting to restrict renewables would produce similar regulation in other parts of the country given the state’s legacy role as a conservative policy braintrust.
“You could have this ripple effect that could end the industry,” Metzger said, “at least in several other states.”
The aggressive and rapid approach sweeping state legislatures has yet to get a national spotlight, so I'm curious how the renewables trade groups are handling these bills.
I asked American Clean Power and the Solar Energy Industries Association if they have any data on the rise of anti-renewables legislation and whether they have comments on this trend. Neither organization responded with data on how many states may soon pass renewables restrictions, but they did get back to me quite fast with comments. SEIA provided a statement from Sarah Birmingham, their vice president of state affairs, noting that energy demand “is rising across the country and we need all the electricity we can get, fast.” The group also pointed to polling it commissioned on solar energy popularity in Texas and a report it just happened torelease in January touting the benefits solar can provide to the state’s revenue base.
ACP meanwhile provided me with a similar statement to SEIA’s, defending renewables and criticizing state bills restricting solar and wind project development.
“Reducing their growth at state and local levels stifles innovation, raises consumer energy costs, and hinders a cleaner, more reliable grid, leaving communities vulnerable to energy shortages,” said spokesman Jason Ryan.
It’s clear some legislators agree with ACP. In Montana, legislation targeting wind turbine height is stuttering after a large cadre of industry representatives and property owners complained it would kill development entirely and kneecap tax revenue to the sparsely populated state. And in Mississippi, lawmakers appear to have abandoned efforts to enact a one-year moratorium on wind turbines for a study on the industry’s impacts on agriculture.
But it’s only March. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how aggressive – and how public – the fight over these bills this year will become.