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Still, the race between the two countries is heating up. Cumulative investment in fusion energy soared 30% between June and September to $15 billion, up from a little over $11 billion, according to a report by the European Union’s F4E Fusion Observatory written up by NucNet. That fusion is, as Heatmap's Katie Brigham has written, “finally, possibly, almost” arriving at the same time that data centers to power artificial intelligence are driving up electricity demand is fortuitous. Or, it would be, if AI doesn’t end up proving to be inflated by hype. On Friday, Wall Street showed jitters over the possibility that the bubble may burst, sending shares of companies such as Oracle and Nvidia plunging. It begs the question Katie raised in another story in September: What if we get fusion, but we don’t need it?
The South Korean battery manufacturer SK On canceled its partnership to work on electric vehicles with the Ford Motor Company, throwing the fate of the two companies’ three factories in the American Southeast into jeopardy. The announcement, E&E News reported, also casts doubt over the $9.6 billion loan the Biden administration gave the joint venture, known as Blue Oval SK. The collaboration came as American automakers teamed up with Korean battery companies to hasten the establishment of an EV supply chain. General Motors inked a deal with LG Energy Solution and Ford with SK On. But as sales of EVs flatline — due in part to President Donald Trump axing the federal tax credit for purchases of new electric vehicles — the nascent supply networks are withering on the vine. Ford isn’t down for the count, however. In August, as I wrote in the newsletter at the time, the company unveiled what it billed as its “Model T moment” for EVs, a whole new assembly line structure meant to scale up and iron out production of battery-powered cars.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Prime Minister Mark Carney has scrapped Canada’s carbon tax, inked major oil and gas deals, and pumped the brakes on a scheme to boost electric vehicle sales. Now the leader of the Liberal Party is facing blowback from allies and sustainability-minded executives who say the reversals put Canada’s net-zero goals out of reach. The former environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, quit the cabinet in protest, as have two founding members of the federal government’s Net Zero Advisory Body. “From a climate-science standpoint, this risks undermining the urgency of emissions reduction,” Paul Polman, the former chief executive of home-goods giant Unilever and a campaigner for sustainable capitalism, told the Financial Times. “Betting heavily on unproven massive-scale CCS [carbon capture and storage] and a cleaner-oil narrative while accelerating production ... seems like a gamble with global emissions targets, and with the credibility of net zero by 2050. Gambling with firm science does not seem smart to me.”
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Utility-scale battery storage systems are facing increased risk of cyberattack from hackers working either for governments or criminal groups. That’s according to a white paper from the consultancies Brattle Group and Dragos. Battery deployments are expected to grow by as much as 45% in the next five years, raising the need for new protections against digital meddling. “Battery storage systems are being used across the grid to enable the deployment of variable demand sources such as solar and wind,” Phil Tonkin, field chief technology officer at Dragos, told Utility Dive’s sister publication Cybersecurity Dive. “This growing dependence makes them an attractive target.” Even relatively small-scale attacks can have devastating consequences. A single outage involving a 100-megawatt system for four hours in the U.S. would cost up to $1.2 million in revenue, the report found. A large-scale cyber attack that takes out 3,000 megawatts for a day would take a $39 million toll on the economy. Dragos is currently tracking as many as 18 groups that “are known to pose a threat to the electrical grid.”
Canada may be taking a U turn on climate policy, but France just updated its National Low-Carbon Strategy with an end date for using fossil fuels. The document “foresees the end of oil use between 2040 and 2045,” France24 reported, with natural gas phasing out by 2050. France is far ahead of most developed countries toward decarbonizing its power system since the nation has generated the majority of its electricity from nuclear reactors since the late 20th century. Under the plan, the French government expected electricity consumption to increase as heat pumps replace furnaces and electric vehicles swap in for diesel cars. Renewables are expected to cover the increase in electricity production.
Conspiracy theorists who think condensation trails from airplanes are some kind of population-control chemical may have their hands full with the paranoia fodder that geoengineering efforts represent. But actual scientists at Leipzig University have made a discovery about contrails’ effect on warming. The researchers found that “hidden” contrails within naturally forming cirrus clouds — previously not factored into assessments — contribute up to 10% of the warming all contrails cause. “We now know that not only the visible contrails we see in the sky but also those that form within clouds need to be taken into account when assessing the impact of aviation on the climate,” Torsten Seelig, the study's lead author, said in a statement.
While it’s still difficult to link specific weather events to climate change, federal researchers have connected intensified atmospheric rivers to the planet’s rising temperatures. But the record heat the world has experienced over the past three years isn’t necessarily due entirely to global warming. In a new analysis published in Carbon Brief, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather found that the main culprits turn out to be a combination of El Niño effects, declining sulfur emissions from Chinese coal plants and global shipping no longer masking warming, and stronger than usual solar radiation.
Solar panels and wind turbines in Zhangjiakou in China's Hebei province.Photo by VCG
China’s success at building new power plants has earned the country the title of the world’s first “electrostate,” a play on the old petrostate moniker afforded to nations where vast domestic oil and gas resources dominate the economy and politics. In the People’s Republic, blue-gray solar panels glaze entire mountainsides, nuclear reactors come online faster than the U.S. can pick a site for one, and wind turbines spring from the ground. In America, meanwhile, power-thirsty data centers are forced to jury-rig on-site power plants made of old jet engines. But that’s not how President Donald Trump sees it. In response to a Wall Street Journal story outlining how China’s vast grid is boosting Beijing’s artificial intelligence ambitions, Trump posted on his Truth Social website that the newspaper was “WRONG.” He went on: “Every AI plant being built in the United States is building its own Electric Generating Facilities. The approvals are being given carefully, but very quickly, a matter of weeks. Any excess Electricity being produced is going to our Electric Grid, which is being strengthened, and expanded, for other purposes than AI, like never before. In other words, AI has far more Electricity than they will ever need.”
The outburst came as Trump’s approval ratings on the economy sunk to the lowest point ever recorded by an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll taken while he’s been in office. Just 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, down from 40% in March.
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Like Tesla, electric vehicle giant Rivian is making a bet on self-driving cars. On Thursday, the company outlined what TechCrunch called “an ambitious effort that includes new hardware, including lidar and custom silicon, and eventually, a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market.” The automaker made the announcements at its inaugural “Autonomy & AI Day” event in Palo Alto, where the publication said the company sent “a very public signal to shareholders that it’s keeping pace, or even exceeding, the automated-driving capabilities of industry rivals like Tesla, Ford, General Motors, as well as automakers from Europe and China.”
It’s just the latest extension of Rivian’s empire. In March, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported that the company spun off its micromobility division. The startup, named Also, announced a $105 million Series B round on the same day it went independent.
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The Republican-led House of Representatives voted largely along partisan lines to pass three bills Thursday designed to speed up permitting for energy projects. While Politico noted the bills are unlikely to be taken up in the Senate, the package managed to pick up six Democrats’ votes in favor of a provision to ease Section 401 Clean Water Act rules and boost pipeline construction. Earlier this week, a bipartisan bill to modernize the federal permitting process and prepare to digitize the experience passed unanimously.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman broke the news this week that the top three Senate Democrats focused on climate issues oppose another permitting reform bill with bipartisan support, the SPEED Act, on the grounds that it did too little to clear bottlenecks for renewables and transmission lines. For those hoping a long-anticipated bipartisan legislative push may finally come to fruition before tax credits expire for solar and wind projects, at least one thing is clear: A negotiation is underway.
The European Commission proposed what PV Tech called a “two-pronged approach to improving Europe’s energy infrastructure.” The plan aims to speed up and make more transparent the process for permitting projects related to the grid. The proposal also calls for establishing eight new “energy highways” to deliver transmission capacity to areas of “strategic importance” in the 27-nation bloc. The first part, called the “European Grids Package,” calls for creating the Trans-European Network for Energy, or TEN-E, that was first proposed in 2013. The report also noted how far behind Europe was on its previous targets. Despite a goal of 88 gigawatts of new cross-border electricity transmission capacity by 2030, the EU is on pace to build just 41 gigawatts.
The move comes days after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen notched a victory for her deregulatory agenda when her center-right coalition in the European Parliament broke taboos and teamed up with the far-right to pass legislation easing environmental rules on most companies. As a result of the change, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, 80% of businesses operating in the EU will no longer have to track and report their own environmental impacts.
Deep in the cloud forests of the Serra do Quiriri mountains in the southern Brazilian Atlantic Forest, scientists discovered an entirely new species of frog. Named Brachycephalus lulai, the tiny amphibian has pumpkin-orange skin with green and brown freckles and obsidian eyes. Males max out at a little over 11 millimeters, while females grow nearly 14 millimeters. They are, according to Phys.org, “among the smallest four-legged animals on Earth.” What makes the discovery so interesting is that the researchers identified the so-called “pumpkin toadlet” by its unique mating song, unlike any known species in its genus, which consists of two short bursts of sound, according to their paper in the journal PLOS One.
