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President Donald Trump’s crusade against wind energy is intensifying — and it could come with some serious costs.
As much as $317 billion in lost investment, to be exact, per new analysis from research firm Cleanview. That figure is based on the 790 projects totaling 213 gigawatts that developers plan to build in the years to come — all of which are at risk of delay or even cancellation under the administration’s policies.
To be clear, those figures represent the high end of what’s at stake — they’re based on what’s currently in the interconnection queue, and projects drop out of that process all the time for various reasons.
But if even a fraction of that investment is canceled or delayed, it will be painful for the regions that miss out on the tax revenue and jobs, with Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey standing to lose the most.
It would also be bad timing: Electricity demand is on the rise nationwide, largely due to the boom in AI data center construction. Delaying or blocking the buildout of gigawatts worth of wind projects when the U.S. is in the midst of an energy-supply crunch would drive up already-climbing power bills. Wind produced just over 10% of U.S. electricity last year.
And, of course, any slowdown in the construction of clean energy is a setback for efforts to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels, a task that grows more urgent with the passage of every hot summer day.
Trump entered office in January with promises that not a single new “windmill” would be constructed during his second term. Though he’s not managed to carry out that vision in its most literal sense, he has certainly operated with its spirit in mind.
On his first day, he issued an executive order calling for an end to offshore wind leasing and a review of leases and permits for all wind projects. In the spring, Trump tried — and ultimately failed — to quash the Empire Wind offshore installation that had just begun construction near New York’s coast. After GOP lawmakers rammed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act through Congress, Trump signed the megalaw on July 4, mandating the swift phaseout of tax credits for wind (and solar) projects.
In recent weeks, his administration has stepped up its attacks even further and undertaken an all-out blitz on wind power, issuing a barrage of far-reaching orders that, at least in theory, could jeopardize every wind project underway in the country.
Cheese. Beer. Clothes. Paper. Manufacturers across the country rely on combustion boilers to produce the heat required for making a range of products. But by burning coal, oil, gas, and other fuels to do so, that equipment spews health-harming and planet-warming pollution into the skies.
A different technology would allow communities to breathe easier. Electric heat pumps, which can provide industrial heat without emissions, are spreading but remain underutilized. They only supply about 5% of global industrial heat.
Now, a new study quantifies what Americans stand to gain from manufacturers switching to heat pumps. A gradual transition would not only decarbonize heating but deliver a staggering $1.1 trillion in public health benefits and avoid 77,200 pollution-inflicted deaths from 2030 to 2050, according to a report released Thursday by the nonprofit American Lung Association.
It’s a move “that’s going to save lives, reduce health emergencies, cut asthma attacks, [and] keep kids healthy enough to be in school rather than missing school days,” said Will Barrett, an assistant vice president at the American Lung Association who works on national clean air policy.
Nearly half of the U.S. population lives in places with very unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, two of the most common and dangerous air pollutants. Antiquated boilers are an oft-overlooked part of the problem.
Like other fossil-fuel-burning machines, such as home appliances and cars, industrial combustion boilers release nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide into the air. These toxic byproducts can harm children and adults in severe ways, such as asthma attacks, preterm births, heart attacks, strokes, and an impaired ability to think.
To quantify the benefits of switching to industrial heat pumps, the authors created an inventory of the industrial boilers across the U.S. based on publicly available data. They found that about 33,500 boilers scattered around the nation operate at the low and medium temperatures — i.e., less than 200 degrees Celsius — that make them the best candidates for heat pumps to replace. (For now, heat pumps are most feasible for lower temperatures, though Barrett noted research-and-development efforts will bring down the costs for higher-temperature changeouts over time.)
The team then estimated how much pollution would be avoided by gradually swapping these boilers out for electric heat pumps over the next 15 years, with lower temperatures addressed soonest. By leveraging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s health impacts tool, the team found that switching to heat pumps would not only save thousands of lives but also prevent 33 million asthma attacks, 204,000 asthma cases, 13 million lost school days, and 3.4 million lost work days.
States in which more people live close to industrial pollution sources would experience the greatest boost to public health and productivity, according to the team’s analysis. The three with the biggest estimated health benefits are Florida, which would save $107 billion over the study period, Pennsylvania ($82 billion), and North Carolina ($68 billion). Twenty-three others would save at least $25 billion each.
The transition would also reduce carbon emissions by 1.6 billion metric tons through 2050. That translates to $351 billion in avoided societal costs due to a destabilized climate — which is already being felt in record-breaking heat waves and deadlier floods. Sources of industrial heat, including boilers, account for 9% of all U.S. greenhouse gas pollution, according to the Department of Energy.
The findings come as the Trump administration aggressively rolls back public health protections, emissions regulations, and support for industrial decarbonization projects, having cancelled $3.7 billion in funding in May.
To push industries to switch to heat pumps, the report recommends state and local policymakers offer manufacturers incentives to electrify their heating, launch education campaigns aimed at communities and companies, and require the adoption of nonpolluting equipment. California has taken the lead; its South Coast Air Quality Management District passed a first-in-the-nation measure last year to gradually phase out combustion boilers and process heaters starting in 2026.
“It’s a new paradigm when you’re operating and fulfilling all the needs of these manufacturing heat processes without causing health-harming pollution,” Barrett said.
Massachusetts has taken another significant step toward its goal of a fossil-fuel-free future.
Last week, state regulators issued an order changing who pays when a new customer wants to connect to the gas system, shifting the burden from gas utility consumers as a whole to the household or organization that requests the hookup. Utilities have 30 days from the date of the order to file plans that reflect the new payment guidelines for consideration by regulators.
It may seem like a small change, but it’s actually a pretty big deal, advocates said.
“It means the expansion of the gas system will be much slower than it otherwise would’ve been,” said Mark Dyen, a climate activist working with advocacy groups Gas Transition Allies and 350 Mass. “It says, ‘If you want to add to that for your own benefit, you can pay for it.’”
Massachusetts has for years been at the forefront of efforts to transition away from natural gas. In December 2023, state utility regulators issued a sweeping order — the first of its kind in the country — that made clear the state’s goal is to move away from fossil-fuel use as it aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The 2023 order laid out a framework for how gas utilities will be expected to participate in this evolution.
Last week’s decision on who should pay for gas-line extensions is the latest effort to turn those principles into practice.
Under the old rules, a new customer that wants to hook up their building to gas generally does not have to pay out of pocket: The cost is spread out among all the utility’s customers over the course of several years on the assumption that the newcomer’s future fuel use will create enough revenue to cover the initial price, a practice known as “line-extension allowances.” In 2023, the average cost of such an installation was $9,000, for an annual total of more than $160 million statewide, according to an analysis filed in the case by research firm Groundwork Data.
“Existing customers are subsidizing these new customers,” said Kristin George Bagdanov, senior policy research manager for the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. “It’s a misalignment of who’s shouldering the costs.”
In their ruling last week, Massachusetts’ regulators agreed with this stance and also declared that the existing approach runs counter to the state’s climate goals by encouraging greater adoption of natural gas. Plus, they said, the current system increases the chance that customers will be left paying for unneeded infrastructure, as more homes and businesses leave the gas system for electricity.
Typically, utilities calculate a 10-year payback period for commercial connections and 20 years for residential. However, as more customers adopt energy-efficiency measures, switch to electric appliances, and even electrify completely, their gas usage — and therefore the revenue they generate for utilities — will drop, extending the payback period, argued Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell in an October filing to state utility regulators.
Currently, more than half of Massachusetts homes are heated with natural gas. However, between 2021 and 2024, about 90,000 households installed heat pumps using incentives from energy-efficiency program Mass Save; the true total, including installations that didn’t go through the incentive program, is likely higher. The state is aiming to get 500,000 households to adopt heat pumps between 2020 and 2030.
“It really doesn’t make sense for existing ratepayers to pay for people to join when we are actively transitioning people off the system,” said Sarah Krame, a senior attorney for the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “The economics of that don’t make sense anymore. We’re no longer in that world.”
Massachusetts joins a handful of other states addressing the issue of line-extension allowances. Over the past three years, these subsidies have been reduced or eliminated in six states, and another six and Washington, D.C., are now considering reforms, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition. In 2022, California became the first to do away with the practice. In June of this year, Maryland utility regulators ended the allowances, and New York state legislators passed a bill that will do the same if it becomes law.
“This is definitely a trend we’re tracking,” George Bagdanov said. “It’s part of the larger movement to reevaluate business-as-usual gas system operations.”
A clarification was made on Aug. 14, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect that there will still be a round of comments taken on the new plans utilities must file.
As the Trump administration aims to bolster fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy expansion, new research shows the oil and gas sector has so far failed to become a major jobs creator for heavily fracked areas of northern Appalachia.
“To the degree that we allocate resources to help develop that industry, we’re diverting those resources from other industries that actually could deliver” more jobs and higher per-capita incomes, said Sean O’Leary, author of the recent report from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
The report uses the term “Frackalachia” to describe 30 top oil- and gas-producing counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. As a group, the counties have smaller populations and a net loss in the number of jobs compared to 2008, just before Appalachia’s shale-gas boom began.
The counties’ growth in per-capita income also has lagged behind the national average, even as their nominal gross domestic product nearly doubled, increasing their share of the country’s GDP by 6%. Basically, comparatively high economic output from the counties did not produce higher-than-average incomes for their residents.
“Despite immense economic growth as measured by GDP, Frackalachia is in a position of actually having lost jobs since the beginning of the natural-gas boom,” O’Leary said. In his view, the numbers contradict pro-industry pitches for more oil and gas development.
“Whatever else it is, the natural-gas boom is not an engine for economic prosperity,” O’Leary said. He thinks the gas industry is “structurally incapable” of delivering lasting growth in jobs and income for the people living in heavily fracked areas. The Frackalachia counties have also seen relatively few jobs from “downstream” industries, such as the production of plastics, he added.
Oil and gas development is “highly capital-intensive, but not very labor-intensive,” O’Leary explained. Most earnings go to shareholders, investors, and suppliers based far from where fossil fuels are extracted, so only a small share of project income stays in the community to stimulate more economic activity.
Completed wells don’t need many permanent employees, O’Leary said. And many people who work in drilling and fracking come from outside the local area.
Canary Media’s review of data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is consistent with that observation. From 2012 through 2022, the agency issued annual reports about the economic impact of the state’s oil and gas industry, including data for both “core” jobs and “ancillary” industries, which support oil and gas development.
More than half of the new hires for the core industry jobs in 2021 came from outside Ohio, according to the state data. Even in ancillary industries, nearly four-tenths of new hires were from other states.
Meanwhile, the state holds clean energy companies to higher standards when it comes to sourcing local labor. Solar developers who want to qualify for certain property tax relief must provide at least 70% of a project’s jobs to Ohio residents.
Canary Media drilled further into the figures from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to see how employment numbers compare to those touted by fossil-fuel industry organizations.
As of 2024, the core shale-industry sectors employed almost 9,100 people. The net gain compared to 2012 was about 860 jobs. Employment in those sectors peaked in 2017 at about 16,400.
Roughly 199,000 people worked in the industry’s ancillary sectors in 2024, for a net gain of about 30,000 jobs compared to 2012. However, the Department of Job and Family Services’ reports note that those ancillary sectors support other industries as well, such as engineering services, iron and steel mills, and construction of highways, streets, and bridges.
The Ohio agency numbers fall short of the 204,000 new jobs that an industry-funded report forecast oil and gas businesses might create or support. That analysis was published in 2011, in the lead-up to the 2012 law that set up the state’s current regulatory scheme for drilling and fracking of horizontal wells.
The agency numbers are also far lower than the 79,000 direct and 375,000 total jobs the American Petroleum Institute cited in a 2021 report based on data from 2019.
A communications representative for the American Petroleum Institute declined to answer Canary Media’s questions about that report or the new research from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
A spokesperson for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association did not respond to a phone call and emails seeking comment for this story.
The cyclical boom-and-bust dynamics that often characterize oil and gas development also impact jobs, said Gilbert Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy at Loyola University Chicago. In contrast, utility-scale solar could be built out over time, to offer “opportunities for a more stable and consistent workforce,” he said.
An analysis prepared by Michaud and others in 2020 estimated that utility-scale solar development could provide tens of thousands of jobs over the course of a few decades if the state encouraged it. That study came out before Ohio lawmakers added extra hurdles for most utility-scale solar and wind projects in 2021.
Now federal policy has also shifted away from renewables and in favor of fossil fuels.
“While this might spur some jobs in oil and gas, it will also take jobs away from renewables, which can be built nearly anywhere, not just in places like eastern Ohio that have shale resources,” Michaud said. “It will threaten a big renewable energy pipeline that has developed over the past decade or two.”
State leaders and clean energy groups across the country are pushing to build more wind and solar projects before the window to claim federal tax credits slams shut.
The new GOP megalaw rapidly phases out incentives for clean energy, years before the Biden-era tax credits were set to lapse. The shortened timeline is expected to slow the construction of wind and solar projects at a moment when states are grappling with soaring power demand that is raising both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
Many local lawmakers and utility regulators were already working to modernize their grids and streamline energy permitting before President Donald Trump signed the budget bill last month. Recently, decision-makers in a handful of places have taken steps to expedite those efforts so that more large-scale renewables projects can qualify for the tax credits before they expire.
Under the megalaw, wind and solar farms must either start construction by July 4, 2026, or be placed in service by Dec. 31, 2027, to qualify for the full production or investment tax credits. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act previously allowed developers to access credits if they began construction either by 2033, or by the time the U.S. power sector cut emissions by 75% compared with 2022 — whichever came later.
For states, “The question then becomes, what can they do to try to maximize the benefits they’ll get from those [clean] technologies between now and then — the jobs, clean air, and power?” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
In Maine, state utility regulators have responded by fast-tracking plans to procure nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy, so that projects can get started before tax credits phase out. Residential and community solar developers in California’s Orange County and Minnesota say they’re focused on installing as many solar arrays as they can, including by tapping into state and municipal incentives that still remain.
Meanwhile, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has directed state energy regulators to conduct “a high-level review” of the budget law and its “specific impacts to New Yorkers.” However, clean energy developers in the state are calling for more specific actions to expedite wind and solar development, such as speeding up the yearslong process for issuing construction permits and improving coordination among state agencies.
For now, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) is the only state leader to issue an executive action to prioritize deployment of clean electricity projects in response to Trump’s budget law.
Earlier this month, Polis penned a letter that directs state agencies to “move quickly and secure success” for large-scale wind, solar, and battery storage resources, as well as community solar projects. The letter calls for eliminating “administrative barriers and bottlenecks” and “prioritizing expeditious review of projects as they come into the queue for state consultation and permitting.” It also raises the idea of invoking the Public Utilities Commission’s authority to override local permit denials.
“When we look at the new generation that is being built in Colorado, the vast majority of it is wind and solar,” Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, told Canary Media. “Getting as many projects as possible able to move forward on a timeline that allows them to receive those [tax] credits is very much in the interest of the state — not only for clean energy goals, but very much for reducing costs to ratepayers.”
Alana Miller, who leads NRDC’s climate and clean energy policy team in Colorado, said the governor’s letter “is a key first step and provides a lot of urgency at this specific moment.” Still, “There’s a lot to be seen how it plays out and how agencies actually implement it,” she said, noting that state legislative action could follow next year.
In Colorado and beyond, officials are largely waiting to outline more concrete plans until the Treasury Department issues its new tax-credit guidance, which is expected to tighten the rules on which projects can claim incentives. Policy experts say they’re watching closely to see how the leaders of other major energy-producing states, including Pennsylvania and California, step in to support renewables in their backyards.
In June, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) warned legislators that the House’s version of the budget bill — which proposed even deeper cuts to clean energy incentives than the final version — would undermine more than $3 billion in direct investment in Pennsylvania energy projects. The impact would be most severe on the “nearest-term energy sources,” namely wind, solar, and batteries, that are coming online to meet surging demand in the state, his letter said.
Shapiro has made building “next-generation power” a key priority as power-hungry data centers strain the state’s grid and drive up electricity costs. His sweeping six-part energy strategy released in January includes policy proposals to increase the amount of electricity that comes from renewable sources in the state, and to establish a “cap-and-invest” program that reduces carbon emissions while also lowering electricity bills.
In California, a leader on clean energy deployment, the industry is urging Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to help blunt the megalaw’s impact on utility-scale wind, solar, and energy storage developments.
Five trade groups sent a letter last month asking Newsom’s office and state legislative leaders to create a “coordinated action plan” to address the shortened tax-credit timelines, as well as the Treasury Department’s forthcoming guidance. The groups proposed steps such as streamlining environmental reviews and making it easier to build projects on agricultural land.
Another measure that California officials could immediately take is to enable wind, solar, and batteries to access “surplus interconnection” at existing gas-fired power plant sites — a concept that state legislators are currently considering.
Gas power plants in California are running less often as the state works to slash its planet-warming emissions, Mike O’Boyle, director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation, explained in a recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. That leaves gas plants’ transmission wires mostly unused. Wind and solar projects could use this existing surplus to immediately connect to the grid, rather than wait years for system upgrades.
A working paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that this pathway could allow California to cost-effectively integrate 24 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. For context, the state currently has nearly 90 GW of total generation capacity.
Clean energy developers in every state will need all the bureaucratic fixes and outside-the-box solutions they can get in order to maintain momentum for the energy transition. Early estimates found that Trump’s megalaw could shrink new clean capacity additions to the grid by up to 62% over the next decade compared to the baseline scenario. By 2035, national average household energy bills could be $78 to $192 higher than if Biden-era policies remained in place, according to Rhodium Group.
“We still anticipate that clean energy will be built and will likely still be able to compete [with fossil fuels] despite the headwinds,” said Miller of NRDC. But the cost of electricity will be higher without the tax incentives.
The Trump administration appears to be backing away from its fiercely contested efforts to freeze a $5 billion federal funding program for electric vehicle chargers.
On Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled revised guidance for states to access their remaining share of $5 billion in formula grants from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. NEVI was created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to establish reliable charging along major highways, particularly in underserved parts of the country.
“Our revised NEVI guidance slashes red tape and makes it easier for states to efficiently build out this infrastructure,” Duffy said in a statement. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.”
Groups representing industries involved in EV charger deployments welcomed the decision, which could allow states to restart projects that have in some cases been paused for months due to orders from the federal government. But environmental advocates warned that the move is just another delay tactic from an administration that’s exceeding its lawful authority by blocking money appropriated by Congress, for EV charging and beyond.
Monday’s announcement comes after months of legal challenges to the Department of Transportation’s February decision rescinding guidance for states to access their NEVI funding. That withdrawal, part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on Biden-era climate and clean energy initiatives, forced states to halt work underway on contracts and projects representing roughly half of the $5 billion in program funding.
Litigation hasn’t panned out in the administration’s favor so far. In June, a federal judge ordered the Transportation Department to release about $875 million for the states that had contested the freeze, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Some of those states have been able to access NEVI funding since then, said Daniel Wilkins, a policy analyst at research firm Atlas Public Policy.
However, a chunk of the funding remains unavailable, and the District of Columbia and 20 states are continuing their fight in court in the hopes of getting the Trump administration to unfreeze the rest. The federal government’s actions have disrupted ongoing contracts with EV charging developers and caused “costly delays in project implementation,” according to an August court filing.
The 20 states suing the Transportation Department are led by Democratic governors, but the NEVI program sets aside money for red and blue states alike. Texas is set to receive nearly $408 million, more than any other state, and Ohio opened the first NEVI-funded charging station.
Under Monday’s order, states can now reapply for funding within the next 30 days.
Getting the NEVI program back up and running will “help to ensure that EV drivers can find charging when and where they need it,” Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, a trade group that includes automakers, battery manufacturers, mining companies, charging manufacturers, and electric utilities, said in a Monday statement. In that light, the new guidance “provides important regulatory certainty for the companies and state departments of transportation that are implementing this program on the ground.”
But the Sierra Club, one of seven nonprofit groups that have joined the legal challenges against the NEVI funding freeze, noted that the department’s guidance does not reinstate those plans, but instead requires states to resubmit them, “further delaying the nationwide EV charging buildout.”
“While the Trump administration has moved away from anti-EV rhetoric in this guidance in response to federal litigation filed by over a dozen states, Sierra Club, and other nonprofit organizations, it is still illegally withholding billions Congress dedicated to EV charging,” Katherine García, director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign, said in a Monday statement. “We will continue to work towards the recovery of nationwide NEVI funding.”
A spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general’s office, one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit by the 20 states and D.C., said the office is reviewing the revised guidance.
Monday’s announcement also weakens the program’s support for lower-income and disadvantaged communities. It removes requirements that the funding “ensure that the deployment, installation, operation, and use of EV charging infrastructure achieves equitable and fair distribution of benefits and services,” and eliminates Biden-era Justice40 requirements that at least 40% of the benefits of the projects be targeted toward disadvantaged communities.
Duffy justified these changes in Monday’s statement. “If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” he said.
The NEVI program has made slow progress. The Biden administration hoped to spur the buildout of 500,000 public charging stations by 2030, up from about 206,000 today. But just 378 NEVI fast chargers have come online as of this month, according to Wilkins at Atlas Public Policy. And of the $5 billion in funds, only about $615 million was under contract for constructing almost 1,000 charging sites as of February, according to EV-charging data firm Paren.
Monday’s announcement highlighted that slow start as a “clear signal of the program’s failure.” Both Republicans and Democrats have criticized the pace of deployment under the Biden administration.
The NATSO and SIGMA trade groups, which represent truck stops and fuel retailers, respectively, praised the Transportation Department’s new guidance, saying in a Monday statement that it “marks a constructive step toward addressing the ongoing challenges associated with deploying EV charging infrastructure while also ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and effectively.”
But Sierra Club’s García said the Trump administration’s freeze has only further delayed the work that Monday’s order purports to streamline. “It’s ironic that this guidance was sold as cutting red tape, yet all it has accomplished is more than half a year of needless delay,“ she said.
The country doubled its number of public charging ports between 2020 and last year, and over 7,100 public fast-charging ports came online in the first half of this year, according to Atlas Public Policy. Still, only 23 NEVI chargers have opened since February.
That delay is particularly harmful to parts of the country that lack the EV adoption to make charger investments worthwhile for private-sector developers — a hurdle NEVI was meant to help overcome. Rural communities in particular are lagging in fast-charger deployments.
Loren McDonald, Paren’s chief analyst, noted that Monday’s revised guidance does give individual states more flexibility and control over how they spend NEVI dollars, which could speed project selection and construction.
However, it could also make the program less effective at serving “charging deserts,” he said — a term for places where EV charging companies like Tesla, EVgo, and Electrify America were “not deploying stations because utilization would be low.”
“One of the main factors holding many people back from getting an EV is they dream of that one road trip in rural Wyoming and won’t get an EV because they’ve heard there are no charging stations,” he said. “NEVI was designed to fix that perception in reality. But I worry that if states have complete control over locations, they may not focus on solving the charging-desert issue.”
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When a heat wave hits New York City, many customers can soon expect a message from Con Edison, asking customers to conserve energy.
The reason is to protect the heat-strained electric grid, which, when taxed to the point of failure, can lead to blackouts and brownouts.
Addy Spiller, an Upper West Sider and founder of a product management business, said those messages from Con Ed drive her bananas.
“Listen, I don’t know how to use less electricity,” she said. “I already have the AC at a reasonable temperature. I don’t think I can do enough to help Con Ed on my own.”
But this summer, Spiller and her dog, Ranger, are among 65 households across the city actually doing more to help — and they don’t have to stop blasting their ACs on sweltering days. That’s because they’re participating in an experiment that connects their air conditioning units to small batteries in their homes. The batteries, about the size of a small microwave oven, plug into wall sockets.
The pilot program, called Responsible Grid, is run by the company Standard Potential in partnership with Con Ed. When demand for energy is high but the utility company needs customers to lay off, the company powers the participants’ AC units with the battery instead of the electric grid.
“There’s a class of large portable phone chargers almost, and instead of powering a whole building, they power a single device and take it off the grid,” said Andrew Wang, Standard Potential’s CEO. “Because we have the battery, it allows folks to participate in the program without having to adjust their comfort levels.”
If more New Yorkers were to connect electric appliances to batteries in their homes, this approach could make the city more resilient, add to the stability of the electric grid, and keep people cool. Responsible Grid is one of about a dozen programs residential Con Ed customers can enroll in to reduce energy during key windows and get financial rewards.
Participants who have the freely provided batteries in their homes through September will also receive about $100 per air conditioning unit plugged into them from Responsible Grid, as Con Ed pays the company to reduce demand.
In southeast Queens, participant Farudh Emiel noticed several times over the hottest days of the summer that his three air conditioning units plugged into the batteries he got through the pilot program kept pumping even as he saw lights dimming. It was likely Con Ed reduced the voltage in his neighborhood to protect the electric system, but his AC units, relying on the batteries, were unaffected.
“I run my ACs 24/7, three of them at the same time,” Emiel said. “One thing I will spend money on is electricity because I don’t want to sweat.”
Outside the individual homes of the participants, batteries have the potential to reshape the electric-supply system and protect ratepayers’ wallets.
When demand for power is high, especially in the summer, fossil-fuel-fired peaker plants kick in to meet that need. Those plants, often located in and around low-income neighborhoods, can be highly polluting and costly to rely on.
“By switching your AC to a battery rather than the outlet, you’re providing a measure of relief to the grid, avoiding more expensive, dirtier power plants turning on,” said Jamie Dickerson, senior director of climate and clean energy programs at Acadia Center, a research and advocacy nonprofit.
The small batteries in participants’ homes have served as a source of backup power in other instances.
In the midst of a heat wave in July, Emiel had just finished cooking a meal when the power went out in his neighborhood. He scurried around his home — a detached, multistory house — to connect his refrigerator, WiFi router, and TV to the batteries.
“We were the only house with electricity because of the stand-alone batteries,” said Emiel, who works as a policy manager for a clean-energy advocacy organization. “We had internet still, we were charging our phones, we had a lamp connected. The air conditioning was still working.”
The blackout lasted for about four hours, he said.
Spiller, too, relied on her batteries in early June, when her prewar apartment building had a planned electrical outage to do some upgrades. The day was hot, and she began feeling stressed as she wondered where she should bring her dog and how she’d get her work done. But then she remembered the battery.
“With the battery, I was able to continue working. My AC worked, my WiFi worked,” Spiller said. “It was such a relief to realize I had a little bit of a buffer and didn’t have to leave my house — I was able to continue just living.”
New York state is looking to deploy large batteries to help make the grid more reliable, especially as officials look to add more forms of renewable energy to replace fossil-fuel sources, and as electric heating, stoves, and vehicles become more common. Wind and solar projects produce power intermittently, but batteries can store extra energy and discharge it back into the grid when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
But connecting big batteries to the grid requires navigating lots of red tape and finding major real estate, two tough tasks in New York City that can slow down adoption.
Jesse Jenkins, a professor in energy and engineering at Princeton University, called the pilot a “compelling model and a good way to avoid the very high costs and bureaucratic headaches of trying to install a grid-connected home battery or solar system.”
But he added that eventually, getting more customers to put the batteries “comes down to the cost of these devices, and whether the value delivered exceeds that cost.”
Looking ahead, Wang said he’s looking forward to scaling up the program to include more participants next summer, and to potentially try pairing the batteries with electric heat pumps in the winter.
The Trump administration recently terminated a $4.9 billion loan for the Grain Belt Express, the country’s biggest transmission grid project. Sen. Martin Heinrich, Democrat from New Mexico, says the decision is illegal.
In an exclusive new interview with Canary Media, Heinrich discusses why he’s demanding that the Department of Energy account for the decision — and what response he’s received.
Last month, Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, sent a letter to the DOE challenging its vague excuse for cutting off the legally binding contract between the federal government and Invenergy, the Chicago-based energy project developer planning to build the power-line project from Kansas to Illinois.
“Not only am I concerned that this move is illegal,” Heinrich wrote — a belief shared by Jigar Shah, the former head of the DOE Loan Programs Office, which issued the conditional loan guarantee in the waning days of the Biden administration. “I am concerned that the federal government is eroding what little trust the private sector has in our ability to be reliable partners.”
That trust is eroding rapidly, Heinrich said. The project has been in the works for more than a decade and is one of only a handful of major transmission developments underway in the United States.
The Grain Belt Express would support gigawatts’ worth of new wind and solar projects — energy sources that are under attack by the Trump administration.
The new GOP megalaw is expected to cut new solar, wind, and battery deployments by more than half just as power demand is rising. Last year, clean energy made up 96% of the new energy capacity being added to the U.S. grid.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has unleashed a flurry of anti-wind and anti-solar actions in the past month that threaten to subject wind and solar projects to burdensome and potentially insurmountable Interior Department reviews, block development on federal lands under “capacity density” restrictions, and potentially put a halt to already permitted wind farms on land and at sea.
The move to block the Grain Belt Express is part of this broader attempt to slow renewable energy — just when the country can least afford it, Heinrich said.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Why did you decide to write the letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright?
Secretary Wright, before he was secretary, said numerous times to our committee [the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources] that he was going to follow the law, and a conditional loan guarantee is a legally binding commitment.
It’s as if you go to your bank and you get preapproved for a mortgage, then when you show up for the closing, you expect the bank to make good on that. And that’s what we had here.
The reality is, we need this administration to follow the law and make good on commitments that have been made so that there is predictability in the market. We also need every cheap electron we can get right now, and so if you put these big infrastructure projects in jeopardy, what you’re really doing is passing along more costs to consumers.
Have you received any response from DOE?
Not yet.
Do you expect you’ll eventually get a response?
I certainly expect to. And if the secretary wants to be taken seriously by the Senate, then he needs to provide that information.
One of the things that really bothers me about a lot of the actions that the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior are taking right now is the sum total is creating a lot of uncertainty in the finance markets, and that flows through to create additional costs for consumers.
When you have a big transmission project like this one, there are $52 billion in energy savings over the course of the next decade, and that should be accruing to consumers. And if you put all of this in jeopardy, the real impact is that costs are going up, and then when you put all of these permits that are usually very predictable and are now uncertain, all of this is going to raise costs for consumers — for retail consumers and for commercial consumers. We’re already seeing electric rates start to rise, and I am deeply concerned that that is going to get a lot worse in the coming years because of their actions and their inactions.
You asked the department if it had analyzed the impact of canceling the loan guarantee. What do you see as the administration’s responsibility in analyzing its actions on energy policy in terms of affordability? And are they fulfilling those responsibilities?
They are not. And it doesn’t take a detailed analysis to understand that, in an environment of surging demand, if you artificially constrain supply, you’re going to be raising costs for people. And I want the American people to know that this is not an accident. They are choosing to take actions which are raising people’s electric bills.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican representing Iowa, has said he won’t be moving Treasury Department nominations forward until there’s some response from the administration regarding its actions on wind and solar tax credits. Can you tell us more about where members of Congress have power to challenge how the administration is managing energy policy?
Well, I think the confirmation process is one obvious place. This is an administration that has been very public about saying that they need more people in place to be able to execute their agenda. But unless they’re responsive to the Congress, that process is not going to speed up.
You asked the DOE for a list of all the closed loans and conditional commitments that the department is reviewing. Have you received any response?
I’ll be honest, they have not been particularly transparent or responsive on many of these issues, and that is a trend that I think does not bode well for the next several years.
Having been through a 17-year process to get one transmission line built [the SunZia line in New Mexico and Arizona], I’m also acutely aware of the jobs that hang in the balance. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of good, high-quality American jobs that are simply not going to come to fruition because this administration has a political agenda. I’ve never seen an administration so insensitive to the job implications of their actions.
CALISTOGA, Calif. — A quaint northerly outpost of Napa Valley wine country, Calistoga has struggled to keep the lights on when wildfires strike the region. Now it’s got a brand-new microgrid to run the whole town for days on end without any onsite fossil fuels, just batteries and liquid hydrogen.
After disastrous conflagrations in 2017 and 2018, utility Pacific Gas & Electric began preemptively shutting off power lines to avoid sparking fires amid dangerously dry, windy conditions.
“We were the first community in all of PG&E’s network that was getting our power shut off to protect us,” said Calistoga City Council member Lisa Gift. “By 2019 we were one of the first communities to have a microgrid in all of PG&E’s network, and that was being powered by diesel generators.”
PG&E arranged a bank of truck-based diesel generators to sit in the town during fire season. When the utility cut grid power, the generators kicked on, belching smoke in a particularly beloved pocket of the 5,000-person community.
“We’re a small town, so they would come up and they’d be polluting the environment, taking up our dog park — loud, gross, noisy,” Gift recalled.
Now the diesel generators are gone and the park has been turned back over to Calistoga’s canine companions.
On a slim parcel of city land next door, publicly traded energy-storage company Energy Vault installed lithium-ion batteries and a 234-foot, reinforced-steel tank for liquid hydrogen (designed to withstand a roaring fire, should it ever come to that) that runs a bank of hydrogen fuel cells. Altogether, this compound should be able to meet Calistoga’s electricity needs without any power from the broader grid. It’s contracted to produce up to 8.5 megawatts for 48 hours, whenever PG&E shuts off grid power due to fire concerns. Refilling the hydrogen tank could let it run for several days more.
“Even though we’re taking elements — fuel cells, batteries, liquid hydrogen storage and distribution — that have been used before in commercial settings, they’re coming together for the first time as resiliency,” said Craig Horne, Energy Vault’s senior vice president for advanced energy solutions, in an interview before the project’s unveiling in early August.
Fans of hydrogen hail it as a solution to just about any entrenched decarbonization challenge, from heavy transport to steelmaking to on-demand power. But how hydrogen is produced makes a huge difference in its climate impact; seemingly clean sources can actually rack up major carbon emissions for negligible benefit. For now, the clean hydrogen economy remains largely speculative, with hardly any truly clean hydrogen being produced or any real projects using it. Many planned clean hydrogen projects have vanished without a trace, following a short-lived boom fueled by Biden-era support.
In Calistoga, Energy Vault has tapped hydrogen to deal with a very specific set of constraints — delivering energy without local emissions, over multiple days, in a tight footprint — but the cleanliness of that hydrogen is a more complicated issue than public descriptions of the microgrid suggest.
The key players all have a lot riding on the project.
Energy Vault, which previously raised several hundred million dollars in a singular bid to store energy with multi-story robotic cranes that stack blocks, wants to build a new long-duration storage business around this hydrogen microgrid showcase. Plug Power, the financially challenged hydrogen company, points to Calistoga as its largest deployment of hydrogen fuel cells (a beefy 8 megawatts, after 28 years of hard work). And PG&E has orders from regulators to add more clean energy microgrids in communities where it regularly cuts off power — Calistoga was its first delivery on that directive, after a few years of soliciting proposals and a couple more years of permitting and construction.
“Community microgrids are the future of the energy system,” said Craig Lewis, who advocates for such projects as executive director of the Clean Coalition nonprofit. The Calistoga microgrid is “a commercial-scale experiment, and I’m grateful for it.”
The results of that experiment will take time to analyze. It could unleash a new, replicable model for premium-priced community-level backup power. Or the quirkiness of the design and the murkiness of hydrogen’s supply chain and emissions could make it a quixotic outlier of questionable climate value.
The Calistoga microgrid poses an answer to the question of how to provide a few days of backup power to a small town in a small space, without worrying too much about cost. The limitations drove the design, which turned out quite unlike anything built thus far.
Energy Vault had to figure out how to pack 293 megawatt-hours of storage into just two-thirds of an acre. The lot used to hold debris from city works, like old bits of sidewalk and pipes, Horne said.
Lithium-ion batteries have proven themselves capable of storing power, be it as a Powerwall in someone’s garage or as a large-scale grid storage facility. But to store nearly 300 megawatt-hours, grid battery enclosures need more acreage than was available to lease from the city. Even if enough batteries could fit, the auxiliary power consumption for keeping them safely cooled would pose a challenge for a project that’s supposed to mostly sit around waiting for an emergency event.
Hydrogen gas can be liquefied by cooling it to ultra-low temperatures, which unlocks greater energy density. When converted back to gas and run through fuel cells, it produces a stream of electricity and no byproduct besides water vapor. That core technology powers hydrogen vehicles, though their cost and inconvenience make for a widely derided car-ownership experience. At Calistoga, the hydrogen flows directly to six Plug Power GenSure 1540 fuel cells, boxy containers with cooling units stacked on top, making them about two stories tall.
The engineers added a small lithium-ion battery (7.7 MW/11.6 MWh) to perform “black start,” the complicated and crucial task of rebooting an electrical system after a complete blackout, Horne noted. The battery also buffers the output of the system while the hydrogen gets up and running. Then the power flows to Calistoga’s grid, which, when PG&E shuts off the transmission lines, will be fully islanded from the surrounding network.
The hydrogen is stored onsite in an 80,000-gallon tank, manufactured in Minnesota by Chart Industries. The tank holds enough to power the fuel cells for about two days, but Energy Vault will try its best to keep the lights on beyond the contracted timeframe, Horne said. So the company made sure the tank can be refueled while it’s in active use.
“The task is to squeeze toothpaste into a toothpaste tube that was being squeezed,” Horne said. “That’s what we proved in our acceptance testing, running for multiple hours while the fuel cells were running and a tank trailer here in the driveway is pushing liquid hydrogen into the tank itself.”
The microgrid’s promise as a clean energy breakthrough, of course, hinges on the supply of clean hydrogen, but supply chains are barely getting started. Almost all commercial hydrogen is currently made from methane gas, a fossil fuel, through a procedure called steam methane reforming that sends the carbon dioxide byproduct straight into the atmosphere.
For hydrogen to stake any claim as a climate solution, it needs to be made without massive carbon emissions. That usually involves an alternative production method called electrolysis, which separates hydrogen from water using electricity. But this method can produce even more emissions than the dirty methane version if the electrolyzers are drawing power from the grid rather than dedicated renewable sources like solar and wind (see this previous Canary Media coverage for a detailed account of why that’s the case).
Energy Vault describes the hydrogen it’s using in Calistoga as “clean,” which Horne clarified as meeting the federal standard of no more than four kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per kilogram of hydrogen produced. But he declined to name the source. Notably, California has subsidized hydrogen fueling stations for over a decade but still hasn’t managed to develop a clean hydrogen supply in-state. So for Calistoga’s hydrogen to be clean, it must be coming from somewhere else.
During a tour of the microgrid, Deepesh Goyal, vice president of stationary power at Plug Power, told Canary Media that Plug Power currently supplies hydrogen from its electrolyzer site in Georgia, which runs on grid power. More than half of Georgia’s electricity comes from fossil fuels, so that electrolysis incurs substantial power-plant emissions. Plug Power buys credits for clean energy supply to compensate for this, Goyal said.
To meet the highest federal standard for clean hydrogen, producers need to obtain clean power matched to their consumption on an hourly basis in the areas where they operate. Plug Power did not respond in time for publication to questions clarifying what type of credits it buys. But a spokesperson for Energy Vault told Canary Media that currently there aren’t any facilities that could supply Calistoga with liquid hydrogen from electrolysis powered by time-matched, dedicated clean electricity, and the earliest such facility is targeting completion in 2026.
Goyal also said some of Calistoga’s hydrogen comes from an unnamed partner in Las Vegas that uses renewable natural gas (RNG) as its feedstock. As it happens, legacy gas supplier Air Liquide opened a steam methane reformer in that area a few years ago to serve California’s demand. Air Liquide says it can substitute RNG for the usual methane, which would make the resulting hydrogen carbon-negative according to the convoluted calculations of California’s clean fuels bureaucracy. It’s still hydrogen made by splitting methane and releasing carbon dioxide, but it looks good on paper thanks to controversial rules that privilege certain politically connected providers of RNG.
If someone were to design a climate solution from a blank slate, they probably wouldn’t run electrolyzers on grid power in Georgia in order to load the super-cooled hydrogen onto diesel-powered tankers and haul it more than 2,800 miles to Northern California, where it will sit around almost every day awaiting a utility power outage.
“We still have to truck in that hydrogen,” said Gift. “That’s not ideal, but we were trucking in the diesel, and we were trucking in the diesel sometimes three times a day and burning that diesel.”
One incontrovertible fact is that the microgrid doesn’t combust anything onsite, so the operations within the fenceline emit almost no carbon emissions and don’t impact air quality. But it will be hard to gauge the real climate impacts of such a project until a more verifiably clean and geographically localized hydrogen supply chain develops. Several companies have said they will build truly green hydrogen production in the coming years. That task has only grown more difficult with the Trump administration’s efforts to thwart renewables development and vastly curtail clean hydrogen tax credits.
The other make-or-break variable for hydrogen-backed resilience is how much it costs. Liquid hydrogen is an expensive, specialty fuel only produced by a handful of suppliers in the U.S., and clean liquid hydrogen is even rarer.
For this first project, Energy Vault didn’t need to worry about consumer price sensitivity. The city of Calistoga isn’t paying Energy Vault for backup power: PG&E is paying the company to provide this service, out of funds socialized across the utility customer base. In fact, Calistoga is making some money, since Energy Vault leased the land from the municipality for 10 years.
The project’s total price tag has not been made public. Regulators allocated up to $46.3 million for PG&E to spend on the endeavor. Energy Vault closed $28 million in project financing this spring to support construction. (The company also said on Thursday that it has raised $300 million to launch Asset Vault, a subsidiary that will build, own, and operate storage projects, with Calistoga as one of two anchor properties.) Horne allowed that the hydrogen microgrid costs more than diesel generators up front, but argued it can be competitive in terms of operating costs, given all the hassles associated with diesel.
“We can do more and waste less, and so that’s how we can be more cost effective,” he said.
The regulatory authorization paints a different picture. The California Public Utilities Commission explicitly allowed PG&E to spend more money than the diesel generators cost in order to test a new model for cleaner resilience.
“This project was supported by a CPUC plan that said we could build a solution that costs no more than twice what it would cost to deploy diesel generation over 10 years,” said Jeremy Donnell, a senior manager for microgrid strategy and implementation at PG&E. “It’s a bit of an arbitrary marker, but that’s what was laid out, and this project did come in under that threshold.”
“But still, we have a ways to go to bring the cost down,” Donnell added. “So hopefully, through implementation of this first project, Energy Vault learned a lot, the industry learned a lot on how to integrate these solutions in future projects.”
Energy Vault hopes to improve the project economics by upgrading the site to allow regular power exports to the grid. Currently, the system is configured to only push out power when PG&E has scheduled a shutoff event; that means the microgrid sits idle almost every day of the year (and is unavailable for unforeseen outages, like if a tree falls on a key line). But with the right permissions and technical tweaks in place, Energy Vault expects to use the battery, and potentially even the hydrogen, to send power to California’s grid at particularly lucrative times.
“We can now have a viable second revenue stream outside of providing that resiliency service, without compromising our ability to provide the resiliency service,” Horne said. PG&E amended its contract this summer to clarify that Energy Vault is allowed to pursue this, provided it does not interrupt delivery of the required resilience services.
Going forward, Calistoga will serve as a showcase for Energy Vault’s new “H-Vault” product line, marketed as a high-tech option for long-duration clean energy needs. Hydrogen tanks will join gravity-based block stacking and conventional lithium-ion batteries as the company’s core offerings.
For the people of Calistoga, the project softens the upheavals of living through climate change–induced extreme weather, without all the downsides of onsite fossil fuel combustion.
“Is it absolutely perfect? No,” Gift said. “But as a society, it is about making that next best right step. And for us in our community, this was that next best right step.”
For Energy Vault and the budding hydrogen industry, the next right step will be expanding hydrogen production that’s definitively low-emissions, and closing the 2,800-mile gap between supply and demand.
Wendy Becktold contributed reporting from Calistoga.
Earlier this week, two low-carbon cement startups unveiled new partnerships with data-center developers and operators, which are looking at ways to curb the tech sector’s ballooning climate impact.
The separate announcements from Sublime Systems and Brimstone are a striking example of how businesses are pressing ahead with efforts to decarbonize essential polluting industries like cement making — even as the Trump administration guts federal programs meant to kick-start U.S. manufacturing of cleaner construction materials.
Both companies are developing novel ways of producing cement that don’t cook the planet in the process. Cement — the gluey powder mixed with sand, gravel, and water to form concrete — is responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Nearly all cement is made today by heating carbon-rich limestone in fossil-fuel-burning kilns.
Sublime, an MIT spinout, said on Tuesday that it completed a “pilot pour” of its fossil-fuel-free cement at a data center campus in northern Virginia owned by Stack Infrastructure. Sublime’s approach involves electrically charging a bath of chemicals and calcium silicate rocks. In Virginia, the startup and its partners used the cement to make seven cubic yards of concrete mix, which was then spread over a high-traffic loading dock.
Demonstration projects like these are key to convincing the inherently cautious construction industry to embrace new approaches. “It gives us a proof point to then [do] larger-scale deployments in a few years,” Cory Waltrip, Sublime’s director of business development and strategy, told Canary Media.
Those future deployments could include facilities run by Microsoft. The tech giant recently signed a binding deal to purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime’s cement products — enough to build roughly 30 professional football stadiums — from the startup’s forthcoming manufacturing facilities. The agreement marks a massive step up for Sublime, which can currently make just 250 metric tons of cement per year at its pilot plant in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Brimstone, for its part, also announced on Tuesday that it signed a commercial agreement with Amazon. The deal allows Amazon, valued at $2 trillion, to reserve future supplies of Brimstone’s low-carbon cement, though the partners declined to provide more specific details.
Oakland, California–based Brimstone sources carbon-free rocks instead of limestone, then pulverizes those rocks and adds chemical agents to leach out valuable minerals. Certain compounds are heated in a rotary kiln to make industry-standard cement. What remains can be used as supplementary cementitious materials — which help bulk up cement mixes — or to make a key component of aluminum.
Cody Finke, Brimstone’s co-founder and CEO, said Amazon began testing Brimstone’s products about a year ago and found they worked just as well as the conventional materials used in Amazon’s buildings. Amazon will get its supply from Brimstone’s $378 million commercial demonstration plant, which is slated to be operating by the end of the decade, Finke said.
The announcements send an important signal that private-sector demand isn’t waning for cleaner construction products — despite the White House abandoning strategies and rescinding funding for using greener cement, steel, glass, and other materials in public buildings, roads, and bridges.
Melissa Hulting, director for industrial decarbonization at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said she was “really excited” about the latest news from Sublime and Brimstone.
“In the absence of federal demand … it’s great to see that companies are stepping in and supporting procurement” of low-carbon cement, she said. “I’m hoping that we’ll see more companies, especially with the building up of these data centers, come in and fill that void.”
Still, green cement startups continue to face a sizable challenge in scaling up their pioneering manufacturing plants. The task is likely to be even harder now that the Department of Energy has clawed back crucial funding for industrial decarbonization initiatives.
In late May, the DOE said it was canceling over $3.7 billion in awards for two dozen projects aimed at decarbonizing everything from cement kilns and glassmaking furnaces to mac-and-cheese factories and whiskey distilleries. Sublime was slated to get up to $87 million to build its commercial-scale cement facility in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Brimstone had been awarded up to $189 million to finance the construction of its commercial plant, the site for which is still being decided.
Both Sublime and Brimstone said they’re in ongoing conversations with the DOE to try to appeal the decision. In the meantime, however, the startups are moving forward as planned with their manufacturing facilities.
Finke said Brimstone’s award cancellation felt like an “oversight, because critical materials are such an important topic for the Trump administration.” But he said that losing the federal funding doesn’t affect the company’s long-term strategy, which is focused on raising private capital. To date, the six-year-old startup has raised over $80 million from investors.
Sublime, meanwhile, has raised over $200 million since its founding in 2020, a figure that includes the DOE award. Leah Ellis, Sublime’s co-founder and CEO, said the startup remains on track to begin delivering cement to Microsoft and other customers from its Holyoke facility in 2028.
“We do think what we’re doing is aligned with the current administration’s priorities of creating jobs and investing in modernizing and onshoring manufacturing of important materials,” she said.
“Everything inside Sublime is going as well as we could hope,” Ellis added. “Nobody thought that scaling up a new cement technology would be easy, right? But that’s what we’re here for.”
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