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:
Pacific Gas & Electric is one of the oldest and largest utilities in the United States. It’s also one of the most notorious.
The company serving Northern California was driven into bankruptcy after being found liable for the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, California. After restructuring and emerging in 2020, it was again found liable for the 2021 Dixie Fire. Needless to say, PG&E has since gotten the message that it needs to better fortify its equipment and surrounding environment. So while utilities aren’t generally renowned for their enthusiastic adoption of novel technologies, PG&E has been going all in on startups that can help prevent future disasters.
“More than half of our northern and central California service areas are within high fire threat areas, and a third of our assets are located in those areas,” PG&E spokesperson Paul Doherty told me. While PG&E’s service area doesn’t overlap with the L.A. fires, the growing list of gridtech and climate tech companies that it’s partnered with could serve as an example for other utilities in the state and country as a whole. In PG&E’s catalogue are vegetation management robots, power pole sensors, advanced fire detection cameras, and autonomous drones, with much of this enhanced by an artificial intelligence-powered analytics platforms.
In some ways, the 120-year-old utility is starting to act like a tech incubator. It hosted its first-ever innovation summit in 2023, where Doherty said it held a Shark Tank-style pitch fest to source ideas for a variety of grid challenges, including wildfire-related ones like system monitoring and vegetation management, ultimately receiving over 600 applications. Out of that, PG&E chose 24 concepts to move forward with in some form.
“My experience has been that they’re very focused on reducing risk,” Dave Winnacker, co-founder of the AI-powered risk visualization and mitigation platform XyloPlan, told me. “That attention is probably focused by the fact that they were held accountable and they had significant monetary losses, reputational losses.”
Last year, XyloPlan partnered with PG&E to pilot its software in the wildfire-prone Lake County, California. The platform provides insight into the areas most at risk from fast-moving fires, which Winnacker told me are much more damaging to communities and critical infrastructure than hot fires, known to be more destructive in forests. “So in our model and our future state, you can still have plenty of fire on the landscape, and you can even have plenty of fast-moving fire, but we have prioritized treatments that would disrupt those fast-moving fires that have the greatest consequences,” Winnacker, the former fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, told me. XyloPlan’s algorithm makes recommendations on where various resiliency efforts such as vegetation management would have the greatest impact.
Winnacker acknowledges though that for utilities, “it’s really difficult and risky to take something new on.” Not only could money be wasted if it doesn’t work out, but as Winnacker told me, “It can be perceived as an admission of your doing things wrong before. The tendency to assign blame makes it harder to adopt new and innovative things.”
“I think the toughest thing for a utility is to trust a technology,” Christina Park, senior director of energy strategy at the autonomous drone company Skydio, told me. A former veteran of the utility industry herself, Park spent 15 years at the New York Power Authority and understands why utilities would be reluctant to tweak at least formerly reliable services and infrastructure that millions of households depend upon. But as climate change brings drought and more extreme weather, and as utility infrastructure ages, evolution seems like the only option. “Based on all the confluence of factors that are kind of putting their backs against the wall, they are more open to change,” Park told me. “It’s just not possible to keep doing things the old way.”
Skydio, which was last valued at $2.2 billion after its 2023 Series E funding round, operates in three main markets — defense, public safety, and utilities. PG&E has been a customer of the company since 2022, and became the first California utility to conduct fully remote drone inspections of its assets in 2023. This was made possible after the utility secured a much-coveted waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that allows it to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight.
“An operator could fly a drone to a location that’s up over a mountain, right up over super steep, rugged terrain that would normally be really hard to access via helicopter, via foot, via vehicle, and now we have the capability to go inspect that,” Doherty told me. Six navigation cameras as well as onboard artificial intelligence and advanced computing allow Skydio drones to operate autonomously, docked and deployed at PG&E substations.
Park told me that PG&E, which has had a drone program since 2019, has used its aviation expertise to help Skydio develop key capabilities. “They have the knowledge in the drone space to really ask for more advanced features — being able to pick out when there is a zoom quality that they would really like to see or a certain lens.” After Skydio’s drones gather reams of visual data, algorithms can pinpoint the location and severity of any infrastructural defects. PG&E has developed its own A.I. model in house to do this.
PG&E is far from alone in its excitement over Skydio’s capabilities. The dronemaker has over 200 utility partnerships to date, and Park told me that across all of them she’s seeing more and more integration of new tech into the standard workflow. “Their business as usual, it just looks different than it did five years ago,” she told me. But while there might be an increased appetite in the industry for novel solutions, Winnacker warns that there are numerous logistical and financial barriers that can get in the way of promising tech moving from pilot to full-scale implementation.
“The challenge on these things always is that the benefit is very widespread, but there has to be someone who is the lead, and ultimately someone has to make the investment,” Winnacker told me. “That’s challenging, because there is a federal component, there’s a state component, there’s a local government component, there’s a non-government, land-owning agency component, and then there’s a small private property component. We have to mesh all of these.”
Sometimes, good companies with good ideas can languish as these various stakeholders with different perspectives and priorities wait for someone else to step up and foot the bill. As of now, Winnacker said he doesn’t know if PG&E is going to make a more significant investment in XyloPlan, although he said last year’s partnership proved fruitful.
But if PG&E does move forward with XyloPlan, or any other gridtech or wildfire mitigation tech for that matter, the success of that program will depend not just on the utility, but also on all the other governmental and non-governmental players that Winnacker mentioned. “There’s a need for really tight alignment, so that the work of one group compliments the other, and we don’t end up in this disjointed manner, where a lot of effort is occurring, but because it’s not coordinated, it’s not aligned, you don’t get that the reinforcing benefit of the network,” Winnacker told me.
Not to mention the fact that in rural and urban areas alike, there’s always competing demands and only so much money to go around. Especially in a state like California, which is facing a severe housing crisis, the perpetual question of prioritization looms over every budget decision. And while tech companies often promise to save utilities money in the long term — via both efficiency gains and avoided disaster costs — implementing new programs often means big upfront expenses, which typically leads to higher customer rates. And, well, everybody hates that.
Suffice it to say, there’s no perfect solution here, but inaction is the worst option of all. As Winnacker put it, “you eat an elephant one bite at a time.” So as Los Angeles recovers from some of the most destructive fires in the state’s history and utilities across the state open themselves up to new ways of doing business, “we need to start with these small bites to get moving so that we can get past the either nothing can be done, this is an act of nature discussion or this pie in the sky, oh, you know, a single tech silver bullet will just make this problem go away,” Winnacker told me.
“This is an all of the above approach, and the time is probably now, with regard to having everyone’s undivided attention on this for a very brief period of time.”
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 nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.