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The Tuesday night primary elections in six U.S. states, meanwhile, offered mixed results for clean energy supporters. Representative Thomas Massie, the dissident Republican from northern Kentucky who repeatedly broke with his party to criticize President Donald Trump and boasted of his off-grid home’s solar and battery system, lost by double digits to his White House-backed rival. Pennsylvania’s state Representative Chris Rabb, a progressive would-be “Squad” member whose platform mirrors the Green New Deal movement’s key policy demands, won the Democratic primary for the 3rd Congressional District spanning parts of Philadelphia.
The site in Utah where Mr. Wonderful wants to build his Stratos Project data center.Natalie Behring/Getty Images
During an appearance on Fox News last week, investor and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary vowed to release documents showing that opponents of the data center complex he proposed building in the Utah desert received funding from China, suggesting the protesters seeking to thwart his $100 billion megaproject were useful idiots in Beijing’s bid to hamper America’s technological progress. Now Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum is echoing those claims. “It’s not organic and local,” he said Thursday on stage at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in Anchorage, where he was the keynote speaker. “Some of this is foreign-sourced dark money coming in.” The link between rising electricity prices and data centers, he said, was “specious.” He went on to cite a specific example of a small town in North Dakota, from when he served as the state’s governor, where a billion-dollar data center project ended up reducing costs for ratepayers by paying a premium to “buy down” the price households paid. It wasn’t immediately obvious which project he was referring to. But my best guess from some cursory research is that he may have meant the Applied Digital data center in Ellendale, along the southeastern border with South Dakota. In 2023, Prairie Public reported that the facility helped bring down transmission costs, reducing ratepayers’ bills by as much as $61 per year.
Burgum also suggested that Democrats were inflaming the data center issue for political gain. But opposition spans the political spectrum. Tom Steyer, the billionaire progressive running for governor of California, on Monday walked back a response to a candidate questionnaire published by Greenpeace, in which he said he supported a pause on data center development. In a statement to Politico, campaign spokesperson Kevin Liao said that while Steyer wants to ensure protections for electricity prices and water resources, he does not support a temporary ban.
It appears Elon Musk is more likely to follow through on his promise to build enough manufacturing capacity to churn out 100 gigawatts of solar panels in the U.S. than to sell 500,000 Cybertrucks a year. Tesla has selected a site just outside Houston for a new factory that will expand the company’s capacity to churn out panels in its home market. That’s according to Electrek, which said it had independently confirmed a tip from a source pointing the publication to the Brookshire, Texas, site. The plant will be co-located with a battery factory that is already under construction at the same site.
“Any level of commitment to onshore the entire supply chain is a positive sign for American solar manufacturing and supply chain security,” Yogin Kothari, the chief strategy officer at the SEMA Coalition trade group that advocates for U.S. solar manufacturers against cheap Chinese imports, told me in a text message Tuesday night. “We can make solar panels here — we just have to have the commitment to do it.”
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New Yorkers could receive $200 rebates from the state as part of Albany’s effort to soothe the pinch of rising electricity prices. On Tuesday, Newsday reported that the program would be part of the state budget agreement, which Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and the Democrat-led legislature are still working to finalize. It wouldn’t be the first check the Hochul administration is sending out to voters as the former lieutenant governor, who initially came to power when former Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned over alleged sexual misconduct, runs for reelection in November. Last year, in a bid to combat the sting of inflation, the state issued rebates ranging from $150 to $400 depending on filing status and adjusted gross income in 2023.
Though it’s home to the world’s largest known reserves of lithium, landlocked Bolivia’s vast resources have largely remained undeveloped after two decades of rule by a left-wing government leery of foreign investment. The right-wing government that finally broke the Movimiento al Socialismo party’s grip on power in La Paz last year has sought to tap the so-called white gold in its salt flats, particularly as Washington looks for new sources of metals outside of supply chains China largely controls. New documents published Tuesday by the left-wing journalist Ollie Vargas appear to show the Bolivia’s Public Prosecutors Office’s warrants to arrest protesters and labor leaders connected to recent nationwide strikes on charges that include terrorism. “Bolivia’s government has ordered the arrest of all the main leaders of the indigenous movements and mineworkers unions,” Vargas wrote in a post on X. “They’re being charged for Terrorism for having organised the general strike against hunger. Strike continues regardless, now in day 7.” Clashes between law enforcement and protesters started last week.
China’s hydrogen industry is booming. Its sales of electrolyzers are beating out domestic manufacturers in Europe. Fuel cell vehicles are hitting the roads. Hydrogen refueling stations are opening. But the Chinese hydrogen sector with the highest volume of orders coming from overseas is for something simpler: Two-wheeled, hydrogen-powered motorcycles. That’s according to the latest China Hydrogen Bulletin, in which analyst Jian Wu reported from the 6th China International Consumer Products Expo on the island province of Hainan that a maker of the motorcycles had secured $300 million in overseas orders.
The Department of Justice, meanwhile, is preparing to weigh in on whether Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is operating an illegal gas electrical plant to power its data center in Southaven, Mississippi. Last month, the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center accused xAI of operating 27 gas turbines without pollution controls or Clean Air permits at the server farm, known as Colossus 2. Last week, the groups asked the federal court for a preliminary injunction to stop pollution from what E&E News described as “tractor-trailer-sized generators.” In response, the Justice Department cited President Donald Trump’s support for AI and said it was “evaluating possible intervention or amicus participation in this lawsuit.” It’s not the only agency riding in to aid Musk and his ilk. As I told you last week, the Environmental Protection Agency just proposed a new rule that would allow data centers and power plants to begin construction without air permits.
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed two separate rules to delay and rescind drinking water limits on four “forever chemicals,” the class of cancer-causing compounds that spread in water and accumulate in the human body. The rules, as The Guardian noted, “must go through an approval process that can take several years, and almost certainly will be challenged in court.” Over the past decade, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, were discovered to be pervasive in the drinking water of some 176 million Americans. The chemicals — which are linked to kidney cancer, immune system suppression, and developmental delays in infants — are estimated to be in nearly 99% of Americans’ blood. In 2024, the Biden administration established limits on six substances, as Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported at the time. But the Trump administration will now ax protections for four of the substances and provide companies with an extra two years to comply with rules on the other two. The move, The New York Times reported, has already “sparked fury within the Make America Healthy Again movement, a diverse group of anti-vaccine activists, wellness influencers and others who make up a key part” of Trump’s base.
The Kudankulam nuclear power plant, India’s largest atomic station. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images
India was once a forbidden prize for nuclear exporters. The world’s most populous nation, its metropoles choked by coal smog, operates two dozen commercial nuclear reactors — and wants more. But until earlier this year, the country was hamstrung by the haunting memory of Union Carbide’s 1984 accident at its Bhopal plant, where a leak killed thousands of Indians and the American chemical giant avoided any serious liability. To prevent a similar dynamic in the nuclear sector, New Delhi passed a law in 2010 that put developers on the hook for any accidents. The statute effectively banned American, European, or East Asian companies from attempting to build any reactors, lest they risk bankruptcy; only Russia’s state-owned nuclear company was willing to sell its wares on the subcontinent. In December, as I told you at the time, the Indian parliament passed legislation to reform the liability law and welcome more foreign developers into its market. Already, as I reported in a scoop for Heatmap last month, a Chicago-based fuel startup is making moves to sell its product in India.
Fast forward to this week: On Monday, a high-level delegation of U.S. industry officials flew to New Delhi to meet with Indian science minister Jitendra Singh and discuss “private investment opportunities” to export small modular reactors and other American nuclear technology, NucNet reported.
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Ford Energy, the wholly owned battery storage business forged out of Ford Motor’s electric vehicle efforts, has landed its first big deal. On Monday, the company announced a five-year framework agreement with French utility giant EDF’s North American renewables division to design battery storage systems for the multinational. As part of the deal, EDF will buy up to 4 gigawatt-hours of battery blocks per year, totaling up to 20 gigawatt-hours by the end of the contract. The first deliveries are expected in 2028. Lisa Drake, Ford Energy’s president, said the deal “validates the market’s need for” a battery storage supplier “that combines industrial-scale manufacturing discipline with full lifecycle accountability.” In a statement, EDF said Ford’s “commitment to domestic manufacturing and its rigorous approach to traceability and lifecycle support align with the standards we hold across our portfolio.”
Last August, I told you that Anglo American’s deal to sell the U.S. giant Peabody Energy its Australian coal business for $3.8 billion collapsed. Well, nine months later, the London-based mining behemoth has found a new buyer for the same price. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Anglo American would sell the Australian coal mining operations to Dhilmar, a little-known and privately held company that was formed out of some Canadian mining assets and incorporated in London in 2024. The value of the deal? $3.88 billion. The agreement, which faces years of arbitration, closes what the newspaper called “a difficult chapter for Anglo” after last year’s sale to Peabody fell apart following an explosion at one of the mines included in the deal.
India isn’t the only country getting its act together on new nuclear plants. On Monday, Sweden’s next-generation reactor champion, the startup Blykalla, submitted the first-ever application to regulators in Stockholm to build the nation’s first commercial advanced nuclear reactor park two hours north of the capital. The 330-megawatt facility would include six lead-cooled units Blykalla called “advanced modular reactors,” or AMRs. “This application is a historic first for Sweden,” Blykalla CEO Jacob Stedman said in a statement. “We’re not just planning an advanced reactor park — we’re building Sweden’s energy future and putting the country at the forefront of the global nuclear power renaissance.”
