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:
On Musk’s successor, a House vote, and Spain’s blackout
Current conditions: Flash flood warnings remain in place today throughout the south-central U.S. • Israel has requested international assistance in fighting large fires that have broken out in the hills near Jerusalem • May in Europe is off to a warm start, with temperatures in the mid-80s in Paris.
1. Tesla board began search for Musk’s replacement: report
Tesla’s board initiated a search for a chief executive to replace Elon Musk, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday night. With stock prices “vaporized,” car sales floundering, and dealerships becoming targets for public frustrations with the government, the board reportedly warned Musk that he needed to shift his focus from reform efforts in Washington and back to Tesla. At the time of the conversation, which happened “about a month ago,” Musk “didn’t push back,” the Journal writes, although Musk subsequently told investors on Tesla’s earnings call last week that he’d be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla.” While the board had reportedly advanced its search for Musk’s successor to the point of having “narrowed its focus to a major search firm,” the current status of the effort to find Musk’s replacement “couldn’t be determined.”
Musk has complained to those close to him that he is “frustrated to still be working nonstop” at Tesla, and has made public comments about his compensation. He spent more than $250 million on Trump’s re-election campaign, although his company faces substantial hurdles due to the president’s policies, including a significant hit from tariffs and a loss of competitive advantage if California’s ability to set vehicle emission standards stricter than the federal government’s, which has generated significant revenue for Tesla in the form of compliance credits it’s sold to other automakers, is revoked.
2. House strikes down California’s clean truck rule, cueing up clean air vote
The House of Representatives voted 231 to 191 on Wednesday evening to revoke California’s ability to incentivize clean truck purchases, a prelude to Thursday’s vote over whether or not the state can set stricter auto emission standards than the federal limits. Thirteen moderate Democrats, including Henry Cuellar of Texas, Susie Lee of Nevada, and Tom Suozzi of New York, joined Republicans in voting to block California from requiring truck dealers to sell an increasing number of zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles over time. In a separate vote on Wednesday, the House revoked another of California’s standard-setting capabilities, designed to cut down on nitrogen oxide emissions, which Republican Morgan Griffith of Virginia described as “an effort to truly vilify diesel engines.” The measures will now be sent to the Senate.
California’s authority to set these rules comes from waivers it’s been granted by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, which otherwise compels states to adhere to federal standards. The Clean Air Act also allows other states to adopt California’s standards, giving the state extraordinary influence over the automotive market.
The marquee vote, however, will come on Thursday, when the House will vote to end California’s vehicle emissions waiver, which some critics have erroneously characterized as an electric vehicle mandate. Many are skeptical, however, that Congress has the authority to revoke the waiver under the Congressional Review Act. Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has previously said the waivers do not qualify under the CRA and “ignoring that ruling would buck decades of precedent under presidential administrations of both parties, and would lay the foundation for potentially tricky legal fights down the road should a future president decide to grant California a new waiver,” journalist Clark Mindock writes for Landmark.
3. Debate rages over whether Spain’s renewable energy dependence caused Iberian blackout
Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images
Monday’s 18-hour blackout across Spain and Portugal has sparked a fierce and ongoing debate over whether the Iberian Peninsula’s heavy reliance on wind and solar energy is to blame. While the investigation into the cause of the blackout is still ongoing, we do know that at the time of the outage, Spain’s grid “had little ‘inertia,’ which renewables opponents have seized on as a reason to blame carbon-free electricity for the breakdown,” my colleague Matthew Zeitlin explains. In essence, gas turbines and nuclear plants have inertia that comes from spinning metal, such as a turbine, which can provide the system with a little more momentum if a generator drops off the grid. “Solar panels, however, don’t spin,” Matthew adds — hence the current line of attack by energy transition skeptics.
On Wednesday, the president of Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, insisted that “linking what happened on Monday to renewables isn’t correct.” Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has likewise claimed that “Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance.” But as Matthew writes, it wouldn’t necessarily be a surprise to learn that a renewables-heavy grid struggled with maintaining reliability due to low inertia — nor is it an insurmountable challenge. Read more about how inertia may have played a part in the blackout here.
4. Equinor considers ‘legal options’ against the Trump administration over canceled wind farm
Equinor, the Norwegian state-owned energy company behind Empire Wind, is reportedly considering suing the Trump administration after the Department of the Interior canceled its Long Island offshore wind farm last month. As my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman reported at the time, Empire Wind was “the second fully permitted offshore wind project” to be targeted by the administration, and its potential cancellation represents “a huge blow to New York State’s climate and clean energy goals.”
Equinor has already spent nearly $2 billion on Empire Wind, which was almost a third complete at the time Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered an immediate halt to construction. The company is now “considering its legal options,” The Guardian writes, and “may take Donald Trump’s administration to court.”
5. India braces for potentially deadly slate of spring heatwaves
India is preparing for a series of heatwaves in May that could potentially strain power grids and lead to dangerous blackouts, Bloomberg reports. The warning — issued on Wednesday by the director general of India’s Meteorological Department, Mrutyunjay Mohapatra — follows what was already a difficult April in the country, with temperatures in New Delhi spiking above 100 degrees Fahrenheit earlier in the month. In Jaipur, temperatures have already broken 110 degrees, leading outdoor laborers to suffer from heatstroke. Mohapatra confirmed that above-average temperatures are expected to persist over most of the country between now and the onset of the monsoon season in June, except in some parts of the southern and eastern states. Spring heatwaves in India have been linked to climate change, with Gianmarco Mengaldo, a climate expert at the National University of Singapore and author of one such report, telling The Guardian, “Many of the events predicted for 2050 or 2070 are already happening. We underestimated the speed of change.
Ministers in the UK are considering a new rule that would require almost all new homes to have rooftop solar.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
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.