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The Block Island Wind Farm, North America's first offshore turbines.John Moore/Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s Day One executive order directing agencies to stop approving permitting for wind energy projects is illegal, a federal judge ruled Monday evening. In a 47-page ruling against the president in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Judge Patti B. Saris found that the states led by New York who sued the White House had “produced ample evidence demonstrating that they face ongoing or imminent injuries due to the Wind Order,” including project delays that “reduce or defer tax revenue and returns on the State Plaintiffs’ investments in wind energy developments.” The judge vacated the order entirely.
Trump’s “total war on wind” may have shocked the industry with its fury, but the ruling is a sign that momentum may be shifting. Wind developers have gathered unusual allies. As I wrote here in October, big oil companies balked at Trump’s treatment of the wind industry, warning the precedents Republican leaders set would be used by Democrats against fossil fuels in the future. Just last week, as I reported here, the National Petroleum Council advised the Department of Energy to back a national permitting reform proposal that would strip the White House of the power to rescind already-granted licenses.
Back in October, I told you about how the head of the world’s biggest metal trading house warned that the West was getting the critical mineral problem wrong, focusing too much on mining and not enough on refining. Now the Energy Department is making $134 million available to projects that demonstrate commercially viable ways of recovering and refining rare earths from mining waste, old electronics, and other discarded materials, Utility Dive reported. “We have these resources here at home, but years of complacency ceded America’s mining and industrial base to other nations,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement.
If you read yesterday’s newsletter, you may recall that the move comes as the Trump administration signals its plans to take more equity stakes in mining companies, following on the quasi-nationalization spree started over the summer when the U.S. military became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, the country’s only active rare earths miner, in a move Heatmap's Matthew Zeitlin noted made Biden-era officials jealous.
NextEra Energy is planning to develop data centers across the U.S. for Google-owner Alphabet as the utility giant pivots from its status as the nation’s biggest renewable power developer to the natural gas preferred by the Trump administration. The Florida-based company already had a deal to provide 2.5 gigawatts of clean energy capacity to Facebook-owner Meta Platforms, and also plans gas plants for oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. and gas producer Comstock Resources. Still, NextEra’s stock dropped by more than 3% as investors questioned whether the company’s skills with solar and wind can be translated to gas. “They’ve been top-notch, best-in-class renewable developers,” Morningstar analyst Andy Bischof told Bloomberg. “Now investors have to get their head around whether that can translate to best-in-class gas developer.”
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In October, Google backed construction of the first U.S. commercial installation of a gas plant built from the ground up with carbon capture. The project, which Matthew wrote about here, had the trappings to work where other experiments in carbon capture failed. The location selected for the plant already had an ethanol facility with carbon capture, and access to wells to store the sequestered gas. Now the U.S. could have another plant. In a press release Monday, the industrial giant Babcock and Wilcox announced a deal with an unnamed company to supply carbon capture equipment to an existing U.S. power station. More details are due out in March 2026.
Executives from at least 14 fusion energy startups met with the Energy Department on Monday as the agency looks to spur construction of what could be the world’s first power plants to harness the reaction that powers the sun. The Trump administration has made fusion a priority, issuing a roadmap for commercialization and devoting a new office to the energy source, as I wrote in a breakdown of the agency’s internal reorganization last month. It is, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has written, “finally, possibly, almost time for fusion” as billions of dollars flow into startups promising to make the so-called energy source of tomorrow a reality in the near future. “It is now time to make an investment in resources to match the nation’s ambition,” the Fusion Industry Association, the trade group representing the nascent industry, wrote in a press release. “China and other strategic competitors are mobilizing billions to develop the technology and capture the fusion future. The United States has invested in fusion R&D for decades; now is the time to complete the final step to commercialize the technology.” Indeed, as I wrote last month, China has forged an alliance with roughly a dozen countries to work together on fusion, and it’s spending orders of magnitude more cash on the energy source than the U.S.
Founded by a former Google worker, the startup Quilt set out to design chic-looking heat pumps sexy enough to serve as decor. Investors like the pitch. The company closed a $20 million Series B round on Monday, bringing its total fundraising to $64 million. “Our growth demonstrates that when you solve for comfort, design, and efficiency simultaneously, adoption accelerates,” Paul Lambert, chief executive and co-founder of Quilt, said in a statement. “This funding enables us to bring that experience to millions more North American homes.”
EPA chief Lee Zeldin, on the far right, eyes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the health secretary, to the right of President Trump. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The “Make America Healthy Again” wing of President Donald Trump’s political coalition is urging the White House to fire Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin over his decisions to deregulate harmful chemicals. In a petition circulated online, several prominent activists aligned with the administration’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., accused Zeldin of having “prioritized the interests of chemical corporations over the well-being of American families and children.” As of early Friday afternoon, The New York Times reported, more than 2,800 people had signed the petition. By Sunday afternoon, the figure was nearly 6,000. The organizers behind the petition include Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer known as the Food Babe to her 2.3 million Instagram followers, and Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA activist who hosts what the Times called “a health and wellness podcast popular among conservatives.”
The intraparty conflict comes as one of Zeldin’s more controversial rollbacks of a Biden-era pollution rule, a regulation that curbs public exposure to soot, is facing significant legal challenges. A lawyer told E&E News the EPA’s case is a “Hail Mary pass.”
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, by far the world’s largest source of cobalt, has slapped new export restrictions on the bluish metal needed for batteries and other modern electronics. As much as 80% of the global supply of cobalt comes from the DRC, where mines are notorious for poor working conditions, including slavery and child labor. Under new rules for cobalt exporters spelled out in a government document Reuters obtained, miners would need to pre-pay a 10% royalty within 48 hours of receiving an invoice and secure a compliance certificate. The rules come a month after Kinshasa ended a months-long export ban by implementing a quota system aimed at boosting state revenues and tightening oversight over the nation’s fast-growing mining industry. The establishment of the rules could signal increased exports again, but also suggests that business conditions are changing in the country in ways that could further complicate mining.
With Chinese companies controlling the vast majority of the DRC’s cobalt mines, the U.S. is looking to onshore more of the supply chain for the critical mineral. Among the federal investments is one I profiled for Heatmap: an Ohio startup promising to refine cobalt and other metals with a novel processing method. That company, Xerion, received funding from the Defense Logistics Agency, yet another funding office housed under the U.S. military.
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Last month, I told you about China’s outreach to the rest of the world, including Western European countries, to work together on nuclear fusion. The U.S. cut off cooperation with China on traditional atomic energy back in 2017. But France is taking a different approach. During a state visit to Beijing last week, French President Emmanuel Macron “failed to win concessions” from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, France24 noted. But Paris and Beijing agreed to a new “pragmatic cooperation” deal on nuclear power. France’s state-owned utility giant EDF already built a pair of its leading reactors in China.
The U.S. has steadily pushed the French out of deals within the democratic world. Washington famously muscled in on a submarine deal, persuading Australia to drop its deal with France and go instead with American nuclear vessels. Around the same time, Poland — by far the biggest country in Europe to attempt to build its first nuclear power plant — gave the American nuclear company Westinghouse the contract in a loss for France’s EDF. Working with China, which is building more reactors at a faster rate than any other country, could give France a leg up over the U.S. in the race to design and deploy new reactors.
It’s not just the U.S. backpedaling on climate pledges and extending operations of coal plants set to shut down. In smog-choked Indonesia, which ranks seventh in the world for emissions, a coal-fired plant that Bloomberg described as a “flagship” for the country’s phaseout of coal has, rather than shut down early, applied to stay open longer.
Nor is the problem reserved to countries with right-wing governance. The new energy plan Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a liberal, is pursuing in a bid to leverage the country’s fossil fuel riches over an increasingly pushy Trump means there’s “no way” Ottawa can meet its climate goals. As I wrote last week, the Carney government is considering a new pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast to increase oil and gas sales to Asia.
There’s a new sheriff in town in the state at the center of the data center boom. Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect Ghazala Hasmi said Thursday that the incoming administration would work to shift policy toward having data centers “pay their fair share” by supplying their own energy and paying to put more clean power on the grid, Utility Dive reported. “We have the tools today. We’ve got the skilled and talented workforce. We have a policy roadmap as well, and what we need now is the political will,” Hashmi said. “There is new energy in this legislature, and with it a real opportunity to build new energy right here in the Commonwealth.”
