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Wildfires in Canada — forcing mass evacuations in Manitoba and prompting urgent calls for assistance from First Nations leaders in Saskatchewan — have intensified as heat, drought, and atmospheric conditions collide, during the last week of May 2025.
Climate change is fueling this early-season heat, making high temperatures in parts of central Canada at least five times more likely than they would be in a world without climate change.
Note: This event may continue beyond May 30. Use the Global Climate Shift Index map to stay updated on heat in your region.
Dr. Kristina Dahl, VP of Science at Climate Central, said:
"When temperatures reach a CSI level 5 across such a large area, it’s not just unusual—it means this kind of heat would be incredibly unlikely without climate change," said Dr. Kristina Dahl, VP of Science at Climate Central. "These conditions, which set the stage for dangerous wildfires, will only become more frequent and more severe if we continue burning fossil fuels."
Kaitlyn Trudeau, senior research associate for climate science and wildfire expert at Climate Central, said:
"Climate change-driven heat dries out vegetation and sets the stage for wildfires. Combine that with persistent drought and a locked-in high-pressure system, and you have a perfect storm—one that’s becoming more common as we continue to burn fossil fuels and heat the planet."
To request an interview with a Climate Central scientist, please contact Abbie Veitch at aveitch@climatecentral.org.
The Climate Shift Index uses peer-reviewed methodology and real-time data to estimate how climate change has increased the likelihood of a particular daily temperature.
Canary Media’s “Electrified Life” column shares real-world tales, tips, and insights to demystify what individuals and building owners can do to shift to clean electric power.
An affordable housing complex for older adults in Sacramento, California, boasts some enticing features. Residents of the earth-toned, low-rise structures can cultivate gardens, swim laps in the pool, and toss bocce balls. They can stroll to visit neighbors. And now, after an electric transformation of the buildings, Foothill Farms residents can also enjoy the cleaner air that comes with ditching gas appliances.
The project not only slashes the complex’s health-harming and planet-warming pollution — it also made financial sense for both the owner BRIDGE Housing and its tenants. Two years ago, the 138-unit property’s original gas-fired equipment was nearing the end of its life. Coupled with available financial support, the timing gave executives of BRIDGE, a nonprofit affordable housing developer and manager, a chance to pivot away from fossil fuels.
The “smart, opportunistic” project at Foothill Farms illustrates how properties can electrify while keeping costs low for residents, according to a case study written earlier this year by staff at the Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future, a collaborative of 13 nonprofits, including BRIDGE. The retrofit is also a trailblazer for the decarbonization journey millions more units of government-supported affordable housing will eventually need to take.
Although single-family housing is by far the most prevalent in the U.S., and the biggest source of carbon pollution from homes, cutting fossil fuels from multifamily affordable housing is a particularly tricky task.
Some of the most vulnerable Americans live in subsidized apartments, including low-income households with older adults, disabled individuals, young families, and veterans — and they usually rent these units. Residents typically lack the power or cash to electrify properties, which presents a hurdle to eradicating emissions from buildings and denies inhabitants the upsides of these retrofits: greater comfort, safer air, and potential bill savings.
“There’s an opportunity for delivering outsized benefits to [these] residents and communities,” said Lucas Toffoli, principal of the carbon-free buildings division at clean-energy think tank RMI.
In 2023, BRIDGE Housing decided Foothill Farms would be a good candidate for energy-efficiency upgrades after Bright Power, an energy services provider, and Carbon Zero Buildings, a company specializing in decarbonization retrofits, analyzed BRIDGE’s entire portfolio of properties.
Carbon Zero carried out the electrifying changes: The turnkey contractor swapped out polluting gas-fueled water heaters for Rheem heat-pump water heaters and replaced ACs with Samsung heat pumps capable of both warming and cooling spaces. The firm also installed LED lighting everywhere, which consumes a tenth of the energy of incandescent light bulbs.
Carbon Zero’s team first piloted the complete retrofit in one unit to work out the kinks. With feedback from staff and residents, the crew honed its approach so that it could complete a unit’s upgrades in a single day during business hours.
“I love that,” said Toffoli, who wasn’t involved in the project. “Displacing folks is not only expensive and burdensome … it’s a real disruption to people who may be juggling a lot of things, like work and family, or who have limited mobility or health problems.”
In the common areas, Carbon Zero installed a new heat-pump pool heater and heat-pump spa heater, 30 EV charging stations, and 240-volt power outlets in the laundry rooms. Foothill Farms still has gas-powered clothes dryers, but BRIDGE plans to replace them with electric dryers when they conk out.
Comparing 2023 average monthly energy usage data to 10 months of data after the in-unit retrofits were completed last spring, natural-gas use has decreased by 98% while electricity use has risen 24% across the whole property, thanks in large part to the almost-magical efficiency of heat pumps.
Virtually all of the project’s $2.6 million cost was covered by state and utility grants: California’s Low-Income Weatherization Program, TECH Clean California, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. Other projects, though, are by no means guaranteed to see so much aid, with funding limited and awards variable, said Sebastian Cohn, senior project manager at the nonprofit Association for Energy Affordability and BRIDGE’s primary contact for the weatherization program incentive.
“It is typically in a property’s best interest to enroll [in these incentive programs] sooner than later,” Cohn told Canary Media. “The same project reserved today would receive less than half the [Sacramento Municipal Utility District] incentives Foothill Farms did due to updated incentive levels and per-project limits.”
Unlike many landlords who don’t pay tenants’ utility bills, and thus don’t benefit from energy-efficiency upgrades, BRIDGE actually had a financial incentive to make this switch to electric appliances: The organization pays for residents’ gas usage but not their electricity bills. How then did the project prevent residents’ costs from going up?
Elementary, my dear reader. Federal rules for most subsidized affordable housing protect residents from high rent and utility costs — and make sure these expenses don’t exceed 30% of their income — by requiring owners to provide what are called utility allowances, i.e., rent reductions to tenants paying their own utilities. The exact amounts are set by housing authorities and depend on locale, home size, and types of appliances. Based on the utility allowances for Sacramento when Carbon Zero pitched the project, the contractor estimated that residents would come out ahead, with each unit on average saving over $200 annually. The estimated savings for BRIDGE itself were $25,000 per year.
The real-world results match the initial project modeling very well, Cohn said, though BRIDGE declined to share specific dollar savings.
BRIDGE isn’t planning to stop with this project; a spokesperson said it’s already working with Carbon Zero and Bright Power on similar retrofits at a few other California properties.
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the week” column.
The future of steel and ironmaking in the U.S. is poised to get cleaner — so long as the country can let go of the industry’s dirty past.
All new steelmaking and ironmaking capacity in the U.S. is slated to use technologies that sidestep the need to burn coal, according to a new report from nonprofit research group Global Energy Monitor.
Steel and iron are among the most essential and widely used materials in the world. They’re also among the dirtiest to produce, responsible together for as much as 9% of global carbon dioxide emissions and a staggering amount of harmful local air pollution.
This is because the sector burns through an enormous amount of coal. The fossil fuel is traditionally used both in blast furnaces to purify iron ore and in basic oxygen furnaces to turn that purified iron into primary steel.
In the U.S., 12 blast furnaces are still producing iron ore this way, but the country’s steelmakers have largely shifted away from making primary steel. Instead, they increasingly rely on electric arc furnaces, a much cleaner technology that uses electricity to melt iron and scrap steel and turn it into fresh steel.
About 70% of the country’s steelmaking capacity today uses electric arc furnaces. All of the new capacity planned in the U.S. will come in the form of facilities that use electric arc furnaces, per Global Energy Monitor’s report.
In theory, steelmakers can run this electric equipment on clean power and pair it with a coal-free iron production process called direct reduction to create carbon-free primary steel. All of the new ironmaking capacity planned in the U.S. will use direct reduction, the report says, likely including Hyundai’s $6 billion plan to make what it describes as “low-carbon” steel in Louisiana. The country will more than double its capacity for direct reduction of iron in the coming years, the report found.
For now, U.S. facilities that use direct reduction will mainly rely on natural gas to purify the ore. Doing so can halve carbon emissions compared with using a coal-based blast furnace. The holy grail from a decarbonization standpoint is to eventually use carbon-free hydrogen in place of gas in the reduction process.
However, despite plans for cleaner facilities, steelmakers don’t intend to retire their dirtiest assets. Several of the dozen coal-fired blast furnaces still operating are slated to undergo costly relinings before 2030 — effectively committing to operating for many more years. A retirement plan has been announced for only one.
This analysis and news roundup comes from the Canary Media Weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it every Friday.
Over the past few months, the Texas Senate passed three bills that could’ve devastated the state’s nation-leading renewable energy rollout — but clean energy has dodged the bullet.
The first of those bills would have established new fees, setback requirements, and other permitting regulations on utility-scale wind and solar development, even though fossil-fuel plants don’t face the same restrictions. The second would have required large renewables installations to buy gas generation as a backup.
And the third would’ve ensured all renewable power development came with a side of fossil fuels, as it directed that 50% of all new power plant capacity added to the state’s grid come from dispatchable resources other than battery storage. That would have amounted to a gas mandate: Since solar panels and wind turbines can only produce power under certain conditions (sun shining, wind blowing, you know the drill), they can only be dispatchable power sources if batteries are involved. An earlier version of the bill explicitly said 50% of new capacity would have to come from gas.
These bills would have seriously slowed Texas’ deployment of solar, batteries, and wind power, which are shattering power-generation records in the state and helping its grid withstand extreme weather and meet surging electricity demand. The legislation would have caused reliability to fall and utility bills to soar, according to an April report from Aurora Energy Research.
But the Texas House’s session is set to end on June 2, and none of those three bills have been scheduled for consideration. This doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t resurface at some point, but they’re at least dead as standalone bills for this session, Doug Lewin writes in his Texas Energy and Power newsletter.
There are growing signs that these sorts of restrictions on renewables aren’t popular among many Texas Republicans and business interests. Recent polling from Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation shows widespread Republican support for renewables, while even the Texas Oil and Gas Association allied with renewable power generators to oppose the state House’s companion to the Senate’s bill requiring gas backup for clean energy.
Similar efforts in the state were defeated two years ago as well.
DOE orders a coal plant to stay open
The Trump administration took its pro-coal agenda to a new level last Friday, ordering a retiring Michigan coal plant to stay open through at least the end of August. The J.H. Campbell plant was supposed to shut down tomorrow, and Michigan utility Consumers Energy had been working since at least 2021 to do so. But the administration contended that the Midwest faces an “energy emergency” and needs the plant to guarantee power reliability.
Clean energy advocates, consumer watchdogs, and even Michigan’s top energy regulator disagree. “We currently produce more energy in Michigan than needed,” Michigan Public Service Commission Chair Dan Scripps said in a statement. “The unnecessary recent order from the U.S. Department of Energy will increase the cost of power for homes and businesses across the Midwest.”
Trump’s nuclear orders probably won’t outweigh cuts
President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders late last week to boost nuclear power — though they probably won’t counteract his many moves to weaken the industry. The four orders will:
But in recent months, the Trump administration has also looked to reduce funding for the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy, and cut staff at the Loan Programs Office, even though it funds nuclear reactor projects. And though nuclear made out better than other low-carbon energy sources in the federal budget bill recently passed by the House, projects would only be eligible for tax credits if they start construction by 2028 — an ambitious timeline for a famously slow-to-build energy source. Those are big setbacks that won’t “magically be solved” by simply cutting red tape, Josh Freed, who heads the climate and energy program at that think tank Third Way, told Latitude Media.
DOGE days over? Elon Musk announces he’ll leave the Trump administration as Tesla investors demand he return to the company, then condemns the U.S. House’s proposed end to clean energy tax credits. (Associated Press, Financial Times, Politico)
A blow to industrial decarbonization: The U.S. Energy Department announces the termination of $3.7 billion in grants from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which funds carbon capture and other ambitious but unproven projects to help cut industrial emissions. (news release)
Solar loses its farm: A U.S. Agriculture Department report says solar development on productive farmland poses a “considerable barrier” to agricultural expansion, and the department says it will reshape federal loans to disincentivize solar on farmland. (Heatmap)
I’ll drive what she’s driving: A nonprofit’s nationwide campaign aims to get more women into electric vehicles, including by turning suburban moms into EV ambassadors who can talk about benefits, like lower operating costs than gas cars and added storage space with “frunks.” (Canary Media)
Recycling reduction: The collapse and bankruptcy of EV battery recycling startup Li-Cycle underscores the battery recycling industry’s challenges, especially as federal support dwindles. (Canary Media)
Things that make no sense: The U.S. EPA has reportedly drafted a plan to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions limits on coal and gas power plants, stating in its proposed rule that the facilities“do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or climate change. (New York Times)
Another threat to batteries: Executives overseeing battery component production at an LG Energy Solution plant in western Michigan say the combination of high tariffs and restricted federal subsidies would devastate the domestic market that’s attempting to compete with China. (New York Times)
Cities step up on climate: Cleveland’s work around reducing building emissions and installing EV chargers in underserved neighborhoods shows how U.S. mayors are taking climate action, with or without the help of the federal government. (Grist)
A clarification was made on June 2, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect that Texas bills targeting renewable energy have not passed.
The Department of Energy announced Friday that it is canceling over $3.7 billion in funding for projects that would cut carbon emissions and toxic air pollution from power plants and industrial sites, ranging from cement kilns to ketchup-processing plants.
The DOE shared a list of the projects to be cut with Canary Media on Friday, which showed that more than half of the awards under the ambitious Industrial Demonstrations Program, housed under the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, will be terminated. OCED funding focused on carbon capture at gas-fired power plants is also impacted.
DOE claimed the projects “failed to advance the energy needs of the American people, were not economically viable, and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
But advocates disagree. Not only would the projects kickstart efforts to clean up industries that are notoriously tricky to decarbonize — they would have generated serious economic benefits, too.
Analyses from groups including the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy have found that federal spending from OCED would have created hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide and helped position U.S. industries to compete in international markets that are increasingly demanding cleaner materials and products.
Stakeholders have for months expected the Trump administration to cut the OCED awards, which were authorized under the Biden administration by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
In March and April, reports surfaced of plans by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate the office’s $6 billion Industrial Demonstrations Program, cut carbon capture and sequestration projects, and cancel billions of dollars of funding for clean-hydrogen hubs based in Democratic-leaning states.
Today’s announcement doesn’t include any hydrogen-hub funding cuts. But the feared elimination of money for carbon capture and industrial decarbonization has become a reality.
The Trump administration is getting rid of funding for several efforts to decarbonize the production of cement, one of the most carbon-intensive industries in the world. That includes $189 million for Brimstone and $87 million for Sublime Systems, two startups pioneering new low-carbon cement production methods. Global cement giant Heidelberg Materials will lose its $500 million award to capture carbon emissions at a massive existing cement plant in Indiana. And the National Cement Company of California won’t receive its $500 million grant to take a multi-technology approach to cutting emissions from its plant in Lebec, California.
The DOE is also pulling funding for projects to replace fossil-fueled industrial heating equipment with heat pumps, electric boilers, and thermal energy storage systems.
Kraft Heinz will lose its $170 million award to install clean heat technologies at 10 of its food production facilities. Beverage giant Diageo North America will no longer receive the $75 million it was promised to help install thermal energy storage systems from startup Rondo Energy at production facilities in Kentucky and Illinois. And Texas-based industrial heat pump manufacturer Skyven Technologies, which had been awarded a $145 million grant to install its technology at a New York state ethanol plant, was listed on DOE’s spreadsheet as having a $15 million grant rescinded. (DOE did not immediately respond to inquiries to determine whether Skyven was set to lose only part of its $145 million grant or if DOE’s spreadsheet was in error.)
Projects to cut pollution from factories that make metals are also on the chopping block. That includes a $75 million grant to back American Cast Iron Pipe Co.’s “Next Gen Melt Project,” which would have lowered emissions from iron and steelmaking at its site in Birmingham, Alabama. It also includes $75 million for United States Pipe and Foundry Co. to replace a coal-fired furnace with electric arc furnaces.
The DOE’s cancellations will also impact several projects seeking to reduce carbon emissions from glass production, including $75 million for Gallo Glass in Modesto, California; $57 million for Owens-Brockway Glass Container in Zanesville, Ohio; and $45 million for Libbey Glass in Toledo, Ohio.
Friday’s list also includes projects to cut carbon emissions from chemicals production, including $100 million for Ørsted to capture and use industrial carbon dioxide waste to make shipping fuel at its Star e-Methanol facility in Texas; $375 million for Eastman Chemical Co.’s plastics recycling project in Longview, Texas; and $331 million for Exxon Mobil to use hydrogen instead of fossil gas for ethylene production in Baytown, Texas.
Funding for carbon capture and storage projects at power plants will be scrapped, too. Calpine will not receive a pair of $270 million awards to retrofit power plants in Texas and California.
The list did not include some high-profile metals decarbonization projects, like the $575 million in grants set to flow to two Cleveland-Cliffs steel facilities in Pennsylvania and Ohio — the latter in Middletown, Vice President JD Vance’s hometown — or the $500 million for Century Aluminum to build a “green smelter,” likely in Kentucky.
What remains unclear is the extent to which Friday’s cancellations have disrupted ongoing construction, hiring of workers, or other unrecoverable commitments from companies impacted. Firms have been tight-lipped about plans to navigate the consequences of federal funding clawbacks. All of the awards required participating companies to invest at least as much as they were set to receive in federal grants.
A representative of Sublime Systems told Canary Media that the company was “surprised and disappointed” by DOE’s decision to cut its grant. Sublime this week announced a deal with Microsoft, which said it would buy 600,000 tons of the low-carbon cement to be produced from the startup’s first commercial-scale plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts — a plant backed by DOE’s grant.
“It is our hope to continue to partner with the DOE to show a success story of American innovation and ingenuity at its finest,” Sublime’s representative said in a Friday email. “Nevertheless, we have prepared for the possibility of this disappointing outcome and are evaluating various scenarios that leave our scale-up unimpeded.”
The projects are without a doubt now on far shakier financial footing, and advocates do not expect that they’ll be able to move forward without the federal funding. Should they fail, the effects would be profound, according to Evan Gillespie, a partner at advocacy group Industrious Labs.
“[The projects] would have helped catapult the U.S. into a leadership position in the technologies that will bring down emissions and pace the next generation of industrial evolution,” he said. “Killing these projects means more emissions, more pollution, and more people getting sick.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas industry executive who insists that climate change is not a crisis, said in Friday’s announcement that the decision would benefit U.S. taxpayers.
“While the previous administration failed to conduct a thorough financial review before signing away billions of taxpayer dollars, the Trump administration is doing our due diligence to ensure we are utilizing taxpayer dollars to strengthen our national security, bolster affordable, reliable energy sources and advance projects that generate the highest possible return on investment,” he said.
Industrial decarbonization advocates pushed back.
“This program could have been a centerpiece of achieving the administration’s goal to bring manufacturing back to the United States,” Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said in a Friday statement. “Choosing to cancel these awards is shortsighted, and I think we’re going to look back at this moment with regret. Locking domestic plants into outdated technology is not a recipe for future competitiveness or bringing manufacturing jobs back to American communities.”
A new state law aimed at expanding gas and nuclear power plants in Ohio may also provide opportunities for solar developers — if they can overcome other policy and political barriers.
Solar industry advocates say House Bill 15, signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in mid-May, contains several technology-neutral provisions that could benefit clean energy projects, including property tax breaks for siting them on brownfields and former coal mines. The law also loosens restrictions on behind-the-meter electricity generation and lowers the overall tax burden for new power plants.
“This is just smart economic development. We need the energy,” said Michael Benson, board president of Green Energy Ohio, whose members include a variety of clean energy companies. In his view, a market-based approach should work in favor of renewables and battery storage, which can generally be deployed more quickly and cheaply than power plants that burn fossil fuels.
Much of the public discussion around the legislation focused on its repeal of coal plant subsidies mandated by HB 6, the 2019 law at the heart of Ohio’s ongoing public corruption scandal. HB 15 also will end the use of “electric security plans,” which let utilities add special charges to customer bills without reviewing all revenue and expenses in a full rate case.
But many of the measures in HB 15 are meant to encourage new electricity production in the state.
“We should open the market to dispatchable energy generation to address future energy shortages,” the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Roy Klopfenstein (R-Haviland), said in his February testimony, in which he also noted growing energy demand from data centers and other large electricity users, and energy supply issues raised by grid operator PJM Interconnection. The term “dispatchable” is often used to refer to power plants that can be turned on or off as demand requires, as opposed to solar or wind without battery backup.
Most of the law’s incentives for new energy production are technology-neutral, however.
Under HB 15, new electricity production on brownfields and minelands designated as priority investment areas will be exempt from property taxes for five years. Grants of up to $10 million each will be available to clean up or prepare the sites for construction. And the Ohio Power Siting Board will speed up its review of energy projects in those areas.
“It’s a huge opportunity,” said Rebecca Mellino, a climate and energy policy associate for The Nature Conservancy in Ohio. Last year the organization estimated that Ohio has more than 600,000 acres of minelands and brownfields suitable for renewable energy production. The sites often have good access to roads and transmission lines, too.
As Mellino sees it, solar in priority areas would avoid objections raised by some people about displacing farmland. And counties with renewable energy bans could presumably modify them to allow development in priority investment areas without affecting other parts of their jurisdictions, she suggested.
The law also removes a restriction that has required behind-the-meter generation to be located on the premises of the customer who is using the power. The change might allow data centers to tap into gas-fired backup generators on an adjacent property, for example. But it could also create new opportunities for clean energy-powered microgrids, in which a group of customers share solar panels and a large battery.
“That is significant, all by itself,” because it provides more flexibility, said Dylan Borchers, an energy attorney with law firm Bricker Graydon in Columbus, Ohio. Just as importantly, the law “allows essentially a portfolio approach for customers and energy resources.”
In other words, multiple businesses could form a shared “self-power” system with equipment for electricity generation or battery storage on adjacent land or on premises controlled by one or more of them. Such a system could include numerous generation or storage facilities, allowing a cluster of data centers, factories, or other large energy users to combine multiple behind-the-meter resources, whether they be natural gas, solar, batteries, or small nuclear when it becomes available.
The ability to combine resources means customers wouldn’t necessarily need lots of land to add renewable energy, said Benson. “If you want the most power quickly and cleanly, you can use rooftops and parking lots and build out a lot of small-scale generation.”
The law also reduces the overall tax burden for new electricity production. Local governments may collect less revenue but still welcome the jobs and other spending that come with new energy investments. And less stringent requirements might even benefit some communities when new power generation is sited, Borchers suggested.
Ohio’s current tangible personal property tax rates have been so high that companies have often used “payments in lieu of taxes,” also known as PILOT programs, to avoid getting walloped by huge tax bills as soon as energy production starts. But counties face somewhat strict requirements for how they must allocate PILOT payments. Developers that take advantage of the lower tax rates available under HB 15 may have more financial flexibility to be able to fund some projects that local governments want most, such as a new fire station or community center, Borchers said.
Taken together, the provisions in HB 15 promise to make it easier to build more solar in the state, industry representatives say.
The governor and legislature saw “the urgent need to expand energy generation as Ohio confronts rapidly increasing demand and the threat of escalating costs and supply shortages,” said Will Hinman, executive director for the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio. “House Bill 15 is a critical step towards addressing these challenges by reducing barriers to energy development — including utility-scale solar projects.”
The law still requires projects to meet multiple criteria to benefit from its provisions. For example, power-generating facilities and transmission lines exceeding certain thresholds may need approval from the Ohio Power Siting Board. The state’s director of development must approve local governments’ designations of priority investment areas. And self-power systems have to be independent of the main power grid.
The biggest downside is that the new law left in place a 2021 statute, Senate Bill 52, which requires utility-scale renewable energy developments to get local approval, said Molly Bryden, a climate and sustainability researcher with think tank Policy Matters Ohio.
Under that earlier law, 34 of Ohio’s 88 counties have banned new solar generation in all or part of their territories. Even where the local law doesn’t bar a new project, local officials can still block projects before a developer even seeks a permit from the Ohio Power Siting Board. A county representative and a township representative also get to vote with state siting board members on whether facilities get a permit, even for some projects that were in the grid operator’s queue before the 2021 law.
Another law took effect in early 2023, letting local governments limit small solar and wind projects that connect to the grid but don’t otherwise fall within the scope of the 2021 law.
Requirements of the 2021 and 2023 laws don’t apply to generation fueled by natural gas, coal, or nuclear power. And Ohio’s high court has ruled local governments can’t ban or regulate gas wells and related infrastructure or even enforce broader zoning laws that would prevent such development.
Lawmakers also cut out provisions from an earlier version of HB 15 that would have allowed community solar development. Community solar lets residential customers save money by sharing the electricity from a local solar array, which doesn’t have to be on their own property.
“There’s still a real need for permitting reform,” Bryden said.
The global chemicals industry is big, and it’s dirty. Chemical plants consume lots of fossil fuels, both to power the high-temperature, high-pressure processes involved and often as a feedstock for the chemicals produced. And to maximize production, those plants are typically built to be as large as possible.
Todd Brix, CEO of startup OCOchem, has a different vision for how to build a modern chemicals industry: Manufacture lots of small machines that are powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels to do the work.
“The way we make cars, the way we make TVs, the way we make semiconductor chips should be the same way we make chemicals plants,” Brix said.
Last week, the company’s pilot plant in Richland, Washington, started producing a class of chemicals known as formates, used in everything from deicing airplanes to preserving animal feed. But instead of the conventional hot, dirty method of combining methanol with carbon monoxide derived from fossil fuels, OCOchem makes formate with just water and carbon dioxide inside four 1.5-meter electrolytic modules.
OCOchem fills those modules with water and carbon dioxide and then zaps the solution with electricity, causing an electrochemical reaction that yields formic acid, a combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. Chemically speaking, it’s “one of the simplest molecules you can imagine,” Brix said — basically, “CO2 with two hydrogen atoms attached to it.”
The $5 million project can make up to 60 tons of formic acid per year. That’s not a lot, compared with the roughly 1 million tons per year of formates produced globally. But being able to deliver an industrial chemical cost-effectively in such small amounts is one of the selling points, Brix explained.
“Once you want to scale out and make more formate, you just make more modules. That’s the power of economies of scale of mass production,” he said. “We can rapidly scale that technology out, and make a lot of little chemical plants, and stack them together.”
Factory-built modular devices are being tried out across various industries, from fertilizer to steel — and they are even being considered for nuclear power. It’s already a winning pathway in the renewable energy sector, where mass-produced solar panels and lithium-ion battery cells have seen costs drop steeply as production volumes increase and manufacturers consistently improve each new generation of products.
“What the solar industry does is mass-produce solar panels — and what we are trying to do is mass-produce chemical plants,” Brix said. “That allows you to dramatically lower the costs over time.”
Tiny chemicals-production cells are a bit more complicated than solar panels, of course. But OCOchem’s electrolytic cells aren’t taking on anything as dangerous as nuclear fission. Brix described the process as akin to “artificial photosynthesis.” Plants use water, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the energy from sunlight. OCOchem cells, which operate at ambient temperatures and pressures, electrify water and carbon dioxide and emit only formic acid, which is corrosive but not flammable or explosive.
Using electrolysis to produce formate is far from a unique idea, said Brix, who worked at Chevron, Intel, and Microsoft before founding OCOchem in 2020. In fact, researchers have been trying to do it for decades. But the efforts he’s aware of have struggled to expand cells to a size that can support commercially viable volumes.
“We started with a reactor that was 10 square centimeters in size,” Brix said. “We’ve scaled that up by a factor of 1,500.” OCOchem has developed patented technologies that can handle the required current density, or electrical throughput, to achieve this increased size and manufactures these key components itself. It then works with a contract manufacturer to assemble them into cells, which otherwise use off-the-shelf equipment from other electrolysis-based industries.
OCOchem raised $5 million in 2023 and has secured federal and state grants for its early technology development, as well as an undisclosed amount of early-stage support from Halliburton Labs, the tech accelerator of oil services company Halliburton. The four cells in the pilot facility are the first it’s produced via this assembly-line process, Brix said, but the company is preparing to scale up its manufacturing to meet orders for more than $300 million in prepurchase contracts.
Those contracts are for the formate it will make, not for the equipment itself, he noted. “Our goal is to be the developer of the technology and operator of the plant and share ownership of the plant with various partners.”
OCOchem’s process emits no carbon dioxide, unlike the fossil-fuel-based processes used to make formates today, Brix said. Much of the world’s supply of the chemicals is from factories that are part of China’s expanding coal-fed chemicals industry. Whether OCOchem’s formate is considered low-, zero-, or negative-carbon depends on two key factors: the carbon footprint of the electricity used to make it and the carbon dioxide going into its cells.
Right now, OCOchem plans to get its CO2 “from the highest purity and cheapest sources we can find,” Brix said. “That turns out to be biogenic CO2,” or gas captured from ethanol plants, breweries, wastewater-treatment facilities, and similar sources. Some of that CO2 is used today as coolant in refrigeration and for carbonating beverages. CO2 that can’t find industrial purchasers is either captured at the expense of its emitter or, far more often, vented into the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change.
Plenty of industries, ranging from sustainable aviation fuel to lower-carbon cement, are planning to rely on captured CO2 to decarbonize. Consulting firm EcoEngineers studied OCOchem’s process and found that every ton the company produces could avoid a combined 7.2 tons of CO2 emissions, compared with fossil-fuel-fed formate production, both by displacing fossil fuels and fixing captured CO2 in the formic acid it makes.
But OCOchem doesn’t need a “green premium” for its low-carbon bona fides, Brix said. Instead, it’s relying on offering customers a cost-competitive alternative to formate shipped from overseas. That’s not possible with its pilot-scale facility today, he stressed. But “even at 10,000 tons per year, which is a small chemical plant, we’ll have lower cost of production” than typical fossil-fuel-fed plants. “We can say, ‘Whatever your market price is, we’ll meet it.’”
More chemical markets beckon. Formic acid can be processed into a number of organic compounds, including many now made from fossil fuels, he said — “not because they’re higher performance, or cleaner, or cheaper, but because they do the job good enough.”
Formates and formic acid could also serve as “hydrogen carriers,” Brix said. Hydrogen, when it’s produced in ways that don’t cause greenhouse gas emissions, can be used to cut the carbon impact of industries from steelmaking to shipping. It’s unlikely that OCOchem’s formates would be a cost-effective source of hydrogen at large volumes, but they could serve as a convenient medium for transporting hydrogen in trucks, he said.
The trick is to find cost-effective ways to separate the hydrogen molecules from the formates once they reach their destination, said Ye Xu, associate professor of chemical engineering at Louisiana State University. Xu specializes in research in surface chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis — the fundamental study of the interaction of solid catalysts with molecules. He’s been working on a project to crack hydrogen from formates in a way that’s economically viable—one of many being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
“If you need to transport huge quantities of hydrogen atoms, you have to compress hydrogen gas under extremely high pressure. That causes cost problems and safety problems,” Xu said, especially for chemicals being transported by truck or train. Hydrogen-bearing formates, by contrast, are “not flammable. They don’t explode. They are not toxic. These are some very attractive characteristics.”
When it comes to separating the hydrogen atoms from formate molecules at the end of the journey, so far “the stumbling block is the speed of the reaction,” he said. “Formates are stable substances and slowly decompose on their own.” Speeding up the process requires a catalyst, and “according to the scientific literature, the only catalyst that works is palladium” — a costly metal, which, like the chemically similar platinum, is already in high demand for electronics, automotive, and many other industrial uses.
Xu’s search for substitute catalysts to make formate a viable hydrogen carrier involves massive computational research as well as collaboration with scientists doing real-world research. In a way, Brix noted, it’s a similar process to the years of research that have gone into OCOchem’s core technologies, such as the gas-diffusion electrodes that allow it to electrolyze water and CO2 at commercial-scale volumes.
Taking such experiments from laboratory to pilot project to commercial production may be labor-intensive and costly. But building, testing, and redesigning the next generation of technologies is a lot easier and faster on an assembly line than as part of a complicated, yearslong engineering, procurement, and construction project to build large-scale facilities, Brix said.
“We’ve built the best little Lego block we can. Now we want to stack the Lego blocks together,” Brix said, and “just build more and more stacks. And from there, it’s rinse, lather, repeat.”
Li-Cycle once seemed like a leader among the startups trying to recycle electric vehicle batteries in the U.S. Now it’s mired in bankruptcy proceedings.
The company’s board replaced the CEO and CFO in a decision announced May 1, when Li-Cycle publicized that it was looking for buyers. A potential deal with mining giant and lead creditor Glencore evidently had not come to fruition: Two weeks later, a Canadian bankruptcy court appointed Alvarez & Marsal Canada Securities to oversee a sale of Li-Cycle’s assets. A Li-Cycle spokesperson referred Canary Media to the company’s public bankruptcy announcements.
Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June. In the meantime, Glencore has loaned $10.5 million to keep things going during the proceedings. Glencore also entered a “stalking horse” offer of $40 million for most of Li-Cycle’s holdings, setting a floor for bidding (if any other investors want a piece of the action). Glencore could emerge with a real deal on its hands, but it won’t be recouping the $275 million it previously invested in Li-Cycle.
“The Company represents a compelling investment opportunity, uniquely positioned to benefit from rapid growth in the battery materials and [lithium-ion battery] recycling market, amid increasing global focus on sustainability and critical raw material supply chain resilience,” Alvarez & Marsal pitch in a flyer for the sale.
That “compelling” opportunity amounts to five battery shredding plants, a massive unfinished recycling center in Western New York, and a business predicated on the growth of a nascent North American EV supply chain that currently faces far-reaching disruption from the Trump administration. A buyer would not be able to fully recycle any batteries without spending a few hundred million dollars more, and even then, it’s not clear they would make any money doing so.
The startup’s collapse underscores the struggles of the fledgling battery recycling industry in general. A few years ago, the sector was flush with venture capital and charting out rapid timelines for commercializing breakthrough technologies that would enable the transition to EVs while minimizing mining. The sector was also seen as a way to achieve the bipartisan goal of reducing dependence on China, which dominates the global battery supply chain.
Li-Cycle was founded in Canada in 2016 and went public in 2021 through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC (generally a red flag for early-stage cleantech companies). Its engineers developed a technique for shredding whole lithium-ion battery packs while they’re submerged in liquid; this prevented fires and saved considerable effort compared with painstakingly discharging and dismantling the packs for processing.
Li-Cycle successfully built five “spoke” facilities to collect and shred whole electric vehicle battery packs, turning them into the powdery mixture known as black mass. The spoke operations have paused in Arizona, Alabama, New York, and Ontario, while a German outpost continues to function during bankruptcy proceedings. Collectively, these facilities can break down up to 40 kilotons of batteries a year.
The spokes were supposed to feed their black mass to Li-Cycle’s hub in Rochester, New York, which would refine it and isolate useful battery materials to reintroduce into the supply chain. This never came to pass because Li-Cycle halted construction in fall 2023, citing runaway costs. It became clear that Li-Cycle needed to find a lot more cash to complete the nearly 2-million-square-foot site.
The company hoped for a lifeline from the Biden-era Department of Energy: In November, its Loan Programs Office finalized a $475 million loan for Li-Cycle to complete the recycling hub. But Li-Cycle never drew on that federal money because it couldn’t secure additional private funding to hold in reserve, as stipulated in the loan terms.
Li-Cycle is not the only battery recycling firm in a tough spot. Since last year, a number of challenges have beset the industry.
The adjacent U.S. EV sector has seen slower growth than expected, which has in turn reduced the urgency of building out a North American battery supply chain. Core battery materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt have plummeted in price, lessening the value of whatever recyclers might glean. And battery makers have increasingly turned to lithium iron phosphate, a cheaper alternative to nickel- and cobalt-based chemistries, further reducing the value of recycling these batteries.
In the past year, a fire destroyed the largest battery shredding plant in the U.S., Interco’s Critical Mineral Recovery site in Missouri. Reno, Nevada–based Aqua Metals ran low on funds and laid off staff while it searched for financing to build a commercial-scale recycling line. Ascend Elements delayed construction of its flagship recycling plant in Kentucky, citing a customer’s decision to postpone buying the recycled materials. In March, Ascend canceled plans to make cathode active materials in Kentucky to focus on precursor materials and lithium carbonate.
Redwood Materials is the rare bright spot. The venture by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel raised a couple billion dollars and has been building out a major compound in the desert outside Reno, not far from Tesla’s factory there. In 2024, Redwood Materials broke down 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries and earned $200 million in revenue from recycled materials.
The industry’s challenges come as the Trump administration says it aims to expand U.S. mineral supplies. Paradoxically, the administration has taken steps to undermine the fledgling U.S. EV and battery industries, which are the big drivers of demand growth for rare earth metals. The budget bill passed by the House last week would strip tax incentives for EV purchases and battery installations, weakening demand for the domestic supply chain that recyclers like Li-Cycle hoped to serve — and making the tough road for recycling firms even tougher.
Modern farming depends on massive amounts of ammonia fertilizer, almost all of it made from fossil gas in enormous chemical plants. These facilities use high heat and pressure to split that gas, mostly made up of methane, into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere, and the hydrogen is mixed with air, where it bonds with the nitrogen under high pressure via the century-old Haber-Bosch process.
The resulting ammonia is a carrier for the nitrogen that plants crave, but producing it this way is highly carbon-intensive, accounting for nearly 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions today. And that ammonia can be costly. The farmers who purchase it are subject to severe price spikes tied to the volatile fossil gas market. Transporting the fertilizer to farmers from where it is produced also adds hundreds of dollars per ton.
Outside the town of Boone, Iowa, startup Talusag and Landus, one of the state’s biggest farming cooperatives, are working on a new method for producing ammonia — tapping electricity to make the chemical from water and air, using technology that could be deployed at modular scale across the country and around the world.
Talusag’s first pilot-scale facility in North America, built at a cost of about $5 million and powered by on-site solar, is capable of producing 1 to 2 tons of ammonia per day, said Talusag CEO and co-founder Hiro Iwanaga. Earlier this year, a test batch was applied to farm fields, marking the first commercial delivery of “green ammonia” from a small-scale facility in North America, according to the partners.
Talusag has already started building a larger project in the nearby town of Eagle Grove, Iowa, that will be capable of producing up to 20 tons of ammonia per day. That facility, which Iwanaga said will cost about $15 million and be running later this year, will tap into grid supplies of wind power, which provides nearly three-fifths of Iowa’s annual electricity generation.
Twenty tons per day is a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly 14 million metric tons of ammonia produced in the U.S. last year or the approximately 240 million metric tons produced globally. But Iwanaga is hoping that his company’s modular systems, which can run on intermittent renewable electricity and be sited closer to farms, can start to provide an alternative to fossil-derived ammonia that’s cheaper and more reliable.
“We only deploy projects where we are cost-competitive or better with the incumbent competition,” he said.
That’s fairly straightforward in the markets that Iwanaga and his team initially targeted. The startup launched in 2021 “largely as a philanthropic venture” to help farmers in developing countries, he said, where fertilizer is far more expensive due to shipping costs. Its first project uses solar power at a nut farm in Kenya, for example. Talusag is pursuing more projects for remote farms, as well as for mining operations that use ammonia to produce explosives, where transportation costs are a significant burden.
But even in America’s agricultural heartland, Talusag can propose long-term contracts at set prices at or below the cost of ammonia shipped via pipeline from the Gulf Coast and then by tanker trucks to further-flung farms, Iwanaga said.
There’s an important caveat to that, however. Talusag’s ammonia is only cost-effective in U.S. markets if generous federal incentives for producing hydrogen with low or zero carbon emissions remain in place — a prospect that is looking increasingly uncertain.
Talusag’s facilities use electrolyzers to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The gas, commonly called “green hydrogen,” is then fed into miniaturized versions of the gigantic Haber-Bosch reactors at industrial ammonia plants. That chemical process yields no greenhouse gas emissions — and if it uses clean electricity, it’s completely carbon-free.
Those green credentials are a nice “ancillary benefit” of the green ammonia that Landus plans to obtain from Talusag’s two Iowa facilities, said Brian Crowe, the cooperative’s vice president of strategic initiatives. But far more important to Landus and its farmer-owners are the prospects of securing a lower-cost source of fertilizer that’s made closer to home, he said.
Landus was first introduced to Talusag back in 2022, when ammonia prices rose to nearly double their typical levels, due in large part to the global disruptions to fossil fuel supplies caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Crowe said. Landus buys, stores, and transports tens of thousands of tons of ammonia per year for its farmer-members, and the agriculture industry at large was “kind of scrambling to figure out, how do we hedge against this?”
The Talusag offering “seemed like a practical solution,” he said. “Make it close to where it’s needed, do it modularly, and lock in the price to create more price stability. They produce it, we take it and pay them for it — or they don’t, and we don’t.”
Iwanaga noted that Landus isn’t taking on financial risk with these projects. Talusag pays for building and producing its green ammonia. That structure puts the pressure on Talusag to deliver on the quality and the low price it has promised to buyers.
But it also potentially provides the company with the long-term revenues it needs to secure project financing, rather than relying on equity capital. Talusag raised a $22 million Series A round in 2023 and is exploring projects with other farmer cooperatives in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, as well as outside the U.S., Iwanaga said.
Shorter supply lines and fixed long-term prices are valuable features of Talusag’s modular model for producing green ammonia. But Iwanaga conceded that the company’s future in U.S. markets hinges on a key federal incentive that may not be around much longer — the 45V hydrogen production tax credit created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a reconciliation bill that calls for all but eliminating the federal clean energy tax credits created under the IRA. That includes ending 45V credits for any project that can’t begin construction before the end of 2025.
Talusag’s two projects in Iowa would squeak under that deadline, and the company may be able to start additional projects before year’s end, Iwanaga said. But if the final bill does kill the 45V credit, that would rule out starting up any other U.S. projects for the foreseeable future, he said.
Robin Gaster, research director at the Center for Clean Energy Innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., noted that would-be commercial-scale producers of ammonia fertilizer made from green hydrogen face a tough road in U.S. markets.
“It’s an interesting idea for developing countries, partly because there are supply-chain issues so often,” he said. But “I would be surprised if there were places in the United States where the supply chain and commodity costs were so bad that green ammonia is a competitive option.”
The economics of green hydrogen production do not stand up on their own without subsidies like the 45V tax credit, he said. Today, hydrogen produced in the U.S. with fossil gas — referred to as “gray hydrogen” — costs between $1 and $2 per kilogram, depending on the price of fossil gas, whereas green hydrogen costs $5 per kilogram and up. “The first question is obviously on cost, and whether they expect this to rely on subsidies forever.”
Crowe noted that there’s an important distinction between green hydrogen used to make ammonia for agriculture and green hydrogen that could potentially be used for industries such as trucking, shipping, and steelmaking. Farmers need ammonia now, and enormous quantities of gray hydrogen are already being used to produce it, while retooling industries like trucking and shipping to use hydrogen would require massive investments in new systems and infrastructure.
The on-again, off-again nature of U.S. clean hydrogen policy has made long-term commitments to green ammonia a tough sell. Some companies that announced ambitious plans to produce green ammonia in 2023 and early 2024 failed to follow through with real-world investments after the Biden administration instituted more stringent clean-energy tracking rules for the 45V credit than industry groups had hoped for. Cutting off the tax credit completely would make the economics of such projects even worse.
Iwanaga pointed out that Talusag’s technology has some advantages over large green ammonia projects, however. For one, the company’s modular systems can be manufactured and deployed in small increments, an advantage over gigantic chemicals facilities, so that exposes Talusag’s investors to less risk, he said.
Talusag’s systems were also designed expressly to run on intermittent clean power, like the solar power serving off-grid or remote farms that were its initial target customers, he said. Most electrolyzer technologies don’t perform as efficiently when they’re forced to ramp up and down frequently to follow fluctuations in power supply. Talusag must deal with those challenges as well, but has incorporated several design features that minimize the efficiency losses, he said.
Talusag’s green ammonia technology isn’t the only one designed to use solar and wind power when it’s available. But being able to do that is a prerequisite not just for systems that rely on their own solar power, but also for grid-connected systems trying to capture the cheapest power available — which more and more frequently is also the cleanest.
Take the wind energy that makes up an increasing share of the electricity flowing across Midwest power grids. Iowa is the second-largest wind power producer after Texas, with 59% of its annual net generation coming from wind in 2023. Other Upper Midwest states heavy on wind power as of 2023 include South Dakota at 55% of annual net generation, North Dakota at 36%, and Minnesota at 25%.
Wind farms produce when the wind is blowing, which isn’t always when most customers are using electricity — and the more surplus wind power is available, the cheaper it is, Iwanaga said. That creates strong long-term prospects for using excess wind energy to make hydrogen, which could eventually make up for the absence of federal clean-hydrogen incentives, Iwanaga said — even if the economics aren’t there yet.
A similar concept has informed a long-running green ammonia project being conducted by the University of Minnesota West Central Research and Outreach Center, the Minnesota Farmers Union, and other groups. Since 2013, an on-site wind turbine has generated power used to electrolyze hydrogen and turn it into green ammonia. In 2023, the Minnesota state legislature created a $7 million grant program to incentivize farmer ownership of green ammonia.
Rural electric cooperatives — member-owned and -operated entities that supply power to the most sparsely populated parts of the country — may also be interested in green ammonia projects that can capture the value of wind power that might otherwise need to be curtailed, Iwanaga said. “If we can absorb some of those peaks, there are cases we are looking at where the rural electric cooperatives think it could potentially lower the cost of power.”
Gaster noted that access to cheap electricity could allow green hydrogen to compete economically with traditional ammonia production. “The cost of generating hydrogen is almost all in inputs — it’s all in the electricity,” he said.
It’s hard to say how the climate benefit of making green ammonia might stack up alongside the benefit of producing green ammonia locally, Iwanaga said. “It’s up to each customer to judge how valuable that is.”
Crowe said that Landus hasn’t yet considered the prospects of earning money from the carbon emissions prevented by buying Talusag’s green ammonia. “We don’t know exactly how it’s going to be monetized yet. But to have that in our back pocket in the future is, I think, valuable.”
A correction was made on May 29, 2025: A previous version of this story misattributed a statement regarding Talusag’s Series A fundraising and its work with prospective customers to Crowe. The information was shared with Canary Media by Iwanaga.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Sixteen states, the District of Columbia, and more than a half dozen environmental groups have alleged in a lawsuit that the Trump administration has indefinitely and unlawfully frozen funds for a nationwide electric vehicle program.
The complaint was filed on Thursday last week in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are asking the judge to require the Trump administration to unfreeze the funds and distribute them to the states according to a formula established by Congress.
During the Biden administration, Congress appropriated $5 billion for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, also known as NEVI, as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. The money would have been disbursed each year to all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, to build a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging stations along designated Alternative Fuel Corridors.
“Transportation is the leading source of climate pollution in the U.S., and halting the NEVI program directly threatens our progress toward clean, reliable transportation options — especially in the Southeast, where EV infrastructure is still catching up,” said Megan Kimball, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “In rural and urban areas alike, more charging access means cleaner air, economic growth, and real savings for families. We’re defending that future.”
The legal challenge coincided with a Government Accountability Office report published Thursday that found the U.S. Department of Transportation is unauthorized to withhold the congressionally appropriated funds. The Transportation Department could petition Congress to pass a law to rescind the funds or change the NEVI program, the GAO wrote, but it can’t act unilaterally.
A department spokesperson said in a prepared statement that the GAO report “shows a complete misunderstanding of the law” and “conflicts with Congress’ intent.”
Less than three weeks after Trump was elected to a second term, the Transportation Department ordered states to stop distributing their funds for fiscal years 2022-2025, worth about $2.7 billion. States could reimburse contractors for money already spent, but no new funding could be obligated.
DOT justified the funding freeze by saying the Federal Highway Administration was “updating the NEVI Formula Program Guidance to align with current policy and priorities.”
The GAO report concluded that the Transportation Department erroneously froze funding when it determined that funding was available only for signed project agreements. Instead, the GAO wrote, the effective date for funding was much earlier: when the law made money for the program available for obligation.
Some agencies delay their funding distribution while trying to comply with legal requirements for a program, the GAO wrote. In the NEVI case, however, DOT imposed requirements that exceed what the law prescribes. For example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires states to submit plans to DOT, but does not provide authority for the secretary of transportation to approve or disapprove such plans.
A DOT spokesperson said the GAO was “cherry-picking language in the program statute.”
The agency is updating NEVI program guidance, according to the spokesperson, “because the implementation of NEVI has failed miserably, and DOT will continue to work in good faith to update the program so it can be utilized more efficiently and effectively.”
Attorneys for the environmental groups — including CleanAIRE NC, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, West End Revitalization Project, Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — wrote that in blocking the distribution of funds, the Trump administration directly defied congressional directives.
The funding freeze nullified more than 150 state implementation plans, according to court documents, which harmed local communities. NEVI requires EV charging stations in the first phase to be installed every 50 miles along the federally approved Alternative Fuel Corridors, and that they be within one mile of those routes.
“By reducing access to reliable public charging,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote, “DOT and the FHWA are restricting electric vehicle owners’ ability to travel and use their EVs, increase their fuel costs, delay EV purchases, worsen health impacts from vehicle pollution, and deprive communities of promised public investment.”
In the Charlotte, North Carolina, metro area, for example, air quality — such as levels of ozone and particulate matter — has worsened, according to the 2025 American Lung Association State of the Air Report. The largest city in North Carolina, Charlotte is ringed and bisected by several highways clogged with cars.
“Tailpipe pollution is a public health crisis — fueling asthma, heart disease, and respiratory illness in communities already overburdened by environmental harm,” Jeff Robbins, executive director of CleanAIRE NC, said in a prepared statement. “NEVI is a vital step toward reducing that harm through zero-emission transportation. Freezing the program blocks progress and keeps our most vulnerable residents breathing dirty air. Clean air and climate justice cannot be put on hold.”
Interstate 85 and U.S. Highway 70 run through many underserved communities in Alamance County, North Carolina, about 30 miles west of Durham.
“For decades, communities like ours in Alamance County have been denied access to basic infrastructure,” said Omega Wilson, codirector of the West End Revitalization Association. “The NEVI program offers a real chance to change that — with public investment in EV charging that finally includes rural Black and brown neighborhoods. Suspending the program delays critical investments, widens infrastructure disparities, and sends the message that once again, the taxpayers who’ve been left behind the longest will be the last to benefit.”
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