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As if one set of energy policy announcements wasn’t enough.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant rules were not the only big energy policy announcement from the Biden administration Thursday. The White House also announced a bevy of initiatives and projects meant to bolster infrastructure throughout the country.
Transmission arguably sits at the absolute center of the Biden administration’s climate policy. Without investments to move new renewable power from where it’s sunny or windy but desolate and remote to where it’s still and cloudy but densely populated, the Inflation Reduction Act is unlikely to meet its emissions reduction potential. While the most important transmission policy changes will likely come from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission next month, and possibly permitting reform legislation under consideration in Congress, the White House and Department of Energy are doing what they can with tens of billions of dollars allotted in both the IRA and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and their power over environmental regulations.
One such pot of money is the Transmission Facilitation Program, which directs funds towards interregional transmission projects. The DOE announced Thursday that one such project, the Southwest Intertie Project-North, would get up to $331 million in funding. The almost-300 mile-long transmission line would connect wind projects in Idaho to the California electric grid. The project was conditionally approved by California regulators in December and would run from Midpoint, Idaho to Robinson Summit in Eastern Nevada, where it could connect to already operating lines that run to Las Vegas and then interconnect with California. The total costs are estimated to run to just over $1 billion.
“We’re building out transmission lines to get clean power from where it's generated to where it's needed,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told reporters Wednesday. The project “will increase grid resilience, especially during wildfires, and it'll create over 300 high quality and union construction jobs,” Granholm said.
The other announcements had to do with great bugbear of the energy transition: permitting. Transmission projects can take decades from conception to completion, often featuring years-long reviews, stakeholders negotiations, and lawsuits. Interregional transmission — especially in the Western United States, where much of the country’s best wind and solar resources are (along with energy-hungry populations in California and the Southwest) — often takes place on and across public lands, thus ensuring plans must undergo the federal government’s full gamut of environmental review.
“Right now, it takes about four years, on average, to permit a new transmission project in the U.S., and in extreme cases it can take over a decade,” Granholm said.
To help speed that up, the DOE said it was establishing a new Coordinated Interagency Transmission Authorization and Permits program, which will facilitate consultation across all relevant government bodies, “create efficiencies, and establish a standard two-year timeline for federal transmission authorizations and permits.” This would establish the DOE as “the main point of contact” for transmission developers Granholm said. This constitutes “a huge improvement from the status quo,” she added, “because developers routinely have to navigate several independent permitting processes throughout the federal government.”
Also in the same announcement (yes, it was a big one), the DOE also said it was creating a “categorical exclusion” — essentially an exemption from much of the typically required environmental review — for upgrading existing transmission lines. While there’s no way to avoid building new transmission to connect new projects, existing lines could be become far more efficient, which would go a long way toward handling the expected steep rise in electricity demand.
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Meet Scott Bessent.
Donald Trump ended weeks of Billions-esque drama on Wall Street and Palm Beach by finally settling late Friday on a nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent.
In contrast to the quick and instinctive picks for major posts like secretary of defense, secretary of state, and attorney general (albeit, two picks for that job), Trump deliberated on the Treasury pick, according to reports, cycling through candidates including Bessent, long the frontrunner for the job, his transition chief Howard Lutnick, private equity titan Marc Rowan, and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh.
Bessent will almost immediately face a challenge that the markets have been putting towards Trump since even before his election: can he deliver what investors crave (tax cuts. deregulation), while smoothing out volatility and possible inflation stemming from the tariffs and mass deportations that Trump has promised to implement? Investors already have slightly cooled on the Trump trade and expect that the interest rate cuts kicked off in September will slow.
Bessent has long advised Trump on the economy and is not unaware of these challenges, but his way around them is to embrace much of Trump’s existing agenda in what the Wall Street Journal has described as a “3-3-3” plan, where deficits are cut in half to 3% of gross domestic product, growth is kicked up to 3%, and oil production rises by three million barrels a day, a goal that Continental Resources chief executive and informal Trump advisor Harold Hamm has cast doubt on due to geologic constraints.
“Scott has long been a strong advocate of the America First Agenda,” Trump wrote on Truth Social announcing the pick. “Scott will support my Policies that will drive U.S. Competitiveness, and stop unfair Trade Imbalances, work to create an Economy that places Growth at the forefront, especially through our coming World Energy Dominance.”
While energy policy will seemingly be handled by the nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and the newly formed National Energy Council, fiscal policy and tariffs will likely play a major role in determining if Trump’s vision of a more productive and less constrained oil and gas sector can be realized, whether it’s by tariffs possibly leading to increases in the price of steel or possible retaliatory duties on American energy exports. Higher interest rates due to tariffs or an overheated economy could deter investment in energy, renewable or not.
One of the Treasury Department’s most important jobs is managing the nation’s debt profile by deciding what kind of debt to sell in order to meet the government’s immense borrowing needs. Bessent criticized the current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a Wall Street Journal essay for having “distorted Treasury markets by borrowing more than $1 trillion in more-expensive shorter-term debt compared with historical norms.” He suggested that selling more longer-term debt “may increase longer-term interest rates and will need to be deftly handled.” Higher long-term rates are more likely to feed through to a higher cost of capital for investors, which will likely hurt renewable energy developers more than their fossil fuel competitors due to how much of the cost of renewables comes up front.
In another ominous signal for the nascent climate economy, Bessent also suggested to the Financial Times that the Inflation Reduction Act could be one area where cuts to the federal budget could be found, telling the newspaper that it was “the Doomsday machine for the deficit.”
This would be the second time the U.S. has exited the climate treaty — and it’ll happen faster than the first time.
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.
Now that the waiting period no longer applies, the U.S. could exit as soon as January 2026, meaning COP31 would be the first where it’s not party to the agreement. The U.S. could still attend the conference as long as it retains membership in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that oversees the meetings, and it could even attend Paris Agreement-related meetings, though for these it would be relegated to “observer status,” with no decision-making power. The U.S. would not be required to submit updated emissions targets and progress reports as prescribed by Paris, and would have much weaker financial commitments to developing countries.
Todd Stern, Obama’s former U.S. climate envoy, told me decisions at COP are essentially made by consensus, meaning that “if you're a player like the U.S., or you're a player like any of the big guys, and you say, We can't do this, that's going to push the negotiation one way or another.” Post-pullout, the U.S. won’t be able to throw that kind of weight around. “But that doesn't necessarily mean, when you get down into the nitty gritty of negotiation, that the people from the U.S. will have views that are uninteresting,” Stern told me, indicating that the American delegation could still make suggestions and share the country’s overall perspective.
Stern noted that after the U.S. announced its first withdrawal from Paris, it kept showing up at COP, with lower-ranking government officials continuing to provide input even as most political appointees stayed home. “The U.S. kept attending and speaking and having ideas because the U.S. team is very skilled. They're smart people who’ve done it a lot,” he told me. Though the delegations Trump sent to COP were notably smaller, less influential, and more fossil fuel-forward than Obama’s and Biden’s representatives, the U.S. kept contributing, even helping to finalize the Paris rulebook in 2018, which codifies detailed guidelines that make the high-level agreement actionable.
Of course the natural next question is, why would Trump pull out again if his first administration seemed to feel that a seat at the table was worthwhile? Beyond the obvious political symbolism around deprioritizing decarbonization, this was something Stern couldn’t quite explain, either. The official statements on COP from that time reiterate that “the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement as soon as it is eligible to do so,” while also stating that the country “is participating in ongoing negotiations, including those related to the Paris Agreement, in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects U.S. interests.”
Nonsensical as these dual goals may be, this time the U.S. simply won’t have the option to prioritize both — it’s one or the other. But hey, maybe ExxonMobil will get its way and Trump will stay in the agreement after all.
We’ll give you one guess as to what’s behind the huge spike.
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.
To give you an idea of just how much power Georgia businesses will demand over the next decade, the two new recently booted up nuclear reactors at Vogtle each have a capacity of around 1,000 megawatts. Of the listed projects that may come online, five will require 1,000 megawatts or more.
The culprit is largely data centers. About 3,330 megawatts’ worth of data centers have broken ground in Georgia, and just over 4,100 megawatts are pending construction, vastly outstripping commitments made by industrial customers.
“New load growth, led predominately by data centers, could triple [Georgia Power’s] size, in ten years. This is the second industrial revolution, led by artificial intelligence,” Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, wrote on X.
Georgia Power is used to upgrading load forecasts. The company had to update its three-year planning process (known as an integrated resource plan, or IRP) in October of 2023, just a year after releasing its previous three-year plan, as its five-year load growth projections had grown from 400 megawatts to 6,660 megawatts, a 17-fold increase. Regulators approved the new plan in April of this year, which included adding turbines to an existing gas-fired plant, pushing out the retirement of a coal-fired plant, and more battery storage.
The latest update, Georgia Power said in the filing, “should provide further certainty that Georgia Power’s load forecast is materializing and that the constructive outcome of the 2023 IRP Update is supportive of economic growth in Georgia.”