Current conditions: The intense rain pummeling Southern California since the start of the new year has subsided, but not before boosting Los Angeles’ total rainfall for the wet season that started in October a whopping 343% above the historical average • The polar vortex freezing the Great Lakes and Northeast is moving northward, allowing temperatures in Chicago to rise nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit • The heat wave in southern Australia is set to send temperatures soaring above 113 degrees.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump ramps up effort to annex Greenland
Homes in Greenland's snowbound capital of Nuuk. Leon Neal/Getty Images
It’s not the kind of thing anyone a decade ago would have imagined: a communique signed by most of Western Europe’s preeminent powers condemning Washington’s efforts to seize territory from a fellow NATO ally. But in the days since the United States launched a surprise raid on Venezuela and arrested its long-time leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump has stepped up his public lobbying of Denmark to cede sovereignty over Greenland to the U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Democrat from New Hampshire, put out a rare bipartisan statement criticizing the White House’s pressure campaign on Denmark, “one of our oldest and most reliable allies.” While Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-line deputy chief of staff, declined to rule out an invasion of Greenland during a TV appearance this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that the goal of the administration’s recent threats against the autonomously-governed Arctic island were to press Denmark into a sale.
The U.S. unsuccessfully tried acquiring Greenland multiple times during the 20th century, and invaded the island during World War II to prevent the Nazis from gaining a North American foothold after Denmark fell in the blitzkrieg. Indeed, Washington purchased the U.S. Virgin Islands, its second largest Caribbean territory, shortly after the 1898 Spanish-American war that brought Puerto Rico under American control. But the national-security logic of taking Greenland now, when the U.S. already maintains a military base there, is difficult to parse. “Greenland already is in the U.S. sphere of influence,” Columbia University political scientist Elizabeth N. Saunders wrote in a post on Bluesky. “It’s far cheaper for the U.S., in material, security, and reputational terms, to have Denmark continue administering Greenland and work within NATO on security.” One potential reason Trump might want the territory, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last fall, is to access Greenland’s mineral wealth. But the logistics of getting rare earths out of both the ground and the Arctic to refineries in the U.S. are challenging. Meanwhile, in other imperialistic activities, Trump said Tuesday evening in a post on Truth Social that Venezuela would cede between 30 million and 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S., though the legal mechanism for such a transfer remains murky, according to The New York Times.
2. PJM expected to ratchet down its AI forecasts for the East Coast
I told you last month about the in-house market monitor at the PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest power grid, urging federal regulators to prevent more data centers coming online within its territory until it can sort out how to reliably supply them with electricity. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote days later, “everyone wants to know PJM’s data center plan.” On Tuesday, E&E News reported that PJM is expected to ratchet down its forecasts for how much power demand artificial intelligence will add on the East Coast. When the grid operator’s latest analysis of future needs comes out later this month, PJM Chief Operating Officer Stu Bresler said during a call last month that the projections for mid-2027 will be “appreciably lower” than the current forecast.
3. Trump’s nuclear fusion company begins site selection for debut power plant
The merger of the parent company of Trump’s TruthSocial website and the nuclear fusion developer TAE Technologies, as I reported in this newsletter last month, is “flabbergasting” to analysts. And yet the pair’s partnership is advancing. On Tuesday, the companies announced that site selection was underway for a pilot-scale power plant set to begin construction later this year. The first facility would generate just 50 megawatts of electricity. But the companies said future plants are expected to pump out as much as 500 megawatts of power.
Meanwhile, the rival startup widely seen as the frontrunner to build America’s first fusion plant unveiled new deals of its own. Over at the CES 2026 electronics show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Commonwealth Fusion Systems — which analysts say is taking a more simplified and straightforward pathway to commercializing fusion power than TAE — touted a new deal with microchip giant Nvidia and told the crowd at the conference that it had installed the first magnet at its pilot reactor, TechCrunch reported.
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4. California lawmaker running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat proposes 2 new energy bills
Scott Wiener, the California state senator making a bid for Representative Nancy Pelosi’s long-held House seat, introduced two new bills he said were designed to ease rising energy costs. The first bill is meant to “get rid of a bunch of that red tape” that makes installing a heat pump expensive and challenging in the state, the Democrat explained in a video posted on Bluesky. The second piece of legislation would clear the way for renters to install small, plug-in solar panels on apartment balconies. “Right now, in California, it is way, way, way too hard, if not impossible, to install these kinds of units,” Wiener said. “We have to make energy more affordable for people.”
5. Sunrun makes a big bet on distributed energy
Sunrun is forming a new joint venture with the green infrastructure investor HASI to finance deployment of at least 300 megawatts of solar across what the companies billed as “more than 40,000 home power plants across the country.” As part of the deal, which closed last month, HASI will invest $500 million over an 18-month period into the new company, allowing the nation’s largest solar installer to “retain a significant long-term ownership position” in the projects. As I reported for exclusively Heatmap in October, a recent analysis by the nonprofit Permit Power, which advocates for easing red tape on rooftop solar, found that the cost of solar panels in the U.S. was far higher than in Australia or Germany due to bureaucratic rules. The HASI investment will help bring down the costs for Sunrun directly as it installs more panels.
Total U.S. utility-scale solar installations for 2025 were on track last month to beat the previous year, as I reported in this newsletter. But the phaseout of federal tax credits next year is set to dim the industry somewhat as projects race to start construction before the expiration date.
THE KICKER
In another session at CES 2026, the electric transportation company Donut Labs claimed it’s made an affordable, energy-dense solid state battery that’s powering a new motorcycle and charges in just five minutes. The startup hasn’t yet produced any independent verification of those promises. But the company is known for what InsideEVs called its “sci-fi wheel-in electric motor” for its bikes.
Homes in Greenland's snowbound capital of Nuuk. Leon Neal/Getty Images 
