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On offshore wind wins, China’s ‘strong energy nation,’ and Japan’s deep-sea mining
What to watch for when the agency releases its final decision on the greenhouse gas endangerment finding.
On nuclear deregulation, Drax’s troubles, and NYC solar scammers
Current conditions: A bomb cyclone is headed up the East Coast, bringing more cold air and possible blizzard conditions to the Northeast, especially New England • Even Tampa Bay, where so-called snowbirds from the Northeast go to winter, could see snow by the end of this week • A storm system named Kristin is on track to bring thunderstorms, strong winds, and hail to Greece.
Workers assemble Volkswagen's ID.3 electric car on a production line at German car factory. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
Sales of electric vehicles in Europe surged 30% to a record high last year, with battery-powered models outselling gas-burning cars for the first time last month, the Financial Times reported. The increase came despite a 38% drop in Tesla’s annual sales on the continent as Chinese rival BYD zoomed past Elon Musk’s automaker. Electric vehicles now account for 17% of EU car sales, up from 14% in 2024.
Tesla, meanwhile, is shifting gears. During a quarterly earnings call Wednesday evening, Musk announced plans to end production of the Model S sedan, its first fully original car design, and Model X SUV. “It’s time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge, because we’re really moving into a future that is based on autonomy,” he said. “So if you’re interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it.” He said he would continue offering support for the existing models “for as long as people have the vehicles.” The big seller in the quarter, however, wasn’t any car at all. The company sold a record number of its utility-scale Megapack batteries. In a shareholder deck, the company told investors it had “achieved our highest quarterly energy storage deployments, driven by record Megapack deployments.” That brought revenue from the energy sector up 27% from 2024 to $12.8 billion.
The Department of Energy has overhauled a set of nuclear safety rules and shared them with companies it’s regulating without making the changes public. Citing leaked documents, NPR reported Wednesday that the agency had cut more than 750 pages from earlier versions of the rules, “leaving only about one-third of the number of pages in the original documents.” The changes include loosening rules on monitoring radiation leaks in groundwater and raising the threshold for an accident investigation. When I asked Emmet Penney, a nuclear historian and a senior fellow at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, what he made of the report, he said the cuts eliminated a number of dubiously useful rules, including reducing how much security is required at nuclear stations, and praised Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “Reducing costs burdens like unnecessary security for test reactors is a smart move from the DOE, as is clarifying vague radiation standards,” he told me. “These changes demonstrate Secretary Wright’s seriousness when it comes to catalyzing the nuclear renaissance.”
Also on Wednesday, the Energy Department announced a new initiative asking states to express interest in hosting “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses,” where companies across the nuclear fuel cycle could set up shop, including recycling used fuel.
Electric and gas utilities requested almost $31 billion worth of rate increases last year, according to a new analysis by the energy policy nonprofit PowerLines. That compares to $15 billion in 2024. “In case you haven’t already done the math: That’s more than double what utilities asked for just a year earlier,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote. Electricity prices went up by 6.7% in the past year, outpacing the 2.7% increase for prices overall. That makes power prices 37% more expensive than just five years ago. “These increases, a lot of them have not actually hit people's wallets yet,” PowerLines executive director Charles Hua told a group of reporters Wednesday afternoon. “So that shows that in 2026, the utility bills are likely to continue to rise, barring some major, sweeping action.” Those could affect some 81 million consumers, he said.
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Drax built its business off a loophole in carbon accounting. Under the international rules on how to quantify emissions, the carbon from losing a tree is counted in the country where it’s felled. That meant chopping down old-growth trees in forests in the American South and shipping the vitamin-sized wood pellets to England to burn in a power plant counted as low-carbon energy in the United Kingdom — even if the power plant had to burn twice as much wood to equal the energy from coal. At long last, European and American policymakers are waking up to the realities of the wood pellet energy industry. Enviva, a major wood pellet producer, went bankrupt in 2024. Drax, meanwhile, has been losing green-energy subsidies in its native U.K. Now the company is facing the potential loss of the new biggest market for its wood pellets. Japan, compensating for the nuclear reactors still sitting idle 15 years after the Fukushima disaster, is set to soon surpass the U.K. as the world’s largest pellet importer market. But Japanese policymakers are now considering pulling support for all projects over 10 megawatts. “The real intention is quite simple: no new government support, phasing out. We don’t see any clear path of bringing down costs in the foreseeable future,” one government official told the Financial Times. “Existing projects might survive but no new projects are coming.”
New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection filed a lawsuit late last week against Radiant Solar and its owner, William James Bushell, demanding $18 million in restitution and about $1.7 million in penalties for damaging New Yorkers’ homes and leaving the customers across the city in debt. It’s the largest sum the city has ever sought from a home improvement contractor. The city argued that Radiant, as The New York Times put it, “engaged in a dizzying array of mechanical and monetary malfeasance for years.” That included padding loans with undisclosed “dealer fees,” signing customers up for large loans they didn't ask for, failing to file paperwork for customers to receive tax credits, and neglecting city approval processes. The company even allegedly ran a bogus sweepstakes for a new Tesla.
Redwood Materials’ big transformation is bringing in the money. Amid a two-year slump in lithium prices, the battery recycling startup announced the launch of a new venture last summer to provide grid-scale storage from restored battery packs. Yesterday, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote, “it’s clear just how much that bet has paid off.” The company raised a $425 million round of Series E funding for the new venture, called Redwood Energy. The money came from such investors as Google and Nvidia’s venture capital arms
Fossil fuel companies colluded to stifle competition from clean energy, the state argues.
A new kind of climate lawsuit just dropped.
Last week the state of Michigan joined the parade of governments at all levels suing fossil fuel companies for climate change-related damages. But it’s testing a decidedly different strategy: Rather than allege that Big Oil deceived the public about the dangers of its products, Michigan is bringing an antitrust case, arguing that the industry worked as a cartel to stifle competition from non-fossil fuel resources.
Starting in the 1980s, the complaint says, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and their trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, conspired “to delay the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy” and “unlawfully colluded to reduce innovation” in Michigan’s transportation and energy markets. This, it alleges, is a key driver of Michigan’s (and the country’s) present-day struggles with energy affordability. If the companies had not suppressed renewable energy and electric vehicles, the argument goes, these technologies would have become competitive sooner and resulted in lower transportation and energy costs.
The framing may enable Michigan to sidestep some of the challenges other climate lawsuits have faced. Ten states have attempted to hold Big Oil accountable for climate impacts, mostly by arguing that the industry concealed the harms their products would cause. One suit filed by the City of New York has been dismissed, and many others have been delayed due to arguments over whether the proceedings belong in state or federal court, and haven’t yet gotten to the substance of the claims. Michigan’s tactic “maybe speeds up getting to the merits of the case,” Margaret Barry, a climate litigation fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told me, “because those jurisdictional issues aren’t going to be part of the court’s review.”
The fossil fuel industry’s primary defense in these suits has been that cities and states cannot fault oil companies for greenhouse gas emissions because regulating those emissions is the job of the federal government, per the Clean Air Act. Making the case about competition may “avoid arguments about whether this lawsuit is really about regulation,” Rachel Rothschild, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan, told me.
The biggest hurdle Michigan will face is proving the existence of a coordinated plot. Geoffrey Kozen, a partner at the law firm Robins Kaplan who works on antitrust cases, told me that companies in these kinds of suits tend to argue that they were simply reacting independently to the same market pressures and responding as any rational market actor would.
There are two main ways for a plaintiff to overcome that kind of argument, Kozen explained. In rare cases, there is a smoking gun — a memo that all of the parties signed saying they were going to act together, for example. More often, attorneys attempt to demonstrate a combination of “parallel conduct,” i.e., showing that all of the parties did the same thing, and “plus factors,” or layers of evidence that make it more likely that there was some kind of underlying agreement.
According to Michigan’s lawsuit, the collusion story in this case goes like this. In 1979, the American Petroleum Institute started a group called the CO2 and Climate Task Force. By that time, Exxon had come to understand that fossil fuel consumption was warming the planet and would cause devastation costing trillions of dollars. The company’s scientists had concluded that cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels would have to make up an increasing amount of the world’s energy if such effects were to be avoided.
“A self-interested and law-abiding rational firm would have used this insight to innovate and compete in the energy market by offering superior and cheaper energy products to consumers,” the complaint says. Michigan alleges that instead, Exxon shared its findings with the other companies in the task force and conspired with them to suppress clean alternatives to fossil fuels. They worked together to “synchronize assessments of climate risks, monitor each other’s scientific and industry outlooks, align their responses to competitive threats, and coordinate their efforts to suppress technologies likely to displace gasoline or other fossil fuels through collusion rather than competition,” according to the complaint.
Michigan’s lawyers point to evidence showing that the named companies shut down internal research programs, withheld products from the market, and used their control of patents to stifle progress away from fossil fuels. The companies were all early leaders in developing clean technologies — with innovations in rechargeable batteries, hybrid cars, and solar panels — but began to sabotage or abandon those efforts after the formation of the task force, the lawsuit alleges.
The case will likely turn on whether the judge finds it credible that these actions would have been against the companies’ self-interest had they not known their peers would be doing the same thing, Kozen told me.
“The actions differ between defendants. They are over a wide range of time periods. And so the question is, is that pursuant to an actual agreement? Or is it pursuant to a bunch of oil executives who are all thinking in similar ways?” he said. “I think that’s going to be the number one point where success or failure is probably going to tip.”
Another challenge for Michigan will be to prove what the world would have looked like had this collusion not taken place. In the parlance of antitrust, this is known as the “but-for world.” Without the Big Oil conspiracy, the lawsuit says, electric vehicles would be “a common sight in every neighborhood,” there would be ubiquitous “reliable and fast chargers,” and renewable energy would be “supplied at scale.” It argues that economic models show that Michigan’s energy prices would also have been significantly lower. While such arguments are common in antitrust cases, it’s a lot more difficult to quantify the effects of stifled innovation than something more straightforward like price fixing.
The companies, of course, reject Michigan’s narrative. A spokeswoman for Exxon told the New York Times it was “yet another legally incoherent effort to regulate by lawsuit.”
If the state can gather enough plausible evidence of harm, however, it may be able to get past the companies’ inevitable motion to dismiss the case and on to discovery. While the case is built on heaps of internal emails and leaked memos that have been made public over the years through congressional investigations, who knows how much of the story has yet to be revealed.
“It’s, in my experience, almost impossible, if someone is actually a member of a cartel, to hide all the evidence,” said Kozen. “Whatever it is, it always comes out.”
