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Not even the companies that — on the surface, at least — seem most likely to benefit from them.
Amidst the chaos of President Donald Trump’s tariff regime so far, there has been one constant — the 25% levies on steel and aluminum imports applied in February, with no country-specific exemptions. I’ve been a bit befuddled as to what these tariffs may, or may not, mean for the companies trying to green these notoriously hard-to-decarbonize sectors. And it turns out, some of them are a bit befuddled, too.
“It’s a mixed bag,” Cody Finke, CEO of the Bay Area-based clean cement and alumina startup Brimstone told me. Brimstone’s core breakthrough is figuring out a way to co-produce cement and alumina — the core material in the critical mineral aluminum — using carbon-free calcium silicates such as basalt rather than limestone, which releases a lot of CO2 when it’s processed.
At least on the surface, a company like Brimstone should fall squarely among the beneficiaries of Trump’s trade policy — the whole point of the tariffs, after all, is to increase demand for domestic steel and aluminum by making foreign metals more expensive. That will likely allow U.S.-based producers to raise prices, too, generating even more revenue.
Then again, green steel and aluminum producers rely on imports of these same materials to build their own plants. Tariffs on these vital construction materials — plus exorbitant levies on all goods from China — will make building new production facilities significantly costlier. (As Keith Norman, CEO of the domestic battery manufacturer Lyten told me last month, “The reality is, the energy transition is a manufacturing transition.”) Not to mention the fact that the auto industry — a heavy user of both steel and aluminum — is facing its own 25% tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts. That stands to raise the price and thus lower the demand for cars, in turn reducing demand for the materials needed to build them, green or not.
Large industry players such as Nucor and Cleveland Cliffs — both of which have plans to produce green steel — have seen mixed responses since the tariffs were announced. “Nucor recently said on an earnings call that they have huge backlogs, suggesting increased demand. [Cleveland] Cliffs, on the other hand, is idling plants due to low demand,” Hilary Lewis, the steel director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit advocating for heavy industry decarbonization, told me via email. But it’s difficult to know how much a company’s recent performance is attributable to the tariffs. “The impact of the steel tariffs are uneven and subject to other disruptions in the market,” Lewis said.
Industrious Labs aluminum lead Annie Sartor told me that Trump’s first term tariffs on aluminum failed to revitalize the industry, which she said “saw a continued downturn.” So while the latest tariffs are more robust, Sartor is hesitant to to think that “this will be a real game changer.” As she explained, “The biggest challenge that the industry faces is access to electricity, and specifically renewable electricity.” While the tariffs won’t directly address that, Sartor said that an optimistic analysis would suggest that with their extra revenue, companies that rely on electrification to clean up their operations “could use those additional funds to help them access the renewable energy that they want.”
At least for now, many of the leading companies have expressed strong support for Trump’s trade agenda. Century Aluminum’s CEO Jesse Gary said the tariffs “will help drive the resurgence of domestic aluminum production,” while Cleveland Cliff’s CEO Lourenco Goncalves stated they would “penalize the foreign competitors who have been playing by a different set of rules.” And while Leon Topalian, CEO of Nucor, acknowledged that the tariffs will increase the price of the raw materials for steel, such as iron ore, he told investors that he thinks this will be outweighed by “the overall macroeconomic trends in the industry, a healthy, vibrant steel industry.”
Aluminum giant Alcoa, which has also expressed interest in producing green aluminum, is an outlier among industry leaders in its opposition to tariffs. The company’s CEO, Bill Oplinger, told the crowd at a metals and mining conference in February that the disruption caused by the tariffs could eliminate 100,000 jobs in the domestic aluminum industry. The company operates two smelters in Canada that will be subject to tariffs, while it’s closed down many older smelters in the U.S. that it’s in no rush to reopen. “It’s hard to make a restart decision based on tariffs that could change,” Oplinger said during an analyst call, the Wall Street Journal reported. “We just don’t know whether they will stick.”
Startups focused narrowly on green metals production, however, have generally been more circumspect in their responses. “At this point, we’re trying to just stay steady through all of it — not reacting to the day-to-day,” Adam Rauwerdink, senior vice president at the green steel startup Boston Metal, told me. His company uses renewable power to electrolyze iron ore at high temperatures to create molten iron, the feedstock for steel.
Boston Metal has yet to build its first demonstration plant, and while Rauwerdink told me the tariffs could provide some incentive to site the facility in the states, the increase in domestic materials demand that tariffs will presumably bring is by no means enough to guarantee a U.S.-based facility will be worth it. “Here in the U.S. right now, the challenge is just the grid not being sufficient,” he said.
With electricity demand on the rise, green metals companies are now competing for renewable resources with tech giants that are trying to scoop up as much clean energy as possible to power their artificial intelligence-focused data centers. “Innovations like that, which change the landscape on the grid, can definitely impact some of these other solutions that are going to be competing for electrons and are probably less profitable than an AI data center,” Rauwerdink told me.
Electra, a startup that’s also using electrolysis to decarbonize the ironmaking process, recently landed a $186 million Series B funding round to build its demonstration plant in Colorado. But the tariffs aren’t enough for them to commit to the U.S. market, either. As the company’s CEO, Sandeep Nijhawan, told me, building a facility in an area with easy access to renewables is of paramount importance to them too.
Adding to all of this tariff-related uncertainty is the fact that many of these demonstration plants or first commercial facilities, including Brimstone’s, aren’t even scheduled to come online until the latter half of Trump’s term, if not the next decade. “We don’t know what the policy of the United States will be at that time,” Finke told me. The plan is for the company’s first commercial demonstration plant to be operational in 2030. “Maybe the next president will extend those tariffs, or maybe they will cut them back,” Finke said. After all, Biden mostly kept Trump’s first term tariffs on steel and aluminum in place — although prior to this February, there were numerous country-specific exemptions in place.
At the end of the day, tariffs are only one of numerous policy unknowns plaguing these green producers. Another major one is the status of the funding many of them were granted from the Department of Energy but have yet to see. In Brimstone’s case, that’s a $189 million award from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations to build its first plant. While Finke told me the company has started spending that money scoping out potential sites, it hasn’t yet been reimbursed. I asked him if that was concerning. “It’s a good question,” he told me. “At this time, it’s too early to say that.”
Similarly, Century Aluminum and Cleveland Cliffs both have $500 million awards from OCED to produce green aluminum and green steel, respectively. While I reached out to both companies for comment on the tariffs and the status of their funding, neither got back to me. Boston Metal also has a $50 million DOE grant for a facility that would produce chromium, a critical material for many advanced energy technologies. That money is, of course, now mired in “limbo and uncertainty,” Rauwerdink told me.
Green aluminum manufacturers large and small also stand to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act’s advanced manufacturing production tax credit, which incentivizes the domestic production of critical minerals, as well as certain types of clean energy components. This credit — along with so many others — may or may not be slashed as Republicans look to cut funding for a variety of IRA-related initiatives in the budget reconciliation process.
While Finke told me — as so many other companies did — that Brimstone does not rely on tariffs, tax credits, or the company’s DOE grant for its survival, it sure would be nice to have just a little certainty for once. “What we’d really like is to know what number to put in our financial model,” he told me.
Wouldn’t we all.
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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.”