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Sparks

Could Trump Scuttle the EPA’s New Car Rules?

Not no, but not yes, either.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The D.C. Armory is big enough to fit an F-150 Lightning, a hybrid Jeep Compass, and a Cadillac Lyriq, with room to spare for an elephant.

That elephant was in the room on Wednesday when Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi announced the Biden administration’s finalized vehicle emissions standards, flanked onstage by plugged-in models from GM, Ford, and Stellantis. That element is the invisible, though nevertheless looming possibility of a second Trump administration.

Though climate advocates and environmental groups have celebrated the EPA’s rules for pushing the country closer to its net zero goals (while also lamenting that the rules didn’t go as far as planned), threats have been mounting. Perhaps none is more concerning than Trump’s potential return to the White House with the Project 2025 playbook in hand. The Heritage Foundation-authored blueprint for a Republican president explicitly describes dismantling the EPA and singles out as a priority reviewing “the existing ‘ramp rate’ for car standards to ensure that it is actually achievable.”

When Trump last took office, he replaced, eliminated, or otherwise undid more than 100 environmental rules, including Obama-era vehicle emissions standards. When I spoke to environmental lawyers at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, though, they stressed that the EPA’s regulations make it difficult for an unfriendly executive branch to shake them off.

If a future administration were to want to change the rules finalized this week, it would have to go through “a full rulemaking process,” Peter Zalzal, a member of EDF’s Domestic Climate and Air legal team, told me. That would include “a proposal that laid out the agency’s rationale for making those choices, and the facts supporting that rationale, and then hold a public comment process to incorporate stakeholder feedback.” Only after going through all that would it be able to take decisive action.

While it is possible that a Trump administration would attempt this, a senior advisor to the NRDC Action Fund, stressed that groups like theirs would fight tooth and nail to halt such a rollback. There are plenty of stages in the EPA rulemaking process where environmental groups could intervene, including by taking the administration to court.

Trouble might start even sooner than January, though. By Thursday morning, there were already multiple reports of Republican attorneys general who had “warned the EPA against rolling out more aggressive tailpipe emissions standards,” and opponents in Congress had filed a bipartisan resolution to undo the rule. There’s even a world in which a decision could be punted up to the Supreme Court, whose recent decisions have been hostile toward the EPA’s regulatory powers. Additionally, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers trade group is planning a seven-figure ad spend across seven states “against the new rules heading into the 2024 election,” Kelley Blue Book reports, including an effort to brand them as a “gas car ban.”

The rules are definitively not a ban, and automakers are generally on board with them. “It’s just not a case that these standards require any kind of particular technologies,” Zalzal, from EDF, told me. “In fact, we’ve done modeling to show that manufacturers could meet these by selling very few battery electric vehicles.” (He added that, to be clear, that isn’t the expectation). Generally, experts seem to agree that the rules are on solid legal footing.

Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has reported, California has quietly been working behind the scenes to get automakers to voluntarily comply with the regulations — and, in that way, sneakily “Trump-proof” the electrification push.

After all, that’s the one thing you can count on with elephants: You can see them coming.

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Sparks

The Trump Administration Helped a Solar Farm

In the name of “energy dominance,” no less.

Solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration just did something surprising: It paved the way for a transmission line to a solar energy project.

On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management approved the Gen-Tie transmission line and associated facilities for the Sapphire Solar project, a solar farm sited on private lands in Riverside County, California, that will provide an estimated 117 megawatts to the Southern California Public Power Authority.

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Sparks

These 21 House Republicans Want to Preserve Energy Tax Credits

For those keeping score, that’s three more than wanted to preserve them last year.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Those who drew hope from the letter 18 House Republicans sent to Speaker Mike Johnson last August calling for the preservation of energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act must be jubilant this morning. On Sunday, 21 House Republicans sent a similar letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith. Those with sharp eyes will have noticed: That’s three more people than signed the letter last time, indicating that this is a coalition with teeth.

As Heatmap reported in the aftermath of November’s election, four of the original signatories were out of a job as of January, meaning that the new letter features a total of seven new recruits. So who are they?

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Sparks

The Country’s Largest Power Markets Are Getting More Gas

Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.

Natural gas pipelines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.

Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.

The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”

So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.

So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.

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