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 Chinese EV giant doesn’t sell cars in the U.S., but it does sell buses.

The Biden administration continued its crackdown on carbon pollution from the transportation sector on Friday, finalizing tough new limits on tailpipe emissions from heavy-duty trucks and buses.
The new rules, which the Environmental Protection Agency projects will keep a billion tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, could push more trucks and buses to use electric motors or experiment with alternative fuels. They apply to a plethora of big vehicles — delivery vans, trash trucks, city and school buses, even 18-wheelers — and go into effect starting in model year 2027.
As Camila Domonoske writes for NPR, these new rules are contentious — far more divisive than the new EPA limits on light-duty car and truck pollution that were unveiled earlier this month. While public-health groups such as the American Lung Association have celebrated the rules, citing their more than $13 billion in net benefits for the public, fossil-fuel trade groups and truckers’ lobbyists have said that they will be expensive to comply with and a “forced march toward electric vehicles.”
Of course, it was never going to be simple to fix the environmental problem posed by America’s heavy-duty vehicle fleet. The transportation sector now produces 29% of America’s carbon pollution, more than any other part of the economy. Heavy-duty trucks and buses are responsible for about a quarter of that pollution, making them second only to passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs as a driver of transportation-related emissions.
Given all the attention on these rules, I wanted to highlight two very different companies that will be affected by them. One is an automaker that is increasingly synonymous with China’s goals of creating a new global mass market for clean vehicles. The other is an all-American electric truck maker that is a particular favorite of upscale Millennial and Gen X dads.
The first is BYD, the Chinese automaker that last year surpassed Tesla as the world’s No. 1 producer of electric and plug-in vehicles. Here in America, most of the attention paid to BYD recently has focused on its zippy, unbelievably affordable electric cars, such as the $9,000 BYD Seagull.
Of course, some of that hand wringing is premature: BYD doesn’t even sell cars in the United States yet, and it’s only begun to push operations into our neighboring market of Mexico. But what BYD does sell in the U.S. is buses — a lot of them. Over the past decade, transit agencies and airports across North America have ordered more than 1,000 buses from BYD, the company says; it cites customers in California, Massachusetts, Georgia, and Louisiana. From an American perspective, BYD is and remains a bus company: It operates an electric-bus factory in Los Angeles County, California, that has been described as the largest in North America, and it recently opened bus-repair centers in New Jersey and Indiana so it could service East Coast and Midwest clients.
BYD, I should add, is not the only electric-bus maker in North America. Nova Bus, a Canadian company owned by the Volvo Group, just received the largest electric bus order in the continent’s history. The Volvo Group also recently bought part of Proterra, an American electric-bus maker that went bankrupt last year. (Somewhat confusingly, the Volvo Group, which is headquartered in Sweden, is a different company from Volvo Cars, which is owned by the Chinese automaker Geely.) Thomas Built, the iconic American maker of yellow school buses, has also unveiled a single electric model, the C2 Jouley. (Fun fact: Even though it makes an icon of Americana, Thomas Built is owned by Daimler.)
Even if BYD reaps some business from the EPA rule, it will be somewhat limited in doing so. In 2021, the Biden administration said that transit agencies could not spend federal money on manufacturers linked to China.
But BYD isn’t the only company that could stand to benefit from these new EPA rules. Another is much closer to home: the electric-truck maker, Rivian.
Although most readers will know Rivian for its rugged and neotenous electric trucks, it also makes delivery trucks and work vans. These vans were initially designed to be sold to Amazon, which owns roughly 16% of Rivian, but they have since blossomed into their own product line. Companies can now buy a Rivian Delivery 500, a chipper work van with 500 cubic feet of cargo space and 160 miles of range, for $83,000 or more.
When I’ve analyzed Rivian’s financial future recently, I haven’t focused as much on its delivery vans in part because that business seemed to be decelerating. Amazon bought fewer delivery vans in the fourth quarter of 2023 than it did in the third quarter, and while Rivian’s executives have blamed that pause on Amazon’s busy holiday-shopping season, it seemed prudent for those of us outside the company to wait and see what will happen to it more broadly. As I’ve written, Rivian needs all the cash it can muster to cross the so-called EV valley of death and survive until early 2026, when it will begin selling its affordable R2 SUV.
But perhaps these EPA rules will generate more demand for electric delivery vans than Rivian might project. If that happens, then other American automakers will be happy, too — such as Ford, whose $46,000 electric E-Transit cargo van could also help companies meet the new rules.
And automakers won’t be the only American companies who benefit. The EPA projects that the new rule’s biggest winner might be the heavy-duty trucking and cargo industry itself — truck owners and fleet operators will save $3.5 billion in fuel costs each year because of the rule, the agency says. But to conserve that money, they might have to shell out a little more at the outset for slightly more expensive vehicles. If that’s true, then the rule seems prudent, almost thrifty. After all, nobody ever said saving money would be cheap.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify limitations on the use of federal funds by transit agencies, as well as the ownership of Proterra and Thomas Built.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.
As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.
The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”
So how did the storm get so strong, so fast? One reason may be the exceptionally warm Caribbean and Atlantic.
“The part of the Atlantic where Hurricane Melissa is churning is like a boiler that has been left on for too long. The ocean waters are around 30 degrees Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees above normal, and the warmth runs deep,” University of Redding research scientist Akshay Deoras said in a public statement. (Those exceedingly warm temperatures are “up to 700 times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” the climate communication group Climate Central said in a press release.)
Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2024 that “tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase” due to anthropogenic climate change, and that “rapid intensification is also projected to increase.”
NOAA also noted that research suggested “an observed increase in the probability of rapid intensification” for tropical cyclones from 1982 to 2017. The review was still circumspect, however, labeling “increased intensities” and “rapid intensification” as “examples of possible emerging human influences.”
What is well known is that hurricanes require warm water to form — at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. “As long as the base of this weather system remains over warm water and its top is not sheared apart by high-altitude winds, it will strengthen and grow.”
A 2023 paper by hurricane researcher Andra Garner argued that between 1971 and 2020, rates of intensification of Atlantic tropical storms “have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans,” and specifically that the number of these storms that intensify from Category 1 or weaker “into a major hurricane” — as Melissa did so quickly — “has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era.”
“Hurricane Melissa has been astonishing to watch — even as someone who studies how these storms are impacted by a warming climate, and as someone who knows that this kind of dangerous storm is likely to become more common as we warm the planet,” Garner told me by email. She likened the warm ocean waters to “an extra shot of caffeine in your morning coffee — it’s not only enough to get the storm going, it’s an extra boost that can really super-charge the storm.”
This year has been an outlier for the Atlantic with three Category 5 storms, University of Miami senior research associate Brian McNoldy wrote on his blog. “For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes,” with wind speeds reaching and exceeding 157 miles per hour, he wrote. “The previous year was 2005. This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.” One of those Category 5 storms in 2005 was Hurricane Katrina.
Jamaican emergency response officials said that thousands of people were already in shelters amidst storm surge, flooding, power outages, and landslides. Even as the center of the storm passed over Jamaica Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service warned that “damaging winds, catastrophic flash flooding and life-threatening storm surge continues in Jamaica.”
Fullmark Energy quietly shuttered Swiftsure, a planned 650-megawatt energy storage system on Staten Island.
The biggest battery project in New York has been canceled in a major victory for the nascent nationwide grassroots movement against energy storage development.
It’s still a mystery why exactly the developer of Staten Island’s Swiftsure project, Fullmark Energy (formerly known as Hecate), pulled the plug. We do know a few key details: First, Fullmark did not announce publicly that it was killing the project, instead quietly submitting a short, one-page withdrawal letter to the New York State Department of Public Service. That letter, which is publicly available, is dated August 18 of this year, meaning that the move formally occurred two months ago. Still, nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.
Second, Swiftsure was going to be massive. It was the largest planned battery storage project in New York State, according to public records, with the ability to store upwards of 650 megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than half a million homes. That makes Swiftsure likely one of the largest battery projects in the country, with more capacity than any other energy storage project currently facing opposition in the U.S., according to our very own Heatmap Pro database. This is the second Fullmark project to totally flop in recent months. We reported last week that one of the company’s projects outside of Los Angeles had its permits voided in a court ruling that also blocked battery storage development in unincorporated areas outside the city.
Third, and potentially most significant for energy developers in New York City: Swiftsure’s death will almost certainly embolden the anti-storage activist movement.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee in next week’s New York mayoral election, was one of many local politicians who opposed Swiftsure and rallied with residents close to the proposed site in May. He’s part of a broader trend of Republican politicians becoming skeptical of battery storage sites near where people live and work, including in Democrat-ruled New York.
Putting batteries in the five boroughs has always been a challenge, but January’s Moss Landing battery fire in California created a PR frenzy in the city, as conservative figures seized on the online panic created by the blaze. Once-agnostic GOP members of Congress from New York City are now anti-battery storage in their backyards, including Anthony D’Esposito, Nicole Malliotakis and Mike Lawler. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin — a former NYC congressman — is now weighing in against individual battery projects on Long Island and Staten Island.
Swiftsure was proposed in 2023 and permitted by the state last year. Fullmark was given a deadline of this spring to submit routine paperwork demonstrating how it would comply with conditions of the site’s permit, including how the battery storage project would be decommissioned. In August, the New York Department of Public Service gave Fullmark an extension until October 11.
Instead of meeting that October deadline, it seems Fullmark quietly withdrew its Swiftsure proposal.
It’s unclear how Democrat Zohran Mamdani or independent Andrew Cuomo would handle the rise of the anti-battery movement if either of them wins the November 4 mayoral election. That’s partially because energy policy and climate change have been non-issues in the campaign, saving small mentions of nuclear power, heat pumps, or gas prices in one-off debate answers or social media posts.
Sliwa, who has referred to Swiftsure as a “mini Chernobyl,” told me that he anticipates this victory will lead to more protests at more battery sites, no matter who wins the mayoral election. “The cancellation of this lithium-ion battery warehouse will reverberate throughout the boroughs,” Sliwa told me Monday. “It’ll be a rallying cry [because] it’s not a fait accompli that these facilities will be complete and operational.”
The Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns did not respond to requests for comment on Swiftsure’s cancellation.
The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.