Duke Energy Asks for Help Keeping the Lights on in Cold Snap

Current conditions: A bomb cyclone dumped as much as 16 inches of snow on North Carolina, and more snow could come by midweek • Tampa, Florida, is seeing rare flurries, putting embattled citrus crops at risk • Sri Lanka is being inundated by intense thunderstorms as temperatures surge near 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Duke Energy asks customers in the South to turn down power or risk blackouts

As the bomb cyclone bore down on the Southeastern United States with Arctic chills, Duke Energy sent out messages to its millions of customers in Florida and the Carolinas last night asking households to voluntarily turn down the power between certain hours on Monday to avoid blackouts on the grid. “Frigid temperatures are driving extremely high energy demand,” the utility said in a statement to its ratepayers in Florida. “As Florida continues to experience the coldest air in the state since 2018, Duke Energy is asking all customers to voluntarily reduce their energy use” from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. EST on Monday. The company issued an identical message to customers in the Carolinas, except the window stretched from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m.

“Put simply, cold temperatures stress the grid,” my colleague Jeva Lange and Matthew Zeitlin wrote last week. “That’s because cold can affect the performance of electricity generators as well as the distribution and production of natural gas, the most commonly used grid fuel. And the longer the grid has to operate under these difficult conditions, the more fragile it gets.”

2. Energy Department exempts advanced nuclear from federal environmental assessments

The Department of Energy just proposed exempting advanced nuclear reactors from carrying out reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, marking yet another step the Trump administration is taking to speed up deployment of new atomic power technologies. Past environmental assessments have demonstrated “that any hazardous waste, radioactive waste, or spent nuclear fuel generated by the project can be managed” and “do not significantly affect the quality of the human environment.” The new categorical exclusion takes effect today, but the agency is taking public comments for the next 30 days and said it may revise the policy depending on the testimony it receives.

When Matthew wrote “everyone wants nuclear now” back in 2024, he was referring to the suddenly ubiquitous popularity of a once taboo energy source. But if you read those four words to instead convey a sense of urgency, you’d be accurately describing the state of affairs in 2026 as electricity demand rapidly eclipses incoming supply, as I wrote last week.

3. Canadian company makes a major alumina discovery

A Canadian company developing what it claims is one of the continent’s first major new sources of alumina, the processed version of bauxite needed to make aluminum, is set to move ahead with the project. The privately-owned Canadian Energy Metals said late last week that the $6.3 billion project contains an estimated 6.8 billion metric tons of alumina within a 230-square-mile stretch of the Prairie province of Saskatchewan. Canada ranks among the top global producers of primary aluminum, but its refineries and smelters rely on imports. The discovery the startup confirmed appears to be large enough to represent more than a third of known alumina globally. “We believe it’s very significant,” Christopher Hopkins, the chief executive at CEM, told The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is taking stock of the value of friends in the fight to find critical minerals outside of China’s control. Trump officials are trying to rally consensus with allies on a pricing mechanism to boost long-term investments in mineral refining and mining. The effort is set to take place this week during meetings with dozens of foreign ministers in Washington. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg told Bloomberg he expects a lot of “momentum and excitement” toward “agreeing on a price mechanism that we can all coordinate together on in order to ensure price stability for people in the mineral refining and extraction business.”

Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:

4. More than 200 dead in a Congolese coltan mine

More than 200 people were killed last week when the Rubaya coltan mine in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo collapsed. Rubaya produces roughly 15% of the world’s coltan, a processed metal needed for electric vehicle batteries, pipelines, and gas turbines. The site, which Reuters said is staffed with locals who dig manually for a few dollars per day, has been under the control of the M23 rebel group since 2024. The actual death toll, which hasn’t been updated since its initial count last week, is likely even higher. The disaster offers a grim reminder of the brutal conditions in the mineral supply chains needed for the energy transition.

5. More trouble is brewing for wood-pellet giant Drax

A view of Drax's wood-burning plant in North Yorkshire, England. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Things were already looking bad for Drax as the wood pellet energy giant faced mounting scrutiny over its pollution. Last week, I told you that Japan, one of the world’s largest markets burning wood pellets for electricity and heat, was souring on the energy source. Now a senior policy specialist at the company’s flagship biomass power station has spoken out about the accuracy of public statements the company made about where it was sourcing its wood. In theory, biomass energy could be low carbon if it uses wood that would otherwise rot and release the carbon trapped inside. But investigations into Drax previously found that the company was felling old-growth forests in the U.S. and Canada, the types of mature trees that absorb the most carbon through photosynthesis, calling its claims of carbon neutrality into question. Drax insisted that didn’t have even licenses to extract trees from such woodlands at all, meaning the company wasn't harvesting them, but the senior employee said that wasn’t true.

THE KICKER

Past studies of polar bear of Svalbard found that the population declined when sea ice disappeared. But new research in the journal Scientific Reports based on hundreds of specimens of Ursus maritimus, discovered that the physical conditions of the bear population on the Norwegian Arctic island improved despite sea ice losses. Without sea ice, the bears were previously thought to struggle to hunt and grow thinner. But the authors suggested that the Svalbard bears may be recovering as populations of land-based prey that were previously over-hunted by humans, such as reindeer and walrus, returns.