Trump Loses on Offshore Wind Twice This Week

Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump will force tech companies to pay for new power in PJM

President Donald Trump struck a deal with the governors of Northeast states such as Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania to direct the nation’s largest grid operator to hold an emergency power auction that will force technology giants to pay for the construction of new power plants, according to Bloomberg. The effort, set to be announced Friday, will urge PJM Interconnection to hold a reliability power auction giving tech companies and data center hyperscalers the chance to bid on 15-year contracts for new electricity generation, according to Bloomberg. If it works according to plan, Bloomberg notes, “it could be mammoth in scale, delivering contracts that would support the construction of some $15 billion worth of new power plants.”

The move comes days after Trump teased forthcoming reforms on Truth Social in which he said companies would be encouraged to build their own generation, as I wrote earlier this week.

2. Empire Wind is back on

A federal court lifted President Donald Trump’s stop-work order on the Empire wind project off the coast of New York, marking the administration’s second defeat this week as his latest attempt to halt construction of offshore turbines on the East Coast flounders. District Judge Carl Nichols — whom my colleague Jael Holzman noted is a Trump appointee — sided with Norwegian energy giant Equinor Thursday morning, granting its request to lift the Department of the Interior’s order to terminate construction.

The ruling comes just days after another federal judge found that the national security concerns the Interior Department cited to justify the work stoppage were insufficient to halt another already-permitted project midway through construction. That judge, too, allowed the Danish developer Orsted’s Revolution Wind project in New England to move forward, as Jael explained here. And the lawsuits just keep coming. Now yet another New England project, Vineyard Wind, has sued the administration.

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3. Ford and BYD are in talks

BYD on display at a German automotive show last year. Johannes Simon/Getty Images

Ford and BYD are in discussions on a partnership in which the American carmaker would buy batteries from the Chinese auto giant for some of the former’s hybrid-vehicle models, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday night. The newspaper cautioned that the talks are ongoing and a deal may not materialize, but a tie-up would mark the most significant beachhead China’s leading automaker has gained in the U.S. market yet. It’s worth revisiting how BYD got so big, which Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast dove deep into back in April. A month earlier, my colleague Robinson Meyer explained how the company’s promise of charging a car’s batteries in five minutes was just the latest example of the company “shocking the world.”

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4. Bill Gates-backed fusion company raises $250 million

Type One Energy, the fusion power startup backed by Bill Gates, is raising a $250 million Series B round at a $900 million valuation, TechCrunch reported. The company is pursuing an approach to fusion known as magnetic confinement. The design is called a stellarator, in which magnets are arranged in a doughnut shape that’s twisted and turned according to the demands of the plasma. Type One signed a deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority last year to build a fusion power plant at the site of a former coal station.

It’s yet another sign, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in 2024, that “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.” There are plenty of startups in the mix. Thea Fusion, as Katie has covered, is raising millions for a simplified stellarator design. Avalanche Energy, meanwhile, is pursuing fusion microreactors. But as I wrote last month, the race may really be with China, which is outspending the whole world on fusion.

5. Canadian Solar wins a patent against rival Maxeon

The Chinese-Canadian solar manufacturer Canadian Solar declared a “decisive victory” in a patent fight against its Singapore-based rival Maxeon. After a nearly two-year legal fight, the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled in Canadian Solar’s favor this week, dismissing Maxeon’s claims of alleged infringement of intellectual property as “invalid.” In a statement to PV Magazine, Canadian Solar president Colin Parkin said “we firmly oppose the misuse or weaponization of patents — particularly those lacking patentability or practical value.” The ruling clears the way for the manufacturer to expand its presence in the U.S. as the company looks to capitalize on new restrictions from the Trump administration on imported panels. Maxeon, however, told Reuters it’s still considering an appeal.

THE KICKER

Tucked in a valley that contains pollution, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s coal-smoked capital city, has some of the dirtiest air in the world. When you visit, you can see the smog from a distance on the way from the airport. A solution may be on the way: The country is considering working with Russia to build its first nuclear power plant, a small modular reactor-based facility somewhere in the middle of the city. Last month, the Kremlin-owned Rosatom touted plans to build an SMR plant in Yakutia, part of Russian Siberia. Now Moscow is in talks with its former suzerainty to build the same style facility in Ulaanbaatar, NucNet reported Thursday. Mongolia has a leg up in one area: The country previously mined uranium during the Soviet era, and has large deposits that could be tapped again for a domestic fuel source.