A Federal Judge Lifted the Stop-Work Order on Revolution Wind

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THE TOP FIVE

1. Federal judge lifts Trump’s stop-work order for Revolution Wind

A federal judge lifted President Donald Trump’s stop-work order for the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported Monday. Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan-era Republican appointee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted a motion for a preliminary injunction at the hearing, allowing construction to continue as the government conducts a review of its concerns over the project. “There is no question in my mind of irreparable harm to the plaintiff,” Lamberth said. As I previously reported in this newsletter, the project’s owners, Danish energy giant Orsted and the developer Skyborn Renewables, filed a lawsuit earlier this month. Analysts never expected Trump’s order to hold, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, though the cost to the project’s owners was likely to rise. The Trump administration has enlisted at least half a dozen agencies in a widening attack meant to stymie the offshore wind industry, despite its growth overseas in Europe and Asia.

In an interview with Axios, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright insisted the assault on offshore wind and the use of the federal permitting apparatus to stall projects, is “a one-off exception, or one-off complication.” Overall, he said, building infrastructure is “going to be massively easier than it has been in a long time.”

2. Energy Secretary tees up his next priority: permitting reform

“The biggest remaining thing” in the Trump administration’s energy agenda that has yet to come to fruition? “Permitting reform,” Wright told Axios. “We’re building big infrastructure, but that’s still much slower and clumsier than it should be.” The will to find compromise on a new permitting reform bill may be limited. Republicans in Congress are reluctant to fuse energy legislation into the next reconciliation bill, as I wrote here yesterday. Last week, I reported that Representative Scott Peters, a key Democrat championing a federal permitting reform bill, warned that he wouldn’t move forward while the Trump administration blocked solar projects in California. But Wright said he’s been talking to Republicans and Democrats and said the political window may “quite possibly” open this year.

3. Pennsylvania’s governor threatens to withdraw from nation’s largest power grid

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.Alex Kent/Getty Images

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro stepped up his threats to withdraw from the PJM Interconnection if the nation’s largest grid operator doesn’t speed up interconnections of new supply and find ways to curb electricity price hikes. In a speech at a summit convened in Philadelphia to bring together the 13 states in the grid system, the Democrat said that PJM’s “slow, reactive approach” to addressing rising power demand “is no longer working for our states,” particularly “at a time when the Trump administration is cutting funding for energy projects.” Separately, in a Monday interview on Bloomberg TV, Shapiro said, “If PJM is not willing to look in the mirror and really reform itself, then I’m willing to go my own way, and Pennsylvania can stand alone in this effort.”

It’s not the first time he’s threatened to leave. In January, Shapiro said something similar while criticizing PJM’s “market failure.” In the meantime, on Monday, he pitched what he called the PJM Governors’ Collaborative to coordinate leaders of the dozen other states in the grid system to advocate for better rates. Shapiro isn’t the only one asking questions about PJM. As Matthew wrote yesterday, “the system as it’s constructed now may, critics argue, expose retail customers to unacceptable cost increases — and greenhouse gas emissions — as it attempts to grapple with serving new data center load.”

4. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway sells stake in BYD

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has fully exited Chinese automaker BYD, ending what Reuters described as a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value in that period. The selloff, revealed in a filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary, recorded the value of the investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024. The company initially invested in BYD in 2008, when it bought a roughly 10% share of the Shanghai-based automaker. In August 2022, Berkshire started paring back its position. By June of last year, Berkshire had sold off almost 76% of its stake, bringing it to just under 5% of BYD’s outstanding shares, CNBC reported. Buffett has not explained why he started selling his BYD stake. But in 2023, he told CNBC’s Becky Quick that BYD is an “extraordinary company” being run by an “extraordinary person,” but “I think that we’ll find things to do with the money that I’ll feel better about.” Around the same time, Berkshire sold most of the company’s shares in Taiwan’s leading semiconductor manufacturer, TSMC.

5. U.S. grants construction permits to a new antimony mine

The U.S. has granted Perpetua Resources permission to begin construction on a mine in Idaho that will produce gold and antimony, a brittle, silvery-white metal used in semiconductors, batteries, and high-tech military equipment, Reuters reported. China controls the global market for antimony, generating nearly four times the supply of the second-place producer, Tajikistan, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. The U.S., by contrast, has no active antimony mines.

Perpetua’s Stibnite project, about 138 miles north of Boise, could change that. The U.S. Forest Service gave Perpetua a conditional notice to proceed, and construction is slated to start next month. Once complete, Stibnite could supply up to 35% of America’s needs. “Completing federal permitting for Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite Gold Project is a major step towards unlocking America’s critical minerals resources,” Emily Domenech, executive director of the government's permitting council, told Reuters.

THE KICKER

A University of Delaware-led research team has developed a new type of catalyst that can help convert plastic waste into liquid fuels without the unwanted byproducts from current methods. Traditional catalysts have a hard time working on bulky polymers because the molecules don’t interact with the active parts of a catalyst, where the chemical reaction takes place. To address this, the scientists transformed a nanomaterial called MXenes (pronounced max-eens) to have larger, more open pores. As a result, the catalyst triggered a reaction nearly two times faster than traditional catalysts. “Instead of letting plastics pile up as waste, upcycling treats them like solid fuels that can be transformed into useful liquid fuels and chemicals, offering a faster, more efficient and environmentally friendly solution,” Dongxia Liu, a professor at the University of Delaware's College of Engineering and the senior author on the study, said in a press release.