Current conditions: Cyclone Nardelle made landfall three times in Australia in the past week and now it’s strengthening and preparing to return once again • The historic heat wave in the Southwest is expected to last through Friday, driving temperatures up into the triple digits across the region • Temperatures in Timbuktu, Mali, are nearing 110 degrees Fahrenheit today.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Yet another offshore wind farm starts pumping electricity onto the grid
Just days after Orsted’s Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island began pumping electricity onto the New England grid, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind farm started sending surges back to Virginia’s wires. The two projects are at very different stages. Dominion has so far switched on just one commercial turbine, while Orsted’s facility is nearly complete. Once finished, the 2.6-gigawatt project off Virginia’s coast will be the biggest offshore wind farm in the U.S. “This project is not just about energy — it’s about national security,” Representative Jen Kiggans, a Republican from the Virginia Beach area, told the Virginia Mercury. “Reliable, domestically produced power strengthens the resilience of critical military infrastructure, including our local bases, ensuring our forces can operate without disruption.”
The milestone marks a setback for President Donald Trump, whose efforts to yank permits from offshore wind projects have repeatedly failed in court. The White House did, however, notch a victory this week when the French energy giant TotalEnergies agreed to abandon two offshore wind projects in exchange for $1 billion and strong federal backing for new gas projects.
2. Exclusive: Applied Atomics raises $8.3 million in seed financing
Applied Atomics joined the nuclear race this year promising to be “a developer and operator of full-stack nuclear power plants,” with the capacity to scale the size of its facilities from 100 megawatts to 1,000 megawatts to meet the needs of industrial customers. “Everybody’s excited about data centers, and we are too. We are fortunate that we are able to go after a few different industry verticals. So we’re focused on decarbonization of hard-to-decarbonize industries,” Benjamin Kellie, Applied Atomics’ founder and chief executive, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham exclusively for this newsletter. “That includes data centers, but it also includes things like concrete and steel. It includes chemical plants and these established heavy industry players are a big focus for us.”
Kellie said the company already has more than 8 gigawatts of potential power purchase agreements and aims to produce its first electricity in 2030. Applied Atomics is “looking at four years for first power,” which it plans to get down to 24 months per module before eventually reducing the construction time to 18 months. “We are targeting $4,000 per installed kilowatt, which is a little bit north of natural gas but much lower than traditional nuclear. And that’s for first-of-a-kind,” he said. “Then nth-of-a-kind we see getting down to around the $3,000 per installed kilowatt range.” Counting the latest investment round, the company has raised a total of roughly $12 million in its first 12 months.
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3. Trump quietly opens more area around a Pacific territory to deepsea mining
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has begun widening the scope of potential seafloor mineral leasing that could take place in the waters off the Northern Mariana Islands, one of America’s five populated non-state territories. Last week, the agency completed the “area identification” step for holding a lease sale in the outer continental shelf off the Pacific archipelago’s shores in what the trade publication gCaptain called “an early but consequential milestone that determines which tracts will move forward for environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act.” While BOEM can’t authorize mining or commit the federal government to a lease sale, the latest step “effectively locks in the geographic footprint for further review.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, finalized a rule to fast-track permits for deepsea mining.
The Northern Mariana Islands, which are located near Guam, isn’t the only Pacific territory the Trump administration is targeting for mineral development. In January, NOAA announced plans to start surveying the waters around American Samoa, a South Pacific island where residents — who, interestingly, are the only territorial denizens who hold status as American nationals but not American citizens — have been looking for new industries to diversity away from the one tuna cannery that sustains much of the island’s economy.
4. Next-gen geothermal startup XGS inks a deal with oil giant Baker Hughes
In yet another sign of the synergies between next-generation geothermal and the oil and gas industries, the developer XGS Energy just inked a major deal with the drilling services giant Baker Hughes. On Wednesday morning, the two Houston-based companies announced a “strategic collaboration” that included an initial order for Baker Hughes’ engineering services to advance XGS’ planned 150-megawatt geothermal project in New Mexico. Once developed, the project is poised to supply electricity to the Public Service Company of New Mexico to support Meta’s data center operations in the state. “By aligning our technology with Baker Hughes’ expertise across subsurface, surface, and power solutions — and one of the most capable project delivery teams in the world — we’re demonstrating that XGS has the execution muscle and industrial collaborations required to deliver at scale for our customers,” Ghazal Izadi, XGS’s chief operating officer, said in a statement. XGS — which uses a closed-loop technology known as “advanced” geothermal, as distinct from the “enhanced” geothermal pioneered by fellow next-generation companies such as Fervo Energy — aced its field tests last year, as I reported for Heatmap. The company, as I reported last year, is also a favorite of the atomic energy industry, with the venture arm of the nuclear utility giant Constellation serving as a lead investor.
Over at the CERAWeek conference, meanwhile, Form Energy announced a deal with the data center giant Crusoe to deliver 12 gigawatt-hours of multi-day energy storage to support more artificial intelligence factories starting in 2027. The agreement “ensures access to Form Energy's 100-hour iron-air battery technology as Crusoe scales its AI infrastructure.”
5. The Philippines declares a national energy emergency
The Bataan nuclear power plant was meant to be the first such facliity in Southeast Asia, but was abandoned. TED ALJIBE/AFP via Getty Images
With a fast-growing population and economy and few domestic energy resources, the Philippines already paid the third-highest electricity prices in all of Asia. Now the Southeast Asian nation has declared a national energy emergency to deal with the energy shock from the Iran war. The procedural step grants the government of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. new authorities to plan for issues such as rationing and prevent people from hoarding fuel. It may also spur on Manila’s plans to finally bring a nuclear power plant online in the country decades after a nearly complete facility was all but abandoned. As I told you back in January, the Trump administration provided funding to the Philippines to help it assess U.S.-made small modular reactors as a potential new grid resource.
THE KICKER
It’s hardly the most urgent tragedy of the conflict, but here’s a statistic that illustrates the long-term destructiveness of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. In just the first two weeks of the conflict, the warring parties released almost 5.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases “by firing carbon-intensive weapons, powering fighter jets and ships, and bombing infrastructure such as oil storage facilities and civilian buildings,” researchers told Live Science. That’s already higher than all the carbon emissions Iceland produces in a year. If the emissions continue at the same rate for a year, the volume would be equivalent to the annual emissions of the 84 lowest emitting countries in the world combined.
The Bataan nuclear power plant was meant to be the first such facliity in Southeast Asia, but was abandoned. TED ALJIBE/AFP via Getty Images
A chart showing U.S. corporate energy purchases by source.CEBA
