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Nearly two weeks ago, Vineyard Wind sued one of its suppliers, GE Vernova, to keep the industrial giant from exiting the offshore wind project off the coast of Nantucket in Massachusetts. Now a U.S. court has ordered GE Vernova to finish the job, saying it would be “fanciful” to imagine a new contractor could complete the installation. GE Vernova had argued that Vineyard Wind — a 50/50 joint venture between the European power giant Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — owed it $300 million for work already performed. But Vineyard Wind countered that the manufacturer remains on the hook for about $545 million to make up for a catastrophic turbine blade collapse in 2024, according to WBUR. “The project is at a critical phase and the loss of [Vineyard Wind]’s principal contractor would set the project back immeasurably,” the Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp wrote in his decision, repeatedly using the name of GE Vernova’s renewables subsidiary. “To pretend that [Vineyard Wind] could go out and hire one or more contractors to finish the installation and troubleshoot and modify [GE Renewables’] proprietary design without [GE Renewables’] specialized knowledge is fanciful.”
Charlotte DeWald fears the world is sleepwalking into tipping points beyond which the Earth’s natural carbon cycles will render climate change uncontrollable. By the time we realize what it means for global weather and agricultural systems that there’s no sea ice in the Arctic sometime in the 2030s, for example, it may be too late to try anything drastic to buy us more time. Much of the discourse around what to do concerns a specific kind of geoengineering called stratospheric aerosol injections, essentially spraying reflective particles into the sky to block the sun’s heat from permeating the increasingly thick layer of greenhouse gases that prevent that energy from naturally radiating back into space. That’s something DeWald, a former Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researcher and climate scientist by training who specialized in modeling aerosol-cloud interactions, knows all about. But her approach is different, using a technology known as mixed-phase cloud thinning, a process similar to cloud seeding. “The idea is that you could dissipate clouds over the Arctic to release heat from the surface to, for example, increase sea ice extent or thickness or integrity,” she told me. “There’s some early modeling that suggests that it could yield significant cooling over the Arctic Ocean.”
With all that context, you can now appreciate the exclusive bit of news I have for you this morning: DeWald is launching a new nonprofit called the Arctic Stabilization Initiative to “evaluate whether targeted interventions can slow dangerous” warming near the Earth’s northern pole. So far, ASI has raised $6.5 million in philanthropic funding toward a five-year budget goal of $55 million to study whether MCT, as mixed-phase cloud thinning is known, could help save the Arctic. The nonprofit has an advisory board stacked with veteran Arctic scientists and put together a “stage-gated” research plan with offramps in case early modeling suggests MCT won’t work or could cause undue environmental damage. The project also has an eye toward engaging with Indigenous peoples and “will ground all future work in respect for Indigenous sovereignty, before any field-based research activity is pursued.” The statement harkens to Harvard University’s SCoPEx trial, a would-be outdoor experiment in spraying reflective aerosols into the atmosphere over Sweden that ran aground after researchers initially failed to consult local stakeholders and a body representing the Indigenous Saami people in the northern reaches of Nordic nations came out against the testing. (By repeatedly invoking ASI’s nonprofit status, DeWald also seemed to draw a contrast with for-profit stratospheric aerosol injection startup Stardust Solutions, which last year Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported had raised $60 million.) “We are continuing to move toward critical planetary thresholds without a viable plan for things like tipping points,” DeWald said. “That was the inflection point for me.”
Modern lighting on an old building in the Qingzhou section of Weifang, which is getting modern molecules in an old gas system.VCG/VCG via Getty Images
China just took yet another step closer to energy independence, despite its relatively tiny domestic reserves of oil and gas, kicking off the world’s largest project to blend hydrogen into the natural gas system. As part of the experiment, roughly 100,000 households in the center of the Weifang, a prefecture-level city in eastern Shandong province between Beijing and Shanghai, will receive a blend of up to 10% hydrogen through existing gas pipes. The pilot’s size alone “smashes” the world record, according to Hydrogen Insight. Whether that’s meaningful from a climate perspective depends on how you look at things. A fraction of 1% of China’s hydrogen fuel comes from electrolyzer plants powered by clean renewables or nuclear electricity. But the People’s Republic still produces more green hydrogen than any other nation. Last year, the central government made cleaning up heavy industry with green hydrogen a higher priority — a goal that’s been supercharged by the war in Iran. Therein lies the real biggest motivator now. While China relies on imports for natural gas, swapping out more of that fuel for domestically generated hydrogen allows Beijing to claim the moral high ground on emissions and air pollution — all while becoming more energy independent.
Meanwhile, China’s container ships are the latest sector to experiment with going electric and forgoing the need for costly, dirty bunker fuel. A 10,000-ton fully electric cargo vessel capable of carrying 742 shipping containers just started up operations in China this week, according to a video posted on X by China’s Xinhua News service.
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The ability of electric vehicles to serve as distributed energy resources, charging in times of low demand and discharging back onto the grid when demand peaks, has long been a dream of EV enthusiasts and DER advocates alike. California’s PG&E utility launched a small bi-directional charging program in 2023, allowing owners of Ford F-150 Lightnings to use their trucks as home backup power, and eventually feed energy back onto the grid. The utility added a host of General Motors EVs to the program back in 2025. On Monday, it announced its latest vehicle participant: Tesla’s Cybertruck. The Tesla vehicle will be the first in the program to run on alternating current, which simplifies the equipment necessary and lowers costs for consumers, according to PG&E’s announcement.
In January, I told you about the then-latest company to benefit from President Donald Trump’s dabbling in what you might call state capitalism with American characteristics: USA Rare Earth. The vertically integrated company, which aims to mine rare earths in Texas, took big leaps forward in the past year toward building factories to turn those metals into the magnets needed for modern technologies. For now, however, the company needs ore. On Monday, USA Rare Earth announced plans to buy Brazilian rare earth miner Serra Verde in a deal valued at $2.8 billion in cash and shares. The transaction is expected to be complete by the end of the third quarter of this year. The company pitched the move as a direct challenge to China, which dominates both the processing of rare earths mined at home and abroad. “The world has become too dependent on a single source and it’s high time to break that dependency,” USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.
As if we needed more evidence that the data center backlash is “swallowing American politics,” here’s Heatmap’s Jael Holzman with yet another data point: According to tracking from the Heatmap Pro database, fights against data centers now outnumber fights against wind farms in the U.S. That includes both onshore and offshore wind developments. “Taken together,” Jael wrote, “these numbers describe the tremendous power involved in the data center wars.”
While the surge in gasoline costs “likely peaked,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright warned that the price at the pump could remain above $3 a gallon until 2027 during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.
The Trump administration pitched its deal to pay TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to cancel the company’s offshore wind leases as a win-win: The government would reimburse the French energy giant for every penny it spent to acquire the leases, and in exchange, Total would “redirect” the money to U.S. oil and gas development. But new document released Friday and analyzed by Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo show that “Americans’ side of the bargain appears to be worthless” given that “Total did not have to make any new investments to get its check.” Indeed, the company was already planning investments in the U.S. that would likely qualify under the deal.
Offshore wind investments are, meanwhile, moving forward. Danish developer Orsted has installed the first wind turbine at its Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New York, offshoreWIND.biz reported. The turbine is the first of what’s expected to be 84 turbines totaling nearly a gigawatt of maximum capacity. It comes just weeks after Wind Scylla, the Cadeler-owned vessel specially designed to deploy turbines, completed work on Revolution Wind, Orsted’s flagship first project off the coast of Rhode Island. That the project is moving ahead as normal is a victory unto itself. The Trump administration pulled out every stop to halt construction of all offshore wind projects.
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that energy companies facing lawsuits over environmental damage to the Louisiana waterfront from oil and gas production can move those cases from state to federal court, where more favorable outcomes are expected. In a unanimous decision in favor of Chevron, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “Congress has long authorized” the transfer from state to federal courts. The New York Times described the ruling as “a significant victory for oil companies.”
The decision comes two months after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which concerns jurisdiction for “public nuisance” claims. It’s still awaiting a hearing date. But the litigation, which dates back to 2018, came when the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, sued the oil giants Exxon Mobil and Suncor for damages from climate change, bringing charges under state law. “The oil companies tried repeatedly to get the case dismissed, arguing that it belonged in federal court. But time and again, the courts disagreed. The Supreme Court already rejected an earlier petition to review the question of whether the case belonged in state or federal court in 2023,” Emily wrote in February. “Now it has agreed to consider a slightly different petition, filed last summer, over whether federal law preempts Boulder’s state-law claims.”
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Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has agreed to work with the state of Indiana to build out “a future pathway for nuclear energy solutions” including “small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear technologies.” The drugmaker behind antidepressant Prozac and erectile dysfunction treatment Cialis signed a letter of intent with the state last month. The deal, first reported by Axios on Friday, marks the latest example of a big corporate power user laying out plans for atomic energy investments for something other than data centers. In 2022, the steelmaker Nucor signed a deal with nuclear developer NuScale to explore building a small modular reactor near one of its electric arc furnaces, and last year forged an alliance with The Nuclear Company to consider backing the startup’s efforts to establish a supply chain for building fleets of reactors. In 2023, Dow Chemical inked a deal with X-energy to use the next-generation nuclear developer’s high-temperature gas-cooled reactors to potentially swap out fossil fuels for splitting atoms as its industrial heat source.
Not all is looking rosy for the nuclear industry. Fermi America, the startup led by former Texas Governor Rick Perry and which promised to build a giant data enter complex backed by, isn’t just “faltering, it’s imploding,” according to a report by independent energy journalist Robert Bryce. But other projects are advancing. On Friday, the next-generation reactor startup Kairos Power broke ground on its demonstration project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Then, on Saturday, Bloomberg reported The Nuclear Company was moving forward with a bid to finish construction of either South Carolina's abandoned V.C. Summer nuclear plant or one of two other potential locations in the state.
The Brucutu iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil.ALEXANDRE MOTA/CVRD/AFP via Getty Images
Brazil is racing to develop its critical minerals as the U.S. looks for new sources in the hemisphere that can help Washington loosen China’s grip over the metals. Just how to regulate the nascent industry is a hot topic in Brazilian politics right now. Lawmakers who back left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are pushing to form a state-owned mining company. In a Sunday post on X, Lula boasted that Brazil “already holds the world’s largest reserve of niobium, the second largest of graphite and rare earths, and the third largest of nickel” — and “only 30% of the mineral potential” is mapped out as of yet. Following the lead of mineral-rich countries in Asia and Africa, Brazil said it would look to make deals for processing and refining. “We will not repeat the role of mere exporters of mineral commodities,” Lula wrote. “We are open to international partnerships that include stages of higher value added and technology transfer.”
That could be an opening for deals with China, which dominates the processing industry. Countries such as Indonesia and Zimbabwe banned exports of raw ore in a bid to capture more of the industrial supply chain. “There are a lot of countries that want something like this right now,” Tim Puko, a minerals analyst at the Eurasia Group, told me on X. “Brazil is one of the few with a good chance of pulling it off.”
Japan may be facing record gas prices as the Iran War squeezed shipments of liquified natural gas. But it’s got some backup coming onto the grid from two sources of clean firm power. Unit 6 of the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, a 1,356-megawatt Advanced Boiling Water Reactor shut down after Fukushima, has resumed commercial operation, World Nuclear News reported. Furusato Thermal Power has announced that the roughly 5-megawatt Waita No. 2 geothermal power plant, located in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, has officially started commercial operations, just two years after construction started, ThinkGeoEnergy reported.
Editor's note: This article was updated after publication to include other sites The Nuclear Company is considering in South Carolina.
