Current conditions: Temperatures in Sicily and southern Italy are approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit as a heat dome settles over the north-central Mediterranean • After pounding Okinawa and injuring two people on Japan’s remote southern islands, Typhoon Saudel is barreling west t … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Temperatures in Sicily and southern Italy are approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit as a heat dome settles over the north-central Mediterranean • After pounding Okinawa and injuring two people on Japan’s remote southern islands, Typhoon Saudel is barreling west t … | Continue reading
Two years ago, Donald Trump made an outlandish campaign promise: He would cut Americans’ power bills in half.It was a ridiculous, impossible pledge — but even so, the affordability problem didn’t need to get this bad. A new report, out this week from the Natural Resources Defense … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer:Hello, it’s Thursday … | Continue reading
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.It’s been a big week for the data center backlash.In Pennsylvania, the governor required data center developers to comply with new restrictions. Texas beg … | Continue reading
The Texas summer isn’t over — highs today are forecasted to be at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in much of the state — but so far the state’s grid has held up.In the past month or so, Texas’ grid has hit a number of generation records, according to data collected by Grid Status … | Continue reading
Voltpost, the company putting electric vehicle chargers on lampposts, is now expanding to parking garages.On Wednesday, the company unveiled two new configurations that can attach to the walls and ceilings of parking garages, lots, and other locations without easy access to stree … | Continue reading
Current conditions: A sleepy Atlantic hurricane season just snapped to attention as two tropical storms started forming near the Caribbean and off Africa’s coast • Southern California is bracing for a week of triple-digit temperatures • The Hawk Fire has forced 42,000 people to e … | Continue reading
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.Even as state-level Republicans have started talking about the data center boom more skeptically, the Trump administration keeps hugging it.The Environmen … | Continue reading
Three-year old startup Pacific Fusion broke ground on Tuesday on what it says will be the world’s first fusion plant to produce more energy than it consumes. The company is aiming to achieve this milestone, known as net facility gain, by 2030. If successful, it would provide the … | Continue reading
Current conditions: A sleepy Atlantic hurricane season just snapped to attention as two tropical storms started forming near the Caribbean and off Africa’s coast • Southern California is bracing for a week of triple-digit temperatures • The Hawk Fire has forced 42,000 people to e … | Continue reading
The race to build data centers is driving a natural gas boom in the U.S. power sector unlike any seen before. According to Global Energy Monitor, a group that tracks energy infrastructure around the world, the amount of natural gas generation proposed to power data centers in the … | Continue reading
In just its first three years, the Inflation Reduction Act had historic impacts on the U.S. energy mix, spurring 115 gigawatts of new, clean generation — enough to power more than 20 million American homes.The law was also living up to its promise to be the largest climate action … | Continue reading
I’ve got an update for you on the data center backlash — and what it could mean for the governor’s race in Wisconsin, one of the country’s most important state-level battles in the upcoming midterms.Last week, I wrote about how the Republican congressman and Wisconsin gubernatori … | Continue reading
All I wanted was to drive an electric car to the solar eclipse. But after the third consecutive charging port RFID reader wouldn’t accept my credit card and finding that the employees inside the attached Spanish hotel restaurant mostly didn’t speak English, I began to feel as tho … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Moke sideswiped Hawaii yesterday just weeks after a weakened Hurricane Lala became the first major storm to hit the Big Island in decades • On the western fringe of the United States’ Pacific borders, Typhoon Saudel struck Guam and the Northern … | Continue reading
The past three months will go down in the books as the hottest meteorological summer on record in Boston — but that is not a record that’s likely to stand long. At 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since 1970, Massachusetts has outpaced the national average by half a degree; by 2 … | Continue reading
The United States has more roads than you could possibly imagine. Eighty-three percent of the land in the Lower 48 lies within one kilometer of a road; if you’re seeking isolation, the furthest you can get away from one is likely only about 25 miles, in a far-flung corner of Yell … | Continue reading
The Trump administration aims to complete its environmental review of what would be the biggest fossil fuel power project in the country in just a few months, Heatmap has learned. This news follows Monday’s announcement from OpenAI that it intends to lease a new 10-gigawatt data … | Continue reading
A series of lawsuits filed in federal court asks a big question – are data center moratoria constitutional?In early August, data center developer DC Blox sued the city of Nashville in federal court to overturn a zoning moratorium stopping them from building a hyperscale facility … | Continue reading
1. Montgomery County, Pennsylvania – We reached a new normal in the data center backlash, and it all seems to have started in King of Prussia.On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced his state – one once coveted by the AI industry for hyperscale construction – will no … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Ella Nilsen, who recently left CNN as a climate reporter and is now a new vice president at energy and cleantech PR firm Echo Communications. Having worked on Capitol Hill alongside Nilsen, I knew her to be an exceptional reporter who asked hard q … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Heavy rainstorms are sweeping across the Great Lakes and the East Coast’s Amtrak Corridor, with the highest flood risk in North Carolina and New Jersey • Monsoonal downpours are drenching western Cameroon, with the West Region capital of Bafoussam facing more … | Continue reading
Washington State’s carbon market is about to get much bigger — and much cheaper. In June, the state signed an historic agreement to link its cap-and-invest program with the California-Quebec market, which has operated jointly since 2014. The deal will further expand what’s alread … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Just a week after Tropical Storm Lala devastated the Big Island, a new tropical rainstorm is barreling toward Hawaii, threatening more flooding, strong winds, and choppy seas by this weekend • Forecasters reduced their estimates for the number of storms in thi … | Continue reading
California now has the most expensive electricity in the continental United States. It also has expensive housing … and an increasingly broken home insurance market.Are the three phenomena linked? They might be. Due to a peculiarity in the state’s constitution, electricity utilit … | Continue reading
The transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer:Hello, it’s Thursday, … | Continue reading
The American public has soured even further on local data center development since the spring, new polling shows.Three-quarters of Americans now say that they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live, according to a new Heatmap Pro poll conducted by Embold … | Continue reading
Gas prices are climbing again.As the United States and Iran confusingly engage following the end of a 60-day “memorandum of understanding” between the two warring countries, the fuel market has begun to readjust yet again, continuing the volatility that has confounded analysts si … | Continue reading
Heatmap News, the award-winning climate and clean energy media company, is looking for a versatile full-stack developer to help build and improve Heatmap News and Heatmap Pro.This is a broad engineering role for someone who is comfortable moving between product development, backe … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Firefighters are encircling Belgium’s largest fire on record, just the latest blaze in Europe as historic heat waves roast the continent • The Canadian wildfire smoke that billowed into Michigan this summer cost the state nearly $6.7 billion • The string of st … | Continue reading
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.Perhaps data centers don’t matter as much as we think.That was my takeaway after last week’s Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, where the liberal … | Continue reading
By many measures, California is the most advanced U.S. demand response market. Its aggressive clean energy targets, widespread home electrification, and near-universal smart meter deployment make it a natural testbed for programs that call upon distributed energy resources — from … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Lake Powell just dropped to its lowest level since the reservoir straddling the border between northern Arizona and Utah began filling 60 years ago • A dangerous new heat dome has formed over the American Southeast, driving midday highs north of 110 degrees Fa … | Continue reading
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.This morning, OpenAI announced that it is leasing an enormous data center facility that will be built in Pike County, Ohio. The facility’s ownership stru … | Continue reading
Trump started his second term in office with a sweeping federal funding freeze that invited a spate of lawsuits all raising the same general question: Can the president refuse to spend the money Congress appropriates?When it came to climate programs, the funds at stake included b … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Floodwaters swept through eastern Iowa, swelling the White River to its highest level in 113 years • A southwest monsoon, or hagabat, has capped off several weeks of storms in the Philippines that, combined, killed nearly two dozen people • Temperatures in Mad … | Continue reading
Here’s some trivia for you: What was the first state to see its average temperature break the 2-degree Celsius threshold for warming above pre-industrial levels? It wasn’t Alaska, the fastest-warming state, nor was it California or Florida, states with some of the most visible im … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Ryan Norris, senior fellow for energy policy at the Abundance Institute. The libertarian-leaning institute — whose name cleverly shortens to AI — is a new-ish entity with increasing relevance in energy and tech spaces. As Norris and I discussed, i … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Ryan Norris, senior fellow for energy policy at the Abundance Institute. The libertarian-leaning institute — whose name cleverly shortens to AI — is a new-ish entity with increasing relevance in energy and tech spaces. As Norris and I discussed, i … | Continue reading
1. Shelby County, Alabama — The Trump administration’s widening effort to intervene in rural energy project fights is facing an early test: What happens if companies don’t take it seriously? This week country music star John Rich, Trump’s “special envoy for American landowners,” … | Continue reading
The Trump administration is considering changing its interpretation of an obscure law related to farmland ownership to transform it into a national security instrument with profound impacts for U.S. renewables projects — and fossil fuels. U.S. energy developers and their trade gr … | Continue reading
Americans have come to expect shocking electricity bills, especially in the summer months. The latest data from the Electricity Price Hub makes clear: Households in every region of the country are seeing not just record high July bills, but also bills that are sharply higher than … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Lala could strengthen into a hurricane before hitting Hawaii’s Big Island, becoming the first such storm to make landfall there since 1900 • A glacial outburst at Suicide Basin near Juneau, Alaska, is raising the Mendenhall River • Temperatures … | Continue reading
This is an edition of Heatmap Daily, an evening review of the day’s news written by our executive editor. Sign up for it here.Ready to be surprised? Clean energy and transportation investment surged in the second quarter of this year, rising to more than $75 billion in total, acc … | Continue reading
A carbon price can be a tough sell when electricity costs are rising.That’s what governors up and down the eastern seaboard are facing as they decide what to do with revenues from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an 11-state cap-and-trade program for the electricity sector … | Continue reading
I believe life should be a little bit silly, which is why I’m a sucker for a gimmick. A hotel just for napping? Sign me up. A “convenience store” full of items made of felt? I now own a bag of inedible Fritos. Hot sauce packaged to look like dynamite? Cute, add to cart.And when I … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Cristobal formed in the Atlantic yet poses no real threats to land, unlike another budding storm gathering strength in the southern Caribbean • Powerful storms spurred derecho winds that spawned tornadoes across the Midwest and left 800,000 with … | Continue reading