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When Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer visited SunZia’s construction site in August 2024, he observed that, once it started running at full blast, the project would “generate roughly 1% of the country’s electricity needs.” Its success in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks on wind could “lay the model” for a new paradigm in which “clean energy buildings and environmental protectors work together to find the best solution for the environment and the climate,” Rob wrote. “We will need many more success stories like it if America is to meet its climate goals — 99 more, to be exact.”
The U.S. Senate voted 50-49 on Thursday to repeal a mining ban on land near the Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, declaring what Heatmap’s Jeva Lange called “open season” on public lands. In what the public lands news site Public Domain called “an unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act,” the vote slashes protections for the iconic nature preserve. Inspiring even fiercer political pushback is the fact that Republicans championed the effort largely to benefit an overseas corporation: Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta, which has for years sought to establish a copper-nickel mine on national forest land near the wilderness area. “The Boundary Waters belong to everyone,” Julie Goodwin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, said in a statement. “They should be protected and enjoyed by all, not jeopardized to benefit a wealthy foreign company.”
At the same time, global demand for both nickel and copper are surging — and a successful effort to decarbonize the world economy through greater electrification will require a lot more of both metals.
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The good news: The Department of Energy is allowing the Direct Air Capture hub program started under the Biden administration to move forward. In documents submitted to Congress this week, the agency listed as approved the up to $1.2 billion the program awarded to two projects: Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub, and Climeworks and Heirloom’s joint Project Cypress in Louisiana. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo noted: “This fate was far from certain.” After the Energy Department cut funding for 10 of the original 21 projects last fall, a leaked list of projects suggested the Louisiana and Texas hubs would be targeted in a second wave of rescissions. The bad news: Last week, Rob had a scoop that Microsoft — whose carbon removal buying made up roughly 80% of the industry — was pausing its purchases. And as he wrote yesterday, even if it’s just temporary, the pause will ripple through the nascent market.
Other technologies that once seemed like science fiction are, in fact, moving forward. In an exclusive for Heatmap, I reported that Clean Core Thorium Energy, a Chicago-based company designing thorium fuel bundles that works in existing reactors, inked a deal to manufacture its first four units. In addition to assembling the bundles, the Canadian National Laboratories will supply the small amount of a special kind of uranium fuel needed to be blended into Clean Core’s mix and that serves as a spark plug for the reaction.
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Last October, the Energy Department asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to set rules for patching data centers, advanced factories, and other large loads onto the grid. The move, as Utility Dive reported at the time, sparked controversy over whether it represented a Washington power grab given that the landmark Federal Power Act gives states jurisdiction over retail electricity interconnections. Now FERC has said it plans to respond. On Thursday, Robin Millican, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, posted on X that FERC announced a notice of intent to act on the Energy Department’s request, with a ruling expected in June. “Good,” she wrote. “Ensuring interconnection costs from data centers, advanced manufacturing, and big electrification projects aren’t passed to retail customers is overdue.”
Back in January, I told you that two geothermal startups raised a combined $212 million: Zanskar, which uses artificial intelligence to hunt down previously undetected conventional geothermal resources underground; and Sage Geosystems, a next-generation startup using fracking technology to drill for geothermal heat in places that conventional resources can’t tap. This week we saw two geothermal companies once again net a nine-digit number. Once again, Zanskar — considered by experts Heatmap surveyed to be one of the most promising climate-tech companies in the game right now for a reason, after all — announced the closing of another $40 million fundraise. Just Capital and Spring Lane Capital led the round, with an additional investment from Tierra Adentro Growth Capital. Zanskar said the round was a development capital facility, a type of deal that usually involves equity or debt to fund a company’s growth. It is “among the first ever structured for early-stage geothermal development, drawing on the best practices from the renewables and natural resource sectors,” the company said Thursday in a press release. The financing will help establish a revolving line of credit “designed to accelerate project development.”
On Wednesday, another competitor in the next-generation geothermal space, Mazama Energy, pulled in a fresh round of capital. The Frisco, Texas-based company, which last year boasted a system that reached hotter temperatures than any other geothermal company, just raised $100 million, according to Axios.
San Diego H2O. Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images
San Diego, once the poster child for a drought-parched Southern Californian city, is now looking to become a water exporter, The Wall Street Journal reported. North America’s largest desalination plant is producing so much freshwater for the San Diego County Water Authority that the city is working on a deal to sell millions of gallons to Arizona and Nevada. The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, which opened in 2015 and is owned by an infrastructure investment firm, may produce more expensive than average water, but “it is important to note that it is more reliable than other sources,” Keith R. Solar, a water attorney from the seaside neighborhood of Point Loma, wrote in the Voice of San Diego last year. “Its value as insurance against disruption of supplies from other sources makes it a critical part of our future.”
This morning, Emily published another banger. While listening to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright speak before the House Appropriations Committee Wednesday, she noticed the cabinet chief say that “well over 80%” of the 2,270 awards reviewed by agency were now moving forward. But there are “big holes” in that number, which doesn't account for several grants to blue states that a judge mandated be reinstated, or for energy efficiency rebates that are still in limbo.
Louisiana’s Public Service Commission voted 4-1 to fast-track a proposal from Facebook-owner Meta and the utility Entergy to build seven new gas-fired power plants, in a $16 billion investment into fossil fuel infrastructure. The project is, according to the watchdog group Alliance for Affordable Energy, one of the largest single power requests in state history. The timeline established under the vote today requires a final vote on the application by December.
The federal government, meanwhile, is getting interested in how much power data centers use. The Energy Information Administration is planning to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use, Wired reported, calling the move the first such effort to collect basic data on the server farms’ power demands.
The American Pacific. Encyclopaedia Britannica/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Super Typhoon Sinlaku slammed into the Northern Mariana Islands as the most powerful storm on Earth so far this year, plunging the U.S. territory into darkness. It’s unclear just how many of the remote Pacific archipelago’s 45,000 residents lost grid connections amid the storm. But reports indicate island-wide blackouts. Local officials told the Associated Press it could take weeks to restore power and water service across the territory. Even if cellphones were charged, Pacific Daily News reported that wireless networks were overloaded and slow throughout the storm. Saipan, the capital, and neighboring Tinian were plunged into “total darkness,” according to Pacific Island Times.
The incident highlights the particular risk that the five populated U.S. territories face from extreme weather. All five — Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean; Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa in the Pacific — are island chains vulnerable to hurricanes, typhoons, and rising seas. And all five depend on increasingly costly imports of oil and gas to generate electricity. This September will mark nine years since Hurricane Maria laid waste to Puerto Rico’s aging grid system.
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Over at NOTUS, reporter Anna Kramer found that the Interior Department “has blown past a congressionally-mandated deadline to report its progress on energy projects.” Per a letter from Senate Democrats, the agency failed to submit two required reports to Congress on its reviews and approvals of energy projects, which wind and solar developers say reflects the administration’s ongoing de facto embargo on permits for renewables.
Overall, 2025 was a worse year for zero-emissions trucks than 2024. Annual total registrations of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that don’t run on gasoline or diesel fell by 7.6%, according to new data from the International Council on Clean Transportation. But the decline wasn’t uniform across all segments: The medium-duty truck, such as a box truck or a delivery truck, saw a 61.7% surge in zero-emission vehicle registrations year over year. That held even as buses fell 32.8% and heavy-duty trucks, such as flatbeds and dump trucks, declined 20.7%.
The times, they are a-changing over at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Once a stalwart opponent of nuclear power and supporter of stricter and more onerous environmental rules, the conservation-focused litigation nonprofit first embraced the need to restart existing nuclear plants, in a major shift. Now the NRDC has thrown its weight behind permitting reform, calling on lawmakers to speed up the process for approving clean energy projects. Green groups like NRDC once derided an overhaul of the landmark U.S. environmental laws as a deregulatory assault on nature. What’s going on here? The Foundation for American Innovation’s Thomas Hochman put it simply: “Vibe shift.”
