Trump Bets $850 Million on a Coal Revival

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THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump offers nearly $1 billion in funding for coal

President Donald Trump just upped his bid to revive America’s dying coal-fired power sector. In the first of three funding announcements Thursday, the Department of Energy said it would spend up to $425 million to support the supply chain and expand the capacity of at least 13 coal plants. The agency said in the same press release that it would give $75 million to build a new coal export facility at the West Gateway Terminal Project in Oakland, designed to ship more than 10 millions tons of coal overseas each year. Then the Energy Department unveiled another $350 million to support construction of America’s first new coal plants in over a decade: one in Anchorage, Alaska, and the other in Mt. Storm, West Virginia. The money will also support an upgrade of Puerto Rico’s only coal plant, the infamous 510-megawatt facility in Guayama, and the recommissioning of a 205-megawatt Cumberland, Maryland-based plant that shut down in 2024. Since taking office, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has repeatedly ordered coal plants set to shutter to remain open, despite steep costs to utilities that the companies are now challenging in court. But coal plants themselves have played the biggest part in thwarting his plans, given that — as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last year — they keep breaking down.

2. The EU steps up to monitor the oceans as Trump dismantles U.S. program

Two days ago, I told you that the Trump administration planned to dismantle a decade-old U.S. monitoring system to track coastal environments and shifting ocean currents. Now the European Union is stepping up to fill the gap. Earlier this week, the European Commission announced plans to “position the EU as the world’s leading provider of ocean intelligence by contributing 35% of the global ocean observing system by 2035 and securing 35% of the market for ocean observation technologies.” In a statement, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the program, called OceanEye Europe, will allow Europe to “lead the race to understand our ocean, to protect it, and to sustainably harness its potential.”

3. Decades after its eradication, a case of flesh-eating screwworm has been detected in the U.S.

Cool, cool, cool: The U.S. just recorded its first case of flesh-eating New World screwworm in decades. Fun! On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed that, for the first time in 60 years, the parasitic fly whose maggot larvae feed only on the flesh of warm-blooded animals had been detected in the umbilical area of a three-week-old calf at a ranch in South Texas. So far, the USDA said there are no additional cases. CNN outlined the stakes this way: “Although it is not a food safety issue, an infestation can be a food production issue. It could cost the economy billions and raise the price of beef at a time when Americans are already paying record high prices.” Not to mention, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote last night, “the screwworm is a lesson about the reality of good governance. State capacity is not so different from managing the electricity system or, for that matter, cutting carbon emissions, in that there is little political reward for getting it right.”

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4. Italy, the first country to phase out nuclear, advances a bill to legalize it again

A view of the former Galileo Ferraris nuclear plant in Trino Vercellese, Italy. Stefano Guidi/Getty Images

In 1987, a year after the world’s only major deadly civilian nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Italians voted in a referendum to phase out its own atomic power stations. The last one shut down in 1990. Now Italy is once again looking to harness the power of fission. On Thursday, World Nuclear News reported that the lower house of the country’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, had approved a bill backed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to restart the nation’s atomic power industry. A poll taken in 2024 found that nearly half of Italian voters supported construction of new reactors, with just 24% opposed. The bill that lawmakers just approved passed with 155 votes in favor, 86 against, and eight abstentions.

Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon the microreactor developer Antares — whose deal for TRISO fuel I broke news of back in February — split atoms for the first time in its test reactor built for the Energy Department’s reactor pilot program. When the administration announced the 10 companies selected for the program, the White House set a goal of at least three projects reaching “criticality,” meaning that they can demonstrate the ability to split atoms, for the first time by July 4. “Today’s achievement is a historic moment for American nuclear energy,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. “By bringing the first American non-light water privately developed reactor to criticality in more than four decades, Antares has shown what is possible when American innovation is unleashed.” Antares CEO Jordan Bramble said the company, which aims to sell its reactors primarily to the military and NASA, will produce electricity for the first time next year.

5. Offshore wind turbines could take up 11% of the North Sea by 2050

In January, the United Kingdom, Norway, and several major European Union nations including Germany and Denmark agreed to a pact to build out a sweeping array of wind turbines in the North Sea, turning the waterway into “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir.” If the pledge holds, roughly 11% of the 222,000-square-mile sea could be covered in turbines. That’s the finding of a new study from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. Under the current target, the North Sea would host a total of about 19,400 turbines by the middle of this century. By 2030, the U.K. alone is on track to have roughly 4,200 turbines, followed by Germany with about 2,700, and the Netherlands with 1,700, according to Renewables Now. The Dutch would claim the highest offshore wind density, with wind farms covering around 19% of its North Sea waters by 2050, followed by Belgium at 18%.

THE KICKER

China’s carbon dioxide emissions from its power sector increased 4% year over year in the first three months of 2026, despite surging deployments of renewables and nuclear power. Why? According to a new Carbon Brief analysis, it’s “wasted” wind and solar. With the grid in the People’s Republic unable to patch the new turbines and panels in, the capacity could not meet growing electricity demand. Had those units been online, the publication’s analysis determined, emissions from the power sector would have been flat in the first quarter of this year.