Current conditions: The Atlantic hurricane season officially began today, in what’s expected to be a relatively mild year • A powerful storm with winds of up to 80 miles per hour is walloping broad swaths of millions of Australians • Temperatures in Oman are approaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
THE TOP FIVE
1. A Chinese wind giant prepares an offshore turbine barrage in Canada
Ming Yang blades, waiting in the wings. Visual China Group via Getty Images
The United States’ offshore wind industry is, at this very moment, booming — at least in terms of the turbine arrays finally coming online in recent weeks. But there are no new projects underway as President Donald Trump pulls out all the stops to kill the industry in what I have previously called a death by a thousand cuts. That’s despite the fact that demand for electricity is soaring in the U.S. Luckily for Americans, our nation’s aging network of power grids overlaps with our northern neighbor’s. And Canada is now looking at a potential offshore wind boom. Last summer, Nova Scotia started laying the groundwork for offshore wind projects. Now Ming Yang, the world’s third-largest manufacturer of wind turbines, is considering investing in a project off Canada’s Pacific coast. The proposed project in the Hecate Strait off British Columbia would add up to 2 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity to Canada’s portfolio, according to Renewables Now. It’s part of Ming Yang’s broader push into Western markets, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported last October.
2. California joins New York’s retreat from climate goals
Just days after New York State delayed its carbon-cutting plan and loosened the rules on how it counts greenhouse gases, California mounted its own retreat on climate goals. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the California Air Resources Board had voted to give as much as $4 billion of free allowances to oil refiners and other industrial polluters to make compliance with the state’s 13-year-old carbon market easier. At least New York Governor Kathy Hochul “had the decency” to signal publicly that she intended to roll back the state’s climate law, said Danny Cullenward, an economist and lawyer who wrote a book on climate policy. “Here in California we do the same in private and call it climate leadership,” Cullenward wrote of California Governor Gavin Newsom and CARB Chair Lauren Sanchez in a post on Bluesky.
Kudos to the Trump administration, then, for being so open about its plans to render the SEC something that might more appropriately serve as an acronym for Salting the Earth of Climate disclosures. Last month, I told you that the Securities and Exchange Commission was reviewing a Biden-era rule requiring companies to disclose the risk climate change posed to their businesses. On Friday, the agency formally proposed eliminating the regulation. “SEC disclosure obligations should comply with the Commission’s statutory authority, be guided by materiality as the North Star, avoid the practical effect of dictating corporate behavior, and be imposed only when the expected benefits justify the likely costs and burdens,” SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins said in a statement.
3. Exclusive: A major provider of off-grid power to data centers is expanding its big factory
Rehlko isn’t a household name, but it used to be: The 106-year-old firm was previously called Kohler Energy. But since spinning out from the titan of American manufacturing of kitchen sinks and bathroom toilets, Rehlko has honed its business as a leading producer and installer of generators and the infrastructure to house the diesel-, gas-, or hydrogen-fired power sources. Now, I can report exclusively for this newsletter, the company is preparing to expand its factory in Wisconsin as its backlog of orders for generators to power data centers stretches beyond 13 months. In an interview on Friday, Rehlko CEO Brian Melka told me that this facility is part of a plan “to increase the size and the output of the business about four to five times, or 400% to 500%, over the next five or six years.” The Wisconsin plant is specifically designed to assemble the company’s “e-frame” product, a generator enclosure that looks like a shipping container and includes the wiring and fire suppression tools needed to safely house one of Rehlko’s proprietary generators, which provide off-grid back-up power to data centers, hospitals, and other large power users. In addition to beefing up its capacity to manufacture more generators and enclosures, the company is expanding its engineering team for larger projects in which Rehlko uses another firm’s gas turbines for full-time power generation.
“We want to maintain that competitive edge, not only to be able to deliver the product faster but also to deliver the entire solution faster,” Melka said. “This is going to significantly increase our capacity as we go into 2027 with this new facility to be able to build many more fully enclosed units. The demand keeps pushing out. We essentially sold out the capacity for that building for 2027 and 2028 before we even signed the lease.”
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4. In a bullish sign for a novel industry, a nuclear recycler starts its NRC application
Unlike Russia, France, Japan, and China, the U.S. doesn’t recycle its nuclear waste. That is, until now. Roughly half a dozen companies are competing to be the first to create a beachhead for a new recycling industry in the U.S. Now one of those startups, Curio, has kicked off the pre-application process for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission permit. It’s just an inaugural step: Submitting a letter of intent to the agency to establish a docket and start providing documents to the regulator. But Curio plans to build a plant that could process up to 4,000 metric tons of used commercial light water reactor fuel per year. “The initiation of this application process marks a key and decisive moment for Curio and our nation as we commercially deploy what will be the world’s most advanced and capable used nuclear fuel recycling facility based on our game-changing NuCycle technology,” Curio CEO Ed McGinnis said in a statement, referring to the brand of the company’s reprocessing technology that was recently validated by four of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories.
South Korea, meanwhile, wants to start enriching and reprocessing its own fuel, and has garnered support from the Trump administration to do so. In the meantime, the democratic world’s most competent builder of civilian nuclear plants is doing what it does best and starting construction on a new reactor. On Friday, World Nuclear News reported that crews had poured the first concrete for Shin Hanul nuclear plant’s fourth reactor.
5. Data centers may be holding back America’s aluminum revival
In January, I told you when Century Aluminum overhauled its plans to build the first new aluminum smelter in the U.S. to include an investment from an Emirati company. At the time, the Energy Department hailed the deal as a sign that Trump’s tariffs were working. On Friday, Mining.com published a feature building off a report from the advocacy group Industrious Labs that examined the recent push for new aluminum smelting in the U.S. The analysis concluded that, while 50% tariffs bolstered the sector, “access to industrial-scale electricity — and increasingly industrial-scale clean electricity — is the pain point,” said Annie Sartor, senior campaigns director at Industrious Labs. “Aluminum producers are being scooped by data centers and hyperscalers. They can simply pay more for the power.”
THE KICKER
Among the more exciting concepts for supplying the market with cheap, clean, and affordable hydrogen is finding the stuff in naturally-formed underground reservoirs, allowing oil and gas drillers to do their thing for a green fuel. Now Oman, the Arab world’s diplomatic equivalent of Switzerland, is making progress in drilling the first wells for natural hydrogen. HyTerra, the Australian startup exploring for hydrogen in the country, told the Oman Observer that the successful pilot well boded well for tapping “one of the best source rock systems” for natural hydrogen yet discovered in the world. Given the latest heat wave in the country, the value of a fossil fuel replacement is likely becoming more obvious.
Ming Yang blades, waiting in the wings. Visual China Group via Getty Images
Getting fracked up. EIA
