The SEC Stops Asking About Climate Risks

Current conditions: The East Coast’s Acela corridor is cooling down this week, with temperatures dropping from 85 degrees Fahrenheit in Philadelphia yesterday to the 60s for the rest of the week • Cape Agulhas is under one of South Africa’s Orange Level 6 warnings for damaging winds and dangerous waves • Floods and landslides in Brazil’s northern state of Pernambuco have left six dead and thousands displaced.

THE TOP FIVE

1. SEC moves to scrap climate rules — and quarterly reporting

The Securities and Exchange Commission has advanced a measure to formally end Biden-era climate disclosure rules for publicly-traded companies. The regulator sent the proposal to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for review on May 4, according to a post on a government website first spotted by Bloomberg. The Wall Street watchdog’s 2024 disclosure rule mandated that publicly traded companies report on the material risks climate change poses to their business models, including the financial impact of extreme weather. Some large companies would have been required to disclose Scope 1 emissions, which are produced by the firm’s own operations, and Scope 2 emissions, which are produced by companies with which the firm does off-site business such as electricity. The rule had already been watered down before its finalization to remove Scope 3 emissions, which come from suppliers up and down the value chain and from customers who use a product such as oil.

In an even bigger move, the SEC also proposed scrapping mandatory quarterly reporting for U.S.-listed companies, instead switching to a twice-yearly filing. The idea, which President Donald Trump first floated years ago as a way of getting companies to focus on longer-term goals, “would provide companies with increased regulatory flexibility,” SEC chair Paul Atkins told the Financial Times. “Public companies have an obligation under the federal securities laws to provide information that is material to investors. Yet, the rigidity of the SEC’s rules has prevented companies and their investors from determining for themselves the interim reporting frequency that best serves their business needs and investors.” While cast as part of a larger deregulatory push, the move could actually be a boon to climate action. Supporters of decarbonization have long lamented how quarterly reporting norms disincentivized costly bets that take longer than three months to pan out.

2. Offshore data centers breathe new life into long-stagnant wave energy

If you have ever body surfed in the ocean — or observed how docks and peers weather over time — it’s easy to intuit why harnessing renewable energy from waves is so tricky. Among experts who often list wave energy along with tidal power as two sources of underdeveloped but potentially promising renewable energy, the latter has long been considered the more commercially viable, with turbines harnessing tidal flows already in operation in France and elsewhere. Wave energy, by contrast, has been perceived as a riskier frontier in the energy industry.

That didn’t stop wave-energy startup Panthalassa from raising $140 million in a Series B round led by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel this week as the company looks to develop floating data centers that can operate in open ocean. The financing will fund the completion of the company’s pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and speed up deployment of its Ocean-3 series of facilities that “will perform AI inference computing at sea” with power generated from ocean waves.

“There are three sources of energy on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear, and the open ocean,” Panthalassa CEO and co-founder Garth Sheldon-Coulson said in a statement. “We’ve built a technology platform that operates in the planet’s most energy-dense wave regions, far from shore, and turns that resource into reliable clean power. We’re now ready to build factories, deploy fleets, and provide a sustainable new source of energy for humanity.” The deal, per the Financial Times, values the company at about $1 billion. “The future demands more compute than we can imagine,” Thiel said in a press release. “Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”

The company has some competition. Earlier this year, the San Francisco-based Aikido Technologies launched a new line of floating platforms for deep-water offshore wind turbines that include data centers built into the ballasts.

3. Heat-trapping microplastics are making climate change worse

Allow me to give you a glimpse into the anxious mind of a young father: Sometimes, I distract myself from my fear over what global weather patterns might look like by the time my one-year-old daughter is my age with my more urgent terror over what particulate matter is entering her perfect little lungs and what microplastics sneak into even her home-cooked meals. Well, worry not! Turns out the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In theory, I knew this was always the case, since the rise of plastic pollution is at least somewhat spurred on by oil and gas companies making big money off the feedstocks for the cheap, single-use plastics that break down into dangerous tiny particles in our environment. But new research shows that microplastics in the atmosphere are actually magnifying the effects of climate change. In a new paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists in China and the U.S. outlined how tiny, colored plastic bits absorb sunlight as the wind blows them around the world, trapping heat and adding to temperature rise. “The plastic problem is not just in our blue oceans, it is also in the invisible skies above us,” Hongbo Fu, a co-author of the study and an atmospheric scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, said at a press conference, per Bloomberg. “Climate models need to be updated.”

Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:

4. Fervo Energy eyes a $6.5 billion valuation

Like wave and tidal power, geothermal was once a sleepy corner of the clean energy world. But next-generation startups that promised to use new drilling techniques to harness geothermal energy in more places than ever thought possible are radically upending an industry that saw its largest power station — the Geysers in California — built in the 1960s and hitherto hadn’t aimed higher. Until a few years ago, next-generation geothermal drilling was esoteric even among energy nerds. But things change quickly in the modern energy business. Fervo Energy, the first major next-generation startup to prove that fracking technology could be used to revolutionize geothermal power, is now eyeing a $6.5 billion valuation. That’s according to a document the company filed with the SEC this week as it prepares to raise more than $1.3 billion in an initial public offering of its stock.

Fervo sees a big market. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month when the company first filed to go public, Fervo told investors its reviewed leases represent over 40 gigawatts of energy. That’s equal to about 15% of all installed solar capacity in the U.S.

5. UAE invests in 30 gigawatts of solar

Solar panels atop a building in Masdar City, a sustainable develop the company built outside Abu Dhabi, when I toured the site in 2021. Alexander C. Kaufman

The United Arab Emirates already ranks as the world’s seventh-largest producer of crude, and could ascend as the country’s exit from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries frees Abu Dhabi to pump for oil. The UAE’s debut atomic power plant — the four-reactor, Korean-built Barakah station in Abu Dhabi — set a new standard for nuclear construction in a Western-aligned nation and vaulted the federation of monarchies to the forefront of global discussions about fission. Now the UAE is making a big move on solar. Abu Dhabi’s state-owned renewables developer Masdar has signed a deal with Emirates Water and Electricity Company to deploy more than 30 gigawatts of solar capacity and 8 gigawatts of batteries. “As the driving force behind the UAE’s energy transition, EWEC is at the forefront of a global shift towards sustainable, utility-scale power and water production,” Ahmed Ali Alshamsi, the utility chief in charge of the Emirates Water and Electricity Company, told PV Tech. “This CFA with Masdar is a pivotal strategic tool that empowers us to accelerate this transformation and meet 60% of Abu Dhabi’s total energy demand from renewable and clean sources by 2035.”

THE KICKER

Norway led the world in electric vehicle adoption. It’s now at the forefront of autonomous vehicle adoption. Europe’s first self-driving bus without a supervisor onboard is set to be rolled out in the southwestern city of Stavanger following a recent regulatory change. While the bus still requires preparation by a human before operating, the project has been underway since 2022 and represents Europe’s most advanced public deployment of the technology.