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The Department of the Interior has struck a deal with Duke Energy to pay the utility $129 million in exchange for abandoning a lease for an offshore wind project in federal waters off North Carolina. In a statement Monday, Duke’s chief executive in the Carolinas, Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe, said the company would reinvest nearly all the money the federal government refunded into new generating capacity, “which may include advancing new nuclear and natural gas generation, and grid enhancements to strengthen reliability.” The announcement came less than two weeks after the Trump administration unveiled a $765 million deal with Invenergy to quash four proposed offshore wind sites, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported.
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the White House has the power to fire commissioners at independent agencies without showing cause, overturning a nearly century-old precedent and granting President Donald Trump new powers over the federal regulatory state. That, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote yesterday, directly overhauls the historical separation of powers at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose members the president appointed but whose culture of not answering to the White House directly created the appearance of being above short-term political concerns. “Agencies like FERC tend not to be as explicitly politicized or partisan as, say, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is led by a single administrator who serves at the pleasure of the president, or the National Labor Relations Board or Federal Election Commission, which oversee areas of law and policy with stark partisan and ideological stakes,” Matthew wrote. “This is partly because FERC justifies decisions on electricity and natural gas policy with reference to ‘technical expertise.’” In the near term, that won’t mean much since the current leadership of FERC and the NRC are closely aligned with the Trump administration. But in an era of eroding institutional trust, the new dynamic could eat away at the credibility of key regulators.
In Texas, regulators are weighing challenges to a transmission line from landowners who say the wires follow a route that unnecessarily intersects with their properties. In North Dakota, however, utility regulators last week passed that point, instead issuing a route permit for a controversial high-voltage transmission line in the eastern half of the state. Utilities first proposed the route for the 92-mile JETx line last summer. “This decision, as with any other decision, has to be based on the law, and then the record and the facts of the case,” Public Service Commissioner Jill Kringstad told the North Dakota Monitor.
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U.S. emissions surged 3.2% last year on the back of a 13% spike in coal-fired power generation, a sign of soaring demand for electricity. Still, solar offered a bright spot, growing by 28% last year. That’s all according to the latest data from the Energy Institute’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy. But the big takeaways were in fossil fuels. Among them: The U.S. remains the world’s top producer of oil and gas, and Canada has consolidated its positions as the world’s No. 4 driller of crude. As a result, “the center of gravity of global oil supply has structurally shifted,” Wafa Jafri, the British lead for energy and natural resource strategy at the accounting giant KPMG, said in a statement. “The Americas now produce 20% more oil than the Middle East, a shift that would have been unthinkable at the start of the century.”
Meanwhile, small-scale solar is making an impact in New York. New analysis by the Energy Information Administration shows that electricity demand falls midday in the state, a phenomenon the agency attributes to the rise of small solar installations in the state. The merits of distributed solar are even more obvious in places like Pakistan, where the grid is prone to going down. The country added a whopping 27 gigawatts of rooftop solar between 2023 and 2025, according to new data in PV Tech.
Just building intermittent renewables without storage is going out of fashion. Investment behemoth Brookfield Asset Management now says that contracts that pair new generation with battery storage are replacing pure renewables deals. In an interview with Bloomberg, Arnaud Jouvin, the head of Brookfield’s global energy strategy, said customers increasingly demand access to solar or wind systems with batteries. “There’s a lot of renewables being built in many markets, and the attractiveness of these renewable megawatt-hours in the middle of the day is declining to a point where many large offtakers no longer want standalone solar,” he said.
Police outside the Arcom headquarters. Rodrigo BUENDIA / AFP via Getty Images
If the U.S. had hoped to secure the minerals it needs from Latin America instead of China, it may have to reconsider at least two Andean nations. Bolivia is in the midst of fierce protests and boycotts designed to thwart the new government’s efforts to develop a private mining industry. Now one of Ecuador’s mineral agencies has suffered a bomb attack. Early Monday morning, a bomb went off at the Quito headquarters of the country’s mining regulator, Arcom, blowing out several floors of windows.
