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On solar breakthroughs, IRA delays, and the magic of mature forests
Current conditions: Another tropical storm is brewing in the Atlantic and could bring more devastation to the Caribbean • In North Korea, Kim Jong Un has been visiting victims of recent catastrophic floods • July was California’s hottest month on record.
About 40% of the largest manufacturing projects made possible through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act are delayed or paused, according to an investigation from the Financial Times. Some of the projects facing delays are a $1.3 billion lithium refinery in South Carolina, a $1 billion solar panel factory in Oklahoma, and LG Energy Solution’s $2.3 billion battery storage facility in Arizona. The companies point to a combination of factors, including overproduction of clean tech from China, macroeconomic pressures, policy confusion, and a drop in EV demand. “Everybody’s running into higher-than-expected costs just because of labor and supply chain,” said Craig MacFarland, mayor of Casa Grande, Arizona, where a semiconductor facility has been delayed by two years. The IRA marks its second anniversary this Friday.
Large wildfires are raging on the outskirts of Athens in Greece, turning the skies an eerie shade of brown and prompting evacuations of at least 11 towns and several hospitals. More than 670 firefighters have been deployed to tackle blazes north of the capital city. Forty new fires ignited yesterday alone, and half the country is under a high-risk fire warning. Drought-stricken Greece is in the grips of its hottest summer ever recorded, and other parts of Europe are sweltering, too.
This year’s COP29 global climate summit in Azerbaijan is expected to draw a smaller crowd than last year’s event in Dubai, according toPolitico. Businesses are “wary of the event’s location and logistics, the oil-evangelizing autocratic regime running it and, perhaps most notably, the prospect of Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential election just days before the November summit begins.” Anticipation is already growing for next year’s event in Brazil, where countries will be expected to submit their new and updated climate plans, or nationally determined contributions, which will outline how they plan to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts. In an article published today, the World Economic Forum insisted this year’s summit in Baku remains relevant because it will determine new goals for climate finance, and could finalize Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which sets out how countries can use international carbon markets. “With a nationally determined contribution update on the horizon, achieving a robust outcome at COP29 is critical to send a strong signal of progress,” the WEF post said.
Researchers at Oxford University have created a new solar power-generating material that “is thin and flexible enough to apply to the surface of almost any building or common object.” The new perovskite film, which Tina Casey at CleanTechnicacalled a “paint-on solar cell,” matches the energy efficiency performance of a traditional single-layer silicon PV and is almost 150 times thinner than a modern silicon wafer. Could this replace silicon-based solar panels altogether? Not anytime soon, Casey wrote, but it could turn almost anything into a solar surface. “We can envisage perovskite coatings being applied to broader types of surfaces to generate cheap solar power, such as the roofs of cars and buildings and even the backs of mobile phones,” said Dr. Junke Wang, a Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions Postdoc Fellow at Oxford University Physics. “If more solar energy can be generated in this way, we can foresee less need in the longer term to use silicon panels or build more and more solar farms.”
Mature trees appear to be able to respond to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by increasing the amount of the greenhouse gas they can absorb. In a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers observed that a group of 180-year-old oak trees exposed to elevated CO2 emissions over a seven-year period made about 10% more woody biomass than trees that didn’t experience the emissions rise. The added wood locks away the gas for decades. The study is only about half-way done and will continue through 2031, but the researchers hope the initial results demonstrate the power of mature forests to act as a natural climate solution. “This is evidence in favor of careful management of established forests,” said Rob MacKenzie, director of Birmingham Institute of Forest Research and one of the study’s authors. “The old forest is doing a huge amount of work for us. What we definitely should not be doing is cutting it down.”
“Certainly, neither despair nor complacency is any use to us. Conversely however, both acceptance and optimism are functionally necessary. Acceptance of our current circumstances is a precondition of effective action in the reality we actually inhabit, whilst hope that liveable futures are possible remains a precondition of necessary effort to bring them about.” –Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell writing about navigating the messy middle paths of climate breakdown at DeSmog.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.