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On EV investments hitting the brakes, Google’s nuclear restart, and a new data center consensus

Current conditions: Cyclone Montha is poised to make landfall over the Andhra Pradesh coast in eastern India with winds of up to 62 miles per hour • South Africa’s Northern Cape faces extremely high fire risks • Southwest California is also facing high risk of wildfires amid Santa Ana winds and dry, warm conditions today and tomorrow.

Hurricane Melissa has strengthened into a major storm, threatening to make landfall over Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane in the next few hours, with winds up to 180 miles per hour and more than four feet of rainfall. It’s likely to be the strongest storm to hit Jamaica since records started in 1851, with storm surge lapping the coast with waves of up to 15 feet. Already the storm has killed at least six people in the northern Caribbean. Evacuations started on Monday. “This can quickly escalate into a humanitarian crisis where a large number of people are in need of basic supplies such as food, safe drinking water, housing and medical care,” AccuWeather forecasters warned on Monday. “The prolonged nature of impacts can result in entire communities being cut off from aid and support for multiple days.”
The U.S. is just weeks away from reviving a shuttered nuclear plant for the first time, as Holtec International’s Palisades plant in Michigan nears its restart. Once that’s done, the Microsoft-backed project to revive the still-operable reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility is likely the next nuclear site to come back from permanent decommissioning. Add another to the list. On Monday, Google inked a deal to back the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, Iowa’s only atomic power station. As I reported in this newsletter back in August, NextEra was already considering a restart of the station, which shut down in 2020. It is, as my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in August, the zenith of the "nuclear dealmaking boom.”
The move comes as the U.S. finally embraces large-scale reactors again after years of pegging all future hopes of new nuclear construction on as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors. On Tuesday, the U.S. government announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build a fleet of at least eight new power plants with a mix of gigawatt-sized AP1000s and some smaller versions, the Financial Times reported.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has breaking news on New York’s energy future: Swiftsure, a 650-megawatt battery energy storage development planned for New York’s Staten Island, was quietly scuttled in August. Rather than make a public announcement, the developer, Fullmark Energy (formerly Hecate), instead wrote a letter to the New York State Department of Public Service withdrawing the proposal. As Jael wrote, “nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.” The project faced heavy opposition, including from New York Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. The campaigns of Democrat Zohran Mamdani and independent Andrew Cuomo did not respond to requests for comment.
In other local news, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange is out with a remarkable new series called The Aftermath, a look at surviving the infernos that are increasingly a fact of life in parts of the U.S., especially out West. The series includes stories on the challenges involved in evacuation, why relocation can be impossible, the stories of wildfires that don’t capture national attention, the limits of what the public knows and doesn’t know about wildfires, and the buffers towns such as the fire-scorched Paradise, California, are trying to establish.
Investments in electric vehicle-related infrastructure, including batteries factories, vehicle assembly plants, and charging stations, tumbled by nearly a third to $8.1 billion in the three months leading to September compared to the same period a year earlier, according to the Financial Times. The analysis, based on data from the U.S. Clean Investment Monitor, found that about $7 billion of planned EV investments were abandoned between April and September. The pullback could define the West’s place in the EV industry for years to come, widening China’s lead over production of battery-powered cars. “We need to … be quicker in development to compete with the Chinese,” Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars, told the newspaper. “As soon as you weaken these signals, everything will slow down,” he added, referring to the knock-on effect of policy changes emanating from the White House.
When Secretary of Energy Chris Wright last week directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track interconnection request for large new energy users, he also endorsed the somewhat controversial idea that big electricity users such as data centers should dial back their operations from time to time when the grid is stressed, Latitude Media’s Lisa Martine Jenkins reported last week. On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI threw its weight behind the idea. In a letter to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Christopher Lehane, OpenAI’s chief government affairs officer, called on regulators to “expand use of curtailable load resources and modernize interconnection policy.” Lehane said “we welcomed the news last week that” Wright had expressed support for the policy. “To strengthen grid reliability and expand capacity for AI and other flexible loads, FERC should allow more demand-side participation in wholesale markets and speed up interconnection for large loads that can curtail,” he added.
The idea has been gaining momentum since Duke Energy researcher Tyler Norris put out a landmark paper in February identifying up to 100 gigawatts of additional load the grid could absorb if data centers simply adopted a policy of reducing power consumption when there was a shortage of electrons. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called it “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
Carbon removal startup Rewind has launched DMS Georgia, the first commercial-scale carbon removal operation using deep mine storage. It’s the first time a certified carbon credit will be delivered by plant-based carbon in naturally oxygen-free underground environments. The project aims to bury carbon-emitting biomass in environments where the lack of oxygen makes decomposition impossible. By 2030, Rewind aims to remove one million metric tons of carbon per year.
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On America’s climate ‘own goal,’ New York’s pullback, and Constellation’s demand response embrace
Current conditions: Geomagnetic activity ramped up again last night, bringing potential glimpses of the Aurora Borealis as far south as the Gulf Coast states • Heavy rain and mountain snow is disrupting flights across the Southwestern United States • Record November heat across Spain brought temperatures as high as 84 degrees Fahrenheit.
President Donald Trump signed legislation to fund the government and reopen operations late Wednesday, setting the stage for federal workers to return as soon as Thursday morning. “That is what has happened in the past — if it is signed the night before, no matter how late, you head back to work the next day,” Nicole Cantello, the head of a union that represents Environmental Protect Agency employees in the agency’s Chicago regional office, told E&E News, noting that it’s told its members to prepare to go back to the office today.
As I noted in yesterday’s newsletter, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history came with some climate casualties. As Heatmap reported throughout the funding lapse, the administration gutted a backup energy storage system at a children’s hospital, major infrastructure projects in New York City, and a bevy of grants for clean energy.
Speaking at the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, on Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of scoring an economic “own goal” by abandoning federal climate policies and ceding dominance over clean energy to China. The Democrat, widely expected to run for his party’s presidential nod in 2028, is the highest-profile American politician to appear at the first conference in years where the sitting U.S. administration declined to send a high-level delegation. Reversing the Biden administration’s carbon-cutting policies amounted to “the own goal of the president of the United States who simply doesn’t understand how enthusiastic President Xi is that the Trump administration is nowhere at COP30,” Newsom told the audience at the Amazonian confab, according to the Financial Times. “The United States of America better wake up at that. It’s not about electric power. It’s about economic power.”
As I wrote in Tuesday’s newsletter, China is on a climate winning streak. New analysis published this week in Carbon Brief found that the country’s emissions stayed flat in the last quarter, extending a trend of flat or falling carbon pollution since March 2024. The biggest driver of power plant development in the U.S., meanwhile, appears to be on increasingly shaky footing. A new report from the Center for Public Enterprise found that data center companies are increasingly taking on debt and creating interlocking financing deals to pay for the rapid buildout of server farms.
Plug Power put plans to build as many as six new hydrogen production plants across the U.S. on hold as the Trump administration pares back its plans to support the zero-carbon fuel. The company, which has never turned a profit, said it has suspended its rollout of factories in Texas, New York, and other states, and, according to the Albany Times-Union, “will instead buy hydrogen from an existing supplier.” Plug Power had received funding not just from the Department of Energy, but also from the New York Power Authority, which awarded a large allocation of low-cost hydropower to support a $290 million green hydrogen facility in Genesee County, just east of Buffalo.
It’s part of a broader reshuffling of decarbonization priorities in the Empire State. New York agreed on Wednesday to suspend implementation of new statewide rules that would have banned all new low-rise buildings from establishing hookups to the gas system, effectively mandating the use of electric heating and cooking appliances. The move comes just weeks after the state lost its biggest battery project on Staten Island amid growing pushback from residents, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported.
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While New York City still has the West Coast handily beaten on public transit, the self-driving robotaxi company Waymo just rolled out rides on freeways for the first time. The Google-spinout startup, which uses all electric vehicles, announced plans on Wednesday to start offering rides on freeways in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix metropolitan areas. “We’re offering freeway access to a growing number of public riders and will introduce the service to more over time, including as we expand freeway capabilities to Austin, Atlanta, and beyond — always guided by our commitment to safety and service excellence,” the company said in a blog post. “Freeway trips make Waymo even more convenient and efficient, whether you’re headed to Sky Harbor International Airport, cruising from Downtown LA to Culver City, or commuting in our newly expanded Bay Area service.”"
Among the warring tribes of the energy transition, you often get so-called nuclear bros on one side calling for as much abundant clean power as possible, and renewables hardliners on the other demanding more judicious use of existing clean power by cutting back on wasted energy. The latest plan from the nation’s largest nuclear plant operator tries to have it both ways. In his utility giant’s latest earnings call, Constellation Energy CEO Joe Dominguez said the company is “seeing a lot of great capability to use backup generation and flex compute,” Utility Dive reported.
It’s a sign of the growing trend toward demand response, wherein large power uses such as data centers scale back when the grid is under particular stress, such as on a hot day when everyone is using air conditioning. “I don’t think we’re going to get to a point where we could flex on and off the full output of data centers,” Dominguez warned. But he said the company is exploring the potential for artificial intelligence software to “attract some of our customers to actually providing the relief or the slack on the system during the key hours.” Still, the idea is attracting attention. Regulators at the state and federal level are now considering what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
The first front of climate action, started in the 1900s, was conservation, figuring out how to use energy more efficiently. The second front was about cleaning up the toxic mess left behind by mid-20th century industry. The third front, now emerging, is about finding ways to support construction of more energy infrastructure in recognition of the fact that there’s no such thing as national prosperity in a low-energy economy. That’s the take from Aliya Haq, the president of the nonprofit Clean Energy Project, who called for a new approach to climate advocacy in a new Heatmap op-ed.
The president of the Clean Economy Project calls for a new approach to advocacy — or as she calls it, a “third front.”
Roughly 50,000 people are in Brazil this week for COP30, the annual United Nations climate summit. If history is any guide, they will return home feeling disappointed. After 30 years of negotiations, we have yet to see these summits deliver the kind of global economic transformation we need. Instead, they’ve devolved into rituals of hand-wringing and half measures.
The United States has shown considerable inertia and episodic hostility through each decade of climate talks. The core problem isn’t politics. It’s perspective. America has been treating climate as a moral challenge when the real stakes are economic prosperity.
I’ve spent my career advancing the moral case from inside the environmental movement. Over the decades we succeeded at rallying the faithful, but we failed to deliver change at the scale and speed required. We passed regulations only to watch them be repealed. We pledged to cut emissions and missed the mark, again and again.
People think of climate change as a crisis to contain when it’s really a competition to win. We need to build what’s next, not stop what’s bad. And what’s at stake isn’t just emissions; it’s whether America leads or lags in the next era of global economic growth.
That calls for a new approach to climate action — a third front.
In the early 1900s, the first front focused on conservation — protecting forests, nature, and wildlife. The second front, in the 1960s and 70s, tackled pollution — cleaning up our air and water, regulating toxins, and safeguarding public health. Both were about “stopping” harm. They worked because they aimed at industries where slowing down made sense.
But energy doesn’t fit that mold. International pledges and national regulations to “stop” carbon emissions are destined to fail without affordable and accessible fossil-fuel replacements. Why? Because low-cost energy makes people’s lives better. Longer life expectancies, better health care, lower infant mortality, and higher literacy follow in its wake. Energy is foundational for prosperity, powering nearly every part of our modern lives.
No high-income country has low energy consumption. Prosperity depends on abundant energy. Global energy demand will keep rising, as poor countries install more refrigerators and air conditioning, and rich countries build more data centers and advanced manufacturing. Today, fossil fuels provide 80% of primary energy because they are cheap and easy to move around. That’s why the tools of “stopping harm” that we used to protect rivers and forests will not win the race. Innovation, not limits, leads to progress.
The third front is not about blocking fossil fuels; it’s about beating them. Stopping fossil fuels doesn’t fix the electric grid or reinvent steelmaking. By contrast, lowering the cost of clean technologies will spur economic growth, create jobs in rural counties, and lower electricity bills for working families.
Yet clean energy projects in the U.S. are routinely delayed by red tape, outdated rules, and policy whiplash. A transmission line often takes more than a decade to plan, permit, and construct. Meanwhile, China has added more than 8,000 miles of ultra‑high‑voltage transmission in just four years, compared with fewer than 400 miles here at home. American entrepreneurs are ready to build but our systems and rules haven’t caught up.
And the urgency to fix the problem is mounting. Electricity prices and energy demand are surging, while terawatts of clean energy projects pile up in the interconnection queue. We are struggling to build a 21st century economy on 20th century infrastructure.
The third front of climate action starts with building faster and smarter. That responsibility lies with policymakers at every level. In the U.S., Congress and federal agencies must treat energy infrastructure as economic competitiveness, not just environmental policy. State and local regulators must expedite permitting. Regional grid operators must speed up interconnection and integration of new technologies.
But government’s role is to clear the path, not dictate the outcome. The private sector — entrepreneurs pioneering technologies from long-duration storage to advanced geothermal to next-generation nuclear — is ready to build. What they need is for policymakers to remove the obstacles. We can use public policy not to command markets, but rather to unlock them, reward innovation, and create certainty that encourages investment.
The same logic applies globally. The multilateral climate system has focused on negotiating emission limits, but we need a renewed effort toward lowering the cost of clean energy so it can outcompete fossil fuels in every market, from the richest economies to the poorest. Whether through the UN, the G-20, or the Clean Energy Ministerial, the international community must play a role in that shift — not through collating new pledges, but by taking action on cost reduction, technology deployment, and removing barriers to scale. Through economic cooperation and competition, both, domestic policies around the world need to align toward making clean energy win on economics, backed by private capital and innovation.
It’s time to measure progress not only by tons of carbon avoided, but also by how much new energy capacity we add, how quickly clean projects come online, and how much private capital moves into clean industries.
There is a cure for the fatigue induced from 30 years of climate summits and setbacks. It’s a new playbook built on economic growth and shared prosperity. The goal is not only to reduce emissions. We must build a system where clean energy is so affordable, abundant, and reliable that it becomes the obvious choice. Not because people are told to use it, but because it is better.
On Trump's global gas up, a Garden State wind flub, and Colorado coal
Current conditions: From Cleveland to Syracuse, cities on the Great Lakes are bracing for heavy snowfall • Rainfall in Northern California could top 6 inches today • Thousands evacuated in the last few hours in Taiwan as Typhoon Fung-wong makes landfall.
The bill that would fund the government through the end of the year and end the nation’s longest federal shutdown eliminates support for the Department of Agriculture’s climate hubs. The proposed compromise to reopen the government would slash funding for USDA’s 10 climate hubs, which E&E News described as producing “regional research and data on extreme weather, natural disasters and droughts to help farmers make informed decisions.”
There were, however, some green shoots. A $730 million line item in the military’s budget could go to microgrids, renewables, or nuclear reactors. The bill also contains millions of dollars for the cleanup of so-called forever chemicals, which had stalled under the Trump administration. Still, the damage from the shutdown was severe. As Heatmap reported throughout the record-breaking funding lapse, the administration slashed funding for a backup energy storage system at a children’s hospital, major infrastructure projects in New York City, and droves of grants for clean energy.

Call it American exceptionalism. The effects of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and America’s world-leading artificial intelligence development “have meaningfully altered” the International Energy Agency’s forecasts of global fossil fuel usage and emissions, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote this morning. The trajectory of global temperature rise may be, as I have written in this newsletter, so far largely unaffected by the new American administration’s policies. But multiple scenarios outlined in the Paris-based IEA’s 2025 World Energy Outlook predict “gas demand continues growing into the 2030s, due mainly to changes in U.S. policies and lower gas prices.”
That stands in contrast to China, a comparison that was inevitable this week as the world gathers for the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil — the first that Washington is all but ignoring as the Trump administration moves to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. As I wrote here yesterday, China's emissions remained flat in the last quarter, extending a streak that began in March 2024.
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Heatmap’s Jael Holzman had a big scoop last night: Yet another offshore wind project on the East Coast is kaput. The lawyers representing the Leading Light Wind offshore project filed a letter on November 7 to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities informing the regulator it “no longer sees any way to complete construction and wants to pull the plug,” Jael wrote. “The Board is well aware that the offshore wind industry has experienced economic and regulatory conditions that have made the development of new offshore wind projects extremely difficult,” counsel Colleen Foley wrote in the letter, a copy of which Jael got her hands on. The project was meant to be built 35 miles off New Jersey’s coast, and was expected to provide about 2.4 gigawatts of electricity to the power-starved state.
It’s the latest casualty of Trump’s “total war on wind,” and comes as other projects in Maryland and New England are fighting to retain permits amid the administration’s multi-agency onslaught.
Xcel Energy proposed extending the life of its Comanche 2 coal-fired power plant for 12 months past its shutdown date in December. The utility giant, backed by state officials and consumer advocates, told the Colorado Public Utilities Commission on Monday that maintaining power production from the 50-year-old unit was important as the power plant scrambled to maintain enough power generation following the breakdown of the coal plant's third unit. The 335-megawatt Comanche 2 generator in Pueblo is expected to get approval to keep running. “We need it for resource adequacy and reliability, underlining that need for reliability and resource adequacy are central issues,” Robert Kenney, CEO of Xcel Energy’s Colorado subsidiary, told The Colorado Sun. The move comes as Trump’s Department of Energy is ordering coal plants in states such as Michigan to keep operating months past closure deadlines at the cost of millions of dollars per month to ratepayers, as I have previously written.
Pennsylvania, meanwhile, may be preparing to withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the cap-and-trade market in which much of the Northeast’s biggest states partake. A state budget deal described by Spotlight PA reporter Stephen Caruso on X would remove the commonwealth from the market.
Germany and Spain vowed to give $100 million to the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds, a $13 billion multilateral financing pool to help poor countries deal with the effects of climate change. The funding, announced Monday at an event at the U.N.’s Cop30 summit in Brazil, is “an opportunity too large to ignore,” Tariye Gbadegesin, chief executive officer of Climate Investment Funds, said in a statement. While mitigation work has long held priority in international lending, adaptation work to give some relief to the countries that contributed the least to climate change but pay the highest tolls from extreme weather has often received scant support. In his controversial memo calling for a sober, new direction for global funding, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates called on countries to take adaptation more seriously. For more on what he said, read the rundown Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote.
Right in time for the region’s most iconic season, when even celebrants in farflung parts of this country think of the old Puritan lands during Halloween and Thanksgiving, I bring to you what might be the most New England story ever. A blade broke off a wind turbine near Plymouth, Massachusetts, last week and landed in — get ready for it — a cranberry bog. The roughly 90-foot blade left behind debris, but “no one was hurt, and the turbine automatically shut itself down as designed,” the local fire chief said.