Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Current conditions: Warm air headed northward up the East Coast is set to collide with cold air headed southward over the Great Lakes and Northeast, bringing snowfall followed by higher temperatures later in the week • A cold front is stirring up a dense fog in northwest India • Unusually frigid Arctic air in Europe is causing temperatures across northwest Africa to plunge to double-digit degrees below seasonal norms, with Algiers at just over 50 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
A chart showing average monthly spot prices for Brent crude oil throughout 2025.EIA
Oil prices largely fell throughout 2025, capping off December at their lowest level all year. Spot market prices for Brent crude, the leading global benchmark for oil, dropped to $63 per barrel last month. The reason, according to the latest analysis of the full year by the Energy Information Administration, is oversupply in the market. China’s push to fill its storage tanks kept prices from declining further. Israel’s June 13 strikes on Iran and attacks on oil infrastructure between Russia and Ukraine briefly raised prices throughout the year. But the year-end average price still came in at $69 per barrel, the lowest since 2020, even when adjusted for inflation.
A chart showing average annual spot prices for Brent crude oil throughout from 2020 to 2025.EIA
The price drop bodes poorly for reviving Venezuela’s oil industry in the wake of the U.S. raid on Caracas and arrest of the South American country’s President Nicolás Maduro. At such low levels, investments in new infrastructure are difficult to justify. “This is a moment where there’s oversupply,” oil analyst Rory Johnston told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin yesterday. “Prices are down. It’s not the moment that you’re like, I’m going to go on a lark and invest in Venezuela.”
The Energy Department granted a Texas company known for recycling defunct tools from oil and gas drilling an $11.5 million grant to fund an expansion of its existing facility in a rural county between San Antonio and Dallas. The company, Amermin, said the funding will allow it to increase its output of tungsten carbide by 300%, “reducing our reliance on foreign nations like China, which produces 83%” of the world’s supply of the metal used in all kinds of defense, energy, and hardware applications. “Our country cannot afford to rely on our adversaries for the resources that power our energy industry,” Representative August Pfluger, a Texas Republican, said in a statement. “This investment strengthens our district’s role in American energy leadership while providing good paying jobs to Texas families.”
That wasn’t the agency’s only big funding announcement. The Energy Department gave out $2.7 billion in contracts for enriched uranium, with $900 million each to Maryland-based Centrus Energy, the French producer Orano, and the California-headquartered General Matter. “President Trump is catalyzing a resurgence in the nation’s nuclear energy sector to strengthen American security and prosperity,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release. “Today’s awards show that this Administration is committed to restoring a secure domestic nuclear fuel supply chain capable of producing the nuclear fuels needed to power the reactors of today and the advanced reactors of tomorrow.”
Low-income households in the United States pay roughly 30% more for energy per square foot than households who haven’t faced trouble paying for electricity and heat in the past, federal data shows. Part of the problem is that the national efficiency standards for one of the most affordable types of housing in the nation, manufactured homes, haven’t been updated since 1994. Congress finally passed a law in 2007 directing the Department of Energy to raise standards for insulation, and in 2022, the Biden administration proposed new rules to increase insulation and reduce air leaks. But the regulations had yet to take effect when President Donald Trump returned to office last year. Now the House of Representatives is prepared to vote on legislation to nullify the rules outright, preserving the standards set more than three decades ago. The House Committee on Rules is set to vote on advancing the bill as early as Tuesday night, with a full floor vote likely later in the week. “You’re just locking in higher bills for years to come if you give manufacturers this green light to build the homes with minimal insulation,” Mark Kresowik, senior policy director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told me.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
The newest reactor at the Zhangzhou nuclear station in Fujian Province has officially started up commercial operation as China’s buildout of new atomic power infrastructure picks up pace this year. The 1,136-megawatt Hualong One represents China’s leading indigenous reactor design. Where once Beijing preferred the top U.S. technology for large-scale reactors, the Westinghouse AP1000, the Hualong One’s entirely domestic supply chain and design that borrows from the American standard has made China’s own model the new leader.
In a sign of just how many reactors China is building — at least 35 underway nationwide, as I noted in yesterday’s newsletter — the country started construction on two more the same week the latest Hualong One came online. World Nuclear News reported that first concrete has been poured for a pair of CAP1000 reactors, the official Chinese version of the Westinghouse AP1000, at two separate plants in southern China.
Back in October, when Japan elected Sanae Takaichi as its first female prime minister, I told you about how the arch-conservative leader of the Liberal Democratic Party planned to refocus the country’s energy plans on reviving the nuclear industry. But don’t count out offshore wind. Unlike Europe’s North Sea or the American East Coast, the sharp continental drop in Japan’s ocean makes rooting giant turbines to the sea floor impossible along much of its shoreline. But the Goto Floating Wind Farm — employing floating technology under consideration on the U.S. West Coast, too — announced the start of commercial operations this week, pumping nearly 17 megawatts of power onto the Japanese grid. Japanese officials last year raised the country’s goal for installed capacity of offshore wind to 10 gigawatts by 2030 and 45 gigawatts by 2040, Power magazine noted, so the industry still has a long way to go.
Beavers may be the trick to heal nature’s burn scars after a wildfire. A team of scientists at the U.S. Forest Service and Colorado State University are building fake beaver dams in scorched areas to study how wetlands created by the dams impact the restoration of the ecosystem and water quality after a blaze. “It’s kind of a brave new world for us with this type of work,” Tim Fegel, a doctoral candidate at Colorado State, who led the research, said in a press release.
“Saturday’s operation didn’t hinge on nuanced assessments of crude grades or the U.S. refining sector’s appetite for heavy supply,” according to Landon Derentz, the energy chief on the White House’s National Security Council during Trump’s first term. In a blog post for the Atlantic Council, where he now serves as the think tank’s vice president of energy and infrastructure, Derentz called it “misguided” to claim that the military intervention was predicated on access to oil. “Venezuelan oil supply is unlikely to move global energy markets meaningfully in the near term. For now, the country remains under an oil embargo imposed by the Trump administration. Even under optimistic assumptions, it will take years to rehabilitate the country’s energy sector and achieve a sizable increase in oil exports.” Oil access was an “enabler” for Trump’s policy of hemispheric domination, he wrote, “not the prize” in itself. And as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote in June, when the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, oil prices shrugged off the possibility of prolonged geopolitical crisis crippling the shipment of fuel.
In my final newsletter of 2025, I told you about Trump’s December 22 order to halt construction on all offshore wind projects in the U.S., including those that had hitherto been spared the administration’s “total war on wind,” on supposed national security grounds. Last week, Orsted filed a court order to challenge Trump’s suspension of its lease, calling the move illegal. The Danish wind giant has been here before. Trump first yanked the permits for Revolution Wind, a joint venture between Orsted and the private equity-owned Skyborn Renewables, back in August, when construction was nearly 80% complete. Orsted fought back. By the end of September, a federal judge lifted Trump’s stop-work order. And as I reported exclusively in this newsletter at the time, New England trade unions signed an historic agreement guaranteeing organized labor jobs in maintaining offshore turbines.
Orsted isn’t the only developer pushing back. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Norwegian developer Equinor was “engaging with U.S. authorities over security concerns.” Even if Trump’s latest push is overturned in court, the move will come at costs. During an appearance on Bloomberg TV last month, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont warned that the delay in building new turbines was “blowing a hole in our efforts to bring down the price of electricity.” At least one key turbine-equipment manufacturer remains bullish on the future of wind. The Financial Times reported that German hardware producer Siemens Energy had fended off calls from activist investors to spin out its wind division.
The Department of Energy asked Santa for more coal last month. On the day before Christmas Eve, the agency ordered two coal-fired plants in Indiana to postpone retirement. The orders directing the R.M. Schahfer and F.B. Culley generating stations to continue operating past their closure dates at the end of December mark what E&E News clocked as the third and fourth times, respectively, that the Trump administration has used its emergency powers to prevent coal plants from shutting down. “Keeping these coal plants online has the potential to save lives and is just common sense,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “Americans deserve reliable power regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining during extreme winter conditions.” While it’s true that coal plants boast a higher capacity factor than many cleaner generating sources, that depends on the units actually running. As Matthew wrote in November, American coal plants keep breaking down.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
South Korea’s nuclear regulator approved a license for the long-delayed Saeul-3 reactor in Busan. The country emerged in recent years as the democratic world’s leading nuclear exporter after successfully building the United Arab Emirates’ first plant largely on time and on budget. But in 2017, then-President Moon Jae-in of the center-left Democratic Party adopted a national plan to dismantle the nuclear industry, prompting delays on Saeul-3. His conservative successor, Yoon Suk Yeol, reversed the phaseout policy. Since President Lee Jae Myung won back the Blue House for the Democrats last year, questions have swirled over whether his administration would revive the anti-nuclear effort. The Nuclear Safety and Security Commission’s decision last week to license the new reactor, a state-of-the-art APR1400 like the ones the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power built in Abu Dhabi, marked nearly 10 years since the Saeul-3 received its initial construction permit, according to The Chosun Ilbo, the country’s newspaper of record.
All the new reactors underway across North America, Europe, South Korea, and Japan, combined would still fall far short of what China is building. In its latest tally, the trade publication NucNet pegged the total number of reactors under construction in People’s Republic at 35.
Police outside the scene of the arson attack on Berlin's power infrastructure.Omer Messinger/Getty Images
A left-wing militant group whose 2024 arson attack halted production at the Tesla Gigafactory in Germany has claimed responsibility for setting fire Sunday to equipment near high-voltage power in Berlin. The attack, which the head of Germany’s Senate called an act of “terrorism,” triggered a blackout across more than 35,000 households and nearly 2,000 businesses in the German capital that could last days, Der Tagesspiegel reported. In a 2,500-word manifesto that The Guardian confirmed with police, the Vulkangruppe, or Volcano Group, condemned a “greed for energy” produced from fossil fuels, calling the attack an “act of self-defense and international solidarity with all those who protect the earth and life.” A previous arson attack by the same group knocked out power in southeastern Berlin for nearly three days in September, marking the longest outage since World War II.
A parched stretch of farmland is set to produce something new: Solar power. The board of California’s Westlands Water District that serves the San Joaquin Valley has adopted a plan that would add 21 gigawatts of solar power on land fallowed by water shortages. The infrastructure strategy document called for a “major land-repurposing initiative” across the nation’s largest agricultural water district, which spans 1,000 miles and provides freshwater to 700 farms near Fresno. Legislation passed in California’s big climate package last fall (Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has a good writeup here) gave water districts the power to develop, construct, and own solar generation, batteries, and transmission facilities.
