2026-04-23 02:32:48
The infamous Florida immigrant detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” can remain open, an appeals court ruled Tuesday, overturning a lower judge’s decision to close the facility because it violated federal environmental laws.
The ruling is the latest development in the months-long legal battle against the center, which was constructed in the Everglades last summer by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration when the Department of Homeland Security needed more detention space to house immigrants pending their deportations.
The center has come under fire for both its living conditions and its impact on the surrounding area. As I reported in March, thousands of people have been detained there despite ongoing reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, lackluster food, and limited water access. Last month, two US senators said they launched an investigation into reported abuses, including the use of “the box,” in which detainees were allegedly shackled and held in small cages in direct sunlight for hours at a time. (A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, told me recently that the allegations were “false.”) In recent weeks, the center landed in the spotlight once again after attorneys representing immigrants held there told a judge that guards had assaulted and pepper-sprayed detainees who protested after the phones were shut off, less than a week after a federal judge ordered legal access should be expanded at the facility.
Environmentalists have spent almost a year trying to shutter Alligator Alcatraz in an effort to protect the Everglades. The center was built on a little-used airfield next to the environmentally protected wetlands of Big Cypress National Preserve. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier quipped in a video posted on social media late last June.
As I reported that month, environmental groups sued federal and state officials to halt the project. They argued that the construction had proceeded without an environmental review or opportunity for public comment, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They filed declarations in the case documenting how the camp could potentially affect the neighboring ecosystems and wildlife. Traffic to and from the detention site increases the likelihood of panthers being struck by vehicles, according to court filings, and light pollution could destroy the nighttime foraging abilities of bats in the area.
“Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades.”
Florida and Trump officials argued that NEPA only applies to federal agencies, and that the facility was operated and funded by the state, which has spent at least $390 million to run it. But in August, a federal judge in Miami concluded that Alligator Alcatraz “exists for the sole purpose of detaining and deporting those subject to federal immigration enforcement” and ordered it to wind down operations within 60 days. The state of Florida appealed and the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit blocked the judge’s decision, allowing Alligator Alcatraz to continue to operate.
Alligator Alcatraz has disrupted the vulnerable ecosystems that surround it, Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, one of the plaintiffs in the environmental lawsuit, told me last month. The high-intensity lighting, for example, has affected about 2,000 acres of habitat for the Florida panther, an endangered species with a population of about 200. “The evidence of that harm is clear,” she said in a phone interview.
The three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the case on April 7 and released a 38-page ruling late Tuesday afternoon. In the 2–1 decision, judges concluded that the environmentalists failed to prove Alligator Alcatraz was under federal control. Florida also hasn’t received any federal funding (though it is in the process of requesting reimbursement). “Federal authority is, at most, indirect: it is involved in the construction only insofar as it sets the terms for which the facility may be used for detention of aliens, but Florida officials dedicated its land to that use,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, in the majority opinion.
Judge Nancy Abudu, a Biden appointee, wrote in her dissent that immigration is ultimately a federal obligation and the majority’s ruling is “just plain wrong.” “So long as Florida remains a willing participant in the federal government’s immigration detention scheme, it subjects itself to the federal government’s substantial control over the parties’ joint efforts,” she wrote.
The case was sent back to the district court. “This fight is far from over,” Samples, the Friends of the Everglades director, said in a statement Tuesday night. “Alligator Alcatraz will go down in history as a boondoggle to taxpayers and a flagrant assault on the Everglades, and we look forward to returning to the District Court to advance our case to shut it down.”
2026-04-23 01:34:19
Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.
Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.
The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.
Even as the company struggled, Nunes prospered. In 2024 alone, his pay outstripped any revenue the company has made over its lifetime—he drew a salary of $1 million, a bonus of $600,000 and was awarded stock worth another $46 million.
To be fair to Nunes, he was asked to oversee a company that despite having one of thet world’s most recognizable faces as its power user, had a remarkably scattershot approach to everything.
When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.
Of those grand dreams, under Nunes, Trump Media managed to launch Truth Social and a tepid streaming service, that runs for free and mostly provides content that is also free on YouTube. Truth Social may have as few as several hundred thousand daily active users, while Elon Musk’s X is estimated to have around 224 million. Those kind of numbers place it firmly in 24th place among social media companies, a few spots behind YouTube Kids.
That’s not how things were supposed to go. At its launch, a slide presentation distributed to investors and filed with the SEC suggested that by 2026, the company expected to have about $3.3 billion in revenue, 40 million users on Truth Social and another 81 million spread across the company’s other services.
Under Nunes, the company has, instead, struck out in seemingly random directions. It has, among other things, launched:
The last initiative, which was announced in May of 2025, a few months before a massive decline in Bitcoin prices kicked in, is responsible for most of the $712 million in losses. The company had purchased roughly $2.5 billion in bitcoin, and the latest data suggests that after declines in the price of Bitcoin and sale of some of the company’s Bitcoins, the treasury is now worth just $753 million.
Trump Media’s boldest move under Nunes might have been the idea to pivot to nuclear power—specifically the largely experimental method of nuclear fusion. In nuclear fission, which is the method used for decades, atoms are split, but in fusion, pushing atoms together generates even greater energy—but the process has never been made commercially viable. In late 2025, Trump Media announced it would be merging with TAE Technologies, a longstanding player in the fusion field, which despite having previously secured funding, was still struggling to build an actual power plant.
The merger, which is supposed to be completed in June, would have made Nunes co-CEO of the social media, streaming, web-hosting, financial products, Bitcoin treasury and nuclear fusion company.
All that is a lot of responsibility for Nunes who began his career working on the family dairy farm in southern California in the early 1990s (he has a degree in agriculture). First elected to Congress in 2003 and served for 19 years, including several as the chairman of the House Intelligence committee, where he and one of his staffers—Kash Patel—became two of Trump’s loudest backers in accusing a “deep state” in the intelligence community of having targeted Trump.
Nunes had no specific experience running a technology company before taking over as CEO of Trump Media, but in 2019 he sued political strategist Liz Mair and two anonymous parody Twitter accounts, including @DevinCow, which purported to be one of the cows on his dairy farm, for defamation. Nunes asked for $250 million in damages, but the case was dismissed.
Nunes confirmed his departure from Trump Media but did not say what he would be doing next. He remains chairman of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
2026-04-23 00:09:25
A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
On Saturday, Donald Trump convened a meeting on the Iran war in the White House situation room. At the table, according to news reports, were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, envoy Steve Witkoff, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Missing from this list: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. This was another opportunity for administration officials to snicker that DNI stands for Do Not Invite.
You might wonder what’s the point of having a director of national intelligence who’s routinely not included in major deliberations about national security. Gabbard’s value for Trump is not in her oversight of the 18 agencies in the intelligence community, which is ostensibly her job. Nor in her intelligence experience, which is slight. It is in her willingness to serve Trump’s lust for vengeance against those he deems his political enemies. That includes her enthusiasm for politicizing and weaponizing intelligence to an extent never seen in US history.
Last summer, she did this by releasing highly classified intelligence documents that she claimed proved that President Barack Obama, his CIA chief John Brennan, and other Deep Staters had committed “treason”—a crime punishable by death. She accused them of falsifying intelligence to show that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had covertly intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Trump. The memos clearly did not show that. (Investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee have confirmed Putin attacked that election to boost Trump.)
Here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.
Gabbard’s stunt was a despicable act of immense gaslighting. And she and Trump each called for Obama, Brennan, and others to be prosecuted. Trump went so far as to post an AI-generated video of FBI agents violently handcuffing and arresting Obama and tossing him into a prison cell. In the video, Obama is on his knees before Trump. Never has intelligence been so abused by an administration for purely political purposes. Gabbard’s move led the Justice Department to mount a criminal investigation of Brennan and others that is ongoing.
At the time, Gabbard also declassified and made public a secret report that cited Russian intelligence material from 2016 that claimed Hillary Clinton suffered from “intensified psycho-emotional problems,” was on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers,” and had schemed to set up the Trump-Russia scandal to distract from her email controversy. But US intelligence analysts and FBI agents had previously judged this Russian material to be unreliable and possibly disinformation. So here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials who worried its disclosure could compromise sources and methods—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.
Trump loved it. Gabbard had been on the outs with the White House prior to this for several reasons, including her release of a video that implied she opposed military action against Iran. Now Trump proclaimed her a “star.”
Recently, Gabbard was again in the hot seat. In March, the day after her ally Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the Iran war, Gabbard testified before Congress on threats posed to the United States. Trump, according to Axios, was displeased that Gabbard at this hearing did not wholeheartedly endorse his war in Iran and personally scolded her. He was also apparently mad that she had protected Kent, who had publicly undercut his rationale for the war. (In his resignation letter, Kent said Iran posed no “imminent threat” to the United States.) Trump began asking his top advisers if he should give Gabbard the boot.
Gabbard showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe.
MAGA activist Laura Loomer tweeted that “Tulsi was done” and that the White House was about to show her the door. But this didn’t happen. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser who was found guilty of lying to Congress during the Trump-Russia scandal (and subsequently pardoned by Trump), took credit for interceding with Trump and rescuing Gabbard. Axios quoted “a source familiar with Trump’s thinking” saying, “Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi.”
Whether Stone’s influence mattered or not, Gabbard last week showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe and to reveal yet another purported Deep State conspiracy against the president.
This time, the target was the whistleblower who in 2019 filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, about the infamous phone call during which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch investigations to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, who was then running for president, and to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election. The whistleblower maintained that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”
Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.
When the acting DNI, John Maguire, declined to share this classified complaint with Congress, Atkinson informed Congress of its existence, triggering a brouhaha that soon led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump was not convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate, but he has always been steamed by the impeachment. Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.
Last week, she released a handful of documents that she asserted exposed “a coordinated effort by elements within the Intelligence Community (IC), including a former Inspector General (IG), to manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump in 2019.” She insisted these records show that Atkinson “did not follow standard IG procedures and relied upon politicized, manufactured narratives” and that he took “actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction.”
Once more, she insisted that Trump was the victim of a nefarious cabal: “Deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States.”
Yet again, Gabbard is pulling a big con. The materials she released do not back up the charge that Atkinson mishandled this case, and they certainly don’t prove a narrative was manufactured. In fact, the whistleblower’s complaint was largely confirmed when the Trump White House, under pressure, released a summary of his call with Zelenskyy. And that summary played a more critical role in the impeachment proceedings than the whistleblower’s complaint. During the Trump-Ukraine controversy, Maguire testified that the whistleblower “did the right thing.” Maguire also testified that Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint was done “by the book” and consistent with the law.
Gabbard went further then pumping out more disinformation. She sent the Justice Department criminal referrals for Atkinson, who Trump fired in April 2020, and the whistleblower, who has never been officially identified. (Conservative media, Donald Trump Jr., and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul revealed his name during the impeachment.)
A pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position.
This is another dangerous action from Gabbard, who once again is abusing intelligence to gin up a criminal case to feed Trump’s revenge fantasy. There is no case here. There was no Deep State plot. This is all about payback—and Gabbard keeping her job.
A few days ago, a pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position. This MAGA influencer called this conduct reprehensible, noting that if Gabbard has evidence of Deep State conspiracies, she ought to put it all out.
But none of the material Gabbard has released so far proves the conspiracy theories she’s peddling. As an apparatchik for Dear Leader, she’s misrepresenting once-classified material to set up show trials and demonstrating she will lie and cheat for Trump—and to stay employed. Such a disingenuous DNI is a threat to national security. Nothing she says—in private to the president or in public—can be trusted.
Gabbard’s most recent efforts to deceive the public have not received the media attention they deserve. They ought to be front-page news, for Gabbard also is leading the administration’s effort to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Remember when she was photographed at the Atlanta site when FBI agents seized voting records and machines?
If Gabbard will manufacture false narratives and bogus evidence to support baseless criminal prosecutions of supposed Deep State conspirators and Trump critics, what might she do to cook up proof of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 elections or to concoct phony evidence of fraud in the coming midterm elections?
Gabbard is a careerist chameleon. In 2018, as I revealed last year, she spoke at the Bernie Sanders Institute and slammed Trump as a supporter of “genocidal war.” In 2019, when she was running for president as a progressive Democrat, she blasted Trump for being “on the brink of launching us into a very stupid and costly war with Iran.” Now she’s a Trump loyalist. She clearly will flip positions and jettison supposed principles to attain power. And she has demonstrated she’s willing to go far beyond that.
Gabbard may not be in the room when the big decisions about war are being made. But she’s prosecuting her own war on the truth to score retaliation for Trump. To date, her war has targeted a handful of people whom Trump craves to see crushed. But with her focus also on elections, it’s a war that could affect the future of American democracy.
2026-04-22 23:58:35
A majority of American adults say that the US House should vote to impeach President Trump—including one-in-five people who voted for him in 2024.
A new poll by Strength in Numbers, a data-based news website, and the market research platform Verasight found that 55 percent of respondents said they support the US House voting for impeachment. Out of the 1,514 Americans surveyed between April 10 and April 14, 37 percent said they opposed and eight percent reported they were unsure.
While this is just one poll in a collection of many, it is clear that Trump’s approval ratings are sinking. The New York Times’ daily average of dozens of polls has the president at a 38 percent approval rating. On January 27, 2025, the first average calculated following Inauguration Day, the Times recorded Trump’s approval rating at 52 percent.
The numbers are striking, but there are few avenues for popular sentiment to achieve tangible results in Washington. There have been numerous calls from lawmakers to impeach and convict Trump or invoke the 25th Amendment, especially following his threats of genocide against the people of Iran. But they appear unlikely to succeed given the Republican majorities in the US House and Senate, as well as large support from his cabinet.
However, as I wrote on Sunday about Trump’s approval rating falling to its lowest point of his second term, if Americans see the upcoming midterms as a referendum on the failures of the current administration, then it could swing elections across the country.
2026-04-22 19:30:00
The most parasocial relationship I have is with a family of eagles that lives in Big Bear Valley, California. I watch them for hours every day through a camera mounted above their nest that is streamed live onto YouTube. There is a mother and a father who’ve been named Jackie and Shadow by the Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the webcam. They have two little chicks that, for now, are nameless. Eventually, the two chicks will have their names selected by a group of third graders in Big Bear.
I turn on the livestream when I start my work day, usually watching on my second monitor, but occasionally parking myself on the couch and opting for a more full-screen experience on the TV. I spend my day typing Slack messages, and Jackie and Shadow spend theirs hunting and feeding their babies and maintaining their nest and watching for threats.
When my husband calls on his way home from work to check in I tell him about these developments.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“It was good, but a little stressful because Jackie and Shadow had to leave the chicks to chase off some ravens that were getting too close to the nest.”
“Oh,” he says, “that is stressful,” kindly refraining from pointing out that this information tells him nothing about my day.
My day, usually, is good too, if not also a little stressful. I run the fact-checking department for Mother Jones. I read the news, and like my colleagues, I live in it. I read their reporting carefully, looking for any leaps in logic or possible factual discrepancies or potential legal issues. I believe strongly in what I do, what we do here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and I like doing it too. Sometimes though, I am overwhelmed by the responsibility of being a journalist in today’s world, or by the news or by just being a person existing.
But I look up from a court document or new draft of a story or an email from a writer when I hear Jackie start to crow. My dog hates the sound, and she’ll pace the living room, looking for the source. Usually, Jackie is shrieking in delight as Shadow delivers a fish from the lake, and she will immediately jump up to feed her chicks. They are just about two weeks old now, but they are growing so fast. They have to, because they’ll fledge the nest in just about eight weeks.
It reminds me of when my husband returns home from work, sometimes with a little treat he’s picked up on the way: a piece of chocolate or a small bag of chips. I crow with delight too, though I have spent the entire day only feet from my kitchen and its full pantry, while Jackie has spent hers 145 feet in the air in a Jeffrey pine tree.
Everything about watching these birds delights me, and simultaneously makes me feel totally insignificant. I get cold and I turn on our heat. Jackie braves snowstorms, creating a canopy with her wings to keep the snow off her chicks. I send more Slacks. Jackie shows her babies how to fly.
Sometimes Jackie stares directly into the camera, and I imagine she’s looking right at me. She can see through the camera and into my living room, me in my enormous stained sweatshirts, my dirty dishes around me, staring at my laptop screen. I wonder how it makes her feel about her nest way up there. I wonder, if from her vantage point, we look as small as I feel.
2026-04-22 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Enormous new batteries keep appearing on the grid, making it devilishly tricky to keep track of which is the biggest in a given region. That’s certainly the case in New England, where acute power needs and robust state climate goals are fueling a buildout of big batteries that keep breaking capacity records.
Canary Media recently covered the inauguration of the 175-megawatt Cross Town battery in Gorham, Maine, which was the largest in New England when it began operating in late November. But that trophy has already passed to a 250-megawatt facility in Medway, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston and about 10 miles from the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.
The Medway battery came online fully on February 25, according to developer VC Renewables, a subsidiary of global energy trader Vitol. “To be fair, I don’t expect Medway to hold that title for very long, either,” said Tom Bitting, managing director at Advantage Capital, which supported the project with a $158 million tax equity deal. “There are other batteries being developed in New England that are bigger, but I think it is all just a sign that we need all of it, and there’s huge demand for it.”
“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone.”
For instance, Jupiter Power, a heavyweight in Texas’ booming grid storage market, is developing the 700-megawatt/2.8-gigawatt-hour Trimount battery plant at a former oil-storage site in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Jupiter aims to finish the project in 2028 or 2029. Trimount is slated to be among the largest stand-alone batteries in the whole country—Vistra’s battery in Moss Landing, California, set that record with 750 megawatts/3 gigawatt-hours, before much of that capacity burned up in a disastrous fire.
The wave of battery megaprojects marks a new chapter for the region, which until recently was focused on building small-scale batteries. Massachusetts encouraged this by requiring energy storage alongside many distributed solar projects that received payments through the state’s main solar incentive; this rule led to a buildout of systems in the range of 1 to 5 megawatts.
Bigger batteries started taking off in the late 2010s out West: In California, Arizona, and Nevada, where developers can sign long-term contracts to deliver grid capacity; and in Texas, where they can bid into a uniquely competitive market.
The first three big batteries in New England—Plus Power’s Cranberry Point and Cross Town, as well as Medway, which was previously developed by Eolian—won seven-year contracts in 2021 to provide capacity for the New England grid, but the grid operator subsequently shortened that kind of contract to one year. After that change, developers have struggled with the lack of long-term capacity revenue; they can still charge up when prices are low and sell when they’re high, but that’s an unpredictable revenue stream that financiers might not want to underwrite.
Massachusetts has succeeded in building a robust fleet of small-scale solar—on recent sunny spring days, it has generated close to half the region’s demand. But leaders knew they needed batteries to keep cleaning up the grid in the hours when solar doesn’t produce. So they created a new policy driver for storage investment called the Clean Peak Standard, which officially took effect in 2020.
The rule orders utilities to serve a percentage of their peak-demand hours with clean electricity, and the target grows with each passing year. Companies that use batteries to save solar energy for the evening—when electricity consumption rises as people get home from work and school—earn credits that they can sell to utilities, providing some revenue certainty outside the wholesale market.
The administration of Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, views storage as a key lever to improve energy affordability, Undersecretary of Energy Michael Judge said, because it makes better use of existing grid infrastructure to meet peak demand.
Batteries can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without smokestacks or pollution.
“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone,” he said. “You don’t have to run these peakers, and you get all the emissions benefits and integration of clean energy benefits, too.”
It took several years for the rule to actually spur batteries in the multihundred-megawatt range, but now that era has begun. Advantage Capital, for example, factored in revenues from the Clean Peak Standard when it analyzed and underwrote the investment in the Medway project, Bitting noted. A total of 725 megawatts of battery storage had qualified for the Clean Peak Standard as of early March, according to state data.
Stand-alone grid battery projects are also bolstered by a federal tax credit that can cut investment costs by 30 percent, an incentive that the Trump administration preserved in last summer’s budget law even as it slashed support for wind, solar, and electric vehicles.
Clean Peak cash alone doesn’t pay the bills; battery developers still need to make money in the marketplace. Though New England lacks long-term capacity contracts, storage companies in the region have at least two factors working in their favor: some of the nation’s highest electricity prices and growing demand for power.
“It’s very difficult to get additional generation online in an area with high population density, because regardless of what type of power generation you’re building, it requires a lot of space,” Bitting said. Batteries, though, can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without the smokestacks or pollution that make it hard to build new fossil-fueled plants in populous areas.
Batteries compete directly with gas power plants to serve the peak hours of demand, when prices are highest. That’s especially valuable in New England, where gas supplies are stretched thin between power generation and home heating on the coldest days of the year.
“When it’s cold, the households are going to continue to demand it,” Bitting said. “But if we can ease some of the peak on the utility side, that will provide a relief valve to supply.”
Jupiter Power’s colossal Trimount project will continue New England’s foray into large batteries, with the ability to discharge enough power for roughly 500,000 homes, per the developer. Trimount was the largest of four battery projects selected in December from Massachusetts’ statewide solicitation to bring on more Clean Peak power. Previously, battery owners could sell off their Clean Peak credits on a quarterly or annual basis. The new solicitation was designed to produce “cost-effective” long-term contracts for storage, giving developers more stable revenue to plan around. Furthermore, Healey doubled down on grid storage in a March 16 executive order that calls for another 5 gigawatts installed by 2035.
“That kind of policy signal, combined with the state’s grid reliability challenges and its decarbonization commitments, creates the conditions for investment at scale,” Hans Detweiler, senior director for development at Jupiter, said in an email.
Massachusetts officials also hope to speed development with new permitting rules, which run large battery applications through a state-level body instead of piecemeal local processes. Community members still get to weigh in, but the program has a clear 15-month timeline and allows just a single appeal to the state Supreme Court, to ensure a more timely resolution of conflicts in the permitting process.
The true test of all these policies will be whether the recent megabatteries kick off a trend, or remain bold outliers in the region’s energy system.
