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Earlier this year in tiny Liberty, North Carolina, a multibillion-dollar Toyota plant began shipping batteries for use in the auto giant’s hybrid and electric vehicles. Expected to ultimately create at least 5,000 jobs, the facility is the largest investment to date in the Southeast’s burgeoning “battery belt,” which leads the nation in plans for the manufacturing of electric vehicles and their components.
The Liberty plant — along with other projects in the EV supply chain — was a bright spot in a recent assessment of the region’s electric transportation sector, which also highlighted record growth in EV sales and rapid deployment of fast chargers. The question is whether that momentum can survive gale-force federal headwinds, including today’s expiration of tax credits for EV buyers.
The two groups behind the report, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Atlas Public Policy, say the answer now depends on key players outside of Washington, from utilities to consumers to automakers. But the organizations cast themselves as cautiously optimistic.
That may seem counterintuitive given that congressional Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have dealt blow after blow this year to the policies meant to hasten the nation’s shift to clean transportation.
Generous tax credits for purchasing new and used electric passenger cars now end Sept. 30 instead of in 2032, as do inducements to buy commercial EVs, thanks to the GOP budget bill signed into law this summer. The measure also scales back incentives for manufacturing EVs and their components, like batteries.
In May, Congress voted to revoke California’s long-held authority to set its own tailpipe pollution standards, which have nudged automakers away from combustion engines and created demand for EVs nationwide. Trump signed the legislation in June.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to roll back the national version of those tailpipe rules and stalled the nationwide buildout of electric vehicle charging infrastructure — which was authorized in bipartisan fashion in 2021.
There are few state policies in the Southeast to counteract this federal backsliding. In fact, due to added registration fees and the like, EV owners across the region pay more into state coffers than do owners of combustion vehicles who drive the same amount. Of the six states covered in the new report, from North Carolina to Alabama to Florida, only the latter has no such punitive fees.
Advocates involved with the analysis are clear-eyed about these roadblocks for passenger EVs. But they also say there is cause for guarded hope — starting with consumer behavior.
The fact remains that EVs are gaining popularity in the region, growing in market share in each of the six years that the report has been produced. EV sales in Florida — hardly a bastion of clean-energy policy — have led the way, making up more than a tenth of new car purchases in the first half of 2025, above the national average. The state’s mild temperatures and flatlands are especially conducive to EV driving, but the growth is still telling.
What’s more, drivers appear relatively undeterred by state EV taxes. Florida leads the region, but Georgia and North Carolina are neck and neck in EV adoption, even though the former has higher fees.
“There’s no clear correlation between those taxes and buying an EV,” said Stan Cross, electric transportation program director at Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and a report author.
Publicly accessible charging ports are also rising sharply across the region, with fast chargers jumping 41% and slower Level 2 chargers increasing by 24% over the last year, according to the study. That growth appears poised to continue. After what critics said was an illegal pause by the Trump administration, money for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program is set to start flowing again. As soon as it does, Cross predicts quick action.
“States have already done the planning, and EV charging companies and the businesses hosting the chargers are chomping at the bit to compete for contracts, get the stations in the ground, and meet the charging demands of eager EV drivers,” Cross said.
The deployment of EVs aligns with the self-interest of the investor-owned monopoly utilities that dominate the region: Electric vehicles can both increase their sales and provide other benefits to the grid. For instance, plug-in cars and buses can act as batteries, storing power that can be discharged during times of high demand. Outlays by Southeastern utilities experimenting with these uses have lagged behind those in the rest of the country — representing just 7% of the nation’s $6.6 billion in approved investments. But utilities in the region, say advocates, are at least moving in the right direction.
Perhaps more than any other player, the automakers themselves will make the biggest difference in how EV deployment unfolds — in the Southeast and across the U.S.
One decision automakers face is on the front end: Do they retreat from, or double down on, the investments they’ve already made in battery and electric vehicle production? The report notes that companies have already canceled plans for seven facilities in the region, worth a total of $3.5 billion, in the last year. But others are proceeding more or less as planned, including the Toyota facility in Liberty.
If major carmakers continue their commitment to produce vehicles and their components in the United States, consumers will likely benefit from lower prices.
“The most expensive part of an EV is the battery,” said Matthew Vining, policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy and an author of the report. The Liberty plant, he noted, has already made Toyota cars produced in the U.S. more affordable.
That trend could persist since Congress spared incentives for battery manufacturing from devastating cuts in this summer’s budget law.
“From the federal government, there’s actually a good amount of support for the battery and the critical minerals industry,” Vining said. “That will have a downward pressure on the price of the vehicles, making them more appealing to drivers.”
Automakers also face choices on the back end. Riding high off a burst in sales from buyers rushing to take advantage of the expiring tax credit, they may keep their prices low for a while longer.
No matter what, transportation is electrifying across the globe. One in four new cars purchased this year will be electric, Vining said, and China already has about 60% of the market. The question is whether carmakers in the United States will try to catch up or retrench to fossil fuels, he said.
“Are these automakers going to rise to the challenge?”
XGS Energy, an advanced-geothermal startup, says it has completed crucial testing that proves its novel technology can operate reliably at commercial scale — without losing a drop of water in the process.
The milestone, announced on Tuesday, will allow Houston-based XGS to begin financing and building its first next-generation geothermal energy project, according to the company. XGS is partnering with Meta and the utility PNM to develop 150 megawatts of around-the-clock clean electricity in New Mexico that will supply the tech giant’s data centers.
“We’re really off to the races now,” said Josh Prueher, the CEO of XGS. The startup is slated to deploy the project’s first 5 MW by around 2027 and bring the remaining megawatts online by 2029, he added.
XGS is part of a fast-growing industry that’s working to harness the world’s abundant geothermal resources to meet soaring electricity demand. Dozens of U.S. companies are developing cutting-edge technologies that promise to access Earth’s heat in drier, deeper, and hotter conditions than is technically or economically feasible for conventional geothermal plants. Another of these firms, Sage Geosystems, is also partnering with Meta to build its own 150-MW geothermal facility somewhere east of the Rocky Mountains.
Today, geothermal energy represents about 0.4% of total U.S. electricity generation, and most facilities are concentrated around geysers and hot springs in Northern California and Nevada.
The next-generation geothermal projects that are currently in development fall into one of three buckets. Enhanced geothermal systems, like the ones that Sage and Fervo Energy are building, involve fracturing rocks and pumping them full of water to create artificial reservoirs far below the earth’s surface. Superhot geothermal, which scientists are studying in Iceland, aims to tap into extreme resources like magma chambers to extract gargantuan amounts of heat.
XGS’s approach falls into the third bucket: closed-loop systems, which entail placing pipes deep underground and sealing them off so that they operate like radiators. As water circulates within the system, it collects heat from the hot rocks below and brings it to the surface, where the heat produces steam that drives electric turbines.
What sets XGS apart from its closed-loop competitors, such as Canadian startup Eavor, is the “thermally conductive” cement alternative that the company places between the hot rock and pipe system. XGS claims its proprietary material, which includes a naturally occurring mineral, can increase the total amount of heat it pulls from the subsurface by 30% to 50%, allowing the company to use simpler and cheaper well designs to access hotter rocks with existing drilling technologies.
XGS completed its first pilot project in late 2024 with a 100-meter-deep well in central Texas. Earlier this year, the startup began operating a full-scale prototype using an idled well at the Coso geothermal field in the Western Mojave Desert region of California. The well runs more than 1,000 meters deep — a standard depth for commercial geothermal wells — and reaches subsurface temperatures of around 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit).
For 3,000 hours, or 125 days, XGS continuously ran its closed-loop system while adjusting key variables, such as the rate at which liquid flows and the amount of heat extracted at the surface. The idea was to simulate how the technology performs in different operating conditions, in order to prove it can withstand various types of stress while also demonstrating the company can accurately predict the system’s performance.
The startup claims the prototype’s actual performance fell within 2% of its predictions, results that XGS later verified with independent engineers, Prueher said. Being able to accurately predict how a project will perform — and for how long — is an essential step for the company to be able to raise the many millions of dollars in debt financing it needs to build its first geothermal power plants, he added.
“This unlocks a huge commercial pipeline that has been accumulating in parallel,” Prueher said of the test results. Along with the 150 MW it’s developing with Meta, the startup has lined up over 3 gigawatts of projects “mostly in the Western United States, where water sensitivity is a huge issue, and where there’s a strong demand signal from data centers and other types of clean energy consumers to build this as quickly as we can.”
XGS has raised $55 million so far from private investors to develop its heat-harvesting technology. One of its biggest backers is VoLo Earth Ventures, which focuses on early-stage climatetech companies.
Joe Goodman, a managing partner for VoLo, said his firm identified XGS “as one of the leading geothermal solutions” about a year and a half ago after reviewing its experimental lab data, and Goodman later joined XGS’s board of directors.
By boosting the system’s overall energy output, XGS’s thermally conductive materials could be the key to making closed-loop geothermal more economically viable, he said, adding that the technology also sidesteps the concerns around water-supply constraints facing enhanced geothermal systems.
“We’re quite optimistic about what we’ve seen,” Goodman said.
The U.S. is a nation of air-conditioned houses, and this ubiquitous cooling machinery drives an outsize chunk of the country’s electrical demand, especially during heat waves. Now, as utilities scramble to meet even more power demand for AI computing, legacy air-conditioning giant Carrier has launched a new business venture to make regular old HVAC equipment part of the solution.
The concept is simple enough: Put a battery on central ACs that can charge up when energy is plentiful and take over the job of running the appliances when the grid is stressed. But actually doing that requires grappling with the forces that shape America’s energy system — monopoly utilities, regulators, decentralized energy, intermittent renewable power, and the looming colossus of data centers’ energy consumption.
“The homes we have and the fact that they all have air conditioning or a heat pump defines how the grid is sized, built, and operated today,” said Hakan Yilmaz, Carrier’s chief technology and sustainability officer and head of its energy-solutions arm, in an interview at this month’s RE+ conference. “The [U.S.’s] peak load is about 750 gigawatts — that’s what the grid can manage today. Around 300 gigawatts of that is reserved for HVAC.”
Now Carrier has begun installing its HVAC-connected batteries in a pilot test with utilities to prove that the product works in customers’ homes. Some 15 households have the batteries already, and the company plans to install more by the end of the year. The Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit that studies emerging grid technologies to inform the power sector, will document the performance.
“We want to measure the reality of what happens — the profile of load shifting across weather conditions,” said Ron Domitrovic, senior program manager for electrification and customer solutions at EPRI.
Carrier hopes to eventually scale up the plan by getting electric utilities to pay for the batteries when households in their territory buy the company’s air conditioners. Then Carrier would operate the batteries based on signals from each utility, charging the devices at times of cheap, clean energy — like during midday in regions with lots of solar generation — and powering the cooling system directly from the battery when electricity demand surges.
“If we replace an HVAC unit today with a battery-integrated HVAC, the load of that HVAC unit never shows up at the peak for the next 15 years,” Yilmaz said. “Use that electricity somewhere else, [like] in the data center.”
Carrier’s market domination — the company has been making air conditioners since its founder, Willis Carrier, invented the thing in 1902 — means that it could scale up and reach far more households far more quickly than residential batteries have thus far.
Carrier, in short, is the rare century-old incumbent trying to shake up its own business to respond to the dynamic shifts in the contemporary energy market.
“Air conditioners really rely on electricity, and in most parts of the world the electricity is still being powered by fossil-based sources,” said Ankit Kalanki, who studies HVAC climate impacts as a principal on the carbon-free buildings team at think tank RMI. “The most demand for air conditioning happens on the hottest days, and at that time the grid is already under strain.”
The power mix gets dirtier in the peak hours — California regularly runs on huge amounts of solar power at noon on sunny days but fires up its gas-burning peaker plants to meet demand in the evenings. So HVAC use at peak times exacerbates carbon emissions and challenges the grid’s ability to deliver enough power.
To mitigate those effects, Yilmaz’s team at Carrier designed a modular battery that sits under or next to its outdoor HVAC units and matches their electricity consumption during peak hours. The batteries range from 5 to 10 kilowatt-hours.
The alternating-current electricity from the home gets converted to direct current for storage in the battery; then the battery supplies DC power right into the HVAC equipment. The duo operate like a nanogrid, connected to the house but separate from all the other appliances. This improves efficiency compared to shipping electricity into and out of a general home battery, losing some energy on each AC-to-DC conversion.
Carrier’s software tracks when the grid supply is “cleaner, greener, cheaper, and more resilient,” Yilmaz said. The goal would be to load up at the cheapest and cleanest times to offset demand in the more expensive and carbon-intensive hours.
Of course, that interaction with the broader energy system goes beyond the usual scope of an HVAC vendor.
“Carrier has a scale that can really make this a much more viable solution for consumers, but it will require the right channels and the right partners to make it happen,” Kalanki said. “It has to be a collaborative effort between utilities and manufacturers and also consumers.”
Carrier has already worked to get utilities on board — hence the testing with EPRI, designed to show the hardware and its controls are up to the industry’s specifications. The company convened an advisory board of utilities covering “the most congested grids” across the country, Yilmaz said. Some of them want to dispatch the batteries based on day-ahead signals, others want to toggle them in real time.
Clearing that hurdle, Carrier wants to help utilities win regulatory approval to pay for these batteries on behalf of all their customers. Regulators have long granted funds for utilities to invest in energy efficiency or demand reduction for individual households as a way to save money for consumers as a whole.
In theory, these HVAC batteries could deliver all the benefits that distributed-energy startups have pitched over the last decade or two: They could defer or eliminate upgrades to the distribution or transmission grid; reduce the need for expensive, fossil-fueled peaker plants; expand utilization of renewable power by shifting it from hours of surplus; and, that new imperative of all grid planners, free up valuable peak capacity for data centers and factories.
That last point also answers the question of why utilities would go for a concept that seemingly threatens their traditional business model. Regulated utilities earn guaranteed profits from building things, like grid expansions or new power plants; Carrier’s plan would diminish the need for those investments. But in the AI era, customer-sited energy devices could look less like a competitive threat and more like a helpful tool as utilities race to catch up with skyrocketing demand.
“We want this technology to work for the utilities so that they can provide more affordable and reliable power to homeowners and industrial growth companies,” Yilmaz said. “It’s a win-win for everyone.”
Consumers can already reduce their peak demand with tools like smart thermostats that turn down HVAC usage, smart plugs that turn off devices, or smart chargers that delay when an electric vehicle refills its battery. But those techniques generally impose some inconvenience, like a warmer home during peak hours or a task delayed to later.
“People tend to think about energy efficiency in isolation and don’t think that cooling is a people-centric issue,” Kalanki said. “HVAC systems are enabling people to feel comfortable on the hot, humid days of the year. In trying to solve for efficiency or the emissions problem, you can create a thermal comfort problem, which should not be the case.”
Also, for many households, Yilmaz noted, the air conditioner is the biggest purchase after a home and a vehicle.
“We have such a big investment from the homeowner, and when they need it the most, the hottest day of the year, you ask them to [dial it back],” he said. “It is very counterintuitive. We think we can do better.”
The software to accomplish this will be powered by Carrier’s acquisition of Viessmann Climate Solutions, a home-energy-management company from Germany. That team includes a large group of software engineers who manage everything from solar to batteries and heat pumps in Europe, Yilmaz said, providing Carrier expertise to lean on as it works to control batteries in the U.S.
The residential battery market, led by brands like Tesla and Enphase, keeps setting records: Last year, homes in the U.S. installed more than 1,250 megawatts of capacity. But the scale of home air-conditioning adoption is staggering compared to residential batteries so far.
Two-thirds of U.S. households use central air conditioning (or heat pumps), and those systems need to be replaced every 10 to 15 years. That translates to around 7 million home HVAC units getting swapped out every year, and Carrier alone sells about 2.5 million of those. The average peak HVAC consumption is 3 kilowatts, Yilmaz said. That math works out to an average of more than 20 megawatts of new electricity demand installed every day from Carrier HVAC alone.
Put another way, if Carrier can get to the point of selling batteries alongside just 16% of its U.S. HVAC units, it would singlehandedly match the current rate of home battery deployment nationwide. Something like that seems eminently doable, over a few years, if Carrier can bring along a handful of the biggest utilities and their regulators.
The company also has to convince customers to participate, even if the battery is free. Domitrovic, from EPRI, noted that the Carrier batteries come with “limited” or “potentially undetectable” impacts on the consumer, while conferring good things like bill savings and greater grid reliability.
The bill savings could be significant, provided that the customer pays different rates for electricity during peak and off-peak times. That approach has been adopted via “time-of-use” rates in some utility territories. Carrier envisions that the batteries would charge up during the hours when customers pay a lower rate, then would reduce consumption in the hours when power prices surge. (Some energy is lost in the process of storing and retrieving electricity, but Yilmaz said utilities can compensate customers so they aren’t negatively affected.)
Volunteering for an HVAC battery also could incrementally reduce the risk of local outages during extreme weather, but is that something that motivates the average person to raise their hand? Perhaps an up-front cash bonus would do the trick. Carrier is considering a range of possible incentives, and finding the right consumer-psychology strategy will be a crucial step for the plan to succeed.
California lawmakers managed to pass a slate of bills aimed at controlling the state’s high and rising electricity costs in the final days of the legislative session this month. But the last-minute negotiations left one key money-saving measure on the cutting-room floor — continued funding for what might be the world’s largest virtual power plant.
Now, companies like Sunrun and Tesla that have enrolled tens of thousands of customers in that VPP program don’t know if they can pay them to participate next year, because it’s unclear if any other state funding can be cobbled together. If not, they’ll have to put those customers on hold — and California could lose hundreds of megawatts of cost-effective grid relief.
Lawmakers “are consistently undervaluing what distributed solar and storage can deliver for the system,” said Kate Unger, senior policy advisor for the California Solar and Storage Association, a trade group that supports the program. “We find this to be very shortsighted and frustrating, because DSGS is a cost-saving measure.”
DSGS stands for the Demand Side Grid Support program, which pays utility customers to help relieve costly peaks in electricity demand during extreme events like heat waves. They do this by cutting their own power consumption with devices like smart thermostats or by feeding extra power to the grid from backup batteries that have been charged by rooftop solar. Customers have already installed and paid for those systems, so making use of them is cheaper than building new power plants or grid infrastructure to manage those peaks.
DSGS has grown quickly since its 2022 launch to more than 1 gigawatt of grid-relief capacity, Unger said, about 700 megawatts of that from batteries in homes and businesses, which can be deployed rapidly. That’s much bigger than other similar programs in the state.
Backers say that’s because DSGS, which is administered by the California Energy Commission, is far less onerous for participants than VPP programs run by the state’s utilities.
It’s also more cost-effective, according to an August analysis from consultancy The Brattle Group. That report, which was commissioned by Sunrun and Tesla, found that solar-charged batteries in DSGS could deliver between tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in net savings to all California utility customers over the next four years. Those projected savings are predicated on the program nearly doubling its current capacity, which is a credible goal given that California residents are adding backup batteries in increasing numbers.
But instead of expanding its funding to achieve that growth, state lawmakers cut it this year in the face of budget shortfalls, just like they did last year. A provision that lawmakers inserted in August into a bill reauthorizing the state’s greenhouse-gas cap-and-trade program would have provided DSGS with a stable funding stream into the middle of next decade, but it was stripped from the bill that emerged from closed-door negotiations between Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and legislative leaders days before it was passed. That leaves DSGS with a dwindling pool of previously committed funding that is very likely to be depleted this year.
The remaining budget currently stands at about $64 million, according to the program administrator. DSGS would need at least $75 million more to continue operating in 2026, according to a letter sent to California lawmakers in August by dozens of companies, trade groups, and advocacy organizations.
DSGS backers are hoping the program might be able to secure a slice of the $1 billion in reserves to be disbursed annually from the state’s newly reauthorized cap-and-trade program. But Unger warned that competition for that money will be fierce — and lawmakers won’t make decisions on that spending until next year.
Without new funding, companies that have been active in DSGS will likely have to tell their customers they won’t be able to participate in 2026, said Brad Heavner, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association. “How do you put your customers in a program if you don’t know they’ll get paid?”
The failure to fund DSGS is particularly frustrating, Heavner said, because it’s the rare example of a successful virtual-power-plant program in the state. Though California has ostensibly prioritized VPPs, it has little else to show for its efforts.
For more than a decade, the state has required its major utilities to incorporate rooftop solar systems, backup batteries, smart thermostats, and other distributed energy resources (DERs) into their grid operations and planning. But utilities have done very little to actually tap these devices beyond launching pilot projects (and terminating many of them), even as the number of DERs in the state has grown dramatically. A June progress report from the California Energy Commission found the state has barely expanded its demand-side capacity over the past two years, and remains far from hitting its goal of 7 gigawatts by 2030.
“California is really excellent at deploying DERs, but really lags in DER utilization,” said Gabriela Olmedo, regulatory affairs specialist at EnergyHub, a company that manages demand-side resources and virtual power plants in the U.S. and Canada. Many of those programs have grown to play a significant role in reducing stress on utility grids during peak demand, she said, including a large-scale initiative in neighboring Arizona. But California’s “fractured, overlapping, and confusing load-flexibility programs really preclude scale,” she said.
DSGS, one of many programs created in response to California’s grid emergencies in 2020 and 2022, has broken that pattern, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of grid-edge research for analytics firm Wood Mackenzie and lead author of a recently released report on virtual power plants. In particular, DSGS has avoided the types of problems that have limited customer participation in other VPP programs, he said.
First, under DSGS, customers can be paid for sending power to the grid from their home batteries that have been charged up by rooftop solar, he said. Most other VPPs in California only allow homes to reduce their consumption from the grid to zero, not to send power back to the grid. That’s a legacy of these programs’ genesis as traditional demand-response offerings that reward customers for reducing power use.
DSGS is also superior to the Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP), the other large-scale VPP program created as a response to California’s grid emergencies, Heavner said. One of the biggest differences is that ELRP is triggered only during specified grid alerts, warnings, or emergency declarations by the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s energy markets. Those emergencies are relatively rare, so participants are idle most of the time.
DSGS, by contrast, is triggered whenever wholesale prices on the state’s transmission grid exceed a threshold of $200 per megawatt-hour, so it plays a more active role in suppressing the price spikes that drive up costs for utilities and customers, Heavner said.
DSGS is also open to customers of all utilities in the state, unlike ELRP and most of the state’s other VPP programs, which are managed separately by each of California’s three large investor-owned utilities. Companies that have participated in both sets of programs say it’s easier to sign up customers and get them paid promptly under DSGS than under utility-managed efforts.
A set of laws passed this year instructs state regulators to develop new VPP plans and programs, which could augment the current limited options. But “it will take years to establish that,” Heavner said. Meanwhile, “companies that have invested in dynamic grid response are left holding the bag right now.”
California may miss out on big money-saving opportunities as a result, he said. A 2024 analysis from The Brattle Group found that VPPs could shave more than 15% of the state’s peak demand by 2035, saving utility customers about $550 million each year.
The loss of funding for DSGS is particularly galling given the scale it has achieved, Heavner said. In a July test of the DSGS and ELRP programs, California’s three major utilities were able to dispatch about 540 megawatts of power from Sunrun and Tesla batteries, in what utility Pacific Gas & Electric described as “the largest test of its kind ever done in California — and maybe the world.”
Most of those batteries were enrolled in the DSGS program. Sunrun batteries alone accounted for at least 360 megawatts of capacity. As Sunrun CEO Mary Powell pointed out in a LinkedIn post, that’s more capacity than many of the state’s fossil-gas power plants provide.
Sunrun had enrolled more than 56,000 customers with solar-battery systems to participate in California VPP programs as of May, the majority of them in DSGS. The company offered participants up to $150 per battery enrolled in the 2025 season.
“We are concerned that California is walking away from its leadership position running the largest and most successful distributed power plant in the country,” Lauren Nevitt, Sunrun’s senior public policy director, told Canary Media.
Standing alone on a rocky coastline wearing a seaman-style knit hat, Samuel L. Jackson reaches into a snack bag and gazes intensely through binoculars. Wind turbines spin ominously on a watery horizon.
“Motherfucking wind farms. Loud, ugly, harmful to nature,” the “Pulp Fiction” actor says. Then, shaking his head knowingly and shifting his tone, he adds, “Who says that? These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels, rising up from the ocean like a middle finger to CO2.”
The 60-second ad, released in July, immediately went viral. It also ran on television channels in Finland, Sweden, Germany, and other European countries. It’s part of a marketing campaign launched by Vattenfall, a century-old Swedish energy giant whose clean energy portfolio includes a famous 11-turbine project built within view of President Donald Trump’s Scotland golf course.
The ad reached 600 million viewers across 33 countries within four days of its release, according to a Vattenfall spokesperson. Trump isn’t named in the video, but Jackson’s script is a comedic wink-and-nod to the president’s frequent anti-wind rants.
“So, what’s it going to be? ‘Motherfucking wind farms’?” Jackson says in a mock angry voice at the end of the video. He then repeats the question, grinning widely and raising his eyebrows cheekily: “Or ‘motherfucking wind farms’?”
Research shows that comedy plays a powerful role in making climate change information salient for public audiences. That’s especially useful now, as the Trump administration works to derail the clean energy transition, but such efforts also come at a fraught moment for comedy in America.
It’s a tough time for political satire. In July, CBS cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” after Colbert used the phrase “big fat bribe” to describe a $16 million settlement the network’s parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay Trump. CBS said the show was killed for financial reasons, but the timing led to speculations that the decision may have been politically motivated.
Then in mid-September, ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” after comments he made related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk provoked a veiled threat from Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. The network’s parent company, Disney, reversed course on Monday following public backlash, and Kimmel was back on air Tuesday.
“There’s this tragedy of killing freedom of speech. … The reason this is happening is because [Trump officials] don’t have the superpower of comedy,” said Staci Roberts-Steele, a producer for the wildly successful film “Don’t Look Up.” The 2021 Netflix movie used satire to point out the absurdity of delaying climate action.
America now has a president pumping the brakes on the clean energy transition, most recently by attempting to scuttle numerous U.S. offshore wind farms already in development.
Trump has called wind turbines “ugly,” “terrible for tourism,” and responsible for “driving the whales crazy.” His dislike of “windmills” dates back to his unsuccessful court battle in the U.K. to stop a Vattenfall offshore wind farm from being installed within view of his Aberdeen, Scotland, golf course. All 11 turbines were eventually built in 2018.
Some Americans who saw the foul-mouthed Jackson ad on social media relished a major Hollywood movie star poking fun at Trump’s favorite anti-climate talking points. Roberts-Steele said she is glad that big European companies like Vattenfall are turning to humor to call out climate disinformation — and that the content is finding American audiences. She hopes it emboldens U.S. comedians and institutions to follow suit.
“The Europeans have been doing it much longer than us. … That’s totally true,” she lamented, adding that U.S. public relations firms and film studios have been less bold about taking big swings at climate skepticism.
“Don’t Look Up” was a rarity for Hollywood. But its chart-topping success mirrors Jackson’s ad in several ways.
Both employed comedy to tackle the topic of climate change. Casting major Hollywood actors drew loads of viewers. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Jonah Hill all starred in what became Netflix’s fourth most successful movie of all time.
Hollywood hasn’t generated a major climate comedy since.
Roberts-Steele is now leading Yellow Dot Studios, a new nonprofit aimed at keeping the climate jokes coming. The studio hosts live comedy events, develops podcasts, and produces short-form videos that, among other things, mock the fossil-fuel industry.
But mainstreaming this kind of comedy isn’t easy, even with Hollywood director Adam McKay as the group’s founder and board member.
“It hasn’t yet trickled up,” said Max Boykoff, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the fusion of climate change and comedy. After years researching the topic, he’s now trying to catalyze it.
Boykoff and his students — in collaboration with CU Boulder theater professor Beth Osnes-Stoedefalke — are part of an ongoing collaboration with some of the nation’s top writers’ rooms.
They’ve been working with writers on “The Daily Show,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and Comedy Central to make climate change news funny and memorable. On Saturday, Boykoff and his students produced a climate-themed comedy show with professional comedians in New York City, timed to coincide with Climate Week NYC.
“Comedy has this power to point out the contradictions in which we live,” said Boykoff. “It’s through comedy that people feel like they’re not being talked down to or lectured.”
With late-night shows facing intimidation under Trump, Boykoff said the involvement of independent academics — like himself — is more important than ever. He added that Europe’s role should not be discounted either.
The Samuel L. Jackson ad was the brainchild of the communications team at Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned energy company that has been around for more than 100 years. It manages a wide range of projects, from hydroelectric dams to offshore wind farms. The company’s long-term goal with its outreach is to spread the idea of freedom from fossil fuels, said Monica Persdotter, vice president and head of brand.
Unlike past campaigns, she said, this one “took off.”
“We’ve always been very bold in the way that we present ourselves to the world, with the messages that we have, which always circles back to fossil-free energy and fossil freedom,” said Persdotter.
The ad hit Vattenfall’s core market — the U.K. and European Union — where the offshore wind sector has grown steadily for decades. For example, offshore wind farms generated 17% of the U.K.’s electricity last year.
Vattenfall operates more than 1,400 wind turbines across 14 wind farms, with a total installed capacity of approximately 6.6 gigawatts in five European countries, according to Persdotter. Several other Vattenfall wind projects are also in the works.
Meanwhile, the U.S. only has one large-scale offshore wind farm in operation. Four others are currently being built in America’s waters. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum abruptly paused construction on a fifth one, Revolution Wind, in August, but this week, the project’s developer, Ørsted, a Danish state-owned company, won a court-ordered injunction lifting the freeze.
Given the contrast between Europe and the U.S., Jackson, a widely recognizable American actor, was a powerful choice for Vattenfall’s ad.
According to Persdotter, her team got a tip that Jackson had studied marine biology in college and, at one point, considered a career in the field. The actor, she said, liked the script, making just a few stylistic tweaks to better align with his voice.
The ad was filmed along the California coast to accommodate Jackson’s schedule. The Golden State has no wind turbines installed in its waters yet — though the Los Angeles Times reports that the state, despite losing some federal funding, has not backed down from its plans to deploy the technology. The ad’s wind turbines were superimposed post-production using video footage of a real Vattenfall wind farm in Denmark.
As for the snack bag Jackson dips into — that’s a nod to the fact that wind farms can provide benefits beyond generating carbon-free electricity, for example, serving as sites for seaweed farming. The seaweed snack Jackson is munching — which he calls “serious gourmet shit” — isn’t commercially available yet, but Persdotter said it was harvested from experimental seaweed farming “lines” strung between wind turbines at Vesterhav Syd, a Vattenfall project in Denmark’s waters. (Vattenfall sent Canary Media a bag of the prototype snack, and a reporter verified that it tasted like conventional seaweed snacks.)
Trump, who famously cannot take a joke, has continued to call for the silencing of comedians critical of his policies, and he’s also been ramping up his attacks on offshore wind.
Last week, during a press conference in England with the U.K. prime minister, the president went on an unprompted rant about the clean energy resource, saying, “We don’t do wind because wind is a disaster. It’s a very expensive joke, frankly.”
Trump may not like jokes. But if the popularity of Vattenfall’s video is any indication, Europeans are clearly having a laugh at him. Roberts-Steele said Americans will keep laughing, too, as long as comedians are free to make the jokes.
Clean energy is starting to bend the curve on China’s fossil-fuel use.
Overall, carbon-free sources met more than 80% of China’s new electricity demand last year — a marked difference from recent years. Between 2011 and 2020, they met less than half of new demand, according to a new report from think tank Ember.
Thanks to China’s astonishingly fast rollout of carbon-free electricity, the country saw its fossil-fueled power generation fall by 2% in the first half of this year compared to the first six months of 2024. That’s a crucial metric to watch: China is the world’s largest source of planet-warming carbon emissions, and its electricity production generates more carbon dioxide than any other sector.
So far this year, the country has deployed 256 gigawatts of new solar capacity — double the amount it installed during the same period last year and orders of magnitude more than installed by the runner-up nations, India and the U.S. Earlier this year, China’s total solar and wind power capacity surpassed its coal-fired power capacity. In 2024, China installed more grid batteries than the U.S. and Europe combined. And the country is home to nearly half of the nuclear power plants currently under construction.
China’s overall fossil-fuel use could be about to decline, too. That’s because the nation is rapidly electrifying its economy — retooling more and more fuel-burning sectors, like transportation and heavy industry, to be powered by electrons instead of combustion. Electricity accounted for nearly one-third of the country’s final energy consumption in 2023, compared to less than a quarter for the U.S. and major European nations.
It’s yet more evidence that China is all in on becoming an “electrostate.” Meanwhile, under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has lost its momentum in abandoning fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. are still expected to fall under Trump, but more slowly than had been expected under Biden-era policies, as the federal government chooses to embrace fossil-fuel nostalgia over a clean-energy future.
There’s nothing like a shared frustration to bring people together. For a group of Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, that’s rising power prices on the grid operated by PJM Interconnection. Both Republican and Democratic governors are calling out PJM’s management and demanding change — a repeat of a cycle that’s been going on for years and has no easy solution.
The U.S. is home to seven regional transmission organizations and independent system operators that are each responsible for managing power transmission and operating energy markets among utilities in their area. PJM is the largest, serving more than 65 million customers across D.C., Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and 10 other states. And for years, leaders in those states have said it’s not doing a great job.
The crux of the issue is rising electricity prices. This summer, PJM announced a new record in its annual capacity auction, which it uses to secure power resources for the grid. Prices hit $16.1 billion, up from $2.2 billion in 2023, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reported in July.
There are a few reasons for the spike in costs. For one, PJM expects that it will need a ton more power-generation capacity in the coming years as data centers come online — though experts dispute just how big the AI energy-demand bubble will actually be. PJM does have a massive backlog of clean-power and battery projects looking to connect to the grid and meet that demand. But the operator hasn’t undertaken reforms that critics say could speed interconnections, and is instead campaigning to keep expensive, dirty fossil-fuel power plants online.
PJM member states’ longstanding dispute with the grid operator reemerged this week as 11 of their governors met in Philadelphia. There, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin both said they would leave PJM if states don’t get a bigger role in the grid operator’s governance.
“This is a crisis of not having enough power, and it is a crisis in confidence,” Youngkin said. “It’s this crisis that demands real reform, real reform immediately — and at the top of the list is that states must have a real say.”
PJM President and CEO Manu Asthana acknowledged that his organization needs to take cost-cutting steps like improving its load forecasting and interconnection processes, but he also put the onus on states to better their own infrastructure siting and permitting rules.
Washington Analysis researcher Rob Rains is doubtful that states will follow through and depart PJM. He said doing so could actually cost customers more in the short term, as the states may have to negotiate their own power procurement at rates even higher than what PJM has secured. Rains predicts that instead of cutting ties with the grid operator, governors will pull other levers to pressure PJM to establish stronger power-market safeguards to keep prices low. Meanwhile, analysts at ClearView Energy Partners suggest states should keep up their push to get more electricity generation developed as soon as possible.
Trump stands alone at the U.N. climate summit
The U.S. set itself apart from the rest of the world at the United Nations’ climate summit this week, and not in a good way. On Wednesday, around 120 countries announced new emissions-reduction plans and climate commitments. That included China, the world’s top carbon polluter, which declared it would aim to cut emissions at least 7% from its peak by 2035. New pledges also came from other major emitters, including the European Union, and from countries with smaller populations and lower gross domestic product.
But the U.S. wasn’t among them. Instead, in a speech on Tuesday, President Donald Trump railed against all things green, clean, and climate-friendly. Climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump said — a scientifically unsound statement, to say the least.
The summit came just days after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the Paris climate agreement is at risk of “collapsing” and that countries needed to ramp up their emissions goals to get things back on track.
Utilities are failing on climate, Sierra Club says
For the past four years, the Sierra Club has annually graded the U.S.’s biggest utilities on their clean-energy progress. The marks haven’t been stellar, but utilities were at least taking steps in the right direction. That is, until this year, when the Sierra Club granted utilities a collective “F,” Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports.
The “Dirty Truth” report examined 75 of the nation’s biggest utilities to see whether they intend to close their coal plants by 2030, whether they plan to build new gas plants, and how much clean energy they expect to build by 2035. In a spot of good news, 65% of utilities have increased their clean-energy deployment plans since 2021. But they’ve slid backward on fossil fuels, increasing their intended gas-plant additions and walking back plans to shut down coal plants.
You say you want a Revolution? A federal judge lets the Revolution Wind offshore project continue construction in a ruling that signals the Trump administration may have trouble defending its attacks on other already-approved wind farms in court. (Canary Media)
Endangerment fight continues: Every Democratic U.S. senator signs on to a letter opposing the Trump administration’s attempt to rescind the endangerment finding, which establishes that greenhouse gases harm human health, while Republican senators urge the administration to repeal it. (The Hill, Kentucky Lantern)
A clear path forward: Glassmaking for windows, beverage bottles, and other products relies on high heat, typically supplied by fossil fuels, but some global manufacturers are exploring alternatives powered by electricity, hydrogen, and biofuels. (Canary Media)
Turbines keep on turnin’: Nearly a decade after the Block Island offshore wind farm began delivering power, residents of the Rhode Island vacation destination say the five turbines have brought them cleaner, quieter power. (New York Times)
“Motherfucking wind farms”: A viral ad promoting offshore wind development featuring Samuel L. Jackson shows how comedy can bring climate change information to everyday audiences — if it’s not silenced under the Trump administration. (Canary Media)
Heat pumps straight ahead: A coalition of states releases a road map for driving widespread adoption of electric heat pumps as they look to cut emissions from fossil-fuel heating systems. (Canary Media)
From the ground up: In 2014, the northeastern Iowa city of West Union became among the first in the country to install a municipal geothermal network; today, the community is saving money and serving as a model for other cities. (Inside Climate News)
Half of global greenhouse gas emissions are now covered by a 2035 climate pledge following a key UN summit this week, Carbon Brief analysis finds.
China stole the show at the UN climate summit held in New York on 24 September, announcing a pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035.
However, other major emitters also came forward with new climate-pledge announcements at the event, including the world’s fourth biggest emitter, Russia, and Turkey.
Following the summit, around one-third (63) of countries have now announced or submitted their 2035 climate pledges, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).
The NDCs are a formal five-yearly requirement under the “ratchet mechanism” of the Paris Agreement, the landmark deal to keep temperatures well-below 2C, with aspirations to keep to 1.5C, by the end of this century.
Nations were meant to have submitted these pledges by 10 February of this year, but around 95% of countries missed this deadline.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell then asked laggard countries to make 2035 pledges by the end of September, so they can be included in a report synthesising countries’ climate progress.
At the summit, many nations shared that they were still working on their NDCs and that they would aim to submit them to the UN before or during COP30 in November.
The map below shows countries that submitted their 2035 pledges by the 10 February deadline (dark blue), after the deadline (blue) and that have now announced their pledge, but not yet submitted it formally to the UN registry (pale blue).
The EU has not yet agreed on a 2035 climate pledge. At the UN climate summit, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a “statement of intent” to cut emissions somewhere in the range of 66.3-72.5% below 1990 levels by 2035.
She added that the EU would aim to make its formal NDC submission to the UN before COP30 in November.
The world’s second-largest emitter, the US, submitted its 2035 pledge in 2024 under former president Joe Biden.
However, current president Donald Trump has since signed an order to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement. Therefore, it is now assumed that the US pledge is now void.
More than 100 nations spoke at the UN climate summit, which was held on the margins of the annual UN general assembly in New York.
Some media outlets mistakenly reported that all of these countries “announced” new pledges at the summit.
However, many of the countries speaking at the summit had already submitted their 2035 pledges, or used their slots to promise to do so at a future date.
Carbon Brief reviewed the six hours of footage from the UN climate summit to get a clear picture of which countries announced new 2035 pledges during the event.
Countries that made new NDC target announcements during the event included China, Russia, Turkey, Palau, Tuvalu, Kyrgyzstan, Peru, São Tomé and Príncipe, Fiji, Bangladesh and Eritrea. (Tuvalu has since submitted its NDC to the UN.)
These countries together represent 36% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Carbon Brief analysis. (It is worth noting that China alone accounts for 29% of emissions.)
Some 53 countries have already submitted their 2035 climate pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These nations account for 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore, countries that have either announced or submitted their 2035 climate pledges now represent half of global emissions, according to Carbon Brief analysis. (The 50% figure excludes the US and the EU for the reasons outlined above.)
Despite the new announcements, two-thirds of nations have still not submitted their 2035 climate pledges, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
This includes major emitters, such as India, Indonesia and Mexico.
According to the Hindu, India plans to submit its 2035 climate pledge at the beginning of COP30 on 10 November.
Both Mexico and Indonesia spoke at the UN climate summit. Mexico said it was “still consulting industries” about its proposed target, while Indonesia made no mention of when it might submit its NDC.
Many other nations appearing at the summit made promises to submit their 2035 climate pledges by COP30.
This might mean that many nations miss the end of September deadline set by UN climate chief Simon Stiell to be included in an upcoming NDC synthesis report.
President Xi Jinping has personally pledged to cut China’s greenhouse gas emissions to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035, while “striving to do better”.
This is China’s third pledge under the Paris Agreement, but is the first to put firm constraints on the country’s emissions by setting an “absolute” target to reduce them.
China’s leader spoke via video to a UN climate summit in New York organised by secretary general António Guterres, making comments seen as a “veiled swipe” at US president Donald Trump.
The headline target, with its undefined peak-year baseline, falls “far short” of what would have been needed to help limit warming to well-below 2C or 1.5C, according to experts.
Moreover, Xi’s pledge for non-fossil fuels to make up 30% of China’s energy is far below the latest forecasts, while his goal for wind and solar capacity to reach 3,600 gigawatts (GW) implies a significant slowdown, relative to recent growth.
Overall, the targets for China’s new 2035 “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) under the Paris Agreement have received a lukewarm response, described as “conservative”, “too weak” and as not reflecting the pace of clean-energy expansion on the ground.
Nevertheless, Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), tells Carbon Brief that the pledge marks a “big psychological jump for the Chinese”, shifting from targets that constrained emissions growth to a requirement to cut them.
Below, Carbon Brief unpacks what China’s new targets mean for its emissions and energy use, pending further details once its full NDC is formally published in full.
For now, the only available information on China’s 2035 NDC is the short series of pledges in Xi’s speech to the UN.
(This article will be updated once the NDC itself is published on the UN’s website.)
Xi’s speech is the first time his country has promised to place an absolute limit on its greenhouse gas emissions, marking a significant shift in approach.
Xi had previously pledged that China would peak its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions “before 2030”, without defining at what level, reaching “carbon neutrality” by 2060.
He also outlined a handful of other key targets for 2035, shown in the table below against the goals set in previous NDCs.
In his speech, Xi also said that, by 2035, “new energy vehicles” would be the “mainstream” for new vehicle sales, China’s national carbon market would cover all “major high-emission industries” and that a “climate-adaptive society” would be “basically established”.
This is the first time that China’s targets will cover the entire economy and all greenhouse gases (GHGs), a move that has been long signalled by Chinese policymakers.
In 2023, the joint China-US Sunnylands statement, released during the Biden administration, had said that both countries’ 2035 NDCs “will be economy-wide, include all GHGs and reflect…[the goal of] holding the increase in global average temperature to well-below 2C”.
Subsequently, the world’s first global stocktake, issued at COP28 in Dubai, “encourage[d]” all countries to submit “ambitious, economy-wide emission reduction targets, covering all GHGs, sectors and categories…aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5C”.
Responding to this the following year, executive vice-premier and climate lead Ding Xuexiang stated at COP29 in Baku that China’s 2035 climate pledge would be economy-wide and cover all GHGs. (His remarks did not mention alignment with 1.5C.)
This was reiterated by Xi at a climate meeting between world leaders in April 2025.
The absolute target for all greenhouse gases marks a turning point in China’s emissions strategy. Until now, China’s emissions targets have largely focused on carbon intensity, the emissions per unit of GDP, a metric that does not directly constrain emissions as a whole.
The change aligns with China’s broader shift from “dual control of energy” towards “dual control of carbon”, a policy that replaces China’s current tradition of setting targets for energy intensity and total energy consumption, with carbon intensity and carbon emissions.
Under the policy, in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030), China will continue to centre carbon intensity as its main metric for emissions reduction. After 2030, an absolute cap on carbon emissions will become the predominant target.
In his UN address, Xi pledged to cut China’s “economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions” to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035, while “striving to do better”.
This means the target includes not just CO2, but also methane, nitrous oxide (N2O) and F-gases, all of which make significant contributions to global warming. (See: What does China say about non-CO2 emissions?)
The reference to “economy-wide net” emissions means that the target refers to the total of China’s emissions, from all sources, minus removals, which could come from natural sources, such as afforestation, or via “carbon dioxide removal” technologies.
Outlining the targets, Xi told the UN summit that they represented China’s “best efforts, based on the requirements of the Paris Agreement”. He added:
“Meeting these targets requires both painstaking efforts by China itself and a supportive and open international environment. We have the resolve and confidence to deliver on our commitments.”
China has a reputation for under-promising and over-delivering.
Prof Wang Zhongying, director-general of the Energy Research Institute, a Chinese government-affilitated thinktank, told Carbon Brief in an interview at COP26 that China’s policy targets represent a “bottom line”, which the policymakers are “definitely certain” about meeting. He views this as a “cultural difference”, relative to other countries.
The headline target announced by Xi this week has, nevertheless, been seen as falling far short of what was needed.
A series of experts had previously told Carbon Brief that a 30% reduction from 2023 levels was the absolute minimum contribution towards a 1.5C global limit, with many pointing to much larger reductions in order to be fully aligned with the 1.5C target.
The figure below illustrates how China’s 2035 target stacks up against these levels.
(Note that the timing and level of peak emissions is not defined by China’s targets. The pledge trajectory is constrained by China’s previous targets for carbon intensity and expected GDP growth, as well as the newly announced 7-10% range. It is based on total emissions, excluding removals, which are more uncertain.)
Analysis by the Asia Society Policy Institute also found that China’s GHG emissions “must be reduced by at least 30% from the peak through 2035” in order to align with 1.5C warming.
It said that this level of ambition was achievable, due to China’s rapid clean-energy buildout and signs that the nation’s emissions may have already reached a peak.
Similarly, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said last October that implementing the collective goals of the first stocktake – such as tripling renewables by 2030 – as well as aligning near-term efforts with long-term net-zero targets, implied emissions cuts of 35-60% by 2035 for emerging market economies, a grouping that includes China.
In response to these sorts of numbers, Teng Fei, deputy director of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, previously described a 30% by 2035 target as “extreme”, telling Agence France-Presse that this would be “too ambitious to be achievable”, given uncertainties around China’s current development trajectory.
In contrast, a January 2025 academic study, co-authored by researchers from Chinese government institutions and top universities and understood to have been influential in Beijing’s thinking, argued for a pledge to cut energy-related CO2 emissions “by about 10% compared with 2030”, estimating that emissions would peak “between 2028 and 2029”.
(Other assessments have pegged relevant indicators, such as emissions and coal consumption, as peaking in 2028 at the earliest.)
The relatively modest emissions reduction range pledged by Xi, as well as the uncertainty introduced by avoiding a definitive baseline year, has disappointed analysts.
In a note responding to Xi’s pledges, Li Shuo and his ASPI colleague Kate Logan write that he has “misse[d] a chance at leadership”.
Li tells Carbon Brief that factors behind the modest target include the “domestic economic slowdown and uncertain economic prospects, the weakening global climate momentum and the turbulent geopolitical environment”. He adds:
“I also think it is a big psychological jump for the Chinese, shifting for the first time after decades of rapid growth, from essentially climate targets that meant to contain further increase to all of a sudden a target that forces emissions to go down.”
Instead of a target consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C, China’s 2035 pledge is more closely aligned with 3C of warming, according to analysis by CREA’s Lauri Myllyirta.
Climate Action Tracker says that China’s target is “unlikely to drive down emissions”, because it was already set to achieve similar reductions under current policies.
In addition to a headline emissions reduction target, Xi also pledged to expand non-fossil fuels as a share of China’s energy mix and to continue the rollout of wind and solar power.
This continues the trend in China’s previous NDC.
Notably, however, Xi made no mention of efforts to control coal in his speech.
In its second NDC, focused on 2030, China had pledged to “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects”, as well as “strictly limit” coal consumption between 2021-2025 and “phase it down” between 2026-2030. It also said China “will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad”.
It remains to be seen if coal is addressed in China’s full NDC for 2035.
The 2030 NDC also stated that China would “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 25%” – and Xi has updated this to 30% by 2035.
These targets are shown in the figure below, alongside recent forecasts from the Sinopec Economics and Development Research Institute, which estimated that non-fossil fuel energy could account for 27% of primary energy consumption in 2030 and 36% in 2035.
As such, China’s targets for non-fossil energy are less ambitious than the levels implied by current expectations for growth in low-carbon sources.
In a recent meeting with the National People’s Congress Standing Committee – the highest body of China’s state legislature – environment minister Huang Runqiu said that progress on China’s earlier target for increasing non-fossil energy’s share of energy consumption was “broadly in line” with the “expected pace” of the 2030 NDC.
On wind and solar, China’s 2030 NDC had pledged to raise installed capacity to more than 1,200GW – a target that analysts at the time told Carbon Brief was likely to be beaten. It was duly met six years early, with capacity standing at 1,680GW as of the end of July 2025.
Xi has set a 2035 target of reaching 3,600GW of wind and solar capacity.
This looks ambitious, relative to other countries and global capacity of around 3,000GW in total as of 2024, but represents a significant slowdown from the recent pace of growth.
Given its current capacity, China would need to install around 200GW of new wind and solar per year and 2,000GW in total to reach the 2035 target. Yet it installed 360GW in 2024 and 212GW of solar alone in the first half of this year.
Myllyvirta tells Carbon Brief this pace of additions is “not enough to even peak emissions [in the power sector] unless energy demand growth slows significantly”.
While the pace of demand growth is a key uncertainty, a recent study by Michael R Davidson, associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, with colleagues at Tsinghua University, suggested that deploying 2,910-3,800GW of wind and solar by 2035 would be consistent with a 2C warming pathway.
Davidson tells Carbon Brief that “most experts within China do not see the [recent] 300+GW per year growth as sustainable”. Still, he adds that the lower levels outlined in his study could be consistent with cutting power-sector emissions 40% by 2035, subject to caveats around whether new capacity is well-sited and appropriately integrated:
“We found that 40% emissions reductions in the power sector can be supported by 3,000-3,800GW wind and solar capacity [by 2035]. Most of the capacity modeling really depends on integration and quality of resources.”
Renewable energy’s share of consumption in China has lagged behind its record capacity installations, largely due to challenges with updating grid infrastructure and economic incentives that lock in coal-fired power.
In Davidson’s study, capacity growth of up to 3,800GW would see wind and solar reaching around 40% of total power generation by 2030 and 50% by 2035.
Meanwhile, China will need to install around 10,000GW of wind and solar capacity to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, according to a separate report by the Energy Research Institute, a Chinese government-affilitated thinktank.
This is the first time that one of China’s NDC pledges has explicitly covered the emissions from non-CO2 GHGs.
However, while Xi’s speech made clear that China’s headline emissions goal for 2035 will cover non-CO2 gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide and F-gases, he did not give further details on whether the NDC would set specific targets for these emissions.
In China’s 2030 NDC, the country stated it would “step up the control of key non-CO2 GHG emissions”, including through new control policies, but did not include a quantitative emissions reduction target.
In preparation for a comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions target, China has issued action plans for methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs, one type of F-gas) and nitrous oxide.
The nitrous oxide action plan, published earlier this month, called for emissions per unit of production for specific chemicals to decrease to a “world-leading level” by 2030, but did not set overarching limits.
Similarly, the overarching methane action plan, issued in late 2023, listed several key tasks for reducing emissions in the energy, agriculture and waste sectors, but lacked numerical targets for emissions reduction.
A subsequent rule change in December 2024 tightened waste gas requirements for coal mines. Under the new rules, Reuters reports, any coal mine that releases “emissions with methane content of 8% or higher” must capture the gas, and either use or destroy it – down from a previous threshold of 30%.
But analysts believe that the true challenge of coal-mine methane emissions may come from abandoned mines, which, one study found, have surged in the past 10 years and will likely overtake emissions from active coal mines to become the prime source of methane emissions in the coal sector.
As the demand for coal could be facing a “structural decline”, the number of abandoned mines is expected to grow significantly.
Meanwhile, the HFC plan did set quantitative targets. The country aims to lower HFC production by 2029 by 10% from a 2024 baseline of 2GtCO2e, while consumption would also be reduced 10% from a baseline of 0.9gtCO2e in this timeframe – in line with China’s obligations under the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on ozone protection.
From 2026, China will “prohibit” the production of fridges and freezers using HFC refrigerants.
However, the action plan does not govern China’s exports of products that use HFCs – a significant source of emissions.
Illinois could start turning homes and businesses into “virtual power plants” with solar-powered batteries aiding the grid, under a bill that has been gaining momentum in the state legislature.
In Puerto Rico, Vermont, California, Texas, and other states, virtual power plants have helped the grid survive spikes in demand, avoiding outages or the need to fire up gas-fueled peaker plants, and saving consumers money.
Illinois is among the areas expecting electricity demand to grow rapidly because of new data centers; meanwhile, the state is mandated to phase out fossil-fuel generation by 2045, and residential and commercial solar have boomed thanks to state incentive programs. If those solar arrays were paired with batteries, they could provide crucial clean power to the grid during high demand.
HB 4120, an ambitious bill that Illinois lawmakers may consider during an October veto session, would create a basic virtual power plant (VPP) program while mandating that the state’s two largest utilities — ComEd and Ameren — propose their own VPP programs by 2027.
The bill’s plan would offer a rebate to customers who purchase a battery, if they agree to let the battery be tapped for several hours a day during the summer months, when air conditioners drive up electricity use.
The Illinois proposal is less nuanced and comprehensive than VPP programs in other states. For example, in Vermont, Green Mountain Power subsidizes the purchase of batteries, which the utility can then tap while also controlling customers’ smart thermostats, EV chargers, and water heaters whenever the grid is stressed.
But stakeholders in the solar and energy storage industry say Illinois’ proposal is an important first step, opening the door for more ambitious VPP services.
“A utility may want a program to address ‘emergency calls’ to reduce peak load, or deal with a winter peaking issue, or address locational capacity constraints,” said Amy Heart, senior vice president of public policy at Sunrun, a national company that has invested heavily in Illinois solar and that runs VPPs in Puerto Rico, California, and other places. “There is an official pathway and timeline for all of this.”
Energy players in Illinois have been talking seriously about VPPs for several years, during negotiations over what has now become HB 4120. The legislation would incentivize the construction of large-scale energy storage in Illinois, through procurement by the state power agency. VPPs, meanwhile, would provide a decentralized form of storage.
Under the bill’s VPP program, residential customers would get a rebate of $300 per kilowatt-hour on the capacity of the battery they purchase, and then receive at least $10 per kilowatt during scheduled dispatches from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays in June, July, August, and September for a five-year period. “It’s sort of a ‘set-it and forget-it’ program,” said Heart.
Illinois residents already receive a rebate for the same amount when they purchase a battery, but with the new rules, consumers would need to participate in the VPP program to qualify.
All community solar projects with storage would be required to participate in the VPP program, dispatching from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
ComEd, which serves northern Illinois, and Ameren, which serves most of the rest of the state, could petition the Illinois Commerce Commission for permission to tap the batteries on a different schedule, for no more than two or three hours a day over 80 days each year.
The basic program would not help with peak demand during unscheduled times — like unexpectedly hot fall weather. But at least utilities would be guaranteed power during the scheduled peaks, said Heart.
“People wanted to move quickly,” on getting a VPP program in the legislation, she added. “You avoid delays [caused by] trying to make this perfect. Industry is talking about how we need stability; nonprofits, ratepayer advocates, utilities, [and] labor are all talking about why we need these investments.”
Illinois, like many states, has demand-response programs that are often considered part of virtual power plants, helping people reduce their energy use during peak demand. And ComEd has already proposed a VPP program to state regulators.
But legislation is crucial for VPPs to really take off, to ensure that programs “feature robust participation, innovation by aggregators, and a wide range of benefits,” said Samarth Medakkar, policy principal for Advanced Energy United, a national trade association of power, transportation, and software companies focused on clean energy.
Illinois’ bill would permit third-party aggregators to manage VPP deployment, a common setup in other states wherein a company, like Virtual Peaker in Vermont, coordinates battery deployment and demand response for the customer and utility.
ComEd and Ameren would be required to file reports by the end of 2028 detailing how many people have enrolled in the VPP program and its effects on energy supply.
By the end of 2027, the companies would have to file proposals for their own VPP programs, which the state regulatory commission must approve by the close of 2028. Those programs would need to include higher incentives for low- to moderate-income customers, “community-driven” community solar projects, and areas targeted for equity investments in Illinois’ existing energy laws.
“VPPs have a huge potential in a state like Illinois, where there are already many capable devices — like smart thermostats and solar systems which can pair with storage — increasing in number at a rate we can accelerate,” said Medakkar.
An analysis conducted by clean-energy think tank RMI found that VPPs could meet most of the expected new demand in Illinois, providing a crucial bridge while more clean-power generation and transmission lines are built.
The report notes that the state will need around 3.9 gigawatts of new generation or energy savings by 2029, as demand grows and old fossil-fueled plants retire.
VPPs could satisfy about three-quarters of that need, the analysis says, if they account for 10% of electricity used during peak demand times by tapping batteries and dialing down customers’ energy consumption.
Plus, it takes much less time to set up a VPP than to build a new traditional power plant. “VPPs can be deployed in as little as six months, nearly three years quicker than the median deployment timelines for utility-scale batteries and natural gas plants,” notes the RMI report, which was produced for Advanced Energy United to inform the legislative process.
The analysis determined that VPPs would save the average Illinois customer $34 a year by reducing the amount of expensive capacity that utilities would have to purchase in the auctions run by regional grid operators. ComEd’s customers especially are seeing their bills skyrocket due to record-high capacity costs in the PJM regional market.
“There’s great untapped potential in demand-response and VPP-type products,” said Sarah Moskowitz, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, which advocates for Illinois’ electric and gas customers. “It’s disappointing we haven’t seen more opportunities of this sort take root here. But maybe now, with the spiraling energy prices, policymakers will finally see that these are programs that can bring real benefit not just to those who directly participate but to everybody.”
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