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On ‘precariously low’ oil stockpiles, China’s ammonia milestone, and a PFAS destroyer
On nuclear waste, a Nevada solar farm, and lithium-harvesting nanorobots
On Yucca Mountain, Europe’s inverter boom, and Romanian offshore wind
Wildfires in France and Spain — and a dire El Niño forecast — point to another era of public attention on disaster.
Can AI help emergency managers make faster decisions when every second counts?
On Meta quits, Elon Musk’s solar plans, and federal coal reserves
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Bertha washed out the majority of monitored sea turtle nests in the western part of the Florida Panhandle • Record rain in West Virginia swelled creeks that toppled bridges in the north central part of the state • In the Pacific, Tropical Depression Kiyapo is barreling toward the northern part of the Philippines’ Luzon island.
Aerial view this month of solar panels in China’s Zhejiang Province. VCG/VCG via Getty Images
China just quietly upped its target for renewable energy consumption, ratcheting up the goal 53% by 2030, rising to 1.8 billion tons of coal equivalent from 1.18 billion tons last year. That’s according to the latest five-year plan for renewables the National Development and Reform Commission published on its website. Wind and solar, paired with energy storage, are expected to provide 20% of electricity during the summer and winter evening peak periods, up from 10% currently, according to Bloomberg. By 2030, Beijing wants 300 gigawatts of peak capacity from renewables. Non-electric utilization of renewables, such as for heavy industry, is projected to rise to 150 million tons of coal equivalent from 60 million in 2025. The People’s Republic is betting on novel technologies to start taking off. By the start of the next decade, China wants to increase solar thermal capacity to 15 gigawatts from just under 2 gigawatts at the end of last year. The government wants marine energy, such as tidal and wave power, to go from virtually nothing today to at least 400 megawatts.
In the meantime, Beijing’s buildout of nuclear reactors continues apace. Per my promise to keep you abreast of all the big milestones, here’s the latest: China General Nuclear just installed the “supermodule” for the CAP1000 — the Chinese version of America’s Westinghouse AP1000 — at its Unit 2 project at the Lufeng Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong Province. The installation this week of a module that’s too big to be transported by rail or boat and thus needed to be fabricated on site “signifies that the construction of the reactor building” for the new unit “has entered a new phase.”
Meta has quit a top corporate initiative to promote clean energy as the Facebook parent company has built out at least a dozen gas-fired power stations to supply electricity to its data centers over the past year. While rivals such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft remain members of the RE100, a project of the British-headquartered nonprofit the Climate Group that former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair co-founded, Recharge News reported that Meta had left the initiative. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch it was a mutual decision, though Meta declined to comment on the exact reasoning.
The United States currently has a little over 70 gigawatts of capacity to manufacture solar panels each year. Tesla has plans to dramatically increase that number. “We are just going to multiply it [by] an order of magnitude,” Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s chief financial officer, said during an earnings call Wednesday night. “We’re going at a very rapid scale.” It was just one of the various investments the electric auto giant is banking on investors to support as billionaire CEO Elon Musk ramps up spending on manufacturing semiconductors and humanoid robots as part of its artificial intelligence buildout, while also tackling an energy source that the scale of China’s factories has largely brought down to a commodified price. The stock plunged nearly 15% on Thursday as CNBC cautioned that investors are increasingly spooked about spending on artificial intelligence. “Yes, this means that we are doing a lot of things all at the same time,” Taneja said. “And that’s why we just have to go as fast as … humanly possible, make things work in the real world.”
Adding to the company’s woes: The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen regulations on car door hands after federal filings linked electric door failures to at least 15 deaths in Tesla vehicles, Bloomberg reported.
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The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, surpassed $100 per barrel for the first time since May amid President Donald Trump’s threats to ramp up the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran and a resurgence of attacks from Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, finished out the day of trading at a little over $92 per barrel. Murban crude, out of the United Arab Emirates, soared nearly 20% to more than $107 per barrel. On Thursday, Trump told Axios he was close to a final decision on whether to launch a “massive attack” on Iran, “bigger than ever before.” The threat comes on what the Financial Times clocked as the 12th straight night of U.S. strikes against the Islamic Republic.
A new analysis from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie, meanwhile, showed the limits of Saudi Arabia’s main bypass for the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh redirected virtually all crude exports through its East-West Pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea after Iran closed the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf at the start of the war in February. Volumes flowing through the pipeline peaked at more than 4 million barrels per day in March. But by June, that flow declined to about 2.4 million barrels per day, a 41% decline. On the whole, crude exports out of the Persian Gulf fell 82% between January and June. That’s likely due to dropping production as the regional industry struggles to find sufficient outlets for its supply. The Red Sea corridor also also “faces a declared Houthi blockade that, if enforced, could reduce global oil supply considerably.”
The U.S. has 4.2 billion short tons of coal reserves in active mines and another 356 billion short tons in untapped deposits, according to an updated U.S. Geological Survey report the Department of the Interior released Thursday. If extracted and burned in a power plant, the coal could supply the nation’s needs for at least 600 years at the current rate of consumption, the agency said. “American Energy Dominance is more important than ever, and so is beautiful, clean coal’s role in the production of electricity needed to fuel our future prosperity,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. “Thanks to the USGS’s rigorous and independent assessment, we’re better equipped to manage America’s vast public lands responsibly while supporting energy security and economic opportunity.” Of the 34 coal mines on federal land, 14 are located in Wyoming, followed by Colorado with six, North Dakota and Utah with four mines each, and Alabama and Montana with three mines each. But Wyoming's mines contain 87% of the reserves associated with active mines on federal lands. As I told you last month, the Trump administration put up $850 million to support a coal revival. And the Iran War, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in March, is only fueling more demand for coal.
Last month, I told you that Japan was the other country, besides the United States, bucking the global trend toward more, not less, offshore wind. Here’s a good reminder that, in most cases, such trends are directional, not definitive. The 315-megawatt Oga-Katagami-Akita offshore wind project just received its certification from Japanese regulators, “confirming that the design of its wind power generation facilities complies with” technical standards. It’s a major step toward building the array of 21 Vestas turbines off the coast of Akita Prefecture, per offshoreWIND.biz.
On Trump’s power pledge, America’s offshore nuclear, and Japan’s offshore wind
Current conditions: A new heat dome is spreading temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit across the Central United States, from Texas north to the Dakotas • Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall over southern Louisiana with winds of up to 45 miles per hour • Tasmania is facing a cold front with freezing wind chills.
Saudi Arabia's Minister of Energy Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman speaks at last year’s International Atomic Energy Agency plenary. JOE KLAMAR/AFP via Getty Images
On December 8, 1953 — just eight years after the United States demonstrated the destructive power of splitting atoms in the form of a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima — then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged to lead the world in harnessing fission to constructive ends. In his famed “Atoms for Peace” speech, he vowed to help other nations build nuclear power stations that he believed would bring about a new era of global prosperity built atop a foundation of abundant electricity. Under the law Congress passed the next year to lay the groundwork for a nuclear buildout, Washington didn’t make it easy for foreign countries to import American technology. Before any U.S. nuclear company can sell its wares abroad, the Senate needs to approve what’s known as a 123 Agreement, essentially a treaty in which the partner nation agrees not to use the technology for weapons proliferation. When Abu Dhabi set out to build the Arab world’s first nuclear power station, the U.S. struck a new, special 123 Agreement with the United Arab Emirates in 2009, in which the Gulf monarchy swore off ever enriching or recycling its own fuel. That deal became the gold standard for U.S. nuclear pacts — and one Washington had planned to make a requirement for any other countries in the region. Saudi Arabia, however, wasn’t happy with those restrictions, particularly as its rival Iran pressed ahead with construction of its second and third reactors at its debut Russian-made nuclear station. With the Biden administration putting up resistance, Riyadh began flaunting talks with Beijing to buy Chinese reactors, in what would mark a major entry of the People’s Republic into the nuclear export market.
All of which you needed to know to appreciate what a huge deal the latest news is. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Associated Press confirmed that Saudi Arabia had reached a deal with the Trump administration that would likely allow Riyadh to enrich and recycle its own fuel on its soil. While a formal announcement is expected this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio already acknowledged the deal by telling reporters any such agreement would not lead to weapons proliferation. On the face of it, the deal is a major win for the U.S. over its arch adversaries. Russia dominates global nuclear exports, and is currently building the debut plants in Bangladesh, Egypt, and Turkey. China, meanwhile, has dramatically brought down the cost and time it takes to build its own domestic reactors, which are based on the leading American design, and Beijing is widely expected to make an export push in the coming years. The U.S. has managed to win deals in Eastern Europe to build Poland’s first nuclear plant. But so far, American technology has struggled to compete on both price and construction competence. A moment when Iran is firing missiles at America’s Arab allies may seem ill-suited to embarking on a civilian nuclear program, but the Atlantic Council researcher Allison Minor, who previously served as a U.S. deputy special envoy to Yemen, said the war had added urgency to brokering the Saudi-U.S. deal. “By keeping the door open for uranium enrichment inside Saudi Arabia, the nuclear deal sends a powerful message to Tehran,” she wrote in a blog post. “By securing a 123 agreement that appears to have more preferable terms than the United Arab Emirates and dozens of other U.S. partners have committed to, Riyadh also signals its role as a major global player, even if it is not among the ranks of nuclear-armed nations.”
In March, the White House organized a voluntary industry pledge in which hyperscalers and data centers developers promised to pay above and beyond the normal rate for electricity to ease the strain on Americans. On Thursday, the Trump administration plans to announce a vast expansion of the pact to include the nation’s largest utilities, Reuters reported. Utilities NextEra Energy and Duke Energy joined data center developers Equinix and Digital Realty along with roughly 200 other entities on a list of signatories The Wall Street Journal obtained.
The move comes a day after ratepayer advocates accused the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of failing to address the cost of upgrading infrastructure in its latest order meant to ease the impacts of data centers, Utility Dive reported. Polling from Heatmap Pro has shown repeatedly that public support for data centers is collapsing.
The Colorado River’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, hit record lows in what experts described to the Los Angeles Times this week as a “five-alarm fire.” On Tuesday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum met with the governors of seven states virtually ahead of his agency’s anticipated release of a plan to cut back on water use to ease shortages. That states appear to be welcoming a federal intervention marks a break with more than a century of Western states fighting to manage their water supplies among themselves with minimal oversight from Washington. Yet “far from a brash commandeering of the system,” E&E News reported, Burgum’s plan “is effectively a kick-the-can exercise for managing the drought-riddled river that supplies water” for one in 10 Americans. “At best, the Trump administration’s plan will leave economies — from the bucolic ranches of the Rocky Mountains to the mansions of Los Angeles, the tech hub of Phoenix and the powerhouse farms along the border with Mexico — in a state of limbo, without clear rules for who will have access to vital supplies in the years to come,” reporter Annie Snider wrote. “At worst, it dares the region’s political leaders — most especially Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, who is facing one of the country’s closest gubernatorial races in the fall — to launch a destabilizing court fight.” As former Heatmap reporter Neel Dhanesha wrote in 2023, sometimes plans can at least buy some time.
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Russia officially kicked off the global race for small modular reactors in 2019 with the launch of its first floating nuclear station, which is still pumping out power in an Arctic port today. Since then, dozens of companies have proposed small reactors on land, and a handful of startups has looked to build nuclear-propelled civilian ships. But no one has really attempted any major offshore nuclear energy projects yet. Still, the Trump administration is preparing for the potential new sector. On Wednesday, the Department of the Interior’s Marine Minerals Administration — the agency recently formed out of combining the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management with the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement — signed a memorandum of understanding with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “responsibly respond to industry requests” and support new technologies.
“Submerged reactor systems have been safely deployed in naval applications for decades, demonstrating their potential as a reliable source of energy in demanding marine environments,” Matt Giacona, the acting director of the Marine Minerals Administration, said in a statement. “While no commercial deployment on the Outer Continental Shelf is planned or approved at this time, it could greatly strengthen America’s energy security in the future.”
China unveiled a new set of rules for the solar industry last week that are expected to “do a good job in cutting out low-cost, outdated technology across the value chain,” according to a new report from the research division at the magazine PV Tech. The new national regulations, set to take effect on January 1, 2027, phase out weaker panels and conventional polysilicon products. “These new restrictions are very interesting as the Chinese government now sees a need to stop the oversupply, maybe coming from lowered deployment in China in the first half of the year,” Joe Hennessy, co-author of the report and analyst at PV Tech Research, told PV Tech. “This will affect the smaller producers the most, as they are less likely to have upgraded lines during the period of losses.” Larger solar manufacturers are already producing panels with efficiency rates of up to 24%, the report found.
This is a story I’m planning to keep a close eye on, given the forthcoming results of the Department of Commerce’s 232 investigation into whether domestic U.S. producers of polysilicon need new tariffs to protect them against Chinese imports. My best-placed sources say the agency is on track to release its findings by next month, though others close to the process say the 74-day government shutdown could give the administration until early September to meet its legal deadlines.”
Koloma, the startup seeking to tap into naturally occurring hydrogen deposits, has a third exploration deal in the Philippines. On Thursday, Heatmap editorial fellow Ameya Hadap broke news that the company has inked an agreement for exclusive rights to a roughly 817-square-mile area of Luzon’s Zambales Province. The Colorado-based firm now has the rights to more than 1,600 square miles of the country.
