Trump Names a Democrat as FERC Chief

Current conditions: The Southeastern U.S. is facing flash floods through the end of Thursday • Temperatures in Fez, Morocco, are forecast to hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit • Wildfires continue to rage across southern Europe, sending what Spain’s environment minister called a “clear warning” of the effects of climate change.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump names Democrat as new FERC chief

President Donald Trump on Wednesday named David Rosner, a centrist Democrat, as the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Since joining the commission in June 2024, Rosner focused the panel on the nation’s growing electricity demand from data centers and pushed for greater automation of the engineering process to connect power plants to the continent’s various grid systems. “Getting grid interconnection moving faster is essential to ensuring reliability,” Rosner told E&E News in March. “We’re starting to learn about these new tools and platforms that just make this work faster, smarter, saves us time, solves the reliability and affordability problems that are facing the country.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center, where Rosner previously worked as a staffer, hailed his promotion as a positive step. “Chairman Rosner’s strong understanding of the energy challenges facing our country, and demonstrated record of bipartisan work to address those challenges, make him well-suited to carry out the responsibilities of FERC chairman,” David R. Hill, the executive vice president of the group’s energy program, said in a statement.

2. Energy Department puts up nearly $1 billion for domestic mining

Lithium production in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the world's main sources.John Moore/Getty Images

The Energy Department announced at least $925 million in funding for five proposed programs to bolster the country’s domestic supply of minerals. “For too long, the United States has relied on foreign actors to supply and process the critical materials that are essential to modern life and our national security,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release. “The Energy Department will play a leading role in reshoring the processing of critical materials and expanding our domestic supply of these indispensable resources.”

That funding includes:

• $50 million for a Critical Minerals and Materials Accelerator .
• $250 million to support companies that pull valuable mineral byproducts out of existing industrial processes.
• $135 million for projects that bolster the rare earth supply chain.
• $500 million for a battery metal processing, manufacturing and recycling program.
• $40 million for a program to extract critical minerals from industrial wastewater.

The Trump administration has made bolstering America’s critical minerals industry one of its signature energy policy priorities. Though as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, it has also gone out of its way to annihilate sources of domestic demand for these minerals, especially in the wind energy and electric vehicle industries.

3. Alaska and Canada mark two grim climate milestones

In Alaska, an overflowing glacial lake north of Juneau triggered the Mendenhall River to surge to a record height, flooding the state’s capital city. The problem has been growing for years as climate change in the nation’s most rapidly-warming state accelerates the volume of ice melt. In 2023, floodwaters eroded Mendenhall’s banks, causing homes to collapse, according to the Alaska Beacon. In 2024, the news outlet reported, “the flood was the worst yet.” The flood peaked Wednesday afternoon at nearly 17 feet, damaging hundreds of homes.

Across the border, meanwhile, the more than 700 active fires blazing in Canada have already made this the country’s second-worst fire season on record. The largest fire, the Shoe fire in Saskatchewan, has been burning across 1.4 million acres — an area larger than the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona — since May 7, The New York Times reported.

4. Trump restarts — and maybe even improves — EV charging program

In an executive order on his first day back in office, Trump singled out the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, directing his Department of Transportation to pause and review the funding, with an eye toward cutting it entirely. Earlier this week, the Federal High Administration completed its review and issued a new guidance that, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, “not only preserves it, but also purports to ‘streamline applications,’ ‘slash red tape,’ and ‘ensure charging stations are actually built.’”

“If Congress is requiring the federal government to support charging stations, let’s cut the waste and do it right,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press release. “While I don’t agree with subsidizing green energy, we will respect Congress’ will and make sure this program uses federal resources efficiently.” The statement, Emily noted, is out of sync with the administration’s other actions to throttle the adoption of EVs: “Only time will tell whether the new guidance is truly a win for EV charging, however. It’s a win in the sense that many EV advocates feared the agency would try to kill the program or insert poison pills into the guidance. But it’s unclear whether the changes will speed up NEVI deployment beyond what might have happened had it not been paused.”

5. Dominion Energy admits it skipped key step when approving a gas plant

Dominion Energy admitted this week that it did not have an independent monitor review bids for its planned gas plant in suburban Richmond, telling state authorities that it alone reviewed the offers. Virginia’s largest energy company had said in previous state filings that there was an independent monitor overseeing its bids for the gas project planned in Chesterfield County. But an inquiry by the Virginia Attorney General’s Division of Consumer Counsel prompted the company to amend its months-old filing, Inside Climate News reported. The admission could trigger greater regulatory scrutiny of Dominion’s generation buildout as the company races to meet growing demand from the state’s data centers.

THE KICKER

A researcher has designed a new centimeter-square device that could help probe the “ignorosphere,” a layer of ultra-thin air that has largely escaped exploration by balloons, aircraft and satellites. The contraption uses technology similar to a weathervane encased in a low-pressure chamber that will spin when exposed to light. “You don’t really believe it until you see it,” Ben Schafer, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Nature.