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The Trump administration appears poised to force more coal plants to stay open past their planned closing dates — an unprecedented intervention in the power sector that is already making energy even more expensive for Americans.
The first signal of the strategy came in late May. A week before the J.H. Campbell coal plant’s scheduled shutdown, the Department of Energy directed the 63-year-old facility in Michigan to keep operating for 90 days. The agency has since re-upped that order, and the power plant’s owner, Consumers Energy, expects another extension later this month. Through the end of September, the move had already cost Consumers’ customers a total of $80 million, or roughly $615,000 per day.
But the J.H. Campbell plant is unlikely to remain the lone example. Despite the costs, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive who denies the severity of the climate change crisis, is reportedly intending to interfere in more long-planned coal plant closures — this time in Colorado.
Late last month, the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association revealed that DOE officials have indicated they will issue a Section 202(c) order to keep Unit 1 of the electric cooperative’s Craig Station coal plant online past its scheduled closure later this year. Tri-State provides power to member utilities that collectively serve over 1 million customers in rural Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
“Based on conversations with the U.S. Department of Energy, we believe that it is likely that we will receive an emergency order before the end of the year,” Tri-State spokesperson Mark Stutz told Canary Media. That puts the cooperative in a bind, given that “we do have legal requirements to close that unit, but we also are closing it for economic reasons,” he said.
Tri-State declined to disclose the costs it would incur due to an emergency order. But the cooperative’s broader plans to expand clean energy and close coal plants are expected to save its members $422 million over 20 years.
Another Colorado coal plant slated for closure this year is also likely to stay online, whether via DOE fiat or more typical state processes.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican representing a district in western Colorado, wrote a letter to the DOE last month asking it to stall the planned retirement of Comanche Unit 2, a more than 300-megawatt power plant owned by Xcel Energy. The utility estimated in 2018 that shutting down two Comanche units and building out renewables would save customers about $213 million over time. This week, Xcel Energy and state agencies petitioned Colorado regulators to delay the retirement of Comanche Unit 2 until the end of 2026 due to repeated failures at the newer Unit 3.
In both Michigan and Colorado, regulators and utilities had previously determined that shutting down the coal plants in question would not compromise grid reliability.
Still, the Trump administration said the J.H. Campbell plant needed to stay online due to summertime grid emergencies. No such emergencies came to pass this summer. In fact, the regional grid operator “had 10 times the amount of unused resources available to it than the amount of energy Campbell was providing,” said Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who’s leading litigation by nonprofits challenging the DOE’s stay-open orders.
The Trump administration has also issued Section 202(c) orders forcing the Eddystone oil- and gas-fired power plant in Pennsylvania to stay open.
These eleventh-hour orders come with both direct and indirect costs.
Power plants on the verge of closure reassign workers and defer maintenance. They stop purchasing fuel; the J.H. Campbell facility likely had to make an expensive rush order after receiving last-minute notice that it would have to operate. These direct costs associated with reversing closure plans can range from the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plus, as is the case in Colorado, utility customers are often already paying for energy infrastructure that will replace coal units, said Matthew Gerhart, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club’s Denver office. If the DOE orders Craig Unit 1 and Comanche Unit 2 to keep running, those customers will end up “paying twice, since they’re already paying for the replacement resources.”
Coal provided about 15% of electricity in the U.S. in 2024, a far cry from the 51% it provided in 2001. Swapping renewables and fossil gas in for the dirty power source has been a major driver of decarbonization for the nation’s grid.
About 8.1 gigawatts’ worth of coal-fired capacity, or 4.7% of the U.S. coal fleet, was scheduled to retire this year as of February, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That list includes the 1,800-megawatt Intermountain Power Project in Utah, the 670-megawatt Unit 2 of the TransAlta Centralia plant in Washington state, and 847 megawatts of generation capacity at the R.M. Schahfer plant in Indiana.
These facilities are some of the most expensive plants to run within the coal fleet, which is itself the costliest source of electricity on the U.S. grid today, said Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation.
The think tank reported in June that coal-plant owners spent $6.2 billion more in 2024 than they would have spent for the same amount of electricity generated by coal in 2021. The 28% increase was driven by the rising costs of maintaining a power-plant fleet with an average age of 44 years.
The plants set to retire this year “are on the higher end of the cost increases we saw” compared to the U.S. coal fleet as a whole, Solomon added.
What’s more, “all these plants are likely to be less reliable and efficient, because the owners are reducing the amount of maintenance they’re doing,” she said. That means, ironically, they’re more likely to be offline when needed for the emergencies that are the DOE’s rationale for keeping them open.
Lenoff highlighted U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data that shows the J.H. Campbell units “kept going on and off” from July 1 through Sept. 30. “They’d operate for 24 hours, days on end — and then shut off.”
That’s problematic for two reasons, he said. First, under Section 202(c), the DOE is “only allowed to order the units to run during designated hours of emergency. But these units have been running 24 hours a day.” Second, weeks-long shutdowns indicate that the plants are unlikely to be available when the grid really needs them.
“Meanwhile, Campbell was racking up costs and polluting its neighbors and polluting Lake Michigan,” he said.
The Trump administration could foist enormous costs onto consumers if it ultimately pursues a policy of blocking most fossil-fuel retirements.
Americans are already struggling with utility bills that have been rising at more than twice the rate of overall inflation this year. Democratic candidates focused on energy affordability won races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and won two of five seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission.
In an August analysis, consultancy Grid Strategies estimated that if the DOE forced about 35 gigawatts’ worth of large fossil-fueled power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028 to keep running, annual costs for utility customers could reach $4.8 billion by the end of Donald Trump’s term.
Add in the risk of forced operations of another 31.4 gigawatts of fossil-fueled power plants that are not slated for retirement but are around retirement age, and the yearly costs rise to $5.9 billion.
Michael Goggin, Grid Strategies executive vice president and author of the report, said that the latest data from Consumers Energy on the costs of J.H. Campbell indicate that “our August estimate stands, and if anything appears conservative.”
The DOE isn’t responsible for every coal plant that remains running past its sell-by date, Goggin noted. Grid operator PJM Interconnection has ordered the Brandon Shores coal plant and H.A. Wagner oil-fired plant in Maryland to run years past their planned closure, under a longstanding process to determine when retirements could threaten critical grid reliability. Xcel’s Monday petition asking state regulators to postpone the closure of Comanche Unit 2 is another example of how coal plants can be kept open through traditional processes.
That “reliability must-run” process has its critics. But it also has well-established rules that regional grid operators, state utility regulators, and other stakeholders follow.
The DOE’s use of Section 202(c) emergency authority under the Trump administration, by contrast, has broken with these decades-old rules. Critics fear the administration’s true goal is not to ensure grid reliability, but to unilaterally carry out a political agenda to bolster the fossil-fuel industry and undermine clean energy.
It’s not an outlandish argument. The Trump administration has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to propping up coal-fired power plants. It has also ordered the DOE to create a process by which the agency could usurp state and regional grid planning decisions to unilaterally declare any power plant in the country as critical. In July, the DOE issued a heavily criticized report claiming that coal-plant closures represent a major threat to grid reliability.
Meanwhile, the costs being pushed onto utility customers by the DOE’s existing must-run orders are starting to cause political tensions.
Last month, Kentucky’s attorney general and an electrical cooperative in the state filed a joint protest before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, challenging PJM’s plan to spread the costs of keeping plants forced to remain open under DOE order across all utilities within the grid operator’s 13-state footprint.
Regulators are working out similar cost-sharing arrangements across the Midcontinent Independent System Operator region for the extra expenses borne by Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell plant running. The logic is that the DOE’s orders claim that the plant is necessary for region-wide grid reliability, and that consumers across the region must therefore bear part of the burden.
These extra costs are coming at a time of rising utility rates in PJM, in MISO, and across the country, which intensifies the likelihood that individual states and utilities will balk at being asked to carry costs for power plants that nobody but DOE has said need to keep running.
“It’s a strange environment,” Goggin said. “There’s large load growth, and resource-adequacy concerns, and there are always going to be people arguing about not paying for something. But in this case it’s complicated by the fact that everyone wants to retire a plant that everyone has already signed off on.”
Legal challenges from state attorneys general and nonprofit groups are underway, but moving slowly. Lawsuits against the DOE’s Section 202(c) order for the J.H. Campbell plant are now awaiting review at the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure this case is heard” quickly, Earthjustice’s Lenoff said. But that process will likely stretch into the middle of next year, he said.
Meanwhile, Goggin said, with the DOE only forcing J.H. Campbell and Eddystone to stay open so far, “this has been flying under the radar a little bit.” But if the DOE moves ahead on Section 202(c) orders for the rest of the coal power plants set for closure this year, “we’re getting people ready to understand that this thing may be coming to your utility very soon.”
Representatives from all over the world are currently meeting on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belem, Brazil, to try and advance the global transition away from fossil fuels.
The occasion is this year’s annual United Nations climate summit, known as COP30. One decade ago, the conference produced the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels.
Today, that 1.5°C target is essentially impossible to meet, and the world is nowhere near on track to achieve the U.N.’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Even keeping warming below 2°C is a long shot. New estimates from the Rhodium Group suggest we’re on track for between 2°C and 3.7°C of warming by the end of the century, with 2.8°C being the average outcome. Those figures would exacerbate extreme weather that has already worsened in recent years with far less warming.
It’s a bleak picture. But here’s the other way of looking at it, one emphasized by Bill Gates in a controversial treatise on climate released ahead of COP30: Today’s worst-case warming forecasts are far less bad than what was once predicted. Before the Paris Agreement was set, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast global temperatures would rise by 2.5°C to 7.8°C by 2100.
The reason warming is now on a better — if not good — trajectory comes down to the remarkable rise of renewable energy.
Solar, wind, and batteries have gotten extremely cheap. Alongside natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, these clean sources have surged onto the grid in recent years and helped displace fossil fuels. Rhodium forecasts that at our current rate, global power-sector emissions will fall by more than half by 2050. Because the power sector is currently the world’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases, per the research group, that could be enough to bend the curve on overall emissions.
Despite this progress, the line of actual, recorded emissions continues to tick up. This year’s COP comes amid global backpedaling on climate commitments and countless calls for a new, affordability-focused approach to the energy transition that proponents say is more pragmatic. The U.S. government, meanwhile, declined to even send a delegation to the event. (Trump administration officials had no problem carving out time to hawk natural gas to the European Union in Athens, Greece, last week.)
These headwinds underscore an important fact: A sustained decline in planet-warming pollution remains only a possibility, one that is likelier now than it was before but still not guaranteed.
New York just slammed the brakes on rules that would’ve prohibited fossil fuels in new homes and businesses.
The Empire State was on the precipice of fully enacting the All-Electric Buildings Act that Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed in 2023. The first-in-the-nation standard requires most new buildings to install efficient, electric appliances such as heat pumps instead of health-harming gas, propane, and fuel-oil systems. Regulators finalized the rules in July; they were set to take effect Dec. 31.
But on Wednesday, the state agreed to not enforce the zero-emissions standard until the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals makes its decision on a two-year-old lawsuit challenging the All-Electric Buildings Act. Climate-advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice expects that’ll delay the landmark building code until at least the fall of 2026, as oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.
The legislation “was a promise that New York would stop locking families into expensive, polluting fossil-fuel systems and start building for the future,” said Democratic Assemblymember Gabriella Romero on a Thursday call with reporters. “Delaying this law is a total betrayal of that promise.”
Putting the all-electric building code on ice is an abrupt about-face for the administration. On Oct. 1, the state filed a brief saying that New Yorkers would “suffer irreparable harm if the Code amendments are delayed from taking effect,” because it would allow new buildings to depend on fossil-fuel equipment that would generate greenhouse gases and local air pollution for decades to come. That, in turn, would drive up the health, agriculture, and broader economy costs imposed by worsening climate catastrophes.
But just over one month later, Hochul signaled openness to pausing the law after a group of 19 Democratic state legislators raised concerns about its affordability and impact on the grid. Multiple studies have found that the grid has ample room for all-electric new buildings, and making them the default would benefit the planet and people’s pocketbooks.
Hochul’s office has positioned the delay as a pragmatic step that could expedite implementation of the rule in the long term. By voluntarily pausing the law, Hochul may be trying to avoid a potentially multiyear holdup should the case reach the U.S. Supreme Court and get on its “shadow docket.” That emergency process is typically less transparent than the court’s usual decision-making protocol.
“The Governor remains committed to the all-electric-buildings law and believes this action will help the State defend it, as well as reduce regulatory uncertainty for developers during this period of litigation,” Ken Lovett, energy and environment spokesperson for Hochul, told Canary Media. She’s “resolved to providing more affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for New Yorkers.”
Earthjustice argues that there’s no reason to expect that the groups challenging the law would’ve been able to hamper its implementation if the state hadn’t made the concession itself.
The plaintiffs in the case — including the New York State Builders Association, National Association of Home Builders, and National Propane Gas Association — allege that the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act preempts the all-electric buildings law. That same reasoning was used to overturn Berkeley, California’s pioneering gas ban. In July, New York prevailed when a federal district judge in the state rejected the argument.
Similar lawsuits are playing out in courts around the country, including a challenge to New York City’s own all-electric-buildings standard, which has been in effect since 2024.
Hochul’s decision to slow-roll building electrification is part of her administration’s realpolitik embrace of fossil fuels. Last Friday, New York regulators signed off on a Trump-backed underwater gas pipeline, after having denied the requisite permits three times before. The same day, her administration announced a deal to allow a gas plant that mainly powers cryptocurrency mining to keep operating for at least five years. She also has yet to sign a bill that repeals gas-hookup subsidies. Legislators passed it in June.
Hochul justified recent moves by saying the state needs to “govern in reality.”
“We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans, including our New York delegation, which is why we have adopted an all-of-the-above approach,” she said last week in a statement.
Democratic Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha said she’s deeply concerned about the administration’s trajectory. Reducing the lethal and expensive harms born of the climate crisis “is not an optional goal,” she said. “Really, we’re talking about a disruption to our economy if we don’t act — in the same way the pandemic disrupted our economy.”
In 2015, countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to keep the global temperature rise “well below 2°C” and limit this increase to 1.5°C.
To meet these targets, there are limits to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that can be emitted. These are called carbon budgets. Every year we emit more CO2, these budgets shrink. (That’s because total warming is roughly proportional to cumulative CO2.)
In the chart, you can see estimates for how much CO2 the world can emit — from the start of next year — while staying below different levels of warming. This is based on having a 50% likelihood of staying below it; if we wanted to guarantee that we didn’t pass these temperatures, our budget would be much smaller.
To get a sense of perspective, we’ve compared each budget with the projected amount of CO2 that the world is expected to emit in 2025. This tells us how many years we have left if emissions stay at their current levels.
At current emission rates, the 1.5°C budget would run out around 2030. It seems implausible that global emissions will fall quickly enough to avoid this.
The 2°C budget would last until mid-century. By taking action on climate change, we buy ourselves more time and can avoid this level of warming.
Have global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions gone up or down this year?
The latest projections from the Global Carbon Project give us some insight. Their researchers and analysts do invaluable work in estimating greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, helping us understand how the situation is evolving.
Today, they published their latest “carbon budget”. The chart shows their historical estimates, as well as their projections for 2025.
They project that this year, emissions from fossil sources — that is, from fossil fuels and industrial processes — will increase by around 1%. Emissions from all three fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are expected to increase. Meanwhile, emissions from land-use change have decreased due to fewer extreme wildfires and reduced deforestation in South America.
This reduction in land use may offset the increase from fossil fuels, resulting in a global total similar to last year. Note that estimates for land-use emissions are much less certain than for fossil fuels.
While many countries have made progress in reducing emissions, global fossil emissions continue to rise. To tackle climate change, they need to peak and rapidly decrease in the coming years and decades.
As of Sept. 30, Ohio lawmakers eliminated a key legal tool used to rein in air pollution from power plants and industrial sites. Now, advocates are suing to restore that right.
For decades, environmental groups in Ohio and elsewhere have used air nuisance rules in state plans as a catchall way to enforce the federal Clean Air Act. Ohio’s version let people take legal action against companies whose emissions “endanger the health, safety or welfare of the public, or cause unreasonable injury or damage to property.” The rule dates back more than 50 years.
Environmental groups have used air nuisance rules to file or threaten lawsuits against coal-burning power plants, iron and steel facilities, coke plants, and other industrial operations, which emit not only planet-warming greenhouse gases but also harmful pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead.
Defendants in cases brought under Ohio’s version of the rule have included Suncoke Energy, AK Steel–Middletown Works, Georgia-Pacific Corp., and Phthalchem. Consent decrees and settlements have produced orders or agreements to stop alleged nuisances, clean up waste, and expand monitoring.
But a last-minute addition to the state’s 3,156-page budget bill, House Bill 96, told the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cut that protection out of the state’s Clean Air Act plan.
“The air nuisance rule is the tool that Ohioans have to hold polluters accountable,” said Neil Waggoner, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign manager for the Midwest. “This is the state government saying … we’re going to take this away from you in the most secretive fashion possible.”
The Sierra Club is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with the Ohio Environmental Council, SOBE Concerned Citizens, and the Freshwater Accountability Project. The fifth plaintiff, Donna Ballinger, is a Middletown resident who lives close to iron and steel operations, which she claims cause nuisance conditions. An August report by the Environmental Integrity Project documented likely air quality problems in that area.
Experts warn that eliminating the right to file air nuisance complaints weakens Ohio’s enforcement of pollution measures at an already perilous moment for environmental regulation.
For months, the Trump administration has been rolling back federal pollution standards and making huge personnel cuts to the staff charged with enforcing the remaining rules and permits. The Ohio EPA has authority to enforce the Clean Air Act but doesn’t always pursue alleged violations.
“Both at the federal and state level, we’re seeing less enforcement,” said Miranda Leppla, who heads Case Western Reserve University’s Environmental Law Clinic and represents the Ohio Environmental Council and the Sierra Club in the lawsuit. “If Ohioans don’t have the ability to bring these enforcement actions on their own through the air nuisance rule, there’s a very serious concern that air quality will continue to degrade and Ohioans’ health will get worse.”
Echoing a recent law in Louisiana, HB 96 also blocks the Ohio EPA from acting on data that groups may collect through community air-monitoring efforts. Such data can fill important gaps and alert communities and enforcement officials to problems that may not be detected by EPA monitors miles away.
Ohio’s limits on using the data will particularly harm fence-line communities, Leppla said.
“At a time when Ohio is seeing renewed industrial building, including new facilities like data centers, as well as a greater federal push for more fossil fuels, it is more important than ever that Ohioans preserve their right to both collect air pollution data themselves and use that data to file suits against harmful air nuisances,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council.
The complaint, filed on Oct. 24 in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, asserts that lawmakers violated the single-subject rule in the Ohio Constitution when they tacked the air pollution provisions onto the massive budget bill.
“This is fundamentally unrelated to the main purpose of the biennial budget,” Waggoner said. “And it was stuck in here in an intentional way so that folks would not have an opportunity to see it, talk about it, or debate its merits.”
The Sierra Club, Ohio Environmental Council, and other groups raised a similar argument two years ago after eleventh-hour changes to a bill about poultry included a new definition of natural gas as “green energy.” That case, also at the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, has been briefed, and parties are waiting for Judge Kimberly Cocroft to issue her ruling.
A 2019 decision in Paulding County, Ohio, rejected a challenge to the late amendment in the 2014 budget bill that tripled property-line setbacks for turbines on wind farms. That case wasn’t appealed and would not bind the court in Franklin County.
Despite the similarities, the new lawsuit is different because the ban goes beyond how state agencies operate, Leppla said. “The air nuisance rule was created specifically to allow Ohioans who are suffering from noxious air pollution and nuisances to protect themselves when the government does not act.”
HB 96 is not the first attempt to take away Ohioans’ right to bring air nuisance claims. In 2020, the first Trump administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removed Ohio’s air nuisance rule, Waggoner noted.
The Ohio Environmental Council, the Sierra Club, Ballinger, and another Sierra Club member mounted a successful challenge in federal court, but due to delays in agency action it wasn’t until this February that the rule became effective again.
“And now here we are with the Ohio legislature attempting to remove it again, when it had already been found to be illegal to do so,” Leppla said.
To prevent another lapse, the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit have asked Judge Julie Lynch to grant a preliminary injunction against removing the rule while the case proceeds.
As defendants, the State of Ohio and the director of Ohio EPA have 28 days to file responses after the complaint was served. What happens next will depend on those filings and the judge’s rulings on any motions.
The Ohio attorney general’s office did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment. Ohio EPA spokesperson Bryant Somerville said the agency is reviewing the lawsuit but had no further response because the matter is in litigation.
Zohran Mamdani surged to a historic victory in Tuesday night’s election for New York City mayor, riding a campaign that was laser-focused on halting soaring rents, improving mass transit, and rebuking President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration in a metropolis where more than one-third of the population is foreign-born.
The city’s skyrocketing electricity prices, however, received scant mention — even as utility rates animated races around the country, including Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial victory in New Jersey. Despite kicking off his career as a state lawmaker in 2020 by fighting to close the city’s fossil-fueled peaker plants, Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, made little hay about climate change at all during the campaign.
Yet the next mayor of the nation’s largest city inherits a world-leading experiment in retrofitting buildings to slash emissions, open questions about how to transition to cleaner power sources, and a patchwork of adaptation efforts meant to protect aging infrastructure from mounting deluges.
The most significant climate policy under the mayor’s purview is a statute called Local Law 97. Passed in 2019, the law requires buildings over 25,000 square feet to slash emissions 40% by the end of this decade and to reach net-zero by 2050. To do so, the nearly 50,000 buildings that qualify must swap oil- and gas-fired heating systems for electric heat pumps.
When the first phase of the law came into effect last year, just 8% of the buildings covered needed to make upgrades to comply, estimated the Urban Green Council, a nonprofit focused on building decarbonization. But more than 50% of buildings will need to make changes to hit the 2030 emissions target.
“That’s a lot,” said John Mandyck, the Urban Green Council’s chief executive. “There’s a lot the next mayor is going to have to do.”
Among the law’s biggest opponents were co-op buildings, condos, and landlord associations that said compliance would cost too much. One anti-Mamdani PAC, as New York Focus reported, sought to make the law a defining issue in the race, saying the candidate from Queens would only raise the price of bringing buildings into line.
In a policy proposal, Mamdani said he would lobby Albany to extend a general tax break that helps middle-income co-op and condo owners pay for building renovations, and to reduce the fees to apply. He also vowed to staff up the agencies in charge of helping building owners navigate the rules. He said in a mid-October debate that he’d heard “from so many” that “it’s cheaper to pay the fine than to actually get into compliance.”
The city could also lower costs by finding a way to purchase heat pumps and other appliances in bulk, Mandyck said. Last year, the New York City Housing Authority agreed to buy 10,000 state-of-the-art induction stoves for apartments in the nation’s largest public housing system, and the state kicked off a new contest shortly after for heat pumps. At the debate, Mamdani said he would look to NYCHA as a model.
But Mandyck said, while the NYCHA programs are “off to a great start,” they’re still only pilot projects.
“That can be part of the solution,” he said. “But there needs to be some new entity, whether an authority or something, that would find a way to do bulk purchasing to aggregate to the market. This is a huge market.”
Yet the buildings covered under Local Law 97 represent just about 5% of the city’s total skyline.
“There’s 950,000 other buildings in New York City,” Mandyck said. “We’re going to have to think about how we help the smaller buildings decarbonize, too.”
To electrify the entire city without spiking emissions, New York will need more clean power plants.
Right now, the city depends on fossil fuels for more than 90% of its power. The mayor has limited say over the electrons that flow into the five boroughs, and the dense urban landscape leaves little space for solar and wind installations within the city. Mamdani’s one major clean-energy plan is aimed at adding solar panels to the roofs of schools, but even that would likely require approval from Albany while only meeting a fraction of local demand.
City Hall does, however, play a role in negotiating contracts for the city’s public institutions with the New York Power Authority, the state-owned utility.
Roughly one-fifth of the power NYPA sells statewide goes to public customers in the city. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, directed NYPA in June to work on building at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear reactors in the state in the coming years, and the Mamdani administration could play a part in brokering a deal for those electrons. At the final mayoral debate, Mamdani said he considered a new nuclear plant “something worth exploring,” though he’s remained mum on nascent efforts to reconstruct the Indian Point power station that once provided about a quarter of New York City’s power.
Mamdani will also inherit a climate problem with more immediately tangible stakes than decarbonization: the need to update New York’s aging infrastructure to deal with increasingly extreme weather.
Routine rainstorms regularly overwhelm the city’s stormwater systems and cause deadly torrential flooding. Just last week, two men died in basements in Brooklyn and Manhattan amid heavy rains.
Since the devastation of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the city has begun a series of adaptation projects totaling billions of dollars — but some less glamorous work has been underway for decades.
Take the New Creek stormwater project on the East Shore of Staten Island as an example. The project, championed by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, is part of the Bluebelt Program that started on Staten Island in 1996 and transformed the city’s least populous borough into a testing ground for water-management infrastructure. The Department of Environmental Protection now plans to apply those solutions in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Five of the 19 project sites are fully complete, and the rest are on track to be finished in the next five years, said Robert Brauman, deputy chief of Bluebelt operations at the agency.
On a sunny Wednesday morning, roughly 12 hours after Mamdani delivered a trumpeting victory speech, Brauman stood atop a concrete structure overlooking the large freshwater stream known as New Creek. Just a few years ago, it was a trickle running through a corrugated culvert under a quiet stretch of the Midland Beach neighborhood that would, in bad weather, turn into a torrent. Today, however, the water travels through a carefully regulated S-shaped pipe system, allowing New Creek to keep stormwater from flooding the surrounding neighborhoods. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection combed over 19th-century botanical records to select plants native not just to the five boroughs but to Staten Island specifically to flank the body of water.
“That prevents flooding downstream, and it gives all the plants we installed time to clean the water, so the native wetland vegetation can suck up nitrogen and phosphorus and everything else and clean the water before it goes out,” said Brauman. “That’s perfect adaptation.”
After walking the perimeter of the project, he arrived at the dead end of Mason Avenue and stopped on the sidewalk. Between the curb and the asphalt of the street was a concrete path that looked like a hard version of the polygreen foam popular on children’s playgrounds. When Brauman poured a sip of coffee from a McDonald’s cup, the liquid spread for a moment, then started to disappear. The specially made porous pavement absorbs fluids, reducing how much liquid flows into storm drains during heavy rainfall.
“This is one of the first ones on Staten Island,” Brauman said. “The city is trying to incorporate it into more projects.”
Mamdani has yet to announce whether he’ll keep Rohit Aggarwala as the Department of Environmental Protection’s commissioner. But Brauman said he’s confident projects like this will continue either way, even if Mamdani had little to say about adaptation on the campaign trail.
Mandyck said the Urban Green Council plans to think through potential policy proposals in the coming months for how to better organize and grow the city’s efforts.
“It’s clear we need to take adaptation more seriously,” he said. “There are a lot of good things going on right now in New York, but they’re a little decentralized.”
China is, without a doubt, leading global efforts to slash emissions from dirty industries, with more than 200 projects in the pipeline for producing lower-carbon chemicals, fuels, and building materials.
But the United States and dozens of other countries are still making progress on that front. Over 1,000 commercial-scale clean industrial plants — totaling roughly $2 trillion in investment — are in development or are operating globally, according to a new report from the Industrial Transition Accelerator and Mission Possible Partnership.
“There’s an opportunity for everyone in this clean industrial revolution in the making,” said Faustine Delasalle, who is both CEO of MPP and executive director of ITA.
MPP is an alliance of global climate and business groups. In 2023, the organization and its partners launched ITA at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai to advocate for increased investment in decarbonizing six key sectors: aluminum, aviation, cement, chemicals, shipping, and steel. Together, they represent roughly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
This week, ahead of the COP30 summit in Brazil, the groups released the latest data, which includes about 300 more facilities than 2024’s report.
To date, only about 8% of the total projects are operational. Another 6% have reached a final investment decision — meaning they’ve secured all the necessary financing and approvals to start construction — while 7% appear “poised” to do so soon. The remaining 787 projects, or nearly 80%, have been announced but need to clear certain financial, technical, or regulatory hurdles before developers can break ground.
Delasalle said the pace at which these low-carbon facilities are coming online is still far too slow to meet global timelines for reining in planet-warming pollution. The on-again, off-again nature of national climate policy — see: the United States — and uncertain demand for cleaner fuels and metals make it challenging for developers to finance and build large, capital-intensive facilities.
Still, Delasalle said she expects the project pipeline to accelerate in the near term, particularly as other countries see China pull ahead in the race to clean up heavy industries. The country’s massive renewable-energy build-out and proactive industrial policies — including for green hydrogen — are fueling China’s early-mover advantage. Public disclosures of China’s projects are often hard to find, meaning the project-tracker report likely underestimates actual progress, according to its authors.
“There’s a growing realization that this is the direction of travel for industry, and that companies and the countries that do move will build their competitive edge,” Delasalle said. “And they are starting to do so.”
A clarification was made on Nov. 7, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify the breakdown of clean industrial projects that have reached a final investment decision versus those that are poised to reach that stage.
Former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger will become Virginia’s new governor after a decisive win this week — and after a campaign that centered around rising power prices in the data-center capital of the world.
With Spanberger’s win, Democrats now control all branches of the state government. Virginia Democrats added more than a dozen seats to their majority in the House of Delegates on Tuesday; the Democrat-controlled Senate didn’t face an election.
That outcome may be a game-changer when it comes to preserving and enforcing the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Passed in 2020, the law requires top utilities Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to achieve 100% renewable power production in the coming decades. Virginia’s Republican delegates and current Gov. Glenn Youngkin have blamed the legislation for rising power prices and pushed to repeal it, while state regulators have approved Dominion’s plans to build a raft of new gas plants in spite of the law.
The Clean Economy Act remains divisive even among Virginia Democrats. Spanberger has said that she’s committed to its long-term goals and to scaling up clean energy generation. But Democratic House Speaker Don Scott was reluctant to get into details about its future in a press conference this week, and didn’t deny the possibility of weakening its fossil-fuel restrictions, Inside Climate News reports.
The trifecta could also pave the way for Virginia to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a collaborative of East Coast states that requires power generators to meet a set cap on carbon emissions or buy allowances to exceed it. States reinvest those proceeds into emissions-reducing projects and clean energy. Youngkin pulled Virginia out of the partnership two years ago, but Spanberger has promised to rejoin.
But there’s one piece of the clean-energy landscape where Spanberger’s win could be more problem than solution. Dominion is currently building what will be the country’s largest offshore wind farm, with support from Youngkin. That Republican backing could be why the Trump administration hasn’t targeted the Dominion array, while at the same time dealing blow after blow to offshore wind projects in blue states.
Climate action wins in elections big and small
It wasn’t just Virginia: Democrats swept statewide races across the country this week. In New Jersey, U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill campaigned on a promise to rein in rising power prices, and, in contrast to her Republican opponent, showed support for offshore wind. Still, the state has no operational or under-construction offshore wind projects, and Sherrill will have limited power to counteract the Trump administration’s anti-wind policies, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reports.
In Georgia, Democrats beat Republican incumbents in two elections widely seen as referendums on rising utility bills. Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson will now take seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, which oversees for-profit utilities and their requests to raise rates. And in New York City, Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani — who tied climate action into his affordability-focused campaign — won the mayoral race.
Several other smaller races also have energy implications. Here are the results of a few:
Clean energy carries on
As the world prepares to meet in Brazil next week for the COP30 climate conference (sans the Trump administration), new reports show that clean-energy progress is still happening in defiance of White House opposition.
BloombergNEF took a look at the impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rolled back federal incentives for clean energy. The legislation will slow solar, wind, and storage deployment over the next few years, BloombergNEF predicts, but growing power demand will ultimately lead renewables to rebound after 2028.
And while the world remains far off track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it’s still making progress. A United Nations report projects the impact of many countries’ new, bolstered emissions-reduction commitments, and finds they’ll limit warming to around 2.5°C this century if fully implemented. It’s not ideal, but it’s still a win from previous reports that forecast as much as 5°C of warming through 2100.
The coast is (somewhat) clear: The U.S. Interior Department removes the Atlantic coast and a portion of the Gulf Coast around Florida from Trump’s plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling, after opposition from local Republicans. (Politico)
Take another look: A federal court ruling is forcing FEMA to fully study whether installing distributed solar and batteries makes more sense than hardening Puerto Rico’s existing grid and repairing fossil-fuel plants in the wake of recent hurricanes. (Canary Media)
Fixer-uppers: The Trump administration announces a $100 million program for operators to refurbish aging coal plants and retrofit facilities to run on natural gas. (E&E News)
Diving deep for clean heat: A 75-year-old gas-powered steam-heating network in Boston and Cambridge is transitioning to electric boilers and heat pumps that draw thermal energy from the Charles River, even in winter. (Canary Media)
Lingering shutdown impacts: The U.S. Senate will vote today on a framework to reopen the government, but funds that help low-income families pay for heating will likely still be delayed for several weeks even if the shutdown ends. (E&E News, E&E News)
Energy Star saved? EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is quietly reconsidering plans to end the Energy Star program, and the agency has renewed contracts with the firm that administers it. (New York Times)
Coal-country dilemma: Navajo Nation citizens and officials debate the future of the coal industry in the Southwest, weighing the economic benefits against the environmental and human health impacts. (New York Times)
Hyundai Motor Group says its plan to invest $6 billion in a low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana “remains unchanged,” despite the Trump administration’s cuts to tax credits for the green hydrogen needed to produce clean iron and a recent immigration raid on a factory the automaker is building in Georgia.
In a statement last week to NPR’s Gulf States Newsroom, Hyundai said the company’s investment “is centered on creating thousands of high-quality American jobs.” The South Korean car manufacturer did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment.
The Louisiana facility, set to come online in 2029, has emerged as the United States’ leading green-steel initiative.
“This is going to be the flagship project when it comes to green steel,” said Matthew Groch, senior director of decarbonization at the environmental group Mighty Earth.
Days before President Donald Trump returned to office in January, Swedish steel company SSAB quietly pulled out of talks with the Department of Energy for a $500 million grant to support a green-steel project in Mississippi. In June, Cleveland-Cliffs backed away from its plans to replace the blast furnaces at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology, also with $500 million in financing from the federal government.
Between those two decisions, however, Hyundai bucked the trend, announcing plans in March for its Louisiana steel plant.
Designed to use direct reduced iron, a cleaner method of making iron that relies on natural gas or hydrogen instead of the coal that fuels a blast furnace, the Hyundai facility is slated to produce 2.7 million metric tons of steel each year, including“low-carbon steel sheets using the abundant supply of steel scrap in the U.S.”
Hyundai’s initial press release did not explicitly mention direct reduced iron or hydrogen. But a Korean newspaper article noted at the time that the project would include direct reduced iron, and the 3.6 million tons of iron ore the Louisiana government said the plant would import each year will require some kind of processing. Since then, the company has clarified its plans at state regulatory hearings, Groch said.
At a Louisiana Clean Hydrogen Task Force meeting in June, Hyundai laid out its vision for bringing the plant online in about four years using what’s called blue hydrogen, a version of the fuel made with natural gas and equipped with carbon-capture technology to prevent the emissions from entering the atmosphere. But by 2034, Groch said, Hyundai intends to start producing green hydrogen — made with renewable energy — at the facility to power the process.
A clean industrial plant would likely be welcomed in Ascension Parish, roughly an hour west of New Orleans in the heart of the Bayou State’s so-called Cancer Alley. A new survey, shared with Canary Media, shows 60% of residents in the area favor investment in green hydrogen for steelmaking. The poll, commissioned by the Sierra Club’s Delta Chapter and conducted by JMC Analytics, “makes clear that steel manufacturing at this scale presents a unique set of opportunities for Louisianans,” said Angelle Bradford Rosenberg, the chair of the Sierra Club affiliate’s board.
“Residents are aware that the technology exists to make steel that is clean and has low impact on communities — they want Hyundai to make good on their promises,” Bradford Rosenberg said in a statement. “This poll shows that communities want industry to prioritize clean energy, and provide steel using renewable energy.”
For much of the past decade, Hyundai has focused on growing its presence in the U.S. market, particularly as competition from cheap Chinese electric vehicles mounts in Asia and Europe. The steel plant is part of a broader $26 billion investment that includes the EV-battery plant in Georgia where Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and shackled hundreds of South Korean workers in a high-profile raid in September.
Signs are emerging of Hyundai’s broader ambitions. First, there’s the location of the plant in Ascension Parish. That industrial corridor hosts the Louisiana stretch of an ammonia pipeline system that extends from the Gulf state all the way north to Indiana. Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to ship because the world’s smallest molecule is prone to dangerous leaking. Transformed into ammonia, however, hydrogen becomes a liquid that can be easily transported via a pipeline.
“They could eventually be selling green hydrogen as far as Indiana,” Groch said of Hyundai. “That’s why they’re building it there.”
Then, there’s the potential to supply rivals.
Last September, General Motors inked a partnership with Hyundai to work together on new car models and establish a shared supply chain that circumvents China. In June, news broke that GM abandoned the Chinese steel company supplying its Korean factories in favor of a new deal with Hyundai.
In August, however, GM signed an unusual three-year deal to buy steel for its American plants from Cleveland-Cliffs. Typically, such deals are structured to last a year. But the expiration date of this one coincides with when Hyundai expects to start selling steel made in Louisiana in the U.S.
“Hyundai has played this incredibly well,” Groch said.
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