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One of the most vulnerable states in the U.S. wants nothing to do with “climate change.”
The Biden administration loves a hub. There are the hydrogen hubs, the direct air capture hubs, and now there are the tech hubs. Established as a part of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, the $10 billion program has so far seeded 12 such hubs across the country. Four of these are focused on clean energy and sustainability, and one is located in the great state of Florida, which recently passed legislation essentially deleting the words “climate change” from state law.
The South Florida ClimateReady Tech Hub did not, in the end, eliminate climate from its name. But while Governor Ron DeSantis might not approve, the federal government didn’t seem to mind, as the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration awarded the hub $19.5 million to “advance its global leadership in sustainable and resilient infrastructure.”
“Regardless of how you feel about the word climate or the words climate change, what I have found in this process is what deeply resonates with folks is that their relationship with water is changing,” Francesca de Quesada Covey, chief of economic innovation and development for Miami-Dade County, told me.
Sea levels around Florida have risen about 8 inches since 1950, and the rate of rise is only accelerating, putting the state’s extensive, low-lying coastlines at high risk for flooding and, eventually, total submersion. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that by 2100, average sea levels will have risen between 1.4 and 2.8 feet, with more drastic scenarios possible if little is done to curb emissions.
Covey, who grew up in Miami, said everyone agrees there are simply more puddles and flooded roads to navigate than when she was a kid. “So there is an understanding that regardless of how you think it happened, or why you think it happened, that our everyday life is harder because the environment around us is changing.”
This narrative, she believes, can help form a basis of bipartisan support for Florida’s hub, which she told me has three technical focus areas: limiting coastal hazards due to sea level rise and extreme weather events, implementing energy efficient technologies, and building resilient structures using low-carbon concrete and cement. South Florida, Covey said, is the perfect place to undertake these projects, as the state has been investing in climate adaptation and mitigation since 1992, when Hurricane Andrew touched down in Miami-Dade County, causing $25 billion in damages. Since then, she says the state’s universities have been churning out climate tech intellectual property.
“We’re seeing the IP grow 10% year-over-year over the last few years,” Covey said. Nine colleges and universities are tech hub partners, with the bulk of the funding going to Florida International University, which will receive $10.3 million to help scale up low-carbon concrete tech, establish an infrastructure innovation center, and improve upon industry building codes and standards. Miami Tech Works, which aims to build a pipeline of tech talent in South Florida, is set to receive $6 million for workforce development programs while the Miami-Dade County government will get $3.2 million for governance and oversight. Two private companies working on advanced concrete products, Titan America and Carbon Limit, are also getting a portion of the FIU funding — $740,000 for Carbon Limit and an undisclosed amount for Titan.
Tim Sperry, CEO of Carbon Limit, is used to getting questions about why he based his early-stage startup out of Florida, his home state. “Great that you guys are a climate tech company, but why would you be in South Florida?” Sperry said people wonder. “Florida at all was a bad look for climate tech companies until this hub actually came together,” he told me. Since the hub was initially announced last October, Sperry says he’s seen more money for climate tech flowing into the state.
Carbon Limit has a patented powder additive for concrete mixes, which enhances concrete’s natural ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it permanently, thereby reducing the carbon intensity of built infrastructure such as buildings and roads. So far the company has worked with the Minnesota Department of Transportation to pave a section of interstate highway, and with Google to pave a portion of its campus. Carbon Limit raised a $1 million pre-seed round two years ago, and its business model revolves around licensing the formula for its additive to concrete producers.
Sperry sees Florida as “ground zero” for climate-related natural disasters, and thus a natural home for this type of technology. When he worked in Miami, he saw people kayaking down the streets during king tides, and found crabs in his office after floods. “They actually raised the road four feet and put pumps and did all this stuff down there. So I think, why shouldn’t it be South Florida?” he asked, “Short of the government stuff …”
Ah yes, the government stuff. While DeSantis hasn’t weighed in publicly on the ClimateReady Tech Hub, Covey said the state’s DeSantis-appointed Chief Resilience Officer, Wesley Brooks, is supportive. Brooks helped craft the “state support” section of the hub’s application, which calls the Office of Resilience “an advocate for the Hub and an ally in providing technical guidance to local governments.”
Climate tech startups can’t eat guidance, however. If the hub is going to accomplish its lofty technical and workforce development goals, it’s going to need a lot more than $19.5 million, and a lack of state-level support could make securing additional funds that much more difficult.
“We requested $70 million,” Covey told me, the maximum amount of federal funding that tech hubs could apply for. Most of the other hubs received between $40 million and $50 million, putting the South Florida hub at the small end of the bunch. Covey said the county didn’t receive feedback as to why. “The way that we’re looking at $19.5 [million] is that this is our first investment tranche. We will be going back to the federal government. We will be going back to private funders. We will be going back to philanthropic funders in order to achieve our metrics,” she told me.
Ultimately, Miami-Dade County wants to leverage the ClimateReady Tech Hub to create 23,000 green jobs with an average base salary of $87,000 over a 10-year period. Thus far, Miami-Dade has raised an additional $500,000 — not nothing, but far from its ultimate goal of raising another $50 million. The increasing probability of a Trump win in November could put future federal funding for the hub at the whims of a notoriously mercurial and climate-adverse cabinet.
But if the tech hub does achieve its goals, Covey estimates the payoff will be huge, adding $41 billion to the region’s GDP. Given all the growth South Florida has seen over the last four years, with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists flooding into the region during the pandemic, Covey thinks the hub’s got a real shot of securing the money it needs. She even told me she views South Florida as “the most competitive place when it comes to climate technology.”
When I noted that the San Francisco Bay Area might beg to differ, Covey emphasized how much it matters that Miami-Dade County is experiencing the impacts of climate change in real time. “The Bay Area doesn’t have those sort of real life testing conditions that we have here. We have $3.5 trillion exposed to climate change right now,” she told me, citing a figure from a National Wildlife Federation report showing that out of all the cities in the world, Miami stands to lose the most from coastal flooding. In other words, in South Florida climate tech isn’t a matter of theoretical tinkering and ideating. As Covey says, “Our economy depends on it.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the chief of economic innovation and development for Miami-Dade County and the target average salary for new jobs created by the hub.
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.