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“Constellation’s restart of a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania will provide affordable, reliable, and secure energy to Americans across the Mid-Atlantic region,” Wright said in a statement. “It will also help ensure America has the energy it needs to grow its domestic manufacturing base and win the AI race.” Constellation’s stock soared in after-hours trading in response to the news. Holtec’s historic first restart in Michigan got the green light from regulators to come back online in July, as I reported in this newsletter at the time. But already another company is lining up to turn its defunct reactor back on: As I reported here in August, utility giant NextEra wants to revive its Duane Arnold nuclear station in Iowa. The push to restart older reactors reflects a growing need for electricity long before new reactors can come online. Meanwhile, next-generation reactors are plowing ahead. The nuclear startup Valar Atomics claimed this week to achieve criticality long before the July 4 deadline set in an Energy Department competition.
Over the next five years, American demand for electricity is set to grow by the equivalent of 15 times the peak demand of the entirety of New York City. That’s according to the latest annual forecast from the consultancy Grid Strategies. The growth — roughly sixfold what was forecast in 2022 — comes overwhelmingly from data centers, as shown by which regions expect the largest growth:
A chart from the report shows rising demand in different grid systems. Grid Strategies
“The fact that these facilities are city-sized is a huge deal,” John Wilson, Grid Strategies’ vice president and the report’s lead author, told Canary Media. “That has huge implications if these facilities get canceled, or they get built and don’t have long service lives.” Mounting political opposition to data centers could make deals less certain. A Heatmap Pro survey in September found just 44% of Americans would welcome a data center opening nearby. And last week I wrote about how progressives in Congress are rallying around a crackdown on data centers.
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The contrast couldn’t be starker. In Washington, President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, offering an opulent welcome to the White House and lashing out at reporters who asked about September 11 or the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In Belém, Brazil, meanwhile, former Vice President Al Gore tore into the team of delegates Saudi Arabia sent to the United Nations climate summit for “flexing its muscles” in negotiations about how to shift away from oil and gas. “Saudi Arabia appears to be determined to veto the effort to solve the climate crisis, only to protect their lavish income from selling the fossil fuels that are the principal cause of the climate crisis,” Gore told the Financial Times. “I hope that the rest of the world will stand up to this obscene greed and recklessness on the part of the kingdom.”
But the Trump meeting could yield some progress on clean energy. Among the top issues the White House listed in its read-out of the summit was the push to export American atomic energy technology to Saudi Arabia as the country looks to follow the United Arab Emirates in embracing nuclear power.
Facing growing needs for domestic sources of metal for the energy transition, the European Union is seeing its trash as treasure. On Tuesday, the European Commission proposed restricting exports of aluminum scrap amid what The Wall Street Journal called “concerns that rising outflows of the resource could leave Europe short of a critical input for its decarbonization efforts.” Speaking at the European Aluminum Summit, EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic referred to the exports as “leakage.” The proposal wouldn’t fully block sales of aluminum scrap overseas, but would adopt a “balanced” measure that ensures sufficient supplies and competitive prices in the single market. “Scrap is a strategic commodity given its important contribution to circularity and decarbonization, as production from secondary materials releases less emissions and is less energy intensive, as well as to our strategic autonomy,” Sefcovic said. The measure is set to be adopted by spring 2026.
In the U.S., the Biden administration made what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin last year called a “big bet” on aluminum. The Trump administration slapped steep new tariffs on imported aluminum, though as our colleague Katie Brigham wrote, “aluminum producers rely on imports of these same materials to build their own plants. Tariffs on these vital construction materials — plus exorbitant levies on all goods from China — will make building new production facilities significantly costlier.”
A chart showing the drop in active drilling rigs in the U.S.EIA
The average number of active rigs per month that are drilling for oil and natural gas in the continental United States fell steadily over the past year. As of last month, the U.S. had 517 rigs in operation, down from a peak of 750 in the end of 2022. The number of oil-pumping rigs dropped 33% to 397 rigs, while gas-pumping rigs slid 23% to 120 rigs over the same period from December 2022 to October 2025. While the Energy Information Administration said the declining rig count “reflects operators’ responses to declining crude oil and natural gas prices,” the federal research agency said it’s also “improvement in drilling efficiencies,” meaning companies are getting more fuel out of existing wells.
It’s been a pattern in recent research on sustainability. Scientists look at methods that Indigenous groups have maintained as traditions only to find that approaches that have sustained throughout centuries or millennia are finding new value now. A study by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology found that Native Hawaiian aquaculture systems — essentially fish ponds known as loko iʻa — effectively shielded fish populations from the negative impacts of climate change, demonstrating resilience and bolstering local food security. “Our study is one of the first in academic literature to compare the temperatures between loko iʻa and the surrounding bay and how these temperature differences may be reflected in potential fish productivity,” lead author Annie Innes-Gold, a recent PhD graduate from the university, said in a press release. “We found that although rising water temperature may lead to declines in fish populations, loko iʻa fish populations were more resilient.”
David Richardson, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, resigned Monday after just six months on the job. Richardson had no experience in managing natural disasters, and Axios reported, he “faced sharp criticism for being unavailable” amid the extreme floods that left 130 dead in Central Texas in July. A month earlier, Richardson raised eyebrows when he held a meeting in which he told staff he was unaware the U.S. had a hurricane season. He was, however, a “loyalist” to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, CNN reported.
With hurricane season wrapping up this month, President Donald Trump was preparing to fire Richardson in the lead up to an overhaul of the agency, whose resources for carrying out disaster relief he wants to divvy up among the states. When FEMA staffers criticized the move in an open letter over the summer, the agency suspended 40 employees who signed with their names, as I wrote in the newsletter at the time.
The Environmental Protection Agency proposed stripping federal protections from millions of acres of wetlands and streams. The New York Times cast the stakes of the rollback as “potentially threatening sources of clean drinking water for millions of Americans” while delivering “a victory for a range of business interests that have lobbied to scale back the Clean Water Act of 1972, including farmers, home builders, real estate developers, oil drillers and petrochemical manufacturers.” At an event announcing the rulemaking, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recognized that the proposal “is going to be met with a lot of relief from farmers, ranchers, and other landowners and governments.” Under the Clean Water Act, companies and individuals need to obtain permits from the EPA before releasing pollutants into the nation’s waterways, and permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before discharging any dredged or fill material such as sand, silt, or construction debris. Yet just eliminating the federal oversight doesn’t necessarily free developers and farmers of permitting challenges since that jurisdiction simply goes to the state.
A chart from the report shows how much worse this year is than previous ones.J.D. Power
Americans are spending greater lengths of time in the dark amid mounting power outages, according to a new survey by the data analytics giant J.D. Power. The report, released last month but highlighted Monday in Utility Dive, cited “increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events” as the cause. The average length of the longest blackout of the year increased in all regions since 2022, from 8.1 hours to 12.8 by the midpoint of 2025. Ratepayers in the South reported the longest outages, averaging 18.2 hours, followed by the West, at 12.4 hours. While the duration of outages is worsening, the number of Americans experiencing them isn’t, J.D. Power’s director of utilities intelligence, Mark Spalinger, told Utility Dive. The percentage of ratepayers experiencing “perfect power” without any interruptions is gradually rising, he said, but disasters like storms and fires “are becoming so much more extreme that it creates these longer outage events that utilities are now having to deal with.”
The problem is particularly bad in the summertime. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained back in June, “the demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing. Between broad-based electrification, manufacturing additions, and especially data center construction, electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.”
Another chart shows the causes of prolonged outages. J.D. Power
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You win some, you lose some. Earlier this month, solar developer Pine Gate Renewables blamed the Trump administration’s policies in its bankruptcy filing. Now a major solar manufacturer is crediting its expansion plans to the president. Arizona-based First Solar said last week it plans to open a new panel factory in South Carolina. The $330 million factory will create 600 new jobs, E&E News reported, if it comes online in the second half of next year as planned. First Solar said the investment is the result of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Administration’s trade policies boosted demand for American energy technology, requiring a timely, agile response that allows us to meet the moment,” First Solar CEO Mark Widmar said in a statement. “We expect that this new facility will enable us to serve the U.S. market with technology that is compliant with the Act’s stringent provisions, within timelines that align with our customers’ objectives.”
If you want to review what actually goes into making a solar panel, it’s worth checking out Matthew’s explainer from the Climate 101 series.
French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies said Monday it would make a $6 billion investment into power plants across Europe, expanding what The Wall Street Journal called “a strategy that has set it apart from rivals focused on pumping more fossil fuels.” To start, the company agreed to buy 50% of a portfolio of assets owned by Energeticky a Prumyslovy Holding, the investment fund controlled by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. While few question the rising value of power generation amid a surge in electricity demand from the data centers supporting artificial intelligence software, analysts and investors “question whether investment in power generation — particularly renewables — will be as lucrative as oil and gas.” Rivals Shell and BP, for example, recently axed their renewables businesses to double down on fossil fuels.
The world has successfully stored as much carbon dioxide as 81,044,946 gasoline-powered cars would emit in a year. The first-ever audit of all major carbon storage projects in the U.S., China, Brazil, Australia, and the Middle East found over 383 million tons of carbon dioxide stored since 1996. “The central message from our report is that CCS works, demonstrating a proven capability and accelerating momentum for geologic storage of CO2,” Samuel Krevor, a professor of subsurface carbon storage at Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said in a press release.
