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As I noted in yesterday’s newsletter, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history came with some climate casualties. As Heatmap reported throughout the funding lapse, the administration gutted a backup energy storage system at a children’s hospital, major infrastructure projects in New York City, and a bevy of grants for clean energy.
Speaking at the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, on Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of scoring an economic “own goal” by abandoning federal climate policies and ceding dominance over clean energy to China. The Democrat, widely expected to run for his party’s presidential nod in 2028, is the highest-profile American politician to appear at the first conference in years where the sitting U.S. administration declined to send a high-level delegation. Reversing the Biden administration’s carbon-cutting policies amounted to “the own goal of the president of the United States who simply doesn’t understand how enthusiastic President Xi is that the Trump administration is nowhere at COP30,” Newsom told the audience at the Amazonian confab, according to the Financial Times. “The United States of America better wake up at that. It’s not about electric power. It’s about economic power.”
As I wrote in Tuesday’s newsletter, China is on a climate winning streak. New analysis published this week in Carbon Brief found that the country’s emissions stayed flat in the last quarter, extending a trend of flat or falling carbon pollution since March 2024. The biggest driver of power plant development in the U.S., meanwhile, appears to be on increasingly shaky footing. A new report from the Center for Public Enterprise found that data center companies are increasingly taking on debt and creating interlocking financing deals to pay for the rapid buildout of server farms.
Plug Power put plans to build as many as six new hydrogen production plants across the U.S. on hold as the Trump administration pares back its plans to support the zero-carbon fuel. The company, which has never turned a profit, said it has suspended its rollout of factories in Texas, New York, and other states, and, according to the Albany Times-Union, “will instead buy hydrogen from an existing supplier.” Plug Power had received funding not just from the Department of Energy, but also from the New York Power Authority, which awarded a large allocation of low-cost hydropower to support a $290 million green hydrogen facility in Genesee County, just east of Buffalo.
It’s part of a broader reshuffling of decarbonization priorities in the Empire State. New York agreed on Wednesday to suspend implementation of new statewide rules that would have banned all new low-rise buildings from establishing hookups to the gas system, effectively mandating the use of electric heating and cooking appliances. The move comes just weeks after the state lost its biggest battery project on Staten Island amid growing pushback from residents, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported.
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Way more capable. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
While New York City still has the West Coast handily beaten on public transit, the self-driving robotaxi company Waymo just rolled out rides on freeways for the first time. The Google-spinout startup, which uses all electric vehicles, announced plans on Wednesday to start offering rides on freeways in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix metropolitan areas. “We’re offering freeway access to a growing number of public riders and will introduce the service to more over time, including as we expand freeway capabilities to Austin, Atlanta, and beyond — always guided by our commitment to safety and service excellence,” the company said in a blog post. “Freeway trips make Waymo even more convenient and efficient, whether you’re headed to Sky Harbor International Airport, cruising from Downtown LA to Culver City, or commuting in our newly expanded Bay Area service.”"
Among the warring tribes of the energy transition, you often get so-called nuclear bros on one side calling for as much abundant clean power as possible, and renewables hardliners on the other demanding more judicious use of existing clean power by cutting back on wasted energy. The latest plan from the nation’s largest nuclear plant operator tries to have it both ways. In his utility giant’s latest earnings call, Constellation Energy CEO Joe Dominguez said the company is “seeing a lot of great capability to use backup generation and flex compute,” Utility Dive reported.
It’s a sign of the growing trend toward demand response, wherein large power uses such as data centers scale back when the grid is under particular stress, such as on a hot day when everyone is using air conditioning. “I don’t think we’re going to get to a point where we could flex on and off the full output of data centers,” Dominguez warned. But he said the company is exploring the potential for artificial intelligence software to “attract some of our customers to actually providing the relief or the slack on the system during the key hours.” Still, the idea is attracting attention. Regulators at the state and federal level are now considering what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
The first front of climate action, started in the 1900s, was conservation, figuring out how to use energy more efficiently. The second front was about cleaning up the toxic mess left behind by mid-20th century industry. The third front, now emerging, is about finding ways to support construction of more energy infrastructure in recognition of the fact that there’s no such thing as national prosperity in a low-energy economy. That’s the take from Aliya Haq, the president of the nonprofit Clean Energy Project, who called for a new approach to climate advocacy in a new Heatmap op-ed.
