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In a post on Truth Social last night, President Donald Trump said he’s “working with major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People” and shift the burden of financing the data center buildout away from ordinary consumers. “First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher utility bills.” He said more announcements were coming in the weeks ahead. While “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE,” he said “Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”
Hours earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg set the stage for a similar announcement when he posted on Threads that the company was establishing a new “top-level initiative” aimed at building “tens of gigawatts” of power for the Facebook owner’s data centers.
A federal judge has overturned President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to kill New England’s Revolution Wind project. On Monday evening, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction suspending the Trump administration’s order halting construction on the nearly complete joint venture from Danish wind giant Orsted and Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables. The decision allows construction to restart immediately while the underlying lawsuit challenging multiple attempts by the Department of the Interior to yank its permits continues in court. In a statement, Orsted said it would resume construction as soon as possible. “Today’s ruling is a decisive win for energy reliability and the hundreds of thousands of families counting on Revolution Wind,” Kat Burnham, the industry group Advanced Energy United’s senior principal and New England policy lead, said in a statement. “The court rightly saw through a politically motivated stop-work order that would have caused real harm: driving up costs, delaying power for Rhode Island and Connecticut, and putting good-paying jobs at risk. It’s good news for workers, ratepayers, and anyone who recognizes the need for a fair energy market.” To glean some insights into how the White House’s most recent effort fell short, it’s worth reviewing my colleague Jael Holzman’s coverage of the last failure and this time.
The Environmental Protection Agency is scrapping the decades-long practice of calculating the health benefits of reducing air pollution by estimating the cost of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to justify clean-air rules. Citing internal documents, The New York Times reported Monday that the Trump administration plans to stop tallying the health benefits from curbing two of the most widespread, deadly pollutants: fine particulate matter and ozone. The newspaper called the move “a seismic shift that runs counter to the EPA’s mission statement.” The overhaul could make slashing limits on pollution from coal-burning plants, oil refineries, and steel mills easier. It’s part of a broader overhaul of the EPA’s regulatory system to disregard the scientific realities that few, if any, credible scientists challenged before. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked in July when the agency dispensed with the idea that carbon emissions are dangerous, “what comes next?”
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A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration’s decision to slash $8 billion in energy grants to recipients in mostly Democratic-led states was illegal. In his decision, Amit Mehta, whom Obama appointed to the bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote that the “terminated grants had one glaring commonality: all the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Trump in the 2024 election.” The ruling called on the Department of Energy to reverse its decision to rescind all awards mentioned in the case. The case only covered seven grants, leaving funding for more than 200 other projects up in the air. But as NOTUS noted, the Energy Department’s internal watchdog announced an audit into the cancellations last month.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul.John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Annual Summit
New York Governor Kathy Hochul positioned herself as one of the most ambitious Democratic governors on nuclear power last summer when, as Heatmap’s Mattew Zeitlin covered at the time, she directed the state-owned New York Power Authority to facilitate construction of at least a gigawatt of new atomic power reactors by 2040. Last week, as we covered here, her administration unveiled 23 potential commercial partners, including Bill Gates’ TerraPower and the utility NextEra, and eight possible communities in which to site the state’s next nuclear plant. Now the governor’s office has told the Syracuse Post-Standard that the administration aims to up the goal from 1 gigawatt to 5 gigawatts of new reactors.
The move comes as Hochul prepares to announce another initiative Tuesday to force data centers to pay for their own energy needs. Piggybacking off Trump’s push, the effort will require “that projects driving exceptional demand without exceptional job creation or other benefits cover the costs they create – through charges or supplying their own power,” according to Axios.
Brazil and Argentina are South America’s only two countries with commercial nuclear power. Despite having governments on opposite sides of the continent’s political divide, the two nations are collaborating on maritime nuclear, using small modular reactors to power ships or produce power from floating plants. “The energy transition process we are experiencing guides us to work together to evolve nuclear regulations and their necessary harmonization, with a view to the use of nuclear reactors on board ships worldwide and, especially, in our jurisdictional waters,” Petronio Augusto Siqueira De Aguiar, the Brazilian admiral from the Naval Secretariat for Nuclear Safety and Quality, said in a statement.
current “legal and commercial constructs” and “frameworks” make the country “uninvestable.” The country’s basic systems need “significant changes,” and its hydrocarbon laws need to be overhauled before the Texas behemoth thinks it can put money into rebuilding the infrastructure in the South American nation. Still, Woods said he was “confident that with this administration and President Trump working hand-in-hand with the Venezuelan government that those changes can be put in place.” As my colleague Robinson Meyer noted in a recent interview for the Shift Key podcast, Trump’s push for imperial resource ventures generally might be a tough sell for actual oil companies.
Exxon’s main U.S. rival, the No. 2 producer Chevron Corp., has invested heavily in Venezuela over the years. Exxon, by contrast, has developed what’s considered the most significant new oil patch in the world, the offshore drilling operations in Guyana. But Exxon still benefits from the Trump administration’s intervention in Caracas. Venezuela has long argued that Essequibo, the sparsely populated jungle province comprising the western half of Guyana, rightfully belongs under Caracas’ rule. The move to threaten Essequibo and Exxon drilling platforms off its waters with the Venezuelan military in recent years drew fierce blowback. Now it seems unlikely such agitation will happen again anytime soon. Meanwhile, Trump said Sunday he may exclude Exxon from the Venezuela spoils, claiming “they're playing too cute.”
Until now, Meta has been the most cautious nuclear investor of its tech peers, brokering just one major deal to buy power from an existing atomic power station. By contrast, Amazon bought a stake in the reactor developer X-energy and put up the money for its first power plant; Microsoft pumped billions into reopening the working reactor at Three Mile Island; and Google is both bringing another reactor back online and investing in the next-generation reactor company Kairos Power. On Friday, the Facebook owner announced a sweeping deal to buy power from the nuclear utility Vistra, help build reactors with the Bill Gates-backed startup TerraPower, and pay cash upfront to finance the purchase of fuel for microreactor developer Oklo’s first power plants in Ohio. “Our commitments to Oklo and TerraPower support the next generation of American developers creating safer, advanced nuclear reactors and accelerating the development of nuclear technologies,” the company said in a statement. “Through our partnership with Vistra, we’re providing financial support for operating nuclear power plants, extending the operational lifespan.”
Constellation's Clinton Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Clinton, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Illinois is the most nuclear-powered state in the nation, with atomic stations supplying nearly all of Chicago’s power at times. Yet the state put a moratorium on new reactors in the 1980s. That is, until last week when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed legislation lifting the ban. In 2023, Pritzker signed a bill that would allow for construction of more speculative technology, like small modular reactors, but maintained the ban on large-scale units. At the time, the Democrat vetoed separate legislation to legalize large-scale reactors, insisting they “are so costly to build that they will cause exorbitant ratepayer-funded bailouts.” Since no one has yet built an SMR in the U.S., there’s no way of really knowing how much the smaller units will cost. But more recent research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Koroush Shirvan finds the opposite. Building another gigawatt-sized Westinghouse AP1000 — the same type of machine that had major cost overruns in Georgia over the past decade — would be cheaper than building a first-of-its-kind SMR, since the supply chains and design are established.
“It’s striking that the same rationale Gov. Pritzker used to veto lifting the nuclear moratorium in 2023 — the prospect of new large-scale reactors in Illinois — is now being celebrated by his administration as a major win,” Madi Hilly, the managing director of the Chicago-based consultancy Radiant Energy Group, told me for this newsletter. “This reversal is a positive signal for future growth and long-term prosperity in Illinois.”
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China went from spending virtually nothing on nuclear fusion in 2021 to investing more than the rest of the world combined, as I told you last month. Well, it’s working. Last week, China’s leading fusion project, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, or EAST, pulled off a “novel high-density operating scheme” in the reactor. In the past, exceeding the limits of how dense the plasma that powers the fusion reactor could get ended up causing disruptions. “The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices,” study co-lead author Ping Zhu, an engineering professor at the University of Science and Technology in China, said in the statement to Live Science.
China plans to end its value-added tax export rebate on solar products on April 1. The finance ministry said the VAT export rebates for battery products will fall to 6% from 9% between April and December and phase out entirely at the end of this year. In a statement on the change, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association acknowledged that some Chinese exporters were, as Reuters put it, “using rebates as a price discount for foreign buyers.” This won few friends in Europe or North America, where governments who wanted strategic solar manufacturing industries saw factories close in the face of overwhelmingly cheap Chinese imports. Analysts told the South China Morning Post the policy is a signal “that Beijing is interested in serious trade relations and is a good partner.”
Biodegradable plastics are not always safer for rivers and oceans. When researchers at East China Normal University compared how microbial cities formed on the surfaces of traditional plastics and biodegradable materials after 88 days in a tidal river in Shanghai, they found that drug-resistant bacteria proliferated on both non-biodragable and biodegradable plastics, but saw a particularly intense but short-lived spike in pathogens developing on the so-called greener material. “Our findings show that biodegradable plastics do not simply dissolve into the environment without consequence,” Yinglong Su, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “They create a different kind of risk that peaks during degradation and should not be ignored in environmental policy.”
