New Jersey Democrat for Governor Pledges to Go Nuclear

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THE TOP FIVE

1. New Jersey’s Democratic governor candidate stumps for new nuclear

Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee for governor in New Jersey, pledged Wednesday to build a new nuclear plant near the Delaware border in Salem County. At a press conference, the sitting U.S. Representative vowed to “massively expand cheaper, cleaner power generation” and build “an energy arsenal in our state.” That could mean building one or more Westinghouse AP1000s, the gigawatt-sized old-fashioned reactor for which the local utility giant, PSEG, already has early site permits from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “I’m going to immediately develop a plan for a new nuclear power site in Salem County,” Sherrill said at a rain-soaked press conference in Kenilworth, a suburb on the north end of the state outside New York City. “It demands urgency.”

The proposal will face challenges. The U.S. hasn’t built any new commercial nuclear plants in states where the grid is managed by regional transmission organizations that formed following a deregulation push in the 1990s that broke up traditional electrical monopolies. New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced plans in June to build her state’s first new nuclear plant since the 1980s, but has a tool New Jersey lacks: the New York Power Authority, the nation’s second-largest government-controlled utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority. In that sense, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote, New York’s plan mirrors the TVA’s own nuclear ambitions. Even if Sherrill finds a surprise fix to finance a new nuclear plant, she said she expects to face difficulties just dealing with the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest power system, of which New Jersey is a part. If elected, she said she will “instruct our attorney general to take on our grid operator.”

2. Mining CEOs woo Trump over controversial copper project

The chief executives of mining behemoths Rio Tinto and BHP met with President Donald Trump to push for a long-stalled joint copper mine. In a post on LinkedIn, Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm said he “highlighted the opportunity at the Resolution Copper project in Arizona” and cheered “BHP’s CEO Mike Henry as we outlined the enormous potential of this project to provide domestic copper and other critical minerals for decades to come.”

The project has faced recent troubles. On Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary restraining order to prevent a transfer of land to the mining giants as the court considered challenges brought by opponents including the San Carlos Apache Tribe, which wants to block the mine on religious, cultural and environmental grounds. (Here’s Heatmap’s Jeva Lange with a deep dive on the fight’s long history.) Following the meeting with executives on Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social: “It is so sad that Radical Left Activists can do this, and affect the lives of so many people. Those that fought it are Anti-American, and representing other Copper competitive Countries.”

3. Half of new U.S. electricity capacity will come from solar this year

Solar power, in dark blue, dominates new generating capacity in the U.S. this year. EIA

Developers added 12 gigawatts of new utility-scale solar power capacity in the U.S. in the first half of 2025, and plan to add another 21 gigawatts by December. If that all comes to fruition, more than half of all the 64 gigawatts of new power slated to come online in the U.S. this year will be solar. That’s according to a new analysis of survey data the U.S. Energy Information Administration released on Wednesday. Battery storage, wind, and natural gas plants account for virtually all the other half. Assuming developers follow through, it will be the largest amount of new capacity added since 2002, when developers completed 58 gigawatts of new power plants, 57 gigawatts of which were fueled by natural gas.

Solar growth almost mirrors that of natural gas in the early 2000s. EIA

In China, the world’s largest annual emitter, the growth of solar reduced planet-heating pollution from the power sector during the first half of this year. While China’s overall carbon output dropped 1%, emissions from the electricity generation — the country’s largest single source of planet-heating gases — plunged by 3% as solar panels met new demand, according to analysis published Thursday morning by Carbon Brief.

4. New York offers up $8 million to boost low-carbon fuels

Not to be outdone by a Garden State politician’s energy ambitions, New York announced a new pot of funding Wednesday for low-carbon fuels. In a press release, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority made nearly $8 million available to “support innovation in the development of low-carbon fuels,” including a program to convert sewage, agricultural waste and other garbage into energy. “Early-stage innovation is a valuable tool that benefits all New Yorkers by accelerating the adoption of technologies that ultimately help to lower emissions from hard-to-electrify sectors such as aviation, maritime and heavy-duty industrial processes,” NYSERDA CEO Doreen Harris said in a statement. Proposals are due by January 22, 2026, and projects will move forward in three phases, from site selection to engineering design and construction.

This follows a series of other New York moves to step up its energy investment, including laying out plans for its new nuclear plant in June and putting out its first bulk order for energy storage last month.

5. Hitachi Energy throws $106 million at the U.S. transformer shortage

Power equipment giant Hitachi Energy is investing $106 million into building North America’s biggest factory to manufacture a key component in electrical transformers. The U.S. has for years now faced a shortage of both power and distribution transformers, the equipment that modifies the voltage of electrons traveling from generating stations to the outlets in your wall. The problem is only getting worse. Manufacturers have struggled to keep up with surging demand from replacements of aging equipment and new additions as the grid expands — which, as my colleague Robinson Meyer explained yesterday, is a factor pushing up electricity prices well beyond the pace of inflation.

The problem has bipartisan origins. The Biden administration pushed to increase the efficiency of new transformers, forcing manufacturers to decide between ramping up production of existing models or preparing assembly lines to meet new standards. While the Biden-era Department of Energy backed off its plans, the Trump administration slapped new tariffs on steel and other imports needed to make transformers, and sowed new chaos for factory owners calibrating the right amount of demand to the shifting requirements of federal energy policy since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

THE KICKER

When Trump made an historic investment into the nation’s only active rare earths producer, MP Materials, his Department of Defense set a price floor of $110 per kilogram meant to spur more U.S. production of the metals needed for modern weapons and clean-energy technology. But in its deal to buy the critical minerals company ReElement Technologies on Wednesday, Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina-based rare earth magnet manufacturer, said it could generate the metals at a price “significantly below” what the Pentagon promised to pay MP Materials. “This pricing will enable Vulcan to be competitive in global markets,” Vulcan CEO John Maslin told Reuters. “We wanted to make sure the unit economics made sense.”