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The Karachi nuclear plant, where China built two Hualong One reactors.Str/Xinhua via Getty Images
China is constructing more reactors at home than any other country by far, and it’s gotten quite good at building its standardized designs for large light water reactors faster and more cheaply than anyone else in the business. Yet Beijing has been slow to make export deals, so far selling just six reactors to two separate power plants in Pakistan. But the People’s Republic is stepping up. With a growing number of countries now seeking to build their first or latest nuclear stations, China is now bidding on major projects. Beijing went head to head with Washington in Riyadh when offering to build Saudi Arabia’s first atomic power station. Now China has submitted what Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic called “an incredible proposal” to build what would be the country’s first nuclear project in a European country, according to NucNet. It’s part of a broader investment scheme that includes $1.1 billion to boost production of artificial intelligence, automobiles, and robots, Bloomberg reported.
That’s far from the country where green technology is finding ways out of China. On Tuesday, InsideEVs reported that Jeep-owner Stellantis is considering manufacturing Chinese-branded cars in Mexico and Canada. Stellantis already owns a majority stake in the Chinese joint venture Leapmotor, and maintains a small North American factory footprint for the brand. The company is using one of its factories in Spain to produce Leapmotor cars in Europe, and now it’s also in talks with the Chinese automaker Dongfeng about adding its more expensive Voyah models to its lineup in France. Still, Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa warned that such vehicles won’t be hitting American streets anytime soon. “I believe that there is space in Mexico. There is, maybe, space in Canada. We’ll see,” Filosa told CNBC. “Now there is no space in the United States. We don’t see that.” Maybe not for long. As Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman put it in January: “Chinese EVs are at the gates.”
The United States achieved energy dominance over Europe as the continent started buying loads of liquified natural gas from America to replace pipeline fuel that once flowed west from Russia once the war in Ukraine began. The Iran War looked set to only deepen that advantage as the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz kept shipments of Qatari LNG at bay. But North America’s other big energy producer is muscling in. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Canada had struck a deal to export up to a million metric tons of LNG to Germany each year from a Pacific Coast terminal in British Columbia. The first deliveries would be due in the early 2030s, and the contract would continue for 20 years. Officials told the newspaper the deal would be announced today.
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Last week, I told you about Otovo, a U.S. -Norwegian startup that billed itself as a kind of AAA for rooftop solar panels and other home energy systems. Founded by the former chief executive of the bankrupt solar installer Sunnova, Otovo aims to serve the very customers “orphaned” by the Chapter 11 and left without a go-to company to fix faulty panels, batteries, or generators. So far, Otovo has built a base of about 30,000 customers subscribed to its repair service, two-thirds of whom are in Europe. On Wednesday morning, I can report exclusively for this newsletter, the company plans to announce that it acquired the customer book from SunSystem Technology. The customer base covers nine U.S. states, nearly tripling Otovo’s footprint to 14 states in total. The deal marks Otovo’s seventh acquisition since its relaunch less than a year ago.
Last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published an interim final rule axing a key step from the environmental review process for large, federally-backed developments. Environmental assessments conducted by HUD staff on projects with more than 200 units will now, according to E&E News, “no longer need an additional review by the field environmental clearance officer.” The change, set to take effect June 22, is meant to streamline affordable housing construction.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s effort to smooth the permitting rules for companies looking to start a whole new sector the deep seafloor is similarly picking up pace. The Metals Company, the U.S.-Canadian startup that helped pioneer the latest effort at establishing a global industry, is the well-known frontrunner racing for U.S. approval, even as the United Nations body that regulates commerce in international waters has yet to lay out its own ground rules for tapping the ocean floor for minerals. As I told you back in March, that U.N. entity, the International Seabed Authority, promised to broker a deal for a global permitting regime this summer. In the meantime, E&E News reports that at least eight ventures are now vying for federal permits in the U.S.
Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft were among the companies to sign onto a new initiative designed to support investment in next-generation energy and materials technologies meant to reduce the environmental impact of data centers. The Data Center Innovation Initiative, organized by the nonprofit investor group Elemental Impact, “will test and validate critical technologies in data center environments, creating potential pathways for future adoption across broader energy and industrial sectors.” Other participants include Salesforce and Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy. “Data centers are uniquely positioned to serve as catalysts for clean energy and sustainable building materials,” Nat Sahlstrom, Meta’s vice president of energy and sustainability, said in a press release. “By sharing what we learn together, we can support entrepreneurs to scale faster and move these innovations to real-world impact.”
Update: This article originally misidentified a signatory of the Data Center Innovation Initiative. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.
U.S. producers, meanwhile, are stepping up to fill the gap in oil and gas supply. On Saturday, the Financial Times reported that companies such as Diamondback, America’s third-largest producer in the Permian Basin, and shale driller Continental Resources were expanding drilling by more than 40% as a result of the war. U.S. companies have added at least 18 rigs since the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. Increased production isn’t just happening at home, either. Exxon Mobil just began drilling a new offshore well near its new operations in Guyana, according to Upstream. Over at the British oil giant BP, however, this morning brought upheaval as the board of directors ousted its chairman after just six months.
Firefighters blast the tank with water. Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
California officials ordered as many as 50,000 Orange County residents to evacuate Sunday after a crack formed in a tank at an industrial facility holding 7,000 gallons of a highly flammable toxic chemical. The accident at the suburban Los Angeles plant owned by the British fighter jet supplier GKN Aerospace began on Thursday, when firefighters in Garden Grove, California, found that a tank containing methyl methacrylate, a feedstock used to make plastic, had started bulging with pressure and releasing gas as it overheated. By Saturday, a fissure had formed in the tank — one of three on site containing the chemical — in what NPR called “good news,” since the opening eased pressure, making an explosion less likely. So far, no one has been injured. “Safety at our facilities is paramount,” a GKN spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times. “We follow all standard safety protocols and processes and are regularly audited by numerous state and federal agencies.” But authorities as far east as Arizona were bracing for the possibility of an explosion. In an update posted on X Monday morning, Orange County’s interim fire chief announced that the threat of what’s called a “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion,” or BLEVE (pronounced blevvy), “is now off the table,” adding that “that threat has been eliminated.”
While the accident will no doubt draw scrutiny to GKN’s record at the facility, known for producing parts for the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet, the episode is unlikely to draw the same fervid response as the fire at California’s Moss Landing battery plant last January. That incident set off what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman pegged as nationwide backlash to batteries. So far, thankfully, cooler heads have prevailed in resisting the urge to demand a shutdown of all production of aircraft components as a result of an accident.
The Trump administration’s yet-undefined rules for determining a key factor in solar projects’ eligibility for outgoing federal tax credits are bifurcating the U.S. market. The administration has yet to spell out in detail how companies should determine what percentage of their project inputs come from a so-called foreign entity of concern. While the list of FEOCs includes Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the main sticking point for developers is China, which dominates the global renewables supply chain. On one side are developers willing to roll the dice on imported equipment. On the other are companies avoiding the risk by buying panels either made in America, or in allied countries. To make navigating the process easier, the SEMA Coalition — an industry group representing U.S. solar manufacturers that support restrictions on cheap Chinese imports — put out a new report that includes a check list to determine whether a panel producer is likely to qualify for federal tax incentives or not. The paper, which was shared exclusively with me for this newsletter, was “informed by tax opinions, legal counsel who advise the SEMA Coalition’s members, as well as public documents.” The findings show that “some of these rules are ambiguous, while others are clear but challenging to comply with in practice.”
As I told you last week, American solar manufacturing is finally seeing something of a boom. Nearly 30 new utility-scale solar factories began production last year, providing more than enough capacity to meet U.S. demand.
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Amid a sweltering London heat wave in 2019, BHP laid out plans for the “biggest global mobilization since World War II” in the name of cutting back on fossil fuel use and fighting a climate that threat that “could be existential,” the world’s largest mining company’s then-CEO Andrew Mackenzie said at the time. Today, however, the giant is reversing course, quietly shelving billions of dollars in projects designed to cut emissions from its mining operations. An internal memo from last year leaked to Australia’s ABC News and The Guardian shows that the need for renewables at BHP’s iron-ore facility in Pilbara had “diminished,” and that a plan to hit net-zero by 2050 had a “low probability of success.”
The West Coast’s continental shelf drops off far more steeply into the Pacific than America’s East Coast slides into the Atlantic, making siting offshore wind turbines tricky off California’s shores. Nevertheless, a developer was trying to build the first floating offshore turbines in the U.S. — at least until the Trump administration struck a dubious deal to pay the company to quit. That agreement is drawing blowback from California regulators, as I told you earlier this month. But the Golden State isn’t abandoning its goals. On Monday, offshoreWIND.biz reported that the California Energy Commission had reaffirmed its target of 25 gigawatts of offshore turbine capacity by 2045. “At a time of global energy volatility, offshore wind is not just a climate strategy. It is part of a national security strategy,” Noel Hacegaba, chief executive at the Port of Long Beach, said in a statement. “The grid we built for the last century cannot carry us through the next. This is renewable energy’s moment.”
The market for offshore wind looks even brighter outside the U.S. Last week, the Danish Energy Agency received bids for two different offshore development areas totaling a combined 1.8 gigawatts of turbines, according to Renewables Now. In an interview with Wind Power Monthly, the chief executive of the automaker Volvo lauded Sweden’s offshore wind farms for giving manufacturers like his a “competitive edge.”
Canadians can now cruise around the 10,000-year-old Columbia Icefield in a vehicle whose pollution isn’t adding to polar melting. On Monday, InsideEVs reported that the truck maker Pursuit had retrofitted one of its old diesel ice explorers to go electric with a huge, 528-kilowatt-hour battery. That’s big enough for about 30 trips up and down the Rocky Mountain icefield. The renovation involved keeping the old cabin but replacing the chassis and driveline with battery-propelled equipment. It is the world’s first all-electric ice explorer.
