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The announcement came the same day the Department of Energy reached a milestone in its reactor pilot program. Launched last year, the program set a goal of three of its 10 participating companies building test reactors and splitting atoms for the first time by July 4. On Wednesday, the startup Deployable Energy, which is seeking to commercialize a 1-megawatt reactor, said it had reached criticality on its Unity test reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, becoming the third developer after fellow microreactor companies Aalo Atomic and Valar Atomics to sustain a chain reaction within its reactor. “Yesterday, we accomplished a significant milestone on a timeline many thought was unachievable,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “Advanced nuclear technologies like Unity will help power the next generation of American industry, strengthen our energy security, and ensure the United States remains the world’s nuclear innovation leader.”
PJM Interconnection’s struggle to muster up enough electricity generation to meet surging demand from data centers and air conditioners is well known at this point. But the difficulty the nation’s largest power grid system has just predicting how much electricity it will need raises real concerns over whether PJM can keep the lights on. Between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. ET today, demand for electricity in PJM Interconnection could top out at 166 gigawatts, according to the energy consultancy ICF. That’s roughly 10 gigawatts higher than PJM’s projected summertime peak of 156 gigawatts for all of this year. “Because PJM’s planning methodology relies on a rolling 30-year historical weather average, it operates under the assumption that the future will resemble the past,” ICF wrote in a memo. “This modeling creates systemic risk, underestimating the frequency and severity of future extreme weather events.” As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, PJM territories such as New Jersey have seen average bills soar from about $91 to $140 over the past five years, while prices are up some 52%, per data from the Heatmap-MIT Electricity Price Hub.
In New York City, meanwhile, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has urged residents in the five boroughs to keep air conditioners set to 78 degrees to conserve electricity and avoid brownouts. “A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved,” he wrote in a post on X. “Let’s ease demand — and get through the heat — together.” New York’s statewide grid operator has warned for months that the zone that includes New York City and its surrounding suburbs is at risk of outages due to a gap between supply and demand that virtually matches the output of the Indian Point nuclear plant that shut down in 2021.
A generator lights a home on a dark street in San Isidro, Puerto Rico.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Of the $14.3 billion the federal government earmarked for the reconstruction of Puerto Rico’s grid, 75% of the funding remains unspent nearly a decade after Hurricane Maria laid waste to the U.S. territory’s electrical system. The Federal Emergency Management Agency alone is sitting on $8.4 billion, and just 400 of the 16,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines that were slated for tree trimming have had overgrown vegetation cleared. That’s all according to the findings of a new report from the Government Accountability Office, an independent federal watchdog within the government. One bright spot for Puerto Ricans has been the success of residential solar panels and batteries in supplying power during frequent outages. But the report notes that the Energy Department canceled up to $350 million in grants for installing solar panels on the homes of disabled and low-income Puerto Ricans. “The GAO report confirms what we’ve been saying for months: This administration’s shortcomings and the lack of coordination among all stakeholders have delayed the disbursement of funds,” Representative Pablo José Hernández Rivera, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, a nonvoting delegate to the U.S. Congress, said in a statement. “Puerto Rico needs less division and excuses and more teamwork with results.”
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Last year, Wyoming, the country’s top coal-producing state, announced that its first new coal mine to open in decades would also produce rare earths. Now West Virginia, where the waning coal industry nevertheless remains a central part of the culture and economy, is getting in on the rare earths game. On Wednesday, an investment company led by the Trump administration’s former critical minerals czar unveiled plans to develop a new hub for refining rare earths out of ore in Rupert, a tiny mountain town in southeastern West Virginia. The project is being developed by the White House and led by Drew Horn, who worked as an adviser to the Energy Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term. Described as a “partnership,” the deal includes the Houston-based rare earths refiner Flash Metals USA, the industrial giant AmForge, and the Greenbrier Smokeless Coal Company, which already operates a metallurgical coal mine in Rupert.
“The initiative is backed entirely by private investment — not state government subsidies, taxpayer funding, or state incentives,” GreenMet, the investment company leading the project, said in a statement. “Instead, private investors recognized West Virginia’s abundant natural resources, skilled workforce, and strategic advantages, committing approximately $150 million to launch this first-of-its-kind processing hub.” While the future refineries aim to extract traces of rare earths left behind in coal mine waste, the project has already secured deals to buy more ore from Greenland, Canada, and Cameroon to beef up its output.
There was once a time when hydrogen fuel cells seemed like a serious rival to lithium battery packs as the energy source to power future passenger vehicles. But over the past decade, battery-powered electric vehicles won the market as prices came down and the infrastructure for buying hydrogen fuel lagged. Still, the limits of batteries — which are already very heavy in passenger cars, and weigh multiple tons when large enough to propel trucks — to affordably power tractor-trailer trucks seemed to leave the heavy-duty vehicle market open to hydrogen. But an article in the in-house magazine of Sinopec, China’s state-owned oil company, now calls into question hydrogen’s future in trucking in the People’s Republic, which has one of the most built-out networks for using the technology anywhere in the world. “In the past, it was generally assumed that electric vehicles would replace gasoline and hydrogen vehicles would replace diesel,” the Mandarin-language article reads, according to a translation I ran through Claude. “But with advances in EV technology and the development of charging and battery-swapping infrastructure, the traditional hydrogen vehicle scenarios of ‘medium-to-heavy loads and long range’ are now also trending toward being taken over by battery-electric heavy trucks.”
Meanwhile, in the inland Henan province, a pair of deep geothermal wells were connected to create a closed-loop system. The wells, dug nearly 11,500 feet deep, reach a temperature of nearly 245 degrees Fahrenheit. Once completed, the wells will be part of seven separate systems designed by developer Wanjiang New Energy to provide district heating. The technology, Think Geo Energy noted, “unavoidably draws comparisons to the closed-loop geothermal technology designed and built by Eavor Technologies,” whose CEO Mark Fitzgerald joined Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast last year.
Build Your Dreams? More like Beat Your Deliveries. Chinese auto giant BYD delivered 557,090 fully electric vehicles in the second quarter of 2026 — trouncing the roughly 400,000 deliveries Tesla is expected to report for the same quarter, according to Electrek. We’ll find out later today when Tesla announces its latest earnings.
Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei and Sungrow currently dominate the inverter market. Earlier this year, SolarEdge started shipping inverters from its factory in Austin to buyers in Europe. But the global inverter market was on track to contract by 2% this year as policy changes in China, the U.S., and Europe created more uncertainty for solar.
The self-described “free state” of Florida has stripped municipalities of their right to set targets for bringing the local economy’s planet-heating emissions to net zero. A new law known as HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero goals, though legal experts said the legislation will not necessarily upend existing climate targets in at least 10 cities and counties including Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando, and Leon County, where the capital city of Tallahassee is located. “It’s certainly meant to scare municipalities and local governments from trying to do things to further net-zero policies,” Bradley Marshall, senior attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice, told Inside Climate News. “Now, its exact impact and what it exactly prohibits is probably up for some debate. Things that are adjacent to it — emissions reductions and even climate change reduction policies — on their face will not run afoul at all of a ban on adopting a net zero policy.” The move comes two years after Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill stripping the words “climate change” from state policies.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has accused New York State of violating U.S. Department of Agriculture standards to make prime farmland available for large-scale solar development. In a letter sent last week to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins warned the state against fast-tracking solar projects on prime farmland, and gave Albany 30 days to “explain why New York is moving away from USDA’s prime farmland standards and what it’s doing to protect these irreplaceable agricultural resources.”
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The pain in Spain is felt mainly by the investors who paid to build out all the solar panels now harvesting the sun on the plain. In just the past six months, the European country has already surpassed its annual record for the number of hours when the owners of solar farms must pay users to take electricity during sunny peak hours, when the sheer volume of panels now turning sunshine into power pushes midday prices well below zero. The glut has kept electricity prices in Spain among the lowest in Europe, with rates roughly half of what Germans pay. But at least four Spanish projects or companies have gone up for sale, according to a Bloomberg tally. The head of Catalonia’s regional utility, L’Energètica, said: “The economics have deteriorated so sharply that investors are trying to exit at steep discounts.”
Investors in the sector had expected that Spain would upgrade its grid and deploy more batteries as the country’s solar sector boomed. But the mismatch between the volume of generation and the capacity of wires, batteries, and offtakers to distribute or make use of that electricity has only grown since the April 2025 blackout that plunged most of Spain and Portugal into darkness. Since then, Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, has grown more aggressive in ordering solar farms offline to avoid disruptions to the frequency and voltage of the distribution system. The country has vowed to undertake more than $34 billion in grid upgrades by 2030.
Priority Group A reactors could be online within five years. Radiant Energy Group
In the three years since Germany shut down its last nuclear power station, the country’s leaders have repeatedly called the phase out a mistake, but seesawed on whether the plants that haven’t yet seen the wrecking ball could be restored to operation. A new study by the nuclear consultancy Radiant Energy Group has found that the most recently shuttered five reactors, all pressurized water reactors, could be returned to service in 2031. “Germany’s nuclear phaseout was presented as permanent and irreversible. In reality, it is neither,” the report concludes. “The shuttered fleet remains to a large degree intact, with most of the value in each site preserved; every major component can be repaired or replaced using procedures demonstrated at comparable plants worldwide; and the economic case for restart is strong.”
Well over half of Argentinians claim Italian ancestry. The South American nation’s future natural gas molecules might now declare a similar background. Eni, the Milan-based national oil company of Italy, inked a deal last week to buy a 32% stake in three upstream blocks of Argentina’s Vaca Muerta basin. Located in the mountainous western province of Neuquén, the discovery is widely considered the most promising natural gas find in Latin America, so vast The Rio Times said it could “reshape South America’s energy map.” In a statement, Eni’s chief operating officer, Guido Brusco, said: “Vaca Muerta is one of the world's richest unconventional basins in terms of resources: our participation positions us across the entire value chain, from Argentine upstream to the supply of LNG to international customers, creating value while contributing to global energy security.”
Meanwhile, Brazil’s national oil company just notched a record output from at the flagship field of its Santos Basin offshore basin. The field is now producing a record 1.1 million barrels of oil daily, surpassing the previous peak set in October of a million barrels per day, according to Oil Price. The milestone comes as Brazil ramps up production of oil and gas, despite its left-wing government’s expressed concern over climate change.
Before there was the drill bit, there was the axe.EIA
New analysis by the Energy Information Administration shows this nation was founded on … renewables. Now, of course, that was primarily wood until hydropower came around in roughly the 1880s. But coal, which surpassed wood in 1885, was the real innovation behind the energy transition away from chopped trees. At a combined 18% of total energy consumption in the U.S., non-fossil sources such as wind, water, and nuclear reached what appears to be the highest point since 1900 last year.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the description of Solaredge.
