Europe’s ‘Hardest’ Challenge ‘Since World War II’

Current conditions: The wildfires in Spain and France are burning so hot they’re creating rare pyrocumulonimbus clouds • Hurricane Genevieve has strengthened into the first Category 5 storm of 2026 as the monster cyclone rampages across the open Pacific with no immediate destination to make landfall • A tornado in Wisconsin toppled power lines, cutting off electricity to nearly 350,000 people.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Europe braces for another heat wave as France and Spain burn

Beachgoers on the shore of Lake Lacanau in southwest FranceMaximilien LAMY / AFP via Getty Images

The back-to-back record heat waves that roasted Western Europe last month killed thousands in France and Germany. The heat also dried out forests, turning woodlands on opposite sides of the Pyrenees into tinderboxes that are now ablaze in some of the worst wildfires the European Union has faced in modern history. With another heat wave now looming, firefighters are racing to contain the flames as hundreds of thousands evacuate in France and Spain. “We need to realize that we’re facing a totally unprecedented fire,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters Monday during a visit to the fire department of Bordeaux. “The situation we’re facing today is the hardest we’ve ever recorded, the hardest since World War II.” In Spain’s Valencia region, the flames are detonating buried ordinances leftover from the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s, Reuters reported.

2. PJM is holding an emergency power auction in September

The other week, I told you when PJM Interconnection once again hit its price cap at its latest capacity auction — and still came up short of the generation needed to meet demand in 2028. On Monday, the board of the nation’s largest grid operator said in a public letter it would hold another emergency auction to find nearly 7 gigawatts of power generation to make up for the shortfall. “The board believes this reliability threat requires decisive action,” the letter stated. The move comes just weeks after PJM shattered its peak demand record after underestimating just how much electricity the grid could need during a recent heat wave in the American Northeast. It’s yet another sign of the mounting stress on the system covering 13 states as everyone from governors to the grid operator itself strive for reforms, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written.

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3. Trump may finally move the U.S. on from Yucca Mountain

Nuclear waste is a political paradox. Critics of atomic energy say that the radioactive waste produced during fission cancel out the benefits of using the most efficient source of carbon-free power humanity has yet harnessed. In the 1980s, the federal government took control of nuclear waste and set about building the world’s first permanent repository to store spent fuel underground for centuries. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated as the debut location for such a facility. Opponents in the Silver State fought back, imagining that Washington was subjecting Nevada to dangers akin to the atomic bomb tests that once took place in its deserts. In 2010 — in a move that nonpartisan Government Accountability Office later pegged as an entirely political, rather than technical, motive — President Barack Obama halted work on a project the then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted kiboshed. The problem is that federal law dictates Yucca Mountain be completed as the first nuclear waste repository before other sites can be considered. No one in Congress has stepped up to make the change. As a result, the U.S. — operator of the world’s largest nuclear fleet and wannabe exporter to countries who want to get into the atomic energy game — has had no clear long-term plan for dealing with nuclear waste in 16 years.

The Trump administration is trying to change that. The Department of Energy has floated plans for nuclear innovation campuses where cutting-edge recycling companies could test out new technologies to reprocess waste into medical isotopes and fresh fuel. But E&E News reported Monday that the administration is poised to press Congress to update federal law to allow the U.S. to finally move on from Yucca Mountain. A leaked document the newswire obtained outlines the administration’s plans to instead press states to take on waste repositories and recycling facilities, in line with the Energy Department’s campus idea. That may not be easy. Even Texas, whose government has sought to roll out the red carpet for nuclear developers recently unsuccessfully sued federal regulators to the Supreme Court to block construction of a waste storage facility.

4. Supreme Court tees up a new test of FERC’s independence

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of President Donald Trump’s right to fire commissioners from previously independent agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees pipelines and the grid. On Monday, E&E News published a feature examining the implications for FERC at a particularly sensitive time in its history, when a once-sleepy agency is increasingly facing scrutiny over the health of the U.S. grid. Experts were mixed on the effects. Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, called Trump “a loose cannon” with “no justification for firing any FERC Commissioner.” Commissioner David LaCerte, a Republican, cheered the Supreme Court for overturning what he said was an unlawful restriction put in place a century ago that limited the White House’s ability to fire any commissioners for anything beyond poor performance. “If a commissioner is going to buckle under that pressure and compromise their integrity because they are afraid of being fired, well, they probably didn’t deserve to be in this job in the first place,” he said during the FERC meeting. But fellow Republican Mark Christie, who previously served as FERC chair and whom Matthew dubbed “the most interesting man” on the commission, said that while he agrees with the court’s decision, open requisitions remain as to what it would mean in practice. “If FERC is now completely under the supervision of the president, is the executive branch going to say how to decide a rate case?” said Christie. “That to me is the single biggest question.”

The Department of Transportation, meanwhile, is gutting funding for public transit, walkways, and bike lanes. In a letter outlining the agency’s spending priorities to the Senate, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed eliminating the Highway Trust Fund’s mass transit account and slashing funding for infrastructure that provides for the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, bike lanes, and grants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. That’s not all: Smart Cities Dive reported that a competitive grant program to fund solutions to traffic safety would scrap options that include public transit improvements and tolling from even being considered.

5. China’s dominance over solar inverters peaked in 2024

China produces most of the world’s inverters for solar panels. It’s increasingly a problem. Last year, Reuters reported that the U.S. had found “killswitch” devices in some inverters, suggesting that Beijing could — in theory — remotely disable solar panels when demand is high on the grid, or try to cause frequency problems like those that triggered the great Iberian blackout of 2025. At the start of this month, I told you the Federal Communications Commission was weighing a ban on Chinese inverters. If you share the Trump administration’s concerns, there’s good news: China’s command over the global inverter market peaked in 2024, according to new data from the research division at PV Tech. Europe, meanwhile, has emerged as a major manufacturer, hitting over 100 gigawatts of factory capacity this year. The U.S. is now at 40 gigawatts, while India is at 20 gigawatts. You’d be reasonable to wonder if these are just Chinese companies setting up shop in Europe. But you’d be wrong. “What distinguishes Europe’s inverter manufacturing expansion from other sectors, particularly solar modules, is the composition of its manufacturing base,” analyst Mollie McCorkindale wrote in the magazine. “As of 2026, over 90% of Europe’s 100-gigawatt manufacturing capacity comes from European-headquartered companies.”

THE KICKER

Everyone knows the U.S. is veering away from offshore wind, and diligent readers of this newsletter (for whom I feel such affection) may recall that Japan is on a parallel trajectory. Elsewhere, however, offshore wind is booming. Romania, whose coastline makes up a single-digit percentage of its mostly landlocked borders, is the latest country to make big plans for seaward turbines. Bucharest is now targeting nearly 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, Renewables Now reported.