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.
For a while First Solar looked like a “Liberation Day” winner. Now its first quarter results suggest otherwise.
When Donald Trump unveiled his now-infamous chart of “reciprocal” tariffs, most of the stock market shuddered — but there were a few exceptions,including the American solar manufacturer First Solar. While the market in the days following “Liberation Day” was on a hunt and destroy mission for stocks of renewables companies known to be heavily exposed to Asia or independent power producers, First Solar stayed roughly flat.
It’s not flat anymore. The company reported first quarter earnings on Tuesday that were short of analysts’ expectations and lowered its expected revenue and profit for the rest of the year citing disruptions from tariffs. The stock has fallen more than 9% on Wednesday, and is down a third so far this year.
“While FSLR” — a.k.a. First Solar — “is the US solar manufacturing bellwether, they are not immune to the far-reaching tariff environment,” Andrew Perocco, a Morgan Stanley analyst, wrote in a note to clients. He also estimated that almost half of First Solar’s manufacturing capacity is in Asia.
The company’s sobering results and warnings about how tariffs could affect their business is a sign that the entire green energy business is likely at risk from uncertain trade policy, even the companies thought to be insulated.
First Solar and other companies’ tariff-affected financial results also show that the Inflation Reduction Act has only been partially successful at boosting American production of green energy technology, and that the country’s green industries are still deeply intertwined with Asian and Chinese production.
“We had been expecting negative effects from tariffs for First Solar, but the impact was greater than we expected,” Brett Castelli, an analyst at Morningstar, wrote in a note to clients.
First Solar chief executive Mark Widmar said that the uncertainty about the reciprocal tariffs — set to back into effect in July absent new trade deals — “has created a challenge to quantifying the precise tariff rate that would be applied to our module shipments into and beyond the second half of this year.”
Widmar said the company expects to move its manufacturing facility in India “away from exports to the U.S.,” and instead will have it produce solar panels for the domestic Indian market. Its factories in Malaysia and Vietnam may see reduced production due to “potentially reduced U.S. demand environment for non-domestic product.”
Widmar also called out the ever-evolving policy around Chinese solar imports into the United States. Solar panels from China itself, as well as four Southeast Asian nations face punitive import duties as high as 3,521% after the federal government determined Chinese companies were “dumping” panels on the U.S. market and trying to circumvent tariffs by moving production to neighboring countries. Widmar said there had been a “surge” of cells and modules from Laos and Indonesia.
“We have no doubt that these Chinese manufacturers are also seeking to establish production and other regions around the world, such as Saudi Arabia, forcing us into a continued game of whack-a-mole,” Widmar said.
Several analysts downgraded the company, with Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith writing in a note to clients that there were questions about “about the profitability of its core business.”
That the tariffs have affected First Solar, long held out as a kind of American solar manufacturing national champion, bodes poorly for much of the rest of the renewable industry, which is still often tightly linked to Asian nations and especially China.
There have been some hints that there’s no safe ground from tariffs in the U.S. clean energy industry. The most vertically integrated green technology company in the United States, Tesla,has flagged repeatedly to investors and the public that it’s at risk from tariffs, whether for certain parts of its cars or, especially, for its stationary storage batteries — which, like much of the rest of the storage industry, relies on a Chinese supply chain.
“Given the majority of the [battery electric storage systems] components with some dependency on Chinese supply chain, solar-plus-storage projects in particular may face significantly increased costs,” Widmar said. Morgan Stanley’s Perocco described Widmar’s comments on solar-plus-storage as a “negative read-through for other utility-scale solar and storage exposed stocks,” such as Array Technologies, Shoals Technology Group, and Fluence. Array and Shoals are down 10% and 3% respectively, while Fluence is about flat on the day.
Spinning turbines have it, but solar panels don’t.
Spain and Portugal are still recovering from Monday’s region-wide blackout. The cause remains unknown, but already a debate has broken out over whether grids like Spain’s, which has a well-above-average proportion of renewables, are more at risk of large-scale disruptions.
At the time of the blackout, Spain’s grid had little “inertia,” which renewables opponents have seized on as a reason to blame carbon-free electricity for the breakdown. If the electricity system as a whole is a dance of electrons choreographed by the laws of electromagnetism, then inertia is the system’s brute force Newtonian backup. In a fossil fuel-powered grid, inertia comes from spinning metal — think a gas turbine — and it can give the whole system a little extra boost if another generator drops off the grid.
Solar panels, however, don’t spin. Instead, they produce direct current that needs to be converted by an inverter into alternating current at the grid’s frequency.
“If a power plant goes out, that frequency starts to drop a little bit because there’s an imbalance in the power between supply and demand, and inertia provides a little bit of extra power,” Bri-Mathias Hodge, an electrical and energy engineering professor at the University of Colorado and a former chief scientist at the nearby National Renewable Energy Laboratory, explained to me. Inertia, he said, “just gives a little bit more wiggle room in the system, so that if there are big changes, you can sort of ride through them.”
Of course, blackouts happen on grids dominated by fossil fuels — the 2003 Northeast Blackout in the U.S and Canada, for example, which plunged several states and tens of millions of people into darkness. Even on renewable-heavy grids, blackouts can still come down to failures of fossil fuel systems, as with Texas’ Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when the natural gas distribution system froze up. Much of the state had no electricity for several days amidst freezing temperatures, and over 200 people died.
But Bloomberg’s Javier Blas was nevertheless fair to the Iberian blackout when he bestowed on it the sobriquet, “The first big blackout of the green electricity era.”
Spain has been especially aggressive in decarbonizing its power grid and there’s some initial evidence that the first generators to turn off were solar power. “We started to see oscillations between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the European power grid, and this generally means that there’s a power imbalance — somebody’s trying to export power that they can’t, or import power that they can’t because of the limits on the lines,” Hodge told me. “The reason why people have gone on to say that this is a solar issue is because where they’ve seen some of those oscillations and where they saw some of the events starting, there are a couple large solar plants in that part of southwestern Spain.”
While Spanish grid and government officials will likely take months to investigate the failure, we already know that Spain and Portugal are relatively isolated from the rest of the European grid and rely heavily on renewables, especially solar and wind. Portugal has in the past gone several days in a row generating 100% of its power from renewables; Spain, meanwhile, was boasting of its 100% renewable generation just weeks before the blackout.
Last week, Spanish solar produced over 20,000 megawatts of power, comprising more than 60% of the country’s resource mix. Spain’s seven remaining nuclear reactors — which still provide about a fifth of its electric power — are scheduled to shut down over the next decade (though officials have indicated they might be open to extending their life), while its minimal coal generation is scheduled to be retired this year.
“Spain and Portugal have been relatively early adopters of wind and solar power. The Iberian Peninsula is actually relatively weakly connected to the rest of Europe through France. And so that’s one of the tricky parts here — it’s not as well integrated just because of the geography,” Hodge said.
The disturbances on the grid started on the Spain-France interconnection, but a European power official told The New York Times that transmission issues typically don’t lead to cascading blackouts unless there’s some major disturbance in supply or demand as well, such as a power plant going offline.
Spain’s grid had issues before Monday’s blackout that can be fairly attributed to its reliance on renewables. It often has to curtail solar power production because the grid gets congested when particularly sunny parts of the country where there’s large amounts of solar generation are churning out power that can’t be transmitted to the rest of the country. Spain has also occasionally experienced negative prices for electricity, and is using European Investment Bank funds to help support the expansion of pumped-hydro storage in order to store power when prices go down.
On Monday afternoon, however, solar power dropped from around 18,000 megawatts to 8,000, Reuters reported. At the time the blackout began, the grid was overwhelmingly powered by renewables. Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said it was able to pinpoint two large-scale losses of solar power in the southwestern part of the country, according to Reuters.
That a renewables-heavy grid might struggle with maintaining reliability thanks to low inertia is no surprise. Researchers have been studying the issue for decades.
In Texas — which, like Spain, has a high level of renewable generation and is isolated from the greater continental grid — the energy market ERCOT has been monitoring inertia since 2013, when wind generation sometimes got to 30% of total generation, and in 2016 started real-time monitoring of inertia in its control room.
That real time monitoring is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered, Hodge said.
As renewables build up on grids, Hodge told me, operators should prepare by having their inverters be what’s known as “grid-forming” instead of “grid-following.”
“Right now, in the power system, almost all of the wind, solar, battery plants, all the inverter-based generation, they just look to the grid for a signal. If the grid is producing at 60 Hertz, then they want to produce 60 Hertz. If it’s producing at 59.9, then they try to match that,” Hodge said. This works when you have relatively low amounts of [renewable generation]. But when [renewables] start to become the majority of the generation, you need somebody else to provide that strong signal for everybody else to follow. And that’s sort of what grid-forming inverters do,” he said.
Grid-forming inverters could hold back some power from the grid to provide an inertia-like boost when needed. Right now, the only sizable grid outfitted with this technology, Hodge said, is the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which has a population of around 75,000. Spain, by contrast, is home to nearly 50 million.
The other key technology for grid-forming inverters to provide stability to a power system is batteries. “Batteries are actually the perfect solution for this because if you have a battery system there, you know most of the time it’s not producing or charging and totally full output or input. So the vast majority of time you’re going to have some room to sort of move on in either direction,” Hodge said.
But this requires both technology and market structures that incentivize and allow batteries to always be ready to provide that instantaneous response.
“The entire stability paradigm of the power grid was built around this idea of synchronous machines,” Hodge told me. “And we’re moving toward one that’s more based on the inverters, but we’re not there yet. We have to fix the car while we’re driving it. We can’t turn off the grid for a couple years and figure everything out.”
Current conditions: Dangerous flash flooding could hit the south-central United States today, with some areas facing the potential for 8 inches of rain in 12 hours • The U.N. is warning countries in Northwest Africa that weather conditions are favorable to locust swarms• Temperatures in parts of Pakistan today will approach 122 degrees Fahrenheit, the global record for April.
After 100 days in office, President Trump has the lowest job approval rating of any president at this point in their tenure in the past 80 years. “Chaos, uncertainty, ‘we don’t know yet.’ These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo writes for Heatmap (something I can vouch for, too). From his slashing of the federal workforce to regulatory rollbacks to his unpopular tariffs and targeted attacks on “climate” in every form, Trump is reshaping the economic and policy environment from the top down.
Emily put together five charts yesterday to help visualize the impact of Trump’s second term to date. Some of the most striking takeaways include:
You can read Emily’s full story — with charts! — here.
Emily also reviewed the first draft of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s budget, which was released on Tuesday. “Remember, the name of the game for Republicans is to find ways to pay for Trump’s long list of tax cuts,” she writes. In the proposed budget, the Transportation Committee puts forward one new revenue-generating program — an annual fee of $200 on electric vehicles and $20 on conventional gas-powered cars to pay into the Highway Trust Fund — plus a list of “rescissions” of unobligated funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. That list includes efforts to claw back more than $1.7 billion for improving the efficiency of government buildings, as well as whatever remains of the $3.2 billion allocated to the Federal Highway Administration to promote improved walkability and transportation access, along with five other key IRA grant programs. But “this is just a first pass,” Emily reminds us, “and this is all subject to change.”
COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago warned that as the U.S. retreats from the fight against global warming, it will become increasingly difficult to persuade other countries to commit to the energy transition. Speaking at the BloombergNEF Summit in New York, approximately six months out from COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Corrêa do Lago stressed that “There is obviously some that say ‘God, how am I going to convince my people to lower emissions when the richest country isn’t doing the same.’”
It is unclear what sort of delegation the U.S. will send to COP30, given the Trump administration’s severing of global climate research and its exit from the Paris Climate Agreement. China, meanwhile, has announced its intention to commit to stricter climate goals ahead of the November meetings in Brazil. “China is demonstrating an absolute conviction that it's the right way to go,’’ Corrêa do Lago said.
Ford’s director of electrified propulsion engineering announced on LinkedIn that the company has made a significant breakthrough in battery technology, the Detroit Free Press reports. “This isn’t just a lab experiment,” the director, Charles Poon, wrote. “We’re actively working to scale [Lithium Manganese Rich] cell chemistry and integrate them into our future vehicle lineup within this decade.” LMR replaces commonly used nickel and cobalt with manganese, which Poon says costs less and helps approach “true cost parity with gasoline vehicles” as well as “higher energy density” that “translates to greater range, allowing our customers to go further on a single charge.”
Many companies have made advances in LMR, which is not a new technology, but Ford clarified in comments to the Free Press that it has overcome some of the technical challenges of LMR, like voltage decay, while “not sacrificing energy density.” Still, Ford was short on details, leaving some skeptical of the supposed revolution in battery technology. Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, thinks Ford “found a workaround, but this is far from a breakthrough,” according to Autoevolution. “However, such efforts are welcome as carmakers try to push the envelope of current battery technology.”
The largest bank in Canada, the Royal Bank of Canada, announced on Tuesday that it is “retiring” its sustainable finance goals and will not disclose its findings on how its high-carbon energy financing compares with its low-carbon energy financing, according to the Canadian Press. Per RBC, the move is due to regulatory changes, including Canada’s Competition Act, which was designed to prevent corporate greenwashing by requiring climate reporting to be backed by internationally recognized measures,The Globe and Mailexplains.
By backing off its target, RBC is abandoning a $500 billion commitment to sustainable finance this year. The bank previously exited the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a global initiative spearheaded by Mark Carney, who was elected to a term as prime minister earlier this week. While “campaigners worry banks are seizing on a shift in the political climate, particularly under U.S. President Donald Trump, to dilute commitments to act quickly on decarbonising their portfolios” — per Reuters — RBC said it has not abandoned its intentions of addressing climate change and that it should be considered the “bank of choice” for the energy transition.
A startup in Switzerland is installing removable solar panels in the unused space between train tracks. The company, Sun-Ways, says that if it installs panels across the entire 3,300 miles of the Swiss rail network, it could generate one billion kilowatt-hours of solar power per year, equivalent to approximately 2% of the nation’s electricity needs.