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Some of the Loan Programs Office’s signature programs are hollowed-out shells.
With a stroke of President Trump’s Sharpie, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law, stripping the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office of much of its lending power. The law rescinds unobligated credit subsidies for a number of the office’s key programs, including portions of the $3.6 billion allocated to the Loan Guarantee Program, $5 billion for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, $3 billion for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, and $75 million for the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
Just three years ago, the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged LPO, originally established in 2005 to help stand up innovative new clean energy technologies that weren’t yet considered bankable for the private sector, expanding its lending authority to roughly $400 billion. While OBBBA leaves much of the office’s theoretical lending authority intact, eliminating credit subsidies means that it no longer really has the tools to make use of those dollars.
Credit subsidies represent the expected cost to the government of providing a loan or a loan guarantee — including the possibility of a default — and thus how much money Congress must set aside to cover these potential losses. So by axing these subsidies, Congress is effectively limiting the amount of lending that the LPO can undertake, given that many third-party lenders would be reluctant to finance riskier, more novel, or larger projects in the absence of federal credit support.
“The LPO is statutorily allowed to take loans on its books to finance these projects in these categories, but it has no credit subsidy by which to take the risk required to do so,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me.
The particular programs that have been eliminated support new and improved energy technologies, clean energy infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and help native communities access energy project financing. The long-running Loan Guarantee Program and the advanced vehicles program in particular are behind some of the best known LPO efforts, supporting companies such as Tesla, Ford, and NextEra Energy, and projects such as Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear reactors, the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and Shepherd’s Flat, one of the world’s largest wind farms.
The Loan Guarantees Program is “the big Kahuna,” Arun told me. “This is the longest-standing program of the LPO. So to see this defunded is like, you’re decapitating the LPO’s crown jewel.”
The program only has about $11 million left over in credit subsidies, consisting of funding that it received prior to the IRA’s appropriations. That won’t be enough to make any meaningful loans, Arun said, and is more likely to be used to “keep a skeleton crew online” for any remaining administrative tasks.
Then there’s the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, which the IRA stood up with a whopping $250 billion in lending authority to transition and transform existing fossil fuel infrastructure for clean energy purposes. Now, OBBBA has axed the program’s remaining $5 billion in credit subsidies and replaced it with $1 billion in new subsidies for projects that “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace” existing energy infrastructure, with a focus on expanding capacity and output as opposed to decarbonizing the economy. It also refashioned the program as the predictably-named “Energy Dominance Financing” initiative.
The new-old program — which the law extended through 2028 — no longer requires LPO-funded infrastructure to reduce or sequester emissions, broadening the office’s lending authority to include support for fossil fuel and critical minerals projects. It also adds language encouraging the LPO to “support or enable the provision of known or forecastable electric supply,” which Arun fears is a “backend way of penalizing the addition of renewable energy” on previously developed land.
“Under the Trump administration’s direction, [the LPO] can use that term, ‘known and forecastable,’ to actually just say, well, guess what? Renewables are not known or forecastable because they are intermittent due to the weather,” Arun told me. So while government and private industry were once excited about, say, turning sites originally developed for coal mining or coal ash disposal into solar and battery facilities, those days are probably over.
Carbon capture in particular stands to suffer from this reprogramming, Arun said, explaining that while the Biden LPO saw potential in adding carbon capture to natural gas and coal plants, its current incarnation will no longer allocate funding in any meaningful amount “because reducing emissions is no longer part of the LPO’s mandate.” Some policymakers and clean energy developers had also hoped that excess renewable energy would make it economically feasible to power the production of hydrogen fuel with renewable energy. But with this law — and really each passing day under Trump — a mass buildout of solar and wind seems less and less likely, making it doubtful that green hydrogen will move down the cost curve.
As bleak as this looks, it’s better than it could have been. There was no guarantee that Trump would keep the LPO around at all. Even in this denuded state, the office can still fund the expansion of existing nuclear projects, and perhaps even the buildout of transmission lines or battery projects on brownfield sites, Arun said, depending on how LPO’s leadership ends up interpreting what it means to “increase the capacity output of operating infrastructure.”
But in many ways, what happened with the LPO looks like another instance of the Trump administration picking winners and losers: Yes to clean, firm energy and fossil fuels, no to solar, wind, and electric vehicles.
Take the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, for example. OBBBA nixed both its credit subsidies and its tens of billions of dollars in lending authority. That’s hardly a surprise, given that the Bush administration created the program in 2007 explicitly to support the domestic development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles and components. But it means that unlike the LPO programs for which lending authority still stands, even if Congress wanted to, it could not redesign the advanced vehicles program to serve a more Trump-aligned purpose. Safer, I suppose, to cut off any opening for funding EVs and hybrids.
The latest LPO rescissions add to the growing list of reasons the private sector has to be wary of the consistently inconsistent landscape for federal funding, Arun told me. He worries that slashing the LPO’s authority at the same time as there’s so much uncertainty around tax credit eligibility will lead some companies to forgo federal funding opportunities altogether.
“We’ll see if private developers even want to play around with the LPO,” Arun told me, “given the uncertainty around the rest of the federal landscape here.”
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The company, Nuclearn, aims to speed development and licensing processes with the help of a specially trained large language model.
You’d be hard-pressed to dream up a buzzier clean tech concept than an AI platform custom-designed for the nuclear industry. Yet Phoenix-based startup Nuclearn has been betting on the role of artificial intelligence in the booming nuclear sector since 2021 — predating the wide launch of ChatGPT and the Trump administration’s recent embrace of nuclear energy.
Now the funds are rolling in. The company announced today that it raised a $10.5 million Series A round led by the climate tech venture fund Blue Bear Capital. With this cash, Nuclearn plans to expand its repertoire of AI offerings, which spans everything from identifying and documenting faults in a reactor to project scheduling, engineering evaluations, and licensing and permitting for new or modified reactors.
To expedite these processes, the company has developed its own, nuclear-specific language model, built atop existing open source models and trained on public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other government agencies, Nuclearn’s cofounder and CFO, Jerrold Vincent, told me. This allows the model to pick up on “a lot of nuclear specifics, whether it’s the acronyms, vernacular, specific processes, even just sometimes the way [the nuclear industry] thinks about certain types of issues and the level of scrutiny they put on one thing versus another,” he explained.
By way of example, Vincent told me that one of the startup’s current customers is working on a licensing application and wanted to conduct some background research to identify potential gaps or areas where the NRC might raise additional questions. Every other time the company has pre-checked an application like this, Vincent said, it was a 400-hour process. Nuclearn helped reduce that timeline to less than a day.
It’s a deeply resonant win for Vincent and his cofounder, Bradley Fox, who are all too familiar with the inefficiencies of the industry themselves. Prior to founding Nuclearn, both worked in data science at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona, where employees spent thousands of hours every year on “a lot of documentation, a lot of paperwork, a lot of manual work,” Vincent told me.
Natural language processing had some very obvious applications for the nuclear industry. “Everything in nuclear is text. Everything’s written down,” Vincent said. So when some of the seminal research on novel deep learning models started coming out in 2017 and 2018, Vincent and Fox took note, exploring ways they could apply this to their own work. “Those were trends we jumped on very, very early, not because they were particularly fashionable at the time or because there was a lot of hype around it, but because that was the type of techniques we needed to be able to solve these problems,” Vincent told me. “That’s why we got into the language model space half a decade before ChatGPT.”
For the majority of jobs, such as working on permitting or license renewals, Nuclearn uses a software layer on top of its language model to coordinate various AI agents working on tasks linked to different data sets, such as analyzing design functions, safety protocols, or systems degradation over time. The software then integrates these various outputs to generate reports or summary analyses. On the operational side, the company has its own benchmarks to evaluate how its AI tools are performing on nuclear-specific tasks.
There is, of course, a certain poetic irony to the fact that AI is being used to license and manage operations for the very reactors that are now in such high demand for their ability to consistently and cleanly power AI data centers. The better AI gets, the more we need nuclear; the more we need nuclear, the more useful AI-powered tools like Nuclearn become.
To date, the company has integrated its AI platform into the operations of more than 65 reactors both domestically and abroad, which Vincent told me represents a mix of standard commercial reactors and small modular reactors. As the market heats up, demand may well follow. With the Trump administration pushing to accelerate nuclear development, electricity demand rising, and tech giants prioritizing clean, firm power, it’s boom times for companies looking to build everything from conventional nuclear plants to small modular reactors, microreactors, and the long-elusive fusion reactor, each and every one of which will have to be licensed and permitted.
All this activity also means that the nuclear workforce is under strain, especially given that 25% set to retire in the coming decade. “We’ve had knowledge and workforce challenges for several years now, and now it’s getting exacerbated quite substantially from all the macro trends going on,” Vincent told me. Given this situation, he doesn’t anticipate that the adoption of AI tools will necessarily lead to layoffs. These days, he said, the industry is just wondering “how do we do the things we need to do to operate a nuclear power plant safely and efficiently with less people?”
With this new capital, the startup plans to scale its operations to encompass even more aspects of nuclear reactor management. One future use case Vincent anticipates is helping to automate the sourcing of unique, industry-specific parts. There are plants operating today, he told me, that rely on equipment from vendors that may be long out of business. Figuring out how and where to source equivalent components is the type of niche challenge he’s excited to take on.
“It just tends to be very manual, labor intensive, and very documentation heavy,” Vincent told me of the industry as a whole. Luckily, “those are all things that AI is very good at solving these days.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to note some poetic irony.
On Tesla’s losses, Google’s storage push, and trans-Atlantic atomic consensus
Current conditions: Hurricane Kiko is soaking Hawaii and slashing the archipelago with giant waves • Nearly a foot of rain is forecast to fall on parts of Texas, risking flash floods • Dry, windy weather across broad swaths of South Africa is bringing “extremely high” fire risk.
China's clean-energy investments are paying green dividends. Ember
China’s clean energy boom is bringing a global decline in fossil fuel demand into sight amid declines in usage in the buildings, vehicles, and industries of the world’s second-largest economy, according to the think tank Ember’s latest China Energy Transition Review. The report, released Tuesday morning, found that exports of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps are soaring, particularly to emerging economies, making the possibility of developing nations making possible an “energy leapfrog” over the coal phase of growth. From 2015 to 2023, China’s end consumption of fossil fuels fell 1.7% across buildings, industry and transport, while electricity use as a replacement rose by 65%. In power generation, fossil output dropped 2% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year, as wind and solar generation soared by 16% and 43%, respectively. Last year alone, Beijing invested $625 billion in clean energy, 31% of the global total.
“China is now the main engine of the global clean energy transition,” Muyi Yang, coordinating lead author of Ember’s 2025 analysis, said in a statement. “Policy and investment decisions made in China over the last two decades are fundamentally changing the basis of China’s own energy system, and enabling other countries to also move swiftly from fossil to clean.”
As Americans scramble to buy electric vehicles ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 consumer tax credit at the end of this month, fewer of those cars are Teslas. The preliminary August data Cox Automotive released on Monday showed the best month for EVs in U.S. history was the worst for Tesla ever recorded. EVs climbed to almost 10% of total car sales last month, but Tesla’s share fell to 38%, with 55,000 cars sold all month. That’s up just 3% compared to July and down 6% from the year prior, while the company’s total market share fell from just over 40% in July and 45% in the first half of the year. By contrast, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted, Tesla commanded about 80% of U.S. EV sales in 2020.
Also on Tuesday, the company unveiled two new energy storage products that could boost its utility division. At the RE+ conference in Las Vegas, Tesla presented the Megapack 3, the latest generation of its utility-scale battery system, and the Megablock, which integrates the Megapack 3 with transformers and switchgear. Batteries were Tesla’s fastest growing business in the first quarter of this year, as Matthew reported in April, but the company feared that tariffs would affect the business. “The energy segment — which includes the company’s battery energy storage businesses for residences (Powerwall) and for utility-scale generation (Megapack) — has recently been a bright spot for the company, even as its car sales have leveled off and declined.”
Google inked a deal with the Salt River Project, the utility serving much of Arizona’s largest metropolis, to test the performance of long-duration energy storage projects. The first-of-a-kind research collaboration aims to “better understand the real-world performance of emerging non-lithium ion long duration energy storage technologies” in the Phoenix area, the power company said in a press release. Google will fund a portion of the costs and evaluate data on the pilot projects’ operational success. “We believe that long duration energy storage will play an essential role in meeting SRP’s sustainability goals and ensuring grid reliability,” Chico Hunter, the nonprofit Salt River Project’s manager of innovation and development, said in a statement.
As I reported in this newsletter in July, Google also backed the Italian carbon dioxide-based storage startup Energy Dome as the tech giant pushes to expand its portfolio of technologies to power its data centers 24/7.
The European Union has been a solid backer of fusion energy research. But the anti-nuclear trifecta of Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg has long thwarted bloc-wide efforts to bolster fission, which provides the bulk of the continent’s electricity. With Berlin finally joining Paris in backing traditional nuclear power, that blockade is no longer holding. The European Commission has proposed spending $11.5 billion on bolstering research in both fusion and fission, the trade publication NucNet reported Monday.
Meanwhile in the United States, where nuclear power remains broadly supported across the political spectrum, the biggest question is how quickly new reactors can come online. The data center industry has now called on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to streamline licensing of new reactors to help meet its surging demand for electricity. In a letter to NRC Chair David Wright shared with E&E News, the Data Center Coalition, a trade group representing server farms, urged the agency to update its regulations to ensure quicker deployment of advanced reactors. “Increasingly, DCC members are forming strategic partnerships and committing to offtake agreements with utilities and nuclear technology developers, injecting new momentum into this strategic sector,” wrote Cy McNeill, the group’s director of federal affairs. “We are approaching the cusp of a truly revitalized nuclear sector.”
The push comes amid what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called a “nuclear power dealmaking boom.”
Patagonia’s billionaire founder helped popularize the greenest trend in apparel — buying less of higher quality, longer-lasting clothing. Now the retailer is pushing to bring that same ethos to the food business. The company’s edible offerings of tinned fish and crackers designed for hiking is now expanding into baby foods, oils, and sauces, The New York Times reported in a new profile of the retailer. Fifty years from now, founder Yvon Chouinard told the newsletter, “I could see the food business being bigger than the apparel business.”
U.S. EV sales have been way up — just not for the domestic champion, which sank to its worst-ever market share in August.
Americans are rushing to buy electric vehicles ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 consumer tax credit at the end of this month.
And fewer of those cars are Teslas.
Preliminary data from Cox Automotive for August, first shared with Reuters, shows that the month was the best for EVs in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month. At the same time, Tesla’s share of the EV market hit its lowest recorded level, down to a (still sizable) 38%.
Cox’s data puts Tesla sales at 55,000 for the month, which is up a little more than 3% from July but down over 6% from a year prior, while the company’s total market share fell from just over 40% in July and 45% in the first half of the year. In 2020, by contrast, Tesla’s share of U.S. EV sales was about 80%. Overall, Cox estimated that Tesla sales in the U.S. are down about 9% so far this year.
“The U.S. EV market is in a far more dynamic place than a few years ago,” Corey Cantor, the research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me in an email. “Most automakers now offer electric vehicle models in multiple segments. There are multiple electric vehicles available below the average price point of a new car at $48,000.”
Entering this new phase means that the EV market is getting less Tesla-centric, almost by definition. Morgan Stanley reported that electric vehicle sales were up 23% in August from a year ago, while overall car sales were up 7.5% — although even amidst this industry-wide growth, Tesla sales fell more than 3% year over year, while electric vehicle sales were up 42%.
Much of that EV market growth comes down to timing. “Early indications are that EV sales are in fact surging over the past two months, following the changes that will phase the credit out at the end of this month. We’ve seen record sales for EV models last month, such as the Honda Prologue,” Cantor said. This likely means some portion of these sales are being “pulled forward” from buyers trying to beat the deadline and these sales numbers will not persist through the rest of the year.
As Tesla’s stranglehold over the U.S. EV market may be weakening, so too is its hold on the international market. Thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s association with right wing politics in the U.S. and abroad, and to fierce competition from Chinese EV leader BYD, Tesla’s sales have fallen dramatically in Europe. Globally, BYD overtook Tesla in sales last year.
None of that seems to matter much to Tesla’s leadership, or to its shareholders. On Friday, the company’s board of directors put forward a new compensation plan for Musk that would boost his ownership of the company to around 25% and put him in line for a $1 trillion payday if he meets growth and performance targets over the next decade.
A Delaware court last year threw out an earlier Musk pay package, arguing that Musk was too close to the board of directors for them to objectively determine his pay in the interest of all the company’s shareholders. (He subsequently relocated Tesla’s official headquarters to Austin, Texas, explicitly to avoid Delaware jurisdiction.) Musk has said that he wants to own about 25% of the company, a significant upgrade from the roughly 15% he owns currently.
Tesla’s board said in a recent regulatory disclosure that Musk had “reiterated that, if he were to remain at Tesla, it was a critical consideration that he have at least a 25% voting interest in Tesla,” and that “Mr. Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”
The board’s disclosure also confirmed that Musk sees the future of Tesla as going far beyond selling cars to people. The filing said that “through its discussions with Mr. Musk,” the special committee in charge of coming up with his compensation had “identified four core product lines that would drive Tesla’s future transformation”: Tesla’s vehicle fleet, automation (i.e. Full Self-Driving) software, its robotaxi product, and humanoid robots. Tesla’s robotaxi service is available on a select basis in Austin, with no date yet indicated for a wider rollout, while its humanoid robots — which Musk has said will one day make up 80% of the company’s value — are due to reach “scale production” next year, Musk said on a recent earnings call.
Tesla stock actually rose on the news of the proposed compensation package, likely because Tesla shareholders viewed it as a way to retain Musk and keep his attention on the company.
Longtime Tesla bull Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said in note to investors that the compensation deal now means that Musk “has an incentive to focus on Tesla more than ever.” Jonas also, like many Tesla bulls, sees its business of selling cars to people as just a small portion of its overall value — in his case, $76 a share, compared to his $410 a share price target or the roughly $346 a share price the stock was trading at on Monday afternoon.
Still, the company today is largely a pretty normal car company, at least according to its income statement. In the second quarter of its current fiscal year, some $16.6 billion of Tesla’s $22.5 billion in revenue came from cars, with $2.8 billion coming from its energy business and $3 billion coming from “services and other revenues.”
Declining market share in its biggest product line isn’t completely meaningless, even if many Tesla shareholders see a glorious future for the company beyond the automobile trade.
Looking ahead, Cantor said to expect the EV market to get even more diverse.
“Moving forward, we will continue to see automakers innovate in the EV space. Timelines may change and models will vary by automaker, but high-profile launches expected over the next year include the Rivian R2, a new version of the Chevrolet Bolt EV, as well as more affordable models by Lucid and Kia,” Cantor said in his email.
“While the 30D [consumer electric vehicle tax] credit’s phase out will have a real impact on sales the next quarter or two here in the U.S.,” he added, “the long-term trend of excitement and innovation continues to be in the launch of new electric vehicles.”