House Passes a Bipartisan Package of Bills to Boost Geothermal

Current conditions: Heavy hail storms across Belgium, France, and Italy have injured at least 30 people • Powerful winds are churning up dust storms that are blanketing broad swaths of Delhi, India’s capital region • The United Nations just warned that El Niño weather patterns have an 80% chance of returning by September, threatening to supercharge weather extremes.

THE TOP FIVE

1. New York sues the Trump administration over shady offshore wind deals

New York Attorney General Letitia James led a group of Northeast states in a lawsuit against the Trump administration to pay TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon its two offshore wind leases in the United States. The lawsuit comes on the heels of reporting by Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo that found, contrary to the administration’s announcements, the U.S. government’s agreement with Total didn’t actually require any new investments in fossil fuels, as the administration strongly implied, and that the payment may not have actually met the requirements to be drawn from a federal coffer designed to fund legal settlements. “After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” James said in a press release. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.” New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont joined the litigation.

Meanwhile, New York State lawmakers are preparing to pass legislation enacting a one-year moratorium on large centers by the end of the week, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told Gothamist, as Democrats caution that the grid can’t handle the new demand. On X, reporter Jimmy Vielkind warned that it’s unclear whether Governor Kathy Hochul would sign the bill. Data from the website Data Center Map shows that the state has more than 130 data centers, nearly half of which are located in the New York City metropolitan area.

2. House passes a package of geothermal bills

The construction site of Fervo Energy’s debut Cape Station plant.Fervo Energy

The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to pass a package of bills aimed at bolstering development of geothermal energy in the U.S. The package overhauls geothermal-specific rules for permitting and land sales to speed up the timelines for deploying the technology. In a statement, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive from New York who is widely discussed as a potential contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nod, thanked her Republican colleagues for working across the aisle on the legislation. “At a time of extreme political polarization, this package shows that Congress can still come together on commonsense solutions to better the lives of the American people,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is eliminating a network of sensors designed to track environmental changes off America’s shores. A decade ago, the U.S. government built a $368 million deep-ocean observation system to monitor coastal environments and marine life and track the shifting ocean currents that affect global weather patterns. Not for long. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the National Science Foundation planned to “dismantle” the system, removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland. The federal agency said the decision to scrap the Ocean Observatories Initiative aligns with a “wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities.” But Craig McLean, a former acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during President Donald Trump’s first term, said the move “reflects the further lack of understanding that the current administration has of scientific value and scientific merit.” He added: “By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

3. Carbon removal is stagnating

The world’s meager capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere already falls far short of what’s needed to bend the curve on climate change. Now, as Emily wrote of a new report, “the chasm is widening.” On Tuesday, the academic consortium behind the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report put out the third version of the analysis. The findings are sobering. While research and deployment of carbon removal technologies has made progress in the past two years, it is still not growing quickly enough to reach the scale required to support the Paris Agreement temperature limits. “We’re seeing a lot of signs that there’s still growth happening,” Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the authors, told Emily. “But we need to see a step change in both early indicators like investment and also actual deployments” between now and 2030, in addition to major emission reductions.

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4. Federal regulators clear the way for Three Mile Island’s restart

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has given Constellation Energy, the nation’s largest operator of nuclear plants, approval to transfer the right to connect to the grid from its Eddystone gas-fired plant outside Philadelphia to the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The approval marks a major step forward for Constellation’s plan to turn the defunct atomic station into its new Crane Clean Energy Center and begin producing electricity as early as next year. Previously, PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, had warned that the plant could not begin supplying new power until 2031. But Constellation said this week’s waiver puts it back on track for a 2027 restart.

Meanwhile, Europe’s top producer of nuclear fuel is ramping up its capacity in the U.S. Urenco, the nuclear fuel enricher co-owned by the British and Dutch governments, on Tuesday announced plans to expand capacity at the only U.S. commercial uranium enrichment facility by nearly 50%, marking what it called a major commitment to strengthening the domestic supply chain. The multi-billion-dollar investment will increase the output from the firm’s National Enrichment Facility in Eunice, New Mexico. “For more than 15 years, Urenco USA has provided its U.S. utility customers with a reliable domestic supply of enriched uranium to power their nuclear reactors,” Boris Schucht, the chief executive of Urenco Global, said in a statement. “This expansion reinforces our commitment to a resilient U.S. nuclear fuel supply chain focused on meeting the long-term needs of our customers as well as supporting U.S. energy security through continued investment by Urenco.”

5. Google’s latest energy deal is with a virtual power plant company

Virtual power plants — software that can tap into networks of distributed energy resources such as solar panels and batteries to supply the grid in times of need — are having a moment as demand from data centers runs laps around any new supply. And while my colleague Katie Brigham recently outlined the steep challenges this technology faces, the deals keep coming. On Tuesday, Google announced a three-year deal with the VPP provider Voltus to supply up to 100 megawatts of new electricity capacity from distributed resources in the country’s highly stressed largest grid, PJM Interconnection. “Under the agreement, Voltus will orchestrate flexible distributed resources — such as batteries and smart thermostats — to reduce energy demand when the grid needs it, paying the local homes and businesses who participate,” Michael Terrell, Google’s global head of advanced energy, wrote in a blog post. “This enables new capacity for the system, channels investment into local communities, and strengthens the grids that serve our data centers.”

THE KICKER

Nearly a year after launching a new company focused on manufacturing next-generation medium-voltage power electronics that can better integrate solar, wind, and data centers onto the grid, former Tesla executive Drew Baglino has struck a major deal. His new startup, Heron Power, just inked an agreement with LG Energy Solution to integrate its solid-state transformer technology with the South Korean battery giant’s energy storage systems in the U.S. “This collaboration reflects a shared commitment to advancing American energy manufacturing and delivering next-generation infrastructure at scale,” Baglino, who serves as Heron’s chief executive, said in a statement. “By engineering a holistic solution together, we are unlocking higher power density, greater efficiency, and faster deployment for developers building the grid of the future.”