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For every level of laundry needs.
Americans love laundry. Of the common household chores, it is
by far the most popular — and the most energy-intensive. Washing and drying a load of laundry every two days for a year generates roughly the same emissions as driving from Chicago to New York and back again in a gasoline-powered passenger vehicle. Nearly three-quarters of those emissions come from drying alone; meanwhile, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average washing machine generates up to 8% of a home’s total energy use. The whole process can cost up to $150 per year in electricity alone, depending on where you live and the frequency of your washes.
With some regulatory prodding, manufacturers have tried to improve water and energy efficiency in new appliances and have rolled out fancy new features like “smart” water-level sensors, vibration reduction technologies, and microfiber-catching filters. But not every house — or budget — has room for the latest and greatest technologies, and systems that would work well in an airy Los Angeles laundry room might make less sense in a drafty apartment in Minnesota.
Heatmap is here to remove some of the guesswork from upgrading one of your home’s most-used appliances. Here is our expert panel’s insight into when and how to purchase a new washer and dryer for your home.
Joanna Mauer is the deputy director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a non-profit advocacy group pushing for stricter energy efficiency legislation. In her role at ASAP, Mauer works with the Department of Energy on its efficiency rules for residential appliances. She has previously worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Center for Integrative Environmental Research.
Amber McDaniel is the head of content at Sustainable Jungle, a website and podcast that publishes tips, tricks, and product reviews, including for major household appliances, with a focus on environmentally friendly solutions.
Scott Flint is a licensed California appliance tech with 30 years of experience. He is known as the Fix-It Guy on his YouTube channel, where he promotes the upkeep and repair of home appliances to extend their use. He has also written extensively about washers and dryers for publications such as The Family Handyman, Taste Of Home, and Earth911.
Peruse the latest washers and dryers and you’ll see features like sensors that adjust the water level to match the load of laundry, voice-activated start buttons, WiFi-enabled push notifications for when it’s time to move a load to the dryer, and more. And while there are environmentally friendly upsides to some of these features, “the more simple the machine, the less likely that things will fail,” Flint told me. In his experience repairing hundreds of washers and dryers over the years, “People save money on their initial purchase and the machine is going to last longer if you can minimize the features.”
The Energy Star certification is a great starting point in your shopping journey. But it shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all of your research. Energy Star represents a range of efficiency standards from different brands, with only the top models earning a “ Most Efficient” distinction.
You’ll still want to read reviews to get a better understanding of the reliability of the products you’re looking at, too. Though many new features on the market promise water and energy savings, they’re harder to repair yourself, meaning any potential fixes can get expensive. They can also have shorter lifespans than simpler models.
Eco-friendly washers and dryers are great for a whole laundry list (get it?) of reasons: They lower your household energy bill, they reduce emissions, they reduce wasted water, they’re often easier to install, and they can be gentler on your clothes. But they don’t necessarily save you time. Energy-efficient electric dryers can take up to twice as long to dry your clothes than traditional gas dryers. Still, all of our expert panelists agreed the upsides outweigh the drawbacks.
Yes, this is a buying guide for purchasing a new washer and dryer. But before you spend money on new appliances, you should consider working with what you already have.
If you’re dealing with an old or sub-optimally functional machine and wondering whether now is the time to upgrade, repairing your existing washer or dryer can actually be a smarter and thriftier solution; in fact, Consumer Reportsonly recommends replacing a dryer if it’s over 10 years old, electric, and cost less than $700 when you initially purchased it. Often, whatever’s going on doesn’t even require a professional to fix. “I think only rarely — let’s say about 20% of the time — would most people need to call in a technician,” Flint told me. Most washer and dryer problems are something you can fix using “normal household tools.” (More on that later.)
Keep in mind, even if you have an old washer or dryer that isn’t very energy efficient, “that’s still not even going to come close to touching the amount of energy that was used to produce and ship a new machine,” McDaniel told me. When your washer or dryer “actually fully stops working and it’s not doing what you need it to do — that’s when it’s time to upgrade.”
Typically, 1.5 to 3.4 cubic feet of capacity is suitable for a one- to two-person household, 3.5 to 4.4 cubic feet will do for two to three people, and 4.5 or more cubic feet will serve a household with more than three people. But having a new baby or pets might mean you do more loads of laundry than an average household, in which case sizing up is better.
Flint told me a common mistake he sees people make is overloading their washing machines, which can destroy an appliance’s rear bearing — the part of the machine that helps the drum rotate smoothly — a repair that is often so costly, it can make more sense to junk the whole machine. On the other hand, running small loads in a large-capacity washing machine can mean wasting water cleaning not-as-many clothes. Consider what washing machine would make the most sense for your needs to maximize efficiency.
Energy and water efficiency are two of the most common considerations when buying a washer and dryer, and are the primary focus of this guide. Some consumers may have additional concerns — McDaniel, for example, recommended looking for a Restriction of Hazardous Substances certification, which signals that an appliance complies with limits on heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Ethical considerations — including a manufacturer’s contributions to armed conflicts, labor practices, and sourcing of conflict minerals — are also worth close inspection. Ethical Consumer offers an excellent guide for finding a brand that best aligns with your values.
“The first thing that we always recommend is: If you need something new, try to go refurbished,” McDaniel told me. Still, there’s a right way and a wrong way to make a major second-hand purchase. McDaniel suggested going through a reputable source that offers a warranty, such as Best Buy (when searching online, make sure to filters for “Energy Star” and “open box” and check the product’s condition).
If you prefer the security of a new product, then it’s time to familiarize yourself with the Energy Star website. You can sort by Energy Star Most Efficient, which are the best of the best, as well as by price, brand, volume, front-load vs. top-load, vented, ventless, heat pump, gas, electric, and more. Energy Star also makes it easy to compare the specs of different products (just tick the “compare” box next to the machines you’re looking at, then scroll to the top to hit the orange “compare” button when you’re ready).
Dryers are the biggest energy suck in most homes, using two to four times as much energy as new washers and nearly twice as much as new refrigerators. McDaniel told me they are also responsible for the greatest wear and tear on clothes. Dryers are an especially American phenomenon; while more than 80% of households in the U.S. own a dryer, just 30% of European households do. That is to say, you probably don’t actually need one, and if you need to save money or space in your laundry routine, this would be the best place to look to make a cut.
“Not relying on a dryer is huge. I only use mine in the wintertime, and in the summer, I line dry my clothes — and the only reason I don’t do that in the winter is I literally don’t have the space inside,” McDaniel said.
Traditional vented dryers — the energy guzzlers of the American home — aren’t the only option anymore, though. The next best thing to a clothesline is a heat pump dryer, which Mauer told me is the “most efficient clothes dryer on the market today,” often far exceeding the Energy Star requirements. Heat pump dryers have a lower maximum temperature, though, so you don’t get that hot-out-of-the-dryer feel when the load is finished. It can also take an hour or more to dry a load of laundry fully. The bright side: Because the heat is lower, heat pump dryers are much gentler on your clothes.
“A big red flag for us is brands that don’t warranty their products in any capacity,” McDaniel told me. Buying a washer or dryer that is durable is important — Flint told me you should expect to get at least a decade of use out of a washer and dryer with proper maintenance and minor repairs — and a warranty is evidence that a company is building a product that they trust to last.
The Electrolux ELFW7637AT has one of the highest energy- and water-efficiency ratings of any washing machine on the market in 2024, with an IMEF of 3.2 and an integrated water factor of 2.6 — both of which are exceptional even by Energy Star’s standards. It also works. Reviewers have lauded its SmartBoost stain removal technology, its internal water heater, and its straightforward controls, although its 85-minute cycle time is a little longer than many other washers on the market.
Both Flint and McDaniel spoke highly of the German brand Miele, which makes this compact washing machine. Though its capacity is about half that of the Electrolux and it didn’t earn Energy Star’s highest level of certification (it has an IMEF of 2.9 and a IWF of 3.2), it is one of the more reliable and best-reviewed washers on the market.
Admittedly, you have to pay for that kind of dependability — Miele is a high-end brand with a sticker price that reflects it. The WXI860 gets high marks for its cleaning ability, including fill-and-forget auto-dispensing features, and boasts 72% lower energy consumption than conventional washers. Additionally, Miele has “a honeycomb-drum technology, so that when it puts the clothes in the spin cycle, it creates a thin film of water between the drum wall and the laundry,” McDaniel told me, which helps prevent clothing fibers from getting caught. “Little features like that that help keep our clothes in circulation for longer are also more sustainable.”
Mauer swears by heat pump dryers, and there are a number of good choices on the market right now. Beko is a favorite of the Sustainable Jungle team, in part because it has a filtration system to stop microplastics from synthetic fabrics from entering the waterways, as well as the company’s ambitious commitments to low-waste and recycled materials. This ventless Beko heat pump dryer is tiny but mighty, making it a great fit for small spaces (it can even fit under the kitchen counter), and it boasts a 2023 “Most Efficient” rating from Energy Star.
Being a heat pump dryer, though, it can take a while to dry clothes — one tester found it took 227 minutes to dry a large, bulky load to 100% — but plan ahead and Beko can give you major savings in the long run. Or, if the Beko isn’t quite what you’re looking for, check out Miele, which makes its own well-reviewed heat pump dryer (although it is small and pricy).
If a heat-pump dryer isn’t right for your lifestyle, the Electrolux ELFE7637AT is one of the more impressive electric dryers on the market right now, earning the Energy Star seal of approval. While it still isn’t super fast (fast takes a lot of heat, which takes a lot of energy, which makes a machine less efficient), reviewers say it can get a large load to 100% dry in 60 minutes if need be. It’s also the best-rated electric dryer on Consumer Reports’ list that isn’t one of the Samsung, LG, or GE models that Flint frequently gets called out to fix.
This combo washer-dryer uses heat pump technology in its dryer, making it one of the more energy-efficient single-unit models on the market. Unlike some of the other options on this list, however, its larger 4.8 cubic foot drum size is big enough for a two- or three-person household. While combo washer/dryers still have some downsides over their two-piece counterparts, including decreased efficiency in cleaning and especially drying, this is one of the better-reviewed units on the market.
Flint told me that you can often find older Kenmore Whirlpool series 80 machines on Craigslist that are “ really good, and tend to sell for about $250 when refurbished, and often come with a one-year warranty.” The only detriment, he said, is that they’re top-loaders — which waste a lot of water — but “if somebody just really needs a tough machine that is going to last, that was a really good design.”
Congratulations! You’re now the proud owner of a new washer and dryer. What happens now?
New washers and dryers are unfortunately not designed with longevity in mind — but that doesn’t mean you need to replace them if something goes wrong after four or five years.
“I can go up to a washing machine that is sitting in the dump, and I can open up the door, and I can spin the spin basket, and I can tell that it’s a perfectly good machine,” Flint told me.
Flint estimates that only about 20% of the time do people actually need to call in a technician to repair their appliances, pointing to fixes like replacing a blown fuse, unsticking a front-load washer that won’t spin, and swapping out a moldy washer door gasket as deceptively simple tasks. Get acquainted with DIY YouTube channels like Flint’s or repair blogs that explain solutions to common problems.
Still, sometimes you need to call in the big guns. In that case, Flint recommends doing your due diligence on a review service like Yelp beforehand.
Once you find someone you like, reach out with the model number of your machine and the symptom you’re experiencing and the technician “should be able to provide you a quote without coming out if they know what they’re doing,” Flint said. If someone does have to come out to figure out what’s going on, then that visit should be free. “Don’t go with someone who’s going to charge you to come out and diagnose the problem and then charge you to fix it.” Repairs to a front-loading washer will probably run around $170, according to Consumer Reports.
You can extend the life of your washer or dryer by following a few more rules of thumb.
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On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”
The Environment and Public Works Committee largely preserved the cuts made by the House, with one odd exception.
The Senate GOP began working through Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill this week, and at least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House.
Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of the bill on Wednesday evening, and it retains many of the policy repeals and funding rescissions that were in the House version.
To be clear, it does not touch the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, the most controversial climate-related parts of the package. Their fate will be up to the Senate Finance Committee, which is not expected to release text for its section of the bill until at least next week. There has been no indication that Republicans in the upper chamber intend to fight for any of the myriad grant programs the IRA created.
Still, I’m looking closely to see if some of it might yet be saved. For example, there is, oddly, one Environmental Protection Agency grant program targeted by the House bill that is absent from this first text from the Environment and Public Works Committee: $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Here’s what is in the text.
The text published Wednesday would repeal and rescind funding for more than two dozen programs, most of which are administered by the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the General Services Administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the now-infamous lending program for clean energy projects targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a wasteful, fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Biden administration, is still on the out list. Same goes for funding for oil and gas producers to reduce their methane emissions, plus a related fee that would be levied on operators who did not reduce methane leakage below a certain threshold.
The full list of cuts:
The text would also rescind two new pots of money that were not touched by the House bill — funding for Endangered Species Act recovery plans, strategies developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help threatened species thrive again, and general funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to train staff, do environmental reviews, and improve stakeholder and community engagement.
Like the House bill, the Senate committee’s text includes instructions to repeal the latest update to the nation’s tailpipe emissions standards for cars. The regulations are required under the Clean Air Act and were strengthened under the Biden administration for model years 2027 through 2032, requiring automakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles over time.
It would not, however, repeal the latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (also known as the CAFE standards), which regulate how far a vehicle must be able to travel on a gallon of fuel and were targeted by the House bill.
This provision is one I’ll be watching closely, as Democrats are likely to challenge its inclusion. If Republicans want to pass the budget bill with a simple majority, they can only include policies that affect the federal budget, and as the Environmental Defense Fund told me, these standards are “regulations, not budgetary provisions.”
The text proposes the same pay-to-play permitting scheme that was in the House bill and would allow energy infrastructure developers to pay for expedited permitting. Like the House bill, it also asserts that environmental assessments made under this program “shall not be subject to judicial review.”
Coming up, we’ll be on the lookout for a text from the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which will reveal whether Senate Republicans have any interest in saving the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, administered by the Loan Programs Office, which provides essential support for the nuclear industry.
Meta’s deal with Constellation is a full circle moment for an Illinois nuclear plant.
America’s nuclear fleet remains its largest source of emissions-free power. America’s biggest technology companies are its largest voluntary buyers of emissions-free power. Only in the past few years have these two facts managed to mingle with each other.
The latest tech nuclear deal is in Central Illinois; Meta on Tuesday unveiled a 20-year power purchase agreement for the electricity produced by the Clinton Clean Energy Center, an 1,100-megawatt nuclear plant run by Constellation Energy. The deal will “guarantee that Clinton will continue to run for another two decades,” Constellation said in its announcement. The deal allows the company to look at extending its existing early site permit for a new plant, the announcement said — or apply for a new one to “pursue development of an advanced nuclear reactor or small modular reactor,” although it made no specific development commitments.
While neither Meta nor Constellation disclosed the value of the deal, Mark Nelson, founder of Radiant Energy Group, estimated that it would cost around $17 billion, of which between $7 billion to $9 billion would be profit for Constellation, enough to fund the building of a new plant. Either way, the announcement represents the “first time a nuclear customer is proposing another nuclear reactor in the state,” Nelson told me.
These types of deals are not exactly novel anymore (Microsoft struck a deal with Constellation last year to resurrect Three Mile Island), but they demonstrate a shift in mindset among tech companies, which are finally showing some respect for the emissions benefits of nuclear energy — albeit about a decade late.
The 2010s were a dark time for the nuclear industry. Cheap natural gas threatened the economic viability of aging plants, while the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan combined with rising enthusiasm for renewable power had left the industry politically isolated. Between 2012 and 2022, 12 nuclear reactors closed in the U.S. Those 12 plants represented over 9,000 megawatts of capacity, about a 10th of the total capacity of the American nuclear fleet.
Nuclear plants suffered most in “restructured” electricity markets like Illinois’, where utilities generally purchase power from independent power producers. In these markets, power that’s cheap on an hourly basis, i.e. renewables and natural gas, sets the price for the whole system, which can disadvantage nuclear power.
At the same time, big technology companies were ramping up purchases of low-carbon power — typically wind and solar — with Google doing its first power purchase agreement in 2010. Many state and federal programs to support alternative energy usage were aimed at wind and solar, i.e. were no help to struggling nuclear generators. Environmental groups were largely either indifferent or outright opposed to nuclear power.
Eventually states had to do what the market couldn’t and big tech wouldn’t and step in and keep plants alive. A broader Illinois clean energy law from 2016 included a program to support nuclear power plants by paying for what the market had historically ignored: the fact that their electricity is generated without carbon dioxide emissions. The zero emission credits were part of a larger climate law that provided 10 years of support for downstate nuclear plants. The Illinois bill followed on similar efforts in New York to keep upstate plants open.
(The push and pull between the economic and environmental concerns on both sides of the nuclear argument also led to some bizarre political inversions: At the same time New York was working to keep the upstate plants open, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo joined with Riverkeeper, the environmental group long associated with Cuomo’s ex-brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to close the Indian Point nuclear plant closer to New York City.)
Environmental groups supported the New York and Illinois clean energy programs, but they were at best cool to the nuclear provisions, illustrating the political hole nuclear power plants had fallen into. Touting the pollution benefits of the Illinois law, the Natural Resources Defense Council claimed that “nuclear energy does not represent a clean energy resource.” In New York, the NRDC filed a brief supporting the state’s legal authority to set up a zero emission credit system — “not because it supports the nuclear support program,” but rather because it supported the broader principle of paying for zero-emissions attributes.
The Environmental Defense Fund likewise supported the Illinois law, but with assurances that the nuclear credits “only represents a small fraction of the more-than-500-page bill.” The Union for Concerned Scientists hailed the bill but also made clear that it was “much more than a nuclear subsidy.”
The balance changed in earnest with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included generous subsidies for new and existing nuclear power, reflecting both its lack of emissions and the industry’s longstanding sway in Washington. Then tech companies’ demand for energy started to climb with the advent of large language models and the immense power needed to train and operate them.
Energy policy experts at the big tech companies were also rethinking how best to decarbonize their operations. They had “run out of baseload,” Nelson told me, referring to always-on power sources as opposed to intermittent sources like wind and solar, and so would need to start supporting options like nuclear in order to truly decarbonize. With the arrival of a new breed of artificial intelligence, Nelson said, these companies realized that they were, in fact, industrial electricity purchasers and would have to act like it.
The past year has seen a flurry of big tech and nuclear tie-ups.
Amazon acquired a data center adjacent to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in March, 2024, although the company’s subsequent efforts to use it as a “behind the meter” power source soon faced regulatory opposition. Google, along with Microsoft and Nucor, announced a plan to work together to buy and advance the development of non-carbon-emitting power, including nuclear. Microsoft announced its Three Mile Island deal later last year, while Amazon started investing in small modular reactors and Google said it would buy power from plants built by the advanced nuclear company Kairos. And in December, Meta released a request for proposals for nuclear energy developers to deliver at least 1 gigawatt and up to 4 gigawatts of clean power by “the early 2030s,” which the company said today it was “still advancing.”
Meta’s deal for the Clinton nuclear plant will essentially replace the Illinois emissions credit program, which runs out in 2027. The announcement of the deal also reflects the volatile and confusing politics of clean power in 2025. While Republicans in Congress are looking to slash the Inflation Reduction Act and its support for clean power investment and production, the House budget reconciliation bill included carve-outs for advanced nuclear power. The Trump administration has also signed a fleet of executive orders looking to streamline nuclear power regulations and encourage new nuclear development, reflecting the high esteem the industry has with the Republican Party despite its lack of interest (at best) in climate change policies, per se.
When Constellation announced the Three Mile Island project less than a year ago, it included a quote from a Biden Energy Department official, as well as a line about how “renewed interest in nuclear energy has spread globally as nations seek to electrify their economies to support the digital economy and address the climate crisis.” This time, Constellation included quotes from Clinton, Illinois’s mayor, as well as three legislators who represent the area, all Republicans, and a local union official. It also mentions climate change zero times, although it does describe the electricity generated by the plant as “emissions free.” (Meta’s release also doesn’t mention climate change specifically.)