Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

The Climate Election You Missed Last Night

While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.

Climate voting.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.

Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.

But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.

Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.

“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”

While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.

The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”

Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.

Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”

Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”

Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)

But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

AM Briefing: House Cues Up Thursday Passage of GOP Megabill

On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits

House Cues Up Potential Thursday Passage of GOP Megabill
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the CarolinasFrench far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in EuropeGreat fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.

THE TOP FIVE

1. House cues up early morning passage of Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Ralph Norman
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

Keep reading...Show less
Politics

Trump Promised Deregulation. His New Law Would Regulate Energy to Death.

The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.

Power lines and Trump's tie.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.

The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue