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On copper chaos, a solar surge, and transformer hopes

Current conditions: Hurricane Erin is generating waves up to 6 feet high in North Carolina as the storm brings dangerous riptides up the East Coast • Heavy rainfall is causing deadly landslides and flooding in Senegal • Isesaki, northwest of Tokyo, is sweltering in temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit as a heat wave that already broke records this month persists.
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.”
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.”

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.”
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Much of California’s biggest county is now off limits to energy storage.
Residents of a tiny unincorporated community outside of Los Angeles have trounced a giant battery project in court — and in the process seem to have blocked energy storage projects in more than half of L.A. County, the biggest county in California.
A band of frustrated homeowners and businesses have for years aggressively fought a Hecate battery storage project proposed in Acton, California, a rural unincorporated community of about 7,000 residents, miles east of the L.A. metro area. As I wrote in my first feature for The Fight over a year ago, this effort was largely motivated by concerns about Acton as a high wildfire risk area. Residents worried that in the event of a large fire, a major battery installation would make an already difficult emergency response situation more dangerous. Acton leaders expressly opposed the project in deliberations before L.A. County planning officials, arguing that BESS facilities in general were not allowed under the existing zoning code in unincorporated areas.
On the other side, county officials maintained that the code was silent on battery storage as such, but said that in their view, these projects were comparable to distribution infrastructure from a land use perspective, and therefore would be allowable under the code.
Last week, the residents of Acton won, getting the courts to toss out the county’s 2021 memorandum allowing battery storage facilities in unincorporated areas – which make up more than 65% of L.A. County.
Judge Curtis Kin wrote in his October 14 ruling that “such expansive use of the interpretation runs contrary to the Zoning Code itself,” and that the “exclusion” of permission for battery storage in the code means it isn’t allowed, plain and simple.
“Consequently, respondents and real parties’ reliance on the existence of other interpretive memos and guidance by the [Planning] Director is beside the point,” Kin stated. “There is no dispute the Director has the authority to issue memos and interpretations for Zoning code provisions subject to interpretation, but, as discussed above, such authority cannot be used in such a way as to violate the provisions of the Zoning Code.”
The court also declared the Hecate project approval void and ordered the company to seek permits under the California Environmental Quality Act if it still wants to build. This will halt the project’s development for the foreseeable future. Alene Taber, the attorney representing Acton residents, told me she has received no indication from Hecate’s legal team about whether they will appeal the ruling.
Hecate declined to comment on the outcome.
Taber’s perspective is unique as a self-described “rural rights” attorney who largely represents unincorporated communities with various legal disputes. She told me this ruling demonstrates a serious risk regulators face in moving too fast for a host community, especially given rising opposition to battery storage in California. Since the Moss Landing fire, opposition to storage projects has escalated rapidly across the state – despite profound tech differences between more modern designs proposed today and the antiquated system that burned up in that incident.
I asked Taber if she thought California enacting a new law last week to beef up battery fire safety oversight could stem the tide of concerns about battery storage. In response, she railed against a separate statute giving energy companies – including battery developers – the ability to work around town ordinances and moratoria targeting their industry.
“Even though the county didn’t consider the community input — which it should’ve — the county process at least still allowed for communities to appeal the project. And they’re also at least supposed to consider what the local zoning code said,” Taber told me. “Local communities are now sidelined all together. They’re saying they don’t care what the concerns are. Where’s the consideration for how these projects are now being sited in high fire zones?”
I was unable to reach Los Angeles County officials before press time for The Fight, but it’s worth noting that, amid the battle over Hecate’s approval, L.A. County planning officials began preparing to update their renewable energy ordinance to include battery storage development regulation – an indication they may need new methods to site and build more battery storage. There’s no timeline for when those changes will take place.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Benton County, Washington – A state permitting board has overridden Governor Bob Ferguson to limit the size of what would’ve been Washington’s largest wind project over concerns about hawks.
2. Adams County, Colorado – This is a new one: Solar project opponents here are making calls to residents impersonating the developer to collect payments.
3. Lander County, Nevada – Trump’s move to kill the Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project has prompted incredible backlash in Congress, as almost all of Nevada’s congressional delegation claims that not a single renewables project in the U.S. has gotten a federal permit since July.
A conversation with David Gahl of SI2
This week I spoke with David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute, or SI2, which is the Solar Energy Industries Association’s independent industry research arm. Usually I’d chat with Gahl about the many different studies and social science efforts they undertake to try and better understand siting conflicts in the U.S.. But SI2 reached out first this time, hoping to talk about how all of that work could be undermined by the Trump administration’s grant funding cuts tied to the government shutdown. (The Energy Department did not immediately get back to me with a request for comment for this story, citing the shutdown.)
The following conversation was edited lightly for clarity.
So what SI2 funding could be cut because of the federal shutdown, and what has it been put toward?
On October 1, the Energy Department put out a list of about $7.5 billion in grants they were terminating. Approximately a week later, another larger list of grants that were slated for termination found its way into the press. There’s an outstanding question about what this other list floating around means, and only DOE can verify the document’s accuracy, but we have two projects that were on that bigger list.
The first was $2.5 million supporting research into how power companies engage communities. We were coming up with a list of community engagement innovations — the idea was to actually test, through rigorous social science research at project sites, which of these innovations produces the best outcomes. We were going to have empirical data that said, If you approach communities in this way you’re more likely to get support, and if you approach communities this other way you wouldn’t.
The second was $3 million to bring diverse stakeholders together to talk about siting and permitting reform, best practices, guidance to make development smoother. The concept there was to bring traditionally warring parties to come up with a framework and tools to help the siting process. If you can get people together to come up with best practices, you can typically move things faster.
This was an “uncommon dialogue” – there was “uncommon dialogue” before on hydropower resources – and this was related to large-scale solar facilities and conservation. It’s not location-specific, more bringing the groups together to talk about a higher level set of issues, not specific projects. Keep in mind, this is relatively small potatoes.
What was the status of that work?
It started earlier in the year and it’s been rolling along. There’s been a lot of progress made so far. People have developed work plans and are working through the issues.
If the funding is canceled, there’s also opportunity for private money to potentially step in, but it puts both initiatives in a precarious place. But to the broader point, the administration has talked about how it wants energy “abundance” and more electrons on the grid to meet growing demand. And these projects funded by the department are addressing key problems to putting electrons onto the grid. Cancellation of these grants is just a complete reversal of what they’re talking about in other forums.
How so? Help me understand how this work actually trickles down to individual project decisions.
One of the challenges with siting any kind of large-scale energy project is getting community buy-in and ensuring the permitting process moves smoothly, that parties aren’t going to be litigating against each other. So if you can come up with ways to make sure the communities feel heard and are designed according to what communities want, you can probably avoid some litigation down the road.
Do you have any indication this government supports the work you’re describing?
What they’ve made clear is they want more electrons to come onto the grid to support data centers and the advancement of artificial intelligence. Canceling grants like these … I mean, we’re talking about potentially canceling projects that make it harder to meet the goal of putting more electricity onto the grid.