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Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.
Wright at the White House in April.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Last fall, Heatmap named Atlantic Shores, a 2,800-megawatt proposed wind farm off the coast of northern New Jersey, one of the most at-risk projects of the energy transition. Eight months later, Atlantic Shores is officially dead. The developer submitted a filing to New Jersey regulators seeking to terminate its agreement to sell power into the state. The move came after the oil giant Shell pulled out of the project in January, and the Trump administration revoked its air permits in March. The administration’s anti-wind actions have forced the company “to materially reduce its personnel, terminate contracts, and cancel planned project investments,” the filing says.
A new report from the Clean Air Task Force argues that the “levelized cost of energy,” the dominant metric used to make financial comparisons between energy sources, is not fit for purpose in today’s discussions about meeting power demand. The calculation covers capital and operating costs, but it does not take into account increasingly important factors such as when the power is available (i.e. not at night, for solar without batteries, which represent an additional cost), and whether it will require new transmission lines or upgrades. While LCOE can illustrate that solar has gotten cheaper over time, it can’t say what will most economically serve the needs of the grid in a given region, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin explains.
Rooftop solar company Sunnova has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after laying off just over half its staff last week, its second major round of layoffs this year. The news came shortly after Solar Mosaic, a residential solar financing company, also filed for bankruptcy. Between high interest rates that are cratering demand and policy uncertainty due to proposals in Washington to kill solar subsidies, the industry is in turmoil. Sunnova asserted that the bankruptcy filing “is not expected to have a material effect on our servicing operations for existing customers.” More on what this all means for customers in my story from yesterday.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday proposed approving Texas’ application to regulate carbon dioxide injection wells, kicking off a 45-day comment period. If its application is approved, Texas would become the fifth state to be granted oversight of such “class VI” wells at the state level, following North Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, and West Virginia. Last year, a group of Texas Democrats sent a letter to the agency advising it to reject Texas’ application due to the state’s history of poor enforcement. The EPA had opened a probe into the state’s oversight of other types of injection wells after a petition from environmental groups said Texas had failed to protect groundwater. The agency will hold one virtual public hearing on the decision on July 24.
Automakers are pivoting en masse to hybrids as federal support for EVs is thrown in reverse. “The unprecedented EV head-fake has wreaked havoc on product plans,” Bank of America analysts wrote in a recent report. “The next four+ years will be the most uncertain and volatile time in product strategy ever.”
