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The Trump administration, meanwhile, is facing accusations of violating the Constitution with its orders to keep coal-fired power stations operating past planned retirement. By mandating their coal plants stay open, two electrical cooperatives in Colorado said the Energy Department’s directive “constitutes both a physical taking and a regulatory taking” of property by the government without just compensation or due process, Utility Dive reported.
Back in December, the promise of a bipartisan deal on permitting reform seemed possible as the SPEED Act came up for a vote in the House. At the last minute, however, far-right Republicans and opponents of offshore wind leveraged their votes to win an amendment specifically allowing President Donald Trump to continue his attempts to kill off the projects to build turbines off the Eastern Seaboard. With key Democrats in the Senate telling Heatmap’s Jael Holzman that their support hinged on legislation that did the opposite of that, the SPEED Act stalled out. Now a new bipartisan bill aims to rectify what went wrong. The FREEDOM Act — an acronym for “Fighting for Reliable Energy and Ending Doubt for Open Markets” — would prevent a Republican administration from yanking permits from offshore wind or a Democratic one from going after already-licensed oil and gas projects, while setting new deadlines for agencies to speed up application reviews. I got an advanced copy of the bill Monday night, so you can read the full piece on it here on Heatmap.
One element I didn’t touch on in my story is what the legislation would do for geothermal. Next-generation geothermal giant Fervo Energy pulled off its breakthrough in using fracking technology to harness the Earth’s heat in more places than ever before just after the Biden administration completed work on its landmark clean energy bills. As a result, geothermal lost out on key policy boosts that, for example, the next-generation nuclear industry received. The FREEDOM Act would require the government to hold twice as many lease sales on federal lands for geothermal projects. It would also extend the regulatory shortcuts the oil and gas industry enjoys to geothermal companies.
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A chart showing which manufacturers are providing the turbines for America's gas projects. GEM
Take a look at the above chart. In the United States, new gas power plants are surging to meet soaring electricity demand. At last count, two thirds of projects currently underway haven’t publicly identified which manufacturer is making their gas turbines. With the backlog for turbines now stretching to the end of the decade, Siemens Energy wants to grow its share of booming demand. The German company, which already boasts the second-largest order book in the U.S. market, is investing $1 billion to produce more turbines and grid equipment. “The models need to be trained,” Christian Bruch, the chief executive of Siemens Energy, told The New York Times. “The electricity need is going to be there.”
While most of the spending is set to go through existing plants in Florida and North Carolina, Siemens Energy plans to build a new factory in Mississippi to produce electric switchgear, the equipment that manages power flows on the grid. It’s hardly alone. In September, Mitsubishi announced plans to double its manufacturing capacity for gas turbines over the next two years. After the announcement, the Japanese company’s share price surged. Until then, investors’ willingness to fund manufacturing expansions seemed limited. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin put it, “Wall Street has been happy to see developers get in line for whatever turbines can be made from the industry’s existing facilities. But what happens when the pressure to build doesn’t come from customers but from competitors?” Siemens just gave its answer.
At his annual budget address in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro touted Amazon’s plans to invest $20 billion into building two data center campuses in his state. But he said it’s time for the state to become “selective about the projects that get built here.” To narrow the criteria, he said developers “must bring their own power generation online or fully fund new generation to meet their needs — without driving up costs for homeowners or businesses.” He insisted that data centers conserve more water. “I know Pennsylvanians have real concerns about these data centers and the impact they could have on our communities, our utility bills, and our environment,” he said, according to WHYY. “And so do I.” The Democrat, who is running for reelection, also called on utilities to find ways to slash electricity rates by 20%.
For the first time, every vehicle on Consumer Reports’ list of top picks for the year is a hybrid (or available as one) or an electric vehicle. The magazine cautioned that its endorsement extended to every version of the winning vehicles in each category. “For example, our pick of the Honda Civic means we think the gas-only Civic, the hybrid, and the sporty Si are all excellent. But for some models, we emphasize the version that we think will work best for most people.” But the publication said “the hybrid option is often quieter and more refined at speed, and its improved fuel efficiency usually saves you money in the long term.”
Elon Musk wants to put data centers in space. In an application to the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX laid out plans to launch a constellation of a million solar-powered data centers to ease the strain the artificial intelligence boom is placing on the Earth’s grids. Each data center, according to E&E News, would be 31 miles long and operate more than 310 miles above the planet’s surface. “By harnessing the Sun’s abundant, clean energy in orbit — cutting emissions, minimizing land disruption, and reducing the overall environmental costs of grid expansion — SpaceX’s proposed system will enable sustainable AI advancement,” the company said in the filing.
He’s fashioned the military’s Defense Logistics Agency into a tool to fund mineral refineries. He’s gone on a shopping spree that made Biden administration officials “jealous,” taking strategic equity stakes in more than half a dozen mining companies. Now President Donald Trump is preparing to launch a strategic stockpile for critical minerals in what Bloomberg billed as “a bid to insulate manufacturers from supply shocks as the U.S. works to slash its reliance on Chinese rare earths and other metals.” Dubbed Project Vault, the venture will be seeded with a $10 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. and another $1.67 billion in private capital. More than a dozen companies have committed to work on the stockpile, including General Motors, Stellantis, Boeing, Google, and GE Vernova.
The shale industry, meanwhile, showed it’s matured enough to go through some consolidation. Oklahoma City-based gas giant Devon Energy is merging with Houston-headquartered Coterra Energy in an all-stock deal that CNBC said would create “a large-cap producer with a top position in the Permian Basin. The deal would establish a combined company with an enterprise value of $58 billion, marking the largest merger in the sector since Diamondback bought Endeavor Energy Resources for $26 billion in 2024. The deal comes as low prices from the global oil glut squeeze U.S. shale drillers — and as the possibility of more oil from Venezuela threatens the sector with fresh competition.
Offshore wind is now five-for-five in its legal brawls with Trump. With Orsted’s latest victory in the Sunrise Wind case on Monday, I’ll let Heatmap’s Jael Holzman serve as the ring announcer spelling out the stakes of the legal victory: “If the government were to somehow prevail in one or more of these cases, it would potentially allow agencies to shut down any construction project underway using even the vaguest of national security claims. But as I have previously explained, that behavior is often a textbook violation of federal administrative procedure law.”
Germany is set to quadruple its installed solar capacity to 425 gigawatts by 2045, according to a forecast from a trade group representing utilities and grid operators. The projections, Renewables Now reported, mean the country needs to expand its transmission system. Installed onshore wind capacity should triple to around 175 gigawatts by that same year. Battery storage is on track to rise about 68 gigawatts, from roughly 2 gigawatts today. Demand is also set to grow. Data centers, which make up just 2 gigawatts of demand on the grid today, are forecast to balloon to nearly 37 gigawatts in the next 19 years.
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In northwestern China, a new 100-megawatt solar farm. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
In October, the Chinese Communist Party published the framework of its next Five-Year Plan, the 15th such industrial strategy. The National People’s Congress is set to formally approve the proposal next month. But on Monday, the energy analyst John Kemp called the latest five-word phrase, articulated in the form of “formal input” from the party’s Central Committee, “the most succinct statement of China’s energy policy.” Those words: “Building a strong energy nation.” The suggested edits from the committee described “accelerating the construction of a strong energy nation” as “extremely important and timely” and called its “main shortcomings” the ongoing reliance on imported oil and gas.
Unlike in the U.S., where the Trump administration is working to halt construction of renewables, the officials in Beijing boast that China’s “installed capacity of wind and solar has ranked first in the world for many consecutive years.” Like the U.S., the Central Committee pitched the plan as “an urgent requirement” for “gaining the initiative in great power competition.”
Japan is mounting a new push to implement a decade-old plan to extract rare earths from the ocean floor. A state-owned research vessel just completed a test mission to retrieve an initial sample of mineral-rich mud from a location 20,000 feet below the surface, the South China Morning Post reported. The government of Sanae Takaichi wants to start processing metal-bearing mud from the seabed for tests within a year. “It’s about economic security,” Shoichi Ishii, program director for Japan’s National Platform for Innovative Ocean Developments, told Bloomberg. “The country needs to secure a supply chain of rare earths. However expensive they may be, the industry needs them.”
With global negotiations over a licensing framework for legalizing deep sea mining in international waters has stalled, the U.S. just finalized a rule to speed up American permitting for the nascent sector, clearing the way for Washington to fulfill Trump’s pledge to go it alone if the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority didn’t act first.
A week after signing an historic trade agreement with the European Union, India has inked another deal with the U.S. That means the world’s two largest consumer markets are now wide open to Indian industry, which relies heavily on coal. New Delhi isn’t just going to scrap all those coal-fired factories and forges. But the government’s latest budget earmarks about $2.4 billion over five years to speed up deployment of carbon capture equipment across heavy industry, Carbon Herald reported. The plan focuses on steel, cement, power, refining, and chemicals.
