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We’re now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and it’s indisputable that climate is one of the most important stories of our time. That’s our philosophy here at Heatmap, but just about everything around us illustrates it, too — from government policy and tech to movies and reality TV.
And of course — or maybe, especially — books.
It’s been about 17 years since the term “cli-fi” (or “climate fiction”) was first coined, and in the meantime, books that touch on climate themes in both fiction and nonfiction have taken off like the Keeling Curve. In 2025, we’ll be reading novels that imagine life in San Francisco after years of deluge and investigative reports into subjects such as how companies have gotten away with dumping forever chemicals into the environment for so long. There will be new natural histories to dive into — on the desert, forests, prairies, and even on the chemical compound CO2 — as well as new frames of thinking about climate change and how we approach its solutions.
Because so many 2025 books will touch on climate themes, I’ve set aside a section of honorable mentions at the end of this list that are also worth checking out. The division doesn’t indicate quality; I chose the primary 18 based on my subjective excitement and to showcase different genres, publishers, and authors. It might be in the appendix that you find a book on the topic you’re personally most excited about (Arctic exploration? Solar geoengineering? Florida-set family dramas?) for next year.
Finally, if you want to see all these books in one place or judge them by their (excellent) covers, you can browse our curated list on Bookshop here.
The U.S. government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment section on the Southwest reads like an apocalyptic horror story: “Heat-related mortality,” “increased wildfire risks,” and “longer and more severe droughts” all make it into the opening few paragraphs. The truth is that the hottest and driest region of the United States is home to 60 million people, many of whom will have to adapt to a more extreme future in the coming years. In New Mexico-born journalist Kyle Paoletta’s debut book, American Oasis, he traces the allure of places like Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas back to the Athapaskan migration from the sub-Arctic around 1100 BCE and through the heydays of Arizona Highways, a magazine from the 1950s, while also charting what lies ahead for those who are drawn to making the desert, however impossibly, their home. Preorder it here.
Speaking of the American desert, on the fiction side of things this winter comes Madeleine Watts’ latest novel, Elegy, Southwest. Watts made a name for herself as a writer of cli-fi after the release of her 2021 novel, The Inland Sea, set against the backdrop of Australia’s fires and floods, and she returns this year with a road trip novel that follows Eloise, a doctoral student studying the Colorado River and climate change. As part of her research, Eloise flies to Las Vegas for a road trip through the Southwest with her husband, Lewis, to whom the novel is addressed. Along the way, Eloise begins to believe she’s pregnant, while Lewis struggles with the fresh grief of losing his mother. As Watts told an interviewer of her process for The Inland Sea, “I wanted to write … about what it’s like to live in the experience of a changing climate that is not always a tangible part of your day-to-day but that’s already there – it’s in the air all around you.” Expect a similar treatment this go-round. Preorder it here.
Eric Puchner’s new novel, Dream State, is the story of two marriages set over 50 years. With the book opening in 2004, that naturally requires some speculation about the future — in this case, the future of “a rapidly warming Montana.” As The Indypendent writes in an early review, “The looming climate crisis — declining snowfall, depleted wildlife, raging seasonal wildfires, and abnormally warm temperatures — is writ large in the book, forming a blistering backdrop, highlighting newfound restrictions on what both residents and short-term visitors can now see and do in the area.” The novel has earned praise from Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson, who called it “a masterpiece,” as well as author Lynn Steger Strong, who has a climate book of her own on the list below. Preorder it here.
Four years ago, Argentinean author Agustina Bazterrica burst onto Americans’ radars with the English-language translation of her 2017 novel Tender Is the Flesh, a book that imagines a future in which animals have become toxic to humans, leading us to resort to industrialized cannibalism. (Critics have described it, vividly, as “splatterpunk.”) This year, Bazterrica turns her attention from factory farming to the climate catastrophe, telling the story of a member of a “Sacred Sisterhood” cloistered in a mysterious convent who is prompted to reflect on her life outside its walls when a new acolyte arrives. Don’t expect Bazterrica to soften her critiques of capitalism here, though it’s not all doom and gloom; early readers have said The Unworthy “ends on a light note of hope.” Preorder it here.
Charlotte McConaghy’s follow-up novel to her critically acclaimed 2020 debut, Migrations, is set on a fictional research island, Shearwater, located between Australia and Antarctica. Dominic Salt, the caretaker of the island’s seed vault, has called the refuge home for the past eight years — ever since fleeing Australia’s accelerating natural disasters, hoping to find a safer place to raise his three children. But with rising sea levels now threatening the island, Dominic and his family have just seven weeks left before they plan to move on. Just before their departure, Dominic’s oldest daughter discovers a woman who has shipwrecked on shore, and the tension — and mystery — starts to grow. Wild Dark Shore has earned a starred review from Kirkus, which calls it a “terrific thriller.” Preorder it here.
Climatologist, World Weather Attribution co-founder, and 2024 Trailblazing Women in Climate laureate Friederike Otto does not mince words about who is most impacted by extreme weather — and who needs to be involved in the solutions. “If we leave the issue of climate change to white men, it’ll continue to be treated as a physical problem with technological solutions,” she has said, adding, “The more diverse the people working on it, the closer we get to implementing these solutions and making progress on climate change.” Her new book, Climate Injustice, elaborates on her thesis further, using the stories of real people in the Global South to illustrate how exploitation, sexism, and colonialism have created a crisis with unequal impacts. Preorder it here.
Everyone who works in the climate space is familiar with the question posed in the title of this book. Entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy is one of the leading proponents of the native gardens movement, and in How Can I Help?, he answers a query implied in his own earlier book, 2009’s Bringing Nature Home: that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” How Can I Help? is structured to address some of the most common questions Tallamy encounters during his lectures about how individuals can become directors of their own miniature national parks at home. Despite the daunting challenge of biodiversity loss, Tallamy offers actionable ideas for helping the planet, with conservation beginning in your backyard. Preorder it here.
If I had to make one prediction for 2025, it’d be that we will hear a lot more about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — that is, the “forever chemicals” commonly known as PFAS. The chemicals are found in everything from our dental floss to our clothes, but perhaps most disturbingly, they’re also found in our drinking water. In Poisoning the Well, The Hill staff writers Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin follow how PFAS got into our environment in the first place — a story of corporate greed and cover-ups that will be familiar to anyone aware of the fossil fuel playbook. Preorder it here.
Journalist Malcolm Harris’ last book was an “encyclopedic,” 700-page history of the city of Palo Alto, which became a fixture of best-of-the-year lists after it came out last February. Hot on its heels is Harris’ follow-up, What’s Left (which slow readers will be relieved to hear is less of a time commitment, at 320 pages). Harris’ intention with his new work is to explore “our remaining options for saving the world,” all of which involve varying degrees of collective action but which escalate from “progressive” to “socialist” to “revolutionary.” It’s one that you can be sure will have people talking. Preorder it here.
Alan Weisman’s hugely successful 2007 book, The World Without Us, speculated about humanity’s legacy if we suddenly disappeared. (Slate named it in 2019 as one of the 50 best nonfiction books in the past quarter-century.) Now, Weisman turns his attention to helping us stick around. “I am working on a book with kind of a vast topic, which is what are humanity’s best and most realistic hopes for getting through this very difficult century that we have,” he told Bangladesh’s Business Standard in 2022, while visiting the country during the research stage of his new project, Hope Dies Last. Weisman’s book took him all over the world — including the Korean de-militarized zone, the Netherlands, and the Marshall Islands — as he looked to speak with people across disciplines and professions about how we can approach our future. Bill McKibben has described the result as “a nonfiction companion to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.” Preorder it here.
In 1999, 24-year-old environmentalist Terence Unity Freitas traveled to Colombia to support the Indigenous U’wa people in resisting Occidental Petroleum, which was interested in drilling to extract some 1.5 billion barrels of oil from beneath the cloud forest. During what was supposed to be a weeklong visit, Freitas was kidnapped by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (better known as FARC) along with two other Americans; their bodies were later found, bound and shot, just over the border in Venezuela. Twenty years later, Abby Reyes — the author of this memoir and Freitas’ partner at the time of his death — was recognized as a victim in Colombia’s truth and reconciliation process, resurfacing old griefs, reflections, and questions. “I bring the reader along in my demand for truth before the tribunal while awakening our collective awareness of what the truth demands of all of us in this era of ecological collapse and social transformation,” Reyes has said of her book. Preorder it here.
In Susanna Kwan’s debut novel, Awake in the Floating City, San Francisco is almost entirely underwater. Years of Biblical rain mean most people have already evacuated, but Bo — who lost her mother to the waters — lingers long past when sensible people have fled. Then one day, she receives a note from her neighbor, Mia, a 130-year-old woman who doesn’t want to leave the city, either; together, the two become the last people left in San Francisco. “What post-apocalyptic vision dares be so gorgeous?” marvels the author Meng Jin in one of the book’s early blurbs. Preorder it here.
Identical twin sister arborists teach the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop. While that sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, it’s the delightfully real-life starting point of journalist Marguerite Holloway’s Take to the Trees. “I was there to be in trees and to better understand them,” she writes of her attendance at the climbing workshop. “Trees and forests are facing existential threats because of climate change, but it can be a struggle to grasp the extent of the danger.” While not all of us have the time, ability, or inclination to take to such “gut-lurching” heights to learn more, we can read Take to the Trees, which records Holloway’s experience overcoming her fears and learning to appreciate the threat to American forests. Preorder it here.
Natural history is one of my favorite genres, and I’m especially excited for Sea of Grass by Minnesota Star Tribute journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty about one of the more neglected ecosystems of the genre: the American prairie. The grassland, which makes up a vast swath of the inner United States, is an incredible self-sustaining marvel — and nearly as biodiverse as a tropical rainforest. Yet many people today still either share European settlers’ disinterested view of the landscape or adopt a purely utilitarian one — which is why, after 200 years of plows, drainages, and nitrogen fertilizers, the effects have been “catastrophic.” Still, plenty of people who live on the prairie understand the importance of protecting such a special ecosystem, and Hage and Marcotty follow the effort to work alongside the land, not just against it. Sea of Grass earned a coveted blurb from McKibben, in which he calls the book “well worth the read.” Preorder it here.
We’ve been attempting to predict the weather for as long as humans have existed. Satellites, radars, and computers helped us make a significant leap forward from the days of farmer’s almanacs, but advances in artificial intelligence, drones, and the proliferation of home weather stations have created previously unimaginable opportunities for accuracy. (It’s a tech frontier we’ve covered quite a bit here at Heatmap, as well). In his book, Journalist Thomas E. Weber dives into the wild — and wildly important — world of forecasting, which will hit shelves just in time for hurricane season. Preorder it here.
Climate scientist and Shift Key guest Kate Marvel structured her highly anticipated first book around nine different emotional lenses for looking at climate change. That might seem like an odd angle for a scientist, since researchers are specifically taught not to bring emotion into their work. Still, she contends that just as there is no one way to feel about climate change, there is no one emotion we can tap to guide our response to it, either. From hope to pride to love, Marvel urges readers to get deep into their feels in Human Nature, which also touches on “Greek mythology,” “witches,” “geophysical fluid dynamics,” and “romantic comedies” — though according to Marvel, you won’t find “despair” in its pages. A 120,000-copy initial print run suggests the publisher, Ecco, believes this one will be a hit. Preorder it here.
Addressing climate change will require us to address how we eat, which accounts for a third of our carbon emissions. How to ameliorate that is one of the most significant questions we’re currently staring down as a species — and the topic of journalist and Heatmap contributor Michael Grunwald’s next book. Though the answers he finds might not always fit into our comfortable narratives — Grunwald recently ruffled feathers with a related piece for The New York Times defending industrial agriculture’s high yields on small parcels of land as our “best hope” — We Are Eating the Earth seems certain to reshape how its readers think about food, policy, and our thrice-daily consumptions. I can’t wait to be challenged by it. Preorder it here.
Science journalist Peter Brannen’s last book was about the five times life on our planet almost ended in mass extinctions. His follow-up, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, will zero in on the collection of molecules that have allowed life to exist in the first place. Of course, the great irony of carbon dioxide is that while it has made our planet habitable, fluctuations in its presence in the atmosphere are also responsible for things like almost killing our ancestors all off in an event known as the Great Dying — and now, of course, we have put our thumb on that scale. By looking backward, often by many millions of years, Brennen gives us a glimpse of our future. You’ll definitely want to preorder this book, if only because it will look great on the shelf next to Brennen’s other Eric Nyquist-designed cover. Preorder it here.
The Edge of Water, by Olufunke Grace Bankole (Feb. 4), a novel about a Nigerian immigrant to New Orleans whose destiny is shaped by a hurricane; Ends of the Earth Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future, by Neil Shubin (Feb. 4), about what we can learn about life and our future from our world’s most extreme landscapes; Dimming the Sun: The Urgent Case for Geoengineering, by Thomas Ramge (March 4), which makes the case for solar geoengineering to turn down the heat on a warming planet; Bad Nature, by Ariel Courage (April 1), an ecological disaster road-trip novel with a patricide plot; Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, by Tamara Dean (April 8), a memoir about living through the era of climate uncertainty; The Float Test, by Lynn Steger Strong (April 8), a family drama set against the backdrop of a sweltering Florida summer; Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy, by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (April 8), about the political reversal over nuclear’s place in the energy transition; Phytopolis: The Living City, by Stefano Mancuso (April 22), about how we can adapt our cities, greenly, to the challenges of the future; Carbon: The Book of Life, by Paul Hawken (March 18), about the element both responsible for life and perhaps the biggest threat against it; A Year of Compassion: 52 Weeks of Living Zero-Waste, Plant-Based, and Cruelty-Free, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau (March 25), about how to protect the planet with small acts of kindness from home; The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street, by Mike Tidwell (March 25), a chronicle of record year for climate change as seen on a single Washington, D.C., block; Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness, by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield (May 6), the story of one of the planet’s most critical features, co-authored by one of its most beloved natural historians; Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World, by Kieran Mulvaney (May 13), about what the age of Arctic exploration can reveal to us about the future of the pole; Hot Takes: Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change, by Sadie Babits (June 2), a handbook for incorporating climate science into your reporting.
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It’s not perfect, but pretty soon, it’ll be available for under $30,000.
Here’s what you need to know about the rejuvenated Chevrolet Bolt: It’s back, it’s better, and it starts at under $30,000.
Although the revived 2027 Bolt doesn’t officially hit the market until January 2026, GM revealed the new version of the iconic affordable EV at a Wednesday evening event at the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles. The assembled Bolt owners and media members drove the new cars past Amity Island from Jaws and around the Old West and New York sets that have served as the backdrops of so many television shows and movies. It was star treatment for a car that, like its predecessor, isn’t the fanciest EV around. But given the giveaway patches that read “Chevy Bolt: Back by popular demand,” it’s clear that GM heard the cries of people who missed having the plucky electric hatchback on the market.
The Bolt died at the height of its powers. The original Bolt EV and Bolt EUV sold in big numbers in the late 2010s and early 2020s, powered by a surprisingly affordable price compared to competitor EVs and an interior that didn’t feel cramped despite its size as a smallish hatchback. In 2023, the year Chevy stopped selling it, the Bolt was the third-best-selling EV in America after Tesla’s top two models.
Yet the original had a few major deficiencies that reflected the previous era of EVs. The most egregious of which was its charging speed that topped out at around 50 kilowatts. Given that today’s high-speed chargers can reach 250 to 350 kilowatts — and an even faster future could be on the way — the Bolt’s pit stops on a road trip were a slog that didn’t live up to its peppy name.
Thankfully, Chevy fixed it. Charging speed now reaches 150 kilowatts. While that figure isn’t anywhere near the 350 kilowatts that’s possible in something like the Hyundai Ioniq 9, it’s a threefold improvement for the Bolt that lets it go from 10% to 80% charged in a respectable 26 minutes. The engineers said they drove a quartet of the new cars down old Route 66 from the Kansas City area, where the Bolt is made, to Los Angeles to demonstrate that the EV was finally ready for such an adventure.
From the outside, the 2027 Bolt is virtually indistinguishable from the old car, but what’s inside is a welcome leap forward. New Bolt has a lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP battery that holds 65 kilowatt-hours of energy, but still delivers 255 miles of max range because of the EV’s relatively light weight. Whereas older EVs encourage drivers to stop refueling at around 80%, the LFP battery can be charged to 100% regularly without the worry of long-term damage to the battery.
The Bolt is GM’s first EV with the NACS charging standard, the former Tesla proprietary plug, which would allow the little Chevy to visit Tesla Superchargers without an adapter (though its port placement on the front of the driver’s side is backwards from the way older Supercharger stations are built). Now built on GM’s Ultium platform, the Bolt shares its 210-horsepower electric motor with the Chevy Equinox EV and gets vehicle-to-load capability, meaning you’ll be able to tap into its battery energy for other uses such as powering your home.
But it’s the price that’s the real wow factor. Bolt will launch with an RS version that gets the fancier visual accents and starts at $32,000. The Bolt LT that will be available a little later will eventually start as low as $28,995, a figure that includes the destination charge that’s typically slapped on top of a car’s price, to the tune of an extra $1,000 to $2,000 on delivery. Perhaps it’s no surprise that GM revealed this car just a week after the end of the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases (and just a day after Tesla announced its budget versions of the Model Y and Model 3). Bringing in a pretty decent EV at under $30,000 without the help of a big tax break is a pretty big deal.
The car is not without compromises. Plenty of Bolt fans are aghast that Chevy abandoned the Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations that worked with the first Bolt in favor of GM’s own built-in infotainment system as the only option. Although the new Bolt was based on the longer, “EUV” version of the original, this is still a pretty compact car without a ton of storage space behind the back seats. Still, for those who truly need a bigger vehicle, there’s the Chevy Equinox EV.
For as much time as I’ve spent clamoring for truly affordable EVs that could compete with entry-level gas cars on prices, the Bolt’s faults are minor. At $29,000 for an electric vehicle in the U.S., there is practically zero competition until the new Nissan Leaf arrives. The biggest threats to the Bolt are America’s aversion to small cars and the rapid rates of depreciation that could allow someone to buy a much larger, gently used EV for the price of the new Chevy. But the original Bolt found a steady footing among drivers who wanted that somewhat counter-cultural car — and this one is a lot better.
“Old economy” companies like Caterpillar and Williams are cashing in by selling smaller, less-efficient turbines to impatient developers.
From the perspective of the stock market, you’re either in the AI business or you’re not. If you build the large language models pushing out the frontiers of artificial intelligence, investors love it. If you rent out the chips the large language models train on, investors love it. If you supply the servers that go in the data centers that power the large language models, investors love it. And, of course, if you design the chips themselves, investors love it.
But companies far from the software and semiconductor industry are profiting from this boom as well. One example that’s caught the market’s fancy is Caterpillar, better known for its scale-defying mining and construction equipment, which has become a “secular winner” in the AI boom, writes Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal.
Typically construction businesses do well when the overall economy is doing well — that is, they don’t typically take off with a major technological shift like AI. Now, however, Caterpillar has joined the ranks of the “picks and shovels” businesses capitalizing on the AI boom thanks to its gas turbine business, which is helping power OpenAI’s Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas.
Just one link up the chain is another classic “old economy” business: Williams Companies, the natural gas infrastructure company that controls or has an interest in over 33,000 miles of pipeline and has been around in some form or another since the early 20th century.
Gas pipeline companies are not supposed to be particularly exciting, either. They build large-scale infrastructure. Their ratemaking is overseen by federal regulators. They pay dividends. The last gas pipeline company that got really into digital technology, well, uh, it was Enron.
But Williams’ shares are up around 28% in the past year — more than Caterpillar. That’s in part, due to its investing billions in powering data centers with behind the meter natural gas.
Last week, Williams announced that it would funnel over $3 billion into two data center projects, bringing its total investments in powering AI to $5 billion. This latest bet, the company said, is “to continue to deliver speed-to-market solutions in grid-constrained markets.”
If we stipulate that the turbines made by Caterpillar are powering the AI boom in a way analogous to the chips designed by Nvidia or AMD and fabricated by TSMC, then Williams, by developing behind the meter gas-fired power plants, is something more like a cloud computing provider or data center developer like CoreWeave, except that its facilities house gas turbines, not semiconductors.
The company has “seen the rapid emergence of the need for speed with respect to energy,” Williams Chief Executive Chad Zamarin said on an August earnings call.
And while Williams is not a traditional power plant developer or utility, it knows its way around natural gas. “We understand pipeline capacity,” Zamarin said on a May earnings call. “We obviously build a lot of pipeline and turbine facilities. And so, bringing all the different pieces together into a solution that is ready-made for a customer, I think, has been truly a differentiator.”
Williams is already behind the Socrates project for Meta in Ohio, described in a securities filing as a $1.6 billion project that will provide 400 megawatts of gas-fired power. That project has been “upsized” to $2 billion and 750 megawatts, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that “energy constraints” are a more pressing issue for artificial intelligence development than whether the marginal dollar invested is worth it. In other words, Zuckerberg expects to run out of energy before he runs out of projects that are worth pursuing.
That’s great news for anyone in the business of providing power to data centers quickly. The fact that developers seem to have found their answer in the Williamses and Caterpillars of the world, however, calls into question a key pillar of the renewable industry’s case for itself in a time of energy scarcity — that the fastest and cheapest way to get power for data centers is a mix of solar and batteries.
Just about every renewable developer or clean energy expert I’ve spoken to in the past year has pointed to renewables’ fast timeline and low cost to deploy compared to building new gas-fired, grid-scale generation as a reason why utilities and data centers should prefer them, even absent any concerns around greenhouse gas emissions.
“Renewables and battery storage are the lowest-cost form of power generation and capacity,” Next Era chief executive John Ketchum said on an April earnings call. “We can build these projects and get new electrons on the grid in 12 to 18 months.” Ketchum also said that the price of a gas-fired power plant had tripled, meanwhile lead times for turbines are stretching to the early 2030s.
The gas turbine shortage, however, is most severe for large turbines that are built into combined cycle systems for new power plants that serve the grid.
GE Vernova is discussing delivering turbines in 2029 and 2030. While one manufacturer of gas turbines, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has announced that it plans to expand its capacity, the industry overall remains capacity constrained.
But according to Morgan Stanley, Williams can set up behind the meter power plants in 18 months. xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis, which was initially powered by on-site gas turbines, went from signing a lease to training a large language model in about six months.
These behind the meter plants often rely on cheaper, smaller, simple cycle turbines, which generate electricity just from the burning of natural gas, compared to combined cycle systems, which use the waste heat from the gas turbines to run steam turbines and generate more energy. The GE Vernova 7HA combined cycle turbines that utility Duke Energy buys, for instance, range in output from 290 to 430 megawatts. The simple cycle turbines being placed in Ohio for the Meta data center range in output from about 14 megawatts to 23 megawatts.
Simple cycle turbines also tend to be less efficient than the large combined cycle system used for grid-scale natural gas, according to energy analysts at BloombergNEF. The BNEF analysts put the emissions difference at almost 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour for the single turbines, compared to just over 800 pounds for combined cycle.
Overall, Williams is under contract to install 6 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power, to be completed by the first half of 2027, Morgan Stanley analysts write. By comparison, a joint venture between GE Vernova, the independent power producer NRG, and the construction company Kiewit to develop combined cycle gas-fired power plants has a timeline that could stretch into 2032.
The Williams projects will pencil out on their own, the company says, but they have an obvious auxiliary benefit: more demand for natural gas.
Williams’ former chief executive, Alan Armstrong, told investors in a May earnings call that he was “encouraged” by the “indirect business we are seeing on our gas transmission systems,” i.e. how increased natural gas consumption benefits the company’s traditional pipeline business.
Wall Street has duly rewarded Williams for its aggressive moves.
Morgan Stanley analysts boosted their price target for the stock from $70 to $83 after last week’s $3 billion announcement, saying in a note to clients that the company has “shifted from an underappreciated value (impaired terminal value of existing assets) to underappreciated growth (accelerating project pipeline) story.” Mizuho Securities also boosted its price target from $67 to $72, with analyst Gabriel Moreen telling clients that Williams “continues to raise the bar on the scope and potential benefits.”
But at the same time, Moreen notes, “the announcement also likely enhances some investor skepticism around WMB pushing further into direct power generation and, to a lesser extent, prioritizing growth (and growth capex) at the expense of near-term free cash flow and balance sheet.”
In other words, the pipeline business is just like everyone else — torn between prudence in a time of vertiginous economic shifts and wanting to go all-in on the AI boom.
Williams seems to have decided on the latter. “We will be a big beneficiary of the fast rising data center power load,” Armstrong said.
On billions for clean energy, Orsted layoffs, and public housing heat pumps
Current conditions: A tropical rainstorm is forming in the Atlantic that’s forecast to barrel along the East Coast through early next week, threatening major coastal flooding and power outages • Hurricane Priscilla is weakening as it tracks northward toward California • The Caucasus region is sweltering in summer-like heat, with the nation of Georgia enduring temperatures of up to 93 degrees Fahrenheit in October.
Base Power, the Texas power company that leases batteries to homeowners and taps the energy for the grid, on Tuesday announced a $1 billion financing round. The Series C funding is set to supercharge the Austin-based company’s meteoric growth. Since starting just two years ago, Base has deployed more than 100 megawatts of residential battery capacity, making it one of the fastest growing distributed energy companies in the nation. The company now plans to build a factory in the old headquarters of the Austin American-Statesman, the leading daily newspaper in the Texan capital. The funding round included major investors who are increasing their stakes, including Valor Equity Partners, Thrive Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, and at least nine new venture capital investors, including Lowercarbon, Avenir, and Positive Sum. “The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation,” Zach Dell, chief executive and co-founder of Base Power, said in a statement. “The challenge ahead requires the best engineers and operators to solve it and we’re scaling the team to make our abundant energy future a reality.”
The deal came a day after Brookfield Asset Management, the Canadian-American private equity giant, raised a record $23.5 billion for its clean energy fund. At least $5 billion has already been spent on investments such as the renewable power operator Neoen, the energy developer Geronimo Power, and the Indian wind and solar giant Evren. “Energy demand is growing fast, driven by the growth of artificial intelligence as well as electrification in industry and transportation,” Connor Teskey, Brookfield’s president and renewable power chief, said in a press release. “Against this backdrop we need an ‘any and all’ approach to energy investment that will continue to favor low carbon resources.”
Orsted has been facing down headwinds for months. The Danish offshore wind giant has absorbed the Trump administration’s wrath as the White House deployed multiple federal agencies to thwart progress on building seaward turbines in the Northeastern U.S. Then lower-than-forecast winds this year dinged Orsted’s projected earnings for 2025. When the company issued new stock to fund its efforts to fight back against Trump, the energy giant was forced to sell the shares at a steep discount, as I wrote in this newsletter last month. Despite all that, the company has managed to raise the money it needed. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Orsted had raised $9.4 billion. Existing shareholders subscribed for 99.3% of the new shares on offer, but demand for the remaining shares was “extraordinarily high,” the company said.
That wasn’t enough to stave off job cuts. Early Thursday morning, the company announced plans to lay off 2,000 employees between now and 2027. The cuts represented roughly one-quarter of the company’s 8,000-person global workforce. “This is a necessary consequence of our decision to focus our business and the fact that we'll be finalizing our large construction portfolio in the coming years — which is why we'll need fewer employees,” Rasmus Errboe, Orsted’s chief executive, said in a statement published on CNBC. "At the same time, we want to create a more efficient and flexible organization and a more competitive Orsted, ready to bid on new value-accretive offshore wind projects.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom. Mario Tama/Getty Images
California operates the world’s largest geothermal power station, The Geysers, and generates up to 5% of its power from the Earth’s heat. But the state is far behind its neighbors on developing new plants based on next-generation technology. Most of the startups racing to commercialize novel methods are headquartered or building pilot plants in states such as Utah, Nevada, and Texas. A pair of bills to make doing business in California easier for geothermal companies was supposed to change that. Yet while Governor Gavin Newsom signed one statute into law that makes it easier for state regulators to certify geothermal plants, he vetoed a permitting reform bill to which the industry had pegged its hopes. “Every geothermal developer and energy org I talked to was excited about this bill,” Thomas Hochman, who heads the energy program at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, wrote in a post on X. “The legislature did everything right, passing it unanimously. They even reworked it to accommodate certain classic California concerns, such as prevailing wage requirements.”
In a letter announcing his veto, the governor claimed that the law would have added new fees for geothermal projects. But an executive at Zanskar — the startup that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last month, is using new technology to locate and tap into conventional geothermal resources — called the governor’s argument “weak sauce.” Far from burdening the industry, Zanskar co-founder Joel Edwards said on X, “this was a clean shot to accelerate geothermal today, and he whiffed it.”
Last month, Generate Capital trumpeted the appointment of its first new chief executive in its 11-year history as the leading infrastructure investment firm sought to realign its approach to survive a tumultuous time in clean-energy financing. Less publicly, as Katie wrote in a scoop last night, it also kicked off company-wide job cuts. In an interview with Katie, Jonah Goldman, the firm’s head of external affairs, said the company “grew quickly and made some mistakes,” and now planned to lay off 50 people.
Generate once invested in “leading-edge technologies,” according to co-founder Jigar Shah, who left the firm to serve as the head of the Biden-era DOE Loan Programs Office. That included investments in projects involving fuel cells, anaerobic digesters, and battery storage. But from the outside, he said on the Open Circuits podcast he now co-hosts, the firm appears to have moved away from taking these riskier but potentially more lucrative bets. “They ended up with 38 people in their capital markets team, and their capital markets team went out to the marketplace and said, Hey, we have all this stuff to sell. And the people that they went to said, Well, that’s interesting, but what we really would love is boring community solar.”
Three of New England’s largest public housing agencies signed deals with the heat pump manufacturer Gradient to replace aging electric heaters and air conditioners with the company’s 120-volt, two-way units that provide both heating and cooling. The Boston Housing Authority, New England’s largest public housing agency, will kick off the deal by installing 100 all-weather, two-way units that both heat and cool at the Hassan Apartments, a complex for seniors and adults with disabilities in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. The housing authorities in neighboring Chelsea and Lynn — two formerly industrial, working-class cities just outside Boston — will follow the same approach.
Public housing agencies have long served a vital role in helping to popularize new, more efficient appliances. The New York City Housing Authority, for example, is credited with creating the market for efficient mini fridges in the 1990s. Last year, NYCHA — the nation’s largest public housing system — signed a similar deal with Gradient for heat pumps. Months later, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo exclusively reported at the time, NYCHA picked a winner in its $32 million contest for an efficient new induction stove for its apartments.
Three chemists — Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi — won the Nobel Prize for “groundbreaking discoveries” that "may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges, from pollution to water scarcity.” Just a few grams of the so-called molecular organic frameworks the scientists pioneered could have as much surface area as a soccer field, which can be used to lock gas molecules in place in carbon capture or harvest freshwater from the atmosphere.