U.S., China Agree to Lower Tariffs

Current conditions: The high will be 88 degrees Fahrenheit in the Twin Cities today after Minneapolis-Saint Paul hit 90 on Sunday, breaking the 125-year daily record • Localized flooding is expected in the Florida Panhandle due to a slow-moving atmospheric river • A heatwave in North Africa will bring temperatures to 113 degrees today across parts of Mali.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Treasury shares details of trade deal with China

China and the United States have agreed to temporarily lower tariffs on each other’s imports by 115% for 90 days, the countries announced in a joint statement on Monday morning. The deal follows a weekend of trade negotiations in Geneva with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer, and their Chinese counterparts. The White House had issued a statement from Bessent on Sunday night that teased “substantial progress” between the two nations to address the trade war.

The decision will leave minimum U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods at 30%, down from 145%, and China’s tariffs on American imports at 10%, down from 125%, CNN notes. Monday’s news saw Dow futures rise by 2% and S&P 500 futures rise by almost 3%. But while some have hailed the result of the talks as a “best case scenario,” fears about rising costs have already caused companies including Rivian and First Solar to lower deliverable estimates and expected revenue for the year. China and the U.S. additionally agreed to a “mechanism to continue discussions about economic and trade relations,” while Bessent said both sides are committed to “more balance in trade” going forward.

2. CATL seeks to raise $4 billion in Hong Kong listing

Image: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Chinese electric-vehicle battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology announced in a filing Monday that it aims to raise as much as $4 billion in its Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing this year. CATL EV batteries were installed in more than 17 million vehicles last year, including Teslas, meaning it was represented in one in every three EVs in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reports; however, earlier this year, the company was given a “scarlet letter” in the U.S. when the Pentagon added it to a blacklist of “Chinese military companies.”

CATL is reportedly offering around 118 million shares, with a final price to be announced on or around May 19, and trading starting on May 20. The offer price will be no more than 263 Hong Kong dollars per share, or about $33.81. Its share offering would “more than double proceeds in Hong Kong’s market for listings this year,” per Bloomberg.

3. States sue Trump administration, arguing there is no ‘energy emergency’

Fifteen states filed a lawsuit on Friday arguing that President Trump’s declaration of an “energy emergency” is “unsupported.” As we’ve covered at Heatmap, Trump’s January 20 executive order directed federal agencies to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure” to expedite extraction of coal, natural gas, and oil, including by bypassing or shortening environmental protections and reviews. The states, however, argued in their filing that “U.S. energy production is at an all-time high and growing,” and that “the invocation of the nation’s emergency authorities … is reserved for actual emergencies — not changes in presidential policy.”

The lawsuit was brought by Democratic attorneys general in Washington, California, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Washington State’s Office of the Attorney General said in a press release that, in addition to being unlawful, Trump’s energy emergency order notably “excludes wind, solar, and batteries — among the cheapest and cleanest modern energy sources that exist today.”

4. Equinor warns it will cancel Empire Wind if admin doesn’t lift stop-work order

Equinor has threatened to cancel its Empire Wind project if the Trump administration does not immediately lift its stop-work order,E&E News reports. The 54-turbine offshore wind project, located south of New York’s Long Island, is fully permitted and has been under construction since 2024. Equinor, however, said that the Interior Department’s order in April to “halt all construction … until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis” is costing the company $50 million a week, which it called “unsustainable.” Equinor also took issue with the characterization of its permitting process as “rushed,” noting that it took the company eight years to receive its federal permits, and that its lease was obtained during the first Trump administration.

As my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman have reported, canceling the project would be a huge blow to New York State’s clean energy goals, since Empire Wind was seen as a path away from its dependence on fossil fuels. “The state’s target of deploying 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 was already going to be nearly impossible due to Trump’s pause on new leases and permits,” they wrote. “Without the 800 megawatt Empire Wind project, New York will only have 1 gigawatt in the pipeline.”

5. PJM warns hotter-than-normal summer could lead to historic supply shortages

PJM Interconnection issued a warning on Friday that anticipated above-average temperatures this summer “could trigger [grid] supply shortages for the first time,” Bloomberg reports. PJM — the country’s largest regional transmission organization, operating a 13-state market across much of the East Coast and Midwest — said that for most of the summer, it anticipates a peak of just over 154 gigawatts, “for which PJM should have adequate reserves to maintain reliability.” But 2025 also marks the first time PJM has assessed that an extreme scenario could put it over its generation capacity, with a potential peak demand as high as 166 gigawatts, beating 2006’s record of 165.6 gigawatts. “Under such circumstances, PJM would call on contracted demand response programs,” which pay customers to reduce their electricity use on an emergency basis, “to meet its required reserve needs,” the company said.

THE KICKER

Construction began last week on the world’s largest battery storage facility in a new technology center in Laufenburg, Switzerland. The redox flow battery will reportedly have a total capacity of 1.6 gigawatt-hours with an output of over 800 megawatts, surpassing the world’s largest redox flow battery in China, which has a storage capacity of 400 megawatt-hours and an output of 100 megawatts.