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The smoke pouring into Seattle from Spokane is particularly bad, but there’s also no such thing as good smoke.
On another offshore wind kill, inverter bans, and NYC’s new power line
A D.C. appeals court upheld an injunction preventing the Trump administration from clawing back $20 billion in climate grants.
The state’s crystal clear lakes are turning into the Reflecting Pool.
On Texas data centers, Microsoft’s carbon removal, and cross-border aluminum
Current conditions: Dangerous degrees of wildfire smoke swept into the Pacific Northwest, leaving air quality in fire-struck Spokane, Washington, at very unhealthy levels through midweek • Yesterday’s thunderstorms across the Northeast grounded flights and delayed thousands of passengers as key airports in New York City, New Jersey, and New England halted incoming arrivals for hours • Temperatures in Abu Dhabi are soaring to nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit all week.
A vessel sails past the partially dried-up river bed of the Rhine in Duisburg, western Germany. Ina FASSBENDER / AFP via Getty Images
Europe’s rivers are running dry amid the prolonged drought and third major heat wave this summer. On Monday, the Rhine River’s water levels dropped to their lowest level in nearly 150 years, beaching cargo barges and jeopardizing output from the various thermal power plants that line the waterway stretching through France, Germany, and Switzerland. The water levels at Kaub, a key crossing for vessels heading to southern Germany and Switzerland, fell to 24 centimeters, the lowest level since records started in 1880, according to a Bloomberg analysis of German federal data compiled by the university ETH Zurich. In Eastern Europe, the Danube’s flow is so depleted that just one reactor at Hungary’s only nuclear station, the four-unit Paks plant, is operating — and only at 50% as cooling water dwindles, NucNet reported.
In Washington State, meanwhile, nearly 65,000 people have now been evacuated from the wildfires that incinerated almost 700 homes in the Spokane area with a “wall of flames.” As of Monday evening, the fire was still 0% contained, according to Fox 13 Seattle, a local broadcaster.
You might not think it, given the partisan politics of our age, but the governors of New York and Texas actually have a lot in common. New York Governor Kathy Hochul is a Democrat, and Texas’ Greg Abbott is a Republican. But they’re both pro-nuclear. They’re both up for reelection this year. And they’re both banning data centers, at least temporarily. Last month, New York became the first state to halt permitting on new, large data centers for a year. Now Texas has put approvals for new data centers on hold until the state’s power regulators and grid managers can audit existing facilities that are seeking to connect to the state’s grid. Until then, E&E News reported, “no more additional data centers can be approved or move forward until that process is over.” In a letter to both the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Abbott wrote: “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUC and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.” On the local level, moratoriums on data centers blossomed in recent months, with more than 530 municipalities having slapped new restrictions on server farms, per a recent Heatmap analysis my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote.
Hochul, as our colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote later last month, is “walking a fine line” with her moratorium, issued via executive order, especially as her administration seeks to appease renewables boosters who say she isn’t doing enough to speed up deployments of that kind of infrastructure. But blocking disfavored types of infrastructure is nothing new for the Texas GOP. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is among the big names now trying to thwart a $33 billion transmission buildout in the state.
Back in April, Rob broke news that Microsoft was pausing its carbon removal purchases. The break marked a major setback for a nascent industry that had come to rely on the tech giant as its biggest and deepest-pocketed source of demand. While the company never confirmed the pause, it appears to be ending. Last night, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo passed along a big exclusive for this newsletter: Microsoft is set to announce a big carbon removal purchase. CREW Carbon, the Brooklyn-based startup that permanently traps carbon dioxide using a limestone and wastewater mix, inked an offtake agreement with Microsoft for 23,602 “durable, verified” credits. CREW “uses strategically-sourced alkaline minerals, such as calcium carbonate, to optimize key conditions, like pH and alkalinity, in each wastewater treatment plant’s specific process to minimize the carbon footprint of plant operations,” the company said in a press release shared in advance with Emily.
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As my colleague Katie Brigham reported last week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems made waves in the clean energy financing world for yet again raising an eye-popping $1 billion to commercialize fusion energy, notably bringing on institutional investors for the first time. Now another fission startup is bringing in a similar chunk of coin. California-based Valar Atomics just pulled in $1 billion to help bring its next-generation high-temperature gas-cooled microreactors to market. The venture capital giant Sequoia led the round, and added the firm’s Shaun Maguire to its board.
Even with progress on nuclear, the future for gas continues to look rosy. On Monday, Utility Dive reported that American Electric Power now has 13 gigawatts of gas turbine capacity in the pipeline.
Zerluma, a Mexican aluminum recycler, has broken ground on a new $50 million facility in Mission, Texas, the San Antonio Business Journal reported. The deal in the city near Texas’ southern border, marks one of the largest private investments in the city’s history, according to the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal.
The agreement comes as the Trump administration seeks to support the opening of the first new American aluminum smelter in half a century, a project that — as you may recall — has attracted scrutiny from state Republicans in Oklahoma. The effort is facing yet more criticism. The Muscogee Nation’s National Council voted unanimously to approve a resolution opposing aluminum smelters on tribal land following the Trump-backed proposal for a $4 billion plant by Emirates Global Aluminum. Last month, city leaders in Port of Inola approved a 60-day moratorium on smelter-related construction, according to the Tulsa broadcaster News On 6.
The United Kingdom has a coke problem: The snortable white stuff is too good and too cheap. So, what is a criminal enterprise that needs something tradeable of high value to do? Well, increasingly, they’re going for gold. Illegal gold mining has replaced cocaine as organized crime’s most profitable business, according to Mining.com. That has grave implications for human rights — and for communities in places such as the Amazon.
On ‘draconian’ water cuts, Tesla’s China business, and Italian nuclear
Current conditions: Slow-moving storms are set to pour rain on the American Northeast, drenching New York City • Temperatures in Phoenix are to top 113 degrees Fahrenheit for the next two days before the heat dome starts to ease • Across China, 11 weather stations broke their August hottest records.
Charred remains of a truck and a home in Spokane's Balboa neighborhood. Erick Doxey / AFP via Getty Images
Washington State officials ordered thousands to evacuate parts of Spokane over the weekend as “home after home caught fire and exploded into flames along with trees” as winds of up to 45 miles per hour fanned a “wall of flames,” according to The Spokesman-Review. Governor Bob Ferguson activated the National Guard to battle against what the newspaper called one of Spokane’s worst natural disasters in history. Major Gen. Gent Welsh, the adjutant general in charge of Washington’s Air and National Guard forces, said the fire conditions eclipsed anything he’d seen in his 38-year career. “When the sun sets and the sun rises, we are going to be in shock,” Welsh said at a news conference. By Sunday, more than 640 homes had been reduced to charred ash. Tom Clemo, the incident commander leading the firefighting effort, said it would take days to assess just how many properties were lost. “Probably the largest, most destructive fire in Washington’s history occurred yesterday afternoon,” he told the paper. The Pacific Northwest has been primed for a big fire since at least last year, as my colleague Jeva Lange, a native daughter of the region, wrote last year.
The Trump administration’s final plan to relieve the drought-parched Colorado River over the next decade puts Arizona first in line to slash its use of the freshwater. The proposal, finalized on Friday, departs from the decades-long rules that traditionally governed how the water was divided between states, according to E&E News. Instead, the Department of the Interior is set to issue smaller plans every two years to decide how the water supply is distributed. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. But Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said the plan is filled with “unacceptable options that include the federal government forcing Arizona to take the majority of draconian water cuts.”
When Tesla entered the Chinese market, billionaire CEO Elon Musk designed the division to be easily separated from the U.S. business in case of geopolitical tensions. Now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Musk is exploring a sale of the unit to clear the way for a merger between his electric auto giant and SpaceX, his rocket and satellite enterprise. “Obviously we can’t talk about, you know, combining companies and that kind of thing on earnings calls,” Musk told investors last week. “It [has] got to be done with the appropriate process.” On X, Musk — who has routinely beefed with the nation’s leading financial newspaper — called the story “fake news.” But the timing is notable. As Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman wrote last month, China — along with Europe — has been fueling a resurgence in Tesla’s sales.
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American Electric Power has outbid a data center developer to buy a coal plant in West Virginia, the Financial Times reported last week. The utility inked a deal to buy the Longview coal plant located along the state’s northern border with Pennsylvania. The name of the data center company was not included in the story, but sources told the reporter Martha Muir it was a “household name” and a “competitive bidding process.” As I told you in June, the Trump administration is betting $850 million on a coal revival. But my colleague Matthew Zeitlin explained last year what the bigger problem is: Even the plants that get funding to stay open keep breaking down.
Base Power, one of the nation’s largest developers of residential battery storage, is raising money on a $13 billion valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Co-founded by CEO Zach Dell, son of computer magnate Michael Dell, the three-year-old company’s model is to deploy tens of thousands of batteries at homes and tap those units to balance out the grid. “We have so much to do and so much room to grow, and we’re very early in the scope of the opportunity,” Dell said.
A mining company says it’s found America’s largest deposit of tungsten, a key metal needed for ammunition and weapons production. But NASA is blocking development of the resource in eastern Nevada. The problem, the Financial Times reported, is that “a third of the company’s claim covers a unique region used to track signals beamed to Earth by satellites in space,” cautioning that mining could disrupt the operations.
