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The new president is annihilating his predecessor’s energy policy.
Every time the White House changes hands from one party to another, some policies toggle back to what they were before, a reset meant to restore the status quo ante. The best-known example may be the Mexico City policy, which forbids U.S. foreign aid funds from going to any organization that performs or even gives information about abortions; since it was first instituted under Ronald Reagan, every Democratic president has revoked it and every Republican president has reestablished it. The change is as predictable as the sunrise.
But presidents also hope that even if their party loses the next election, they will have created more durable policy change. If the outgoing president has been clever enough at creating smart design, administrative momentum, and political reality, even a hostile new president may find it difficult to roll back everything their predecessor did. That was certainly the Biden administration’s goal when it came to climate policy. Some even hoped that President Trump would just be too preoccupied with the things he cares more about — especially deporting immigrants and imposing tariffs — to devote too much time and effort to undoing the progress that has been made on climate.
In other words, Trump could have taken much the same approach as Biden, except with the favored industries reversed. Biden worked hard to boost renewable energy, but apart from a few high-profile moves like the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and a temporary suspension of approvals for new liquified natural gas export facilities, he mostly left the fossil fuel industry alone. The result was a boom time for oil and gas, with record production and almost limitless profits. Turn it upside down, and you’d have an administration that gives fossil fuel companies what they want — relaxed regulations, speeded-up permits, the opening of federal lands for more drilling — without a frontal assault on renewables.
Unfortunately, Trump has not chosen that mirror-image course. Instead, he seems determined to undermine, roll back, and impair the transition to clean energy in almost every way his administration can think of. As it has in one area after another, the Trump government is acting with a head-spinning speed and ambition, as though it will count itself as successful only if the entire renewables industry lies in ruins by the end of its term.
This is a strange approach to take if Trump actually believes there is an “energy emergency” that demands a mobilization to produce dramatically more power, as he declared in an executive order he signed on his first day in office. But that order made clear the administration’s belief that wind and solar are literally not energy; it states that “The term ‘energy’ or ‘energy resources’ means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.”
Trump didn’t write the order himself, but it certainly reflects the sweeping policy moves his administration has made against renewable energy and environmental enforcement, including the following:
All that is in addition to the expected policy reversals, such as withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which Trump abandoned in his first term and Biden rejoined. Even including those, it’s still not a comprehensive list.
For years, Republicans (including Trump) have described their approach to energy as “all of the above,” i.e. that every kind of energy, including fossil fuels, should be developed as much as possible. That phrase is clearly no longer operative, as the administration is showing an unmitigated hostility to solar and wind power. The administration also seems determined to arrest the growth of the electric vehicle industry, which raises the question of how one particular interested party — Elon Musk — may be reacting to these moves.
Whether or not you think this question has already been settled depends on how much you trust Musk as a reliable exponent of his own true beliefs. On the campaign trail, he boasted that killing the $7,500 EV tax credits would only help Tesla by damaging its competition. After the election, when asked about the tax credit during a visit to Capitol Hill, Musk told reporters, “I think we should get rid of all credits.” But there are other EV-related policies Trump has trained his crosshairs on, including California’s ability to set more stringent fuel efficiency standards than the federal government, granted under a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency. The law allows companies to buy and sell credits in order to meet the required mix, and as a maker of entirely zero-emission vehicles, Tesla has plenty of credits to sell. As of last November, selling those credits accounted for more than 40% of Tesla’s net income for the year to date.
So far, Musk hasn’t commented on the subject, but it isn’t hard to imagine that if he tried to convince Trump to reverse some of these decisions and pursue a true “all of the above” strategy, Trump would be highly persuadable. But Musk is no longer an ally of the renewables industry, and his interest in the electrification of the nation’s auto fleet begins and ends with his own company.
Part of the theory underlying Biden’s limited moves against the fossil fuel industry was that the energy transition has so much momentum that it can’t be stopped — that, while every day we continue burning oil and gas makes climate change worse, the eventual arrival of a net-zero-emissions future is inevitable. That reality hasn’t changed, but the Trump administration is determined to delay it as long as possible. And in order to do so, it’s bringing the same commitment to rapid, aggressive, destructive policy change it’s deploying across the entire federal government.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.