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Plus more of the week’s big money moves in critical minerals and electric vehicle charging.
On flesh-eating parasites, Italian nuclear, and China’s “wasted” renewables
Notes from Heatmap’s second Energy Entrepreneurship Summit.
On data center generators, nuclear waste recycling, and Omani H2
Current conditions: The Atlantic hurricane season officially began today, in what’s expected to be a relatively mild year • A powerful storm with winds of up to 80 miles per hour is walloping broad swaths of millions of Australians • Temperatures in Oman are approaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ming Yang blades, waiting in the wings. Visual China Group via Getty Images
The United States’ offshore wind industry is, at this very moment, booming — at least in terms of the turbine arrays finally coming online in recent weeks. But there are no new projects underway as President Donald Trump pulls out all the stops to kill the industry in what I have previously called a death by a thousand cuts. That’s despite the fact that demand for electricity is soaring in the U.S. Luckily for Americans, our nation’s aging network of power grids overlaps with our northern neighbor’s. And Canada is now looking at a potential offshore wind boom. Last summer, Nova Scotia started laying the groundwork for offshore wind projects. Now Ming Yang, the world’s third-largest manufacturer of wind turbines, is considering investing in a project off Canada’s Pacific coast. The proposed project in the Hecate Strait off British Columbia would add up to 2 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity to Canada’s portfolio, according to Renewables Now. It’s part of Ming Yang’s broader push into Western markets, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported last October.
Just days after New York State delayed its carbon-cutting plan and loosened the rules on how it counts greenhouse gases, California mounted its own retreat on climate goals. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the California Air Resources Board had voted to give as much as $4 billion of free allowances to oil refiners and other industrial polluters to make compliance with the state’s 13-year-old carbon market easier. At least New York Governor Kathy Hochul “had the decency” to signal publicly that she intended to roll back the state’s climate law, said Danny Cullenward, an economist and lawyer who wrote a book on climate policy. “Here in California we do the same in private and call it climate leadership,” Cullenward wrote of California Governor Gavin Newsom and CARB Chair Lauren Sanchez in a post on Bluesky.
Kudos to the Trump administration, then, for being so open about its plans to render the SEC something that might more appropriately serve as an acronym for Salting the Earth of Climate disclosures. Last month, I told you that the Securities and Exchange Commission was reviewing a Biden-era rule requiring companies to disclose the risk climate change posed to their businesses. On Friday, the agency formally proposed eliminating the regulation. “SEC disclosure obligations should comply with the Commission’s statutory authority, be guided by materiality as the North Star, avoid the practical effect of dictating corporate behavior, and be imposed only when the expected benefits justify the likely costs and burdens,” SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins said in a statement.
Rehlko isn’t a household name, but it used to be: The 106-year-old firm was previously called Kohler Energy. But since spinning out from the titan of American manufacturing of kitchen sinks and bathroom toilets, Rehlko has honed its business as a leading producer and installer of generators and the infrastructure to house the diesel-, gas-, or hydrogen-fired power sources. Now, I can report exclusively for this newsletter, the company is preparing to expand its factory in Wisconsin as its backlog of orders for generators to power data centers stretches beyond 13 months. In an interview on Friday, Rehlko CEO Brian Melka told me that this facility is part of a plan “to increase the size and the output of the business about four to five times, or 400% to 500%, over the next five or six years.” The Wisconsin plant is specifically designed to assemble the company’s “e-frame” product, a generator enclosure that looks like a shipping container and includes the wiring and fire suppression tools needed to safely house one of Rehlko’s proprietary generators, which provide off-grid back-up power to data centers, hospitals, and other large power users. In addition to beefing up its capacity to manufacture more generators and enclosures, the company is expanding its engineering team for larger projects in which Rehlko uses another firm’s gas turbines for full-time power generation.
“We want to maintain that competitive edge, not only to be able to deliver the product faster but also to deliver the entire solution faster,” Melka said. “This is going to significantly increase our capacity as we go into 2027 with this new facility to be able to build many more fully enclosed units. The demand keeps pushing out. We essentially sold out the capacity for that building for 2027 and 2028 before we even signed the lease.”
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Unlike Russia, France, Japan, and China, the U.S. doesn’t recycle its nuclear waste. That is, until now. Roughly half a dozen companies are competing to be the first to create a beachhead for a new recycling industry in the U.S. Now one of those startups, Curio, has kicked off the pre-application process for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission permit. It’s just an inaugural step: Submitting a letter of intent to the agency to establish a docket and start providing documents to the regulator. But Curio plans to build a plant that could process up to 4,000 metric tons of used commercial light water reactor fuel per year. “The initiation of this application process marks a key and decisive moment for Curio and our nation as we commercially deploy what will be the world’s most advanced and capable used nuclear fuel recycling facility based on our game-changing NuCycle technology,” Curio CEO Ed McGinnis said in a statement, referring to the brand of the company’s reprocessing technology that was recently validated by four of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories.
South Korea, meanwhile, wants to start enriching and reprocessing its own fuel, and has garnered support from the Trump administration to do so. In the meantime, the democratic world’s most competent builder of civilian nuclear plants is doing what it does best and starting construction on a new reactor. On Friday, World Nuclear News reported that crews had poured the first concrete for Shin Hanul nuclear plant’s fourth reactor.
In January, I told you when Century Aluminum overhauled its plans to build the first new aluminum smelter in the U.S. to include an investment from an Emirati company. At the time, the Energy Department hailed the deal as a sign that Trump’s tariffs were working. On Friday, Mining.com published a feature building off a report from the advocacy group Industrious Labs that examined the recent push for new aluminum smelting in the U.S. The analysis concluded that, while 50% tariffs bolstered the sector, “access to industrial-scale electricity — and increasingly industrial-scale clean electricity — is the pain point,” said Annie Sartor, senior campaigns director at Industrious Labs. “Aluminum producers are being scooped by data centers and hyperscalers. They can simply pay more for the power.”
Among the more exciting concepts for supplying the market with cheap, clean, and affordable hydrogen is finding the stuff in naturally-formed underground reservoirs, allowing oil and gas drillers to do their thing for a green fuel. Now Oman, the Arab world’s diplomatic equivalent of Switzerland, is making progress in drilling the first wells for natural hydrogen. HyTerra, the Australian startup exploring for hydrogen in the country, told the Oman Observer that the successful pilot well boded well for tapping “one of the best source rock systems” for natural hydrogen yet discovered in the world. Given the latest heat wave in the country, the value of a fossil fuel replacement is likely becoming more obvious.
On Thea Energy’s $100 million Series B, plus more of the week’s big money moves.
Nuclear is once again a dominant theme this week, with fusion startup Thea Energy landing a $100 million Series B that will help it expand its magnet manufacturing capabilities. While $100 million is nothing to scoff at, it somehow sounds modest alongside some of this year’s other deals, which include a $450 million Series A for Inertia Enterprises and $240 million for Shine Technologies. This week also brought the news that small modular reactor startup Newcleo plans to go public via SPAC later this year, bringing to mind the exuberance of the 2021 SPAC boom, in a deal expected to net a cool $429 million.
Elsewhere, gridtech company Utilidata raised fresh capital after (surprise!) pivoting to the data center market, while a standalone battery storage developer and operator is betting there’s still plenty of money to be made in the increasingly crowded ERCOT market.
Thea Energy officially joined the growing ranks of fusion companies to surpass $100 million in total funding this week, raising a $100 million Series B round led by the U.S. Innovative Technology Fund to scale its magnet manufacturing operations as it targets a demonstration reactor by 2030. Thea is a part of the Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, which seeks to accelerate efforts for commercial fusion power. In January, the DOE certified Thea’s preconceptual pilot plant design, making it the first of the program’s eight awardees — who will split $46 million in federal funding — to see its reactor architecture validated.
Unlike many top-funded fusion startups, which are building donut-shaped tokamak reactors, Thea Energy is betting on a stellarator design. Traditional stellarators resemble a helical tokamak, which require manufacturing and installing dozens of huge, twisted magnets, but Thea’s approach deviates from the norm. Instead, it relies on hundreds of small, planar magnets arranged in the more familiar donut-shaped configuration, which the company’s artificial intelligence software controls individually. That enables Thea to create the same complex magnetic field within a far simpler and more manufacturable shell.
Thea plans to use the new capital to build a second facility in New Jersey to complement its existing lab and to double its headcount as it seeks a site for its demo reactor later this year. The startup is aiming to bring its subsequent commercial pilot online by 2034, on par with the timeline laid out by fusion industry leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems. According to Gaetano Crupi, USIT founder and billionaire investor Thomas Tull “believes the stellarator is the right architecture for commercial fusion, and Thea Energy is the company that makes it commercially viable.” As Crupi put it in a press release, that’s because “Thea Energy’s breakthroughs shift complexity from precision mechanical fabrication to software-defined controls.”
Newcleo is the latest small modular reactor startup seeking a quick pathway to the public markets via a SPAC merger, announcing plans to list on the Nasdaq in the second half of the year after merging with a blank-check firm. The deal values the European fuel and reactor developer at $2.4 million, and is expected to deliver about $429 million in fresh capital. It comes just months after Newcleo raised $88 million in a growth financing round as the company expands into the U.S. market while continuing to fund projects across Europe.
Newcleo stands out in the crowded SMR field through its fuel and cooling strategy. It plans to run its 200-megawatt reactors on recycled fuel made from nuclear waste products like recovered plutonium and depleted uranium, and cool its reactors with liquid lead rather than water. Because liquid lead has such a high boiling point, lead-cooled reactors can operate at atmospheric pressure, reducing the need for the complex, high-pressure systems used in conventional nuclear plants and potentially improving safety along the way.
The company has already raised over $760 million to date, and CEO Stefano Buono told the Wall Street Journal that the pending SPAC could carry it through 2028 or 2029. Even that won’t be enough, however, for Newcleo to reach its target of opening a fuel factory by 2031 and bringing a commercial reactor online the following year. Not to mention that SPACs — a once rare go-to-market strategy — have a checkered history in the SMR industry. After NuScale went public via SPAC in 2022, its flagship project collapsed, taking its stock down with it and underscoring the risks that pre-revenue companies face when their early failures unfold in the public markets. On the other hand, shares of Sam Altman-backed startup Oklo’s have surged since it went public via SPAC in 2024, reaching a market cap over $11 billion, though it also has yet to build a reactor.
Newcleo’s capital push may also be tied to its strategic partnership with Oklo, as it has preliminary plans to invest up to $2 billion to develop advanced nuclear fuel facilities in the U.S. in partnership with the SMR pioneer. Earlier this week, the DOE selected Oklo — and by extension, Newcleo — to enter “advanced negotiations” to receive surplus weapons-grade plutonium for use in reactor fuel.
What’s that I hear? Another climate tech company has pivoted to the data center market? While Utilidata — an artificial intelligence-powered gridtech company — initially set out to give utilities granular insight into household-level electricity usage and grid data, it’s now raised a $40 million extension round to accelerate its shift into the data center market. As I wrote following last year’s initial $60 million tranche of Series C funding, Utilidata initially set out to get its hardware module inside residential smart meters — which it managed to do at pilot scale — to enable faster fault detection and eventually even automate load management at the household level.
Now, Utilidata is taking this same principle and applying it to the booming data center market, where so many climate tech companies are finding their first customers. The company developed its AI platform in collaboration with Nvidia, installing its modules on server racks to help data centers optimize power allocation across its facility. The company says it measures power consumption a million times per second, such that if usage on one rack is low, it can reroute electricity to parts of the data center that need it. Much like electric grids, data centers also overbuild their capacity to ensure they can handle sudden spikes in demand or hardware failures. Utilidata wants to tap into that headroom by managing power flow in real time.
Utilidata’s first commercial data center deployment is set to go live next month in Montreal in partnership with European AI cloud provider NexGen Cloud, with the startup targeting a 50% increase in the data center’s usable processing power. It also plans to use this latest funding to increase headcount by 25% this year as it builds out operations at its new Ann Arbor headquarters, which opened in February.
In some later-stage funding news, battery energy storage developer, owner, and operator Goshe Energy Storage just secured up to $40 million in strategic financing from S2G investments. As I wrote last week, S2G recently raised a $1 billion fund aimed at helping growth-stage companies commercialize, though this latest commitment actually comes from a different arm of the firm — its Special Opportunities team. This division focuses on non-dilutive financing, in this case providing Goshe with a HoldCo loan backed by the company’s portfolio of energy storage projects. Rather than lending to a specific project, a HoldCo loan gives Goshe flexible capital that can be used to fund its broader growth.
Founded in 2022, Goshe specializes in acquiring late-stage battery storage projects and getting them over the finish line by securing capital and managing the construction process into commercial operations. Thus far, all of its announced projects are in Texas’ ERCOT electricity market. Alongside this financing announcement, Goshe said that its first project — a 100-megawatt battery storage plant in Bexar County, Texas — is now fully operational after securing $288 million in project financing. The company also expects to bring its second project, a 180-megawatt storage facility, online in the following few months, with two additional ERCOT projects slated to begin construction later this year.
This funding is the latest sign that infrastructure investors have grown comfortable backing battery energy storage projects, with a record 24.3 gigawatts of new battery storage capacity projected to come online in the U.S. this year alone. The wholesale ERCOT market, however, is no longer the guaranteed moneymaker that it was just a few years ago. Between January 2024 and January 2026, ERCOT more than tripled its battery storage capacity, driving battery revenues down as the market has become increasingly crowded. In this landscape, there may be a growing number of stranded projects for Goshe to acquire, though it’ll also have to be increasingly selective.
