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Culture

Welcome to Heatmap

We hope to do climate coverage a little differently.

Climate change and clean energy.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Let us tell you a story about a force that’s reshaping everything you care about. It’s a story of parched earth and rising tides, great power rivalries and massive infrastructure projects, the food we eat and the homes we build, ultra-fast cars and the richest man in the world. It’s the story of climate change, and it’s what we’re focused on here at Heatmap.

I started Heatmap because I wanted to read it. I was hungry to discover the details, nuances, and hard choices of climate change, because that’s where the most interesting and important parts of any story lie. I wanted stories that go beyond the basics and approach the topic as the all-encompassing epic it is.

After all, think of how many important stories had climate change or energy at their center over the past year. There’s President Biden’s climate legislation, his biggest accomplishment to date. There’s the war in Ukraine, which is being waged by a petro-state and has sent the world hurtling towards decarbonization. There’s inflation, driven by fossil fuels and energy shortages. In Silicon Valley, venture funding is pouring into climate tech at a record clip and the world’s digital public square was recently acquired by an erratic electric vehicle mogul. Meanwhile on Apple TV next week, a climate show premieres starring Edward Norton, Meryl Streep, Kit Harington, and Diane Lane.

There’s a lot to cover.

Heatmap is made up of an incredible group of journalists and media veterans who are interested in telling the same stories and diving into the same details as I am. Some of us come to Heatmap with deep climate expertise. Others come fresh to the topic from relevant backgrounds, like politics or economics or culture. (I come from The Week, where I dabbled in a bit of everything.)

All of us are grateful for you reading us today as we get started. If you enjoy what you read, I hope you’ll consider supporting our work with a subscription so we can continue to pursue this fascinating, vital story in all its detail.

Thank you,

Nico Lauricella
Founder and editor in chief

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Spotlight

The Moss Landing Battery Backlash Has Spread Nationwide

New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.

Moss Landing.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.

As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.

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Hotspots

The Race to Qualify for Renewable Tax Credits Is on in Wisconsin

And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.

  • Xcel’s Ten Mile Creek solar project doesn’t appear to have begun construction yet, and like many facilities it must begin that process by about this time next year or it will lose out on the renewable energy tax credits cut short by the new law. Ten Mile Creek has essentially become a proxy for the larger fight to build before time runs out to get these credits.
  • Xcel told county regulators last month that it hoped to file an application to the Wisconsin Public Services Commission by the end of this year. But critics of the project are now telling their allies they anticipate action sooner in order to make the new deadline for the tax credit — and are campaigning for the county to intervene if that occurs.
  • “Be on the lookout for Xcel to accelerate the PSC submittal,” Ryan Sherley, a member of the St. Croix Board of Supervisors, wrote on Facebook. “St. Croix County needs to legally intervene in the process to ensure the PSC properly hears the citizens and does not rush this along in order to obtain tax credits.”

2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.

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Q&A

All the Renewables Restrictions Fit to Print

Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.

The Q&A subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.

The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.

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