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Electric vehicles are the future. But what if you can’t buy one now?
As unpredictable as world events have been recently, very few people would’ve put money on the humble Toyota Prius getting a stunning makeover for 2023. Somehow, that’s exactly what happened. Now the all-new, fifth-generation Prius hybrid boasts sleek, almost sports-car-like looks to go with its impressive 57 miles per gallon.
The Prius will need every advantage it can muster. Its sales have been down for years, and hybrid cars also feel almost anachronistic compared to the new crop of high-range, high-performance electric vehicles hitting the market. Why go hybrid when you’re about to have more options than ever when it comes to breaking up with gasoline entirely?
Even the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act seems to be reinforcing this idea. While the act modernized how EV and plug-in hybrid tax credits work, regular hybrids without plugs have been left out in the cold. In other words, if you want an American-made EV like a Ford F-150 Lightning, you now qualify for a $7,500 tax break; but if you want a hybrid F-150 or Maverick pickup truck, you’re out of luck because those don’t have plugs.
Furthermore, the hybrid — long the standard-bearer for eco-friendly driving — seems to have a target on its back. “Hybrid cars are still incredibly popular, but are they good for the environment?,” NPR wondered in February, probably much to the chagrin of listeners, many of whom have enjoyed “All Things Considered" while commuting in their own hybrids.
This is all deeply unfortunate, especially given how quickly we need to reduce emissions to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. Whether there's a plug or not is also the wrong way to think about hybrids.
There’s still a strong case to be made for hybrids today. But let’s be clear about what that case isn’t: an argument for extending the internal combustion era or to slow-walk EV adoption. Rather, hybrids can and should be seen as an essential tool for reducing vehicle emissions right now, and as cars that still have tremendous advantages EVs don’t have yet.
The auto industry’s move toward zero-emission vehicles is now basically inevitable. But there’s still a long way to go. In the interim, cars that pair electricity and gasoline can play a vital role in making the air cleaner and serving as a gateway drug for widespread EV adoption.
For a long time, the primary appeal of a hybrid car was that it would help you save money on gas. But they do much more than that. The science is clear: Hybrid vehicles generate fewer tailpipe emissions than their all-gasoline counterparts, and obviously none when running only on electricity. In fact, 2021 data from the U.S. Department of Energy indicates hybrids produce about half the carbon dioxide on average that fully internal-combustion cars do. The numbers are even better for plug-in hybrids.
Of course, battery EVs fare the best; the only emissions they’re tied to are related to vehicle and battery production and charging. If your goal with your next car purchase is to cut down on CO2, this is a superb way to do so.
As for plug-in hybrids, those have gotten a bad rap in recent years with various studies (especially out of Europe) claiming they pollute much more than automakers advertise. Certainly, that wouldn’t be the car industry’s first rodeo when it comes to greasing emissions — remember Dieselgate?
One thing that hasn’t made headlines is the fact that in Europe, many corporations took advantage of government subsidies to buy PHEVs for their corporate fleets, but company car owners often didn’t charge them. The result is a heavier car, thanks to its additional batteries, that isn’t being used as intended.
The moral of this story: If you drive a PHEV, make sure to plug it in so that it can be driven in all-electric mode properly. The average PHEV gets between 20 and 40 miles of electric range, and given that most Americans drive around 40 miles a day on average, you may be surprised how much gasoline you don’t end up using.
You have more options than ever before when it comes to EVs, and things will get even better in the years to come. Just about every automaker is planning an aggressive EV rollout across multiple categories — trucks, vans, even convertibles — and multiple price points. Electric range is getting better, and thanks to the IRA, EVs built in North America will come with enticing tax credits. Starting next year, those credits will even be applied at the point of sale at the dealership, so you won’t even need to wait on a tax return to reap the benefits.
But there’s still a lot of daylight between where the EV market is now and where it will go next. America’s public charging network is woefully inadequate and many providers offer an infamously subpar experience. Few good charging solutions exist for city dwellers and those who live in apartments. (In fact, I’ve been seeing more and more EVs here in New York charged by 100-foot extension cords running out of windows, which is suboptimal for countless reasons.) Whether you’re into road trips or not, long distances remain a challenge for many EVs too, thanks to these network issues.
Tesla still has objectively the best charging network and it’s opening up to other EVs, but that’s a ways off. So is the network expansion that will be driven by the IRA’s incentives.
Then there's the fact the best EVs are comparatively hard to buy. Many of the really in-demand new EVs — the Mustang Mach-E, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, and the Kia EV6 — are tough to find and still impacted by supply chain issues. If you want a car with great range, a beautiful interior, and excellent range, get in line. Now, to be fair, supply remains super weird across the whole automotive industry, but the most desirable electric cars still seem to have among the longest lines.
EVs remain expensive as well, even by modern standards; by late last year, the average EV was priced around $65,000, around $20,000 more than a typical new vehicle's price tag. That too should change as batteries get cheaper and more options come to market, but for now, going electric could mean sticker shock, too — especially if your EV does not qualify for the new tax breaks.
In other words, it should get much easier to be an EV owner in the next few years. Until then, if these barriers to entry are too onerous, consider a hybrid instead.
There’s also the unfortunate matter of how “green” our electricity really is. Recently, Polestar and Rivian — two companies with every incentive to get you to buy their EVs — jointly commissioned a study that urged a dramatic increase in renewable energy powering both the automotive supply chain and electricity sources in order for these vehicles to be maximally effective at deterring climate change.
EVs alone will not be enough to reduce the harmful effects of the transportation sector. While it’s hard to say “be patient” when we directly experience climate change, we must realize that making changes that should’ve happened decades ago will be a process.
Until then, there’s great value in doing whatever can be done to reduce CO2 emissions, and driving hybrids — to say nothing of walking, biking, and taking public transit — can be crucial to that too.
Are hybrid cars essentially a stopgap to full EV adoption? At this point, it feels like the definitive answer is yes. Car companies like General Motors, Ford, Volvo, and Volkswagen all say they plan to phase out internal combustion entirely by the middle of the next decade, and even if they try to renege on their promises, governments from Brussels to California are banning the sale of new gasoline cars around the same time.
Between regulations and market forces — especially China’s aggressive EV push — the writing is on the wall for gasoline cars. Reducing emissions will be the single most crucial guiding force for the auto industry over the next few decades. In the meantime, and for that very reason, more and more hybrid options are coming to market.
Sure, the Prius’ sales figures don’t look great, but the venerable Toyota Tacoma truck is heavily expected to offer a hybrid option soon. The Toyota Sienna minivan is now only offered as a hybrid, as is the quirky new Toyota Crown sedan. Honda brought back the Accord Hybrid for 2023 and the all-new CR-V Hybrid looks promising as well. Mazda is finally dipping its toes into that market with the new CX-90 plug-in hybrid. Even the beloved Mazda Miata, the gold standard for affordable sports cars, is heavily rumored to have some kind of electrification when an all-new one arrives in the next few years. And as of this year, every new Volvo you can buy is a hybrid if it’s not a full EV.
The point is, while EVs are getting the splashy headlines, car companies aren’t yet done with hybrids. Not by a long shot. In fact, electrification is likely to become even more common as we start to approach the end of the internal combustion era, particularly as battery costs start to go down.
Think of it this way: If the Chevy Corvette can go hybrid, so can you.
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Governors, legislators, and regulators are all mustering to help push clean energy past the starting line in time to meet Republicans’ new deadlines.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act put new expiration dates on clean energy tax credits for business and consumers, raising the cost of climate action. Now some states are rushing to accelerate renewable energy projects and get as many underway as possible before the new deadlines take effect.
The new law requires wind and solar developers to start construction by the end of this year in order to claim the full investment or production tax credits under the rules established by the Inflation Reduction Act. They’ll then have at least four years to get their project online.
Those that miss the end-of-year deadline will have another six months, until July 4, 2026, to start construction, but will have to meet complicated sourcing restrictions on materials from China. Any projects that get off the ground after that date will face a severely abbreviated schedule — they’ll have to be completed by the end of 2027 to qualify, an all-but-impossibly short construction timeline.
Adding even more urgency to the time crunch, President Trump has directed the Treasury Department to revise the rules that define what it means to “start construction.” Historically, a developer could start construction simply by purchasing key pieces of equipment. But Trump’s order called for “preventing the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility and by restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built,” an ominous sign for those racing to meet already accelerated deadlines.
While the changes won’t suppress adoption of these technologies entirely, they will slow deployment and make renewable energy more expensive than it otherwise would have been. Some states that have clean energy goals are trying to lock in as much subsidized generation as they can to lessen the blow.
There are two ways states can meet the moment, Justin Backal Balik, the state program director at the nonprofit Evergreen Action, told me. Right now, many are trying to address the immediate crisis by helping to usher shovel-ready projects through regulatory processes. But states should also be thinking about how to make projects more economical after the tax credits expire, Balik said. “Green states can play a role in tilting the scale slightly back in the direction of some of the projects being financially viable,” he said, “even understanding that they’re not going to be able to make up all of the lost ground the incentives provided.”
In the first category, Colorado Governor Jared Polis sent a letter last week to utilities and independent power producers in the state committing to use “all of the Colorado State Government to prioritize deployment of clean energy projects.”
“Getting this right is of critical importance to Colorado ratepayers,” Polis wrote. The nonprofit research group Energy Innovation estimates that household energy expenses in Colorado could be $170 higher in 2030 than they would have been because of OBBB, and $310 higher in 2035. “The goal is to integrate maximal clean energy by securing as much cost-effective electric generation under construction or placed in service as soon as possible, along with any necessary electricity balancing resources and supporting infrastructure,” Polis continued.
As for how he plans to do that, he said the state would work to “eliminate administrative barriers and bottlenecks” for renewable energy, promising faster state reviews for permits. It will also “facilitate the pre-purchase of project equipment,” since purchasing equipment is one of the key steps developers can take to meet the tax credit deadlines.
Other states are looking to quickly secure new contracts for renewable energy. In mid-July, two weeks after the reconciliation bill became law, utility regulators in Maine moved to rapidly procure nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of wind and solar — for context, that’s about 13% of the total energy the state currently generates. They gave developers just two weeks to submit proposals, and will prioritize projects sited on agricultural land that has been contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the chemicals known as PFAS. (When asked how many applications had been submitted, the Maine Public Utilities Commission said it doesn't share that information prior to project selection.)
Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is eyeing a similar move. During a public webinar in late July, the agency said it was considering an accelerated procurement of zero-carbon resources “before the tax increase takes effect.” The office put out a request for information to renewable energy developers the next day to see if there were any projects ready to go that would qualify for the tax credits. Officials also encouraged developers to contact the agency’s concierge permit assistance services if they are worried about getting their permits on time for tax credit eligibility. Katie Dykes, the agency’s commissioner, said during the presentation that the concierge will engage with permit staff to make sure there aren’t incomplete or missing documents and to “ensure smooth and efficient review of projects.”
New York’s energy office is planning to do another round of procurement in September, the outlet New York Focus has reported, although the solicitation is late — it had originally been scheduled for June. The state has more than two dozen projects in the pipeline that are permitted but haven’t yet started construction, according to Focus, and some of them are waiting to secure contracts with the state.
Others are simply held up by the web of approvals New York requires, but better coordination between New York agencies may be in the works. “I assembled my team immediately and we are trying to do everything we can to expedite those [renewable energy projects] that are already in the pipeline to get those the approvals they need to move ahead,” Governor Kathy Hochul said during a rally at the State University of New York’s Niagara campus last week. The state’s energy research and development agency has formed a team “to help commercial projects quickly troubleshoot and advance towards construction,” according to the nonprofit Evergreen Action. (The agency did not respond to a request for more information about the effort.)
States and local governments are also planning to ramp up marketing of the consumer-based credits that are set to expire. Colorado, for example, launched a new “Energy Savings Navigator” tool to help residents identify all of the rebate, tax credit, and energy bill assistance programs they may be eligible for.
Consumers have even less time to act than wind and solar developers. Discounts for new, used, and leased electric vehicles will end in less than two months, on September 30. Homeowners must install solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and any other clean energy or efficiency upgrades before the end of this year to qualify for tax credits.
Many states offer additional incentives for these technologies, and some are re-tooling their programs to stretch the funding. Connecticut saw a rush of demand for its electric vehicle rebate program, CHEAPR, after the OBBB passed. Officials decided to slash the subsidy from $1,500 to $500 as of August 1, and will re-assess the program in the fall. “The budget that we have for the CHEAPR program is finite,” Dykes said during the July webinar. “We are trying to be good stewards of those dollars in light of the extraordinary demand for EVs, so that after October 1 we have the best chance to be able to provide an enhanced rebate, to lessen the significant drop in the total level of incentives that are available for electric vehicles.”
As far as trying to address the longer-term challenges for renewables, Balik highlighted Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s proposal to streamline energy siting decisions by passing them through a new state board. “One of the big things states can do is siting reform because local opposition and lawsuits that drag forever are a big drag on costs,” Balik told me.
A bill that would create a Reliable Energy Siting and Electric Transition Board, or RESET Board, is currently in the Pennsylvania legislature. (New York State took similar steps to establish a renewable siting office to speed up deployment in 2020, though so far it’s still taking an average of three years to permit projects, down from four to five years prior to the office’s establishment.) Connecticut officials also discussed looking at ways to reduce the “soft costs” of permitting and environmental reviews during the July webinar.
Balik added that state green banks can also play a role in helping projects secure more favorable financing. Their capacity to do so will be significantly higher if the courts force the federal government to administer the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
When it comes to speeding up renewable energy deployment, there’s at least one big obstacle that governors have little control over. Wind and solar projects need approval from regional transmission operators, the independent bodies that oversee the transmission and distribution of power, to connect to the grid — a notoriously slow process. The lag is especially long in the PJM Interconnection, which governs the grid for 13 mid-Atlantic States, and has generally favored natural gas over renewables. But governors are starting to turn up the pressure on PJM to do better. In mid July, Shapiro and nine other governors demanded PJM give states more of a say in the process by allowing them to propose candidates for two of PJM’s board seats.
“Can we use this moment of crisis to really impress the urgency of getting some of these other things done — like siting reforms, like interconnection queue fixes, that are all part of the economics of projects,” Balik asked. These steps may help, but lengthy federal permitting processes remain a hurdle. While permitting reform is a major bipartisan priority in Congress, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, a deal that’s good for renewables might require an about-face from the president on wind and solar.
The Danish government is stepping in after U.S. policy shifts left the company’s New York offshore wind project in need of fresh funds.
Orsted is going to investors — including the Danish government — for money it can’t get for its wind projects, especially in the troubled U.S. offshore wind market.
The Danish developer, which is majority owned by the Danish government, told investors on Monday that it would seek to raise over $9 billion, about half its valuation before the announcement, by selling shares in the company.
Publicly traded companies do not typically raise money by selling stock, which is more expensive for the company, tending instead to finance specific projects or borrow money.
But the offshore wind business is not any industry.
In normal times, Orsted and other wind developers will conduct “farm-downs,” selling stakes in projects in order to help finance the next ones. Due to “recent material adverse development in the U.S. offshore wind market,” however, the early-morning announcement said, “it is not possible for the company to complete the planned partial divestment and associated non-recourse project financing of its Sunrise Wind offshore wind project on the terms which would provide the required strengthening of Orsted’s capital structure” — a long way of explaining that it can’t find a buyer at an acceptable price. Hence the new equity.
While the market had been expecting Orsted to raise capital in some form, the scale of the raise is about twice what was anticipated, according to Bloomberg’s Javier Blas.
About two-thirds of the stock sale will be used to continue financing Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt planned offshore wind project off the coast of Long Island, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Construction began last summer, just days after Orsted took full ownership of the project by buying out a stake held by the utility Eversource.
Despite all the sound and fury around offshore wind in the United States, the company said in its earnings report, also released Monday, that “we successfully installed the first foundations at Sunrise Wind, following completion of the wind turbine foundation installation at Revolution Wind,” a 704-megawatt project off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. “Construction of our offshore U.S. assets is progressing as expected and according to plan,” the company said.
But the report also said Orsted took a hit of over a billion Danish kroner in the first half of this year due to tariffs and what it gingerly refers to as “other regulatory changes, particularly affecting the U.S.,” a.k.a. President Donald Trump.
The president and his appointees have been on a regulatory and financial campaign against the wind sector, especially offshore wind, attempting to halt work on another in-construction New York project, Empire Wind, before Governor Kathy Hochul was able to reach a deal to continue. All future lease sales for new offshore wind areas have been canceled.
Even before Trump came back into office, the offshore wind industry in the U.S. had been hammered by high interest rates, which raised the cost of borrowed money necessary to fund projects, and spiraling supply chain costs and project delays, which also increased the need for the more expensive financing.
“Because of the sharp rise in construction costs and interest rates since 2021, all the projects turned out to be value-destructive,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note about the Orsted share issue. The company took large losses on scuttled projects in the U.S. and already cancelled its dividend and announced a plan to partially divest many other projects in order to shore up its balance sheet and fund future projects.
While the start-and-stop Empire Wind project belongs to Equinor, Orsted’s Scandinavian neighbor (majority-owned by the Norwegian government), Orsted management told analysts on its conference call that “the issues surrounding Empire Wind's stop-work order from April 2025 had negatively impacted financing conditions for Sunrise,” according to Jefferies analyst Ahmed Furman.
Equinor, too, has had to take a bigger share of Empire Wind, buying out the stake held by BP in January of this year. BP had bought 50% stakes in three Equinor wind projects in 2020, but last year wrote down its investment in the offshore wind sector in the U.S. by over $1 billion.
Why could Orsted not simply pull out of Sunrise Wind? “Orsted and our industry are in an extraordinary situation with the adverse market development in the U.S. on top of the past years’ macroeconomic and supply chain challenges,” Rasmus Errboe, who took over as the company’s chief executive earlier this year, said in a statement. “To deliver on our business plan and commitments in this environment, we’ve concluded that a rights issue is the best solution for Orsted and our shareholders.”
The Danish government will maintain its 50.1% stake in the company, putting the small Scandinavian country with its low-boiling trade and territorial conflicts against the Trump administration in direct capitalist conflict with the American president and his least favorite form of electricity generation.
In the immediate wake of the announcement, Jefferies analyst Ahmed Farman wrote to clients that the deal would “obviously de-risk the [balance sheet], but near-term dilution risk seems substantial,” citing the unexpected magnitude of the raise and no sign pointing to new growth. “As a result, we expect the initial stock reaction to be quite negative.”
And so it has been: The stock closed down almost 30%, its biggest-ever single-day drop and below the price at which it went public in 2016, according to Bloomberg data.
A new letter sent Friday asks for reams of documentation on developers’ compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is sending letters to wind developers across the U.S. asking for volumes of records about eagle deaths, indicating an imminent crackdown on wind farms in the name of bird protection laws.
The Service on Friday sent developers a request for records related to their permits under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which compels companies to obtain permission for “incidental take,” i.e. the documented disturbance of eagle species protected under the statute, whether said disturbance happens by accident or by happenstance due to the migration of the species. Developers who received the letter — a copy of which was reviewed by Heatmap — must provide a laundry list of documents to the Service within 30 days, including “information collected on each dead or injured eagle discovered.” The Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
These letters represent the rapid execution of an announcement made just a week ago by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who released a memo directing department staff to increase enforcement of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities.” The memo stated that all permitted wind facilities would receive records requests related to the eagle law by August 11 — so, based on what we’ve now seen and confirmed, they’re definitely doing that.
There’s cause for wind developers, renewables advocates, and climate activists to be alarmed here given the expanding horizon of enforcement of wildlife statutes, which have become a weapon for the administration against zero-carbon energy generation.
The August 4 memo directed the Service to refer “violations” of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to the agency solicitor’s office, with potential further referral to the Justice Department for criminal or civil charges. Violating this particular law can result in a fine of at least $100,000 per infraction, a year in prison, or both, and penalties increase if a company, organization, or individual breaks the law more than once. It’s worth noting at this point that according to FWS’s data, oil pits historically kill far more birds per year than wind turbines.
In a statement to Heatmap News, the American Clean Power Association defended the existing federal framework around protecting eagles from wind turbines, noted the nation’s bald eagle population has risen significantly overall in the past two decades, and claimed golden eagle populations are “stable, at the same time wind energy has been growing.”
“This is clear evidence that strong protections and reasonable permitting rules work. Wind and eagles are successfully co-existing,” ACP spokesperson Jason Ryan said.