Revolution Wind Beats Trump in Court, Again

Current conditions: Temperatures in Buffalo, New York, are set to plunge by 40 degrees Fahrenheit • Snow could hit the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast as early as midweek • A cold snap in northern India is thickening fog in the region.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump says he’ll make tech companies build their own power

In a post on Truth Social last night, President Donald Trump said he’s “working with major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People” and shift the burden of financing the data center buildout away from ordinary consumers. “First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher utility bills.” He said more announcements were coming in the weeks ahead. While “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE,” he said “Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”

Hours earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg set the stage for a similar announcement when he posted on Threads that the company was establishing a new “top-level initiative” aimed at building “tens of gigawatts” of power for the Facebook owner’s data centers.

2. Revolution Wind resumes construction after winning a court injunction

A federal judge has overturned President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to kill New England’s Revolution Wind project. On Monday evening, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction suspending the Trump administration’s order halting construction on the nearly complete joint venture from Danish wind giant Orsted and Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables. The decision allows construction to restart immediately while the underlying lawsuit challenging multiple attempts by the Department of the Interior to yank its permits continues in court. In a statement, Orsted said it would resume construction as soon as possible. “Today’s ruling is a decisive win for energy reliability and the hundreds of thousands of families counting on Revolution Wind,” Kat Burnham, the industry group Advanced Energy United’s senior principal and New England policy lead, said in a statement. “The court rightly saw through a politically motivated stop-work order that would have caused real harm: driving up costs, delaying power for Rhode Island and Connecticut, and putting good-paying jobs at risk. It’s good news for workers, ratepayers, and anyone who recognizes the need for a fair energy market.” To glean some insights into how the White House’s most recent effort fell short, it’s worth reviewing my colleague Jael Holzman’s coverage of the last failure and this time.

3. EPA will stop considering lives saved by pollution rules

The Environmental Protection Agency is scrapping the decades-long practice of calculating the health benefits of reducing air pollution by estimating the cost of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to justify clean-air rules. Citing internal documents, The New York Times reported Monday that the Trump administration plans to stop tallying the health benefits from curbing two of the most widespread, deadly pollutants: fine particulate matter and ozone. The newspaper called the move “a seismic shift that runs counter to the EPA’s mission statement.” The overhaul could make slashing limits on pollution from coal-burning plants, oil refineries, and steel mills easier. It’s part of a broader overhaul of the EPA’s regulatory system to disregard the scientific realities that few, if any, credible scientists challenged before. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked in July when the agency dispensed with the idea that carbon emissions are dangerous, “what comes next?”

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4. Federal judge rules Trump’s blue-state energy cuts illegal

A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration’s decision to slash $8 billion in energy grants to recipients in mostly Democratic-led states was illegal. In his decision, Amit Mehta, whom Obama appointed to the bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote that the “terminated grants had one glaring commonality: all the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Trump in the 2024 election.” The ruling called on the Department of Energy to reverse its decision to rescind all awards mentioned in the case. The case only covered seven grants, leaving funding for more than 200 other projects up in the air. But as NOTUS noted, the Energy Department’s internal watchdog announced an audit into the cancellations last month.

5. New York increases its new nuclear goal fivefold

New York Governor Kathy Hochul.John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Annual Summit

New York Governor Kathy Hochul positioned herself as one of the most ambitious Democratic governors on nuclear power last summer when, as Heatmap’s Mattew Zeitlin covered at the time, she directed the state-owned New York Power Authority to facilitate construction of at least a gigawatt of new atomic power reactors by 2040. Last week, as we covered here, her administration unveiled 23 potential commercial partners, including Bill Gates’ TerraPower and the utility NextEra, and eight possible communities in which to site the state’s next nuclear plant. Now the governor’s office has told the Syracuse Post-Standard that the administration aims to up the goal from 1 gigawatt to 5 gigawatts of new reactors.

The move comes as Hochul prepares to announce another initiative Tuesday to force data centers to pay for their own energy needs. Piggybacking off Trump’s push, the effort will require “that projects driving exceptional demand without exceptional job creation or other benefits cover the costs they create – through charges or supplying their own power,” according to Axios.

THE KICKER

Brazil and Argentina are South America’s only two countries with commercial nuclear power. Despite having governments on opposite sides of the continent’s political divide, the two nations are collaborating on maritime nuclear, using small modular reactors to power ships or produce power from floating plants. “The energy transition process we are experiencing guides us to work together to evolve nuclear regulations and their necessary harmonization, with a view to the use of nuclear reactors on board ships worldwide and, especially, in our jurisdictional waters,” Petronio Augusto Siqueira De Aguiar, the Brazilian admiral from the Naval Secretariat for Nuclear Safety and Quality, said in a statement.