Back
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.
Evanston, Illinois, just passed an ordinance requiring the city’s largest buildings to eliminate all fossil fuels and use 100% renewable electricity by 2050.
On March 10, the Chicago suburb joined 14 other state and local governments across the U.S. that have enacted policies to decarbonize existing buildings, which often account for the bulk of a city’s carbon emissions. Evanston’s Healthy Buildings Ordinance marks the first such law — known as a building performance standard — to pass in the U.S. this year and the second to be adopted in the Midwest after St. Louis.
More could be on the way soon. Evanston is part of a wave of small cities that have recently passed building performance standards, including Newton, Massachusetts, in December. Another city outside Boston and two in California are also working on adopting standards this year, according to the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit that helps state and local governments implement building efficiency policies.
Under the Trump administration, local leadership is “the only front on which the climate action battle will be fought,” said Jonathan Nieuwsma, an Evanston city council member and key sponsor of the law.
For cities that want to continue climate progress, regulating large, existing buildings is one of the best avenues available, said Cara Pratt, Evanston’s sustainability and resilience manager. Besides targeting local emissions sources, performance standards spur more proactive maintenance to ensure cities are “providing the healthiest indoor air environment possible for the folks who live and work in these buildings.”
The city of Evanston, home to around 75,000 residents, committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 under a 2018 climate action plan. Buildings are key to reaching that target: The city’s 500 largest structures alone account for roughly half of total emissions, and the sector overall accounts for about 80%. While the city has adopted building codes to rein in emissions from new construction, existing buildings aren’t subject to equivalent rules to make sure routine upgrades of systems like heating and cooling happen in line with Evanston’s climate goals.
The new law fills in that gap by requiring the city’s biggest commercial, multifamily, and government buildings to reduce their energy-use intensity, achieve zero on-site fossil fuel combustion, and procure 100% renewable electricity by 2050. But the ordinance itself does little aside from setting up long-term goals. Instead, it creates two groups charged with developing the detailed rules needed to actually implement the law.
One is a technical committee that will develop interim targets covering five-year intervals between 2030 and 2050, along with other regulations like compliance pathways and penalties. The other will serve as a community accountability board to ensure the policy’s design and implementation incorporates equity concerns, including by minimizing costs to low-income residents and tenants and providing support to less-resourced buildings such as schools or affordable housing.
Like other building performance standards across the country, Evanston’s policy will set limits on emissions or energy efficiency without mandating how property owners should reach those targets. Buildings can typically choose from a menu of compliance options, from weatherization and efficiency upgrades to installing heat pumps and other electric alternatives.
Nieuwsma describes Evanston’s law as “an enabling ordinance” that “sets up a process for those very important details to be developed with robust stakeholder input.” Once both committees agree on regulations, they will need to be approved by the City Council. Nieuwsma and other officials expect the city to adopt rules sometime next year.
Evanston’s policy is unusual in baking in a high level of formal input from property owners. Three out of six seats on the technical committee will be nominated directly by local building owners associations, an amendment made after several City Council deliberations. (The rest of the members of both committees will be nominated by the mayor.)
The setup is designed to address property owners’ cost concerns and could help Evanston avoid industry pushback that has stymied similar laws in places like Colorado, which currently faces a lawsuit brought by apartment and hotel trade associations against its policy.
Building performance standards are still relatively novel. The first one in the U.S. was introduced in Washington, D.C., in 2018, followed by New York City’s Local Law 97 in 2019. Four states — Colorado, Maryland, Oregon, and Washington — and 11 local governments, including Evanston, have now adopted the policy. More than 30 other jurisdictions have committed to introducing the standards as part of a national coalition that was led by the White House under the Biden administration and is now spearheaded by the Institute for Market Transformation.
Last year, the Biden administration doled out hundreds of millions of federal dollars under the Inflation Reduction Act to cities and states pursuing building performance standards. Evanston was one of them and received a $10.4 million conditional award from the Department of Energy in early January.
But since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has attempted to freeze and claw back climate funding to nonprofits and local governments. Pratt said the federal government has not told the city that it will withdraw its grant, but Evanston has also not received word on whether the funding will be finalized.
The city had intended to use the grant to hire additional staff and support energy audits for resource-constrained buildings like public schools, Pratt said. Yet regardless of whether the city receives the money, the work to reduce emissions from large buildings will continue, she said, adding that Evanston committed to adopting a building performance standard a few years ago without the promise of federal funding. “To me, it was always a huge positive addition. But it’s not necessary to do the work.”
Jessica Miller from the Institute for Market Transformation, who served on a committee that helped the city develop its ordinance, pointed out that the country’s first building performance standards were passed during the first Trump administration. “There are many jurisdictions that have passed these types of policies without federal support,” she said.
Another proposed energy-saving program is on the chopping block in Ohio.
Duke Energy Ohio quietly dropped plans late last year to roll out a broad portfolio of programs that would have boosted energy efficiency and encouraged customers to use less electricity during times of peak demand. The plans, which would have saved ratepayers nearly $126 million over three years after deductions for costs, were part of a regulatory filing last April that sought to increase charges on customers’ electric bills.
The move came after settlement talks with other stakeholders, including the state’s consumer advocate, which opposes collecting ratepayer money to provide the programs to people who aren’t in low-income groups.
State regulators are now weighing whether to approve the settlement with a much smaller efficiency program focused on low-income neighborhoods.
The case is the latest chapter in a struggle to restore utility-run programs for energy efficiency after House Bill 6, the 2019 nuclear and coal bailout law that also gutted the state’s renewable energy standards and eliminated requirements for utilities to help customers save energy.
Studies show that utility-run energy-efficiency programs are among the cheapest ways to meet growing electricity needs and cut greenhouse gas emissions. Lower demand means fossil-fuel power plants can run less often. Less wasted energy translates into lower bills for customers who take advantage of efficiency programs. Even customers who don’t directly participate benefit because the programs lower peak demand when power costs the most.
Energy efficiency can also put downward pressure on capacity prices — amounts paid by grid operators to electricity producers to make sure enough generation will be available for future needs. Due to high projected demand compared to available generation, capacity prices for most of the PJM region, including Ohio, will jump ninefold in June to about $270 per megawatt-day.
“At a time when PJM is saying we’re facing capacity shortages, we should be doing everything we can to reduce demand,” said Rob Kelter, a senior attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
Since 2019, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has generally rejected utility efforts to offer widely available, ratepayer-funded programs for energy efficiency. Legislative efforts to clarify that such programs are allowed under Ohio law have been introduced but failed to pass.
In the current case, Duke Energy Ohio, which serves about 750,000 customers in southwestern Ohio, proposed a portfolio of efficiency offerings that would have cost ratepayers about $75 million over the course of three years but created net savings of nearly $126 million over the same period.
The package included energy-efficient appliance rebates, incentives for off-peak energy use, education programs for schools, and home energy assessments. The company also proposed incentives for customers who let it curtail air conditioning on hot days through smart thermostats.
In November, Duke Energy Ohio filed a proposed settlement with the PUCO staff, the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, industry groups, and others. The terms drop all the programs for energy efficiency, except for one geared toward low-income consumers at a cost of up to $2.4 million per year. The Environmental Law & Policy Center and Ohio Environmental Council objected, as did a consumer group, the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio.
The PUCO will decide whether to approve the settlement plan by evaluating whether it benefits ratepayers and the public interest, whether it is the result of “serious bargaining” among knowledgable parties, and whether it violates any important regulatory principles or practices. Witnesses testified for and against the settlement at a hearing in January. Parties filed briefs in February and March.
Duke Energy Ohio argued in its brief that the settlement will still benefit customers and serve the public interest, even without the energy-efficiency programs for consumers who aren’t low-income. It also suggested that cutting out most of the energy-efficiency measures was needed to reach a deal with other stakeholders and the PUCO.
Staff at the PUCO said the settlement would benefit customers by cutting some projects and limiting how high other charges could go. They dismissed objections about dropping broadly available programs for energy efficiency. “[T]he standard is whether ratepayers benefit, not whether they could have benefitted more,” state lawyers wrote in their brief.
The Environmental Law & Policy Center, Ohio Environmental Council, and Citizens Utility Board of Ohio all argued there is no evidence to support dropping the energy-efficiency programs. They questioned the approach by a Consumers’ Counsel witness of counting only avoided rider costs as benefits, without considering the projected savings from energy efficiency.
The Consumers’ Counsel defended its perspective in an email to Canary Media. “We oppose subsidizing energy efficiency programs through utility rates when those products and services are already available in the competitive marketplace,” the office’s statement said. “And when the programs are run by the utility, there are added charges to consumers, such as shared savings and lost distribution revenue.” The statement also noted that other PUCO decisions have refused to allow energy-efficiency programs that would serve groups other than low-income households.
Last year, for example, the PUCO allowed FirstEnergy to run a low-income energy-efficiency program but turned down its proposal to include generally available rebates in a rider package. Those are “better suited for the competitive market, where both residential and non-residential customers will be able to obtain products and services to meet their individual needs,” the commission’s opinion said. The commission did, however, say the company should develop a rebate program for smart thermostats to help customers manage their energy use. FirstEnergy included that in its latest rider plan filed on Jan. 31.
Ohio has been particularly devoid of programs like those dropped in Duke’s settlement since HB 6 took effect, said Trent Dougherty, a lawyer for the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio. Calculations as of 2019 estimated the law’s gutting of the state’s energy-efficiency standard costs each consumer savings of nearly $10 per month.
“Continuing a pattern of wish-casting, that the market will provide the savings that HB 6 took away, is not a solution,” Dougherty said.
Airplanes. Power plants. Cars and trucks. Their images might be the first to spring to mind when thinking about the challenge posed by the energy transition.
But what about plain old buildings?
From their structural bones to the energy they constantly consume, buildings account for a staggering one-third of global carbon pollution: 12.3 gigatons of CO2 in 2022.
Most of these emissions come from their operations — the fuel burned on-site for heating and cooking and off-site to produce their electricity. But 2.6 gigatons of CO2 annually, or 7% of global emissions, stems from the carbon baked into the physical structures themselves, including the methods and materials to build them, otherwise known as embodied carbon.
A February report lays out a blueprint for tackling each of these sources of CO2 and cleaning up buildings globally by 2050. The challenge is massive: It depends on the actions of millions of building owners. But the policy and technology tools already exist to meet it, according to report publisher Energy Transitions Commission, an international think tank encompassing dozens of companies and nonprofits, including energy producers, energy-intensive industries, technology providers, finance firms, and environmental organizations.
The report identifies several key levers that must all be pulled in order to deal with the climate problems from buildings: energy efficiency, electrification, flexible power use, and design that minimizes materials and uses cleaner ones. Each is showing varying degrees of progress around the world.
“We already have so many of the solutions that we need,” said Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, at a panel discussion last month. But to implement them, “we need to change minds and practices.”
Building developers and owners can pursue a variety of strategies to make their buildings less energy-intensive and cheaper to operate without sacrificing the comfort of their residents, according to the report.
They can seal air leaks; insulate attics, walls, and floors; and install double- or triple-pane windows to make buildings snug like beer cozies. Weatherization strategies that take a medium level of effort would cut 10% to 30% of energy use, according to the report; deeper changes could slash up to 60%.
For retrofits, online tools and in-person energy audits can help owners decide which changes make the biggest difference for the climate, their comfort, and their energy bills.
Other simple techniques can combat growing demand for cooling, which globally is set to more than double by 2050 due to rising temperatures and incomes, the report notes. Passive approaches that deflect the sun’s rays, from painting roofs white to planting shade-giving trees, can slash cooling needs by 25% to 40% on average.
Efficiency measures “deliver a clear return to households over time,” said Hannah Audino, building decarbonization lead at the commission.
But because the payoffs can be slow to materialize, governments should provide targeted financing to lower-income households that might not otherwise be able to afford these upgrades, she added.
There’s also the challenge of convincing landlords to invest in efficiency measures even though tenants often pay for utility bills themselves. To ensure broad uptake, the authors recommend policymakers implement building performance standards, an approach adopted by U.S. cities like New York and St. Louis to penalize building owners who fail to meet certain emissions or energy-use benchmarks.
For new builds, energy codes and other regulated standards can set a performance floor. They differ widely worldwide, but the Passive House approach is “the gold standard,” per the report. Buildings that meet its benchmarks typically slash energy use by a whopping 50% to 70% compared to conventional constructions.
What’s more, new buildings that use 20% less energy than those built merely to code usually have a “very manageable” premium of 1% to 5%, the authors write, which can be recouped in a higher sale price for developers or lower bills for owners.
Connecting buildings via underground thermal energy networks in which they share heat can also unlock big efficiency gains — and do it faster and at bigger scales than individual action might. The report notes that they “should be deployed where possible.”
Buildings will need to be fully electrified to become climate friendly. That means swapping fossil-fuel–fired equipment for über-efficient heat pumps (including the geothermal kind), heat-pump water heaters, heat-pump clothes dryers, and induction stoves.
Heat pumps are essential to decarbonize heating, which is the biggest source of operational emissions and currently only 15% electrified worldwide, according to the report. The appliances are routinely two to three times as efficient as gas equipment, and they lower emissions even when powered by grids not yet 100% clean.
Heat pumps can come at a premium, though the authors expect prices to fall as sales grow and installers gain experience. In countries with mature markets, heat pumps can even be cheaper than gas heating systems, according to the report: Take Denmark, Japan, Poland, and Sweden.
For most homes in the U.S. and many in Europe, per the report, heat pumps are cheaper to run than gas equipment and have lower total lifetime costs. Heat pumps make even more economic sense when consumers are considering installing an AC and a gas furnace; heat pumps are both in one.
These appliances also keep getting better. Manufacturers learn how to improve technologies with experience, as they have done with solar panels and wind turbines. The result is that heat pumps are becoming more efficient; getting smaller; and reaching higher temperatures as they transition to natural refrigerants (which also have lower global warming potentials), the authors write.
But policymakers need to address energy costs to encourage widespread electrification, according to the report. Countries with high electricity prices relative to those of gas lag in heat pump adoption.
Fixes include shifting environmental levies that are currently disproportionately piled onto electricity bills to gas costs, offering lower electricity rates for customers with electric heating, and putting a price on carbon, the report says. Banning gas equipment would be the most direct move, but “only a handful of countries, such as the Netherlands, have successfully outlined plans” to do so.
Buildings will need more power when they’re all-electric, potentially straining grids. Unchecked, global electricity demand for buildings by 2050 could grow 2.5 times what it is today, per the report. But with efficiency improvements, the commission expects electricity requirements to grow a more modest 45%.
That’s still massive. So, to decarbonize buildings without breaking the grid, we’ll need to make them flexible in their electricity demand, the authors note. By using power when it’s cheap, clean, and abundant, these edifices will also be more affordable than they’d be otherwise.
Low-cost smart thermostats and sensors can reduce demand by 15% to 30% and shift energy use automatically when prices drop. In some places, commercial building owners can already reap tens of thousands of dollars in annual savings by dialing down energy use when grid demand is highest.
The report recommends that all buildings aim to have the ability to shift when they actively heat or cool by two to four hours without compromising comfort. That’s doable with existing solutions that provide thermal inertia, including insulation and tank water heaters that can store hot water for when it’s needed.
Utilities and regulators can spur more flexible demand by implementing electricity rates or utility tariffs that reward customers for using power outside of peak periods.
“When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and we’ve arguably got an abundance of clean power on the grid, prices often go negative,” Audino said. Tariffs can reflect that reality, creating a clear financial incentive for households and others to shift their power usage. Without these more dynamic tariffs, “it’s really hard to see how we can drive this [shift] at scale.”
Building floor area globally is expected to grow by over 50% by 2050, according to the report. If structures are built with the same techniques as today, cumulative embodied carbon emissions could soar an additional 75 gigatons of CO2 between now and midcentury.
But that amount could be reduced to about 30 gigatons of CO2 by maximizing the utility of buildings that already exist, decarbonizing building materials, and designing new ones differently.
Using existing structures is “the biggest opportunity” for reducing embodied carbon, per the report: The strategy avoids adding any new embodied emissions at all. But it’s harder to implement this tactic than it is to change building techniques, the authors add.
Producing materials drives up-front emissions, and the biggest contributors are cement, concrete, and steel, the report notes: They account for 95% of the embodied carbon from materials in buildings.
Low- and zero-carbon cement, concrete, and steel can be made using electricity, alternative fuels, exotic chemistries (including ones inspired by corals), and carbon capture with storage. But developers need incentives to buy these clean materials, which aren’t yet widely available or competitive on cost alone.
A complementary approach is to design buildings with less of the emitting stuff. For the same floor space, a mid-rise structure uses less material than a high-rise, which needs a larger foundation and bigger columns. A boxy building is more efficient than an irregular one.
Developers can moreover supplement construction with alternative, lower-carbon materials, per the report. These include recycled materials, sustainably sourced timber, bamboo, rammed earth, and “hempcrete” — a low-strength, lightweight mixture of hemp, lime, and water that actually absorbs carbon.
Embodied carbon has been particularly challenging to curb because it’s largely invisible. In 2021, London regulators decided to change that, requiring major developers to tally all the carbon emissions, operational and embodied, over the building’s lifetime while still in the planning stage, the authors write.
Developers weren’t required to stay below any carbon-intensity threshold; they just had to report expected emissions, said Stephen Hill, associate director in the buildings sustainability team at firm Arup, a member of the Energy Transitions Commission.
“But it triggered a kind of race downwards in terms of embodied-carbon intensity for developers, all of whom wanted to have the lowest-carbon developments,” he added. “It’s a fascinating example of what transparency will do and how the market behaves.”
Stephen Richardson, senior impact director at the nonprofit World Green Building Council, emphasized at the commission’s panel event that to decarbonize buildings, governments need to do two things at once. “We need to incentivize, on the one hand, make it financially more appealing,” he said. And “we need to mandate.”
Large parts of Asia, most of Africa and South America, and even some U.S. states lack mandatory building codes, the report notes. And that’s the “absolute, No. 1” policy that needs to be in place, Richardson said. “Without policy, nothing happens — or very little.”
.svg)
