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A newly released memo from the Department of the Interior freezes the pipeline for 60 days.
The Department of Interior has issued an order suspending the ability of its staff, except a few senior officials, to permit new renewables projects on public land. The document, dated January 20, suspended the authority of “Department Bureaus and Offices” over a wide range of regular actions, including issuing “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.”
The suspension lasts for 60 days and can only be overridden by “a confirmed or Acting official” in a number of senior roles in the Department, including the secretary.
Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of the interior, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, cleared a Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee vote earlier this week, and will likely be confirmed by the full Senate soon. The suspension was signed by Walter Cruickshank, the acting secretary, a longtime public servant in the department.
“This step will restrict energy development, which will harm consumers and fail to meet growing electricity demand,” Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for American Clean Power, the clean energy trade group, said in an email. “We need an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy, not just a ‘some-of-the-above’ approach.”
The order is yet another early action taken by the Trump administration indicating its favoritism towards oil and gas (and some non-carbon-emitting energy sources such as geothermal and nuclear) and its hostility or indifference towards renewables.
An earlier executive order suspending permitting of new offshore wind projects was written broadly enough that industry officials told Heatmap it could affect more than half of all new wind projects, including those on- and offshore. Trump also halted a specific wind project, Idaho’s Lava Ridge, that was unpopular with Republican elected officials in the state. There are currently 12 renewable energy projects planned on federal lands in various stages of the permitting process, according to the Permitting.gov databased, including two that have been canceled.
“We don’t want windmills in this country,” President Trump said Thursday in an interview with Fox News. “You know what else people don’t like? Those massive solar fields, built over land that cover 10 miles by 10 miles, they’re ridiculous.”
While the vast majority of solar development happens on private land, the Biden administration set ambitious goals for solar deployment on public land, identifying some 31 million acres that could be used for utility-scale solar in the western United States. Between January 2021 and December 2024, the Biden administrationapproved 45 renewables projects on public lands, totaling some 33 gigawatts of capacity.
The order suspended a number of other Department of Interior activities, including new hiring, land sales, and altering land management plans. The order noted that the suspension of new permits for renewables projects “does not limit existing operations under valid leases.”
The order is part and parcel of a broad freeze on renewable energy and climate change programs, including funding for projects through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Former President Joe Biden issued a similar order on his first day in office,
halting new permits for oil and gas projects on public lands for 60 days except with permission by senior officials, followed up with a longer term pause on leasing in order to review the climate and environmental effects of oil and gas projects on public lands, which was eventually blocked by a federal judge. Like President Trump, Biden also killed off a specific energy project that many of his supporters opposed on his first day in office, the Keystone XL pipeline.
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Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.
Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.
Renewable energy development is especially sensitive to higher interest rates. That’s because renewables projects, like wind turbines and solar panels, have to incur the overwhelming majority of their lifetime costs before they start operating and generating revenue. Developers then often fund much of the project through borrowed money that’s secured against an agreement to buy the resulting power. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, projects become less viable, with lower prospective returns sometimes causing investors not to go forward .
High interest rates have plagued the renewables economy for years. “As interest rates rise, all of a sudden, solar assets that are effectively bonds become less valuable,” Quinn Pasloske, a managing director at Greenbacker, a renewable investor and operating company, told me on Tuesday, describing how the stream of payments from a solar project becomes less valuable as rates rise because investors can get more from risk-free government bonds.
The new inflation data is “consistent with our call of an extended Fed pause, with only one rate cut in 2025, happening in June,” Morgan Stanley economists wrote in a note to clients. Bond traders are also projecting just a single cut for the rest of the year — but not until December.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking committee Tuesday, “We think our policy rate is in a good place, and we don’t see any reason to be in a hurry to reduce it further.”
The yield for the 10-year Treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of credit, is up 0.09% today, to 4.63%. While this is below where yields peaked in mid-January, it’s a level still well above where yields have been for almost all of the last year. When Treasury yields rise, the cost of credit throughout the economy goes up.
Clean energy stocks were down this morning — but so is the overall market. Because while high interest rates are especially bad for renewables, they’re not exactly great for anyone else.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees U.S. wetlands, halted processing on 168 pending wind and solar actions, a spokesperson confirmed to Heatmap.
UPDATE: On February 6, the Army Corp of Engineers announced in a one-sentence statement that it lifted its permitting hold on renewable energy projects. It did not say why it lifted the hold, nor did it explain why the holds were enacted in the first place. It’s unclear whether the hold has been actually lifted, as I heard from at least one developer who was told otherwise from the agency shortly after we received the statement.
The Army Corps of Engineers confirmed that it has paused all permitting for well over 100 actions related to renewable energy projects across the country — information that raises more questions than it answers about how government permitting offices are behaving right now.
On Tuesday, I reported that the Trump administration had all but paralyzed environmental permitting decisions on solar and wind projects, even for facilities constructed away from federal lands. According to an internal American Clean Power Association memo sent to the trade association’s members and dated the previous day, the Army Corps of Engineers apparatus for approving projects on federally shielded wetlands had come to a standstill. Officials in some parts of the agency have refused even to let staff make a formal determination as to whether proposed projects touch protected wetlands, I reported.
In a statement to me, the Army Corps has confirmed it has “temporarily paused evaluation on” 168 pending permit actions “focused on regulated activities associated with renewable energy projects.” According to the statement, the Army Corps froze work on those permitting actions “pending feedback from the Administration on the applicability” of an executive order Trump issued on his first day in office, “Unleashing American Energy,” and that the agency “anticipates feedback on or about” February 7 from administration officials.
While the statement demonstrates how vast the potential impacts to the renewables sector may be, it also leaves several important questions unanswered. It’s unclear whether each pending permit action that has been frozen applies to its own individual project, or whether some projects have more than one permit pending before the Army Corps, so it is still fuzzy precisely how many projects may be impacted. The Army Corps did not say whether that feedback would lead to the lifting of holds on permitting activity, nor did it explain why the holds were enacted in the first place.
Finally, there’s one big question that still needs answering: The executive order in question focuses on fossil fuel projects and says nothing about renewable energy — no mentions of “renewable,” no “solar,” no “wind.” Why did this order trigger a permitting freeze in the first place? This level of confusion and ambiguity is part and parcel with other statements in the ACP memo, including that guidance and agency perspectives have varied widely in recent weeks depending on who in the government is being asked.
Climate advocates are already pressing the panic button. “This is a 5 alarm fire alert. This could decimate all the clean energy we worked to pass under Biden,” Nick Abraham, state communications director for League of Conservation Voters, wrote on Bluesky in response to my reporting.
I asked the Army Corps for clarity on how the executive order led to a pause on their permitting activity, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.
The leaders of both countries reached deals with the U.S. in exchange for a 30-day reprieve on border taxes.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariff on Mexican goods imported into the United States that were to take effect on Tuesday.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that Sheinbaum had agreed to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, “specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our Country.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick will lead talks in the coming month over what comes next.
“I look forward to participating in those negotiations, with President Sheinbaum, as we attempt to achieve a ‘deal’ between our two Countries,” Trump wrote.
In her own statement, Sheinbaum said the U.S. had committed to work on preventing the trafficking of firearms into Mexico.
There has still been no pause on planned tariffs on Canadian imports, which would likely affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. Canadian leaders announced several measures to counter the tariffs at both the federal and provincial level.
Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have spoken today, and are scheduled to do so again this afternoon. Canadian officials are not optimistic, however, that they’ll be able to get a similar deal, a Canadian official told The New York Times.
UPDATE 4:55 p.m. ET: Trudeau announced that he had reached a similar deal that would stave off the imposition of tariffs for a month. Following a “good call” with Trump, Trudeau said in a post on X that he would deploy personnel and resources to his country’s southern border. “Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border,” Trudeau wrote. He also said that Canada would have a “Fentanyl Czar” and would “launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering.”