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Sparks

Beryl Narrowly Missed the Gulf’s Energy Heartland

Millions are without power, still.

Matthew Zeitlin •
07/09/2024
Beryl making landfall in Texas.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Hurricane Beryl, ahem, barreled into America’s Gulf Coast as a Category 1 storm, and whenever something like that happens the entire global energy industry holds its breath. The Gulf of Mexico is not just a frequent target and breeding ground for massive storms, it is also one of America’s — and the world’s — most important energy hubs. Texas and Louisiana contains giant oil and gas fields, and the region is home to about half of the United States’ refining capacity.

At least so far, the oil and refining industry appears to have largely dodged Beryl’s worst effects. The storm made landfall in Matagorda, a coastal town between Galveston and Corpus Christi, both of which are major centers for the refinery industry. Only one refinery, the Phillips 66 facility in Sweeny, Texas, was in the storm’s cone, according to TACenergy, a petroleum products distributor. Phillips 66 did not respond to a request to comment, but Reuters reported that the Sweeny facility as well as its refinery in Lake Charles, Louisiana were powered and operating. Crude oil prices have seen next to no obvious volatility, rising to $83.88 a barrel on July 3 and since settling around $82.84.

Electricity consumers, however, were not so lucky. As many as 2.7 million Texanslost power, and some 2.3 million are currently experiencing outages according to PowerOutage.us. In Arkansas and Louisiana, about 35,000 electric customers are without power. ERCOT, the energy market for about 90% of Texas, described the current outages as “local in nature and not an ERCOT grid reliability issue,” indicating that the problem is with distribution and transmission, not supply and demand.

The heavily industrialized Gulf Coast would seem to be a perfect spot to build out offshore wind infrastructure, but the regular hurricane-force winds in the region are holding it back. The Department of the Interior has successfully auctioned off just one lease for wind development off of Lake Charles, Louisiana near the Texas border. The next auction will include sites along the Texas coast closer to Houston and Bay City, Texas, and thus closer to where Beryl made landfall.

Beryl is now a tropical depression, working its way up the Great Plains and the Midwest, bringing along with it heavy rains and strong winds. Power generators may be off the hook in Texas, but the situation there does not bode well for our ability to get electricity to households and businesses reliably in a world of stronger storms.

“For a Category 1 hurricane to result in over a million customer outages in its immediate aftermath demonstrates that there is plenty of need for the resiliency hardening investments,” Wei Du, a consultant at PA Consulting Group and former Con Edison analyst, told me.

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Matthew Zeitlin profile image

Matthew Zeitlin

Matthew is a correspondent at Heatmap. Previously he was an economics reporter at Grid, where he covered macroeconomics and energy, and a business reporter at BuzzFeed News, where he covered finance. He has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, Barron's, and New York Magazine.

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Sparks

Ditching the Paris Agreement Will Throw the U.S. Into COP Purgatory

This would be the second time the U.S. has exited the climate treaty — and it’ll happen faster than the first time.

Katie Brigham •
11/22/2024
Donald Trump and the Eiffel Tower.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As the annual United Nations climate change conference reaches the end of its scheduled programming, this could represent the last time for at least the next four years that the U.S. will bring a strong delegation with substantial negotiating power to the meetings. That’s because Donald Trump has once again promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty adopted at the same climate conference in 2015, which unites nearly every nation on earth in an effort to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

Existentially, we know what this means: The loss of climate leadership and legitimacy in the eyes of other nations, as well as delayed progress on emissions reductions. But tangibly, there’s no precedent for exactly what this looks like when it comes to U.S. participation in future UN climate conferences, a.k.a. COPs, the official venue for negotiation and decision-making related to the agreement. That’s because when Trump withdrew the U.S. from Paris the first time, the agreement’s three year post-implementation waiting period and one-year withdrawal process meant that by the time we were officially out, it was November 2020 and Biden was days away from being declared the winner of that year’s presidential election. That year’s conference was delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic, by which point Biden had fully recommitted the U.S. to the treaty.

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Georgia Just Released Eye-Popping New Energy Demand Estimates

We’ll give you one guess as to what’s behind the huge spike.

Matthew Zeitlin •
11/20/2024
A data center.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Georgia is going to need a lot more electricity than it once thought. Again.

In a filing last week with the state’s utility regulator, Georgia Power disclosed that its projected load growth for the next decade from “economic development projects” has gone up by over 12,000 megawatts, to 36,500 megawatts. Just for 2028 to 2029, the pipeline has more than tripled, from 6,000 megawatts to 19,990 megawatts, destined for so-called “large load” projects like new data centers and factories.

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Sparks

Will Trump Take Down Biden’s IRA Billboards?

The signs marking projects funded by the current president’s infrastructure programs are all over the country.

Jeva Lange •
11/20/2024
Donald Trump taking down an IRA sign.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Maybe you’ve seen them, the white or deep cerulean signs, often backdropped by an empty lot, roadblock, or excavation. The text on them reads PROJECT FUNDED BY President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Law, or maybe President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, or President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. They identify Superfund cleanup sites in Montana, road repairs in Acadia National Park in Maine, bridge replacements in Wisconsin, and almost anything else that received a cut of the $1.5 trillion from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

Officially, the signs exist to “advance the goals of accountability and transparency of Federal spending,” although unofficially, they were likely part of a push by the administration to promote Bidenomics, an effort that began in 2023. The signs follow strict design rules (that deep cerulean is specifically hex code #164484) and prescribed wording (Cincinnati officials got dinged for breaking the rules to add Kamala Harris’ name to signs ahead of the election), although whether to post them is technically at the discretion of local partners. But all federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Transit Authority, which of each received millions in funding — were ordered by the Office of Management and Budget to post the signs “in an easily visible location that can be directly linked to the work taking place and must be maintained in good condition throughout the construction period.”

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