The U.S. Has Lost $34 Billion in Clean Energy Projects

Current conditions: Temperatures across the Northeast will drop nearly 30 degrees Fahrenheit below historical averages as another five inches snow heads for New England • Warmer air blowing eastward from the Pacific is set to ease the East Coast cold snap by mid-month • Storm Leonardo is pummeling Iberia with rain, killing at least one person so far and forcing more than 4,000 to evacuate Andalusia, Spain.

THE TOP FIVE

1. More than $34 billion of clean energy projects canceled in the U.S.

Developers axed or pared down more than $34 billion worth of clean energy projects across the United States last year as the Trump administration yanked back support for renewables and low-carbon industries. Last year marked the first time since 2022 that companies abandoned more annual investments than they announced in the sector, E&E News reported, citing a new report from the clean energy business group E2. The 61 affected projects had promised about 38,000 jobs.

Things may be looking up for embattled renewables. Offshore wind companies have, so far, won every challenge to President Donald Trump’s orders to halt construction. As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, Katie Miller, the right-wing influencer and wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has for the past two days promoted the value of solar and batteries in posts on X. Another data point: The Wall Street Journal just reported that the chief financial officer of the posh home-exercise bike company Peloton is jumping ship to the solar company Palmetto.

2. Federal judge rules Texas law penalizing fossil fuel critics unconstitutional

A federal judge in Texas struck down a 2021 law barring state agencies from investing in firms accused of boycotting fossil fuel companies, ruling that the statute was unconstitutional. In his decision, Judge Alan D. Albright of the U.S. District Court in Austin blocked the state from enforcing the law, known as SB 13, which he ruled was targeting activities protected by free speech rights. “SB 13 is impermissibly vague in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment because it fails to provide persons of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what conduct is prohibited and does not provide explicit standards for determining compliance with the law,” Albright wrote in a 12-page decision. “Thus, the law is unconstitutional and unenforceable.” The decision, The New York Times reported, was part of a lawsuit filed in 2024 by the American Sustainable Business Council on behalf of two companies, Ethos Capital and Sphere, which claimed they were put on a blacklist.

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3. Energy Department takes a big step to boost nuclear recycling

Spent nuclear fuel stored in dry casks and in-ground vaults at the Idaho National Laboratory. DOE

For France, Russia, and Japan, nuclear waste isn’t waste at all — spent fuel is reprocessed to separate out the harmful byproducts caused by fission and extract some of the roughly 95% of uranium left behind after a used fuel assembly comes out of a reactor. The U.S., too, would be in that club of nations were it not for former President Jimmy Carter’s decision to kill off what was supposed to be America’s first commercial recycling plant for nuclear waste back in the 1970s. Since then, no one has seriously attempted to revive the industry. That is, until now. Last month, as I reported here, the Department of Energy announced plans to set up nuclear fuel campuses where startups could test out recycling technology. On Thursday, the agency awarded $19 million to five startups to hasten development of recycling technology. “Used nuclear fuel is an incredible untapped resource in the United States,” Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish said in a statement. “The Trump Administration is taking a common-sense approach to making sure we’re using our resources in the most efficient ways possible to secure American energy independence and fuel our economic growth.” One of those companies, Curio Solutions, told me the funding shows the technology is “now moving decisively toward scaling up for ultimate full commercialization.”

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4. Amazon outbids a utility for a giant solar farm

Amazon outbid Puget Sound Energy last month in an auction for a 1.2-gigawatt solar farm in Oregon in a move the Seattle Times warned left “the utility concerned about a larger competition for resources with energy-hungry artificial intelligence companies.” The tech giant agreed to pay $83 million for the facility, which could end up as one of the largest solar projects in the U.S. The project, which would span 9,442 acres, plans to build an equal amount of battery storage capacity. The bidding war was close. PSE’s final offer was $82 million. “We are used to being kind of the only buyers for these things as utilities, and now there are other buyers who are a little bigger than we are,” Matt Steuerwalt, senior vice president of external affairs at PSE, told the newspaper Thursday.

Amazon said Thursday it plans to spend an eye-popping $200 billion — with a B — on AI infrastructure this year alone. It’s not alone in the big spending. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced Wednesday that it expects to spend between $175 billion to $185 billion on data centers, energy, and other AI investments this year, roughly double what it paid in 2025. But as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted, Google’s spending spree is “fabulous news for utilities.” Just last week, utility and renewable developer NextEra told investors on its quarterly earnings call that it expects to bring 15 gigawatts of power to serve data centers over the next decade. “But I’ll be disappointed if we don’t double our goal and deliver at least 30 gigawatts through this channel by 2035, NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said.

5. Study: Air pollution from wildfires kills tens of thousands of Americans each year

Chronic exposure to fine particulate matter from wildfires is killing an average of 24,100 people in America’s lower 48 states each year, according to a new study. The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, examined the period from 2006 to 2020 and found that long-term exposure to the tiny particulates from the blaze is linked to at least that many deaths. “Our message is: Wildfire smoke is very dangerous. It is an increasing threat to human health,” Yaguang Wei, a study author and assistant professor in the department of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told the Associated Press. A scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles who was not involved in the study described the findings as “reasonable” and called for further research. A paper from 2024, which Heatmap’s Jeva Lange covered at the time, found a 10-fold increase in deaths from wildfire smoke from the 1960s to the 2010s.

THE KICKER

Much like the classic animated movie about a bunch of zoo animals from New York City that end up stranded on Africa’s largest island, a non-native species is messing with Madagascar’s lemurs. New research from Rice University found that strawberry guava, an invasive plant from Brazil, can prevent forests from naturally regenerating. The plant, whose fruit lemurs often eat, was introduced to Madagascar during the colonial era in the 1800s and tends to take hold in areas where the rainforest canopy is damaged. Once established, the strawberry guava can stall native trees’ regrowth by decades.