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The company is well-positioned to take advantage of Trump’s nuclear policies, include his goal of installing a microreactor on a military base within the next few years.

At one point during his 12-year stint at SpaceX, Doug Bernauer turned his attention to powering a Martian colony with nuclear microreactors. Naturally, these would also fuel the rocket ships that could shuttle Mars-dwellers to and from Earth as needed. Then he had an epiphany. “I quickly realized that yes, nuclear power could help humanity become multiplanetary in the long term, but it could also transform life on Earth right now,” Bernauer wrote in 2023.
As nuclear power reemerges as a prominent player in the U.S. energy conversation, its potential to help drive a decarbonized future has crystallized into a rare bipartisan point of consensus. Radiant Nuclear, the Earth-based microreactor company that Bernauer founded after leaving SpaceX in 2019, is well positioned to take advantage of that, as its value proposition might as well be tailor-made for the Trump administration’s priorities
The startup’s aim is to make highly portable 1-megawatt reactors that can replace off-grid power sources such as diesel generators, which are ubiquitous in remote areas such as military bases. It’s fresh off a $165 million Series C funding round, with plans to begin commercial deployment in 2028. That aligns neatly with Trump’s recently announced goal of deploying a reactor on a military base by the same year. It’s an opportunity that Radiant Chief Operating Officer Tori Shivanandan told me the company is uniquely well-suited to take advantage of.
“A diesel generator that operates at 1 megawatt you have to refill with diesel about every three to five days,” Shivanandan explained. That means having regular access to both fuel and the generator itself, “and that’s just not reliable in many locations.” The company says its reactors only need refueling only every five years.
Radiant’s goal is to be cost competitive with generators in far flung locales — not just military bases, but also distant mines, rural towns, oil and gas drilling operations, and smaller, more dispersed data centers. “A customer who’s on the North Slope of Alaska, they might pay $11 or $12 a gallon for diesel,” Shivanandan told me. That’s a price she said Radiant could definitely compete with.
“The military’s interest in microreactors has been coming for quite a long time,” Rachel Slaybaugh, a climate tech investor at the venture firm DCVC told me. The firm led Radiant’s Series C round. Some of Radiant’s appeal is “right place, right time,” she said. “Some of it is putting in a lot of work over a long time to make it the right place, right time.”
Trump’s recent nuclear-related executive orders also have Shivanandan and her team over the moon. As the administration looks to streamline nuclear licensing and buildouts, one order explicitly calls for establishing a process for the “high-volume licensing of microreactors and modular reactors,” which includes “standardized applications and approvals.” These orders, Shivanandan told me, will keep Radiant on track to start selling by 2028, and set the stage for the company’s rapid scale up.
Alongside DCVC, the company's latest round included funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s “American Dynamism” team, Union Square Ventures, and Founders Fund. This raise, Shivanandan told me, will cover Radiant’s expenses as it builds out its prototype reactor, which it plans to test at Idaho National Lab next year. It will be the first fueled operation of a brand new reactor design in 50 years, she said.
“My perspective is the bigger reactors are important and interesting, and there are a lot of great companies, but they’re not a very good fit for venture investing, Slaybaugh told me. “We like microreactors, because they just need so much less capital and so much less time.”
That potential buildout speed also means that even as the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits look poised for a major haircut, Radiant may still be able to benefit from them. In the latest version of the budget bill, nuclear projects are only eligible for credits if they begin construction by 2029 — a tall order for the many startups that likely won’t start building in earnest until the 2030s. But if all goes according to plan, that’s a timeline Radiant could work with — at least for its initial reactors, which would be the most expensive and thus most in need of credits anyway.
The company aims to reach economies of scale relatively quickly, with a goal of building 50 reactors per year at a yet-to-be-constructed factory by the mid 2030s. The modular design means Radiant can deploy multiple 1-megawatt reactors to facilities with greater power needs. But if a customer wants more than 10 or so megawatts, Radiant recommends they look to microreactors’ larger cousins, the so-called small modular reactors. Companies developing these include Last Energy, which makes 20-megawatt reactors, as well as NuScale, Kairos, and X-energy, which aim to build plants ranging from 150 megawatts to 960 megawatts in size.
While it could take one of these SMR companies years to fully install its reactors, Radiant’s shipping container-sized products are not designed to be permanent pieces of infrastructure. After being trucked onsite, the company says its reactors can be switched on the following day. Then, after about 20 years of continuous operation, they’ll be carried away and the site easily returned to greenfield, since there was no foundation dug or concrete poured to begin with.
This April, the Department of Defense selected Radiant as one of eight eligible companies for the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations Program. The winner(s) will design and build microreactors on select military installations to “provide mission readiness through energy resilience” and produce “enough electrical power to meet 100 percent of all critical loads,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit’s website.
Also on this list was the nuclear company Oklo, which counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman among its primary backers and went public last year. This Wednesday, the Air Force announced its intent to enter into a power purchase agreement with the company to build a pilot reactor on a base in Alaska. The reactor will reportedly produce up to 5 megawatts of power, though Oklo’s full-scale reactors are set to be 75 megawatts. Whether the military will opt to contract with other nuclear companies is still an open question.
Perhaps more meaningful, though, is the show of support Radiant recently gained from the Department of Energy, which selected it as one of five companies to receive a conditional commitment for a type of highly enriched uranium known as HALEU that’s critical for small, next-generation reactors. Much of this fuel came from Russia before Biden banned Russian uranium imports last year, in a belated response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine and an attempt to shore up the domestic nuclear supply chain.
America’s supply of HALEU is still scarce, though, and as such, Shivanandan considers the DOE’s fuel commitment to be the biggest vote of confidence Radiant has received from the government so far. The other companies selected to receive fuel are TRISO-X (a subsidiary of X-energy), Kairos Power, TerraPower, and Westinghouse, all of which have been around longer — the majority a decade or more longer — than Radiant.
Though the company is currently focused on Earth, Radiant hasn’t completely abandoned its interplanetary dreams. “We do believe that, should you want to colonize Mars and also create the environment in which you could refuel your rocket and send it back, then you would need 1-megawatt nuclear reactors,” Shivanandan told me. Anything larger might be too heavy to put in a rocket.
Good to know.
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Deep Sky is running a carbon removal bake-off on the plains of Alberta.
Four years ago, Congress hatched an ambitious, bipartisan plan for the United States to become the epicenter of a new climate change-fighting industry. Like an idea ripped from science fiction, the government committed $3.5 billion to develop hulking steel complexes equipped with industrial fans that would filter planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air.
That vision — to build regional hubs for “direct air capture” — is now languishing under the Trump administration. But a similar, albeit privately-funded initiative in Canada has raced ahead. In the span of about 12 months, a startup called Deep Sky transformed a vacant five-acre lot in Central Alberta into an operational testing ground for five different prototypes of the technology, with more on the way.
I had been following the project since early last year, after receiving roughly a dozen press releases from Deep Sky about all of the companies it was setting up partnerships with. But it was hard to believe the scope of the ambition until I saw it with my own eyes.
CarbonCapture Inc., one of the companies piloting its technology at Deep Sky, had originally planned to deploy in the U.S., but has since packed up and headed north. The Los Angeles-based startup recently shipped all the equipment for its first demonstration project from Arizona to the Deep Sky site on four flatbed trucks. On a crisp October day, under a bluebird sky, the company’s CEO Adrian Corless stood in front of the newly installed towering mass of metal fans and explained the move.
“Because of what’s been going on in the U.S. and the backing away from support of climate technology and carbon removal, we made a decision back in February that we were going to redirect our focus and effort to Canada,” he told an audience of Canadian officials who had come to see the tech up close.
“Eight weeks ago, this was just dirt,” Corless said. “Today, we’re actually going to bring the first of our modules to life.” Then he invited Danielle Smith, Alberta’s conservative Premier, to do the honors. She pointed her fingers like a pistol and yelled, “Hit it!”
Behind her, the fans started to whir.
Deep Sky is not like other companies working in direct air capture, or DAC. Whereas most startups are developing their own patented designs and then raising money to go out and build demonstrations, Deep Sky is solely a project developer. It buys DAC systems, operates them, and sells credits based on the amount of carbon it’s able to remove from the air and sequester underground. Other companies buy these credits to offset their own emissions.
In the spring of 2024, Damien Steel, Deep Sky’s then-CEO, explained the theory of the case to me. It takes a different set of skills to engineer the tech than to deploy it in the real world, he said, which requires procuring energy to run the system and developing storage sites for the captured CO2. “There’s a reason why renewable developers don’t build their own windmills and solar panels,” he told me.
DAC technology is nowhere near as advanced as solar panels or wind turbines. Removing carbon dioxide from the air, where it makes up just 0.04% of the total volume, is currently far too energy-intensive to be commercially viable. There are more than 100 companies around the world trying to crack it.
Deep Sky’s first ambition was to buy a bunch of prototypes, test them next to each other, and figure out which were the most promising. Steel told me he was in the process of acquiring 10 unique DAC systems to install at a “commercialization and innovation center” known as Deep Sky Labs.
 
By the end of that summer, the company had signed a lease for the site in Alberta. Less than a year later, this past June, it had completed initial construction and was ready to begin hooking up DAC systems. In August, it announced that it had successfully injected its first captured carbon into an underground storage well. I had never seen one DAC project in the real world, let alone five. The company suggested I come for a tour during CarbonCapture’s launch event in late October.
By then Steel, who joined Deep Sky after more than a decade in venture capital, had stepped down from the CEO role “for personal reasons,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post, though he stayed on as an advisor. My guide would be his successor, former Chief Operating Officer Alex Petre.
Deep Sky Labs, now called Deep Sky Alpha, is in Innisfail, a town of about 8,000 people surrounded by farmland and prairie. To get there, I flew to Calgary and drove 75 miles north on Highway 2, the primary throughway that connects to Edmonton. Innisfail is dense and suburban-looking, with an industrial corridor on the western edge of town. Deep Sky was on its outermost edge, on the site of a former sewage lagoon the town had recently reclaimed, and sat catty corner to a welding and manufacturing company, which, as I was later told — multiple times — was developing hydrogen-powered locomotives.
A bright white cylindrical building about the size of an airplane hangar, emblazoned with “Deep Sky” in big black letters, was visible from half a mile away. As I pulled up to the site, workers in neon vests and hard hats were scurrying among outcroppings of pipes and metal structures. Unsure of where to enter, I parked on the road and wandered up to some trailers outside the perimeter. Petre poked her head out of one and beckoned me inside an office, where she fitted me with my own vest and hard hat so I could get a closer look.
“This is the only place in the world where we are putting together different direct air capture technologies side by side,” she told me, as we passed through a gate and began walking the grounds. Other than the sound of trucks and excavators driving around, it was fairly quiet. None of the DAC units were operating that day — one was down for maintenance, one for the winter, and the rest were still under construction.
The first stop on the tour was a modest black shipping container labeled SkyRenu, a DAC company based in Quebec. It was the smallest system there, designed to capture just 50 tons of carbon per year — roughly the annual emissions from a dozen cars. Directly across from it, workers appeared to be fitting some pipe on a much larger and more complicated structure resembling Paris’ Pompidou Center. This was United Kingdom-based AirHive’s system, which would have the capacity to capture about 1,000 tons per year once completed.
 
DAC systems are feats of chemistry and mechanical engineering. At their core is a special material called a sorbent, a liquid or solid designed to attract carbon dioxide molecules like a magnet. The process is generally as follows:. First, the sorbent is exposed to the air, often with the help of fans. Once saturated with carbon, the sorbent is heated or zapped with electricity to pry loose the CO2. The resulting pure CO2 gas then gets piped to a processing facility, where it’s prepared for its ultimate destination, whether that’s a product like cement or fuel or, in the case of Deep Sky, a deep underground rock formation where it will be stored permanently.
Deep Sky’s aim was to trial as many iterations of the tech as it could at Alpha, Petre told me. That’s because what works best in Alberta’s climate won’t necessarily be optimal in Quebec or British Columbia, let alone hotter, more humid zones. “When the feedstock, which is ambient air, ends up being so different, we need multiple different technologies to work,” she said.
Case in point: A DAC system designed by Mission Zero, another U.K company, was offline the day I visited — and would remain so until next spring. It utilized a liquid sorbent and had to be drained so that the sorbent wouldn’t freeze when temperatures dropped below freezing overnight. The challenge wasn’t entirely unique to Mission Zero, however. “Everyone is struggling with winter,” Petre told me.
 
Alpha is piloting systems with liquid sorbents and solid sorbents, variations on the chemistry within each of those, and systems that use different processes to release the carbon after the fact. The development cost ran to “over $50 million” Canadian, Petre told me. The company raised about that amount in a Series A back in 2023. It also won a $40 million grant from Bill Gates’ venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy in December 2024, and this past June, the Province of Alberta awarded Deep Sky an additional $5 million from an emissions-reduction fund paid for by fees on the fossil fuel industry.
The company fully owns and operates almost all of the DAC units onsite, although it’s still working with the vendors to troubleshoot issues and sharing data with them to improve performance.
When it comes to Carbon Capture Inc., however, the arrangement is a bit different. Deep Sky has agreed to host the company’s tech, giving it access to power, water, and underground CO2 storage, but CarbonCapture will retain ownership and help with operations, and the two companies will share the proceeds from any revenue the unit generates.
Petre said the structure was mutually beneficial — Deep Sky gets to demonstrate its strengths as a full-service site developer, while CarbonCapture gets access to a plug-and-play spot to pilot its system in the real world. The U.S. company is also looking to expand in Canada. “There’s lots of potential collaboration down the line,” Petre said.
Before Trump arrived at the White House, CarbonCapture had been making aggressive plans to grow in the states. In the fall of 2022, before the company had even demonstrated its tech outside of a lab, it announced that it would build a project capable of removing 5 million tons of carbon per year in Wyoming by 2030. It later leased an 83,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Arizona to produce the equipment for the project.
At the time, the Biden administration was integrating carbon removal — of which DAC is just one variety — into its “whole-of-governement” climate strategy. The Department of Energy rebranded its Office of Fossil Energy to reflect a new focus on “carbon management,” a broad term that encompasses carbon captured at fossil fuel plants as well as from the atmosphere. In addition to overseeing the development of the DAC Hubs, the agency was running more than a dozen other grant programs and research initiatives mandated by Congress that were intended to help the nascent industry get established in the U.S. Biden’s 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, also increased the tax credit available to DAC projects from $50 for every ton of carbon stored underground to $180.
As helpful as all of that may have been for the nascent industry, Canada was arguably going further. In 2022, the country finalized its own tax credit — an investment tax credit — that would cover 60% of the capital cost of building a direct air capture plant. The approach, while inspired by the U.S. subsidy, is geared more at de-risking project development than rewarding project success. The following year, the province of Alberta said it would offer an additional 12% investment tax credit on top of that.
Alberta was also becoming a leader in developing carbon storage infrastructure. Despite — or, more likely, because of — its oil-based economy, the province views carbon capture and storage as a “necessary pathway” that “will help Alberta transition to a low-carbon future.” Canada is the fourth largest producer of crude oil in the world, and the bulk of it comes from Alberta’s environmentally destructive tar sands.
 
The government of Alberta owns most of the subsurface rights there, unlike in the U.S., where such rights are bestowed to landowners. That meant the province could simply offer companies leases to develop carbon injection wells. After two requests for proposals, the province selected 24 projects to “begin exploring how to safely develop carbon storage hubs.” A few of them, including Deep Sky’s storage partner — the Meadowbrook Hub Project north of Edmonton — are now operating.
Corless, of CarbonCapture, told me he spent a lot of time in Washington talking to the new staff at the DOE after Trump’s inauguration. It became increasingly clear to him that the DAC Hubs funding — and the general support for the sector enjoyed under the previous administration — would be going away.
By that point, the company had already planned to move its Wyoming venture to Louisiana after struggling to secure a grid connection at its original site. CarbonCapture had been awarded a DAC Hubs grant to conduct an engineering study for the project, but it received a notice from the DOE that the grant was canceled earlier this month. The company is still considering its options for how or whether to move forward.
On the same day the news leaked, CarbonCapture announced that it was shifting its plans to build a separate, 2,000 ton-per-year pilot plant from Arizona to Canada. Corless told me the company had originally planned to partner with a cement company to store the captured carbon in building materials, but Alberta offered more attractive commercial prospects. The company could more quickly access geologic carbon storage there, enabling it to sell carbon credits, which command a higher price than experiments in carbon-cured cement.
The timing of the announcement was pure coincidence. The poor prospects for an American DAC industry under Trump weren’t not a factor in the move, however. CarbonCapture wanted its pilot project to be a “springboard” for its first commercial plant, and Canada was attractive “given the favorable economic incentives, favorable regulatory environment, and the general positive interest in deploying DAC,” the company’s marketing director, Ethan Stackpole, told me in an email. “This is in contrast to the current atmosphere in the U.S.”
CarbonCapture signed a contract with DeepSky to host the pilot, dubbed Project Tamarack, in May, and set up a Canadian business entity called True North to build it. When I visited the site, the company was in the final stages of “commissioning” the unit, i.e. getting it ready to operate. The equipment had been manufactured at the company’s factory in Arizona, but it may end up being the only system produced there. The facility is now sitting idle.
Petre and I followed the tidy rows of wires and pipes that wound through Deep Sky Alpha, carrying electricity, water, and compressed air to each DAC system. A set of return pipes delivers the captured CO2 to Deep Sky’s central processing facility — the big white cylindrical building — where the company measures the output from each system before combining it all into a single stream. Inside, she showed me how the gas moved between large, tubular instruments that measure, dry, compress, and cool it into a liquid.
“Everything outside is first of a kind,” she said. “All of this equipment in here is fairly standard energy oil and gas equipment, it’s just arranged in a very different way.”
Sensors monitoring the wires and pipes enable Deep Sky to measure how much energy and water goes into producing a ton of CO2. Finally, trucks carry away the liquid CO2 to the Meadowbrook storage hub about two hours north, where an underground carbon sequestration well operated by a separate company called Bison Low Carbon Ventures provides it a permanent home.
While trucking the CO2 wasn’t ideal, the amount Deep Sky would capture at Alpha was so small that it made more sense to partner with Bison, which already had a permitted well, than to try to build one itself, Petre explained. When Deep Sky scales up at its next facility, which it expects to build in Manitoba, the company aspires to drill its own carbon sequestration wells on site.
Despite Alberta’s advantages for DAC, the location is not without drawbacks. The province had imposed a seven-month moratorium on renewable energy approvals from 2023 to 2024, which led to project cancellations and put development on ice. When the ban lifted, new regulations restricting wind and solar on agricultural land and near designated “pristine viewscapes” continued to make it difficult to build. Petre told me Deep Sky was one of only two companies in Alberta to secure a power purchase agreement with a solar farm last year.
“If I said, ‘I need 150 megawatts for my next facility right now,’ it would be a fairly difficult process,” she said. “There isn’t that much capacity online, and I would have to compete with data centers and a whole bunch of other folks who are also looking to come here and develop.” The company has started looking into building its own renewable energy supply on site, she said.
That anti-renewable sentiment stems from the region’s strong oil and gas identity. After my tour with Petre, I sat through a short program celebrating Project Tamarack’s launch, where Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith conveyed her excitement by asserting that the province was “working to phase out emissions, not oil and gas production.” Alberta would double its energy production in the coming years, she said, while still reaching a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.
Of all the extraordinary things I had seen and heard that day, this was the most brazen. The promise of direct air capture — the entire reason to expend time and energy and funds on plucking CO2 molecules out of the air — is that it’s one of the few ways to clean up the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. Using it to offset continued oil and gas production might slow climate change, but there are a lot of other cheaper, more efficient, and more effective ways to reduce emissions — like switching to carbon-free power and electric cars.
I asked Corless about Smith’s comments later that day over coffee. Was it realistic to double oil production and go carbon neutral? He was coy. It would be very hard, he said. But it also depends on whether you’re talking about neutralizing the emissions from producing the oil versus from burning it. Corless seemed to view the argument as a political necessity, if a dubious one, to win government support for scaling DAC.
“I was hopeful that when the new administration came in, we could create an economic argument and tie what we’re doing to energy dominance and energy security,” he said, of the Trump administration. “It was just, I think, a bridge too far. Whereas here, that narrative is landing.”
Petre was more equivocal, responding that Deep Sky acknowledges that “we are not going to move away from oil and gas tomorrow,” and takes this as motivation to “get direct air capture to as low cost as possible and as easy to deploy as possible.”
In addition to the five DAC units currently installed at Alpha — SkyRenu, Airhive, CarbonCapture, Mission Zero, and a system from a German company called Phlair — Deep Sky has announced plans to bring two more units to the site from Skytree and GE Vernova. A few other deals are in the works but not yet public, Petre told me.
Even once Deep Sky Alpha has enough capacity installed to be printing carbon credits by the day, it won’t have proven that DAC is viable at scale. It’s not meant to. Many aspects of the facility are intentionally inefficient because of its nature as a testing ground.
“We had to do a lot of overspec-ing and oversizing of things,” Petre said. All the excess makes her optimistic about Deep Sky’s next project, however, where it will scale up a smaller number of systems to a much larger capacity. “If we can do something this complex, there’s a lot of room to simplify,” she said.
Hurricane Melissa made landfall over Cuba with winds raging up to 120 miles per hour | If the Category 5 storm veers westward as it heads north, Melissa will bring roiling seas to Atlantic Canada; if it veers eastward, it will bring rain to the United Kingdom | Heavy snowfall in Tibet forced Chinese authorities to shut down access to Mount Everest.
 
China’s commerce ministry promised to suspend its latest export restrictions on rare earths for at least a year as part of a trade truce President Donald Trump brokered with President Xi Jinping. Under rules Beijing issued on October 8, Chinese companies were required to obtain the ministry’s permission before exporting equipment to process ore and technology for mining and refining rare earths, magnets made from the metals, and components for electric vehicle battery manufacturing. That doesn’t mean Beijing is dialing back all its restrictions on rare earths, over which China controls roughly 90% of the world’s refining capacity. “Importantly, China’s commerce ministry today made no mention of suspending its April 4 regulations, which require export licenses for seven kinds of rare earths and magnets made from them,” The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief, Keith Bradsher, wrote Thursday morning. “The April rules continue to disrupt production at the many factories in the United States and Europe that need Chinese materials.”
That’s bad news for Western rare earth companies whose stocks have been on a tear since China announced the latest export controls. But it’s good news for clean-energy companies who need access to the minerals — and not their only cause for optimism this morning. The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, bringing the cost of borrowing down to its lowest level in three years. The move came amid a flurry of economic uncertainty from the United States’ ongoing trade conflicts, accusations from the Trump administration’s over jobs and inflation reports, and the ongoing government shutdown. For the first time since 2019, two Fed officials dissented over the rate cut decision — one who wanted a larger, half-point cut, and the other who called for holding steady at the current level. The political upheaval aside, any cut is good news for renewable energy developers. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote after last month’s quarter-point cut, the move may “provide some relief to renewables developers and investors, who are especially sensitive to financing costs.” But it still “may not be enough” to erase the challenges from higher tariffs.
On Wednesday, General Motors pinkslipped more than 3,400 workers who build electric vehicles and batteries as the company “rapidly adjusts to new policy under President Donald Trump and sluggish interest among U.S. buyers,” The Detroit News reported. The automaker’s Detroit-area all-electric assembly plant, called Factory Zero, will be the hardest hit, with 1,200 cuts.
GM had emerged this year as the best-selling electric vehicle maker in the country, with record sales in the most recent quarter. By eliminating the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles last month as part of his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, however, Trump cost GM “1.6 billion,” as Andrew Moseman wrote last week in Heatmap.
Just over a week ago, as I wrote here, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse warned that his vote on the bipartisan permitting reform ideas he helped put forward depended on the Trump administration easing up on what we’ve frequently called in this newsletter the “total war on wind.” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum balked at the idea. And yet, talks seem to be progressing. On Wednesday, E&E News reported that Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee and a longstanding climate hawk, said talks were "pretty constant right now” and that the Senate planned to release a framework by the end of the year. He added that “there’s good faith on all four corners, referring to Environment and Public Works Chair Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and ranking member Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat. “I don’t think we necessarily have to be down to legislative language, but it has to be clear enough to where we’re going so our colleagues have a chance to look at it and kick the tires and see what their concerns are.”
Kentucky is reeling from the looming halt to federal food stamps. Now the Trump administration wants to let the nation’s biggest grid operator charge Kentuckians to keep aging fossil fuel stations open in other states? No way, say one of the state’s biggest utilities and its attorney general. As Utility Dive reported, East Kentucky Power Cooperative, which serves nearly a quarter of the state’s ratepayers, and Attorney General Russell Coleman are challenging the PJM Interconnection’s plan to make utilities across its system pay for the Department of Energy’s emergency orders to keep coal-, oil-, and gas-fired power plants set to close this year open past their expiry dates. Much like the coal plant the agency ordered to stay open in Michigan, the Energy Department recently directed utilities in the PJM service area to keep two gas- and oil-fired units online near Philadelphia and a 400-megawatt oil-fired plant going near Baltimore. In August, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected East Kentucky Power Cooperative’s arguments against having to pay for PJM’s overall costs. But now the utility and the attorney general, a Republican, are fighting back against the latest filings.
Elsewhere in the PJM territory, chip giant Nvidia is investing in a data center built to smooth out power use as demand for artificial intelligence surges. The project, announced in Axios, is “the first commercial rollout of software that adjusts energy draw in real time.” Nvidia is set to deploy grid-regulating software by the startup Emerald AI at a server farm under construction in Virginia. Once completed, the facility will be “the first built to a new industry-wide certification on flexible power.”
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power board voted unanimously to approve a contentious plan for an $800 million conversion of two units at the Scattergood Generating Station. The 3 to 0 decision to sign off on the plant’s environmental impact report clears the way for the city’s largest gas-fired plant to burn both natural gas and hydrogen. While the regulators said the plan was in line with the city’s goal of running on 100% renewables by 2035, since green hydrogen is made with clean electricity, opponents told the Los Angeles Times that the project would prolong the use of fossil fuels in the city and contribute to local pollution from nitrogen oxides.
If successful, the conversion will be one of the country’s biggest experiments in swapping gas for hydrogen. On Long Island in New York, utility giant National Grid announced a plan in August to install the world’s first linear generator that will run entirely on green hydrogen. Yet the efforts come as the Trump administration has eliminated federal funding for two of the seven regional hydrogen hubs set up under the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that were specifically designed to commercialize green hydrogen. And now, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, a list of rumored cuts that could come once the government shutdown ends puts the other five hubs on the chopping block.
Artificial intelligence is starting to decode the language of whales. Now biologist David Gruber of the Cetacean Translation Initiative, who has spent decades trying to understand marine life, said that the work his research outfit is doing to detect patterns in whale songs could “dramatically strengthen legal protections for nonhuman life,” Inside Climate News reported. Already, Gruber’s work has uncovered a sperm whale “alphabet,” finding that click patterns shift with conversational context, and discovered that whales even have dialects with pods from different parts of the ocean “vocalizing as differently as a New Yorker and a Texan.”
The former FERC chair explains why Chris Wright is likely to succeed where Rick Perry failed.
Neil Chatterjee thinks it’s going to go better this time.
Eight years ago, Chatterjee was the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Trump was the president. When Trump’s then-Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, asked the commission to ensure that generators able to store fuel on site — which in the U.S. largely means coal and nuclear — get extra payments for doing so, thus keeping struggling power plants in business, it rejected the proposal by a unanimous vote.
“There’s no doubt my 2017 experience — that was politically driven,” Chatterjee told me, though he did concede that Perry was “right to be concerned about retiring generation at the time.” The Perry plan had been heavily influenced by the coal industry, he told me, and the regulatory structure of “compensating plants for having the attribute of on-site fuel … it was just a bit of a stretch.”
Now there’s a new Trump administration, with a new Secretary of Energy and a new FERC — and on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright asked the commission to do something else. He put forward what’s known as an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, directing FERC to come up with ways to help to make sure the grid can deal with another large-scale transition.
“They’re just apples and oranges,” Chatterjee said of the two requests. “This is a much more elegant, much more thoughtful exercise.”
Wright’s letter lays out the challenge of integrating large loads — i.e. data centers — onto the grid, arguing that they “must be able to connect to the transmission system in a timely, orderly, and non-discriminatory manner.” Doing so, he said, will “require unprecedented and extraordinary quantities of electricity and substantial investment in the Nation’s interstate transmission system.”
The overall thrust of the proposal is to make things easier and faster, including suggesting that interconnection studies for large loads that have their own generation or are flexible could be finished in just 60 days — which, if successful, could take a process that can last for years and get it done in less than a season.
The notice suggests a number of reforms for FERC to consider, including faster interconnection for “large loads that agree to be curtailable and hybrid facilities that agree to be curtailable and dispatchable” — touching on what has been the hottest subject in energy policy this year.
Tyler Norris, a Duke University researcher who has been one of the leading promoters of load flexibility, called Wright’s notice a “BFD” — that is, big effing deal — in a brief email to Heatmap.
Norris elaborated further on X. The proposal “appears to have done the near-impossible — generate overwhelming bipartisan enthusiasm — in what may be the most positive cross-sector response we’ve seen yet to DOE action under Secretary Wright,” he wrote.
Wright’s proposal suggests that both new data centers and new sources of power should be studied together for interconnection. While this sounds like it would be adding complexity, it may actually be simplifying the process. “Such an approach will allow for efficient siting of loads and generating facilities and thereby minimize the need for costly network upgrades,” the proposal says, reflecting the twinned desire to get more data centers on line faster while shielding electricity consumers from higher costs.
Another of Wright’s suggestions, however, might face more opposition. He argues that “load and hybrid facilities should be responsible for 100% of the network upgrades that they are assigned through the interconnection studies.”
This is designed to address the possibility — already being realized in parts of the country — that the network infrastructure required to bring data centers online could lead to higher costs for all electricity customers served by a given utility as it spreads out those costs to its rate base. The risk, however, is that utilities won’t like it. That’s because in most of the country, utilities earn a regulated rate of return on their investment in grid upgrades (by way of customer bill payments, of course), creating an incentive for them to continue to spend.
Those dynamics may be changing. Utilities once enjoyed primacy in Washington on electricity policy, especially among Republicans, but have seen their status slip of late in favor of a new force: big tech companies with big data centers.
“The hyperscalers have the influence to counteract the utilities here,” Chatterjee told me. “And that’s a new dynamic, historically — when it came to FERC, when it came to DOE, when it came to, quite frankly, Congress. People are sensitive to their utilities.”
Wright’s proposal, Chatterjee said, is trying to balance several different considerations the White House faces.
“This is the most vexing issue before the commission right now. And the reality is, it’s not clean politically within FERC, within DOE, even within the White House. There are differences of opinion on how best to thread this needle,” he told me, pointing to divides between those who want to drive AI development as fast as possible and those who are concerned about electricity prices.
By contrast, the Perry proposal to FERC was widely recognized as being primarily about supporting the coal (and to some extent nuclear) industry.
“I really think what DOE has put forward here is kind of an elegant solution that touches on everything,” Chatterjee said. “It’s not preferring particular sources of generation. It’s for flexibility — flexibility is having its moment.”
The proposal has already won some plaudits from the technology industry. In a letter to the White House, OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Christopher Lehane wrote that the company “welcomed the news last week that DOE recommended to FERC that it assert jurisdiction and create standardized rules for large load interconnections.” He also noted that OpenAI’s data centers “are designed to be curtailable — reducing their draw or even returning power during peak demand, helping to protect reliability and avoid higher costs for consumers.”
The DOE gave FERC an April 2026 deadline for final action on the proposed rulemaking, and FERC said Monday night that comments would be due by November 14.
Chatterjee said he expects FERC to eventually issue rules based on the proposal on a unanimous and bipartisan basis.
“I think the initial thought was, Oh, here goes the Trump administration again, leaning on FERC. This is actually a thoughtful exercise that I think most people in the energy space recognize is necessary to be done.”