Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change.

The Republican president-elect’s return to the White House means the US is going to squander precious momentum, unraveling hard-won policy progress that was just beginning to pay off, all for the second time in less than a decade. 

It comes at a moment when the world can’t afford to waste time, with nations far off track from any emissions trajectories that would keep our ecosystems stable and our communities safe. Under the policies in place today, the planet is already set to warm by more than 3 °C over preindustrial levels in the coming decades.

Trump could push the globe into even more dangerous terrain, by defanging President Joe Biden’s signature climate laws. In fact, a second Trump administration could boost greenhouse-gas emissions by 4 billion tons through 2030 alone, according to an earlier analysis by Carbon Brief, a well-regarded climate news and data site. That will exacerbate the dangers of heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts, and famine and increase deaths and disease from air pollution, inflicting some $900 million in climate damages around the world, Carbon Brief found.

I started as the climate editor at MIT Technology Review just as Trump came into office the last time. Much of the early job entailed covering his systematic unraveling of the modest climate policy and progress that President Barack Obama had managed to achieve. I fear it will be far worse this time, as Trump ambles into office feeling empowered and aggrieved, and ready to test the rule of law and crack down on dissent. 

This time his administration will be staffed all the more by loyalists and idealogues, who have already made plans to force civil servants with expertise and experience from federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency. He’ll be backed by a Supreme Court that he moved well to the right, and which has already undercut landmark environmental doctrines and weakened federal regulatory agencies. 

This time the setbacks will sting more, too, because the US did finally manage to pass real, substantive climate policy, through the slimmest of congressional margins. The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated massive amounts of government funding to accelerating the shift to low-emissions industries and rebuilding the US manufacturing base around a clean-energy economy. 

Trump has made clear he will strive to repeal as many of these provisions as he can, tempered perhaps only by Republicans who recognize that these laws are producing revenue and jobs in their districts. Meanwhile, throughout the prolonged presidential campaign, Trump or his surrogates pledged to boost oil and gas production, eliminate federal support for electric vehicles, end pollution rules for power plants, and remove the US from the Paris climate agreement yet again. Each of those goals stands in direct opposition to the deep, rapid emissions cuts now necessary to prevent the planet from tipping past higher and higher temperature thresholds.

Project 2025, considered a blueprint for the early days of a second Trump administration despite his insistence to the contrary, calls for dismantling or downsizing federal institutions including the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That could cripple the nation’s ability to forecast, track, or respond to storms, floods, and fires like those that have devastated communities in recent months.

Observers I’ve spoken to fear that the Trump administration will also return the Department of Energy, which under Biden had evolved its mission toward developing low-emissions technologies, to the primary task of helping companies dig up more fossil fuels.

The US election could create global ripples as well, and very soon. US negotiators will meet with their counterparts at the annual UN climate conference that kicks off next week. With Trump set to move back into the White House in January, they will have little credibility or leverage to nudge other nations to step up their commitments to reducing emissions. 

But those are just some of the direct ways that a second Trump administration will enfeeble the nation’s ability to drive down emissions and counter the growing dangers of climate change. He also has considerable power to stall the economy and sow international chaos amid escalating conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. 

Trump’s eagerness to enact tariffs, slash government spending, and deport major portions of the workforce may stunt growth, drive up inflation, and chill investment. All that would make it far more difficult for companies to raise the capital and purchase the components needed to build anything in the US, whether that means wind turbines, solar farms, and seawalls or buildings, bridges, and data centers. 

His clumsy handling of the economy and international affairs may also help China extend its dominance in producing and selling the components that are crucial to the energy transition, including batteries, EVs, and solar panels, to customers around the globe.

If one job of a commentator is to find some perspective in difficult moments, I admit I’m mostly failing in this one.

The best I can do is to say that there will be some meaningful lines of defense. For now, at least, state leaders and legislatures can continue to pass and implement stronger climate rules. Other nations could step up their efforts to cut emissions and assert themselves as global leaders on climate. 

Private industry will likely continue to invest in and build businesses in climate tech and clean energy, since solar, wind, batteries, and EVs have proved themselves as competitive industries. And technological progress can occur no matter who is sitting in the round room on Pennsylvania Avenue, since researchers continue striving to develop cleaner, cheaper ways of producing our energy, food, and goods.

By any measure, the job of addressing climate change is now much harder. Nothing, however, has changed about the stakes. 

Our world doesn’t end if we surpass 2 °C, 2.5 °C, or even 3 °C, but it will steadily become a more dangerous and erratic place. Every tenth of a degree remains worth fighting for—whether two, four, or a dozen years from now—because every bit of warming that nations pull together to prevent eases future suffering somewhere.

So as the shock wears off and the despair begins to lift, the core task before us remains the same: to push for progress, whenever, wherever, and however we can. 

In 2022, the US made a massive bet on the carbon removal industry, committing $3.5 billion to build four major regional hubs in an effort to scale up the nascent sector. But industry observers fear that market demand isn’t building fast enough to support it, even with these substantial federal grants and other subsidies. 

Some are now calling for the Department of Energy to redirect a portion of the money earmarked to build direct-air-capture (DAC) plants toward purchases of greenhouse-gas removal instead. At issue is the lack of natural demand for the product that these plants ultimately generate: carbon dioxide that, in most cases, is immediately buried underground. Businesses and organizations that purchase credits representing that CO₂ do so only to meet climate neutrality goals, which are mostly self-imposed. Carbon removal proponents worry that without greater government efforts to prop up ongoing demand, some of the facilities funded through the program may not survive—or even be built.

Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates–backed climate and clean energy organization, released a commentary today calling for more government support for demand to ensure that the industry doesn’t stall out in its infancy, MIT Technology Review can report.

“You’re essentially totally dependent on a handful of companies willing to pay a very high dollar amount as you try to drive the technology down the cost curve,” says Jack Andreasen, head of carbon management within the policy advocacy arm of Breakthrough Energy. “My fear is we’ll build a bunch of facilities and they’ll just be mothballed because they can’t sell enough credits.” 

The Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program was funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which President Joe Biden signed in late 2021. To date, only a few of the awardees have been selected, none of the projects have been built, and few of the funds have been dispersed, so any stumbles would still be years in the future. But if any of the DOE-backed projects did ultimately fail, it would likely chill investor interest and spark a political backlash like the Solyndra scandal did in the early 2010s, creating fresh grounds for critics to assail federal support for climate, clean energy, and carbon removal projects. 

“It’s absolutely critical that the DAC Hubs program creates high-quality projects and that the DOE does everything they can to make sure they thrive,” says Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, a nonprofit group that represents the industry. She says the organization has heard from numerous companies that “demand continues to be a challenge for them,” especially for larger-scale projects.

The DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which oversees the DAC Hubs program, didn’t respond to an inquiry from MIT Technology Review before press time. 

One of the companies that already secured funds through the program, Heirloom, says it is seeing adequate demand for its projects. But in a prepared statement, the company did say that governments will need to step up support in the coming years, noting that according to the UN’s climate panel, the world may need to suck down billions of tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2050 to prevent temperatures from rising past 2 °C over preindustrial levels.

“Achieving that type of scale won’t happen through a voluntary market alone; it will require significant demand-side policy at home and abroad,” the company said.

The hubs

The DOE announced the first set of DAC Hubs grants last summer, revealing that it would provide more than $1 billion to two projects, each with the capacity to suck down a million tons of carbon dioxide per year: Occidental Petroleum’s proposed carbon removal factory in Kleberg County, Texas, and a collaboration between Battelle, Climeworks, and Heirloom to develop facilities in Louisiana. 

As Heatmap previously reported, Heirloom has pre-sold a “substantial” portion of the capacity for the two projects it is now planning in the state to customers including JPMorgan Chase, Klarna, Meta, Microsoft, and Stripe.

Occidental’s first industrial-scale DAC project, the Stratos plant in Ector County, Texas, is expected to come online next year. The company’s 1PointFive subsidiary is developing the project and has announced customers including AT&T, Amazon, Microsoft, and Trafigura.

The company didn’t respond to a question concerning whether it has lined up deals for the separate DAC Hubs–funded project. But Michael Avery, president of 1PointFive, said in a prepared statement: “We’re continuing to see increasing understanding and interest in the importance of highly-durable CDR solutions like direct air capture to address residual emissions across several industries.”

Last month, the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations said it would provide up to $1.6 billion to a variety of additional DAC facilities, as well as the infrastructure that would support them, which might include storage wells and pipelines. 

Notably, the agency significantly reduced the size of the facilities that might qualify for the second tranche of grant funding. Rather than million-ton facilities, the office said, it would likely look for “mid-scale projects” that could remove 2,000 to 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and “large-scale” ones that capture at least 25,000 tons. It also stated that it plans to use some portion of the remaining funds “to support current and future awardees in addressing key barriers or major industry challenges that fall outside the original award scope and budget.” 

Industry observers interpreted that to mean the office was seriously considering the growing calls to provide more demand support for carbon dioxide removal (CDR). That could take the form of direct government procurement of tons of carbon removal that could be applied toward the nation’s goals under the Paris climate agreement or federal subsidies that help defray the cost of corporate purchases.

Andreasen and Amador both said the DOE should allocate up to $500 million from the original $3.5 billion toward such efforts. Repurposing that money may mean building fewer or smaller plants through the DAC Hubs program, but it could increase the odds of success for those that do get developed.

A public good? 

Breakthrough Energy isn’t a disinterested observer. The venture arm of the organization has made multiple investments in the carbon removal industry. For that matter, it’s not unusual for an industry organization, like the Carbon Removal Alliance, to call for governments to bestow tax breaks, subsidies, or other forms of federal assistance on its members.

The US already provides significant support for the industry on top of the DAC Hubs funding, including a subsidy of up to $180 for every ton of carbon dioxide removed by a direct-air-capture plant and then permanently stored underground. 

The DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has started a pilot effort to directly purchase carbon removal last year, with $35 million in available funding. In May, it revealed a list of 24 semifinalists for the purchase contracts, including Charm Industrial, Climeworks, Ebb Carbon, Heirloom, and others. The office intends to select up to 10 companies that could receive as much as $3 million for the sale of removed carbon dioxide when those tons are delivered.

Many critics will see industry figures asking for still more handouts as pleas for lavish levels of corporate welfare.

But others consider carbon removal principally a public good, and there’s wide agreement that the sector will need massive and sustained government support to reach anywhere near the scale that would meaningfully address climate change.

That’s because it’s an odd industry, fueled less by customer demand than by climate imperatives. An earlier National Academies report said the world may need to remove and store away around 10 billion tons per year by midcentury. But that doesn’t mean companies are especially eager to cover the high cost of doing it.

“Demand is a challenge for all climate technologies,” Amador says, given the often high premiums. “But it’s particularly acute for carbon removal and direct air capture, because it’s a public good. We’re producing a waste management service that no one currently has to pay for, and that makes commercializing this particularly difficult.” 

The hope and the challenge

The hope is that scaling up the sector will drive down costs, unlocking additional demand among corporations hoping to cancel out their pollution and making it cheaper for governments to make larger and larger purchases. 

The consulting firm BCG estimates that voluntary demand for carbon removal could increase to as much as 750 million tons by 2040, and that supportive government policies could drive an additional 500 million to 2.5 billion tons of “durable” demand by 2050. Among other possibilities, the European Union, Japan, and California may, for instance, incorporate carbon removal into their regulated carbon trading systems in the coming years. 

But there’s no guarantee that carbon removal costs will drop, voluntary market demand will build, or government support will rise as fast as needed to keep the industry growing before that occurs. Nor is it a given that nations or businesses will ever collectively suck up the cost of drawing billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the air. 

Even if the industry gets costs down to $100 a ton, a standard target that could drive much more demand, removing 10 billion tons a year would add up to a $1 trillion annual expenditure. The obvious question that raises is who should pay for the bulk of that—average taxpayers who would receive the benefits in the form of lower climate risks, or the major polluters that did the most to cause the problem? 

There are bubbling concerns that too many startups are already chasing too little demand and that follow-on investments are tightening amid a broader slowdown in climate-tech-focused venture capital. Several companies in the space have already gone out of business, including Running Tide and Nori.

Total purchases of carbon removal, through direct air capture and other methods, have continued to rise. A handful of companies, like Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, and Google, have committed to paying the steep current costs of removing tons of CO₂, hoping to help to stand up the sector and earn credit for taking action to address climate change. In fact, the deal volume so far in 2024, at more than $1.4 billion, exceeds the total seen in all previous years combined, says Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, which tracks carbon removal purchases.

But in what he called “a concerning trend,” the number of buyers—and especially the number of new buyers—has ticked down in recent quarters. Microsoft’s carbon removal purchases alone made up more than 77% of this year’s total.

The problem is, “you need 10 Microsofts to finance one DAC hub,” says Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, which advises companies on carbon removal. 

There’s an added challenge for direct air capture within the voluntary carbon market: It’s one of the most expensive ways for corporations to cancel out emissions. Carbon removal purchases only make up about 3% percent of the voluntary carbon market today, according to a Carbon Direct report last year. And DAC purchases only represent about 18% of that fraction of the market, according to CDR.fyi. 

Traditional carbon offsets for projects that promise to reduce or avoid emissions are still the main competition for any form of carbon removal, making up about 90% of the voluntary market. The problem is that a variety of studies and investigative stories have found that these credits, which can be earned and sold for preserving forests, building renewable-energy facilities, and similar efforts, often overstate the climate benefits. But they’re a lot cheaper than reliable carbon removal options and remain appealing to many companies looking for a way to cancel out their emissions, at least on paper.

Höglund says that corporate climate goal-setting bodies like the Science Based Targets initiative should help push along the business of high-quality carbon removal by requiring participating companies to set interim objectives for purchases that start small and rise over time. 

But he, too, stresses that the major buyers will need to be governments.

“More, and larger, such government purchase initiatives are likely to be needed to keep the permanent CDR sector on the right track,” Höglund said in an email.

Earlier this year, the US Congress approved another $20 million for a second phase of the DOE’s carbon removal purchase program.

The agency is helping to drive demand by buying carbon removal in small, but likely growing amounts, says Noah Deich, a senior advisor in the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which oversees the pilot program. But he stresses that additional corporations will need to do their part as well, paying for the high costs of carbon removal today, to ensure that more and more parties can afford to buy large amounts of it in the future.

“Unless we start to make a bigger market for CDR purchasers, we won’t achieve the commercial liftoff in the 2030s,” he says.

Michael Skelly hasn’t learned to take no for an answer.

For much of the last 15 years, the Houston-based energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest, delivering clean electricity to cities like Albuquerque, Chicago, and Memphis. But so far, he has little to show for the effort. 

Skelly has long argued that building such lines and linking together the nation’s grids would accelerate the shift from coal- and natural-gas-fueled power plants to the renewables needed to cut the pollution driving climate change. But his previous business, Clean Line Energy Partners, shut down in 2019, after halting two of its projects and selling off interests in three more.

Skelly contends he was early, not wrong, about the need for such lines, and that the market and policymakers are increasingly coming around to his perspective. Indeed, the US Department of Energy just blessed his latest company’s proposed line with hundreds of millions in grants. 

The North Plains Connector would stretch about 420 miles from southeast Montana to the heart of North Dakota and create the first major connection between the US’s two largest grids, enabling system operators to draw on electricity generated by hydro, solar, wind, and other resources across much of the country. This could help keep regional power systems online during extreme weather events and boost the overall share of electricity generated by those clean sources. 

Skelly says he’s already secured the support of nine utilities around the region for the project, as well as more than 90% of the landowners along the route.

He says that more and more local energy companies have come to recognize that rising electricity demands, the growing threat storms and fires pose to power systems, and the increasing reliance on renewables have hastened the need for more transmission lines to stitch together and reinforce the country’s fraying, fractured grids.

“There’s a real understanding, really, across the country of the need to invest more in the grid,” says Skelly, now chief executive of Grid United, the Houston-based transmission development firm he founded in 2021. “We need more wires in the air.” 

Still, proposals to build long transmission lines frequently stir up controversy in the communities they would cross. It remains to be seen whether this growing understanding will be enough for Skelly’s project to succeed, or to get the US building anywhere near the number of transmission lines it now desperately needs.

Linking grids

Transmission lines are the unappreciated linchpin of the clean-energy transition, arguably as essential as solar panels in cutting emissions and as important as seawalls in keeping people safe.

These long, high, thick wires are often described as the highways of our power systems. They connect the big wind farms, hydroelectric plants, solar facilities, and other power plants to the edges of cities, where substations step down the voltage before delivering electricity into homes and businesses along distribution lines that are more akin to city streets. 

There are three major grid systems in the US: the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnected System. Regional grid operators such as the California Independent System Operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, and the New York Independent System Operator oversee smaller local grids that are connected, to a greater or lesser extent, within those larger networks.

Transmission lines that could add significant capacity for sharing electricity back and forth across the nation’s major grid systems are especially valuable for cutting emissions and improving the stability of the power system. That’s because they allow those independent system operators to draw on a far larger pool of electricity sources. So if solar power is fading in one part of the country, they could still access wind or hydropower somewhere else. The ability to balance out fluctuations in renewables across regions and seasons, in turn, reduces the need to rely on the steady output of fossil-fuel plants. 

“There’s typically excess wind or hydro or other resources somewhere,” says James Hewett, manager of the US policy lobbying group at Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates–backed organization focusing on clean energy and climate issues. “But today, the limiting constraint is the ability to move resources from the place where they’re excessive to where they’re needed.” 

(Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the investment arm of the firm, doesn’t hold any investments in the North Plains Connector project or Grid United.)

It also means that even if regional wildfires, floods, hurricanes, or heat waves knock out power lines and plants in one area, operators may still be able to tap into adjacent systems to keep the lights on and air-conditioning running. That can be a matter of life and death in the event of such emergencies, as we’ve witnessed in the aftermath of heat waves and hurricanes in recent years.  

Studies have shown that weaving together the nation’s grids can boost the share of electricity that renewables reliably provide, significantly cut power-sector emissions, and lower system costs. A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that the lines interconnecting the US’s major grids and the regions within them offer the greatest economic value among transmission projects, potentially providing more than $100 million in cost savings per year for every additional gigawatt of added capacity. (The study presupposes that the lines are operated efficiently and to their full capacity, among other simplifying assumptions.)

Experts say that grid interconnections can more than pay for themselves over time because, among other improved efficiencies, they allow grid operators to find cheaper sources of electricity at any given time and enable regions to get by with fewer power plants by relying on the redundancy provided by their neighbors.

But as it stands, the meager links between the Eastern Interconnection and Western Interconnection amount to “tiny little soda straws connecting two Olympic swimming pools,” says Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a consultancy in Washington, DC. 

“A win-win-win”

Grid United’s North Plains Connector, in contrast, would be a fat pipe.

The $3.2 billion, three-gigawatt project would more than double the amount of electricity that could zip back and forth between those grid systems, and it would tightly interlink a trio of grid operators that oversee regional parts of those larger systems: the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, and the Southwest Power Pool. If the line is developed, each could then more easily tap into the richest, cheapest sources at any given time across a huge expanse of the nation, be it hydropower generated in the Northwest, wind turbines cranking across the Midwest, or solar power produced anywhere.

This would ensure that utilities could get greater economic value out of those energy plants, which are expensive to build but relatively cheap to operate, and it would improve the reliability of the system during extreme weather, Skelly says.

“If you’ve got a heat dome in the Northwest, you can send power west,” he says. “If you have a winter storm in the Midwest, you can send power to the east.”

Grid United is developing the project as a joint venture with Allete, an energy company in Duluth, Minnesota, that operates several utilities in the region. 

The Department of Energy granted $700 million to a larger regional effort, known as the North Plains Connector Interregional Innovation project, which encompasses two smaller proposals in addition to Grid United’s. The grants will be issued through a more than $10 billion program established under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, enacted by President Joe Biden in 2021. 

That funding will likely be distributed to regional utilities and other parties as partial matching grants, designed to incentivize investments in the project among those likely to benefit from it. That design may also help address a chicken-and-egg problem that plagues independent transmission developers like Grid United, Breakthrough’s Hewett says. 

Regional utilities can pass along the costs of projects to their electricity customers. Companies like Grid United, however, generally can’t sign up the power producers that will pay to use their lines until they’ve got project approval, but they also often can’t secure traditional financing until they’ve lined up customers.

The DOE funding could ease that issue by providing an assurance of capital that would help get the project through the lengthy permitting process, Hewett says. 

“The states are benefiting, local utilities are benefiting, and the developer will benefit,” he says. “It’s a win-win-win.”

Transmission hurdles

Over the years, developers have floated various proposals to more tightly interlink the nation’s major grid systems. But it’s proved notoriously difficult to build any new transmission lines in the US—a problem that has only worsened in recent years. 

The nation is developing only 20% of the transmission capacity per year in the 2020s that it did in the early 2010s. On average, interstate transmission lines take eight to 10 years to develop “if they succeed at all,” according to a report from the Niskanen Center.

The biggest challenge in adding connections between grids, says Gramlich of Grid Strategies, is that there’s no clear processes for authorizing lines that cross multiple jurisdictions and no dedicated regional or federal agencies overseeing such proposals. The fact that numerous areas may benefit from such lines also sparks interregional squabbling over how the costs should be allocated. 

In addition, communities often balk at the sight of wires and towers, particularly if the benefits of the lines mostly accrue around the end points, not necessarily in all the areas the wires cross. Any city, county, or state, or even one landowner, can hold up a project for years, if not kill it.

But energy companies themselves share much of the blame as well. Regional energy agencies, grid operators, and utilities have actively fought proposals from independent developers to erect wires passing through their territories. They often simply don’t want to forfeit control of their systems, invite added competition, or deal with the regulatory complexity of such projects. 

The long delays in building new grid capacity have become a growing impediment to building new energy projects.

As of last year, there were 2,600 gigawatts’ worth of proposed energy generation or storage projects waiting in the wings for transmission capacity that would carry their electricity to customers, according to a recent analysis by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. That’s roughly the electricity output of 2,600 nuclear reactors, or more than double the nation’s entire power system. 

The capacity of projects in the queue has risen almost eightfold from a decade ago, and about 95% of them are solar, wind, or battery proposals.

“Grid interconnection remains a persistent bottleneck,” Joseph Rand, an energy policy researcher at the lab and the lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The legacy of Clean Line Energy

Skelly spent the aughts as the chief development officer of Horizon Wind Energy, a large US wind developer that the Portuguese energy giant EDP snapped up in 2007 for more than $2 billion. Skelly then made a spirited though ill-fated run for Congress in 2008, as the Democratic nominee for the 7th Congressional District of Texas. He ran on a pro-renewables, pro-education campaign but lost by a sizable margin in a district that was solidly Republican.

The following year, he founded Clean Line Energy Partners. The company raised tens of millions of dollars and spent a decade striving to develop five long-range transmission projects that could connect the sorts of wind projects Skelly had worked to build before.

The company did successfully earn some of the permits required for several lines. But it was forced to shut down or offload its projects amid pushback from landowner groups and politicians opposed to renewables, as well as from regional utilities and public utility commissions. 

“He was going to play in other people’s sandboxes and they weren’t exactly keen on having him in there,” says Russell Gold, author of Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy, which recounted Skelly’s and Clean Line Energy’s efforts and failures.

Ultimately, those obstacles dragged out the projects beyond the patience of the company’s investors, who declined to continue throwing more money at them, he says. 

The company was forced to halt the Centennial West line through New Mexico and the Rock Island project across the Midwest. In addition, it sold off its stake in the Grain Belt Express, which would stretch from Kansas to Indiana, to Invenergy; the Oklahoma portion of the Plains and Eastern line to NextEra Energy; and the Western Spirit line through New Mexico, along with an associated wind farm project, to Pattern Development. 

Clean Line Energy itself wound down in 2019.

The Western Spirit transmission line was electrified in late 2021, but the other two projects are still slogging through planning and permitting.

“These things take a long time,” Skelly says. 

For all the challenges the company faced, Gold still credits it with raising awareness about the importance and necessity of long-distance interregional transmission. He says it helped spark conversations that led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to eventually enact rules to support regional transmission planning and encouraged other big players to focus more on building transmission lines.

“I do believe that there is a broader social, political, and commercial awareness now that the United States needs to interconnect its grids,” Gold says. 

Lessons learned

Skelly spent a few years as a senior advisor at Lazard, consulting with companies on renewable energy. But he was soon ready to take another shot at developing long-haul transmission lines and started Grid United in 2021.

The new company has proposed four transmission projects in addition to the North Plains Connector—one between Arizona and New Mexico, one between Colorado and Oklahoma, and one each within Texas and Wyoming.

Asked what he thinks the legacy of Clean Line Energy is, Skelly says it’s mixed. But he soon adds that the history of US infrastructure building is replete with projects that didn’t move ahead. The important thing, he says, is to draw the right lessons from those failures.

“When we’re smart about it, we look at the past to see what we can learn,” he says. “We certainly do that today in our business.”

Skelly says one of the biggest takeaways was that it’s important to do the expensive upfront work of meeting with landowners well in advance of applying for permitting, and to use their feedback to guide the line of the route. 

Anne Hedges, director of policy and legislative affairs at the Montana Environmental Information Center, confirms that this is the approach Grid United has taken in the region so far.

“A lot of developers seem to be more focused on drawing a straight line on a map rather than working with communities to figure out the best placement for the transmission system,” she says. “Grid United didn’t do that. They got out on the ground and talked to people and planned a route that wasn’t linear.”

The other change that may make Grid United’s project there more likely to move forward has more to do with what the industry’s learned than what Skelly has.  

Gramlich says regional grid operators and utilities have become more receptive to collaborating with developers on transmission lines—and for self-interested reasons. They’ll need greater capacity, and soon, to stay online and meet the growing energy demands of data centers, manufacturing facilities, electric vehicles, and buildings, and address the risks to power systems from extreme weather events.

Industry observers are also hopeful that an energy permitting reform bill pending in Congress, along with the added federal funding and new rules requiring transmission providers to do more advance planning, will also help accelerate development. The bipartisan bill promises to shorten the approval process for projects that are determined to be in the national interest. It would also require neighboring areas to work together on interregional transmission planning.

Hundreds of environmental groups have sharply criticized the proposal, which would also streamline approvals for certain oil and gas operations.

“This legislation guts bedrock environmental protections, endangers public health, opens up tens of millions of acres of public lands and hundreds of millions of acres of offshore waters to further oil and gas leasing, gives public lands to mining companies, and would defacto rubberstamp gas export projects that harm frontline communities and perpetuate the climate crisis,” argued a letter signed by 350.org, Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and hundreds of other groups.

But a recent analysis by Third Way, a center-left think tank in Washington, DC, found that the emissions benefits from accelerating transmission permitting could significantly outweigh the added climate pollution from the fossil-fuel provisions in the bill. It projects that the bill would, on balance, reduce global emissions by 400 million to 16.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide through 2050. 

“Guardedly optimistic” 

Grid United expects to begin applying for county and state permits in the next few months and for federal permits toward the end of the year. It hopes to begin construction within the next four years and switch the line on in 2032.

Since the applications haven’t been made, it’s not clear what individuals or groups are or will be opposed to it—though, given the history of such projects, some will surely object.

Hedges says the Montana Environmental Information Center is reserving judgment until it sees the actual application. She says the organization will be particularly focused on any potential impact on water and wildlife across the region, “making sure that they’re not harming what are already struggling resources in this area.”

So if Skelly was too early with his last company, the obvious question is: Are the market, regulatory, and societal conditions now ripe for interregional transmission lines?

“We’re gonna find out if they are, right?” he says. “We don’t know yet.”

Skelly adds that he doesn’t think the US is going to build as much transmission as it needs to. But he does believe we’ll start to see more projects moving forward—including, he hopes, the North Plains Connector.

“You just can’t count on anything, and you’ve just got to keep going and push, push, push,” he says. “But we’re making good progress. There’s a lot of utility interest. We have a big grant from the DOE, which will help bring down the cost of the project. So knock on wood, we’re guardedly optimistic.”

MIT Technology Review set out last year to recognize 15 companies from around the world that demonstrated they have a real shot at meaningfully driving down greenhouse-gas emissions and safeguarding society from the worst impacts of climate change.

We’re excited to announce that we took up the task again this year and will publish our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch on October 1. We’ll reveal it first on stage to attendees at our upcoming EmTech MIT event, and then share it online later that day.

The work these companies are doing is needed now more than ever. Global warming appears to be accelerating. The oceans are heating up faster than expected. And some scientists fear the planet is approaching tipping points that could trigger dramatic shifts in Earth’s ecosystems.

Nations must cut the greenhouse-gas pollution fueling that warming, and the heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and fires it brings, as fast as possible. But we can’t simply halt emissions without plunging the global economy into a deep depression and the world into chaos. 

Any realistic plan to cut billions of tons of emissions over the next few decades requires us to develop and scale up cleaner ways of producing electricity, manufacturing goods, generating heat and cooling, and moving people and stuff around the world. 

To do that, we need competitive companies that can displace heavily polluting industries, or force them to clean up their acts. Those firms need to provide consumers with low-emissions options that, ideally, don’t feel like a sacrifice. And because climate change is underway, we also need technologies and services and infrastructure that can keep communities safe even as the world grows hotter and the weather becomes more erratic and extreme.

As we stated last year, we don’t claim to be oracles or soothsayers. The success of any one business depends on many hard-to-predict variables, including market conditions, political winds, investor sentiment, and consumer preferences. Taking aim at the business model and margins of conglomerates is especially fraught—and some of these firms may well fail.

But we did our best to select companies with solid track records that are tackling critical climate problems and have shown recent progress. 

This year’s list includes companies working to cut stubborn agricultural emissions, mine the metals needed for the energy transition in cleaner ways, and help communities tamp out wildfires before they become infernos. Others are figuring out new ways to produce fuels that can power our vehicles and industries, without adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. 

A few companies from last year’s list also made the cut again because they’ve made notable strides toward their goals in the past 12 months.

We’re proud to publish the full list in the coming weeks. We hope you’ll take a look, ideally learn something new, and perhaps leave feeling encouraged that the world can make the changes needed to ease the risks of climate change and build a more sustainable future.

Early next year, Google and its partners plan to launch the first in a series of satellites that together would provide close-up, frequently refreshed images of wildfires around the world, offering data that could help firefighters battle blazes more rapidly, effectively, and safely.

The online search giant’s nonprofit and research arms have collaborated with the Moore Foundation, the Environmental Defense Fund, the satellite company Muon Space, and others to deploy 52 satellites equipped with custom-developed sensors over the coming years. 

The FireSat satellites will be able to spot fires as small as 5 by 5 meters (16 by 16 feet) on any speck of the globe. Once the full constellation is in place, the system should be capable of updating those images about every 20 minutes, the group says.

Those capabilities together would mark a significant upgrade over what’s available from the satellites that currently provide data to fire agencies. Generally, they can provide either high-resolution images that aren’t updated rapidly enough to track fires closely or frequently refreshed images that are relatively low-resolution.

The Earth Fire Alliance collaboration will also leverage Google’s AI wildfire tools, which have been trained to detect early indications of wildfires and track their progression, to draw additional insights from the data.

The images and analysis will be provided free to fire agencies around the world, helping to improve understanding of where fires are, where they’re moving, and how hot they’re burning. The information could help agencies stamp out small fires before they turn into raging infernos, place limited firefighting resources where they’ll do the most good, and evacuate people along the safest paths.

“In the satellite image of the Earth, a lot of things can be mistaken for a fire: a glint, a hot roof, smoke from another fire,” says Chris Van Arsdale, climate and energy research lead at Google Research and chairman of the Earth Fire Alliance. “Detecting fires becomes a game of looking for needles in a world of haystacks. Solving this will enable first responders to act quickly and precisely when a fire is detected.”

Some details of FireSat were unveiled earlier this year. But the organizations involved will announce additional information about their plans today, including the news that Google.org, the company’s charitable arm, has provided $13 million to the program and that the inaugural launch is scheduled to occur next year. 

Reducing the fog of war

The news comes as large fires rage across millions of acres in the western US, putting people and property at risk. The blazes include the Line Fire in Southern California, the Shoe Fly Fire in central Oregon, and the Davis Fire south of Reno, Nevada.

Wildfires have become more frequent, extreme, and dangerous in recent decades. That, in part, is a consequence of climate change: Rising temperatures suck the moisture from trees, shrubs, and grasses. But fires increasingly contribute to global warming as well. A recent study found that the fires that scorched millions of acres across Canada last year pumped out 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide, four times the annual pollution produced by the airline industry.

Humans have also increased fire risk by suppressing natural fires for decades, which has allowed fuel to build up in forests and grasslands, and by constructing communities on the edge of wilderness boundaries without appropriate rules, materials, and safeguards. 

Observers say that FireSat could play an important role in combating fires, both by enabling fire agencies to extinguish small ones before they grow into large ones and by informing effective strategies for battling them once they’re crossed that point.

“What these satellites will do is reduce the fog of war,” says Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, who is focused on fire policy issues. “Like when a situation is really dynamic and very dangerous for firefighters and they’re trying to make decisions very quickly about whether to move in to defend structures or try to evacuate people.” 

(Wara serves on the advisory board of the Moore Foundation’s Wildfire Resilience Initiative.)

Some areas, like California, already have greater visibility into the current state of fires or early signs of outbreaks, thanks to technology like Department of Defense satellites, remote camera networks, and planes, helicopters, and drones. But FireSat will be especially helpful for “countries that have less-well-resourced wildland fighting capability,” Wara adds.

Better images, more data, and AI will not be able to fully counter the increased fire dangers. Wara and other fire experts argue that regions need to use prescribed burns and other efforts to more aggressively reduce the buildup of fuel, rethink where and how we build communities in fire-prone areas, and do more to fund and support the work of firefighters on the ground. 

Sounding an earlier alarm for fires will only help reduce dangers when regions have, or develop, the added firefighting resources needed to combat the most dangerous ones quickly and effectively. Communities will also need to put in place better policies to determine what types of fires should be left to burn, and under what conditions.

‘A game changer’

Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior wildfire advisor to the Moore Foundation who previously served as state fire marshal for California, says she can “personally attest” to the difference that such tools will make to firefighters in the field.

“It is a game changer, especially as wildfires are becoming more extreme, more frequent, and more dangerous for everyone,” she says. “Information like this will make a lifesaving difference for firefighters and communities around the globe.”

Google Research developed the sensors for the satellite and tested them as well as the company’s AI fire detection models by conducting flights over controlled burns in California. Google intends to work with Earth Fire Alliance “to ensure AI can help make this data as useful as possible, and also that wildfire information is shared as widely as possible,” the company said.

Google’s Van Arsdale says that providing visual images of every incident around the world from start to finish will be enormously valuable to scientists studying wildfires and climate change. 

“We can combine this data with Google’s existing models of the Earth to help advance our understanding of fire behavior and fire dynamics across all of Earth’s ecosystems,” he says. “All this together really has the potential to help mitigate the environmental and social impact of fire while also improving people’s health and safety.”

Specifically, it could improve assessments of fire risk, as well as our understanding of the most effective means of preventing or slowing the spread of fires. For instance, it could help communities determine where it would be most cost-effective to remove trees and underbrush. 

Figuring out the best ways to conduct such interventions is another key goal of the program, given their high cost and the limited funds available for managing wildlands, says Genny Biggs, the program director for the Moore Foundation’s Wildfire Resilience Initiative.

The launch

The idea for FireSat grew out of a series of meetings that began with a 2019 workshop hosted by the Moore Foundation, which provided the first philanthropic funding for the program. 

The first satellite, scheduled to be launched aboard a SpaceX rocket early next year, will be fully functional aside from some data transmission features. The goals of the “protoflight” mission include testing the onboard systems and the data they send back. The Earth Fire Alliance will work with a handful of early-adopter agencies to prepare for the next phases. 

The group intends to launch three fully operational satellites in 2026, with additional deployments in the years that follow. Muon Space will build and operate the satellites. 

Agencies around the world should be able to receive hourly wildfire updates once about half of the constellation is operational, says Brian Collins, executive director of the Earth Fire Alliance. It hopes to launch all 52 satellites by around the end of this decade.

Each satellite is designed to last about five years, so the organization will eventually need to deploy 10 more each year to maintain the constellation.

The Earth Fire Alliance has secured about two-thirds of the funding it needs for the first phase of the program, which includes the first four launches. The organization will need to raise additional money from government agencies, international organizations, philanthropies, and other groups  to deploy, maintain, and operate the full constellation. It estimates the total cost will exceed $400 million, which Collins notes “is 1/1000th of the economic losses due to extreme wildfires annually in the US alone.”

Asked if commercial uses of the data could also support the program, including potentially military ones, Collins said in an email: “Adjacent applications range from land use management and agriculture to risk management and industrial impact and mitigation.” 

“At the same time, we know that as large agencies and government agencies adopt FireSat data to support a broad public safety mandate, they may develop all-hazard, emergenc[y] management, and security related uses of data,” he added. “As long as opportunities are in balance with our charter to advance a global approach to wildfire and climate resilience, we welcome new ideas and applications of our data.”

‘Living with fire’

A wide variety of startups have emerged in recent years promising to use technology to reduce the frequency and severity of wildfires—for example, by installing cameras and sensors in forests and grasslands, developing robots to carry out controlled burns, deploying autonomous helicopters that can drop suppressant, and harnessing AI to predict wildfire behavior and inform forest and fire management strategies. 

So far, even with all these new tools, it’s still been difficult for communities to keep pace with the rising dangers.

Dargan Marquis—who founded her own wildfire software company, Intterra—says she is confident the incidence of disastrous fires can be meaningfully reduced with programs like FireSat, along with other improved technologies and policies. But she says it’s likely to take decades to catch up with the growing risks, as the world continues warming up.

“We’re going to struggle in places like California, these Mediterranean climates around the world, while our technology and our capabilities and our inventions, etc., catch up with that level of the problem,” she says. 

“We can turn that corner,” she adds. “If we work together on a comprehensive strategy with the right data and a convincing plan over the next 50 years, I do think that by the end of the century, we absolutely can be living with fire.”