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Hurricane Melissa swirling toward Jamaica. NOAA via Getty Images
Hurricane Melissa has strengthened into a major storm, threatening to make landfall over Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba as a Category 5 hurricane in the next few hours, with winds up to 180 miles per hour and more than four feet of rainfall. It’s likely to be the strongest storm to hit Jamaica since records started in 1851, with storm surge lapping the coast with waves of up to 15 feet. Already the storm has killed at least six people in the northern Caribbean. Evacuations started on Monday. “This can quickly escalate into a humanitarian crisis where a large number of people are in need of basic supplies such as food, safe drinking water, housing and medical care,” AccuWeather forecasters warned on Monday. “The prolonged nature of impacts can result in entire communities being cut off from aid and support for multiple days.”
The U.S. is just weeks away from reviving a shuttered nuclear plant for the first time, as Holtec International’s Palisades plant in Michigan nears its restart. Once that’s done, the Microsoft-backed project to revive the still-operable reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility is likely the next nuclear site to come back from permanent decommissioning. Add another to the list. On Monday, Google inked a deal to back the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, Iowa’s only atomic power station. As I reported in this newsletter back in August, NextEra was already considering a restart of the station, which shut down in 2020. It is, as my colleague Katie Brigham wrote in August, the zenith of the "nuclear dealmaking boom.”
The move comes as the U.S. finally embraces large-scale reactors again after years of pegging all future hopes of new nuclear construction on as-yet-unbuilt small modular reactors. On Tuesday, the U.S. government announced an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build a fleet of at least eight new power plants with a mix of gigawatt-sized AP1000s and some smaller versions, the Financial Times reported.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has breaking news on New York’s energy future: Swiftsure, a 650-megawatt battery energy storage development planned for New York’s Staten Island, was quietly scuttled in August. Rather than make a public announcement, the developer, Fullmark Energy (formerly Hecate), instead wrote a letter to the New York State Department of Public Service withdrawing the proposal. As Jael wrote, “nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.” The project faced heavy opposition, including from New York Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. The campaigns of Democrat Zohran Mamdani and independent Andrew Cuomo did not respond to requests for comment.
In other local news, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange is out with a remarkable new series called The Aftermath, a look at surviving the infernos that are increasingly a fact of life in parts of the U.S., especially out West. The series includes stories on the challenges involved in evacuation, why relocation can be impossible, the stories of wildfires that don’t capture national attention, the limits of what the public knows and doesn’t know about wildfires, and the buffers towns such as the fire-scorched Paradise, California, are trying to establish.
Investments in electric vehicle-related infrastructure, including batteries factories, vehicle assembly plants, and charging stations, tumbled by nearly a third to $8.1 billion in the three months leading to September compared to the same period a year earlier, according to the Financial Times. The analysis, based on data from the U.S. Clean Investment Monitor, found that about $7 billion of planned EV investments were abandoned between April and September. The pullback could define the West’s place in the EV industry for years to come, widening China’s lead over production of battery-powered cars. “We need to … be quicker in development to compete with the Chinese,” Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars, told the newspaper. “As soon as you weaken these signals, everything will slow down,” he added, referring to the knock-on effect of policy changes emanating from the White House.
When Secretary of Energy Chris Wright last week directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track interconnection request for large new energy users, he also endorsed the somewhat controversial idea that big electricity users such as data centers should dial back their operations from time to time when the grid is stressed, Latitude Media’s Lisa Martine Jenkins reported last week. On Monday, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI threw its weight behind the idea. In a letter to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Christopher Lehane, OpenAI’s chief government affairs officer, called on regulators to “expand use of curtailable load resources and modernize interconnection policy.” Lehane said “we welcomed the news last week that” Wright had expressed support for the policy. “To strengthen grid reliability and expand capacity for AI and other flexible loads, FERC should allow more demand-side participation in wholesale markets and speed up interconnection for large loads that can curtail,” he added.
The idea has been gaining momentum since Duke Energy researcher Tyler Norris put out a landmark paper in February identifying up to 100 gigawatts of additional load the grid could absorb if data centers simply adopted a policy of reducing power consumption when there was a shortage of electrons. Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called it “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
Carbon removal startup Rewind has launched DMS Georgia, the first commercial-scale carbon removal operation using deep mine storage. It’s the first time a certified carbon credit will be delivered by plant-based carbon in naturally oxygen-free underground environments. The project aims to bury carbon-emitting biomass in environments where the lack of oxygen makes decomposition impossible. By 2030, Rewind aims to remove one million metric tons of carbon per year.
Just because the U.S. is pulling back support for the production of batteries doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of purchasers. On Monday, BloombergNEF estimated that global energy storage additions are set to reach 92 gigawatts this year, up 23% from last year, according to the consultancy’s market forecast for the second half of 2025. Utility-scale projects made up 84% of the annual growth, and the U.S. market kept expanding despite federal funding cuts. BloombergNEF also said U.S. buyers were looking for more domestic manufacturers to weather rising tariffs, which might be tricky given recent trends in the space.
An oil rig in Utah. George Frey/Getty Images
Despite the Trump administration’s promises to speed up permitting for energy projects, the Department of the Interior plans to fire more than 200 workers in state offices that manage federal licensing in key regions for fossil fuel, geothermal, and mining development. In a court filing Monday, the agency said it would cut as much as 12% of the staff at its Bureau of Land Management office in Utah, 9% in the California outpost, and 6% in Colorado. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s regional office for the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, was set to lose 5% of its employees. And those are just the local offices I found in the 35-page document that explicitly handled energy permitting. The cuts are part of a plan to “imminently” axe at least 2,000 jobs from the Interior Department overall, including — as NOTUS first reported — hundreds of National Park Service employees.
The administration’s tightened grip over the BLM office in Utah has already caused some headaches for next-generation geothermal companies, according to industry sources I spoke to earlier this year, as local officials who once had the autonomy to greenlight incremental permits for drilling exploration suddenly needed to report back to political officials in Washington. The Interior Department ultimately eased the issue, but the example illustrates what’s at stake when a state office that’s tasked with doing more as new projects proliferate has fewer people and resources.
A month after federal officers raided Hyundai Motor Group’s $26 billion factory in Ellabell, Georgia, shackling more than 300 South Korean workers the Trump administration accused of violating visa rules, the carmaker remains focused on expanding its U.S. production. Facing growing competition from Chinese cars in other markets, the Korean auto giant still sees the U.S. as its best market for growth, The New York Times reported Monday. “My top three priorities are U-S-A,” José Muñoz, chief executive of Hyundai Motor Company, the car-making subsidiary, said at the company’s annual investor gathering, reportedly pausing for effect after each letter. “If we do well here, it’s very good for Korea. It’s very good for the company.”
The chance to reap the fruits of what Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman called Hyundai’s “incredible timing” may be too tempting to pass up, even as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid sparked a diplomatic crisis involving South Korea’s foreign minister. The company spent three years working on the 2,900-acre campus near Savannah, and sought to make a public statement about its support for President Donald Trump’s re-industrialization plans by naming the facility Metaplant America. With tariffs now coming into force, Andrew argued, Hyundai is better positioned than most to supply the domestic market.
The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan received fresh nuclear fuel on Monday in what the facility’s owner called “a major milestone on the path to restarting” a permanently shuttered atomic station for the first time in the U.S. As I reported in this newsletter at the time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Holtec International the green light to restart the facility in July, setting a new precedent for reauthorizing operations at a plant that was already slated for decommissioning. The project faced some local opposition from not-in-my-backyard types backed by the anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear. But the Trump administration stood behind the project. The $1.5 billion loan granted by the Biden-era Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office to Holtec to fund the reopening was the only financing deal the agency maintained without any interruption through the change in leadership.
Aside from the 68 fuel assemblies arriving, Holtec said “major equipment restoration work is progressing,” including the reassembly of the main turbine generator and the chemical cleaning of the steam generators. Once complete, the work will remake Holtec — until now primarily a manufacturer of casks to store nuclear waste and a decommissioning company — into an operator of an active power plant. In a press release, Holtec CEO Kris Singh called the “esprit de corps of our tirelessly toiling worker force” a “testament to the national consensus and our collective will to harness nuclear energy to meet the galloping demand for power in our country.”
Isometric bills itself as the world’s leading carbon registry, providing what it calls “scientifically rigorous carbon removal credits so companies can reliably meet their climate commitments.” Now the British company is expanding its operations to cover two climate superpollutants: landfill methane and hydrofluorocarbons. The startup plans to develop protocols for eliminating emissions of both superheating gases with its in-house science team and network of more than 300 outside researchers. Among its partners will be Recoolit, a company that collects and destroys refrigerants and previously partnered with Google to destroy the carbon dioxide equivalent of 250,000 metric tons of superpollutants. Another is Cool Effect, a California-based nonprofit that sells carbon credits for landfill gas collection projects. It worked with Google earlier this year to support the installation of methane destruction equipment at a landfill in Cuiabá, Brazil. “Superpollutants are responsible for nearly half of global warming,” Eamon Jubbawy, Isometric’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Isometric is entering this market to bring the scientific rigour needed to help this crucial climate solution scale, using the same transparent approach that is building the trust needed to scale the carbon removal market.”
Call the paradox of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Overall, it’s a disaster. But the mass melting is fueling the engine of Arctic food chains: algae. A new study led by the University of Copenhagen suggests there will be more food for future marine life than previously thought. That will also improve the ocean’s carbon dioxide uptake, which the researchers said was “likely good news” for the climate. “But biological systems are very complex, so it is hard to make firm predictions, because other mechanisms may pull in the opposite direction,” Lasse Riemann, professor at the Department of Biology and senior author of the study, said in a press release. “We do not yet know whether the net effect will be beneficial for the climate.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Cool Effect’s role in capturing landfill methane.
