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The administration argued in the name of national defense — but Orsted had receipts.
These are the 10 most important clean energy transition projects struggling to get off the ground
On China’s carbon goal, a U.S. uranium ramp up, and Microsoft’s green steel deal
In a special episode of Shift Key, Rob interviews Representative Sean Casten about his new energy price bill, plus Emerald AI’s Arushi Sharma Frank.
The Senate Minority Leader addressed the crowd at New York Climate Week, talking about energy costs, extreme weather, and Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill.”
Representatives Sean Casten and Mike Levin have a new package of legislation designed to lower electricity prices — in a way that just so happens to be “clean.”
House Democrats introduced a new package of proposals on Wednesday taking aim at rising electricity prices. The move signals a shift in how the party plans to talk about the energy industry — and an even bigger change in how the party plans to talk about climate change in the Trump 2.0 era.
After four years in which the party focused on climate change as an existential crisis, Democrats have reoriented to talking about energy chiefly as an affordability problem.
The new package, sponsored by Representatives Sean Casten and Mike Levin, would encourage new power line construction and strengthen utility regulation in much of the country. It would also restore longstanding tax credits for wind and solar energy, which were repealed as part of President Trump’s partisan tax and spending law earlier this year.
Many of the provisions, although not all of them, were first proposed in a Democratic bill called the Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act last year. This year, it’s been rechristened to something much simpler: the Cheap Energy Act.
“The purpose of the bill is a longtime wish of mine — that we would have an energy policy that puts the interests of American consumers first, by making sure that American consumers have access to cheap, reliable energy,” Representative Sean Casten, who is one of the bill’s coauthors, told me. “We’ve never done that as a country.”
In his view, achieving that goal will require many of the same policies that would cut carbon emissions. But that’s just good luck: “It’s a happy coincidence that cheap is synonymous with clean,” Casten said. “But the goal is cheap.”
The bill arrives at an unusual moment for the American energy economy. Although oil and gasoline prices have stayed low this year, electricity prices have surged. Over the past year, power costs have grown twice as fast as overall inflation. At the same time, the artificial intelligence boom — as well as the rise of electric vehicles and the country’s spate of new factories — have helped increase overall U.S. electricity demand for the first time in decades.
The politics of energy, in other words, have gone topsy-turvy. Americans normally sweat over gasoline prices and don’t think too much about their power bills. But this year, 57% of U.S. registered voters say that surging electricity costs are having at least “a decent amount” of influence on their personal finances, according to a recent Heatmap Pro poll.
“I believe very strongly that right now, in this moment — when electricity costs are increasing at double the rate of inflation, and when the administration has totally doubled down on fossil fuels — that highlighting the ability to transition to more affordable energy, and that clean energy is cheap energy, and talking about the bill in the context of cheap energy, is really the way to go,” Representative Mike Levin, a cosponsor of the bill and a Democrat from California, told me.
The Trump administration knows that electricity is becoming a political problem. Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted last month that the Trump administration “is going to get blamed” for higher power prices, although he blamed the increase on Democratic policies.
The new Democratic bill contains a slew of reforms to the country’s energy and electricity policies — including some changes that nobody expects to pass under the current administration, and some that could potentially advance in a bipartisan fashion.
Some of the most important are around transmission. The law would beef up the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s ability to plan and approve large-scale cross-country power lines. It would create a new tax credit for developers who build transmission lines, similar to those that exist for other clean energy technologies.
“We have to make it easier to site transmission lines so that we build where we need to build,” Levin said.
The bill also includes a proposal — which has support from some Republicans — mandating that each region of the country have enough infrastructure to send a minimum amount of electricity to its neighbors. And perhaps most importantly, it lays out the rules for how utilities would divide the cost of a new power line — an accounting hurdle that has held back many transmission projects.
Another important set of proposals would reshape the utility industry. The bill would allow state regulators to engage in “performance-based ratemaking,” which compensates utilities for how well they save money rather than how much infrastructure they build. (This is closer to how the EU and United Kingdom regulate utilities — my cohost Jesse Jenkins and I talked about it on a recent episode of our podcast, Shift Key.)
Casten said that changing how utilities are regulated will ultimately get more new power generation built — and keep rates lower — than loosening permitting rules alone. “If we fix the profit incentives in the energy industry so that [utilities] make money by saving their consumers money, then permitting is easy,” he said. (Such an approach is “much smarter” than that taken by Senator Joe Manchin and John Barrasso in their permitting bill last Congress, he added.)
The bill would also allow the government to step in and cover some of the cost of new grid-enhancing or wildfire prevention equipment. It would also spend $2.1 billion to unsnarl and build manufacturing capacity for transformers, a key piece of grid equipment, through the Defense Production Act. Electrical transformers, which can step up or down electricity voltage, have been in short supply since the pandemic, helping to drive up power prices.
“We’re trying to figure out where the bottlenecks are and trying to unclog them, as best we can, so that we can actually deliver the lowest cost energy to the end user,” Levin said.
Other proposals appear to respond to Trump-led initiatives. For instance, the bill would limit the Energy Department’s ability to keep fossil fuel power plants open for an “emergency” when that emergency is more than a year in the future. The Trump administration has used this emergency authority to keep coal, oil, and gas plants open in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.
It would also require the Energy Department to study whether approving a new liquified natural gas export terminal would drive up domestic gas prices before approving it. “If you take gas out of the United States and send it overseas, you're going to reduce supply,” Casten said. “The mere act of connecting those markets raises prices.”
Yet the bill also includes a grab bag of environmental proposals from other Democratic bills, not all of which seem necessarily designed to produce cheap energy. The package would support owners of reflective roofs, expand community solar programs, and double the cap on how much the government can spend on the weatherization assistance program. It would have FERC pay nonprofits that participate in public comment periods on proposed regulations — an approach already used in California — and it would speed up permitting approvals for infrastructure projects that include a community benefit agreement.
That points to the bill’s hybrid nature: Although it’s focused on cheap energy, it retains many policies from an era when Democrats were focused more exclusively on reducing carbon emissions. That change might make for good politics, but it leaves key questions about the future of Democratic energy policy unanswered. If Democrats really do want cheap energy for consumers at all costs, as Casten said, are they willing to accept, say, new fossil fuel development to get it?
Levin demurred. Democrats will next face something like that choice when Congress takes up a bipartisan permitting reform package, he said. But as long as the Trump administration continues to wage a regulatory war on wind and solar projects, he said, then it doesn’t make sense for Democrats to come to the table to negotiate a bill like that.
“If the [natural] gas folks — if they actually want a good-faith dialogue around what the energy system needs — an actual system analysis, looking at AI and data centers and all the rest of it, and then looking at what the permitting situation needs to look like — that would be one thing. But we’re not seeing that. We’re seeing a reflexive repetition of President Trump’s message that wind is bad,” he told me.
“I don’t know how we could have a good faith discussion around permitting reform — or a bipartisan permitting reform package — that would make any sense when people are saying things that are objectively untrue,” Levin said. Many Republican officials “know better,” he added, naming Wright and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “But they don’t want to get sideways with Trump.”
On offshore wind labor history, Oklo breaks ground, and American gallium
Current conditions: Typhoon Ragasa slammed into East Asia as the year’s strongest storm to date, killing 14 and leaving dozens missing in southern Taiwan and forcing more than 400,000 to evacuate in China • Hurricane Gabrielle intensified into the second major hurricane in the Atlantic this season, churning rip currents on East Coast beaches in the U.S. and lashing Europe with heavy rain later this week • Argentina is facing an ongoing drought.
President Donald Trump speaking at the U.N. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He complained that scientists used to warn the governments about “global cooling … then they said global warming will kill the world.” Yet “all of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people” from countries with “no chance for success.” He urged other nations that “if you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Scientists first suggested over a century ago that the carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels could create a greenhouse effect warming the planet and destabilizing the climate norms in which human beings evolved to survive. As global emissions of carbon and other planet-heating gases have surged over the past several decades, the Earth’s average temperature has risen by more than 1 degree Celsius, an increase that the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world attribute to pollution from fossil fuels and agriculture. The Trump administration issued a report written by contrarians who raised the possibility that climate change won’t be as bad as most scientists say, but more than 1,000 peer-reviewed researchers signed onto a letter condemning the findings. In a statement on the president’s UN speech, Gina McCarthy, the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency chief and the Biden administration’s climate policy director, said Trump “continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home. He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.” For more on the basics of climate change, you can consult this explainer by Heatmap’s Jeva Lange.
As part of this week’s New York Climate Week, we’re hosting Heatmap House, a live journalism exploring the future of cities, energy, technology, and artificial intelligence. We’ll also be livestreaming all day for those who aren’t able to join in person. Register here and tune in any time from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday to catch Heatmap journalists including Robinson Meyer, Emily Pontecorvo, Katie Brigham, and Matthew Zeitlin, in conversation with the likes of Senator Brian Schatz and executives from Amazon, Microsoft, and Duke Energy. We hope you’ll join us!
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Rhode Island’s biggest labor federation has brokered a deal for union workers to carry out the construction on the SouthCoast Wind project, a 2.4-gigawatt offshore turbine array — and won what the Rhode Island AFL-CIO called the first agreement in the nation guaranteeing organized labor handles all the operations and maintenance of the facility. On a panel I moderated for the Climate Jobs National Resource Center on Tuesday evening, Rhode Island’s AFL-CIO president, Patrick Crowley, told me the “labor peace agreement” will help the union organize more workers in the offshore-wind industry. “The labor movement is in this to win, and we’re not ready to give up the fight yet,” he told me. “If developers want to have a winning strategy, they have to partner with organized labor, because we’re going to make sure that, come hell or high water, we get these things built.”
After a federal judge lifted Trump’s stop-work order halting construction on the Revolution Wind farm off Rhode Island’s coast, a project that was 80% complete before the president’s abrupt intervention, Crowley said executives immediately directed workers onto boats to restart work on the turbines.
Microreactor developer Oklo’s stock price has been on a tear for months, surging to $21 billion in September despite no revenue or completed facilities. That’s starting the change. On Tuesday, the company broke ground on its debut nuclear plant at the Idaho National Laboratory. The California startup, which is also seeking to construct the nation’s first nuclear recycling plant, is the only company in the Department of Energy’s newly established Reactor Pilot Program to secure two projects in the federal effort to prove that new reactor technologies – Oklo’s tiny reactors use a different and rarer kind of coolant and fuel than the entire U.S. commercial fleet – can successfully sustain fission reactions by next July.
“As advancements in artificial intelligence drive up electricity demands, projects like this are critical to ensuring the United States can meet that need and remain at the forefront of the global AI arms race,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement.
Earlier this month, the federal Defense Logistics Agency backed Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. to help the Ohio-based startup’s efforts to commercialize a novel technology for processing cobalt for batteries. Now, as I reported in an exclusive for Heatmap on Tuesday, the company is applying its approach to refining gallium, another key industrial metal over which China has a monopoly grip.
It’s not the so-called DLA’s only push into minerals. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the agency is seeking to stockpile up to $40 million worth of scandium oxide over the next five years. The agency plans to buy the rare earth element used as an alloying agent used in aerospace, defense, and automotive technologies from mining giant Rio Tinto.
A team of researchers in China found a way to turn clothianidin, a widely used pesticide notorious for accumulating in soil and crops and harming human health, into a nutrient for plants that removes the chemical from the dirt. Scientists at Hunan Agricultural University developed a novel biochar-based catalyst that converts the pesticide residues into ammonium nitrogen, a form of fertilizer that helps crops grow. “Instead of simply eliminating pesticides, we can recycle their nitrogen content back into the soil as fertilizer,” Hongmei Liu, a co-author of the study, said in a press release. “It offers a win–win solution for food safety and sustainable agriculture.”
