Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Las Vegas as a heat wave settles over the Southwest • In India’s northwest Gujarat state, thermometers are soaring as high as 112 degrees • Fire season in the U.S. state of Oregon has officially begun, weeks ahead of usual.
THE TOP FIVE
1. A Qatari gas tanker passes the Strait of Hormuz
A tanker carrying liquified natural gas from Qatar has appeared to transit the Strait of Hormuz, marking the country’s first export out of the Persian Gulf since the Iran War started. On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that the Al Kharaitiyat had successfully passed through the narrow waterway near the mouth of what’s traditionally the busiest route for oil and gas in the world. As of Sunday evening, the vessel en route to Pakistan from Qatar’s Ras Laffan export plant had reached the Gulf of Oman. The ship, the newswire noted, “appears to have navigated the Tehran-approved northern route that hugs the Iranian coast through the strait.”
Still, progress on ending the war the United States and Israel are waging on Iran remains limited. In a Sunday post on his Truth Social network, President Donald Trump said he had just read a “totally unacceptable” counter proposal to end the war “from Iran’s so-called ‘representatives.’” In the meantime, it’s not just hydrocarbon buyers feeling the pinch of higher prices. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, the closure of the strait is squeezing both ingredients for battery storage and solar panels.
2. The New England utility betting against data centers
Data centers may represent big new buyers for electrical utilities. But Eversource Energy, the Massachusetts-based electrical power company serving nearly 5 million customers across New England, is betting against data centers. On a call with investors last week, Eversource CEO Joe Nolan said he’s “not interested” in developing new server farms across the company’s territory, as it’s “only going to drive up the price of energy,” according to Utility Dive. “It’s of no value to our residential customer — actually, any customer,” Nolan said. A limited buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure had kept prices steadier in New England’s grid than in PJM Interconnection, the mid-Atlantic system. “If you look at the volatility in ISO New England, there’s not a very volatile market compared to PJM,” he said. “So, I feel good about it.”
That position may align well with the push from some Democrats, particularly on the left, to halt data center construction amid a populist backlash to the projects. But this isn’t a blue state issue alone. The same day Nolan made the remarks, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a hard-line Republican, signed a bill mandating that utilities require large data centers to pay their own service costs and prevent those costs from being shifted to ratepayers. “You should not pay one more red cent for electricity because of a hyperscale data center as an individual,” DeSantis said, according to E&E News. “That’s just not right, for the most wealthy companies in the history of the world to come in and have individual Floridians or Americans subsidize these hyperscale data centers.”
3. U.S. and Japan mark historic shipment of rare nuclear fuel
One of the biggest early problems afflicting America’s next-generation nuclear industry is the fact that a key fuel many new reactor technologies need has, for years, only been manufactured commercially by Russian and Chinese state-owned nuclear companies. For companies pitching a return to fission as a way for the West to avoid Moscow’s gas and Beijing’s solar panels, batteries, and critical minerals, that posed a problem. But Washington has been racing to shore up a domestic supply of what’s known as high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. Now it’s tapping in one of its closest allies and partners in the atomic energy industry. On Friday, World Nuclear News reported that Japan had shipped 1.7 metric tons of HALEU to the U.S. as part of “the largest single international shipment of uranium in the history of the National Nuclear Security Administration.” The delivery joined together the U.S. Department of Energy’s NNSA, Japan’s top two nuclear regulatory agencies, and the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Transport Solutions and Civil Nuclear Constabulary. “This milestone accelerates our progress towards a secure and independent energy future, while reaffirming our commitment to nuclear nonproliferation,” Matthew Napoli, the NNSA’s deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said in a statement. “Through this partnership with Japan, we are fuelling the next generation of nuclear power, and solidifying America's energy dominance.”
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4. The world’s biggest fusion experiment inches closer to completion
ITER is just about ready to eat. The world’s biggest nuclear fusion experiment, the globally-funded megaproject in France known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, has received the final shipment of components needed to assemble the giant magnet at the heart of the facility. As a result, the project is now back on schedule, NucNet reported last week.
The joint effort between the U.S., China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea was once considered the vanguard of the quest for the so-called holy grail of clean energy. But delays, bureaucracy, and funding pauses created repeated setbacks. Meanwhile, fusion has made major strides at small startups in the U.S., while China — as I have reported here — is outspending the entire world combined on research.
5. Chinese solar giant Jinko sells U.S. factories to private equity firm
JinkoSolar is selling a 75.1% stake in its U.S. manufacturing subsidiary to the private equity firm FH Capital for an undisclosed sum. The deal, announced Friday, also includes the Chinese giant’s battery business. “FH Capital brings deep sector expertise, financing experience, and a deep understanding of the U.S. market,” Nigel Cockroft, U.S. general manager of JinkoSolar, said in a statement. “We believe this transaction provides the right ownership, management and strategic direction for this new venture to grow capacity and serve the growing demand for high performance U.S.-sourced renewable energy products.”
U.S. manufacturers have long struggled to compete against Chinese solar panel producers, which — as I told you two weeks ago — have seen exports more than double since the start of the Iran War. And as I also recently noted, new kinds of solar panels are getting a second look in the U.S. right now. But U.S. panel manufacturers don’t just struggle to compete on price. A new industry report highlighted last week in PV Magazine found that U.S. solar factories are struggling to meet high soldering standards.
THE KICKER
Not chasing road runners. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Coyotes are the best animal, just in case you didn’t know or you weren’t sure. They are cunning, beautiful, and so clearly emblematic of the natural wonder of this continent that various Native Americans cultures revered the canine European settlers later renamed Canis letrans — “barking dog” in Latin — as a deity. They are wily, the trickster whose wit and determination to endure against bigger predators such as wolves and bears and survive a record-shattering onslaught by the U.S. government. If you ever want to fall in love with the biology and mythology of these creatures, read Coyote America by the environmental historian Dan Flores, or listen to one of his lectures on YouTube. What you’ll learn is that the coyote was subjected to the most extensive extermination campaign in American history, facing all kinds of creatively cruel new weapons especially after World War II as ranchers demanded the U.S. government eradicate one of the peskier pests for livestock, only to spread to more corners of North America than ever before. One of the worst innovations in coyote killing: Cyanide bombs. In 2023, the Biden administration banned the devices, which shoot liquid cyanide into the animal’s mouth causing a vicious but swift death. Now the Trump administration is bringing back cyanide bombs, despite concerns that the traps kill wolves, foxes, and unleashed dogs. It may kill off more individual canines. But it certainly will not eliminate coyotes.
Not chasing road runners. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
