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While both of these stats represent new peaks — as is almost always the case with electricity prices over time — the overall growth in prices in April was not unusual, Emily wrote. “National average electricity prices have been increasing at a similar rate this year as they have during the past five years, with the exception of 2022, when there was a significant spike in the cost of natural gas. Natural gas plants generate the largest proportion of U.S. power, and the cost of the fuel has an outsized influence on our electricity prices.”
But some places, such as New Jersey and Washington, D.C., saw 21% and 25% increases, respectively, in their 12-month trailing averages due to strained dynamics in PJM, the electricity market they are part of, where power demand is outstripping supply. But Emily writes that: “The new April data also shows how sometimes electricity prices undergo big fluctuations for more arbitrary, and ultimately temporary reasons.” For example, some states such as California and Massachusetts issued dividends or rebates that reduced bills during hotter months when electricity costs typically rise.
See the data for yourself here..
We all know that the backlash to data centers is mounting. As I reported for Heatmap in February, the proportion of voters who strongly oppose developing server farms grew by an eye-popping 50% in just a few months. Now Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has some exclusive data via our intelligence platform Heatmap Pro that really puts a fine point on how effective that political pushback has become. At least 20 proposed data centers were canceled amid local pushback during the first three months of 2026, smashing a record set only in the previous quarter. “The cancellations,” Rob wrote, “reveal the rapidly expanding backlash to data center construction has not yet peaked.” About 100 new data center fights were also added to Heatmap Pro’s database during the first quarter, another new record.
It’s no wonder why. Even the data centers owned by the richest man in the world aren’t fulfilling basic promises made to voters about the sustainability of the projects. Elon Musk pledged two years ago to build a state-of-the-art water recycling plant in Memphis, Tennessee, to guarantee that his xAI servers wouldn’t deplete the city’s groundwater. Now that Musk’s first data center dedicated to his AI chatbot is up and running, construction on the recycling facility has come to an abrupt halt.
Add this to the list of achievements for China’s booming offshore wind industry. China Three Gorges Corporation announced that it has completed the installation of a 16-megawatt floating offshore wind turbine off the coast of Guangdong province, in what offshoreWIND.biz described as “the world’s largest single-unit floating wind turbine platform.” The pilot project is located in waters nearly 44 miles offshore at depths of close to 165 feet. The developer called the installation a milestone toward deep-sea floating wind technology that could harness stronger air flows and expand the footprint of offshore wind into areas of the Pacific coastline where the continental shelf drops off steeply and close to shore. As in sectors such as solar panels and batteries, the floating wind industry is driven by fierce internal competition in China.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the developer that had planned to build the nation’s first floating offshore wind farm off central California just took a payout from the Trump administration in exchange for abandoning its federal lease. Golden State Wind was among two companies that followed French energy giant TotalEnergies in taking refunds from the Department of the Interior while promising to halt all offshore wind development in the future, as I wrote last month. And as I told you on Tuesday, California regulators are now investigating the developer.
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As the nation’s largest federally owned utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority is, in many ways, the closest thing the U.S. has to one of the giant state companies that handle nuclear construction in countries with major atomic energy sectors such as France, South Korea, or Japan. The TVA has recently refashioned itself as a testing ground for new American reactor technologies. The world’s second BWRX-300, the 300-megawatt boiling water reactor from GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, is set to be built at the TVA’s Clinch River site. The first power purchase agreement between a next-generation reactor developer and a U.S. utility was Kairos Power’s Google-backed deal to sell electricity from its first commercial molten salt reactor to the TVA. The White House is even giving the TVA an early look at new rules coming out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So it’s fitting that now the TVA is generating far more electricity from nuclear energy than this time last year. The utility’s nuclear fleet supplied 41% of its power in the first half of this year, compared to 31% in the same six-month window of 2025, Utility Dive reported. The milestone comes as Mike Skaggs, the TVA’s interim chief executive since CEO Don Moul announced his retirement last month, names nuclear as a top priority.
Type One Energy, a U.S.-based fusion company backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has made a deal to develop its first commercial power plant in the United Kingdom within a decade. The consortium includes the U.S. engineering firm Aecom and the British fusion supplier Tokamak Energy. Type One is already in “very early conversations with several potential customers,” CEO Chris Mowry told the Financial Times. The move comes just weeks after Gates’ fission company, TerraPower, began construction on its first plant in Wyoming, as I wrote last month.
Meanwhile, another clean energy venture in the U.K. is going under. Morrow Batteries, a lithium-ion manufacturer in Europe, filed for bankruptcy Wednesday. “It’s a tough outcome after years of building with over €400 million invested, strong technology, real products in the field, and an outstanding team that stands together through tremendous challenges,” CEO Jon Fold von Bülow wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “I firmly believe this is not the end.” He said he’s hoping to sell to a buyer who will take the technology forward.
Everything is bigger in Texas. John Bistline
I’ll let this chart from the sustainability research service Watershed speak for itself. As Watershed’s head of science John Bistline put it on X: “Texas just passed California in utility-scale solar. And it's not close in wind or energy storage.”
In an even bigger move, the SEC also proposed scrapping mandatory quarterly reporting for U.S.-listed companies, instead switching to a twice-yearly filing. The idea, which President Donald Trump first floated years ago as a way of getting companies to focus on longer-term goals, “would provide companies with increased regulatory flexibility,” SEC chair Paul Atkins told the Financial Times. “Public companies have an obligation under the federal securities laws to provide information that is material to investors. Yet, the rigidity of the SEC’s rules has prevented companies and their investors from determining for themselves the interim reporting frequency that best serves their business needs and investors.” While cast as part of a larger deregulatory push, the move could actually be a boon to climate action. Supporters of decarbonization have long lamented how quarterly reporting norms disincentivized costly bets that take longer than three months to pan out.
If you have ever body surfed in the ocean — or observed how docks and peers weather over time — it’s easy to intuit why harnessing renewable energy from waves is so tricky. Among experts who often list wave energy along with tidal power as two sources of underdeveloped but potentially promising renewable energy, the latter has long been considered the more commercially viable, with turbines harnessing tidal flows already in operation in France and elsewhere. Wave energy, by contrast, has been perceived as a riskier frontier in the energy industry.
That didn’t stop wave-energy startup Panthalassa from raising $140 million in a Series B round led by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel this week as the company looks to develop floating data centers that can operate in open ocean. The financing will fund the completion of the company’s pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and speed up deployment of its Ocean-3 series of facilities that “will perform AI inference computing at sea” with power generated from ocean waves.
“There are three sources of energy on the planet with tens of terawatts of new capacity potential: solar, nuclear, and the open ocean,” Panthalassa CEO and co-founder Garth Sheldon-Coulson said in a statement. “We’ve built a technology platform that operates in the planet’s most energy-dense wave regions, far from shore, and turns that resource into reliable clean power. We’re now ready to build factories, deploy fleets, and provide a sustainable new source of energy for humanity.” The deal, per the Financial Times, values the company at about $1 billion. “The future demands more compute than we can imagine,” Thiel said in a press release. “Extra-terrestrial solutions are no longer science fiction. Panthalassa has opened the ocean frontier.”
The company has some competition. Earlier this year, the San Francisco-based Aikido Technologies launched a new line of floating platforms for deep-water offshore wind turbines that include data centers built into the ballasts.
Allow me to give you a glimpse into the anxious mind of a young father: Sometimes, I distract myself from my fear over what global weather patterns might look like by the time my one-year-old daughter is my age with my more urgent terror over what particulate matter is entering her perfect little lungs and what microplastics sneak into even her home-cooked meals. Well, worry not! Turns out the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In theory, I knew this was always the case, since the rise of plastic pollution is at least somewhat spurred on by oil and gas companies making big money off the feedstocks for the cheap, single-use plastics that break down into dangerous tiny particles in our environment. But new research shows that microplastics in the atmosphere are actually magnifying the effects of climate change. In a new paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists in China and the U.S. outlined how tiny, colored plastic bits absorb sunlight as the wind blows them around the world, trapping heat and adding to temperature rise. “The plastic problem is not just in our blue oceans, it is also in the invisible skies above us,” Hongbo Fu, a co-author of the study and an atmospheric scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, said at a press conference, per Bloomberg. “Climate models need to be updated.”
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Like wave and tidal power, geothermal was once a sleepy corner of the clean energy world. But next-generation startups that promised to use new drilling techniques to harness geothermal energy in more places than ever thought possible are radically upending an industry that saw its largest power station — the Geysers in California — built in the 1960s and hitherto hadn’t aimed higher. Until a few years ago, next-generation geothermal drilling was esoteric even among energy nerds. But things change quickly in the modern energy business. Fervo Energy, the first major next-generation startup to prove that fracking technology could be used to revolutionize geothermal power, is now eyeing a $6.5 billion valuation. That’s according to a document the company filed with the SEC this week as it prepares to raise more than $1.3 billion in an initial public offering of its stock.
Fervo sees a big market. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month when the company first filed to go public, Fervo told investors its reviewed leases represent over 40 gigawatts of energy. That’s equal to about 15% of all installed solar capacity in the U.S.
Solar panels atop a building in Masdar City, a sustainable develop the company built outside Abu Dhabi, when I toured the site in 2021. Alexander C. Kaufman
The United Arab Emirates already ranks as the world’s seventh-largest producer of crude, and could ascend as the country’s exit from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries frees Abu Dhabi to pump for oil. The UAE’s debut atomic power plant — the four-reactor, Korean-built Barakah station in Abu Dhabi — set a new standard for nuclear construction in a Western-aligned nation and vaulted the federation of monarchies to the forefront of global discussions about fission. Now the UAE is making a big move on solar. Abu Dhabi’s state-owned renewables developer Masdar has signed a deal with Emirates Water and Electricity Company to deploy more than 30 gigawatts of solar capacity and 8 gigawatts of batteries. “As the driving force behind the UAE’s energy transition, EWEC is at the forefront of a global shift towards sustainable, utility-scale power and water production,” Ahmed Ali Alshamsi, the utility chief in charge of the Emirates Water and Electricity Company, told PV Tech. “This CFA with Masdar is a pivotal strategic tool that empowers us to accelerate this transformation and meet 60% of Abu Dhabi’s total energy demand from renewable and clean sources by 2035.”
Norway led the world in electric vehicle adoption. It’s now at the forefront of autonomous vehicle adoption. Europe’s first self-driving bus without a supervisor onboard is set to be rolled out in the southwestern city of Stavanger following a recent regulatory change. While the bus still requires preparation by a human before operating, the project has been underway since 2022 and represents Europe’s most advanced public deployment of the technology.
