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The Trump administration just unveiled one of its biggest bets on nuclear power yet. The Department of Energy announced $17.5 billion in low-interest loans for utilities to pay for the equipment needed to order new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. The program marks arguably the most significant effort yet to reclaim U.S. control over its flagship reactor design. While the two 1,100-megawatt units completed at Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Generating Station in 2023 and 2024 were the first installed in the U.S., China has been building its own version of the reactors at an industrial scale for years. The program will support up to 10 reactors, including two per venture with as many as five utilities. The power companies, currently in talks with the administration, have not yet been named. But Dan Sumner, the chief executive of Westinghouse Electric, told The Wall Street Journal the deal “really kick-starts fleet-scale nuclear development in the United States.” As my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last night: “I hesitate to praise the project's climate bonafides at the risk of discouraging the Trump administration, but it is worth noting that if this project were to succeed, it would be one of the largest state-assisted build-outs of zero-carbon electricity in recent American history. But it would still take some time to arrive: These reactors aren’t forecast to come online til 2035.”
Yet another behemoth solar farm has come online. On Tuesday, the developer rPlus Energies said its Green River Energy Center had started operations. The facility in central Utah with 400-megawatts of solar panels and 1,600 megawatt-hours of batteries is now the largest solar-and-storage plant within PacifiCorp’s six-state territory out west, including Oregon, Washington, California, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. “Operation Gigawatt is about ensuring Utah has the reliable, homegrown energy needed to power opportunity for generations,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, said in a statement. “Green River Energy Center represents the kind of large-scale energy investment we need to deliver reliable energy, support rural Utah, and help power the next generation of prosperity across our state.”
The opening comes as solar is now generating more U.S. power than coal, as I told you recently.
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Lights out in Cuba. Magdalena Chodownik/Anadolu via Getty Images
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Exxon Mobil has the right to sue a Cuban-owned company to recoup more than $70 million in 1960 dollars from an oil complex seized by the Cuban government after Fidel Castro’s revolution. Havana later transferred the ownership of the refinery, terminals, plants, and service stations to Corporación Cimex, the state-owned conglomerate. The lawsuit could now see the oil major try to recover more than $1 billion in losses. “Today’s decision is a critical moment in a 60 year effort to be compensated for what the Cuban government illegally seized,” Exxon spokesperson Todd Spitler told E&E News in an emailed statement. “It reflects two things: the merits of our argument and the fact that our company will fight a good fight for as long as it takes.”
The Trump administration understands the importance of refining cobalt — that’s why, as I reported last year, the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency is pumping money into a startup that promises a new and cheap way to process the mineral. Canada’s Sherritt International started shutting down its Fort Saskatchewan refinery after the U.S. expanded sanctions on Cuba, halting exports of a feedstock supply needed for the plant in Alberta, Canada. The move, in addition to the Supreme Court ruling, come amid intensifying pressure by Washington on the Cuban regime.
California is once again following a New York trend. Just weeks after Albany sued to stop the Trump administration’s bid to pay TotalEnergies to give up its offshore wind projects, Sacramento is joining the litigation. “At a time when the country needs more reliable and sustainable power supply, the Trump Administration is busy using taxpayer money to strike backroom buyouts that make clean-energy projects disappear,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “California won’t stand idly by as the Trump Administration illegally strikes deals to kill offshore wind projects and replace them with more windfalls for his fossil fuel friends; we’re putting the Administration on notice that we intend to sue.”
Lucid Motors is downsizing, again. The electric vehicle maker is laying off 18% of its staff just a few months after a 12% reduction in force in February, according to Electrek. The company also eliminated a second production shift at its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. EV sales plummeted in the U.S. after the federal EV tax credit expired in September. While many automakers are canceling new electric vehicle lines in the U.S., Lucid hasn’t axed any plans yet, and will be releasing its first lower-cost EV, the Lucid Cosmos SUV, later this year with a price tag under $50,000. It’s also preparing to launch a robotaxi service later this year in partnership with Uber and the autonomous driving technology company Nuro. According to Lucid’s new CEO, Silvio Napoli, the staff cuts will help “simplify the company, sharpen execution, and position Lucid to become more competitive over time.”
A Lucid robotaxi with Nuro technology.Courtesy of Lucid Motors
Trump’s environmental deregulation crusade continues. The Interior Department proposed several changes to the rules governing oil and gas leasing on federal lands Monday that would limit public input and cut costs for companies. Under existing rules, which were updated during the Biden administration, companies must maintain a minimum bond of $500,000 for each state where they hold leases to cover the cost of capping oil and gas wells when they are done drilling. Trump’s proposal would reduce the requirement to $25,000, shifting the financial risk of remediation to state taxpayers. The new rules would also shorten public participation periods from 90 days to 10, and get rid of a requirement that companies include plans to minimize methane emissions when they apply for drilling permits.
Red states are going after California, this time for its nation-leading plastic regulations. In 2022, the Golden State passed a law setting plastic waste reduction targets and requiring companies to cover the cost of recycling of their own products. The state aims to cut single-use plastic packaging on products by 25% by 2032. Now, 17 attorneys general from red states have teamed up with the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, a trade group, to sue California, arguing that the rules represent an “unprecedented overreach” that will increase the cost of goods throughout the country.
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In the first case of its kind, 10 Australians are suing the government for violating their human rights by failing to limit fossil fuel production. The claimants, each of whom has been personally affected by climate change-fueled extreme weather, brought the case to the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee on Monday. Some of them have lost their homes to wildfires and floods, while others have experienced health impacts from heat waves. The case follows a 2025 ruling by the International Court of Justice that all governments have an obligation to protect people from climate change, citing support for fossil fuel production and consumption as a potential violation of this obligation. While that ruling didn’t have any enforcement power, it teed up the potential for country-level claims like this one in Australia. The country is the second largest exporter of coal in the world and the third largest exporter of liquified natural gas.
The rumors were true. The Trump administration has appointed Travis Kavulla, a former utility regulator and power company executive, to lead the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency that sells electricity from the government’s hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. Kavulla arrives as the agency prepares for a controversial exit from California’s real-time electricity trading market to join a new day-ahead market overseen by the Southwest Power Pool, a regional transmission organization. Environmental groups are urging Kavulla reconsider the decision, arguing that it risks raising energy costs for Northwest ratepayers.
The climate change research and news site Carbon Brief debuted Project Cosmos on Monday, the world’s largest database of research on the warming planet. It includes more than 1.8 million publications and “captures the vast body of human knowledge about climate change that has accumulated over more than a century of academic study.” The architects created a stunning “star” map that visualizes the collection by clustering of fields of study, such as medicine, chemistry, or agriculture. They also identified the 500 most-cited studies and scientists, with French carbon cycle modeler Philippe Ciais earning the top spot.
