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Nearly 30 new utility-scale solar factories started production in the U.S. last year, reaching a high enough capacity to supply nearly twice the expected demand for photovoltaic modules through the end of the decade. That’s according to the latest report out this morning from the American Clean Power Association, the biggest trade group representing the renewable energy industry. The country now has the capacity to produce more than 60 gigawatts of panel modules per year, enough to meet forecast demand through 2030 of just over 35 gigawatts per year nearly twice over. The increase in module manufacturing capacity over the last five years topped 1,600%. But it’s not all rosy. Upstream, solar cell manufacturing has seen a far slower uptick, with just three active factories. The number of factories in the pipeline between now and 2030 falls just below projected demand. Thanks to tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s repeal of solar tax credits, and tight new eligibility restrictions on the use of foreign products in federally-supported projects, solar imports last year fell 33% compared to 2024 levels. The U.S. is also growing self-sufficient on batteries. Last year, the country expanded its manufacturing base enough to meet battery demand with domestic modules, putting the industry on track to do so with domestic cells as well by the end of this year. The five new active anode material plants set to come online by December — one of which is already in operation — could meet total U.S. demand for battery storage by 2028. “We haven’t attracted all of the supply chain yet, it’s still a work in progress, but so far the signs are quite good,” John Hensley, ACP’s senior vice president of markets and policy analysis, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo in an exclusive interview.
A chart showing U.S. corporate energy purchases by source.CEBA
For the past five years, solar has been king among corporate energy buyers. Wind, then, could be considered the crown prince, trailing behind photovoltaics but undeniably the second in line for the throne. Not anymore. In 2025, nuclear surpassed wind as the second-largest technology in corporate deals, with over 5 gigawatts of capacity announced in a single year, according to the latest data from the Corporate Energy Buyers Association. It’s not just about fission, either. “Beyond nuclear, 2025 saw buyers procure more geothermal and hydropower capacity than in any previous year tracked, as well as growth in fusion and the first-ever natural gas with CCS deal, reflecting growing attention to reliability and system adequacy,” the report stated.
New York culture is full of stark rivalries. Artists versus finance bros. Yankees versus Mets. Islanders versus Rangers. Puerto Rican mofongo versus Dominican mofongo. West Side versus East Side. But between the city’s two great train stations, there has long been a clear winner: Grand Central. By comparison, Penn Station, as I can tell you from countless commutes, has long been the armpit of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a complex maze of perpetually sticky floors, fluorescent lighting, and bathrooms so dirty that even a nauseatingly tipsy teenager thinks twice about entering. And yet the 2021 opening of the Moynihan Train Hall marked a serious upgrade. Now the Trump administration is chipping in another $8 billion to remake the rail hub.
The announcement, according to Gothamist, marked the first time the federal government has publicly disclosed how much it will spend to reconstruct the station since the White House took over control of the project from the MTA last year and turned the work over to the facility’s owner, Amtrak. “When it comes to our rail, we’re making generational improvements to the Northeast Corridor,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said under oath during his opening testimony at a Senate hearing Tuesday morning. “That means … a transformative investment in New York’s Penn Station — $8 billion, by the way.”
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Back in February, I told you the cautionary tale of Boston Metal. The Massachusetts-based green steel startup faced an unexpected equipment accident at its plant in Brazil, making it impossible to meet a key development milestone needed to unlock another tranche of funding from its financiers. As a result, the company had to lay off much of its workforce. Now it’s mounting a comeback. On Wednesday, the firm announced a new $75 million funding round to support the scaling of its operations worldwide. Combined with previous financing deals, the company has now raised a total of more than $500 million. The latest funding will allow Boston Metal to expand its business producing metals such as niobium, tantalum, vanadium, and nickel — all of which the U.S. wants to secure more supplies of from domestic sources or allied countries. “This financing marks a pivotal step for Boston Metal,” Rick Cutright, a venture capitalist whose firm, Climate Investment, joined the latest round, said in a statement. “The company has built a new metallurgical platform and demonstrated its ability to produce high-quality metals from complex feedstocks; now the focus is commercial production. Critical metals are the right first market because the need is immediate.”
In South Dakota, meanwhile, the world’s largest producer of biofuels just inked a major energy storage deal. Antora turned on its 5-gigawatt-hour, multi-day thermal energy storage system, which is delivering energy to POET under a long-term offtake agreement. The technology will help expand production POET’s bioprocessing facility in Big Stone City. “Homegrown energy sources create good-paying jobs, support our agriculture producers, and provide affordable options for consumers,” Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, said in a statement. “I’m grateful for this impressive addition to South Dakota’s budding biofuels industry, and I can’t wait to see the benefits for South Dakota producers and families across our state.”
Convective Capital is not your usual venture capital firm. The San Francisco-based company, which Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has written about repeatedly, formed around a parochial specialty with ubiquitous appeal to Californians: wildfire technology. The startups financed through its first fire-focused fund have so far attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Now Convective is launching a second fund. On Thursday morning, the firm announced $85 million for a fund focused on resiliency. In a blog post, Convective founder Bill Clerico said the company has already launched a media channel to tell stories about companies finding novel ways to shore up infrastructure against extreme weather disasters and assembled a network of more than 10,000 resiliency-focused professionals. “There’s $60 trillion of real estate that's at high risk from disaster,” Clerico told Katie in an interview yesterday. “While we spend as a nation a trillion dollars a year preparing to fight enemies overseas, we spend comparatively very little at home protecting our neighborhoods and cities. I think the silver lining in this is that it’s gotten so bad that I think the private markets can now take over.”
It’s been almost exactly a year since the rooftop solar giant Sunnova went bankrupt. Now its former chief executive is back with a new startup called Otovo that’s focused on servicing and fixing solar panels, batteries, and generator systems “orphaned” by their original developers’ bankruptcies. The business is panning out. This morning, I reported exclusively for Heatmap that Otovo has so far racked up 30,000 customers in less than a year and is considering listing on an American stock exchange as early as this year.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Boston Metal has already been working in the critical metals space. It has also been updated to correct the nature of Antora’s agreement with POET.
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.
