Britain Launches a State-Owned Power Grid Company

Current conditions: For the first time since 1914, the Atlantic hurricane season may pass without any major hurricanes, per an AccuWeather forecast • From Phoenix to Dallas, flood watches are in effect as the remnants of Hurricane Polo stretch inland from the Pacific through the Southwest • Surigae, now upgraded to a “severe” tropical storm, is set to slam into Japan’s Izu Islands, a partially populated archipelago in the same municipality as Tokyo.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump taps the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as diesel nears $7 a gallon

The Department of Energy has ordered the release of 40 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as diesel surpasses $6.50 per gallon and Texas proclaims a statewide “disaster” over soaring prices. The move, which Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said would “stabilize the market,” comes as the Trump administration weighs whether to temporarily ban exports of diesel, a radical step that might only slightly lower American prices while sending Europe’s fuel costs skyrocketing, as the chief executive of the continent’s No. 2 oil company cautioned in a Bloomberg interview this week. The oil is expected to be a loan from the stockpile that would, Wright said, ultimately save Americans more than $3 billion. The transaction follows the same approach the Trump administration has taken since agreeing to distribute 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve back in March, when the war with Iran began. Had the administration instead sold the barrels through an emergency drawdown instead of a trade, as it did previously, and simultaneously structured the deal to allow it to buy back oil at the lower prices the futures market is trading at presently, the Energy Department could have significantly increased its profits. That’s the finding of a policy memo from the think tank Employ America that I told you about a few weeks ago. The profit could, in turn, be used to invest in America’s fuel stockpile, clearing some of the $230 million backlog of physical repairs needed on the infrastructure that stores the crude. “The choice to deliver more barrels is fraught, but with that decision made, the administration missed an opportunity to set up the SPR for long-term success,” Arnab Datta, Employ America’s managing director of policy implementation, told me in a text message last night. “I hope they consider creative options to do so moving forward.”

Meanwhile, oil is actually flowing through the Strait of Hormuz again. “Iran’s regime has lost control of the Strait of Hormuz,” energy investor Alexander Stahel wrote in a lengthy post on X. The U.S. military’s naval escorts and the United Arab Emirates’ commitment to circumventing Iran’s blockade are returning the critical waterway to “normal,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote. Over text message last night, I asked an energy trader if this meant we were winning. “I’d say we’re losing less than we had been,” they said. “If Iran hadn’t gotten the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia and seize the Red Sea, we’d definitely be.” Big if!

2. Britain launches a state-owned power grid company

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham emerged triumphant from the Labour Party’s recent political implosions after he established himself as a pragmatic left-wing populist during his time as mayor of Manchester — drawing frequent comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Now Burnham is demonstrating what his brand of “business-friend socialism” means in energy. On Tuesday, Downing Street announced the launch of Great British Grid, a new subsidiary of the state-owned Great British Energy, designed to compete with private companies for investments in the power grid. “We have a cost crisis. We all know it,” Burnham said in a speech, according to The Guardian, which broke news of GB Grid. “The price of energy is crippling for businesses, and British bill payers pay some of the highest energy costs in Europe. We have an energy system where prices are dictated in markets miles away, while families and businesses here shoulder the costs. Once again, the British public has lost control.” His answer? Reverse what he called “40 years of neoliberalism.” Over here on this side of the pond, we are waiting to see what’s in the deal the Senate has brokered to ease federal permitting, one of many hurdles to building new transmission lines in America. The text of the agreement is due out later today.

Down in the South Atlantic, things are heating up in the Falkland Islands, even as temperatures outside remain low. The archipelago has never had a native population — as far as anyone can tell, the longest-lasting settled population has been the mostly British herders and fishers who have voted repeatedly to stay under the British crown. That didn’t stop Argentina, which has claimed what it calls Las Malvinas for centuries, from launching an invasion in 1983, in which the British military won a decisive victory. Now that the sleepy Falklands are preparing to drill oil wells in the offshore economic zone surrounding the islands, Buenos Aires is waging what one Falklander described to the Financial Times as “economic warfare.” Instead of Union Jacked Sea Harriers and Argentinian light cruisers doing the combat, this time Argentina is limiting trade, isolating the Falklands. “We’re just a few thousand people trying not to get blown off a rock,” local radio host Ronnie MacLennan Baird told the newspaper. “We just want to get on with our lives.”

3. In a first, someone just agreed to buy electricity from solar panels in space

Beam me up to baseload. Virtus Solis Technology

Lots of solar developers are promising to compete with nuclear, geothermal, and hydro plants in generating the type of electricity that matches today’s favored buzzwords of “24/7,” “clean,” and “baseload” by pairing panels with batteries. Few companies, for obvious reasons, actually mean generating solar energy all day and night. Virtus Solis Technology, on the other hand, is promising to pioneer a method for delivering solar power generated from panels affixed to satellites in space, capable of angling at every hour to meet the sun’s rays and beaming wireless power back down to Earth. It’s hardly the only developer reaching for solar in space. But the Troy, Michigan-based startup is the first to get someone to agree to buy that electricity. On Wednesday, the company inked its first power purchase agreement to sell electricity from its debut, 100-megawatt solar satellite to the Chicago-based data center developer Brae Systems over the next 20 years. Virtus Solar called it the “first in a series of commercial offtake agreements” expected in the next several months. As part of the deal, Virtus Solar will build a “dedicated terrestrial receiving station to be constructed in Illinois.” The contract includes an option to increase capacity to 250 megawatts within three years of commercial operations. “Securing a direct 20-year supply of firm, clean power from Virtus Solis ensures our GPU infrastructure operates with predictable power costs and zero carbon emissions, completely insulated from terrestrial grid curtailment,” Brae Systems CEO Vishnu Indukuri said in a statement.

Other frontier energy sources have evolved quickly from plans to deals. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the current frontrunner in America’s fusion startup race, signed its inaugural power purchase agreement with Google last year. Now the spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is attracting institutional investors, as my colleague Katie Brigham has written, and inching closer to building out its supply chain. On Wednesday morning, the company announced what it called a “landmark supply agreement” with the Japanese industrial giant Fujikura to buy more than 6,200 miles of high-temperature superconducting tape to help build CFS’ doughnut-shaped ARC fusion reactors.

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4. The EU considers delaying its methane rule

As of now, the European Union is set to start forcing foreign oil and gas companies to monitor and submit data on their methane emissions or face financial penalties. But Brussels is now considering delaying the methane reporting rules by as much as a year as tight fuel supplies send prices ever higher amid the twin energy shocks from the wars in Iran and Ukraine. On Tuesday, Reuters and OilPrice.com reported that EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen had confirmed that officials are examining whether to postpone the provisions. The statement came days after Jorgensen made a similar remark to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Jorgensen’s native Denmark is heeding the former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz’s call to invest more in clean fuels. On Tuesday, Hydrogen Insight reported that the country planned to increase its budget for building a network of dedicated hydrogen pipelines by $850 million.

5. Solar manufacturers highlight a hole in Trump’s polysilicon tariffs

One of the more memorable moments of the 2024 vice presidential debate came when JD Vance lashed his Democratic rival, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for failing to prioritize manufacturing of solar panels in the U.S. The Democrat shot back that such factories were open in his very state. Among them was Heliene, a producer of high-performance solar modules designed for boutique rooftop units. On Tuesday, the company rolled out a new all-American module at a moment when solar buyers are increasingly seeking technology that won’t be subject to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. “The new module brings together American-made polysilicon, ingots, wafers, and solar cells, reconnecting critical stages of the solar supply chain with U.S. manufacturing after more than a decade,” the company said, calling the module “an important step in reshoring U.S. solar manufacturing, bringing more of the upstream silicon supply chain back to America.”

As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo and I reported last month, the Department of Commerce just threw solar manufacturers a lifeline by slapping new import levies and restrictions on foreign polysilicon, the main ingredient in solar panels. But the agency halted enforcement until early December, giving importers the opportunity to stockpile in advance of the new rules taking effect. Last week, the Commerce Department moved to ban stockpiling. “Protecting against stockpiling is critical to ensure a functionally viable remedy from the Section 232 rules,” Matt Card, president of the U.S. cell manufacturer Suniva, told PV Tech.

THE KICKER

A quick letter of recommendation to close out this morning’s newsletter. Back in 2018, I received a galley copy of a forthcoming book by a niche left-wing sociologist with a growing focus on climate change. The title — After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration — struck me. Geoengineering and its associated technological ideas to adapt to a hotter world, such as carbon dioxide removal, were at that point very taboo in climate policy circles. The technology, assuming it even worked, posed what many saw as a moral hazard, a Pandora’s box that, if opened, would sap humanity’s collective will to do the hard work of mitigating fossil fuel emissions. At least, that was the dominant mode of thinking at the time. So, you can imagine, I found that book title provocative. Over the course of 288 pages, the author, Holly Jean Buck, bounced between dense but readable chapters of nonfiction explanations of the latest science behind various cutting-edge climate technologies and sections of fictional sci-fi vignettes. The stories painted a picture of life in the not-so-distant future. One that has stuck with me over the years is a vision of an Oklahoma rancher earning passive income by letting a state carbon disposal program pump captured CO2 into the geological formations beneath his property. I offer my sincere congratulations to Holly, who yesterday was named among the 20 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation’s prestigious “genius grant.”