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Trump 2.0 may sound the death knell for climate tech — not the concept, of course, but the phrase. “Climate tech” became ubiquitous during the Biden era, attached to companies pitching anything vaguely related to either climate change or technology, as well as the specialized and well-resourced venture capital firms created to fund them. It’s even in my job title: climate tech reporter.
I’ve been hearing rumblings around the liabilities of this language for a while, going back well before the election. The big bummer truth is that talking about “climate” is polarizing, and though we may be mostly removed from the days of pure denialism, climate solutions are now being framed as a priority of the elites. “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American dream,” the president of the Heritage Foundation and leader of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, said at this year’s New York Climate Week.
Given that an unfortunately solid percentage of the next administration is likely sympathetic to Roberts’ notions, I was inclined to agree with Tommy Leep, the founder and sole operator of the software-focused “climate tech” venture firm Jetstream, when he posted this a few days after the election.
When I followed up with Leep, he told me, “I actually think it’s still a great time to start a climate startup. Just don’t call it a climate startup.” No matter who is in office, Leep said, he sees the arc of the startup universe bending toward companies with positive climate externalities. But that doesn’t mean we need to categorize them as such. “Call it ‘American dynamism,’ or ‘critical infrastructure,’ or ‘frontier tech,’ or any of these other things.”
Todd Khozein, co-founder and CEO of the startup incubator and investment firm SecondMuse, threw out some additional ideas — “energy efficiency,” “energy independence,” and “resilient cities” could all do the trick. After all, “Who doesn’t want a resilient city? Who doesn’t want to save?” Khozein asked.
And while Trump’s preferred term for his fossil-fuel oriented agenda, “energy dominance,” is a tad aggressive and definitely not something I’d want on my business card, many climate tech companies do play in the realm of “energy security” and “energy resilience” by providing baseload power to stabilize the grid, secure fuel supplies, and wean the U.S. off energy imports (a process that has been ongoing for more than a decade). These could be excellent euphemisms, because even if Trump guts the Department of Energy, he will definitely not do the same to the Department of Defense. DOD funding supports a number of clean technologies, including next generation geothermal, novel battery tech, and sustainable aviation fuel.
“I think that we’ll see a very rapid adaptation of the language of entrepreneurs because their survival is dependent upon it,” Khozein told me. “A lot of these businesses, if you’re not going to get that million dollar grant, if you’re not going to get that [Small Business Innovation Research funding], if you’re not going to get that support from the Department of Energy, then there’s simply no future.”
There’s certainly precedent for this type of alternate framing. This summer I reported on Florida’s climate resilience-focused tech hub, formed shortly after Governor Ron DeSantis deleted the words “climate change” from state law. But Francesca de Quesada Covey, who leads the hub’s development, told me that what resonates most with Floridians is the acknowledgement that their “relationship with water is changing.” And when I was researching the funding landscape for climate adaptation tech, Jay Koh, co-founder of the investment firm The Lightsmith Group, told me that the adaptation companies he’s interested in often “call themselves ‘business continuity’ or ‘water efficiency’ or ‘agricultural precision technologies’ or ‘supply chain management in the face of weather volatility.’”
Since Trump loyalists will be holding the purse strings of coveted government subsidies, grants, and loans, it’s clear why companies would want to rebrand. But Leep told me it’s an open question as to whether VCs such as Jetstream will feel compelled to follow suit. Personally, he’s now most excited to support startups that not only have a positive environmental impact, but are also aligned with the incoming administration’s focus on domestic manufacturing.
As for his website that advertises Jetstream’s focus on “pre-seed climate tech software startups?”
“Give me a couple months,” Leep assured me. “I’m sorting through what that language is.”
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.