Back
Under the Biden administration, the federal government gave out billions of dollars to companies looking to slash the planet-heating emissions from concrete, cement, and asphalt.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, the future of that support for low-carbon materials has been thrown into question. The Environmental Protection Agency has already canceled millions of dollars in grants for the industries, and the administration is considering deep cuts to the Energy Department office in charge of a $6.3 billion industrial decarbonization program that includes major cement and concrete projects.
But bipartisan legislation the House of Representatives passed in a 350-73 vote last week would give the Department of Energy a clear mandate to develop a full program to research, develop, and deploy clean versions of the building materials.
Dubbed the IMPACT Act — short for the Innovative Mitigation Partnerships for Asphalt and Concrete Technologies Act — the bill marks just the first step of a push in Congress to bolster the nascent industry.
A second, separate bill introduced in the House just weeks ago as the 2.0 version of the legislation would allow state and municipal transportation departments to pledge to buy future output of manufacturers of low-carbon concrete, cement, and asphalt.
Sister legislation in the Senate combines features from both bills. Advocates say a bill that blends the legislation together could soon pass in both chambers as part of the next federal highway budget.
Concrete and asphalt together comprise nearly 2% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Most of concrete’s emissions stem from its key ingredient, cement, which on its own makes up as much as 8% of the world’s carbon output.
Since roughly half of all cement and concrete in the United States is sold to governments paving roads, patching sidewalks, and building bridges, giving state and local agencies the power to guarantee future purchases of green products could help startups in the space take off, said Erin Glabets, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts-based low-carbon cement maker Sublime Systems.
“Having the weight of the federal government and ultimately having that flow through the states to support the use of clean, innovative cements in our public infrastructure is really the best thing a company working in this field can ask for,” she said.
“We’re hopeful and enthusiastic,” she added. “That’s a really powerful buying signal.”
Unlike traditional manufacturers who use a carbon-intensive process to break down limestone in fossil-fueled kilns fired up to 1,400 degrees Celsius, the company makes a replacement for Portland cement — the most common variety — using electricity and alternative materials that don’t generate carbon as a byproduct.
Sublime is currently building its first commercial-scale plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with money it was awarded last year through the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) — the office established in 2021 under the bipartisan infrastructure law whose more than $20 billion budget is staring down Trump’s chopping block.
It’s not the only such project relying on support from the under-fire office. The federal government put up $500 million last year to equip Germany-based Heidelberg Materials’ new cement plant in Mitchell, Indiana, with hardware to capture and store carbon emissions.
The facility is a rare example of a carbon capture project backed by the Sierra Club, which typically opposes technology to filter CO2 emissions out of power plant smokestacks as a bid to prolong the use of fossil fuels.
Oakland, California-based startup Brimstone won a $189 million grant last March from the same office to build a first-of-a-kind commercial-scale plant to demonstrate its technology that converts calcium-bearing silicate rocks into Portland cement with significantly lower emissions.
In total, OCED pledged to support $1.5 billion worth of low-carbon cement and concrete projects through the Industrial Demonstrations Program.
Passage of the IMPACT Act comes as several states move forward with Buy Clean policies that aim to boost low-carbon building materials.
In 2017, California became the first state to pass such a law, and the California Air Resources Board in March released a draft decarbonization strategy for the cement sector.
Eight other states, including Colorado and Minnesota, have since followed suit on Buy Clean policies. But states have limited purchasing power compared to the federal government, and in any case procurement power itself is not enough for the industry to take off — research and development funding is needed, too.
That’s what makes the federal bills so significant, said Harry Manin, the Sierra Club’s deputy legislative director for industrial policy and trade.
“When it comes to the supply side, actual money to demonstrate these technologies has been more the bailiwick of the federal government,” he said.
While Democratic sponsors such as U.S. Rep. Valerie Foushee of North Carolina may see the bills as climate legislation, Manin said the GOP recognizes “it’s important to protect these industries domestically.”
“They understand tariffs aren’t enough,” Manin said.
To that end, he said, Sen. Bill Cassidy from Louisiana is working to convince fellow Republicans to back separate legislation that would establish a carbon border adjustment mechanism, sometimes called a carbon tariff, to slap levies on imports produced in heavily emitting countries such as China and India.
But the real selling point, Manin said, is that cleaner building materials will ultimately mean cheaper building materials.
“Yes, these materials come with a premium in the short term, but since we’ll eventually commercialize materials that take far less energy to make, ultimately we’re going to be lowering costs,” he said. “That’s why Republicans are so interested.”
Ground-source heat pumps, which tap into the stable temperatures found hundreds of feet beneath the Earth’s surface, are a super-efficient way to heat and cool homes. They’re also quite expensive to install in existing houses.
There’s a pretty straightforward reason: It’s hard to drill in a residential neighborhood. Hiring contractors to fit rigs into tight single-family yards and drill boreholes in places where utility infrastructure crisscrosses underfoot is a lot more complicated and expensive than installing an air-source heat pump, fossil-gas furnace, or other standard, aboveground HVAC systems.
But what if you could bore hundreds of holes at a time across a patch of cleared land and then build heat pump–equipped houses on top of them? That should be a lot cheaper. In fact, it could make ground-source heat pumps about as cheap as traditional HVAC offerings in newly built homes.
On Wednesday, Google X spinout Dandelion Energy and major U.S. homebuilder Lennar unveiled a partnership that aims to prove that proposition. The companies have pledged to build ground-source geothermal into more than 1,500 new homes in Colorado over the next two years, starting with Lennar’s Ken-Caryl Ranch development in Littleton, Colorado.
The goal is simple, Kathy Hannun, Dandelion’s founder and president, told Canary Media: “Can you get the up-front cost to be lower than everything else? Because then you have no reason not to do it.”
Just being able to tackle hundreds of boreholes at a time should more than halve the drilling costs that burden existing home retrofits, she said. Large-project economies of scale and designing homes around the high-efficiency heating and cooling that Dandelion’s system provides will yield further cost reductions, she said.
And by eliminating the need for new gas pipelines and reducing the peak electricity demands on the power grid, subdivisions built on this model could save a bundle on utilities as well, she said. That’s a key benefit cited in a January report from the Department of Energy, which found that widespread adoption of ground-source heat pumps, also known as geothermal heat pumps, could cut hundreds of gigawatts of peak demand and tens of billions of dollars in grid costs over the coming decades.
That study also found ground-source heat pumps could make a big dent in residential energy consumption and carbon emissions, particularly in climates where they outperform air-source heat pumps during cold winter weather.
But as it stands, the technology is in no more than 1% of U.S. homes, the report found. For comparison, air-source heat pumps are now in about 13% of U.S. homes.
The chief barrier, once again, is the up-front expense. Dandelion has spent the past eight years working to bring down those costs through a combination of technology and business-model innovation, and has done more than 1,000 home retrofits in the U.S. Northeast, targeting homes with high heating costs, many of which use expensive fuel oil.
To break into larger volume deployments, Dandelion has shifted its focus to new construction over the past two years or so, Hannun said. That pivot has naturally included Lennar, an investor in Dandelion that now owns about 10% of the startup, she said.
Lennar and Dandelion aren’t disclosing cost data for the homes they’re collaborating on in Colorado. But, Hannun said, “in a few markets, the up-front cost of geothermal today is less than conventional” heating.
That’s certainly the case in Colorado, where Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, has made geothermal energy, or “the heat beneath our feet,” as he’s dubbed it in various state and regional policy initiatives, a big part of the state’s broader decarbonization strategy.
Over the past few years, the state has passed legislation creating tax credits for heat pumps, including ground-source systems, and competitive grants for geothermal energy projects. It also passed a law in 2021 that spurred Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, to launch a Clean Heat Plan that will provide significant rebates to projects that improve energy efficiency and help customers switch from gas to electric heating.
“The rebates coming out of Xcel’s Clean Heat Plan played a really significant role in the ability of the Dandelion-Lennar investments to pan out,” said Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, which manages state energy programs.
The government and utility incentives will also lower costs for people who aren’t buying these homes, because geothermal heat pump systems reduce the need for other utility infrastructure, he noted.
All-electric homes don’t need new gas pipeline extensions, the costs of which are typically recovered through increases on the bills of utility customers at large. And ground-source heat pumps need much less electricity than air-source heat pumps to keep homes warm during the coldest hours of the year, since they’re able to pull heat from deep underground thermal reservoirs rather than from cold outdoor air.
“There’s clearly some cost of putting in a geothermal system. But once it’s in there, it’s such an inexpensive approach to heating buildings,” Toor said. “If we can come up with creative ways to get these systems installed, we think it will help homeowners and businesses save money on their energy bills over the years.”
Power grids are sized to meet maximum electricity demand, so buildings that can reliably keep electricity use below certain limits minimize the need to build more grid infrastructure. These factors can make geothermal networks the least expensive option on a system-wide basis when the lifecycle costs of infrastructure and energy consumption are built in.
Xcel Energy is looking for ways to mitigate growing grid costs as it seeks regulatory approval to spend nearly $5 billion on its low-voltage distribution grid over the next five years, much of it to support growing power demand from heat pumps and electric vehicles.
“Based on our own research and forecasting, homes heated with ground-source heat pumps may require less electricity at peak and overall compared to homes with an air-source heat pump or resistance heating, therefore requiring fewer infrastructure investments on the grid,” Xcel spokesperson Tyler Bryant told Canary Media in an email. Xcel will study the grid impacts of Lennar and Dandelion Energy’s use of ground-source heat pumps to “inform future projects from a grid planning perspective.”
Hannun isn’t aware of other homebuilders embedding ground-source heat pumps into large-scale single-family construction, though they are being built into bigger buildings, including multifamily housing.
But there are similar, yet distinct, approaches for single-family homes to tap underground temperature reserves to save energy and cut carbon emissions.
One is thermal energy networks — projects that build the infrastructure needed for geothermal heat pumps at a campus-wide or neighborhood scale instead of serving just one home. Utilities in Massachusetts and New York are actively pursuing these projects as part of their states’ decarbonization strategies. Six other states, including California and Colorado, have passed legislation that allows or mandates gas utilities to develop demonstration projects or pilots, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition.
“Geothermal heat pumps and thermal energy networks are a cost-effective way for utilities and developers to deliver clean, affordable heating and cooling, at scale, while minimizing strain on the electric grid,” said Ania Camargo, the nonprofit’s associate director of thermal networks. “The more geothermal systems we install, the better for the homeowner and the grid in the long run.”
Newly built neighborhoods can also incorporate thermal energy networks. A shared geothermal system will serve the 7,500-home Whisper Valley development in Austin, Texas. In Colorado, the housing authority serving Steamboat Springs is studying a community geothermal system for a new housing development.
Under a state law passed last year, Xcel Energy is examining several “neighborhood-scale alternatives to the gas system that can include both electrification and thermal energy network or ground-source heat pumps,” Toor said.
Hannun agreed that shared thermal energy networks are an effective way to approach neighborhood-scale geothermal heating. But they’re also more complicated to build and administer than individual ground-source heat pumps, particularly for entities that aren’t a regulated utility with state-mandated authority to provide energy services to customers. Lennar and Dandelion opted for single-home ground loops to avoid any complications that could arise from getting lots of homeowners to commit to a shared system, she said.
Not all homebuilders will embrace the additional costs of ground-source geothermal, she said. Developers don’t pay utility bills, incentivizing them to choose the lowest-cost heating and cooling options available. At the same time, nationwide homebuilders like Lennar “often offer new products to homeowners to try to stand out,” Hannun said, and ground-source heating has “traditionally been a luxury system.”
It’s also a straightforward way to meet state or local energy-efficiency building codes, she added.
Air-source heat pumps are inherently more energy efficient than fossil-fueled furnaces, since they use energy to move heat from one place to another rather than to create heat directly. But ground-source heat pumps can be more than twice as efficient as air-source models.
“These homes will have the lowest operating cost for HVAC possible,” Hannun said. “The homeowners will spend less than if they were using air-source heat pumps or if they were using gas. And that will be locked in for the lifetime of that home because that ground loop is built to last.”
A coalition of environmental justice advocates is pushing Illinois to become the first Midwest state to adopt California’s Advanced Clean Trucks standards designed to spur a transition to zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles over the next decade.
“Air pollution is an equity issue,” Griselda Chavez, an environmental justice organizer with Warehouse Workers for Justice, said at a recent press conference. The group represents workers and residents in communities heavily impacted by warehouses, including the Chicago-area town of Joliet, a major logistics hub.
“Black, brown, and low-income communities in and around Joliet are disproportionately affected by diesel pollution, large amounts of truck traffic, and increasing growth of the warehouse industry,” Chavez said. “Those workers also go home to their families and go to schools that are surrounded by large amounts of truck traffic and poor air quality.”
The Illinois Pollution Control Board is considering adopting not only California’s clean truck standards but also the Golden State’s Advanced Clean Cars II program, which would phase out the sale of most non-electric passenger vehicles by 2035, and its stricter nitrogen oxide limits on heavy-duty vehicles. The deliberations are happening as the Trump administration seeks to block California’s unique authority to set vehicle emission standards that exceed federal rules.
Illinois advocates have focused mostly on the clean trucks program because of the health and environmental justice implications of diesel-powered trucks throughout the state. They are especially concerned about places like Joliet and Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, a largely immigrant community where warehouses have also proliferated.
In 2023, the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization worked with the Center for Neighborhood Technology on a truck-counting study that showed on one June day, an average of 1.5 heavy-duty trucks per minute drove along a residential street in the heart of the community.
Sally Burgess, downstate lead organizing representative for Sierra Club’s Illinois chapter, told the Pollution Control Board during a March 10 hearing that she counted more than 300 diesel-burning semi-trucks during the 65-mile drive between her home in central Illinois and the state’s capitol.
“All along our route, on both sides of the highway, farm fields, rustic barns, cows and other farm animals, some homes,” said Burgess. “Some would refer to it as a bucolic rural setting — clogged with diesel trucks.”
The Advanced Clean Trucks program would require manufacturers selling in Illinois to ensure that between 40% and 75% of their heavy-duty vehicle sales are zero-emissions by 2035, with the percentage depending on type of vehicle. They would have to sell higher percentages of electric medium-sized non-tractor trucks than pickup trucks and vans as well as larger tractor-trailers.
Manufacturers could also comply by purchasing credits from other companies that go beyond those targets, or by shifting credits from types of vehicles where they exceed the mandates.
“If, for example, a truck-maker sells a lot of zero-emission delivery vans but doesn’t offer a zero-emission version of their box trucks, they can convert their extra [pickup and van] credits into [midsize truck] credits and still maintain compliance,” said Trisha DelloIacono, head of policy for Calstart, a national nonprofit focused on clean transportation policy and market development, by email.
DelloIacono said demand for zero-emissions heavy-duty vehicles is so high that manufacturers should not have trouble meeting the sales targets if they make the inventory available. After a certain number of years, those that don’t comply either through electric vehicle sales or credit purchases could be fined.
Advocates say that the state mandates benefit people nationwide since they motivate manufacturers to increase their EV offerings.
Manufacturers including Daimler Truck’s Freightliner, Volvo, Navistar, GM, and Ford have introduced or increased sales of electric trucks since California adopted its clean trucks program, according to Calstart, and companies have also rolled out charging infrastructure and heavy-duty “charging-as-a-service” offerings that include installation, maintenance, and management.
“If Illinois adopts [the Advanced Clean Trucks program], we could expect to see new truck charging stations pop up at rest stops along major freight corridors like I-57, I-80, and I-70,” said DelloIacono. “This in turn would make it easier for fleet operators in nearby states to start adopting zero-emission trucks for regional-haul and long-haul routes.”
Ann Schreifels, who testified before the Pollution Control Board, said she saw firsthand how regulations drive industry innovation when she worked at the machinery manufacturing firm Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois. Schreifels, who retired about five years ago, said she does not speak for the company but recalled how industry opposition to new federal emissions regulations gave way to progress once they took effect.
“The entire industry was against the regulations,” she told Canary Media. “Change is hard. It took the fuel manufacturers, suppliers, designers, software engineers all working together to solve the problem. But the end result was the company made the best engine they’d ever made — more fuel efficient, more reliable, more durable, it saved customers money. Despite the fact that industry is going to complain and lobby against regulations, that’s when innovation actually happens.”
A national association of small businesses told regulators they oppose the program and that it could drive businesses out of Illinois. But other companies have expressed support, including Kansas-based electric truck manufacturer Orange EV and Rivian, the electric pickup truck manufacturer with a factory in Normal, Illinois.
Tom Van Heeke, environmental and legal senior policy advisor at Rivian, said in an email, “The standards would set Illinois apart as the Midwest’s undisputed priority market for EVs, giving adjacent industries — from EV suppliers to charging providers — investment certainty while delivering EV choice and cleaner air to businesses and communities across the state.”
The federal Clean Air Act governs vehicle emissions but grants California the right to receive waivers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allowing the state to impose stricter standards. A 1990 Clean Air Act amendment also lets other states adopt California’s standards.
President Donald Trump has long denounced California’s vehicle emissions programs and during his first term revoked the state’s waivers.
The Biden administration’s EPA granted California’s Advanced Clean Trucks waiver in 2023 and in December 2024 granted the state’s Advanced Clean Cars II waiver, letting it ban sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
On Jan. 13, ahead of Trump’s inauguration, California preemptively withdrew its request for a waiver to implement its Advanced Clean Fleets program that would have ordered all commercial trucking fleets to transition to zero-emissions between 2035 and 2042.
The EPA can revoke waivers through a lengthy process, as it did during the previous Trump administration, but Republicans have more recently proposed overturning waivers through the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress power to invalidate rules within 60 days after they are passed. On March 6, the U.S. Government Accountability Office opined that California’s vehicle emissions waivers are not rules and hence immune from that law, affirming its similar 2023 finding.
Nonetheless, Chicago attorney Timothy French advised the Illinois Pollution Control Board during a March 11 hearing that these federal efforts make it more challenging for Illinois to adopt the Advanced Clean Trucks program.
“You have to factor all this in if you’re considering what proponents are asking you to do,” said French, who has represented trade organizations in regulatory proceedings and litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal and state courts.
The Environmental Protection Agency revoked an essential Clean Air Act permit last month from Atlantic Shores, an offshore wind development slated to be built off the New Jersey coast. One of the main justifications was President Donald Trump’s January executive order calling for a halt and reexamination of the fledgling offshore wind industry.
The move suggests the agency, which has historically played a relatively small role in wind development, may be joining Trump’s assault on a renewable sector that many blue states are counting on to slash their planet-warming emissions and shore up grid reliability.
Lee Zeldin, one of President Trump’s first allies in Congress, now heads the EPA. Anti-wind groups have speculated in emails with Canary Media that Zeldin is sympathetic to their cause. One group has already submitted a “copycat” petition in hopes of convincing the agency to yank the same type of permit from Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, a project expected to come online this year.
Permits are now the golden tickets of offshore wind.
Depending on the location and size of the project, an offshore wind farm needs to secure between eight and 10 federal permits before the first turbine can be built.
If you don’t already have them, you’re effectively locked out of building a wind farm over the next several years given Trump’s directive to freeze new permitting. Only nine projects in the U.S. — including Atlantic Shores — had all the necessary permits in hand when Trump took office again in January. But as indicated by the case of Atlantic Shores, even having all the paperwork in order may not be enough to keep projects from being crippled by the Trump administration’s assault on wind.
Most of the necessary federal permits are examined and issued by the Interior Department. But only the EPA or one of its regional delegates can give out the Clean Air Act permits that are required to ensure wind companies minimize air pollution during construction and operation.
The EPA appeals board has a history of pulling these permits from energy or industrial projects when appropriate, according to the letter of the Clean Air Act. Presidential orders are not typically a meaningful factor.
“It’s not unprecedented,” said Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA, referring to the use of a presidential order in this kind of agency decision. “But it still seems unusual that you would cite it that heavily in a case.”
The decision comes as Zeldin moves to dramatically reshape the agency.
He has floated plans to cut 65% of its budget, is reportedly considering slashing 10% of its workforce, and has aggressively attempted to claw back $20 billion of funds Congress had already approved for clean energy projects. In early March, he released an extensive plan that aims to eliminate dozens of bedrock environmental regulations. The goal, he said in the statement, is to reorient the EPA around making it “more affordable to purchase a car, heat homes, and operate a business.”
It’s a remarkable shift not only for the agency but for Zeldin himself, who began his political career as a moderate blue state Republican before morphing into what The New York Times described in a recent profile as the cabinet’s “MAGA warrior.” As a congressman, he supported offshore wind and other renewable projects in his home state of New York.
That transformation was on display in his confirmation hearing held in January.
“When asked about wind power, he spouted fossil fuel–funded talking points about harms to marine life,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, at a meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to vote on Zeldin’s confirmation.
The EPA’s appeals board — which has a decades-long track record of independence — could now theoretically become caught up in Zeldin’s crusade against clean energy, too, argued Meiburg.
In 1992, the Environmental Appeals Board was formed as “an impartial appellate tribunal” to resolve regulatory disputes. The four-judge panel is staffed by long-time EPA attorneys who are senior career officials — not political appointees. In the agency’s early years, disputes were settled by the administrator directly, but the workload became overwhelming. In the three decades that followed its establishment, the board evolved from an extension of the administrator’s office to an independent body untethered from politics. According to a 2017 EPA document, unless a case requires another agency to weigh in, the board’s decisions “cannot be appealed to the EPA Administrator.” In other words, the board has the final say.
“The value of the Environmental Appeals Board as an institution has derived from the fact that they are seen as independent,” said Meiburg, who now serves as executive director of Wake Forest University’s Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability. “And they want to make sure to preserve that independence and integrity because that’s the basis of some of their credibility.”
Zeldin could reverse course, exerting more political pressure on the board or firing its judges.
“The Environmental Appeals Board is independent of all EPA components outside the immediate office of the Office of the Administrator,” said an EPA spokesperson via email. “It is an impartial appellate tribunal established by regulation to hear administrative appeals under the major environmental statutes that EPA administers.”
On March 14, Environmental Appeals Board Judge Mary Kay Lynch ruled to “remand,” as EPA calls it, a Clean Air Act permit issued last September to Atlantic Shores. Companies can appeal the board’s remand decisions in federal court but, according to Meiburg, most of those appeals fail. Overall, less than 1% of the board’s final decisions have been reversed.
EPA officials working in the Region 2 office in the Northeast had recommended in February a reexamination of the permit, in light of Trump’s anti-wind order and in response to a formal petition, filed in October, from a local anti-wind group called Save Long Beach Island. Along with other concerns, the group had raised questions about the impact on wildlife at a nearby refuge.
Atlantic Shores contested the decision, which moved the dispute to the EAB judges’ desk.
The project’s lawyers argued that Trump’s anti-wind order — the EAB’s main justification for pulling the permit — should not be retroactively applied to a permit that was issued in September, well before his election.
But Judge Lynch wrote in her motion that the board has “broad discretion” in pulling permits, handing a win to the EPA officials and another blow to Atlantic Shores. The judges offered no opinion on the actual merits of the original petition about nearby wildlife, according to Meiburg.
The revoked permit came after the project was already faltering in the face of rising costs from inflation and waning support from the state’s lame-duck governor. Shell, one of the project’s partners, pulled out in January.
“Atlantic Shores is disappointed by the EPA’s decision to pull back its fully executed permit as regulatory certainty is critical to deploying major energy projects,” Atlantic Shores spokesperson Terence Kelly wrote in a statement.
Lawyers working in the environmental field expressed similar concerns.
“My first reaction was disappointment — these are projects that had gone through extensive review by the agency. It seems to be invoking a tangential issue here,” said Kate Sinding Daly of the Conservation Law Foundation, a nonprofit that has brought numerous cases to the agency’s appeals board.
She explained that Atlantic Shores’ air permit application will now be reexamined. Most revoked Clean Air Act permits are eventually reissued, sometimes with modifications, but it’s unclear what will happen with Zeldin at the helm given Trump’s order to halt permitting activity.
Sinding Daly also raised concern about the “copycat” petition submitted last week by Nantucket-based group ACK for Whales to challenge Vineyard Wind’s Clean Air Act permit.
That petition argues that the EPA did not properly anticipate emissions from wind turbine malfunctions, such as the Vineyard Wind blade accident, which left the developer with almost a year of extra at-sea work and thus created extra emissions from the ships working on the project. The wind farm is slated to come online later this year, feeding renewable energy from near Nantucket Sound to the state’s energy grid.
“We’re hopeful that our petition to EPA will be carefully reviewed as we believe our concerns are valid,” said Amy DiSibio, a member of ACK for Whales, in an email.
Sinding Daly said the group’s petition addresses a more narrow provision in the law and pointed out that it’s been submitted years after the original air permit was issued, instead of just weeks, like with Atlantic Shores. She doubts that the Massachusetts petition will be successful. But when asked about potential “copycat” Clean Air Act petitions elsewhere, directed at other U.S. wind projects, she said she still considers them a “threat.”
Historically, she said, the agency has focused on protecting public health and the environment. But the remit is different now under Zeldin — and the EPA has just enough permitting authority over large infrastructure projects to slow down turbine installations in line with the Trump 2.0 mandate.
Want to know why EV chargers can be so hard to connect to crowded urban power grids? Just look to San Francisco’s latest public charging station, opened by startup Revel last week.
At first glance, the station, Revel’s first foray outside of its home city of New York, doesn’t seem like it should be that tricky for Northern California utility Pacific Gas & Electric to connect. It’s a fairly small parking lot in the city’s Mission District, right next to a major freeway, featuring a fairly standard number of high-speed chargers — 12 — that are available 24/7.
But when all those chargers are used at once, the total demand on the grid adds up to 1.3 megawatts, Neema Yazdi, a strategic analyst on PG&E’s clean energy transportation team, said at the ribbon-cutting event last week. That’s equivalent to roughly one-quarter of the power demand of the city’s tallest building, the 1.4-million-square-foot, 61-story Salesforce Tower.
“That’s a big feat for a utility to energize,” he said — “and to do something like that is impossible without the close collaboration of our customers.”
More such challenges and collaborations are on the way. Revel plans to start construction this year on seven more Bay Area sites with a total of 125 fast-charging plugs. It’s an ambitious pace in a state with notoriously long wait times to bring EV charging hubs online.
One way Revel hopes to achieve this plan is by entering two of its upcoming stations into a new PG&E program to fast-track EV charging hubs. On one condition, that is: Station operators have to be willing to reduce the power that chargers can deliver at the times when PG&E’s grid can’t handle the maximum draw. PG&E and Revel will pursue this “flexible service connection” approach at one site in the city of Oakland and another near San Francisco International Airport.
Under standard utility practice, customers can’t connect if their maximum power draw threatens to overtax the grid, even if only during a handful of hours per year when grid demand peaks. That’s despite the fact that many EV charging sites are highly unlikely to have enough vehicles charging at once to reach that limit — and that they can theoretically dial back their power use during those critical hours.
Flexible service turns that theoretical capability into an operational reality. The process is straightforward: PG&E forecasts its grid needs and, a day ahead of time, sends customers instructions for when they need to curtail power use.
Both customers and utility win out, Yazdi said. Customers can “connect quickly and more seamlessly” and charge at full capacity most of the time, as they wait for PG&E to complete grid upgrades that will eventually remove the constraints they face during peak hours.
PG&E, meanwhile, gets to expand EV charging more quickly than it would otherwise be able to. That’s not just good for meeting the state’s carbon-cutting goals but for reducing rates for customers at large. That’s because the program helps reduce immediate pressure on PG&E to make grid upgrades, which are a primary driver of rising electricity rates in its territory, while also quickly expanding its electricity sales.
“Only a few utilities in the United States are doing this nowadays,” Yazdi said. “This is really forward-thinking, and we’re really excited about it.”
So are the authors of a February Environmental Defense Fund report that highlights PG&E’s leading position among U.S. utilities on the flexible connection front. Southern California Edison is pursuing a similar pilot project, the report notes, and utilities and regulators in Illinois and Colorado are exploring approaches to flexible interconnection as well.
Finding ways for EV charging stations to connect more rapidly provides “both economic benefits to the fleet that can put its newly acquired vehicles and chargers to work, and societal benefits where these electric trucks and buses are displacing fossil fuel vehicles earlier than otherwise possible,” the report’s authors wrote.
It took PG&E more than a year to establish, test, and gain confidence in the underlying technology needed to complete its first flexible interconnection at a Tesla charging complex in California’s Central Valley late last year.
With initial projects proving the technology is reliable, PG&E started looking to expand its use of flexible connections, including at several more EV charging sites in the Central Valley — and Revel’s two sites in the Bay Area.
Revel has been working with PG&E for about 18 months to identify sites and plan for its flexible connection projects, said Jake Potent, the company’s vice president of corporate affairs. “There are a lot of times we don’t go forward because we’re grid-constrained.”
In New York City, Revel has already built five locations serving a total of 88 fast chargers and plans to more than triple that number to 267 chargers by the end of the year. But finding spots with enough grid capacity to serve those concentrated power demands hasn’t been easy, Paul Suhey, Revel’s chief operating officer and cofounder, told Canary Media back in 2021.
At last week’s ribbon-cutting, Suhey emphasized that building urban fast-charging stations is “kind of hard — well, it’s really hard. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
But finding ways to fit megawatt-scale charging into cities is important for localities in states like New York and California, which have set aggressive goals to end sales of new gasoline-fueled cars by 2035. EVs now make up about one-third of passenger vehicle sales in San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie said at last week’s event, well above the national share of around 8%.
Those adoption numbers gave Revel confidence its fast chargers would get enough use to earn back its costs, Suhey told Canary Media. In New York City, where EV adoption is lower, Revel also operates an all-EV rideshare fleet rather than relying solely on public customers to make the economics of its charging sites work out. New York City and California have mandates for rideshare companies to switch to EVs over the coming years, which further heightens the need for charging sites.
Cities also struggle to bring public charging stations into neighborhoods where most people rent their homes, said Joe Piasecki, public affairs and policy coordinator for the San Francisco Environment Department.
That’s a big problem: Most people charge their EVs at home, but renters face an uphill battle in convincing landlords to install EV chargers on their behalf. That means renters tend to be disproportionately reliant on public EV charging while also having worse access to it. About 70% of San Francisco residents live in multifamily housing, Piasecki said.
The economics of urban EV charging have been helped along in California and New York by regulator-approved programs that instruct utilities to cover the costs of “make-ready” infrastructure — digging trenches, installing transformers and switchgear, and other work required to connect charging stations to the grid — that the site developer might otherwise bear. Similar programs support EV charger installations in Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states.
But make-ready work is just one of the expenses that EV charging creates. Sometimes, big sites might force utilities to upgrade the substations serving entire neighborhoods. Flexible interconnection can allow utilities to postpone those “upstream” upgrades until they can be conducted as part of a broader strategic grid expansion plan.
Demand for those upgrades will increase as high-speed charging expands — and as the latest generation of chargers requires even more power to charge vehicles faster. Electrify America’s flagship indoor charging station in San Francisco, which houses 20 high-speed chargers, required PG&E to deliver high-voltage power typically reserved for transmission grids and major industrial customers.
Public fast chargers aren’t the only option, of course. Slower Level 2 chargers can be installed in garages, along curbs, or into street lights. Even slower Level 1 chargers could offer overnight charging options for multifamily buildings.
But fast chargers that replicate the experience of fueling up at a gas station are widely seen as a vital amenity to expand the pool of people willing to switch to an EV. “Without widespread, easy to use, convenient, reliable fast charging, dreams of EV adoption are just that — dreams,” Suhey said.
When we emit carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, most of it stays there for centuries or millennia. This means that CO2 emitted even a century ago has contributed to the rising temperatures we see today.
In other words, how much the climate warms depends on how much cumulative CO2 is emitted over time.
The chart shows the ten countries with the largest share of the world’s historical emissions, based on cumulative emissions from fossil fuels and industry since 1750.
The United States has contributed the most, accounting for almost one quarter. This is followed by China and Russia.
When ecologist Anthony Bicknell went looking for fish around the foundations of wind turbines a dozen or so miles off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea, he wasn’t sure what he’d find.
But he was ready for something surprising. Around that time, some European lobsters were catching researchers off guard by taking up residence in wind turbine foundations in the waters off of the British Isles. Sure enough, Bicknell and his team counted two more sea creatures that scientists had never documented congregating around wind turbines: a flatfish known as a dab and, most strikingly, haddock.
Haddock is one of Scotland’s highest-value commercial fish, ranking above cod and just below herring in total number of fish caught annually. Unlike cod, haddock don’t usually hang out around shipwrecks and other human-made structures on the seafloor.
The discovery that these sleek silvery fish are utilizing wind foundations, described in a study published earlier this year, demonstrates how much researchers are still learning about the potential benefits of installing wind structures in the ocean floor.
Offshore wind is growing rapidly in some parts of the world, particularly in northern Europe and China, as nations look to complement other carbon-free resources like solar.
In the U.S., the industry has faced opposition from the fishing industry, environmentalists, and other anti-wind groups who have raised concerns about how turbines will affect marine life. False claims about offshore wind’s impact on ocean animals — especially whales — have been spread by opponents including President Donald Trump, who issued an executive order on his first day in office that has slowed the industry to a crawl.
The new study from Bicknell, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter, is the latest in a growing body of research that suggests offshore wind turbines, like other hard structures introduced to the seabed, can not only coexist with marine life but potentially benefit certain species.
Scientists have repeatedly found, for example, that an oil rig or oil platform can become an oasis of hard structure in ocean expanses devoid of much else but sand. They attract barnacles, shellfish, invertebrates, and, eventually, the fish that like to eat those creatures. An entire food web can grow.
Studies like Bicknell’s find the same phenomenon is playing out around some wind turbines installed on the seafloor of the North Sea. Except, unlike oil rigs, these massive pieces of infrastructure are helping to reduce the carbon emissions caused by burning fossil fuels, which is rapidly warming the ocean and devastating marine life worldwide.
Bicknell and his coauthors discovered that the older the wind foundation, the more fish — and sometimes bigger fish — like to call it home. This is true, they found, for many demersal fish like flatfish, haddock, and cod, which sit lower on the food chain. His team focused on the U.K. offshore wind farms known as Beatrice and Moray East; some of the studied turbines were built in 2017, while others went in around 2020.
These studies also underscore that offshore wind farms are clearly changing the ocean. Scientists are still debating which species are most feeling the change.
“Are they good or bad for fish? The caveat is, well, what fish?” said Bicknell.
Take the case of the European lobsters that like to turn wind foundations into homes. In 2021, researchers tagging lobsters around turbines installed off the coast of North Wales found that almost half of tagged animals hung out around a turbine’s base to find food or hide from predators. The doughnut of rocks and boulders deposited around a turbine’s base may also protect the lobsters. At least one tagged lobster ended up in a local fisherman’s trap, providing the first anecdotal evidence that turbines can support lobsters that also feed people.
For haddock, the turbines are more like a buffet. Bicknell described the fish as enjoying what he and other scientists call “indirect benefits.” Because haddock don’t usually hang around hard structures, preferring instead the sandy sea bottom, the groups that showed up on the researchers’ underwater cameras likely come there to feed and then leave. His study provides more evidence that wind foundations may increase the availability of food for many fish.
Some of these discoveries are helping researchers in the U.S., where offshore wind has been slow to catch on. Five projects are actively under construction in the country, but only one commercial-scale offshore wind project, South Fork Wind, is in operation today. Meanwhile, the U.K. has over 40 offshore wind installations with a total capacity of 15 GW plugged into its grid.
“I think when it comes to surveying offshore wind infrastructure for fish, yes, we are a little bit behind,” said Brendan Runde, a marine ecologist with The Nature Conservancy who is based in Virginia.
Runde is part of an ongoing research project to understand how fish use two wind turbines installed off the coast of Virginia as part of a 2020 pilot by Dominion Energy. This installation — and the fish that use it — serve as a glimpse of what’s to come in the region’s waters. Less than a mile away, the state’s first commercial-scale project is under construction and, according to its developer Dominion, on track to be completed in 2026.
During construction, wind farms could have negative effects on fish, said Runde.
Artificial noise, changes to seafloor sediment, and newly laid cables that emit electromagnetic fields can all impact fish in the short-term. However, his team’s research has found that the Atlantic sturgeon, an endangered species, and a variety of sharks are not avoiding the area even during ongoing construction.
At least 78 wind foundations have already been installed off the coast of Virginia, according to Dominion, while new ones continue to be built in spite of federal headwinds from Trump. In Virginia, offshore wind has a history of bipartisan support, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, is a vocal supporter of Dominion’s 2.6-gigawatt, 176-turbine project.
Runde’s research is ongoing and must now endure a challenging political moment for the offshore wind sector. In addition to calling wind farms “garbage” and vowing to halt the construction of new turbines, President Trump has gutted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of staff and resources in recent months. Runde actively collaborates with NOAA scientists on this research, and his project itself is funded by the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
When it comes to measuring the long-term benefits of these structures, Runde and his team use some of the same methods as their British counterparts: baited remote underwater video, which measures fish abundance, size, and diversity at the pilot turbines. The foundations they explore can reach depths of 120 feet below the water’s surface.
Black sea bass are already making homes out of these foundations. Runde said that one fish that was tagged at a Virginia wind foundation in February 2024 was still there seven months later when he returned.
“We know that, for many species of fish, this wind foundation is a really big deal,” said Runde.
The world needs to move away from fossil fuels to low-carbon power if we’re to reduce our carbon emissions and tackle climate change.
There are two key sources of low-carbon power: renewables (which include solar, wind, hydropower and others) and nuclear.
While rapid growth in solar and wind has increased the amount of power coming from renewables, a lack of enthusiasm for nuclear means it’s playing a shrinking role in the global electricity mix.
In the chart, you can see the share of global electricity coming from fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear since 1985. Since 2000, nuclear and renewables have followed very different trajectories. Back then, both categories made up a similar share of global electricity, but today, renewables make up more than three times as much: 30% compared to 9%.
The total amount of electricity produced by nuclear plants is almost exactly the same as it was two decades ago. But because the world produces much more electricity overall, its share of the electricity mix has declined.
Explore the electricity mix of different countries in our Energy Data Explorer →
A simple principle has shaped Texas’ electricity system for the last two decades: Developers should build the types of power plants they think will compete best on the state’s open market.
As the cost of solar, wind, and grid batteries has plummeted in recent years, developers in the Lone Star State have increasingly opted to build clean energy projects — a whole lot of them. The state generated the most clean power in the nation last year, and solar and storage dominate new power capacity forecast to come online in 2025.
That principle — and Texas’ rapidly expanding clean energy industry — could be thrown out the window if a bill that recently passed the state Senate becomes law, Julian Spector reports for Canary Media. The legislation would require 50% of new power plant capacity in the state to be“sourced from dispatchable generation other than battery energy storage,” penalizing solar and wind power, which pair best with batteries.
An earlier iteration of SB 388 explicitly called for half of new power plants to “use natural gas,” and though the bill text no longer says that, the outcome would be the same: Gas would be the key beneficiary.
But developers aren’t exactly lining up to build gas plants. It can take years to source the specialized parts needed to get gas power plants built and running, while solar panels and batteries are mass-produced and can be installed far more quickly and cheaply. In fact, back in 2023 Texas created a $5 billion fund to issue low-interest loans to companies building gas power plants — but last month a developer that had applied for loans for two such projects withdrew them due to “equipment procurement constraints.”
An SB 388–driven slowdown of renewable deployment would meanwhile pose reliability challenges for the state, which famously suffered major blackouts in 2021 in large part because of challenges in the gas system. Since then, solar and batteries have repeatedly helped the state avoid weather-related outages. And with data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, and new manufacturing all slated to boost Texas’ energy demand, the state is going to need more cheap, fast, clean power — not less.
Put reliability over politics, power grid leaders say
Leaders of the country’s seven power operating systems told Congress on Tuesday that it should prioritize reliability over politics as it considers the future of the U.S. energy system. Electricity demand is set to rise dramatically as more data centers and other power-hungry facilities come online and people adopt EVs and electric appliances. Pitting clean energy against fossil fuels will only lead to power shortages and higher prices, the executives said.
New England in particular faces a “serious challenge” if political battles over clean energy continue, the head of its grid operator said. The region is counting on offshore wind to meet growing demand, but President Donald Trump’s attacks on the industry throw that future into uncertainty.
Hyundai brings ‘low-carbon’ steel, EV manufacturing to the U.S.
Hyundai Motor Group announced a $21 billion investment on Monday that will amp up its U.S. manufacturing presence. Nearly $6 billion will go toward a “low-carbon” steel plant in Louisiana that will supply the company’s Alabama and Georgia auto factories, Alexander C. Kaufman reports for Canary Media. The low-carbon claim comes from Hyundai’s plans to use an electric arc furnace. But it’s only a small step toward greener steel, one environmental advocate told Canary, since Hyundai will likely still use fossil gas in its process.
Also this week, Hyundai opened a giant plant outside of Savannah, Georgia, where it’ll manufacture its increasingly popular Ioniq EVs.
Renewables on the rise: Wind, solar, and other renewables were installed at an astonishing pace last year — but energy emissions still increased as demand for electricity soared. (Canary Media)
Tesla’s global challenges: Tesla faces more setbacks as Chinese EV firm BYD reports 2024 revenue that exceeds the U.S. company’s, and as its market share continues to fall in Europe. (CNN, Reuters)
Energy dominance?: Energy executives express deep concerns about the oil and gas sector’s outlook in a new Dallas Fed survey, pointing to President Trump’s trade and tariff policies as headwinds that will drive up drilling costs. (Reuters)
Building to decarbonization: A new report details the many ways buildings must decarbonize — from the materials they’re built with to how they’re powered and heated — and the massive amount of coordination it’ll take to make that happen. (Canary Media)
Recycling revolution: The need for metals and minerals for the clean energy transition poses a huge environmental toll, but the U.S. can combat that by accelerating recycling, which has stalled in comparison to some other countries. (Grist)
Coal’s comeback: The Trump administration rolls back coal plant regulations as utilities move to extend the life of facilities to meet an anticipated spike in power demand from tech companies, though critics warn hopes of a coal comeback are “wishful thinking.” (Washington Post)
Get-out-of-pollution-free card: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it will no longer “shut down any stage of energy production” that doesn’t pose an imminent health threat, a move a former Biden EPA official says amounts to the agency telling companies, especially those selling fossil fuels, that it will let them break the law. (New York Times)
Fossil-fueled feedback loop: Hotter weather is driving increased fossil-fuel use as it spurs people to run air conditioners more often, creating a vicious cycle of climate change, the International Energy Agency finds. (New York Times)
Two opposing forces are tugging at the global energy transition: the inexorable rise of clean energy and the insatiable demand for electricity.
Last year, over 700 gigawatts of clean energy capacity were installed worldwide, per a March International Energy Agency report. That’s more than double the amount built in 2022.
Despite the blistering growth of carbon-free power, global emissions from the power sector rose by 1.7%.
Renewable resources produced 32% of the world’s electricity last year. That’s just shy of coal’s share of 35%. Taken together with nuclear power, carbon-free sources met over 40% of global electricity demand in 2024 — a record high.
The reason clean energy is producing more power than ever is simple: The world is building staggering amounts of new clean capacity. Most of this is happening in China, and the vast majority of what’s being built is solar power. In 2024 alone, 553 GW of solar panels were installed worldwide; the sun-powered resource is growing so fast that it keeps forcing industry analysts to revise their forecasts upward.
So, why aren’t power-sector emissions falling? Because global electricity use is surging.
Power demand rose by 4.3% last year, per the IEA, nearly double the average annual growth rate over the past decade. And while clean energy’s slice of the electricity production pie is bigger than ever, the overall pie itself is growing. The net effect: Power plants ultimately burned through 1% more coal, gas, and oil last year than they did in 2023, even though the global share of electricity produced by fossil fuels actually declined.
Air conditioning was a key driver of this uptick in demand, thanks to a devastating feedback loop: As emissions from burning fossil fuels push global temperatures to record heights, people use more AC — in turn creating more demand for electricity that is still produced using mostly fossil fuels. Data centers and other industrial customers are also boosting demand.
The only way to meet the urgent need for more power and bring down emissions at the same time is to build clean energy — solar, wind, batteries, or hydropower and nuclear — faster than even last year’s record-setting pace.
This story was updated on March 28 with details about global power sector emissions in 2024.
.svg)
