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The Nuclear Company is betting on the old school approach.
More than any other form of zero-carbon energy, nuclear energy seems to be stuck between its past and its future. There are currently 94 working reactors in the United States, fewer than there were in 1990. With the country’s growing energy needs in mind, the federal government has made generous incentives and tax credits available for constructing new nuclear power, operating existing plants, and for re-opening shuttered plants. It has also literally rewritten the rulebook for nuclear power to encourage the development of smaller advanced reactors that are supposed to be, eventually, cheaper to build at scale.
But in the meantime, there’s the confused present.
Despite more reactors closing than opening in the past decade, nuclear remains the largest source of carbon-free energy on the U.S. grid. Right now, there are only a handful of reactor designs certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but no actual plans to build any more of them. The two most recently built reactors in the U.S., Vogtle 3 and 4, are both AP1000s, the latest version of the workhouse United States nuclear design — massive light water reactors, the most common reactor type, which use regular water as a coolant. (The other approved designs include the ESBWR, a GE-Hitachi reactor, and the APR-1400 — both versions of large, light-water reactors, both more likely to be built overseas than at home.) The NRC has approved just one small modular reactor design, but a recent attempt to actually build it for a coalition of utilities fell through.
The two reactors that have been built recently, Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4, were each delivered years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. “So there was a feeling in the industry that we weren’t going to build anymore AP1000s,” Jessica Lovering, co-founder and executive director of the Good Energy Collective, told me. “And that was a shame because we just got all this experience from doing this big project.”
Lately, however, utilities have been asking a provocative question. What if, instead of waiting for one of the many nascent advanced reactor technologies to take off, we just ... keep building AP1000s, instead?
Anyone who wants to build or buy new nuclear power might have a new partner in The Nuclear Company, which wants to build a 6 gigawatt fleet of reactors — to start — using “proven, licensed technology,” according to the company’s public statements. Juliann Edwards, The Nuclear Company’s chief development officer, wouldn’t specify which technology in particular the company is planning on deploying, but she did tell me it plans on doing so one after the other, in sequence, hoping to drive down the massive price of building a new reactor. “We’re definitely focused on fleet scale deployment,” Edwards said.
“Six has been this magic number that comes back again and again and again,” Ted Nordhaus, founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute told me. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, for instance, called for 6,000 megawatts — a.k.a. 6 gigawatts — of new nuclear built with a new production tax credit as an incentive, exactly what Edwards and crew are planning to deliver.
The Nuclear Company won’t be designing or operating the reactors. Instead, Edwards told me, “picture us as the front end as well as throughput to operations. That’s ensuring that a project gets developed, licensed, all the necessary environmental permits, interconnect filings,” working with utilities that have licensed and permitted development sites already lined up. The company is focusing particularly on the big new sources of electricity demand — data centers and manufacturing — which likely means it will concentrate its activities in the East and Southeast. As far as areas where nuclear development has already been approved, Utility Dive identified sites in Florida and South Carolina that are licensed for AP1000, while others in Michigan and Virginia are authorized to use GE-Hitachi reactors.
The reason having this fleet approach matters, Lovering told me, is that building out a supply chain and getting the requisite investment is much easier when everyone involved knows there’s going to be six reactors’ worth in the pipeline, and costs could fall as the reactors are constructed. “If it was just a one-off project, I’d be much more skeptical,” she said. “It’s always easier to get financing for a proven project that's already up and running.”
John Kotek, the head of public policy for the Nuclear Energy Institute, concurred. He told me in an emailed statement that The Nuclear Company’s business model “demonstrates the innovation needed to meet the demand for clean, reliable nuclear energy.”
But there’s a reason much of the nuclear advocacy and policy community has seen advanced reactors as the solution to building out the scale of nuclear power needed to help power a growing grid without carbon emissions. Nordhaus’ Breakthrough Institute is one of the biggest boosters of nuclear, with a focus on reforming the regulatory system in order to make advanced nuclear more economical.
“The market for a 1 gigawatt reactor is a very large public works project,” Nordhaus said. “No one in the world has ever built one of these things on spec. Instead, they’re typically built by national energy companies, or, in the United States, by utilities who are able to essentially charge their customers for the massive costs of construction.”
While the nuclear industry has, with lots of intellectual and public support from groups like Nordhaus’s Breakthrough, oriented its energies toward advanced reactors, The Nuclear Company likely has fans in the Department of Energy, which would really like to see more large reactors getting built soon. “There’s a lot of energy right now, being driven in part by [Secretary of Energy Jennifer] Granholm and [the Loan Programs Office’s] Jigar [Shah], who are like, We need to get nuclear steel in the ground and get more AP1000s built,” Nordhaus said.
Granholm has called for a buildout of new nuclear “at a scale not seen since the ’70s and ’80s.” The Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, meanwhile, has been supporting nuclear since its founding following the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and Shah has scolded utilities and state regulators for demanding the government essentially provide cost overrun insurance before they even think about building a new AP1000, pointing to the incentives and loans available from the feds.
Nordhaus, who called himself “skeptical” about The Nuclear Company’s plans, told me that his goal was “to get technology to market that would be feasible to build outside a vertically integrated market. I don’t see how nuclear has a future in this country if you don’t do that.”
That’s Edwards’s goal, too. She’s confident that The Nuclear Company could build even in restructured electricity markets where utilities can’t tap their ratepayers to build expensive new plants, she told me. “We need to be able to get in a cycle where maybe we're breaking ground and by the late 2020s. And then we're going into putting neutrons on the grid by the mid 2030s.”
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An agreement to privatize Minnesota Power has activists activated both for and against.
For almost as long as utilities have existed, they have attracted suspicion. They enjoy local monopolies over transmission (and, in some places, generation). They charge regulated prices for electricity and make their money through engaging in capital investments with a regulated rate of return. They don’t face competition. Consumer advocates habitually suspect utilities of padding out their investments and of maintaining excessive — if not corrupt — proximity to the regulators and politicians designated to oversee them, suspicions that have proved correct over and over again.
Environmental groups have joined this chorus, accusing utilities of slow-walking the energy transition and preferring investments in new, large gas plants and local transmission as opposed to renewables, demand response, and energy efficiency.
Add private equity to the mix and you have a recipe for the kind of controversy playing out in Minnesota over the proposed acquisition of the northern Minnesota utility Minnesota Power by Global Infrastructure Partners, an infrastructure investment firm acquired by BlackRock, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the investment manager for Canadian retirement savings.
The deal has attracted activist opposition from environmental groups like the Sierra Club, consumer watchdogs in Minnesota, as well as national policy groups critical of both utilities and private equity. It’s also happening in a moment when utility ratemaking has come under increasing scrutiny on account of rising electricity prices.
Utilities across the countries have requested $29 billion of dollars in rate increases so far this year, according to PowerLines, the electricity policy research group, while as of May, retail electricity prices were climbing at twice the rate of inflation. Utilities earn regulated rates of return on capital projects, and with data centers and artificial intelligence driving up demand for new electricity, investors are eyeing utilities as potential cash cows. The Dow Jones Utilities index has even slightly outperformed the market so far this year.
Global Infrastructure Partners announced that it had agreed to buy the northern Minnesota utility Minnesota Power’s parent company, Allete, for over $6 billion million last May, and the deal has been working its way through the utilities regulatory process ever since. In July, the Minnesota Department of Commerce reached a settlement with the company and its potential buyers that, among other provisions, agreed to a rate freeze and a reduction in the return on capital investment the new owners will be to earn.
While the companies were able to win the support of one part of the Minnesota governmental apparatus, another one harshly condemned the deal. Following the settlement announcement, administrative law judge Megan McKenzie recommended that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission ultimately reject the deal. The judge’s recommendation is non-binding, but it is a comprehensive review of the evidence and arguments made by supporters and opponents of the deal that could have sway over the commission’s final decision.
The judge’s recommendation largely echoed the case advocates had been making against the merger. The opinion was laced with criticisms of private equity as such, arguing that the new owners would “pursue profit in excess of public markets through company control.” Ultimately, McKenzie concluded that “this transaction carries real and significant costs and risks to Minnesota ratepayers and few, if any, benefits. Accordingly, the proposed Acquisition is not in the public interest.”
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is expected to make a final decision in September. In the meantime, advocates on either side are continuing to press their arguments.
Citing the administrative law judge, Karlee Weinman, a research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a frequent critic of utilities, told me that the advocate objections to the deal were twofold: One, that Minnesota Power might not be able (or willing) to finance its capital needs; and two, that as a private company, it will no longer be required to file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, removing a lever for ratepayer advocates.
The “layer of transparency” provided by SEC filings “is something that consumer advocates are finding valuable to help inform both their understanding of the utility and their advocacy on behalf of ratepayers,” Weinman told me. Or as a coalition of public interest groups argued more formally in a utility commission filing, “privatization of ALLETE and the discontinuation of ALLETE’s SEC reporting obligations would significantly reduce information about ALLETE that is available to the Commission and Minnesota ratepayers.”
Going private “would make it more difficult for Minnesota regulators like our commission to monitor the board’s decisions and hold the company accountable to state law, but also to the public,” Jenna Yeakle, a campaign manager at the Sierra Club and resident of Duluth, told me.
“We do not have a choice where our electricity comes from,” she said. “We are the most impacted by Minnesota Power’s choices and the decisions made at the state and federal level when it comes to our electrical utility, because we don’t get a choice in the matter.”
Unions, on the other hand, often play well with utilities, using their regulated status to ensure good jobs for their members. Construction unions especially are big fans of big capital projects, which means more construction jobs.
One of those unions is the LIUNA Minnesota & North Dakota, an affiliate of the Laborers' International Union of North America, the construction workers union. “We just want the utility to work, the utility works well for us, they use union labor, they build projects, they create jobs,” Kevin Pranis, its marketing manager, told me.
Pranis was especially skeptical of opponents’ arguments that changing the investor in an investor-owned utility would make a huge difference in terms of how it conducted itself in front of the Public Utilities Commission. “There’s this bizarre fan fiction that has developed around publicly traded stocks, that somehow they are transparent,” he said. Corporate filings rarely, if ever have the kind of information ratepayers and their advocates need in rate cases, Pranis argued.
“The Securities Exchange Commission doesn’t care about ratepayers. The New York Stock Exchange doesn’t care about ratepayers. Those regulations don’t serve ratepayers in any way. They serve investors to know what you’re investing in.”
The environmental arguments also go in the other direction. One supporter of the deal, former Loans Program Office chief Jigar Shah, wrote in Utility Dive that “to fully decarbonize its electricity sales and keep pace with rising demand, Minnesota Power must navigate an increasingly complex and capital-intensive landscape.”
“What Minnesota Power needs is long-term vision and stable capital,” he continued, which is “precisely what this private investment offers. That’s the only way to do the big things required to serve its communities, especially when federal energy rhetoric doesn’t always align with real on-the-ground needs.”
Minnesota law mandates that the state reach 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040, which supporters of the deal have said justifies allowing Minnesota Power to be owned by deep-pocketed investors.
Two clean energy groups, the Center for Energy and Environment and Clean Energy Economy Minnesota, wrote in a filing that meeting that goal would require “significant and unprecedented investment,” and that “although the exact investment levels needed may be uncertain or disputed by parties, the scope of investment needed is clear, and the Acquisition makes that level of capital available to Minnesota Power today.”
LIUNA pressed the point more forcefully in another filing, arguing that opponents of the deal “have dangerously underestimated the threat posed by a lack of ready capital to undertake historic investments,” and that they were “whistling past the graveyard.”
Minnesota Power and its proposed buyers, for their part, have argued in a that Allete requires “more than $1 billion in new equity to fund its expected investment requirements over the next five years,” including to comply with the emissions requirements, and pointed out that “in the Company’s 75-year history in publicly traded markets, the Company has raised $1.3 billion in equity.”
Judge McKenzie disagreed in her opinion, arguing that capital commitments weren’t enforceable and echoing the public interest groups in saying that Minnesota Power had told its investors that it was able to access capital markets when it needed to. The company and its investors have argued this was conditional on its ability to find a buyer, and that “further analysis to identify its approach to comply with the Carbon Free Standard” showed the investment need.
Judge McKenzie also got to the heart of recent debates around data centers and grid management, arguing that the planned investments in new generation and transmission weren’t truly necessary to meet the legally mandated emissions standard. “ALLETE could reduce capital needs by making greater use of power purchase agreements (PPAs) to reduce capital spending on self-built generation. Greater use of demand response, energy efficiency measures, and grid-enhancing technologies could also reduce the need for capital spending on generation,” she wrote.
Ultimately, how Minnesota Power conducts itself — the projects it engages in, the rates it charges consumers and industrial customers — will be up to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and the state legislature, whether it’s owned by public investors or infrastructure and pension funds.
“None of those changes will affect the Commission’s authority, process, or obligation to regulate Minnesota Power’s actions,” the two clean energy groups wrote in a filing. Utility regulation will continue to be a challenge, but the investors may not matter as much as the utility.
The Berkeley-based startup has a chemical refining method it hopes can integrate with other existing recycling operations.
Critical minerals are essential to the world’s most powerful clean energy technologies, from batteries and electric vehicles to power lines, wind turbines, and solar panels. But the vast majority of the U.S. mineral supply comes from countries such as China, putting supply chains for a whole host of decarbonization technologies at geopolitical and economic risk.
Recycling minerals domestically would go a long way toward solving this problem, which is exactly what ChemFinity, a new startup spun out of the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to do. The company claims its critical mineral recovery system will be three times cheaper, 99% cleaner, and 10 times faster than existing approaches found in the mining and recycling industries. And it just got its first big boost of investor confidence, raising a $7 million seed round led by the climate tech firms At One Ventures and Overture Ventures.
“We basically act like a black box where recyclers or scrap yards or even other refiners can send their feedstock to us,” Adam Uliana, ChemFinity’s co-founder and CEO, told me. “We act like a black box that spits out pure metal.”
It works like this: After a customer sends ChemFinity its feedstock — anything from a circuit board to a catalytic converter to recently mined metal ore will do — the material goes into a chemical solution that dissolves the metals to be recovered, separating them from the solid feedstock. That liquid is then pumped through ChemFinity’s sorbent filters, which capture target minerals “like metal-selective Brita filters.”
The core breakthrough is a new polymer used in these filters that Uliana and his co-founder designed while PhD students in Chemical Engineering at Berkeley. The novel material is made of innumerable mineral-trapping pores smaller than the width of a hair, making it “so porous that 1 gram of the material — like a spoonful of the material — can have the same surface area internally as that of a football field,” Uliana told me. This allows the filters to capture an astonishing amount of metal using very little polymer.
Crucially, the pores are customized for each specific mineral. “You can tune the size of these pores, the shapes of these pores, the chemistries of these pores, and it basically acts like a cage, or like an atomic catcher’s mitt, just for that individual metal,” Uliana explained. After that atomic mitt traps the minerals, a proprietary liquid solution flows through the mineral-filled polymer, stripping off the minerals so that they can be recovered. The company can then reuse the porous sorbent without performance loss.
Uliana told me this method is orders of magnitude more efficient than what exists on the market today — even when compared to the most successful and innovative startups in the space such as Redwood Materials, which recycles lithium-ion battery minerals. That’s because refining typically requires more than a dozen steps and extremely high temperatures, as systems remove impurities one by one, gradually concentrating a mineral until it’s pure enough for commercial viability.
ChemFinity’s process, on the other hand, operates at room temperature. And because its filter is so selective, there are far fewer steps overall. “If we’re able to successfully scale this, it’s really unprecedented unit economics,” Uliana said. He sees potential for other companies like Redwood to adopt the startup’s refining technology as part of a larger operation.
But that’s a ways down the road. ChemFinity isn’t prioritizing battery recycling to begin with, instead focusing on recovering and refining precious metals such as gold, silver, and platinum. These minerals are all over the e-waste from consumer electronics —- things like circuit boards, connectors, memory chips, capacitors, and switches all contain precious metals.
They’re a good group of minerals to go to market with, Uliana explained, both because they’re expensive and difficult to purify. “These metals have extremely high value. So you don’t necessarily need to be quite as large-scale as if you were recovering copper from a copper tailing,” he told me. The flip side, though, is “that these are some of the hardest minerals to separate.” So if ChemFinity proves capable of refining these at scale, it will be a pivotal proof point as the startup looks to apply its process to more than 20 critical minerals across the periodic table.
With this first influx of funding, the company is looking to scale production of its novel sorbent material from a few kilograms to about 100 kilograms per day as it sets up initial pilots. And while ChemFinity’s first customers could range from manufacturers of clean tech to metal traders and jewelers, the company says its materials breakthrough could have applications in an even wider array of sectors, from wastewater treatment to carbon capture and petrochemical processing.
Because if ChemFinity has, as Uliana told me, truly created the “that perfect cage, just for one mineral at a time,” there really is a world of opportunity out there.
On GOP lockstep on renewables, a wind win, and EPA’s battery bashing
Current conditions: Hurricane Erin’s winds strengthen to 160 miles per hour as the Category 4 storm barrels toward the U.S. East Coast • Temperatures have dropped 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the U.S. Northeast as cooler air and storms sweep in • The death toll in Spain’s wildfires rises to four as the country calls in the military to deal with blazes.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Donald Trump campaigned last year on slashing electricity rates by as much as half. His administration is now bracing for political blowback from the opposite effect — surging electricity rates as data centers drive up demand for an already limited supply, all while Congress and federal agencies curb development of the fastest-to-deploy solar and wind facilities. “The momentum of the Obama-Biden policies, for sure that destruction is going to continue in the coming years,” Wright told Politico during a visit to wind- and corn-rich Iowa. Yet, he added: “That momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who’s going to get blamed for it? We're going to get blamed because we're in office.”
Rising electricity prices are already emerging as a political issue ahead of upcoming elections, including in the New Jersey’s governor race, where rates soared by 20% in June. According to an Energy Innovation analysis of the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Republicans and signed by Trump, wholesale electricity prices could rise by as much as 74% by 2035 as a result of the law.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ruled that the utilities whose coal and gas-fired power stations are subject to Trump’s order to keep fossil fuel plants open could recoup the cost from ratepayers. The commission couched its decisions — which approved pathways for recovering costs from ratepayers, but did not yet greenlight rate hikes — largely on bureaucratic legal grounds, arguing that it’s “reasonable” to pass the costs along to households and businesses in the places where the electricity is used.
The ruling concerned two separate cases, and the panel’s decision diverged somewhat between them. In a case involving the PJM Interconnection, FERC gave permission to spread the costs around the nation’s largest grid system. In another involving the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, the regulator approved concentrating the cost recovery around Michigan, where the coal in question is located. FERC rejected questions about easing the cost to consumers with rebates as “beyond the scope” of the narrow proceedings. As a next step, the utilities that operate the plants will still need to come back to FERC for permission to hike rates on the grounds the two rulings set out.
It could have been worse. The Treasury guidance issued Friday dictating what wind and solar projects will be eligible for federal tax credits could have effectively banned developers from tapping the write-offs set to start phasing out next July. In the weeks before the Internal Revenue Service released its rules, GOP lawmakers from states with thriving wind and solar industries, including Senators John Curtis of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, publicly lobbied for laxer rules as part of what they pitched as the all-of-the-above “energy dominance” strategy on which Trump campaigned. Grassley went so far as to block two of Trump’s Treasury nominees “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent,” as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered earlier in August.
Since the guidance came out on Friday, both Grassley and Curtis have put out positive statements backing the plan. “I appreciate the work of Secretary [Scott] Bessent and his staff in balancing various concerns and perspectives to address the President’s executive order on wind and solar projects,” Curtis said, according to E&E News. Calling renewables “an essential part of the ‘all of the above’ energy equation,” Grassley’s statement said the guidance “seems to offer a viable path forward for the wind and solar industries to continue to meet increased energy demand” and “reflects some of the concerns Congress and industry leaders have raised.”
Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas secured one of its largest orders ever — 950 megawatts of turbines — despite the Trump administration’s aggressive pushback against wind projects in the U.S. The backers of the new development, described as a tech giant, haven’t yet been revealed, according to the news site The Danish Dream. But the company’s stock soared on Monday after Treasury’s guidance proved less punitive than some had anticipated. Just last week, Vestas finance chief Jakob Wegge-Larsen told the trade publication Recharge that demand from data centers would buoy the wind industry despite the political headwinds.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin returned to his native Long Island Monday to hold a press conference with opponents of battery energy storage systems who object to the clean energy technology on safety grounds. In a press release, the agency said battery fires “have raised legitimate safety concerns from communities nationwide, especially in metropolitan areas.” New York has relatively little battery capacity compared to states with more wind and solar generation, and just last month put out its first bulk order for energy storage. But Zeldin accused the state of promoting batteries as a “partisan push to fill yet another delusional ‘green goal’” and putting “the safety and well-being of New Yorkers second to their climate change agenda,” and complained that New York had “banned the safe extraction of natural gas.”
In January, a large battery fire ignited at the battery facility of the Moss Landing Power Plant in Monterrey, California, spreading to roughly 100,000 lithium-ion modules at the station. The accident and resulting pollution fallout from the fire has since spurred a nationwide backlash to batteries, as my colleague Jael Holzman has written. Zeldin on Monday also touted new EPA safety guidance for grid-scale batteries, calling on developers to put in place “clear and comprehensive incident response plans.”
The United Kingdom’s famously overcast skies aren’t keeping the country from hitting new solar power milestones. Solar power generation in Britain so far this year surpassed the total for 2024 as panel installations have continued to grow this year. The country has produced more than 14 terawatt-hours of electricity from solar this year as of August 16, about one-third higher than this point last year, according to a Financial Times analysis of University of Sheffield data. That’s enough to power 5.1 million homes for a year, or the entire London Underground for more than a decade.