An Oil Giant Bets $1 Billion on Fusion

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THE TOP FIVE

1. Eni makes a $1 billion bet on Commonwealth Fusion

The Italian oil giant Eni announced a deal Monday morning to buy more than $1 billion worth of electricity from Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ debut power plant in Chesterfield, Virginia. It’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff’s second major power-purchase agreement since signing its debut contract with Google in July, part of a large deal Eni described as a “strategic collaboration.” The companies did not disclose the terms of the broader contract. “It is a big vote of confidence to have Eni, who has contributed to our execution since the beginning, buy the power we intend to make in Virginia,” Bob Mumgaard, the chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion, said in a statement. “Our fusion power attracts diverse customers across the world — from hyperscalers to traditional energy leaders — because of the promise of clean, almost limitless energy.”

The U.S. is pushing hard to commercialize fusion energy. At least one company, the Microsoft-backed Helion, aims to generate its first electricity for the grid as early as 2028. But Commonwealth Fusion, which is aiming for the 2030s, has raised a third of all the private capital invested into fusion energy so far. Though fusion hopefuls have been burned before, the investment boom is a sign that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.”

2. UN General Assembly kicks off, with climate taking a backseat

The United Nations General Assembly has convened in New York City. With wars raging in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza, and Western powers such as the United Kingdom and Australia granting official recognition to the state of Palestine, climate change is likely to take a backseat outside of the New York Climate Week panels, conferences, and happy hours that take place across the city alongside the UN gathering.

The U.S. has dramatically reversed its public diplomacy on climate change since President Donald Trump returned to office. While the European Union has remained largely committed to its goals, the bloc could not find enough consensus to pass a binding climate plan ahead of the UN meeting. Instead, the 27 nations signed onto a “statement of intent,” in what the Financial Times called “a blow to hopes of EU leadership” in advance of November’s big UN climate summit, COP30, in Brazil.

3. South America’s new oil giant says it’s investing in clean energy

Guyanese President Irfaan Ali. Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

A year ago, the leader of Guyana went viral for a BBC segment in which he lambasted a British journalist for daring to lecture his tiny South American nation about climate change when his country has more carbon-absorbing forests than people, and Britain grew rich long ago felling its old-growth trees. In an interview in The New York Times series with world leaders published this past weekend ahead of the UN General Assembly, Guyana President Irfaan Ali delivers a similarly strident rebuke of critics in the rich world who oppose his country’s embrace of Exxon Mobil’s offshore drilling. “The moral question is: Who can produce what the world needs in the least environmentally damaging way? Because let’s be clear on this, too. We can’t be naïve. The world will need fossil fuel a long time into the future,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean Guyana is going all in on using fossil fuels at home. “Guyana is a new oil producer, but we are using the resource to finance our energy transition, to build resilient infrastructure, to support the region that we are in, to invest in livelihood options that will keep our forest standing, which stores many gigatons of carbon,” Ali said. “We’re investing in solar farms, hydro, natural gas, wind and biomass, all aimed at transitioning to a low-emission energy grid. We are building off-grid systems, solar farms, wind farms for the hinterland community, where the Indigenous people live.”

4. Republicans are skeptical about adding energy to the next reconciliation bill

Republicans overhauled federal energy policy with the last budget legislation that became the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. At the moment they’re deep in negotiations over a new spending bill to forestall a government shutdown on October 1. But Congress is also already looking ahead to a possible second reconciliation bill in the fall — though that is unlikely to say much of anything about energy, according to E&E News. House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, a representative from Texas, said the first reconciliation bill “exhausted” the possibilities for energy reforms and left little “meat on the bones.” Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, said energy policy would “be interesting if it develops,” but said “it’s not developing now.” Some in the clean energy world had hoped a second reconciliation bill would be a chance for moderate Republicans with a lot of wind and solar in their states to quietly reverse anti-renewables policies that made it into law in the OBBB Act. But avoiding the issue might keep more punitive policies at bay, including a Republican proposal to add new fees on electric vehicles.

5. New Jersey’s gubernatorial candidates spar over energy in first debate

Energy prices are a central theme of New Jersey’s gubernatorial race as Democrat Mikie Sherrill has repeatedly vowed to pressure the state’s regional grid operator over utility rates that surged 20% this year, and even build new nuclear reactors to meet growing demand for power. At her first televised debate Sunday night with Republican Jack Ciattarelli, Sherrill slammed the Trump administration’s cuts to renewable energy and vowed to take on utilities and the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, which serves New Jersey. “Everbody at the table is at fault, and they keep dumping the costs onto the ratepayer here in New Jersey,” she said, according to a CNN transcript. “Let’s face it, some of our utility companies have made over a billion dollars in profits, and yet our ratepayers are constantly suffering.”

Ciattarelli instead blamed renewables for the high prices, a claim the data in this piece by Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin seriously undercuts. “Nobody wants wind farms on our Jersey Shore,” Ciattarelli asserted, and vowed to pull out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the interstate carbon-trading market in the Northeast. But his solutions didn’t sound so far off from the Democrat’s, including promises to “expand our nuclear footprint in South Jersey” and “accelerate solar on rooftops.”

THE KICKER

Maybe call it a teal jay? Biologists at the University of Texas at Austin reported the discovery of a bird formed naturally by a green jay and a blue jay mating in the wild, marking one of the first documented examples of hybrid species created due to changing climate patterns. The two different parent species are separated by 7 million years of evolution, and their migratory ranges only recently started to overlap. “We think it’s the first observed vertebrate that’s hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change,” Brian Stokes, a graduate student researching ecology and evolution and first author of the study, said in a press release.