Last year, the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, distributed nearly $4 billion to households struggling to pay their energy bills. It’s a lifeline for more than 6 million families, but in recent months the program has become a target for funding cuts.
In early April, Donald Trump’s administration laid off the roughly dozen staff members at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversaw the program. Because HHS hadn’t yet distributed all of the funding for this fiscal year, the staff cuts put about $400 million in jeopardy. Senator Susan Collins, the Republican chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, sent a letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the HHS secretary, asking him to reverse course “on any staffing or funding cuts that would jeopardize the distribution of these funds to our constituents.”
Then, HHS temporarily rehired one of the employees who’d been laid off. That person’s job was to determine how much LIHEAP money states and other recipients receive. They were brought back on to release the remaining $400 million, which the agency did last Thursday.
In a budget proposal released the next day, the White House proposed ending the program altogether. The Trump White House said LIHEAP is “unnecessary” and that the administration would “support low-income individuals through energy dominance, lower prices, and an America First economic platform.”
“It’s a cruel proposal,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, which represents managers of state LIHEAP programs. “They’re proposing to zero it out, and that would cause significant harm to some of the poorest families in the country.”
Trump’s budget proposal is, at this point, just that — a proposal. Every year, the president’s submission serves as a starting point for Congress’ budget process. Ultimately, Congress controls the purse strings of the federal government and makes decisions about appropriations for LIHEAP. Historically, Congress has championed LIHEAP. Since 2009, the program, which was created in the 1980s, has received no less than $3 billion from Congress. At the height of the pandemic, Congress appropriated more than $8 billion through LIHEAP.
But the Trump proposal is a signal of the administration’s priorities — it recommends a nearly 23 percent cut in overall federal spending — and HHS still decides whether and how to distribute LIHEAP funds. Staff at the program, who have now been laid off, are responsible for divvying up the money to states, tribes, and territories based on a complex formula that takes climate, demographics, and various other factors into account. Without staff to run the program and given the administration’s position, HHS could decide not to disburse any funds Congress appropriates for the next fiscal year, which begins October 1.
“They’ve been slow-walking the funds, they have been delaying payments — and in this case, since they’re making the argument this program is no longer necessary, why would they release the funds?” said Wolfe.
In addition to questioning the program’s necessity, the White House referenced a long-closed audit of the program by the Government Accountability Office. The 2010 report found 11,000 applications for LIHEAP with names of dead people and 1,000 applications from federal employees whose salaries exceeded the income thresholds set by the program. In response to these findings, HHS required states to collect social security numbers as a condition of LIHEAP eligibility and to cross-reference applications with death data. These changes took effect by 2014, and the Government Accountability Office closed the report.
“It’s just factually inaccurate to say that those findings are the case,” said a former HHS employee who was responsible for LIHEAP compliance and was recently laid off. They said that the program now requires applicants to provide social security numbers, proof of income, and an active utility bill. “And ultimately, someone has to physically come in to apply for the program.
“In my time at HHS and overseeing the LIHEAP program, the majority of the compliance findings had more to do with improving the program to make it more effective and more efficient — not related to fraud, waste, or abuse,” they said.
As the Collins letter indicates, the Trump administration does seem sensitive to public and congressional pressure to fund LIHEAP. Wolfe and others Grist spoke to said it was likely the biggest factor in the administration releasing the remaining $400 million. Given Collins’ crucial role in the budget-making process, the Trump administration could opt to distribute the funds as instructed. But given that the administration wants to end funding for the program and the fact that the staff responsible for running it have been laid off, it’s unclear what might happen if Congress appropriates money for LIHEAP in the coming months.
The lack of certainty about the program trickles down to the state and local implementers of LIHEAP, said Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition.
“Typically, they would have reached out to our federal partners at HHS to answer questions that they have, but those staff have been eliminated,” she said. “There’s just a lot of unrest and uncertainty.”
The world doesn’t know yet what caused the dramatic power outage on the Iberian Peninsula (BBC, 4/28/25). Nevertheless, the right-wing press both in the US and Britain quickly exploited it to dubiously suggest that the blame rested with Spain’s push for more renewable energy sources. The insinuation that clean energy is at fault has even infected outlets like the New York Times and AP.
New York Post (4/30/25): “Experts have previously warned that Europe’s increasing reliance on renewable energy…could lead to blackouts and other supply issues.”
The right-wing New York Post (4/30/25), while admitting that a final determination on the cause of the outage in Spain hadn’t surfaced, ran with the headline “Devastating Blackout in Spain Raises Questions About Reliance on Solar Power, Wind Power.” As the Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid criticized the Spanish government’s response, it reminded its readers that that government is “socialist.” It cited “experts” four times to pin blame on “renewables,” while naming only one. That expert noted that solar plants’ lack of inertia—which, the Post explained, is something produced by “gas and nuclear power plants,” means that “imbalances must be corrected more quickly.” (Inertia is not a characteristic unique to non-renewable energy, as the Post suggests; hydroelectric energy, another popular renewable, uses turbines and produces inertia.)
An op-ed by anti-environmentalists Gabriel Calzada and Fernández Ordóñez in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (4/30/25) said that “Spain’s system was engineered politically, not rationally.” They blamed “energy-transitionist ideologues” on the continent for the blackout, because they “forced in” renewables.
Again, while admitting that the cause of the outrage had yet to be determined, they echoed the Post’s suggestion that renewable sources are by their nature “unreliable,” focusing on their lack of “inertia”:
The greater the share of renewables vis-à-vis conventional power plants with synchronous turbines, the less inertia there is to cushion instantaneous load fluctuations in the grid.
This causes the whole system to become “increasingly fragile, with higher risk of failure.”
The far-right journal Compact (4/29/25) said renewable “sources, especially photovoltaic solar, can’t supply the requisite inertia the grid needs.” Admitting that the cause of the outrage was still unknown, it hoped the affair would repopularize climate-ravaging forms of power generation against woke wind farms and soyboy solar plants:
Whatever the cause, this blackout could have a salutary impact on European energy policy if it dissuades countries from pursuing aggressive renewable energy policies that make power less reliable.
The importance of inertia
Energy Central (8/14/24): “While transitioning to a renewable-based power grid presents challenges, the benefits significantly surpass the risks.”
The loss of power for Spain and Portugal, a major crisis reminiscent of the great northeast American blackout of the summer of 2003 (WABC, 8/14/23), has taught the world an important lesson about centrality of inertia in the electricity systems built around traditional energy sources. Gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants use giant spinning turbines that “store kinetic energy, which helps stabilize the grid by balancing supply and demand fluctuations,” explained Energy Central (8/14/24). “High inertia means the system can better withstand sudden disturbances, such as a generator tripping or a sudden surge in demand.”
Solar and wind energy, which are in growing use in Iberia and seen as a clean alternative in an age of climate crisis, lack this feature, which means integrating them into energy grids requires alternative ways of addressing energy fluctuation problems. It’s something engineers have long understood, and have been addressing with a variety of technical solutions (Green Tech Media, 8/7/20; IET Renewable Power Generation, 11/10/20).
In general, questions of inertia are an important concern of energy planners when it comes to balancing clean energy and the need to stabilize the grid. But they’re not the only way the grid is stabilized.
A Spanish professor of electrical engineering explained in Wired (5/1/25) that both local “meshes,” which help distribute electrical flows, and interconnections with neighboring grids are crucial for preventing the kind of imbalance that apparently led to the Iberian blackout. But the latter has always been Spain’s “weak point,” because of the “geographical barrier of the Pyrenees” mountains. Rather than suggest a pullback from solar or wind, as right-wing media seem to pine for, experts told Wired the needed response was greater interconnection, and more storage mechanisms or stabilizers to account for the reduction in inertia.
‘Uniquely vulnerable to outages’
New York Times (4/29/25): “The blackout could bolster the argument for retaining conventional generation sources.”
But the anti-renewable drum beat from the right inspired similar reporting in more centrist corners. The New York Times (4/29/25) took a similar tone, under the headline, “How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable.” The article itself seemed to have an identity crisis, trying to paint the peninsula’s success in ramping up renewables as a false victory while at the same time acknowledging that it wasn’t just the renewable energy itself that caused the vulnerability:
The incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.
The article did also explain Spain’s relative lack of investment in necessary grid infrastructure and storage. But those who didn’t get past the headline would have come away with the same false impression about renewables as readers of the New York Post.
The Times (4/30/25) doubled down in a follow-up piece the next day, saying, “The incident has raised questions about whether Spain and Portugal’s rapid shift to renewable energy left them more vulnerable to outages.”
An AP (4/30/25) explainer, which was also picked up by the Washington Post (4/30/25), used phrases like “renewed attention” and “questions remain” to cast a vague haze over the role of the peninsula’s renewable energy:
On Tuesday, there was renewed attention on Spain’s renewable energy generation. The southern European nation is a leader in solar and wind power generation, with more than half of its energy last year having come from renewable sources. Portugal also generates a majority of its energy from renewable sources.
Questions remain about whether Spain’s heavy renewable energy supply may have made its grid system more susceptible to the type of outage that took place Monday. The thinking goes that nonrenewable energy sources, such as coal and natural gas, can better weather the type of fluctuations observed Monday on Spain’s grid.
After sowing doubt about renewables, the AP wrote that Eamonn Lannoye, managing director at the Electric Power Research Institute, said “it was too early to draw a straight line between Monday’s event and Spain’s solar power generation.”
‘You’ve got to get the engineering right’
Euro News (4/29/25): “Far from being the cause of the peninsula’s woes…the large percentage of renewable energy in Spain and the flexibility of hydropower systems enabled the nation to react and recover more quickly.”
Though none of the outlets above seemed able to find them, some experts suggested neither solar power nor inertia were likely at fault. Euronews (4/29/25) said:
Some experts have previously voiced concern that Spain’s grid needs to be upgraded to cope with the rapid integration of solar and wind. But others stress the unlikelihood of the mass blackout being down to the intermittent renewables, which the Spanish and Portuguese operators are by now adept at handling.
Spanish energy think tank Fundacion Renovables explains that renewable power plants with 2MW of power generation or more were disconnected because of a disturbance in the frequency of the power grid—as per national safety protocols.
Essentially, the disturbance was “a consequence and not a cause,” it said in a statement. SolarPower Europe, UNEF and Global Solar Council also emphasise that photovoltaic power plants did not voluntarily disconnect; they were disconnected from the grid.
The English edition of the Spanish daily El País (5/1/25) concurred, quoting Pedro Fresco, general director of the Valencia Energy Sector Association:
The failure of a photovoltaic plant, however large, doesn’t seem likely to be the cause of the collapse of the entire electricity system…. Nor is it true that there weren’t enough synchronous sources at that time: There was nuclear, a lot of hydropower, some solar thermal and combined cycle power, and even cogeneration, coal and renewable waste… In fact, there was more synchronous power than at other times.
Others pointed more to the grid itself. Reuters’ energy columnist Ron Bousso (4/30/25) said the “issue appears to be the management [emphasis added] of renewables in the modern grid.” The outage, he said, “should be a stark warning to governments: Investments in power storage and grid upgrades must go hand in hand with the expansion of renewables generation.”
The Guardian (4/29/25) also intervened, quoting a European energy analyst: “The nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause.” Further, the paper quoted University of Strathclyde electrical engineer Keith Bell:
Events of this scale have happened in many places around the world over the years, in power systems using fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro or variable renewables. It doesn’t matter where you are getting the energy from: You’ve got to get the engineering right in order to ensure resilient supplies of electricity.
Experts say it could take months to determine the exact cause(s) of the outage (New York Times, 4/29/25).
Exploiting the crisis
Spanish power company chief Beatriz Corredor (Al Jazeera, 4/30/25): ““These technologies are already stable, and they have systems that allow them to operate as a conventional generation system without any safety issues.”
The quickness of not only right-wing but also centrist outlets to blame solar and wind power for the debacle is in part rooted in Spain’s right-wing political opposition’s exploitation of the crisis, using it to bash the left-leaning governing parties and Red Eléctrica de España (REE), the nation’s energy company. Al Jazeera (4/30/25) quoted a spokesperson for the right-wing People’s Party:
Since REE has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, we can only point to the malfunctioning of REE, which has state investment and therefore its leaders are appointed by the government.
It’s easy to see why the People’s Party would politicize this. Just last year, the party fell under heavy criticism in Valencia, where the party is in local power, for its failure to act in the face of dire weather reports that led to massive flooding, killing more than 200 people (AP, 11/9/24). The national blackout has allowed the right to attempt to shift the anger toward the ruling Socialist Workers Party.
But it’s also par for the course for the right-wing media to defend the conservative alliance with the fossil fuel industry, which is threatened by any move to address the climate crisis. The media’s jump to blame Spain’s renewables for a massive blackout looks a whole lot like their eagerness to (falsely) blame wind power for Texas’s 2021 blackouts (Media Matters, 2/19/21; FAIR.org, 2/26/21).
While we may eventually know exactly what happened—likely to be a complicated mechanical explanation that should inform us how to better guard against future problems—propagandists know that one should never let a good crisis go to waste.
In February, Germany held an election that had many echoes of the one America held in November. Voters were incensed with inflation — especially electricity prices, which surged 80 percent after Russia invaded Ukraine and never returned to normal. Right-wing parties channeled that fury toward the incumbent government’s green policies, including the pioneering Energiewende decarbonization plan that has made renewable energy more than half of the electricity Germans use today.
The goal: Quickly reduce bills for households and businesses and reinvigorate the economy. Merz says German economic policy has been “almost exclusively geared toward climate protection,” according to Politico. “I want to say it as clearly as I mean it: We will and we must change that.”
Historically, Europeans have been willing to shoulder the higher costs of aggressive climate and energy policies. But after three years of war in Ukraine, energy prices remain elevated — with household electricity rates still one-third above their pre-war levels — frustrating consumers and raising fears of industrial collapse. European companies face electricity costs 2 to 3 times that of the U.S. and natural gas prices 4 to 5 times higher.
Elections across the continent last year featured a “green backlash.” Politicians focused on voters’ biggest complaints — migration, the cost of living, a stagnant economy — and ignored climate. Dutch farmers revolted against a law to reduce air pollution; the Italian far right railed against a coming ban on conventional cars.
However, few interpret these developments as Europeans wanting to ditch the energy transition. In Germany, businesses say the Energiewende needs permitting and regulatory reforms and a greater focus on cost efficiency, not “a chainsaw.”
Michael Stiefel, a policy officer on people experiencing poverty with Diakonie Deutschland who advocates on behalf of low-income households, including those burdened by energy costs, says he never hears anyone express climate skepticism or opposition to clean energy. “Their main aim is to get to a minimum standard for their own lives,” he said. “A higher living style which would be stable and sufficient.”
The Energiewende dates to the 1990s, when German leaders resolved to decarbonize the economy, starting with the grid. The plan was to transition from a power system centered on coal and nuclear power to one based on renewables – with natural gas being recruited later as an interim fuel. Germany lacks domestic gas reserves and relied heavily on Russia, which provided 40 percent of the European Union’s imported gas in 2021. Germans financed the wind and solar buildout through surcharges on utility bills.
The program has remade the German power mix. About 22 gigawatts of coal and nuclear have been retired just since 2020, clearing the way for renewables’ surge. The power grid’s transformation is the main reason Germany’s emissions have fallen by half since the 1990s.
Race to renew
Share of electricity production from hydropower, solar, wind, biomass & waste, geothermal, wave, and tidal sources, 2000–2023
After invading Ukraine in 2022, Russia sharply reduced gas shipments to Europe, and electricity and fuel prices skyrocketed. In Germany, where three-quarters of buildings are heated by gas or oil, people shivered: In 2022, 5.5 million Germans felt they couldn’t afford to keep their homes warm.
Europe’s painful lesson: An energy transition without energy security is risky.
“Energy in my opinion is very geopolitical, and you always have to strive toward diversifying your energy resources,” said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, who leads the European Power Markets team at BloombergNEF. “Somewhere along the line, it just seems like Europe forgot it was building its reliance on a sleeping bear.”
Germany has replaced most of its Russian gas with fuel from friendlier, if pricier, sources in Europe and the U.S. It also used the war as motivation to accelerate solar and wind buildouts: In 2021 it built 5.7 gigawatts of solar; in 2023 it added about 15 GW. But with 2.2 percent inflation still burdening many Germans, right-wing and far-right politicians had no trouble campaigning against the incumbent, center-left government last year. Merz called wind turbines “ugly” and promised policy “for the majority who can think straight … and not for any green and leftwing nutcases.”
In April, Merz’ party announced a coalition with other governing partners and laid out its policy plan for the next five years. Some climate advocates read the blueprint with relief, as it stopped short of torching many of Germany’s long-term climate targets, such as achieving net-zero by 2045 and phasing out coal by 2038.
Merz says his guiding light for energy policy is not climate but “competitiveness.” Taxes and fees on power bills are part of why Germans have some of the most expensive electricity in Europe, according to the International Energy Agency. The new coalition promises to ease these charges so electricity rates drop at least 5 euro cents per kilowatt-hour; that’s about an eighth of the rate the average German household currently pays.
The coalition agreement says it wants to keep developing all renewable energy sources, but with an emphasis on compatibility with the grid. Power companies have complained that in the rush to hit its renewables targets, Germany has often built solar and wind farms in remote or hard-to-reach places, resulting in higher costs. Geographic mismatches — for example, brisk wind energy in the north not being able to reach customers in the industrial south — mean that electricity prices can spike in one region even as they go below zero in another.
More controversially, the new government has proposed building 20 gigawatts of natural gas generation by 2030; the whole German power system stands at about 260 GW. Solar and wind are now the cheapest energy sources in most of the world, but they’re still prone to wild swings in productivity — in December, Germany’s wind output fell 85 percent below normal. Merz is sympathetic to energy-industry arguments that new gas plants can mitigate such eventualities. He’s also proposing to clear red tape for energy storage, which plays a minimal role today but could theoretically serve the same balancing role.
A likely target of the Merz government is the country’s building energy law, which outlaws most new fossil-fuel heating systems in buildings starting in 2028. Inflation has left many people unable or unwilling to pay the up-front costs for electric systems like heat pumps — an unpopularity that conservatives exploited in the campaign.
So what, if anything, can be learned from Germany’s experience?
A worker installs solar panels at the construction site of a new solar energy park as wind turbines spin in the background on April 06, 2023.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images
Renewables are cheap, but bills often don’t reflect that
In principle, renewable energy should lower electric bills. Solar and wind are inexpensive to build, and their fuel is free.
In practice, the savings often don’t reach consumers. Ratepayers must cover the cost of integrating renewables into the grid, paying for new transmission lines and the backup systems needed to balance nature’s flutters. Conservatively, Germany needs to invest 500 billion euros (about $565 billion) over the next two decades just to upgrade the power grid, estimates Deutsche Bank. These should be one-time investments, but during inflationary times, it’s understandable if people wonder what they’re paying for.
Worse, many European countries that have greatly expanded renewable energy, including Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany, nevertheless tend to base power rates on the price of gas. A recent report on European competitiveness said this is a structural flaw, arguing countries should reform pricing so consumers benefit more directly from clean energy.
Green energy is cheap…eventually
The good news: Both the U.S. and Europe have made significant headway in decarbonizing their power sectors. The bad: The transportation, buildings, and industrial sectors remain, and the alternative technologies are much less mature. The sticker shock associated with electric cars, hydrogen furnaces, and heat pumps contributed to last year’s green backlash in Europe.
Still, energy experts argue that electrifying more of the economy eventually lowers costs overall. “If you do this you can really go to a very sustainable, pretty cheap and high-performance energy system. That’s actually the goal,” said Gunnar Luderer, who leads the Energy Transition Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
He said China is moving in this direction. For example, it recently launched a pilot project in nine cities to see if their growing fleets of electric cars can provide battery storage for the system. Recent trends in the Western world raise the question of whether voters are willing to make these kinds of investments.
Ignore social impacts, risk green backlash
In Germany, buildings have to pay a carbon tax that rises over time. Germany’s previous government promised to create a fund to help citizens manage these price increases — to the tune of several hundred Euros per year — but cut it for budget reasons, leaving the public with all stick and no carrot. Europeans remain broadly supportive of their governments’ climate policies, but it’s “increasingly clear that this support could fade if the transition is not fair and citizens are left to shoulder the costs on their own,” said a recent report by E3G, a think tank.
While some governments have sent money to households during crises to help them pay bills, others are tackling the issue at a deeper level. E3G said Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy, Denmark and Poland have all expanded incentives to make homes more energy-efficient — which could not just save citizens money, but help them weather the next crisis.
On many nights, John Allaire can turn off the lights in his house and keep reading a book by the glow of 80-foot-high flares blasting from a gas export terminal a mile away.
The prospect of a second liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal in his once-peaceful corner of southwest Louisiana is unsettling for Allaire, a retired oil and gas engineer whose house sits near Calcasieu Pass.
“There’s the ongoing noise pollution, ongoing flaring,” he said. “And the light pollution is unbelievable.”
Venture Global, the U.S.’s second-largest LNG producer, plans to build a second terminal alongside its Calcasieu Pass facility in sparsely populated Cameron Parish. Venture also owns the newly built Plaquemines LNG terminal, about 20 miles south of New Orleans.
The proposed second Venture terminal in Cameron, dubbed CP2, was recently granted an export permit by the U.S. Department of Energy. The permit was the fifth LNG-related approval from the department since President Donald Trump took office and lifted former President Joe Biden’s pause on new LNG permits.
The Trump administration aims to cut “red tape around projects like CP2” and boost the availability of “affordable, reliable, secure American energy,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
Louisiana has four LNG terminals and two more are under construction. Many more are welcome, said Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry.
“Every time these projects come to Louisiana, [they] give the people of our state the ability to have their income raised,” he said during a speech last month announcing Australian company Woodside Energy’s decision to invest nearly $18 billion in a stalled terminal project, formerly known as Driftwood LNG, near Lake Charles, about 22 miles north of CP2.
Environmental groups say reviving the LNG building boom has serious consequences for coastal communities, fisheries and the climate.
Venture Global CEO Michael Sabel speaks with media alongside at the company’s liquified natural gas export facility alongside Secretary of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, in Plaquemines, Louisiana.
Jack Brook / AP Photo
“It has been damaging to our coast, damaging to our air quality and our water quality,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “It’s destroyed property values [and] it’s certainly damaging to our health.”
Venture did not respond to a request for comment.
LNG is natural gas cooled to a liquid state, compressing its volume and making it easier to store and ship long distances. Six of the country’s eight LNG export terminals dot the western Gulf Coast, including the world’s largest, Sabine Pass LNG in west Cameron. LNG shipments from the U.S. have skyrocketed over the past decade, rising from about 16 billion cubic feet in 2014 to just under 4.4 trillion cubic feet last year, making the U.S. the world leader in LNG exports. A little more than half of U.S. LNG goes to Europe, where demand has slowed in recent years, but Asia is hungry for more, with that continent’s share of exports rising to more than 30 percent last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Venture’s Calcasieu Pass terminal had a rocky startup process that began in 2022 and ended last month when the facility sent its first shipments. The company’s construction strategy, which relied on pre-fabricated, modular components to speed construction and cut costs, resulted in power outages, several repairs and dozens of pollution violations, according to company documents and a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. In 2022, the facility exceeded its air pollution permits 139 times, according to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. A March warning letter from DEQ indicated many problems haven’t been fixed. The letter cited recent inspections showing several “areas of concern,” including frequent emissions violations and failures to report air pollution exceedances.
Much of the pollution comes from flaring, a process often triggered by operational malfunctions that force facilities to burn excess gas to avoid fires or explosions. Flaring emits chemicals that can cause cancer, respiratory illnesses and other health problems.
The Calcasieu Pass facility is allowed 60 flaring hours annually by DEQ, but nearby residents allege it goes well over that allowance.
“It’s been ongoing, sometimes days in a row,” Allaire said.
Commercial shrimpers in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes say dredging to deepen waterways for large LNG transport ships has harmed habitat and made fishing harder.
“The numbers we’re catching now have decreased drastically,” shrimper Travis Dardar said.
Boosting the U.S.’s LNG export prowess is “part of one of the biggest fossil fuel build-outs in our lifetimes,” and will dampen efforts to shift toward cleaner energy sources like solar and wind, said Ethan Nuss, an organizer with the Rainforest Action Network.
“This will deepen the climate crisis and lock us into decades of emissions,” he said.
Rolfes said opposing LNG is now doubly hard because both the state and federal government strongly back the industry. Instead of focusing on regulators, environmental groups may attempt to delay projects through lawsuits or convince the industry’s insurers and investors that LNG is a bad long-term bet.
“We’ll keep getting the word out about their accident history [and] their horrible track records as business partners,” Rolfes said. “But we acknowledge the odds are tremendous.”
Georgia Power, which expects a boom in power demand from data centers, says it needs to get a lot more electricity online — fast.
So what kind of power plants does the utility intend to rely on to accomplish this? It’s refusing to say, raising concerns that the state’s largest utility is trying to avoid public scrutiny of plans to build huge amounts of expensive, unnecessary, and polluting fossil-fueled infrastructure.
But the integrated resource plan (IRP) also has few details about the mix of energy sources the utility wants to draw on to supply the new electricity generation it says it needs by 2031. Georgia Power puts that amount at 9.5 gigawatts, which is equal to nearly half of its total current generation capacity. This means stakeholders don’t know to what extent the utility plans to build new fossil-gas power plants versus clean energy and batteries.
That worries environmental and consumer advocates as well as trade groups representing the tech giants whose data center plans are driving Georgia Power’s electricity needs to begin with. For years, these groups have been pressing Georgia Power and the state Public Service Commission to prioritize clean energy, batteries, and other alternatives to fossil-fueled power plants.
Now, they fear Georgia Power’s secretive IRP process may allow the utility to rush through approval of a gas-heavy plan. By keeping its intentions to itself until the last possible moment, Georgia Power is giving the public little time to digest proposals and respond with economic or environmental counterarguments.
It also puts the state’s utility regulators in a bind. The utility says it needs to start building these new power plants ASAP or else grid reliability will suffer. That sense of urgency may give regulators little choice but to approve Georgia Power’s plans as-is.
“It’s very confusing, and it’s very concerning for us to be planning a future of growth without knowing how we’re going to meet it,” said Jennifer Whitfield, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of several groups demanding more information on Georgia Power’s plans. “And that’s the position we’re in until we know more.”
Georgia Power’s missing gigawatts
Whitfield brought up the issue at a Public Service Commission hearing last month. Georgia Power’s IRP has identified only 517 megawatts of projects, she pointed out. The utility is seeking out the remaining roughly 9 GW of resources needed by 2031 through an “all-source RFP,” or request for proposals. The process is separate from the IRP — and shrouded in confidentiality.
That’s a problem, Whitfield said at the hearing, because state law requires IRPs to provide “the size and type of facilities” that a utility expects to own or operate over the next 10 years. Yet, in Georgia Power’s current IRP, “95 percent of the need to fill capacity in Georgia in 2031 is not made available,” she said. “How are we supposed to effectively intervene to judge the economic mix without additional information?”
Jeffrey Grubb, Georgia Power’s director of resource planning, replied at the hearing that those details are, “by commission rule, not publicly available because that could have detrimental impacts on the RFP itself.”
Whitfield argued that Georgia Power should at least disclose what portion of the roughly 9 GW of unidentified resources might consist of fossil gas–fired power plants built by the utility, as opposed to clean power, batteries, or resources built and owned by third-party developers.
Grubb declined to provide that information. “We cannot speak about those because we’re still working on them,” he said.
But Georgia Power is already working on at least one large expansion of fossil-fueled power. In March, the utility applied for state permits to build four gas-fired turbines with a combined generation capacity of about 2.9 GW at the site of the utility’s coal-fired Plant Bowen.
Grubb conceded in the hearing that the utility sought those permits in preparation for possibly building the gas-fired units, which aren’t mentioned in Georgia Power’s IRP.
“We’re not sure if we’ll need all four of those,” he said. “There’s other things that we’re looking at, but I can’t speak more than they are potential resources from that RFP, and that’s why we had to move forward” with filing the permits.
Whitfield asked the Public Service Commission to require Georgia Power to provide more information on the projects being considered in its RFP, including details on fuel type, ownership, and size. Last week, in response to that request, Whitfield received the following document from the utility, which contains nothing but two columns of the word “redacted.”
“It’s difficult to understand any justification for redacting this information,” said Bob Sherrier, a staff attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “How can the public meaningfully engage with Georgia Power’s proposed data center plans without any insight into what’s coming?”
Georgia Power spokesperson Jacob Hawkins told Canary Media in an April 18 email that the utility follows “established processes and legal requirements when submitting sensitive or proprietary information that, if made available broadly and publicly, could hurt our ability to negotiate and procure the best value and resources for our customers. Intervenors who sign confidentiality agreements as part of the process have access to much greater and detailed information.”
“We would disagree in the strongest possible terms that we are not following all statutory requirements and state law across the board in these proceedings, period,” Hawkins wrote.
Regulatory blind spots
Many states allow utilities to withhold details about the cost or type of resources in all-source RFPs to avoid undermining the competitive bidding process. But what’s uncommon about Georgia Power’s current case is just how much of its future will be dictated by this process.
Georgia Power’s need for new generation has exploded in the past two years, driven largely by a flood of plans to build data centers in the region. The utility has tripled its decade-ahead electricity demand forecasts since 2022. That projected boom in demand has somewhat scrambled the standard processes for utility resource planning, Whitfield told Canary Media.
In its last full-scale IRP in 2022, Georgia Power identified enough resources to cover its needs until 2029, she said. But it also identified an approximately 500 MW gap between demand and supply from 2029 to 2031, and agreed with regulators to launch the all-source RFP to fill it. That all-source RFP process is not subject to the same disclosure rules as an IRP, as it involves competitive bidding between the utility and third-party energy project developers.
Regulators approved an interim IRP last year that allows Georgia Power to build 1.4 GW of fossil-fueled power plants and 500 MW of batteries, and to contract for nearly 1 GW more from other utilities’ coal- and gas-fired power plants, to relieve some of its nearer-term pressures.
But the all-source RFP launched back in 2022 has remained Georgia Power’s main mechanism to get what it needs by 2031, Whitfield said. That’s despite the fact that it was initially meant to cover just 500 MW, a figure nearly 20 times smaller than the 9.5 GW it is now planning to fill via the all-source RFP process.
This has created something of a regulatory shell game in which Georgia Power can contract for the vast majority of its future energy and capacity needs outside the purview of the standard IRP process, said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association trade group.
“Many organizations and companies focus exclusively on the IRP, while the ultimate decisions may occur in a totally separate docket, where fewer intervening parties are engaged,” he said.
The battle over Georgia Power’s missing gigawatts comes as the utility has failed to bring as much renewable energy into its resource mix as it previously pledged to.
The utility has about 3 GW of solar, helping to push Georgia into the top 10 states for solar growth. But it’s also been slow to contract with third-party owners of solar and battery projects to meet its power needs. Georgia Power’s 2025 IRP calls for an additional 3.5 GW of renewable energy by the end of 2030, but that plan partially just makes up for the utility’s cancellation of previous clean-power procurements, Mahan noted.
Solar alone can’t meet Georgia Power’s capacity needs, which are driven by demand for electricity for heating in wintertime.
But batteries that can store solar or general grid power could play a more significant role. Regulators approved Georgia Power to add 500 MW of battery storage in last year’s interim IRP, and its 2025 IRP calls for further expanding its energy storage capacity. Mahan noted that much of the solar power being proposed in the state will likely be paired with batteries to enhance its value to Georgia Power’s grid.
Without more information on the contents of the all-source RFP, it’s nearly impossible for environmental groups, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders to know whether Georgia Power is properly weighing renewable alternatives to gas-fired power plants that the utility will build and own itself.
The big picture on carbon and cost
Georgia Power’s commitment to fossil gas and coal — which together made up nearly 60 percent of its capacity last year — is certainly a problem for the climate. The Sierra Club calculates that the generation mix laid out in Georgia Power’s proposed 2025 IRP would make the utility “one of the top greenhouse gas emitters in the U.S.”
It could be a problem for utility customers, too, who have already seen rates rise significantly in recent years due to Georgia Power’s more than $30 billion expansion of its Vogtle nuclear power plant.
Like most regulated utilities, Georgia Power earns a set rate of profit on investments in power plants, power grids, and other capital assets. It’s also required to allow third-party developers to compete with it to build solar and battery projects — a process that can yield lower costs for its customers but also lower rates of return for the utility.
Regulators have a responsibility to closely monitor the utility’s process for choosing which resources end up winning to ensure those decisions aren’t maximizing Georgia Power’s profits at the expense of its customers, said Patty Durand, a consumer advocate and former Public Service Commission candidate. But she fears regulators will fail to challenge Georgia Power’s assertions on which resources will most cost-effectively meet its grid needs.
“We need to keep stock of how many gigawatts of fossil fuel Georgia Power is building or keeping on the grid because of data centers,” she said. “That is a climate change disaster.”
Durand has also challenged Georgia Power’s load-growth forecasts, noting that the utility has consistently overestimated future electricity demand across the past decade, helping it justify increased spending on profit-earning assets.
“Are utility bills a kitchen-table issue? If they are, these guys are in trouble,” she said. “Data centers are about to make the bills we pay now into a joke.”
Some of the tech giants playing a role in the data center expansion driving Georgia Power’s demand forecasts have similar concerns. Last year, Microsoft challenged the utility on how it models the value of clean energy resources as well as how it forecasts load growth.
Georgia Power also faced pushback from the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA), which represents companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft that are simultaneously planning major data center expansions and striving to decarbonize their energy supplies. In testimony before the Public Service Commission last year, CEBA warned that “some of the new load Georgia Power is forecasting may not materialize if Georgia Power increases the carbon intensity of its resource mix.”
CEBA ended up supporting last year’s interim IRP on the condition that Georgia Power follow through with a promise to offer large industrial and commercial customers new options to bring more carbon-free resources onto the utility’s grid.
Georgia Power’s 2025 IRP lays out a “customer-identified resource” proposal to meet its end of the bargain, said Katie Southworth, CEBA’s deputy director of market and policy innovation for the South and Southeast. In simple terms, the utility would allow big customers to work with third-party developers to build solar, batteries, and other carbon-free resources that they could use to power their data centers and other large facilities. That’s a fairly common practice in parts of the country operating under competitive energy markets — but not in Georgia and most of the U.S. Southeast, where utilities remain vertically integrated.
However, the utility’s plan lacks transparency and certainty about how customer-proposed projects will be assessed and approved, and it limits the scale and scope of resources that big customers can bring to the table. Georgia Power also plans to delay implementation of that program, frustrating CEBA members eager to start searching for potential projects.
Hawkins, the Georgia Power spokesperson, told Canary Media that the utility continues to “incorporate CEBA’s feedback into our program designs, while still ensuring that all Georgia Power customers are protected. Our proposed IRP portfolio of renewable procurements and programs represents a continuation of our steady and measured renewable growth that delivers benefits to all customers.”
In the meantime, Southworth said, CEBA is encouraging Georgia Power customers looking for cleaner energy options to “get involved in the design of the all-source process. That gives us a chance to include other resources that could play a role.”
That may be an option for qualified energy developers active in that competitive procurement. But it remains unclear if or how the Public Service Commission will push Georgia Power to open the hood on that process for consumer advocates and environmental groups that have been denied information thus far.
“This is an exceptionally unusual time in the Georgia energy world for a million reasons, of which this is one. I think this is a hugely important issue,” Whitfield said. The investments being planned today are “going to transform our energy system,” and Georgia Power is conducting that work “without providing critical information about what that new system might look like.”
But time is running short to order more transparency. Georgia Power plans to announce the winning bids for its all-source RFP in July, Whitfield said — the same month that state regulators expect to take their final vote on the IRP.
This story is part of a Grist package examining how President Trump’s first 100 days in office have reshaped climate and environmental policy in the U.S.
President Donald Trump came into office promising to “drill, baby, drill” and, on day one, signed an executive order aimed at “Unleashing American Energy.” On Friday, just over 100 days later, oil companies released their first quarterly earnings reports of Trump’s second term. They weren’t pretty.
The two largest oil companies in the United States saw revenues tumble. Earnings at Exxon Mobil fell 6 percent compared to last year, to $7.7 billion. Chevron’s first-quarter income dropped more than a third, to $3.5 billion. “We are seeing significant downward pressure on prices and margins,” Darren Woods, chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said during a call with analysts on Friday. “In this environment, it is more important than ever to focus on what we can control.”
This caps a three month stretch — and the first 100 days of an administration — that saw oil executives swooning at the possibility of a boon. But since President Trump has taken office, headwinds have mounted.
The price of a barrel of oil has fallen from almost $80 to about $60 since his inauguration, sweeping new tariffs have made things like steel costlier, and economic uncertainty has made planning considerably more challenging. According to Baker Hughes, an oil field service provider, the number of drilling rigs in the nation’s largest oil field, the Permian Basin, have fallen about 3 percent over the last month.
“There seems to be a lack of continuity in the policymaking that affects that industry,” said Sanjay Srinivasan, a professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State University.
“They are fast-tracking dangerous, disastrous projects that are going to put the health and safety of people, the water, and the environment at risk,” said Jasmine Vazin, Deputy Director of the Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign at the Sierra Club, pointing to the Line 5 pipeline in Michigan as one example. “This is what [oil companies] wanted.”
At the same time, the president has called for oil prices of $50 a barrel, which would decimate the industry. “At $50-per-barrel oil, we will see U.S. oil production start to decline immediately and likely significantly,” one anonymous executive responded in a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. “There cannot be ‘U.S. energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.” Others reported already cutting future capital expenditures based on the administration’s ambitions.
Trump’s tariffs have also taken a toll on oil companies by raising the cost of the steel they rely on for wells and other equipment, as well as, likely slowing global demand for oil, which generally drops along with economic activity. Foreign producers deciding to increase output, including an OPEC+ announcement last week to boost its supply by more than 400,000 barrels a day in June, has only compounded domestic pressures.
“I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career,” said one executive in the Federal Reserve survey. Another added: “Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal. We want more stability.”
Whether the Trump administration can bring that stability remains an open question. Even if it does, there’s no guarantee that American oil output — which was already at record levels before Trump took office — can grow significantly, or that it will create more jobs. It’s also unclear if Trump cares.
“I’ll get those guys drilling,” he told supporters in Greenville, North Carolina, in November. “If they drill themselves out of business, I don’t give a damn.”
So far, that seems to be the trajectory. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that American oil-and-gas companies lost more than $280 billion in stock-market value between April 2, when Trump unveiled his tariff blitz, and Monday.
That drop outpaced that of every other major sector.
This story is part of a Grist package examining how President Trump’s first 100 days in office have reshaped climate and environmental policy in the U.S.
Jeffrey Willig doesn’t mine coal anymore. For nine years he worked underground, most recently for a company called Blackjewel, which laid off around 1,700 workers in June of 2019 without paying them. Robbed of their final paycheck, Willig and the others set up camp and blocked the company’s last trainload of “black gold” from leaving Harlan County, Kentucky, beginning what would be months of protest. They called on Democrats and Republicans alike for support, and received some, but ultimately were left disillusioned, spending years in court fighting for what they were owed.
Their plight came during a wave of layoffs that has rocked coal country for more than a decade. When Willig heard Democrats discuss mine closures and extoll the growth of clean energy jobs, it frustrated him. “Say they want to do solar panels. That’s great,” Willig said. “But why don’t [they] put those type of jobs in our area? They don’t do that. That’s the problem.”
Democratic party leaders and renewable energy advocates didn’t always seem to understand, he felt, how good a job mining could be. Willig earned $75,000 a year without a college degree, in a county with an annual per capita income not even one-third that. What’s more, it was fulfilling — hard work, and dangerous, but it came with unmatched camaraderie and pride in helping fuel the world. When those jobs were gone, he felt Democrats didn’t provide a clear answer to what would come after.
“They didn’t replace those jobs,” Willig said. “I had guys that I worked with who were good people, and loved their family and everything, and they lost homes.” One friend took his own life, unable to see a way forward to provide for his family.
Harlan County still has many active mines, but, like all of coal country, it has seen layoffs and bankruptcies cut the number of jobs by more than half since 2012. The reasons are complex, but, during his first 100 days in office, President Trump — who has promised to “unleash American energy” and “restore energy dominance” — has reprised a notion he first raised in 2016: Those jobs will come back if environmental and labor regulators simply get out of the way.
Last month, the president appeared with more than two dozen men wearing reflective stripes and hard hats to sign an executive order titled Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry. “We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” Trump said. “With us today are some of the amazing workers who will benefit from these policies.”
If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because the president’s 2016 run made a star of the Appalachian coalfields. He made regular appearances there, promising to end the “war on coal” by reopening closed plants and reinvigorating the industry. The campaign, which preceded a swirl of national soul-searching that positioned the region, many argued too broadly, as “Trump Country,” featured rallies in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where the candidate, met by signs declaring “Trump Digs Coal,” donned a hard hat and once pantomimed digging coal.
“You’re real people,” Trump said at one event. “You made this country.”
President Trump surrounded himself with coal miners when he signed an executive order on April 8 declaring coal a critical mineral and calling for revitalization of an industry in decline. Andrew Thomas / Middle East Images via AFP / Getty Images
Then, as now, the president was following an example set by politicians before him, said Lou Martin, a labor historian at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Candidates on both sides of the aisle, from FDR and Carter to Nixon and Trump, have dressed the part to campaign in Appalachia, where, despite its dangers, mining coal provided a middle-class living to generations of families.
“The coal miner has always been viewed as the epitome of hard work, a hardworking person who is noble and honest,” Martin said. Appalachia is a popular political backdrop because it is often seen as an epicenter of white rural poverty and “a recognizable world of suffering” for some voters. “Appalachia is seen as white in the national imagination,” he said, despite being home to a people from a diverse set of backgrounds for hundreds of years.
At the same time, Martin said, the Eastern coalfields have often been stereotyped as both out of step with modernity and left behind by progress. “When somebody pays homage to coal miners it’s like saying, ‘I see you and I care about you.’”
The order Trump signed on April 8 declares coal a “critical mineral,” a designation that requires a host of federal agencies, including the energy, treasury, and interior departments, to take steps to support the industry and eliminate regulations that hinder domestic production. Many of those gathered around Trump applauded the move, which comes even as the administration has taken steps to undermine mine safety and protection from black lung disease.
But little about the ceremony was representative of the working-class miners Trump’s campaigns have venerated, said Erin Bates, communications officer for the United Mine Workers of America. “Not a single one of those were union miners and most of them were management,” she said, men more likely wear sharp button-downs than hard hats and go to bed without having to shower first.
Bates wants to see mines remain open and miners remain at work, but she doubts the Trump administration can overcome the trends driving the sector’s downfall. Industry experts predicted in 2017 that the market forces sidelining coal were too strong and the its resurgence is unlikely, and so far they’ve been correct. The number of people working the nation’s coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trump’s first term, and has continued that slide.
“He hasn’t spoken about coal miners quite as much as he did in 2016,” Bates said of the president. “And I think that’s because he wasn’t able to follow through on a lot of things.”
The reason for that is simple: Demand has slowed as renewable energy and, to a larger extent, natural gas have grown cheaper, making coal an increasingly expensive proposition — even as the cost of maintaining the power plants that use has climbed. Such facilities provide 88 percent of the electricity in West Virginia, and the longer they run, the more residents will pay for energy, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported. That’s got some ratepayers turning against the fossil fuel.
Utilities like Appalachian Power have continued to raise rates to keep up with repair costs. Others, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, are decommissioning aging and expensive coal-fired plants and turning to natural gas. Coal-powered electricity generation steadily declined during the first Trump administration, and continues apace. A recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argued very few idled coal plants could be cheaply re-started, given high maintenance costs and the decreasing viability of coal power.
Given the domestic decline in consumption, many U.S. producers rely upon exports to countries like China — 14 percent of the nation’s coal went abroad in 2022 — but the trade war stemming from Trump’s tariffs threatens that lifeline.
Jeffrey Willig has long since left the coalfields for a manufacturing job. But he watches with a combination of frustration and hope as Democrats and Republicans alike promise to restore the fortunes of those who still work the mines.
Scott Olson / Getty Images
Trump still enjoys broad support throughout eastern coalfields. “I think that he meant every word, he wanted to make the country more energy efficient. The guys that I worked with had high hopes,” Willig said, adding that he felt four years wasn’t enough time to enact real change.
Cathy Davis Estep, a retired teacher and the daughter of a coal miner who lives in Harlan County, remains hopeful that Trump will revitalize the industry. She takes note, however, that the administration has targeted at least 33 Mine Safety and Health Administration offices, including the Harlan County location, for closure. This comes after years of staff reductions and budget cuts to the agency had already wrung it of much of its power. Miners and their advocates fear the closures will diminish an agency that’s improved safety over the past 50 years or so despite its shortcomings and could play a vital role protecting them as the Trump administration promotes coal and the nation scrambles to produce lithium and other metals.
Vonda Robinson is vice president of the Black Lung Association and feels she has a handle on what miners need. Her husband dug coal until he contracted the disease, which is caused by chronic exposure to silica dust, in his 40s. Now 58, he is awaiting a double lung transplant. Many others are awaiting diagnosis and treatment, but Trump administration policies have stymied them. “We’re gonna have coal, we’re gonna dig baby dig, but what upsets me is there’s not one thing about safety,” she said. “If we do not take care of our coal miners, we’re not gonna have a coal industry.”
Miners’ health programs are shuttering, with immediate impacts, said Scott Laney, a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NiOSH, epidemiologist. His staff was put on leave last month and expects to be fired in June. His research laid the groundwork for the federal silica rule, which limits exposure to the toxic dust. The rule was adopted last year, but has been placed on hold pending a legal challenge by the National Sand, Gravel, and Stone Association, and NiOSH cuts have held up enforcement regardless.
Laney’s research also supported the Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program, which provided free black lung screenings throughout Appalachia. “We currently are unable to accept X-rays from clinics for these miners, we’re unable to go out in the field,” he said. Nor can the program provide the documentation essential to allowing workers diagnosed with the disease to transfer to roles with less exposure to silica, as required by law.
“As we potentially increase coal production in the United States, we’re in the midst of the worst outbreak of black lung that we’ve seen in the last 50 years and we’re shutting down the health and safety programs to protect these miners who may be entering the industry for for the first time,” Laney said. “The protections that were granted to their fathers and their fathers’ fathers will not be afforded to them.”
Even as Trump promises to revitalize an industry facing inevitable decline, its future remains uncertain. But Willig won’t be a part of it. He’s long since left the coalfields for a manufacturing job in Louisville, Kentucky. But he watches with a combination of frustration and hope as Democrats and Republicans alike promise to restore the fortunes of those who, like him, once enjoyed the middle class life that working underground once provided.
Around the world, farmers are retooling their land to harvest the hottest new commodity: sunlight. As the price of renewable energy technology has plummeted and water has gotten more scarce, growers are fallowing acreage and installing solar panels. Some are even growing crops beneath them, which is great for plants stressed by too many rays. Still others are letting that shaded land go wild, providing habitat for pollinators and fodder for grazing livestock.
According to a new study, this practice of agrisolar has been quite lucrative for farmers in California’s Central Valley over the last 25 years — and for the environment. Researchers looked at producers who had idled land and installed solar, using the electricity to run equipment like water pumps and selling the excess power to utilities.
On average, that energy savings and revenue added up to $124,000 per hectare (about 2.5 acres) each year, 25 times the value of using the land to grow crops. Collectively, the juice generated in the Central Valley could power around 500,000 households while saving enough water to hydrate 27 million people annually. “If a farmer owns 10 acres of land, and they choose to convert one or two acres to a solar array, that could produce enough income for them to feel security for their whole operation,” said Jake Stid, a renewable energy landscape scientist at Michigan State University and lead author of the paper, published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
The Central Valley is among the most productive agricultural regions in the world: It makes up just 1 percent of all farmland acreage in the United States, yet generates a third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. But it’s also extremely water-stressed as California whiplashes between years of significant rainfall and drought. To irrigate all those crops, farmers have drawn so much groundwater that aquifers collapse like empty water bottles, making the earth itself sink by many feet.
Farmers can’t make their crops less thirsty, so many have been converting some of their acreage to solar. The Central Valley is ideal for this, being mostly flat and very sunny, hence the agricultural productivity. At the same time, farmers have been getting good rates for the electricity that they offset and that they send back to the grid.
Now, though, California has adopted standards that reduce those rates by 75 percent on average. For a farmer investing in panels, the investment looks less enticing. “The algebra or calculus — or whatever math discipline you want to reference — it just doesn’t work out the same way,” said Karen Norene Mills, vice president of legal advocacy at the California Farm Bureau, which promotes the state’s agricultural community.
Also, the study found that by fallowing land for solar panels, food production in the Central Valley dropped by enough calories to feed 86,000 people a year. But, Stid said, markets can adjust, as crops are grown elsewhere to make up the deficit. By tapping the sun instead, Stid added, growers can simultaneously help California reach its goals of deploying renewable and reducing groundwater usage.
The tension, though, is meeting those objectives while still producing incredible quantities of food. “That is always our concern about some of these pressures,” Mills said.
But this isn’t an either-or proposition: Many farmers are finding ways to grow some crops, like leafy greens and berries, under the panels. The shade reduces evaporation from the soil, allowing growers to water less often. In turn, a wetted landscape cools the panels, which improves their efficiency. “This is the compromise that’s going to allow for both energy independence and food security,” said horticulturalist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies agrisolar at Colorado State University but wasn’t involved in the new study.
Farmers are also turning livestock loose to graze under their panels. Their droppings fertilize the soil, leading to more plant growth and more flowers that support native pollinators. “The grass, it’s so much more lush under the panels, it’s amazing,” said Ryan Romack, founder of Virginia-based AgriSolar Ranch, which provides grazing services. “Especially when the sheep have been on site long-term, you can really see the added benefits of the manure load.”
Then, if a farmer decides not to replace the solar panels at the end of their lifespan — usually around 25 or 30 years — the soil will be refreshed with nutrients and ready to grow more crops. Even if a grower simply lets them sit for decades without any management, the fallowing can restore the soil’s health. “We really see solar as a collective landscape,” Stid said, “that can be sited, managed, and designed in a way to benefit both people and the planet and ecosystems as well.”
Cuba may slowly ease its crippling blackouts and strengthen the electricity grid as it begins building seven solar parks with the first batch of equipment from China.
The Chinese aid helps Cuba’s plan to build 92 solar installations by 2028, adding about 2,000 megawatts to the island’s power grid and help reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports. Once completed, the project would significantly boost Cuba’s strained power system, which currently has a capacity of 7,264 MW.
Installation work is set to begin soon in Artemisa, about 50 kilometers west of Havana, where the equipment arrived late last month. Additional solar parks are planned for the provinces of Pinar del Rio, Las Tunas, Holguin, Granma and Guantanamo.
America’s federal public lands are truly unique, part of our birthright as citizens. No other country in the world has such a system.
More than 640 million acres, including national parks, forests and wildlife refuges, as well as lands open to drilling, mining, logging and a variety of other uses, are managed by the federal government — but owned collectively by all American citizens. Together, these parcels make up more than a quarter of all land in the nation.
Canoers paddle out to fish on Broken Bridge Pond in the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire in 2021. Brianna Soukup / Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
“Even if you don’t own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures,” he wrote in 2011.
Despite broad, bipartisan public support for protecting public lands, these shared landscapes have come under relentless attack during the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term. The administration and its allies in Congress are working feverishly to tilt the scale away from natural resource protection and toward extraction, threatening a pillar of the nation’s identity and tradition of democratic governance.
“There’s no larger concentration of unappropriated wealth on this globe than exists in this country on our public lands,” said Jesse Duebel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, a conservation nonprofit. “The fact that there are interests that would like to monetize that, they’d like to liquidate it and turn it into cash money, is no surprise.”
Landscape protections and bedrock conservation laws are on the chopping block, as Trump and his team look to boost and fast-track drilling, mining, and logging across the federal estate. The administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are eyeing selling off federal lands, both for housing development and to help offset Trump’s tax and spending cuts. And the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, is wreaking havoc within federal land management agencies, pushing out thousands of civil servants. That purge will leave America’s natural heritage more vulnerable to the myriad threats they already face, including growing visitor numbers, climate change, wildfires, and invasive species.
The Republican campaign to undermine land management agencies and wrest control of public lands from the federal government is nothing new, dating back to the Sagebrush Rebellion movement of the 1970s and 80s, when support for privatizing or transferring federal lands to state control exploded across the West. But the speed and scope of the current attack, along with its disregard for the public’s support for safeguarding public lands, makes it more worrisome than previous iterations, several public land advocates and legal experts told Grist.
This is “probably the most significant moment since the Reagan administration in terms of privatization,” said Steven Davis, a political science professor at Edgewood College and the author of the 2018 book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer. President Ronald Reagan was a self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel.
A National Park Service ranger wears a patch as she conducts a walking tour in Everglades National Park, Florida on April 17. The Trump administration’s DOGE program has fired hundreds of park rangers across the United States. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Duebel said the conservation community knew Trump’s return would trigger another drawn out fight for the future of public lands, but nothing could have prepared him for this level of chaos, particularly the effort to rid agencies of thousands of staffers.
The country is “in a much more pro-public lands position than we’ve been before,” Duebel said. “But I think we’re at greater risk than we’ve ever been before — not because the time is right in the eyes of the American people, but because we have an administration who could give two shits about what the American people want. That’s what’s got me scared.”
The Interior Department and the White House did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.
In an article posted to the White House website on Earth Day, the Trump administration touted several “key actions” it has taken on the environment, including “protecting public lands” by opening more acres to energy development, “protecting wildlife” by pausing wind energy projects, and safeguarding forests by expanding logging. The accomplishment list received widespread condemnation from environmental, climate, and public land advocacy groups.
That same day, a leaked draft strategic plan revealed the Interior Department’s four-year vision for opening new federal lands to drilling and other extractive development, reducing the amount of federal land it manages by selling some for housing development and transferring other acres to state control, rolling back the boundaries of protected national monuments, and weakening bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act.
An aerial view of gas and oil drilling pads in the Plateau Creek Drainage, near DeBeque, Colorado, where Bureau of Land Management sold leases in 2016 and 2017. Helen H. Richardson / The Denver Post via Getty Images
Meanwhile, Trump’s DOGE is in the process of cutting thousands of scientists and other staff from the various agencies that manage and protect public lands, including the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. Nearly every Republican senator recently went on the record this month in support of selling off federal lands to reduce the federal deficit, voting down a measure that would have blocked such sales. And Utah has promised to continue its legal fight aimed at stripping more than 18 million acres of BLM lands within the state’s border from the federal government. Utah’s lawsuit, which the Supreme Court declined to hear in January, had the support of numerous Republican-led states, including North Dakota while current Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was still governor.
To advance its agenda, the Trump administration is citing a series of “emergencies” that close observers say are at best exaggerated, and at worst manufactured.
A purported “energy emergency,” which Trump declared in an executive order just hours after being inaugurated, has been the impetus for the administration attempting to throw longstanding federal permitting processes, public comment periods, and environmental safeguards to the wind. The action aims to boost fossil fuel extraction across federal lands and waters — despite domestic oil and gas production being at record highs — while simultaneously working to thwart renewable energy projects. Trump relied on that same “emergency” earlier this month when he ordered federal agencies to prop up America’s dwindling, polluting coal industry, which the president and his cabinet have insisted is “beautiful” and “clean.”In reality, coal is among the most polluting forms of energy.
“This whole idea of an emergency is ridiculous,” said Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “And now this push to reinvigorate the coal industry seems absolutely crazy to me. Why would you try to reinvigorate a moribund industry that has been declining for the last decade or more? Makes no sense, it’s not going to happen.”
Coal consumption in the U.S. has declined more than 50 percent since peaking in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, largely due market forces, including the availability of cheaper natural gas and America’s growing renewable energy sector. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff war threatens to undermine his own push to expand mining and fossil fuel drilling.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, second from left, looks on as President Donald Trump signs executive orders about boosting coal production on April 8. Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images
The threat of extreme wildfire — an actual crisis driven by a complex set of factors, including climate change, its role in intensifying droughts and pest outbreaks, and decades of fire suppression — is being cited to justify slashing environmental reviews to ramp up logging on public lands. Following up on a Trump executive order to increase domestic timber production, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed a memo declaring a forest health “emergency” that would open nearly 60 percent of national forest lands, more than 110 million acres, to aggressive logging.
Then there’s America’s “housing affordability crisis,” which the Trump administration, dozens of Republicans, and even a handful of Democrats are pointing to in a growing push to open federal lands to housing development, either by selling land to private interests or transferring control to states. The Trump administration recently established a task force to identify what it calls “underutilized lands.” In an op-ed announcing that effort, Burgum and Scott Turner, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote that “much of” the 500 million acres Interior oversees is “suitable for residential use.” Some of the most high-profile members of the anti-public lands movement, including William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during Trump’s first term, are championing the idea.
Without guardrails, critics argue the sale of public lands to build housing will lead to sprawl in remote, sensitive landscapes and do little, if anything, to address home affordability, as the issue is driven by several factors, including migration trends, stagnant wages, and higher construction costs. Notably, Trump’s tariff policies are expected to raise the average price of a new home by nearly $11,000.
Chris Hill, CEO of the Conservation Lands Foundation, a Colorado-based nonprofit working to protect BLM-managed lands, said the lack of affordable housing is a serious issue, but “we shouldn’t be fooled that the idea to sell off public lands is a solution.”
“The vast majority of public lands are just not suitable for any sort of housing development due to their remote locations, lack of access, and necessary infrastructure,” she said.
A slot canyon cuts through the western portion of one of the country’s newest national monuments, Chuckwalla Mountains, near Chiriaco Summit, California. President Trump rescinded the area’s monument status on March 15. David McNew / Getty Images
David Hayes, who served as deputy Interior secretary during the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and as a senior climate adviser to President Joe Biden, told Grist that Trump’s broad use of executive power sets the current privatization push apart from previous efforts.
“Not only do you have the rhetoric and the intentionality around managing public lands in an aggressive way, but you have to couple that with what you’re seeing,” he said. “This administration is going farther than any other ever has to push the limits of executive power.”
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a Colorado-based conservation group, said Trump and his team are doing everything they can to circumvent normal environmental rules and safeguards in order to advance their agenda, with no regard for the law or public opinion.
“Everything is an imagined crisis,” Weiss said.
Oil, gas, and coal jobs. Mining jobs. Timber jobs. Farming and ranching. Gas-powered cars and kitchen appliances. Even the water pressure in your shower. Ask the White House and the Republican Party and they’ll tell you Biden waged a war against all of it, and that voters gave Trump a mandate to reverse course.
During Trump’s first term in office, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke repeatedly boasted that the administration’s conservation legacy would rival that of his personal hero and America’s conservationist president, Theodore Roosevelt — only to have the late president’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, and the conservation community bemoan his record at the helm of the massive federal agency.
Like Zinke, Burgum invoked Roosevelt in pitching himself for the job.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tours a fracking site in Washington County, Pennsylvania on April 3, where he discussed President Trump’s recent executive orders to boost domestic fossil fuel production. Department of the Interior
“In our time, President Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda can be America’s big stick that will be leveraged to achieve historic prosperity and world peace,” Burgum said during his confirmation hearing in January, referencing a 1990 letter in which the 26th president said to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
The Senate confirmed him to the post in January on a bipartisan 79-18 vote. Some public land advocates initially viewed Burgum, now the chief steward of the federal lands, waters, and wildlife we all own, as a palatable nominee in a sea of problematic potential picks. A billionaire software entrepreneur and former North Dakota governor, Burgum has talked at length about his fondness for Roosevelt’s conservation legacy and the outdoors.
Whatever honeymoon there was didn’t last long. One-hundred days in, Burgum and the rest of Trump’s team have taken not a stick, but a wrecking ball to America’s public lands, waters, and wildlife. Earlier this month, the new CEO of REI said the outdoor retailer made “a mistake” in endorsing Burgum for the job and that the administration’s actions on public lands “are completely at odds with the longstanding values of REI.”
At an April 9 all-hands meeting of Interior employees, Burgum showed off pictures of himself touring oil and gas facilities, celebrated “clean coal,” and condemned burdensome government regulation. Burgum has repeatedly described federal lands as “America’s balance sheet” — “assets” that he estimates could be worth $100 trillion but that he argues Americans are getting a “low return” on.
“On the world’s largest balance sheet last year, the revenue that we pulled in was about $18 billion,” he said at the staffwide meeting, referring to money the government brings from lease fees and royalties from grazing, drilling, and logging on federal lands, as well as national park entrance fees. “Eighteen billion might seem like a big number. It’s not a big number if we’re managing $100 trillion in assets.”
Boats dock at Antelope Point Marina on Lake Powell near Page, Arizona in 2022. Public lands are the foundation of a $1 trillion outdoor recreation economy in the U.S.
David McNew / Getty Images
In focusing solely on revenues generated from energy and other resource extraction, Burgum disregards that public lands are the foundation of a $1 trillion outdoor recreation economy, nevermind the numerous climate, environmental, cultural, and public health benefits.
Davis, the author of In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer, dismissed Burgum’s “balance sheet” argument as “shriveled” and “wrong.”
“You have to willfully be ignorant and ignore everything of value about those lands except their marketable commodity value to come up with that conclusion,” he said. When you add all their myriad values together, public lands “are the biggest bargain you can possibly imagine.”
Davis likes to compare public lands to libraries, schools, or the Department of Defense.
“There are certain things we as a society decide are important and we pay for it,” he said. “We call that public goods.”
The last time conservatives ventured down the public land privatization path, it didn’t go well.
Shortly after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, then-Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican representing Utah, introduced legislation to sell off 3.3 million acres of public land in 10 Western states that he said had “been deemed to serve no purpose for taxpayers.”
Public backlash was fierce. Chaffetz pulled the bill just two weeks later, citing concerns from his constituents. The episode, while brief, largely forced the anti-federal land movement back into the shadows. The first Trump administration continued to weaken safeguards for 35 million acres of federal lands — more than any other administration in history — and offered up millions more for oil and gas development, but stopped short of trying sell off or transfer large areas of the public domain.
Demonstrators protest federal workforce layoffs at Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County, California, on March 1. Santiago Mejia / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Yet as the last few months have shown, the anti-public lands movement is alive and well.
Public land advocates are hopeful that the current push will flounder. They expect courts to strike down many of Trump’s environmental rollbacks, as they did during his first term. In recent weeks, crowds have rallied at numerous national parks and state capitol buildings to support keeping public lands in public hands. Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who voted to confirm Burgum to his post and serves as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has taken to social media to warn about the growing Republican effort to undermine, transfer and sell off public lands.
“I continue to be encouraged that people are going to be loud. They already are,” Deubel said. “We’re mobilizing. We’ve got business and industries. We’ve got Republicans, we’ve got Democrats. We’ve got hunters and we’ve got non-hunters. We’ve got everybody speaking out about this.”
In a time of extreme polarization on seemingly every issue, public lands enjoy broad bipartisan support. The 15th annual “Conservation in the West” poll found that 72 percent of voters in eight Western states support public lands conservation over increased energy development — the highest level of support in the poll’s history; 65 percent oppose giving states control over federal public lands, up from 56 percent in 2017; and 89 percent oppose shrinking or removing protections for national monuments, up from 80 percent in 2017. Even in Utah, where leaders have spent millions of taxpayer dollars promoting the state’s anti-federal lands lawsuit, support for protecting public lands remains high.
Protesters rally outside Yosemite Valley Welcome Center on March 1 during a national day of action against Trump administration’s mass firing of National Park Service employees. Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
“Even in all these made up crises, the American public doesn’t want this,” Hill said. “The American people want and love their public lands.”
At his recent staffwide meeting, Burgum said Roosevelt’s legacy should guide Interior staff in its mission to manage and protect federal public lands. Those two things, management and protection, “must be held in balance,” Burgum stressed.
Energy storage innovator MGA Thermal has turned its sights to large scale commercial projects after proving up its proprietary technology as a clean steam alternative to gas for industry. The progress and completed demonstration facility are being unveiled Tuesday at MGA Thermal’s 5 MWh Tomago plant near Newcastle, pushing the Main Sequence backed startup almost…
The United States has never really cared much about tackling climate change, at least at the federal level. Up until the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — which handed out billions of dollars for people to electrify their homes, and pumped billions more into the clean energy economy — neither Congress nor the executive branch advanced truly meaningful climate policy, given the scale of the crisis.
Accordingly, Trump has set his sights on states during the first 100 days of his administration. He has tried to kill New York City’s congestion pricing, though last week the Department of Justice accidentally filed a document outlining the legal flaws with the administration’s plan. On April 8, he signed an executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify and halt any state climate laws that she deems illegal, including California’s pioneering cap-and-trade program. That directive, though, is probably illegal because the Constitution guarantees states broad authority to enact their own laws, legal experts told Grist. “This is the world the Trump administration wants your kids to live in,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “California’s efforts to cut harmful pollution won’t be derailed by a glorified press release masquerading as an executive order.”
In a counterintuitive way, the lack of federal climate ambition has made what action has occurred more resilient, because states are doing their own things and collaborating with each other. If the country had established a grand governing body years ago — something like an Environmental Protection Agency but focused exclusively on climate change — the Trump administration could easily dismantle it.
“States have been saying since the election that they retain the authority and the ability and the ambition to drive down pollution and keep America on track to meet its goals,” said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 governors (just one of them a Republican) focused on climate action. “This order is an indication that the president and this administration know that all of that is true.”
This is not the climate movement’s first tussle with an administration hostile to action. The U.S. Climate Alliance and America Is All In — a coalition of thousands of political, cultural, and business leaders — both formed after Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017. States also now regularly share information with each other, like the best ways to encourage the construction of energy-efficient buildings and to replace gas furnaces with electric heat pumps. They’re also collaborating to modernize their grids to meet the extra demand that comes with widespread electrification.
“That relationship-building and trust has not only allowed us to be truly a coalition, but it’s allowed us to move faster together on our climate action,” said Amanda Hansen, deputy secretary for climate change at California’s Natural Resources Agency. “The coalitions that came together very quickly in response to the first Trump administration are now significantly larger, more capable, and have really solid foundations for true collaboration.”
While California and other states will have to wait and see which climate policies Bondi deems illegal, they’re already fighting on other fronts in court. When the Trump administration froze nearly $3 trillion in federal assistance funds in January, including those provided by the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, 23 attorneys general (including those in Republican-led Vermont and Nevada) sued, and a judge ordered the money released.
Disbursing these sorts of funds isn’t optional — it is required, because Congress passed legislation allocating them. To stop the flow of money, Congress would have to change the laws. “It’s just costing the taxpayers millions of dollars to address these lawsuits for congressionally authorized funds that were critical to addressing the climate crisis,” said Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, a coalition of 125,000 attorneys, students, and activists.
Other organizations and nonprofits are joining in the litigation as well. Lawyers for Good Government worked with the Southern Environmental Law Center, for instance, which is suing the administration to release federal funds meant to invest in, among other things, energy-efficient affordable housing. “This administration appears to be just banking on the fact that they don’t need to follow the law until and unless someone sues them,” Blanchard said. “And that’s really an unfortunate state of affairs for the United States of America.”
Even as uncertainty looms, progressive states are doubling down on climate policies. For example, Washington state’s legislature recently passed an update to its clean fuel standard that could double emissions cuts from transportation, the state’s biggest source of carbon emissions. “We really need to continue to lead on this front,” said Leah Missik, the acting director for Washington at Climate Solutions. “States have always been the incubators for important climate policy work.” The state’s voters last fall resoundingly rejected an attempt to repeal a landmark law that caps emissions and raises money from polluters to install energy-efficient heat pumps, electrify ferries, and put solar panels on public buildings.
Ultimately, climate action is increasingly popular among voters. A spokesperson for Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois pointed to polling that shows 65 percent of people in the state are worried about climate change and 70 percent support fully transitioning to clean energy by 2050. “Voters are smart,” the spokesperson said, “and the more the Trump administration tries to kill clean energy policies that are giving us cleaner air, good-paying jobs, and lower energy bills, the more pushback you’re going to see, because those policies are popular for a reason.”
At every light switch, power socket, and on the road, an unstoppable revolution is already underway.
Technologies that can power our lives and jobs while doing less harm to the global climate — wind, solar, batteries, etc. — are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant. The pace of progress on price, scale, and performance has been so extraordinary that even the most optimistic forecasts about green tech in the past have turned out to be too pessimistic. Clean energy isn’t just powering our devices, tools, and luxuries — it’s growing the global economy, creating a whole suite of new jobs, and reshaping trade.
And despite what headlines may say, there’s no sign these trends will reverse. Political and economic turmoil may slow down clean energy, but the sector has built up so much momentum that it’s become nigh unstoppable.
Take a look at Texas: The largest oil- and gas-producing state in the US is also the largest in wind energy, and it’s installing more solar than any other. Texas utilities have come to realize that investing in clean energy is not just good for the environment; it’s good business. And even without subsidies and preferential treatment, the benefits of clean technologies — in clean air, scalability, distribution, and cost — have become impossible to ignore.
And there’s only more room to grow. The world is still in the early stages of this revolution as market forces become the driver rather than environmental worries. In some US markets, installing new renewable energy is cheaper than running existing coal plants. Last year, the US produced more electricity from wind and solar power than from coal for the first time.
If these energy trends persist, the US economy will see its greenhouse gas emissions diminish faster, reducing its contribution to climate change. The US needs to effectively zero out its carbon dioxide emissions by the middle of the century in order to keep the worst damages of climate change in check.
Now, just a few months into Trump’s second presidency, it’s still an open question just how fragile the country’ s progress on clean energy and climate will be. But the data is clear: There is tremendous potential for economic growth and environmental benefits if the country makes the right moves at this key inflection point.
Certainly incentives like tax credits, business loans, and research and development funding could accelerate decarbonization. On the other hand, pulling back — as the Trump administration wants to do — would slow down clean energy in the US, though it wouldn’t stop it.
But the rest of the world isn’t sitting idle, and if the US decides to slow its head start, its competitors may take the lead in a massive, rocketing industry. —Umair Irfan, Vox climate correspondent
Wind
President Donald Trump does not like wind energy — apparently, in part, because he thinks turbines are ugly.
“We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said after his inauguration during a rally. “Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.”
He’s put some power behind those feelings. Within mere hours of stepping into office,Trump signed an executive order that hamstrung both onshore and offshore wind energy developments, even as he has claimed that the US faces an energy crisis. The order directed federal agencies to temporarily stop issuing approvals for both onshore and offshore wind projects and pause leasing for offshore projects in federal waters.
Policies like this will harm the wind industry, analysts say, as will existing and potential future tariffs, which will likely make turbines more expensive. Those policies could also pose a serious threat to offshore developments. But the sector overall simply has too much inertia to be derailed, according to Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton University who studies clean energy.
“Because costs have been coming down so dramatically in the last decade, there is a certain momentum there that’s going to carry through,” Larson said.
Since 2010, US wind capacity has more than tripled, spurred by federal tax incentives. But even without those incentives — which Congress may eventually try to cut — onshore wind turbines are the cheapest source of new energy, according to the research firm Lazard. In 2023, the average cost of new onshore wind projects was two-thirds lower than a typical fossil fuel alternative, per a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency.
In fact, wind energy might be the best example of how politics have had little bearing on the growth of renewable energy. Texas, which overwhelmingly supported Trump in the recent election, generates more wind energy than any other state, by far. The next three top states for wind energy production — Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — all swung for Trump in the last election, too. These states are particularly windy, but they’ve also adopted policies, including tax incentives, that have helped build out their wind-energy sectors.
“It’s just a way to make money,” Larson said of wind. “It has nothing to do with the political position on whether climate change is real or not. People continue to get paid to put up wind turbines, and that’s enough for them to do it.”
The wind sector is not without its challenges. In the last two years the cost of wind energy has gone up, due in part to inflation and permitting delays — which raised the costs of other energy sources, too. Construction of new wind farms had begun slowing even before Trump took office. Dozens of counties across the US, in places like Ohio and Virginia, have also successfully blocked or delayed wind projects, citing a range of concerns like noise and impact on property values. Offshore wind, which is far costlier, faces even more opposition. Opponents similarly worry that they’ll affect coastal property values and harm marine life.
Yet ultimately these hurdles will only delay what is likely inevitable, analysts say: a future powered in large part by wind. —Benji Jones, Vox environmental correspondent
Solar
It’s hard to think of a natural wonder more unstoppable than the sun, and harnessing its energy has proven just as formidable. The United States last year saw a record amount of clean energy power up, with solar leading the way. Over the past decade, solar power capacity in the US has risen eightfold.
Why? Solar has just gotten way, way, way cheaper, even more than wind.
The main technology for turning sunlight into electricity, the single-junction photovoltaic panel, has drastically increased the efficiency by which it turns a ray of sunlight into a moving electron. This lets the same-size panel convert more light into electricity. Since the device itself is a printed semiconductor, it has benefited from many of the manufacturing improvements that have come with recent advances in computer chip production.
Solar has also benefited from economies of scale, particularly as China has invested heavily in its production. This has translated into cheaper solar panels around the world, including the US. And since solar panels are modular, small gains in efficiency and cost reduction quickly add up, boosting the business case.
There are some clouds on the horizon, however. The single-junction PV panel may be closing in on its practical efficiency limit. Solar energy is variable, and some power grid operators have struggled to manage the spike in solar production midday and sudden drop-off in the evening, creating the infamous “duck curve” graph of energy demand that shows how fast other generators have to ramp up.
Still, solar energy provides less than 4 percent of electricity in the US, so there is immense room to grow. Overall costs continue to decline, and new technologies are emerging that can get around the constraints imposed by conventional panels. Across the US and around the world, the sun has a long way to rise. —Umair Irfan
Our energy grid
While wind and solar energy have soared upward for more than a decade, storing electricity on the grid with batteries is just taking off.
Grid-scale battery capacity suddenly launched upward around 2020 and has about doubled every year since. That’s good news for intermittent power sources, such as wind and solar: Energy storage is the booster rocket for renewables and one of the key tools for addressing the stubborn duck curve that plagues solar power.
Batteries for the grid aren’t that far removed from those that power phones and computers, so they’ve benefited from cost and performance improvements in consumer batteries. And they still have room to get cheaper.
On the power grid, batteries do a number of jobs that help improve efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions. The obvious one is compensating for the capriciousness of wind and solar power: As the sun sets and the wind calms, demand rises, and grid operators can tap into their power reserves to keep the lights on. The specific combination of solar-plus-storage is still a small share of utility-scale projects, but it’s gaining ground in the residential market as these systems get cheaper.
Batteries also help grid operators cope with demand peaks: They can bank power when it’s cheap and sell those electrons when electricity is more expensive. They also maintain grid stability and provide the juice to restart power generators after outages or maintenance. That means there’s a huge demand for grid batteries beyond backing up renewables.
Right now, the main way the US saves electricity on the grid is pumped hydropower, which currently provides about 96 percent of utility-scale storage. Water is pumped uphill into a reservoir when power is cheap and then runs downhill through turbines when it’s needed. This method tends to lose a lot of energy in the process and is limited to landscapes with the ideal terrain to move water up and down.
Batteries get around these hurdles with higher efficiencies, scalability, and modularity. And since they stay parked in one place, energy density and portability don’t matter as much on the grid as they would in a car or a phone. That opens up several more options. Car batteries that have lost too much capacity to be worthwhile in a vehicle can get a second life on the power grid. Designs like flow batteries that store energy by the megawatt-hour and molten salt batteries that stash power for months could outperform the reigning lithium-ion battery. —Umair Irfan
The electric vehicle transition
Transportation is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Fossil fuels currently account for nearly 90 percent of the energy consumption in the transportation sector, which makes it an obvious target for decarbonization. And while it will take some time to figure out how to electrify planes, trains, and container ships, the growth of EVs, including passenger cars and trucks, has reached a tipping point.
The price of a new EV is nearly equivalent to a new gas-powered car, when you include state and federal subsidies.And the US charging infrastructure is getting better by the day: With over 200,000 chargers currently online, the number is growing. Even though the Trump administration has effectively waged war on the EV transition by pulling funding for charging infrastructure expansion and threatening to end subsidies for new EV purchases, at best those moves may slow a largely unstoppable EV transition in the long term. The automotive industry is all in on the electric transition. Buoyed by strong and growing EV sales trends in China and increasing EV offerings, global demand is growing.
There are signs, however, that the number of people buying EVs in the US and Europe is slowing, even as subsidies remain available. Experts say this is likely due, in part, to more consumer choice, as the number of EV offerings, including off-road trucks and minivans, continues to grow. But even here we see encouraging signs: As more EVs have come to market, more plug-in hybrid models have also appeared. And plug-in hybrids tend to be slightly cheaper and help people deal with range anxiety, the umbrella term for the fear of not being able to find a charger, while still reducing emissions.
“The early adopters who are just all in on that EV tech, they’ve adopted it,” Nicole Wakelin, editor at large of CarBuzz, told Vox in January. “So now it’s up to everybody else to dip their toes in that water.”
Around the world, cheap EVs are surging in popularity. Prices of EV batteries, the most expensive component of the vehicle, are dropping globally even as their capacity grows. That trend is leading to more and more inexpensive EV models hitting the market. China, once again, is leading the charge here. The cheapest model from Chinese front-runner BYD now costs less than $10,000, and by 2027, Volkswagen promises it will sell a cheap EV in Europe for about $20,000. Meanwhile, in the US, the average price for a used EV in mid-2024 was $33,000, compared to $27,000 for an internal combustion engine vehicle. Those Chinese EVs aren’t currently available in the US.
It remains to be seen how far Trump will go to keep America hooked on fossil fuels. It’s clear, however, that more and more people want EVs and are buying them, charging them, and quite frankly, loving them. —Adam Clark Estes, Vox senior technology correspondent
Jobs
For any of these clean energy sectors to reach their highest potential, there’s an essential requirement they all share: a robust, skilled workforce. The good news for the clean energy industry is that data show the jobs are rolling in.
The 2024 Clean Jobs America report by E2, a national group focused on climate solutions across industries, paints a positive picture for clean jobs. Renewable energy jobs increased by 14 percent from 2020 to 2023 — a surge boosted by the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate-focused policies. Jobs in the solar sector have grown by 15 percent in that same period, with 12 percent growth for wind and 11 percent growth for geothermal. In just 2023 alone, 150,000 jobs in the clean energy industry were added. All together, clean energy outpaced economy-wide employment growth for the last five years.
And while the Trump administration has targeted the wind industry, rolled back some climate-friendly policies, and griped about solar, the administration’s policies have yet to put a dent on positive job growth in clean jobs.
“I expect [the administration] will go after some provisions, but there is quite a bit in the IRA that will be very difficult to repeal since large-scale clean energy investments have been made, and a majority of those in red states whose politicians will not want to give them up,” one former US official told Heatmap News. Republican districts have benefited far more than progressive ones from clean tech manufacturing investments to the tune of over $161 billion, Bloomberg reported. Going after clean jobs would mean stalling economic growth in communities that helped deliver Trump a second term — a move that most would call politically unwise.
The clean industry is growing beyond the United States. Globally, clean energy sectors added over 4.7 million jobs to a total of 35 million from 2019 to 2022 — exceeding the amount of fossil fuel jobs internationally.
While the data bodes well for the industry, there are concerns from workers, unions, and communities that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy may leave many skilled employees behind. One paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that fewer than 1 percent of fossil fuel workers have transitioned to green jobs, citing a lack of translatable skills — operating an oil derrick isn’t as applicable to installing solar panels, for example. Another paper from Nature found that while some fossil fuel workers might have the right skills for clean energy jobs, the location of green jobs often aren’t where fossil fuel workers are based.
Several policy routes can be taken to create a more equitable transition for these workers, such as funding early retirement programs for fossil fuel workers who lose their jobs or heavily investing in fossil fuel communities where there is potential for creating renewable energy hubs.
Clean energy jobs are growing, and it doesn’t have to be at the cost of the 1.7 million workers in the US with fossil fuel occupations. —Sam Delgado
Geothermal
While President Trump has largely been hostile to renewable energy, there’s one clean energy source that the administration actually supports: geothermal.
Geothermal has long lived in the shadows of other renewables — especially as wind and solar have surged. But geothermal’s potential may be greater than any of those, and ironically, being in Trump’s good graces may give this sector the final boost it needs.
If you know President Trump’s motto of “drill, baby, drill,” this might not come as a surprise. Geothermal energy is tapped by drilling into the ground and extracting heat from the earth, and it uses similar technology to the oil and gas industry. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has long praised geothermal, and the fracking company he oversaw prior to joining the Trump administration invested in Fervo Energy, a company that specializes in geothermal technologies.
Despite the fact that the first geothermal plant was built in 1904 in Italy, the energy source is still in its infancy. In 2023, geothermal energy produced less than half a percent of total US utility-scale electricity generation, far behind other renewables like solar and wind.
Historically, developing geothermal energy has been constrained by geography and relatively few have been built. Most geothermal production happens in the western United States because of the region’s access to underground hot water that can drive turbines isn’t too far from the surface. California dominates the geothermal landscape, with 67 percent of US geothermal electricity generation coming from the state — the outcome of state policy priorities and the right geologic conditions. The regional specificity has been a big barrier to geothermal taking off more broadly.
Then there’s the issue of cost. Compared to solar and wind development and operations, building geothermal plants and drilling is much more expensive. And it currently costs more per megawatt hour than solar and wind.
But these geographic and financial barriers could be broken down. Geothermal companies have been exploring enhanced geothermal, a method that could make it possible to drill for geothermal energy everywhere. Coupling enhanced geothermal with drilling technology and techniques from the oil and gas industry can also help with efficiency and bring down costs — a parallel to how advances in fracking in the early 2000s helped supercharge the US oil and gas industry.
What geothermal lacks in current scale, it makes up for in future potential. Because it’s not intermittent and doesn’t rely on specific weather conditions (the way that solar, wind, and hydropower do) geothermal has a capacity advantage over other renewables. In 2023, geothermal had a capacity factor, or how often an energy source is running at maximum power, of 69 percent, compared to 33 percent and 23 percent for wind and solar, respectively — meaning it’s more capable of producing reliable power.
That advantage could be critical for US decarbonization goals. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), enhanced geothermal has the potential to power more than 65 million homes and businesses in the US.
Right now, stakeholders from energy policymakers to climate scientists to geothermal company executives, are determined to turn potential into reality.
In March 2024, the DOE released a lengthy report on the necessary steps to unlocking enhanced geothermal’s full potential on a commercial scale. In October of last year, the federal government approved a massive geothermal project in Utah that plans to provide power for more than 2 million homes and aims to be operational by 2026. The company behind the project and one of the leading enhanced geothermal startups, Fervo Energy, secured $255 million in funding from investors just before the year came to a close.
Geothermal also has bipartisan support (and is perhaps one of the few issues that the Biden and Trump administration would share similar views on). And because it’s borrowing technology from the gas and oil industry, it can tap into former fossil fuel workers to staff these plants.
But it’s key to note that getting to take off will be really, really expensive — the DOE projects that it will take $20 billion to $25 billion to get geothermal ready for a commercial breakout by 2030. Geothermal’s breakthrough isn’t assured, but it’s on the cusp of takeoff. If the necessary financial investments are made, and companies can show that advances in technology can be scaled up beyond the western US, it could usher in the age of a geothermal energy revolution. —Sam Delgado, former Future Perfect fellow
Raymond Ward wants to see solar panels draped over every balcony in the United States and doesn’t understand why that isn’t happening.
The technology couldn’t be easier to use — simply hang one or two panels over a railing and plug them into an outlet. The devices provide up to 800 watts, enough to charge a laptop or power a small fridge. They’re popular in Germany, where everyone from renters to climate activists to gadget enthusiasts hail them as a cheap and easy way to generate electricity. Germans had registered more than 780,000 of the devices with the country’s utility regulator as of December. They’ve installed millions more without telling the government.
Here in the U.S., though, there is no market for balcony solar. Ward, a Republican state representative in Utah who learned about the tech last year, wants that to change. The way he sees it, this is an obvious solution to surging power demand. “You look over there and say, ‘Well, that’s working,’” he told Grist. “So what is it that stops us from having it here?”
His colleagues agree. Last month, the Legislature unanimously passed a bill he sponsored to boost the tech, and Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed it. H.B. 340 exempts portable solar devices from state regulations that require owners of rooftop solar arrays and other power-generating systems to sign an interconnection agreement with their local utility. These deals, and other “soft costs” like permits, can nearly double the price of going solar.
Utah’s law marks the nation’s first significant step to remove barriers to balcony solar — but bigger obstacles remain. Regulations and standards governing electrical devices haven’t kept pace with development of the technology, and it lacks essential approvals required for adoption — including compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories. Nothing about the bill Ward wrote changes that: Utahans still can’t install balcony solar because none of the systems have been nationally certified.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems. The initial standard was followed by revised versions in 2018 and 2019 that further outlined technical requirements.
The regulatory structure has continued to evolve. Ofenheusle has worked with other advocates to amend grid safety standards, create simple online registration for plug-in devices, and enshrine renters’ right to balcony solar. Politicians supported such efforts because they see the tech easing the nation’s reliance on Russian natural gas. Cities like Berlin and Munich have provided millions of euros in subsidies to help households buy these systems, and the country is creating a safety standard for batteries that can store the energy for later use.
Balcony solar systems feature one or two small photovoltaic panels and a microinverter and generate enough power to charge a laptop or power a small fridge.
Tobias Schwarz / AFP via Getty
Meanwhile, the United States has yet to take the first step of creating a safety standard for the technology. U.S. electrical guidelines don’t account for the possibility of plugging a power-generating device into a household outlet. The nation also operates on a different system that precludes simply copying and pasting Germany’s rules. The U.S. grid, for example, operates at 120 volts, while that country’s grid operates at 230 volts.
Without proper standards, a balcony solar system could pose several hazards.
One concern is a phenomenon called breaker masking. Within a home, a single circuit can provide power to several outlets. Each circuit is equipped with a circuit breaker, a safety device within the electrical panel that shuts off power if that circuit is overloaded, which happens when too many appliances try to draw too much electricity at the same time. That prevents overheating or a fire. When a balcony solar device sends power into a circuit while other appliances are drawing power from the circuit, the breaker can’t detect that added power supply. If the circuit becomes overloaded — imagine turning on your TV while a space heater is running and you’re charging your laptop, all in the same room — the circuit breaker might fail to activate.
This was a concern in Germany, so it developed standards that limit balcony solar units to just 800 watts, about half the amount used by a hairdryer. That threshold is considered low enough that even in the country’s oldest homes, the wiring can withstand the heating that occurs in even the worst of worst-case scenarios, said Sebastian Müller, chair of the German Balcony Solar Association, a consumer education and advocacy group. As a result, Ofenheusle said there haven’t been any cases of breaker masking causing harm. In fact, with millions of the devices installed nationwide, Germany has yet to see any safety issues beyond a few cases where someone tampered with the devices to add a car battery or other unsuitable hardware, he said.
Another issue in the U.S. is the lack of a compatible safety device called a ground fault circuit interrupter, or a GFCI. They are typically built into outlets installed near water sources, like a sink, washing machine, or bathtub. They’re designed to minimize the risk of electric shock by cutting off power when, for example, a hairdryer falls into a sink. Yet there are no certified GFCI outlets in the U.S. designed for use with devices that consume power, like a blender, and those that generate it, like a balcony solar setup. Germany’s equivalent of a GFCI, called a residual current device, can detect bidirectional power flows, said Andreas Schmitz, a mechanical engineer and YouTuber in Germany who makes videos about balcony solar.
Some people have raised concerns about the shock risk of touching the metal prongs of a plug after unplugging a balcony solar device. German regulators accounted for that by requiring the microinverter — which converts currents from the panel into electricity fed into the home — shut down immediately in an outage or when it is suddenly unplugged. Most of them already have this feature, but any U.S. standard will likely need to formalize that requirement.
The lack of an Underwriters Laboratories, or UL, standard is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the adoption of balcony solar. The company certifies the safety of thousands of household electrical products; according to Iowa State University, “every light bulb, lamp, or outlet purchased in the U.S. usually has a UL symbol and says UL Listed.” This assures customers that the product follows nationally recognized guidelines and can be used without the risk of a fire or shock.
While some companies have sold plug-in solar devices in the U.S. without a UL listing, the company’s seal of approval typically is a prerequisite for selling products on the wider market. Consumers might be wary of using something that lacks its approval. Utah’s new balcony solar policy, for example, specifies that the law applies only to UL-listed products.
Achim Ginsberg-Klemmt, vice president of engineering at the plug-in solar startup GismoPower, has been working on creating such a standard for more than a year and a half. In 2023, the Department of Energy awarded his company a grant to work with UL to develop a standard.
GismoPower sells a mobile carport with a roof of solar panels and an integrated electric vehicle charger. Unlike rooftop solar, the system doesn’t need to be mounted in place but can be rolled onto a driveway and plugged in, generating electricity for the car, house, and the grid. “We’re basically taking rooftop solar to the next level” by making it portable and accessible for renters, Ginsberg-Klemmt said. The product is in use at pilot sites nationwide, though a lack of standardized rules for plug-in solar has forced the company to negotiate interconnection agreements with local utilities — a time-consuming and sometimes costly process.
GismoPower’s product avoids one of the biggest technical challenges with balcony solar by plugging into a dedicated 240-volt outlet, the kind typically used for dryers. Such an outlet serves a single appliance and uses a dedicated circuit, sidestepping the risk of overloading. But it runs headlong into the same obstacle of lacking a compatible UL standard. Ginsberg-Klemmt is working with researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, other entrepreneurs, and engineers at Underwriters Laboratories to develop such a standard, but it hasn’t been easy. “We have found so many roadblocks,” he told Grist.
One major sticking point is that any standard must comply with the National Electrical Code, a set of guidelines for electrical wiring in buildings that does not allow for the installation of plug-in energy systems like balcony solar. The rules are issued by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit trade association, and adopted on a state-by-state basis.
The code is updated every three years, with the next iteration due later this year for the 2026 edition. Ginsberg-Klemmt and his working group submitted recommendations for amending the code to allow plug-in solar — and every one of them was rejected in October.
Jeff Sargent, the National Fire Protection Association’s staff liaison to the National Electrical Code committee, told Grist that this is the first time the organization had received public comments about plug-in solar systems. For now, it cannot consider amendments to allow their use until a compatible ground fault circuit interrupter exists, he said. Once that’s available, he said, the association can ensure that outdoor outlets can be safely used for balcony solar.
Electrical standards are constantly evolving, and it often takes more than one cycle of code changes to allow for new products, said Sargent. Ginsberg-Klemmt said his group will continue to pursue other avenues to amend the codes.
Until that happens, a UL standard for plug-in solar is unlikely to go anywhere. But interest in plug-in energy solutions isn’t going away, and decision-makers will have to adjust to that reality eventually, Ward said. It happened in Germany, where people across the political spectrum have embraced the technology. Ward believes the same thing will happen here. The way he sees it, “It’s just a good thing if you set up a system so people have a way to take care of as much of their own problems as they can.”
The British government says a new state-owned renewable energy company will not be allowed to source solar panels made with Chinese slave labor.
The government announced Wednesday that it will introduce an amendment to ensure that the planned company, Great British Energy, will not have slavery in its supply chains.
China is the dominant global player in the renewable energy market including solar energy. The BBC cited customs data that Britain imports more than 40% of its solar photovoltaics from China.
A key component is polysilicon sourced from the Xinjiang region in China’s far west, where minority Uyghur Muslims have faced persecution including use of their forced labor.
In 2021, the U.S. Labor Department listed polysilicon as a product made with forced labor in China in violation of international standards.
The British government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer had initially rejected an amendment to the Great British Energy Bill to include provisions to prevent purchase of solar panels made with slave labor.
However, on Wednesday, it changed track.
“Great British Energy will act to secure supply chains that are free of forced labor, under an amendment brought forward by the government today,” the Department of Energy Security said in a news release.
It said a new measure in the bill “will enable the company to ensure that forced labor does not take place in its business or its supply chains.”
The opposition Conservative Party described it as a “humiliating U-turn” for Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, but it was also supported by some members of the ruling Labour Party.
Rahima Mahmut, executive director of the activist group Stop Uyghur Genocide, welcomed the amendment, posting on X that it was a “massive step toward justice.”
Forced labor is on a long list of serious human rights problems that have been documented in Xinjiang and is cited along with the incarceration of an estimated 1.8 million people in detention camps since 2017 and forced birth control by the U.S. government and others as evidence of genocide of the Uyghurs.
China denies the rights abuses.
Edited by Mat Pennington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.
In March, in a thunderous op-ed in Power Magazine, a trade publication covering the electricity industry, Republican senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee called for President Donald Trump to make some major institutional changes in the Tennessee Valley Authority, America’s biggest public utility.
A couple months earlier, TVA’s CEO Jeff Lyash had announced his retirement. When the board of directors, whose seats are appointed by the president, chose Lyash’s successor, they selected someone from among the utilities current staff — Don Moul, who had been the executive vice president and chief operating officer since 2021. Blackburn and Hagerty expressed concern over the utility’s direction and leadership, saying a new direction was needed if it was to move quickly on building nuclear technology and lead “America’s Nuclear Renaissance.”
“With the right courageous leadership, TVA could lead the way in our nation’s nuclear energy revival, empower us to dominate the 21st century’s global technology competition, and cement President Trump’s legacy as ‘America’s Nuclear President,’” the senators wrote.
“As it stands now,” the senators continued, “TVA and its leadership can’t carry the weight of this moment.”
Blackburn and Hagerty called for Moul’s replacement, intimated a need for reframing the focus of the board, and demanded a stronger focus on development of small modular nuclear reactors, which are purported to be safer, easier to build, and cheaper to run than larger nuclear plants, though only China and Russia have successfully built SMRs to date.
“If we, as a nation, fail to meet this moment,” they wrote, “American leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, and the ability to win conventional wars will be put at risk. If we choose to lead, a Golden Age lies ahead.”
About a week after the op-ed was published, President Trump fired two members of the board — including the chair. It appeared as though the senators were getting what they wanted. But the move may end up backfiring.
Under its prior leadership, the TVA was already moving toward an expansion of nuclear power. During the Biden administration, which touted nuclear as a key ingredient of its decarbonization plans, the TVA marketed itself as a clean energy leader, pointing to its massive fleet of hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants. Lyash was a proponent of nuclear power. He sat on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute and oversaw plans to build a new small modular reactor in TVA territory.
Now, though, according to Simon Mahan, the executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, the recent changes could slow down any movement toward new nuclear plants rather than, as Blackburn and Hagerty hope, speed it up. The TVA’s board is operating without the quorum it needs to make major decisions, including electing a new board chairperson and approving new energy projects — like, for instance, a nuclear plant.
“There are some real concerns that TVA’s plan is not matching up with their implementation, and it will be even harder for that to be synced up without a full functioning board,” Mahan said.
Some observers say that such concerns have to do with an inability to learn from TVA’s own history.
“Tennessee has a long and troubled history when it comes to nuclear energy,” said Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which opposes nuclear energy, preferring renewables as a cheaper and more quickly deployable option.
In the 1960s, about 30 years after the TVA was founded, it planned to build 17 nuclear power plants. Compared to the private utilities, the TVA seemed like a natural fit for the development of nuclear energy: It was easier for a public utility to take on the risk of the long, expensive construction periods without the need for immediate profit. But during the oil crisis of the 1970s and after the Three Mile Island disaster, the political support for nuclear power dissipated. Only seven of the plants that TVA planned for were completed — three of which are active today. The utility is still paying off billions in debt from the partially completed construction of reactors that simply never came online.
Nuclear plants are extremely expensive to build, they are risky investments for the private sector, and they require huge trained workforces and the coordination of many players with different interests, including reactor designers, construction firms, utility companies, regulators, and customers. For nuclear advocates, it’s an open question whether the Trump administration’s energy officials recognize the scale of the state-led effort that would be required to achieve their purported ambition for a nuclear revival — so far, there are few indications that they do. Aside from the personnel troubles at the TVA, firings at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office and President Trump’s newly announced tariffs could also hobble an expansion of nuclear plants in Tennessee and throughout the country.
Despite the growing bipartisan political consensus in favor of nuclear energy, only two new U.S. plants have been built in the last three decades — two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which were completed last year, after long delays and at a cost so enormous they contributed to the bankruptcy of their designer. A $9 billion project in South Carolina to build a pair of the same reactors was abandoned in 2017 before its completion. Multiple project executives were convicted of fraud and sent to prison.
The completion of the Vogtle expansion project cemented a belief among some nuclear advocates that the primary obstacle to a nuclear build-out was perhaps no longer the environmental regulations many had long seen as the main roadblock, but rather a problem of the decline of American industrial capacity. Now that Vogtle is completed, though, some in the nuclear industry hope that the ingredients are in place for that project’s knowledge and workforce to kick-start similar projects in other states.
The costs, however, may still just be too high. “I see a lot of people who want to somehow find a way to get around the cost problem,” said John Parsons, an economist at MIT who studies investment in energy markets. But he suggested that pinning hopes for a nuclear revival on individual states’ willingness to shoulder the burden and risks of paying for another reactor ignores the necessity of state-driven funding and coordination of the kind that TVA could be particularly well positioned to administer — if it’s returned to its roots as a national incubator for energy innovation.
TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks told Grist that the agency’s plans for a new small modular reactor are moving forward. The utility plans to apply for additional Department of Energy funding for the project, supplemented with private funding.
Among the main vehicles that the Biden administration used to defray costs for nuclear investment — notably including billions in loan guarantees for the new reactors at Plant Vogtle — was the Loan Programs Office, or LPO; under Trump, staffing at that office is being decimated. The news outlet Heatmap reported that about half of the LPO’s staff have requested to take a buyout in anticipation of future layoffs orchestrated by Elon Musk’s initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency.
Added to the high costs of nuclear development are the economic uncertainties caused by President Trump’s tariffs, which are likely not only to drive up costs for imported materials like steel, but also to dissuade private-sector investment.
“We might be moving into an environment where people are shy about investing in major infrastructure projects because there’s so much uncertainty now about what the inputs are going to be for such a project,” said Emmet Penney, an energy researcher at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning think tank.
“In that case, the fact that the LPO can get long-term, low-interest loans for these projects is going to be vital to getting people comfortable getting to the table and agreeing to build these projects,” Penney continued. “If there isn’t that guarantee, we could see even private capital dry up for both traditional nuclear and for small modular reactors.”
According to Brooks, the TVA spokesperson, President Trump’s tariffs will not have much of an effect on the utility’s current operations. The majority of TVA’s economic activity, Brooks said, “is domestic — most based within the Tennessee Valley.” He preferred not to speculate on the tariff situation a decade from now, when the first of TVA’s new SMRs is set to be complete.
But developing nuclear power plants does tend to require an international supply chain. Even if the TVA is all set for now, much of the nuclear supply chain is deeply tied in with international markets. A 2022 DOE report shows connections between the U.S. nuclear industry and manufacturers in countries like Japan, China, France, and Germany. There is also a continual need for critical minerals, most of which are mined outside the United States — China once again being among the dominant suppliers. Uranium and a large number of critical minerals may be exempted from Trump’s tariffs currently, but other materials, such as basic construction components like steel, are not.
State Representative Aftyn Behn, a Democrat, supports diversifying the utility’s energy portfolio, but, looking toward the future, is more concerned about transparency and accountability.
“There’s some bipartisan interest in ‘advanced nuclear,’” Behn told Grist. But, she continued, “the Republican supermajority isn’t interested in a good-faith energy debate. They’re interested in handing TVA over to big utilities and fossil fuel donors, locking us into expensive, inflexible systems with no public oversight.”
A forthcoming Supreme Court decision is poised to weaken a bedrock law that requires federal agencies to study the potential environmental impacts of major projects.
The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, concerns a proposed 88-mile railroad that would link an oil-producing region of Utah to tracks that reach refineries in the Gulf Coast. Environmental groups and a Colorado county argued that the federal Surface Transportation Board failed to adequately consider climate, pollution, and other effects as required under the National Environmental Protection Act, or NEPA, in approving the project. In 2023, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the challengers. The groups behind the railway project, including several Utah counties, appealed the case to the highest court, which is expected to hand down a decision within the next few months.
Court observers told Grist the Supreme Court will likely rule in favor of the railway developers, with consequences far beyond Utah. The court could limit the scope of environmental harms federal agencies have to consider under NEPA, including climate impacts. Depending on how the justices rule, the decision could also bolster — or constrain — parallel moves by the Trump administration to roll back decades-old regulations governing how NEPA is implemented.
“All of these rollbacks and attacks on NEPA are going to harm communities, especially those that are dealing with the worst effects of climate change and industrial pollution,” said Wendy Park, senior attorney at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, a party in the Supreme Court case.
Since 1970, NEPA has required federal agencies to take a “hard look” at the environmental effects of proposed major projects or actions. Oil and gas pipelines, dams, mines, highways, and other infrastructure projects must undergo an environmental study before they can get federal permits, for example. Agencies consider measures to reduce potential impacts during their review and can even reject a proposal if the harms outweigh the benefits.
NEPA ensures that environmental concerns are “part of the agenda” for all federal agencies — even ones that don’t otherwise focus on the environment, said Dan Farber, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley. It’s also a crucial tool for communities to understand how a project will affect them and provide input during the decision-making process, according to Park.
Oil tanker railway cars in Albany, New York, in 2014. John Carl D’Annibale / Albany Times Union via Getty Images
In 2021, the Surface Transportation Board, a small federal agency that oversees railways, approved a line that would connect the Uinta Basin to the national rail network. The basin, which contains large deposits of crude oil, spans about 12,000 square miles across northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado and is currently accessible only by truck. The proposed track would allow companies to transport crude oil to existing refineries along the Gulf Coast, quadrupling waxy crude oil production in the basin. According to the agency’s environmental review, under a high oil production scenario, burning those fuels “could represent up to approximately 0.8 percent of nationwide emissions and 0.1 percent of global emissions” — about 30 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Environmental groups and a Colorado county challenged the board’s approval at the D.C. Circuit Court. The groups argued that the agency had failed to consider key impacts in its NEPA review, including the effects of increased oil refining on communities already burdened by pollution along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas, and the potential for more oil spills and wildfires along the broader rail network. In August 2023, the D.C. Circuit largely agreed, finding “numerous NEPA violations” in the agency’s environmental review.
In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the developers of the railway initially argued that an agency shouldn’t have to consider any environmental effects of a project that would fall under the responsibility of a different agency. In this case, for example, the Surface Transportation Board wouldn’t have to consider air pollution impacts of oil refining on Gulf Coast communities because the Environmental Protection Agency, not the Surface Transportation Board, regulates air pollution.
By oral arguments in December, however, the railway backers had walked away from this drastic interpretation, which contradicts decades of NEPA precedent. It’s standard practice for one agency’s environmental review to study impacts that fall under the responsibility of other agencies, said Deborah Sivas, a law professor at Stanford University. The railway proponents instead proposed that agencies shouldn’t have to consider impacts that fall outside of their authority and are“remote in time and space.” That would include the effects on Gulf Coast communities residing thousands of miles away — as well as climate impacts like greenhouse gas emissions.
Park, from the Center for Biological Diversity, argued that overlooking those impacts would undermine the intent of NEPA, which is to inform the public of likely harms. “The entire purpose of this project is to ramp up oil production in Utah and to deliver that oil to Gulf Coast refineries,” she said. “To effectively allow the agency to turn a blind eye to that purpose and ignore all of the predictable environmental harms that would result from that ramped-up oil production and downstream refining is antithetical to NEPA’s purpose.”
Lawyers for the railway’s developers didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment. A coalition of Utah counties backing the project has previously underlined the economic potential of the project. “We are optimistic about the Supreme Court’s review and confident in the thorough environmental assessments conducted by the STB,” said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, said in a statement after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. “This project is vital for the economic growth and connectivity of the Uinta Basin region, and we are committed to seeing it through.”
The Supreme Court has historically always ruled in favor of the government in NEPA cases, and legal experts told Grist the decision will likely support the railway developers in some manner. But during oral arguments, several justices seemed skeptical of positions presented by railway supporters. Chief Justice John Roberts noted that imposing such severe limits on NEPA review could open agencies up to legal risk.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts poses for an official portrait in 2022.
Alex Wong / Getty Images
The court could reach some kind of middle ground in its decision — not going as far as the D.C. Circuit to affirm the legitimacy of considering a wide range of climate and other risks, but also not excluding as many impacts as the railway developers had hoped, said Farber.
Any decision will ultimately serve as an important guide for agencies as the Trump administration introduces even more uncertainty in the federal permitting process. In February, the administration issued an interim rule to rescind regulations issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees NEPA implementation across the federal government. The council’s rules have guided agencies in applying the law for nearly five decades. Now, Trump officials have left it up to each individual agency to develop its own regulations by next February.
In developing those standards, agencies will likely look to the Supreme Court’s decision, legal experts said. “What the Supreme Court rules here could be a very important guide as to how agencies implement NEPA and how they fashion their regulations interpreting NEPA,” said Park. If the court rules that agencies don’t need to consider climate impacts in NEPA reviews, for example, that could make it easier for Trump appointees to ignore greenhouse gas emissions, said Sivas. The White House has already instructed agencies not to include environmental justice impacts in their assessments.
On the other hand, a more nuanced opinion by the Supreme Court could end up undercutting efforts by the Trump administration to limit the scope of environmental reviews, said Farber. If justices end up affirming the need to consider certain impacts of the Utah railway project, for example, that could limit how much agencies under Trump can legally avoid evaluating particular effects. Agencies need to design regulations that will withstand challenges in lower courts — which will inevitably rely on the Supreme Court’s ruling when deciding on NEPA challenges moving forward.
In the meantime, however, legal experts say that Trump’s decision to have each agency create its own NEPA regulations will create even more chaos and uncertainty, even as the administration seeks to “expedite and simplify the permitting process” through sweeping reforms.
“I think that’s going to just slow down the process more and cause more confusion, and not really serve their own goals,” said Farber.
Just before the November 2024 election, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its flagship annual report on global energy markets – and the agency’s forecast suggested a new era was dawning.
Over 150 years of growth in demand for fossil fuels has nearly reached its end, the IEA’s forecasts showed for a second year in a row. Fossil fuel demand will peak by the end of this decade, the organization affirmed, concluding that clean energy like wind, solar, and storage look increasingly capable of driving fossil fuels out of global energy markets – and soon.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has spent years talking with people living in rural parts of the country who have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs and shuttered coal mines. They’re the very people President Donald Trump argues will benefit most from his sweeping wave of tariffs and recent executive orders aimed at reviving coal mining in the US. But Hochschild is skeptical that Trump’s policies will actually benefit those in rural America. But Hochschild argues that Trump’s policies will only fill an emotional need for those in rural America.
In her latest book, Stolen Pride, Hochschild visited Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city in Appalachia where coal jobs were leaving, opioids were arriving, and a white supremacist march was being planned. The more she talked to people, the more she saw how Trump played on their shame and pride about their downward mobility and ultimately used that to his political advantage. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with Hochschild about the long slide of downward mobility in rural America and why she thinks Trump’s policies ultimately won’t benefit his most core supporters.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson Donate today at Revealnews.org/more
Last year, the Boston Community Solar Cooperative announced plans for its first community solar project: 81 kilowatts of panels atop an affordable housing complex in a low-income, historically Black Boston neighborhood. The success of the project depends, in large part, on tax credits the Inflation Reduction Act established in 2022. Because the solar panels will sit on a subsidized apartment building in a low-income community, up to 50 percent of the project’s cost could ultimately be recouped through tax credits. But, in all likelihood, once the project’s completed, the Boston Community Solar Cooperative won’t actually receive those credits — and that’s by design.
Instead, the cooperative intends to sell its tax credits as soon as it can, said Gregory King, the organization’s president. This will bring in more cash early on, reduce the amount of debt required, and improve the financial outlook of the project.
In the past, a scheme like this would have required whoever purchased the credits to retain an ownership stake in the project for at least five years — an unthinkable prospect for a cooperative that aims to provide its member-owners, primarily Black and brown residents of disinvested areas of Boston, with a modest passive income from the energy generated by the panels. But the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, not only revamped old tax credits and introduced fresh ones, it also made these credits transferable. In other words, anyone developing a clean energy project who didn’t have enough tax liability to take full advantage of the tax credits could sell them to a company that did, without ceding ownership.
This change has enabled countless clean energy projects to get off the ground. Wind farms, geothermal plants, large-scale battery facilities, electric vehicle charging banks, manufacturing projects, and even mining operations for critical minerals have all taken advantage of the tax credits markets that emerged and matured in just a year and a half after transferability went into effect. Crux Climate, one of the companies that built a platform to facilitate tax credit transfers, estimates that $24 billion worth of IRA-related credits were exchanged in 2024 alone.
A worker carries a solar panel for rooftop installation in Las Vegas in 2023.
David Becker for the Washington Post via Getty Images
“Before the IRA passed, it was very difficult for a lot of renewable energy developers to take full advantage of the tax credits,” said Charles Harper, a senior policy lead with the climate advocacy nonprofit Evergreen Action.
This is because tax credits work as a form of discount on a business or individual’s annual tax bill, allowing them to cut a chunk out of what they owe the government based on the dollar value of the credit. This can save a lot of money — if you owe enough taxes in the first place. “Tax credits are only good if you have enough tax liability that you owe the government to remove,” Harper said.
The IRA made it easier for project developers without major tax liabilities, like the Boston Community Solar Cooperative, to sell their credits at a discount before breaking ground on a solar or wind project. This allows the developers to bring in much-needed cash to pay for equipment and labor. Meanwhile, buyers — which can include banks, companies, and even some high net-worth individuals — get an additional write-off on their own hefty tax statements.
It was technically possible to shift tax credits from one entity to another before the IRA, but the process was complicated and onerous, meaning very few players had the appetite to sell or buy credits. “The largest banks make up the overwhelming share of that market,” said Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux Climate. This limited how many developers could actually sell their tax credits and often made the deals inaccessible to small developers and community-based projects.
“Transferability was a godsend in many ways, because it simplified the process,” said Derek Silverman, co-founder of Basis Climate, another site for trading tax credits.
Before a clean energy developer can list a credit for sale on an exchange like Crux Climate, they must first get their credits pre-approved by the Treasury Department. To do so, they need to submit paperwork showing that they control the site where the project will be developed and that they have a contract with a customer who will purchase the electricity once it’s flowing.
The process isn’t frictionless, but it’s no longer as difficult as it was before the IRA. Now, instead of navigating complex legal agreements to move tax credits from developer to investor, “it’s like going and buying a Walmart gift card for 85 cents on the dollar,” said Jon Abe, CEO of the clean energy investment firm Sunwealth, “but with a lot more paperwork.”
That 85-cents-on-the-dollar discount is what attracts buyers to these markets. On Crux Climate’s platform, the actual per-dollar markdown shifts based on the size of the transaction, from 89 cents or less for the smallest deals to 95 cents for the largest.
But even if the developers of smaller projects sell their tax credits for a deeper discount, it can still make a pronounced impact. Based on King’s estimates, Boston Community Solar Cooperative could bring in around $150,000 from its tax credit sales. And last year, Basis Climate helped the solar service provider Navajo Power Home sell credits for $355,000 to support a project that is bringing solar and battery systems to Navajo Nation and providing electricity to more than 100 homes that would otherwise have to rely on diesel generators.
“Solar is pretty capital-intensive. So to the degree that you could use someone else’s money and not have to take on debt to bring that capital to your project,” King said, “you’re much more likely to have projects that pencil,” or make financial sense.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks to reporters after the House passed a Republican blueprint for budget reconciliation in early April. Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
In addition to making material improvements in disadvantaged communities, the transferable tax credits have spurred private investments that create jobs and expand domestic manufacturing, all while helping big businesses lighten their tax load. Yet these tax credits are under threat as congressional Republicans work through budget reconciliation, a special legislative process that allows Congress to fast-track spending legislation and bypass the Senate filibuster. (The IRA itself was adopted through budget reconciliation.)
Right now, the main priority for Republicans in this process is extending tax cuts worth $4.5 trillion over a decade that would primarily benefit the wealthy, and reducing federal spending by at least $1.5 trillion to make up some of the difference. It’s not yet clear what might get cut, but the IRA tax credits are being considered. In February, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that his approach to repealing the IRA would “be somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.”
But an estimated 85 percent of IRA-related investments have flowed into Republican districts, inspiring four Senate Republicans to come out in favor of the tax credits this month. This came after nearly two dozen House Republicans co-signed a letter in March in defense of the law’s tax provisions. “If at least a handful of those 21 House members are serious about protecting investment and jobs in their districts that the [IRA tax credits] are providing,” said Harper, “then that would be huge.”
New York City’s second largest utility is being sued in federal court for the alleged inappropriate handling of at least 77 tons of radioactive waste at a 120-acre site located in Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough.
The radioactive waste, as well as other hazardous coal waste, is a leftover of a bygone era, more than a century ago, when the parcel was the location of Equity Works, a manufactured gas plant (MGP) that derived gas from heating coal, and then piped it across the city to power lighting, cooking, and heating.
Cooper Tank & Welding, which purchased the site from London-based National Grid in 1987, is seeking “no less than $2,000,000” in damages, charging in its lawsuit that the multinational electric and gas utility’s “negligent operating and waste management practices resulted in contamination” from “concentrated radioactive materials,” as well as “coal tar and other hazardous substances.”
The Centennial State may become first in the nation to require retailers to warn consumers that burning fossil fuels “releases air pollutants and greenhouse gases, known by the state of Colorado to be linked to significant health impacts and global heating.”
The warning is the linchpin of a bill — HB25-1277 — that narrowly passed the state House on April 2 and is scheduled to be heard in the Senate’s Transportation & Energy Committee this week. Its Democratic sponsors say the bill will raise awareness among consumers that combusting gas in their vehicles creates pollutants that harm their health and trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to more intense and extreme weather, wildfires and drought.
The groundbreaking measure would require retailers to place warning labels printed in black ink on a white background in English and Spanish in no smaller than 16-point type on fuel pumps and “in a conspicuous location” near displays offering petroleum-based goods for sale.
Proponents compare the stickers to warnings labels on cigarettes that scientific evidence found motivated consumers to reconsider the health impacts of smoking.
The labeling bill is backed by environmental groups, including 350 Colorado and the Sierra Club, and opposed by gas stations, chambers of commerce and energy trade associations. About 136 lobbyist registrations were filed with the secretary of state in the position of support, opposition, or monitoring — a benchmark of the measure’s divisiveness.
“The bill, as you’ve heard, seeks to drive systemic change and to help us meet our greenhouse gas emission goals,” state Rep. Junie Joseph (D-Boulder), a sponsor, testified at a House Energy & Environment Committee hearing on March 6. “Colorado is actively working to reduce emissions to comply with the Clean Air Act and state climate targets.”
Colorado is on track to meet greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 26 percent by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030, over 2005 levels — albeit a year late for each period mandated under state law, according to a November report compiled by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Colorado Energy Office.
Yet the state is woefully behind in its compliance with federal air quality standards. Emissions from energy industry operations and gas-powered vehicles are the main drivers of the nine-county metropolitan Denver region’s failure to clean up its air over the last two decades. The state’s largest cities rank among the 25 worst in the nation for lung-damaging ozone pollution.
Several days before the labeling bill passed the House, the state’s health department said it planned to ask the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to downgrade its air quality for the second time in a year. The request is intended to give regulators more time to draw up a plan to reduce pollutants that cause a toxic haze that blurs the Rocky Mountains from May to September.
Colorado repeatedly touts its “nation-leading” greenhouse gas emissions reduction laws targeting oil and gas production, as well as requirements that utilities transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Yet to make long-term progress toward a state mandate to cut emissions 100 percent by 2050, officials need residents to drive less and carpool and take public transit more. The bill’s sponsors cited a first-in-the-nation labeling law in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, as proof such initiatives work.
The Cambridge City Council enacted its greenhouse gas label law in 2020. City inspectors affix about 116 bright yellow stickers that read: “Warning. Burning Gasoline, Diesel and Ethanol has major consequences on human health and on the environment including contributing to climate change” in pump bays at 19 gas stations annually, along with inspection stickers, Jeremy Warnick, a city spokesman, wrote in an email.
Early research into the impacts of Cambridge’s labeling law suggest that peer pressure that results from one person seeing a label on a gas pump and telling friends about it at a party can indeed motivate people to reconsider their transportation choices. A measure instituted in Sweden in 2021 that requires labels depicting each fuel grade’s impact on the climate to be installed on gas pumps produced similar results.
The warning stickers communicate to people as they’re pumping gas that others in their community acknowledge petroleum products create emissions that are warming the planet, said Gregg Sparkman, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College.
Sparkman’s research found Americans function in a state of “pluralistic ignorance,” essentially “walking around thinking others don’t care about climate change.”
A study he co-authored in Nature in 2022 found that most Americans “underestimate the prevalence of support for climate change mitigation policies.” While 66 percent to 80 percent of people approve of such measures, Americans estimate the prevalence to be between 37 percent and 43 percent, on average, data showed. Warning labels can cut through this apathy, he said.
“These signs chip away at the mirage — they become one of hopefully many signals that an increasing number of Americans regard this as an emergency that requires urgent action out of government, citizens and everybody,” he said.
In Colorado, gas station owners, as well as representatives of retail trade organizations and the American Petroleum Institute, among others, testified against the labeling bill at the three-hour March 6 House energy committee hearing, calling the legislation an “unfunded mandate” that would “shame consumers” and target retailers with “exorbitant fines.” Some warned it would make gas prices rise.
The law would require convenience stores to design, buy and affix the labels and to keep them in good condition. If a consumer reported a defaced decal to the state Attorney General’s Office, a store owner could face a $20,000 penalty per violation — standard for violations under the Consumer Protection Act. An amendment added on the House floor would provide retailers with 45 days to fix a problem with a label.
“The gas pump itself is already cluttered with words, numbers, prices, colors, buttons and payment mechanisms,” Angie Howes, a lobbyist representing Kum & Go, which owns Maverik convenience stores, testified at the committee hearing. “The message will likely be lost in the noise and we question the impact of such a label toward the proponents’ goals.”
Republican and Democratic committee members alike expressed concern about the fines, asking bill sponsors to consider reducing them.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, or CDPHE, also opposed the measure, citing the state’s efforts to make it easier and cheaper for Coloradoans to reduce their energy use by taking advantage of electric vehicle and heat pump subsidies, among other voluntary measures.
Colorado is already first in the nation in market share of new EVs, Lindsay Ellis, the agency’s director of legislative affairs, testified.
“This bill presupposes that awareness alone is an effective strategy for changing behavior and does so at the liability and expense of small businesses like gas stations,” she said. “We should continue to focus on solutions with measurable emissions reductions to improve air quality.”
Gov. Jared Polis also appears dubious of the measure’s ability to effect long-term change. When contacted by Capital & Main for comment, spokesperson Eric Maruyama cited legislative and administrative strategies that have “cut hundreds of millions of metric tons of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 2010.”
“Like CDPHE, Governor Polis is committed to protecting Colorado’s clean air and reducing pollution through proven strategies that are good for the environment, good for consumers, and that empower Colorado businesses and individuals to take meaningful action that improves public health,” Maruyama wrote in an email. “Governor Polis is skeptical of labeling requirements and will review any legislation that reaches his desk.”
Doctors and scientists who testified at the House energy committee hearing on March 6 disagreed.
“I take care of children living in some of the most polluted zip codes in the country, and I can tell you firsthand that burning fossil fuels is making them sick,” Dr. Clare Burchenal, a Denver pediatrician, told the committee.
“Warning labels can connect the abstract threat of a climate emergency with fossil fuel use in the here and now — my patients and their families have a right to know how the products they’re using are impacting their health.”
Last week, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed into law a bill that packaged together dozens of reforms to utility regulations. Among them was a provision called “construction work in progress,” or CWIP, which allows power companies to bill their customers for the costs of building power plants during their construction phase, rather than after they are completed and generating electricity. The law repeals an earlier ban on CWIP passed via a ballot referendum that Missouri voters, concerned about the then-mounting costs of nuclear plants, initiated in 1976.
In states with traditional, vertically integrated energy markets, the utility companies that distribute electricity to homes and businesses also build the power plants that supply them. Their profit models are based on collecting a return on their capital investments at a fixed rate set by state commissions, paid for through customers’ electricity bills.
Where CWIP comes in is in answering the question of when this money should be collected: during construction, or only after the project is “used and useful.”
Missouri’s new law appears to be part of a wave of similar policies passed or introduced in several state legislatures. Last month, the neighboring state of Arkansas passed a law that included a CWIP policy. Last year, Mississippi’s legislature passed a law that included CWIP-like provisions (though it didn’t use that name for the policy). Another law passed last year in Kansas allowed CWIP cost recovery for gas plants. And a bill currently moving through the North Carolina legislature expands the use of CWIP for new nuclear and natural gas plants.
The Missouri bill’s sponsors, Senator Mike Cierpiot and Representative Josh Hurlbert, justified the CWIP provisions in interviews with The Beacon, a Kansas City nonprofit outlet, on the basis that it didn’t apply to nuclear plants, but only to gas generation — and therefore would be less risky. Hurlbert said CWIP “is not going to be used on anything nuclear like we’ve seen with some projects in Georgia and South Carolina,” even though the language of the bill leaves room for the possibility of a nuclear plant being financed by CWIP under certain conditions.
Cierpiot told The Beacon that a clawback provision in the bill, under which cancellation of a plant forces the companies to pay back customers with interest, disincentivized CWIP’s use for nuclear energy. “That’s fine for gas turbines, because gas turbines don’t get canceled,” he said. “But for a nuclear plant, if they spend four or five billion dollars on a nuclear plant and then they cancel it, all that money is coming back to the consumers. I think that means no company is going to take that risk with the clawbacks we have.”
The argument is sometimes made in favor of CWIP that, if all goes well, charging ratepayers for the cost of building a power plant during its construction saves them money in the long run, because it avoids a scenario in which customers have to pay loan interest if the rate increases are deferred until project completion. Opponents of CWIP policies counter that even if the financing structure reduces costs in the scenario when all goes well, it simultaneously gives power companies enough guaranteed capital to make riskier choices about planning and spending. Under CWIP agreements, customers not only pay for the costs of construction, but also insure utility companies against the risk of delays or cancellations.
CWIP laws first emerged in the 1970s, during a period in which utility companies made the case to legislatures that they needed an alternative model of financing in order to contend with then-rising costs of power-plant construction and predicted growth in power demand, said Ari Peskoe, an expert in electricity law at Harvard Law School. “And then it turned out that the demand just didn’t materialize, for a number of reasons. Electricity demand was increasing like 8 to 10 percent a year, and then it went down to like 3 percent a year.”
This put states where nuclear projects broke ground and then were abandoned in the position of having to answer the difficult question of whether to charge ratepayers for the incomplete work. Those states where CWIP laws had been passed, however, were in a different position: “If you already had CWIP, if you had already been collecting a significant amount of these costs, it changes the calculus, because now ratepayers aren’t going to get that money back. They’ve already paid the billion dollars,” Peskoe said.
A subsequent wave of CWIP policies occurred in the early 2000s. A 2017 investigation by The Post and Courier found that CWIP and similar policies passed in 11 states “ignited a bonfire of risky spending” and financed three of the last decade’s most spectacular energy boondoggles: the Kemper Project, a failed $7.5 billion “clean coal” facility in Mississippi; the V.C. Summer expansion project, a failed $9 billion nuclear plant in South Carolina; and Units 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle — a pair of nuclear reactors in Georgia which did actually get built, but seven years past their deadline and $17 billion over their original budget.
When a CWIP-financed project goes south, ratepayers have little practical guarantee that they can get their money back, said Daniel Tait, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute. “In the case of Mississippi, with Kemper, they did end up taking that money back and charging shareholders, only after lawsuits basically documenting fraud. V.C. Summer did not; even though people went to jail for fraud, customers are still paying for that to this day in South Carolina,” Tait said.
Amid the current crop of CWIP bills, all in Republican-dominated legislatures, one state provides something of a cautionary tale: A bill in the Ohio legislature aims to reverse a prior CWIP policy. The bill comes in the wake of a massive utility bribery scandal that landed the former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives in prison.
Audits of the bribes paid to politicians in that scandal found that the power company FirstEnergy “capitalized a portion of this money as construction work in progress, even though it had nothing to do with building things,” said Dave Anderson, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute. “And it’s kind of still sitting on their books, waiting to be potentially collected from rate payers.”
Some of the recent CWIP bills are more protective of ratepayers than others, and they apply to different generation methods. But despite their differences, all of the bills come at a time when America’s electricity demand is projected to grow dramatically over the next few years because of the expansion of AI. Many states are competing to lure data centers with tax breaks (and with policies like CWIP), while others have so many data centers already planning to break ground that they are desperately augmenting their states’ power grids to accommodate the demand that utilities say is coming.
Crucially, though, there is significant uncertainty around the amount of load growth that will actually materialize from AI. Power companies have limited insight into how much more electricity generation they will actually need to build for, and if they overshoot or undershoot, someone will be stuck with the bill. Who pays for the risk of such a costly error is a consequential question.
“If you have a bunch of prospective load growth, there’s risk on two fronts: One, that it shows up and you’re using mechanisms like CWIP that essentially use captive ratepayers as the piggy bank for the benefit of others that are not paying their fair share,” said Tait, citing the example of a Meta data center in Louisiana whose costs advocates have raised concerns are being passed on to Entergy ratepayers. “The second is, what happens if the load doesn’t show up, the customers have already paid for it, and there’s no way out?”
CWIP policies could also lock in plans that some environmental advocates say might not be the best way to meet growth in electricity demand. “From an environmental standpoint, we want to have flexibility,” said Joshua Basseches, a professor at Tulane University who studies state-level energy and climate policy. “We don’t want just gas plants; we want to have microgrids and demand response and batteries and all this other stuff. But once you pass CWIP and then you start collecting for a plant that isn’t yet operative, it sort of forecloses other possibilities to meet that load in other ways.”
Those other possibilities would also be less profitable for power companies than the mere construction of capital-intensive power plants of the sort that are incentivized by CWIP policies. And to many observers, these industry-friendly bills are no surprise in light of those companies’ vast political and lobbying power in their respective states. Missouri’s governor has received some $400,000 in campaign donations from utility companies, according to an Energy and Policy Institute analysis. And the legislator who sponsored North Carolina’s CWIP bill, which passed the state senate shortly before his retirement, is a former executive at Duke Energy.
Amid trade war talk of expanding Canadian energy infrastructure, a new report reveals that direct Canadian subsidies to the fossil fuel and petrochemical sectors reached nearly $30 billion in 2024.
For comparison’s sake, Canada spent between $38 billion and $39 billion on defense in 2024.
“Oil and gas companies – emboldened by their influence over President Trump – are exploiting the current economic uncertainty to call on governments to double down on fossil fuels,” Julia Levin, associate director of national climate with nonprofit group Environmental Defence, which put out the report, said in a statement.
A first-of-its-kind pilot to electrify homes on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard is set to finish construction in the coming weeks — and it could offer a blueprint for decarbonizing low- and moderate-income households in Massachusetts and beyond.
The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering is designed to be a turnkey program that makes it financially feasible and logistically approachable for households of all income levels to adopt solar panels, heat pumps, and batteries, and to realize the amplified benefits of using the resources together. These technologies slash emissions, reduce utility bills, and increase a home’s resilience during power outages, but are often only adopted by wealthier households due to their upfront cost.
“We are going to be advancing this as a model that should be emulated by other states across the country that are trying to achieve decarbonization goals,” said Todd Olinsky-Paul, senior project director for the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that produced a new report about the program.
In total, the program is providing free or heavily subsidized solar panels and heat pumps to 55 participating households, 12 of which also received batteries at no cost. Work should be completed on the final participating home this month.
“This is the first and only instance where solar and battery storage are being presented in combination with electrification and traditional efficiency,” Olinsky-Paul said. “Instead of having several siloed programs, it’s all being presented to the customer in a package, which makes everything work together better.”
It’s a strategy that program planners hope can help address the disproportionate energy burden felt by lower-income residents of the region, where households making less than one-third of the area median income spent an average of 27 percent of their income on energy as of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. (The updated figure is unavailable because the federal tool that provided this data is no longer live.)
The initiative is a project of the Cape Light Compact, a unique regional organization that negotiates electric supply prices and administers energy-efficiency programming for the 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The compact first proposed the pilot in 2018, but regulators rejected the idea. The organization submitted a revised version in 2020 and 2021, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the state finally gave the program the green light.
An energy-efficiency contractor partners with each program participant to assess their home, then coordinates the necessary work, including any preparations that need to be completed before solar panels, heat pumps, or batteries can be put in. The batteries installed through the program are enrolled in ConnectedSolutions, a state program that pays battery owners who send power to the grid when needed. Because the pilot footed the bill for the batteries, these payments will go to the Cape Light Compact, rather than residents, to help defray the cost of the program.
Bringing the program to life was not always a smooth process. The original proposal called for 100 homes to participate in the pilot, but the final number fell well short of that target. Some homeowners who originally expressed interest were put off by the requirement to remove all fossil fuel systems from their homes, particularly if they had recently invested in new gas or propane heating, said Stephen McCloskey, an analyst with the Cape Light Compact and the program manager for the pilot.
In some cases, homeowners balked at upfront costs. Moderate-income households that did not live in deed-restricted affordable housing had to pay 20 percent of the cost for heat pumps and any cost over $15,000 for solar panels. If a roof was too shady for solar, homeowners were responsible for removing trees and branches.
“At the end of the day, each customer and their decision-making process is different,” McCloskey said.
The original plan called for installing batteries in 25 participants’ homes, but unexpected limitations lowered that number, McCloskey said. Houses without basements, for example, couldn’t receive batteries. In some cases, the combined capacity of solar panels and a battery would have exceeded the local utility’s threshold for connecting a system to the grid.
The compact also had not fully accounted for the array of barriers that needed to be addressed before weatherization could be done. Some homes had mold or needed electrical upgrades. Others required roof work before solar panels could be installed.
These challenges are not dealbreakers but lessons learned for utilities or organizations that attempt to emulate the program in the future, McCloskey said. And Olinsky-Paul sees great potential for similar plans to be pursued nationwide. Nearly half of U.S. states have adopted 100 percent clean energy targets, he said, and distributed-energy programs like the Cape and Vineyard’s can make those goals more achievable by reducing the cost and strain electrification can create for the grid.
“If you’re going to do decarbonization, you have to do electrification,” Olinsky-Paul said. “And so there is going to be a huge need for some way of doing this without inadvertently causing massive new fossil fuel use” to generate more power.
The Cape Light Compact intends to release a full report on the deployment of the pilot in August, but feedback so far has been very positive from participants who appreciate the turnkey approach to comprehensive electrification, McCloskey said.
“There are definitely things that whoever is facilitating that program would need to look at, to game plan for,” he said. “But this is a great model.”
The summer of 2021 was brutal for residents of the Pacific Northwest. Cities across the region from Portland, Oregon to Quillayute, Washington broke temperature records by several degrees. In Washington, as the searing heat wave settled over the state, 125 people died from heat-related illnesses such as strokes and heart attacks, making it the deadliest weather event in the state’s history.
As officials recognized the heat wave’s disproportionate effect on low-income and unhoused people unable to access air conditioning, they made a crucial change to the state’s energy assistance program. Since the early 1980s, states, tribes, and territories have received funds each year to help low-income people pay their electricity bills and install energy efficiency upgrades through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. Congress appropriates funds for the program, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, doles it out to states in late fall. Until the summer of 2021, the initiative primarily provided heating assistance during Washington’s cold winter months. But that year, officials expanded the program to cover cooling expenses.
Last year, Congress appropriated $4.1 billion for the effort, and HHS disbursed 90 percent of the funds. But the program is now in jeopardy.
Earlier this month, HHS, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., laid off 10,000 employees, including the roughly dozen or so people tasked with running LIHEAP. The agency was supposed to send out an additional $378 million this year, but those funds are now stuck in federal coffers without the staff needed to move the money out.
LIHEAP helps roughly 6 million people survive freezing winters and blistering summers, many of whom face greater risks now that the year’s warm season has already brought unusually high temperatures. Residents of Phoenix are expected to have their first 100 degree high any day now.
“We’re seeing the warm-weather states really coming up short with the funding necessary to assist people in the summer with extreme heat,” said one of the HHS employees who worked on the LIHEAP program and was recently laid off. Losing the people that ran the program is “absolutely devastating,” they said, because agency staff helped states and tribes understand the flexibilities in the program to serve people effectively, assistance that became extremely important with increasingly erratic weather patterns across the country.
In typical years, once Congress appropriates LIHEAP funds, HHS distributes the money in the fall, in time for the colder months. States and other entities then make critical decisions about how much they spend during the winter and how much they save for the summer.
The need for LIHEAP funds has always been greater than what has been available. Only about one in five households that meet the program’s eligibility requirements receive funds. As a result, states often run out of money by the summer. At least a quarter of LIHEAP grant recipients run out of money at some point during the year, the former employee said.
“That remaining 10 percent would be really important to establish cooling assistance during the hot summer months, which is increasingly important,” said Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition, a group of nonprofits and utilities that advances the needs of low-income people. “If LIHEAP were to disappear, people would die in their homes. That’s the most critical issue. It saves people.”
In addition to Washington, many other states have expanded their programs to provide both heating and cooling programs. Arizona, Texas, and Oregon now offer year-round cooling assistance.
HHS staff plays a crucial role in running LIHEAP. They assess how much each state, tribe, and territory will receive. They set rules for how the money could be used. They audit local programs to ensure funds are being spent as intended. All that may now be lost.
But, according to Metzler, there are some steps that HHS could take to ensure that the program continues to be administered as Congress intended. First, and most obvious, the agency could reinstate those who were fired. Short of that, the agency could move the program to another department within HHS or contract out the responsibilities.
But ultimately, Metzler continued, LIHEAP funds need to be distributed so those in need can access it. “Replacing the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is a nearly impossible task,” she said. States “can’t have enough bake sales to replace” it.
US electric utilities are fielding massive requests for new power capacity as Big Tech scours the country for viable locations for new data centres to keep up with the compute demands of AI. A survey of 13 major US electric utility earnings transcripts found nearly half have received inquiries from data centre companies for volumes…
On March 6, at the start of the still-simmering trade war between the U.S. and Canada, hydropower generator Hydro‑Québec quietly stopped exporting electricity to New England.
At a time of year when Canadian hydropower typically supplies up to a tenth of New England’s power, the region has instead gone almost a month with virtually no cross-border flow of electrons.
Hydro‑Québec leaders say low prices in the New England market — not politics — are behind the decision to suspend sales. The disruption hasn’t affected power costs or reliability in the region yet, but some experts say it could if the cutoff extends into the summer cooling season. The situation also highlights a potential risk to state clean energy plans that count on Canadian hydropower to help offset fossil fuels.
“This shows the potential for the region to be vulnerable to manipulations of the supply,” said Phelps Turner, director of clean grid for the Conservation Law Foundation.
Hydro‑Québec’s main transmission line into New England, known as the Phase II line, stopped exporting any meaningful amount of power two days after President Donald Trump’s tariff on Canadian imports went into effect. Last March, by comparison, anywhere from a few hundred megawatts to more than 1,200 MW flowed along the line at any given time, making up between 5 percent and 10 percent of the region’s electricity use on average, Turner estimated.
The longer that New England needs to replace the absent hydropower, the more often it will call on natural gas or oil power plants to fill the gap with dirtier and more expensive electricity, particularly as demand increases in the summer and again next winter.
“Electrically, this is pretty much the most boring time of year, and certainly a much easier time of year to have a source go away or be on pause here,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association. “There is going to be both a cost and environmental consequence if we see this be a really durable situation.”
The future of Canadian energy in New England
In an email from a company spokesperson, Hydro‑Québec attributed its lack of exports to market conditions, saying milder spring weather has lowered demand and thus prices. Others have theorized the move is also a show of power aimed at the Trump administration.
Hydro‑Québec has been sending signals for a while that it might be moving away from delivering power to New England at its historic levels. Last year, 5,560 gigawatt-hours of power traveled into the region over the Phase II line, less than half the amount exported in 2022. And in the last two forward capacity auctions run by grid operator ISO New England, Hydro‑Québec did not take on any obligation to provide power for 20 of the 24 months covered.
This pullback is likely due, at least in part, to ongoing abnormally dry and drought conditions in much of Quebec, which mean less water flow to power the company’s generators. Hydro-Québec, therefore, faces choices about what to do with the power it can generate, whether that means holding out for higher prices on the New England market or selling it domestically to meet the province’s own growing demand as it too electrifies in pursuit of climate goals.
“Hydro-Québec is proactively managing its energy reserves in the context of low runoff and, as such, will continue to limit its exports as it did in 2024,” said company spokesperson Lynn St-Laurent.
The lack of exports from Hydro-Québec coupled with the specter of fluctuating tariffs and counter-tariffs brings into focus the need for the New England grid to develop more stateside power resources and expand the infrastructure required to get energy where it’s needed, experts said.
“We’re going to need all the supply we can find, and part of that is going to come from Canadian hydro,” said Jeremy McDiarmid, managing director and general counsel at clean energy industry association Advanced Energy United. “We also need to be building things: We need to build transmission lines. We need to build new generation.”
Some are also concerned that ISO New England is not properly accounting for the declines in Canadian hydro supply. The grid operator’s planning process still uses the assumption that neighboring regions — mostly Quebec, Dolan said — will be willing and able to send 2,000 MW into New England at moments of exceptionally high demand, an expectation Dolan said “doesn’t strike me as responsible or appropriate reliability planning,” given the trend in the Canadian firm’s exports.
The situation has also raised questions about the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission line, a 145-mile project designed to import 1,200 MW of Hydro-Québec power into New England as part of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Massachusetts utilities. The line is expected to be operational starting in 2026, and a Hydro-Québec spokesperson said the company plans to deliver the power promised.
Recent circumstances, however, have those in the industry combing over the contracts to determine how solid Hydro-Québec’s commitment to deliver that power actually is and how tariffs might affect the terms of the deal. One promising sign, they said: The company is still sending electricity into the U.S. over a second, smaller transmission line that ends in Vermont, which has an agreement to buy power from Hydro-Québec until 2038.
“That does seem to suggest that [Hydro-Québec] is performing under existing contracts,” Turner said. “But every contract in every situation is different.”
In the meantime, the region will just have to wait and see what Hydro-Québec does next, without much information to go on.
“It’s hard to say what’s motivating the decision” to cut power flow, Turner said. “We just know it’s happening, but we don’t know why it’s happening.”
Households across the UK are bracing for a series of bill increases that have come into effect today, marking the beginning of an economically taxing period dubbed “Awful April.” This surge in costs is hitting those on the lowest incomes hardest, with their finances stretched woefully thin. This is to the point where nearly half their income will go on just six bills – and that doesn’t even include rent.
Awful April – well, for poor people, anyway
Citizens Advice has issued a stark warning, stating that even prior to these changes, individuals and families with the lowest incomes were already spending around 41% of their earnings on essential bills including water, energy, broadband, and car insurance.
In contrast, those in the middle-income bracket were spending only 11%, and the wealthiest households a mere 5%. Clare Moriarty, chief executive of Citizens Advice, elaborated on the dire situation, saying:
After years of cost-of-living pressures, households across the country are about to feel the extra shock of rising essential bills. But for those on the lowest incomes, these unavoidable costs are already eating away at their finances, leaving their budgets stretched beyond breaking point.
Moriarty also highlighted the need for action:
Social tariffs could be an effective safety net and put money back in people’s pockets, but the Government and providers must work together to make sure nobody struggling to make ends meet misses out.
Local councils, particularly those in England, are expected to impose maximum hikes to council tax, reaching an average increase of 4.99%—a move that could further burden families already facing these rising costs.
High-profile councils like Birmingham, Newham, and Trafford are among those that have received special permission to increase their rates even higher, further signalling the alleviate pressures on their budgeting.
Energy Costs: The energy price cap, regulated by Ofgem, has increased, which translates to an added £9.25 monthly, or £111 annually, for the average household relying on direct debit payments. The cost of gas has surged from 6.34 pence per kilowatt-hour to 6.99 pence, while electricity has jumped from 24.86 pence to 27.03 pence per kilowatt-hour. With energy bills already reaching an average of £1,738, these increases will contribute significantly to the financial strain many families face.
Water Bills: In what has been described as “extortionate” by concerned advocacy groups, households across England and Wales can expect their water bills to increase by an average of £86 in just the next year—a staggering rise of 20%. Companies like Southern Water and Severn Trent will see increases soaring upwards of 47%, pushing many families deeper into financial difficulty.
Council Tax: The anticipated surge in council tax will leave millions of households grappling with an increase. The projected new annual figure for a typical Band D property is set to reach £2,280. All councils across Merseyside, for instance, are imposing the maximum allowed increase. Families are encouraged to investigate any available support options from their local councils to help mitigate this financial hit.
Mobile and Broadband: Added to the financial burden, broadband and mobile contracts are also seeing price hikes, with average increases of £21.99 and £15.90 respectively. Households that are locked into inflation-link contracts could be particularly affected, witnessing bills rise significantly without warning. There are suggestions that consumers should actively check their contracts to explore potential savings through switching providers.
TV Licence Fee: In today’s increases, the standard price of a TV licence has risen by £5 to £174.50, further impacting household budgets. It remains crucial for eligible claimants, particularly those over the age of 75, to remember that they can still apply for exemptions under specific conditions, ensuring they do not miss out on necessary financial support.
Car Tax: Lastly, an increase in car tax adds to the woes. New standard rate taxes for cars registered post-April 2017 will go up by £5, while owners of electric vehicles will no longer enjoy exemption from car tax. This is a notable shift, especially for those who switched to electric cars with the promise of being free from tax burdens.
Awful April: making ends meet?
Of course, on top of all of this is the fact that social housing rents also go up by more than inflation every April. This is thanks to the previous Conservative government dropping a freeze on how much housing associations could increase rents by.
So, as households brace themselves for the financial repercussions of these new rates, the undercurrent of frustration and helplessness among benefit claimants, disabled people, and jobseekers persists.
With the ongoing pressures imposed by significant increases across essential services, the reality presents a challenging landscape for those already struggling to make ends meet.
