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Over the weekend, President Donald Trump once again ratcheted up pressure on Denmark and the European Union to consider his bid to seize Greenland. In a post on Truth Social, the president announced punitive 10% tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland starting on February 1, with plans to raise the levies to 25% by June. “We have subsidized Denmark, and all of the Countries of the European Union, and others, for many years by not charging them Tariffs, or any other forms of remuneration,” he wrote. “Now, after Centuries, it is time for Denmark to give back — World Peace is at stake!” In response, the EU has threatened to deploy its economic “big bazooka.” Known formally as the anti-coercion instrument, the policy came into force in 2023 to counter China’s attacks on Lithuania, and involves the imposition of sweeping trade sanctions, ousting the aggressor nation’s companies from the world’s second-largest market, and ending intellectual property protections. Economists told the Financial Times that a trade war over Greenland would risk sparking the worst financial crisis since the Great Recession.
If you look at the second chart, solar is on a clear incline.EIA
Electricity generation is set to grow 1.1% this year and 2.6% in 2027, according to the latest short-term energy outlook report from the federal Energy Information Administration. Despite the Trump administration’s attacks on the industry, solar power will provide the bulk of that growth. The U.S. is set to add 70 gigawatts of new utility-scale solar in 2026 and 2027, representing a 49% increase in operating solar capacity compared to the end of 2025. While natural gas, coal, and nuclear combined accounted for 75% of all generation last year, the trio’s share of power output in 2027 is on track to slip to 72%. Solar power and wind energy, meanwhile, are set to rise from about 18% in 2025 to 21% in 2027.
Still, the solar industry is struggling to fend off the Trump administration’s efforts to curb deployments of what its top energy officials call unreliable forms of renewable power. As Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last month, the leading solar trade association is pleading with Congress for help fending off a “near complete moratorium on permitting.”
Everybody wants to invest in critical minerals — including the Western Hemisphere’s second center of power. Brazil is angling for a trade deal with the U.S. to mine what the Financial Times called its “abundant but largely untapped rare earth deposits.” With tensions thawing between Trump and the government of leftwinger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, officials in the Brazilian administration see a chance to broker an agreement on the metals Washington needs for modern energy and defense technologies. “There’s nothing but opportunity here,” one official told the newspaper. “Brazil’s government is open to a deal on critical minerals.”
Northwest of Brazil, in Bolivia, the new center-right government is stepping up efforts to court foreign investors to develop its lithium resources. The country’s famous salt flats comprise the world’s largest known reserve of the key battery metal. But the leftist administration that ruled the Andean nation for much of the past two decades made little progress toward exploiting the resource under state-owned companies. The new pro-Washington government that took power after the October election has vowed to bring in the private sector. In what Energy Minister Mauricio Medinaceli last week called the government’s “first message to investors,” the administration vowed to honor all existing deals with Chinese and Russian companies, according to Mining.com.
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Last month, I told you about how swapping bunker fuel-burning engines for nuclear propulsion units in container ships could shave $68 million off annual shipping costs. That’s got real appeal to the British. Five industrial giants in the United Kingdom — Rolls-Royce, Babcock International Group, Global Nuclear Security Partners, Stephenson Harwood, and NorthStandard — have formed a new group called the Maritime Nuclear Consortium to boost British efforts to commercialize nuclear-powered cargo ships. “Without coordinated U.K. action, the chance to define the rules, create high-skilled jobs and anchor a global supply chain could be lost to faster competitors,” Lloyd's Register, a professional services company in London that provides maritime certifications, said in a statement to World Nuclear News. “Acting now would give the U.K. first-mover advantage, and ensure those standards, jobs and supply chains are built here.”
On the more standard atomic power front, the U.S. has officially inked its nuclear partnership deal with Slovakia, which I wrote about last week.
Sunrun has come out against the nascent effort to harvest the minerals needed for panels and batteries from metal-rich nodules in the pristine depths of the ocean. Last week, America’s largest residential solar and storage company signed onto a petition calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining. The San Francisco-based giant joins Google, Apple, Samsung, BMW, Volvo, Salesforce, and nearly 70 other corporations in calling for a halt to the ongoing push at a little-known United Nations maritime regulator to establish permitting rules for mining in international waters. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange has written, there are real questions about whether the potential damage to one of the few ecosystems on Earth left untouched by human development is really worth it. Trump has vowed to go it alone on deep-sea mining if global regulators can’t come to agreement, as I wrote last year. But it’s unclear how quickly the biggest developer in the space, The Metals Company, could get the industry started. As You Sow, the advocacy group promoting the moratorium, said Sunrun’s signature “brings an important voice from the clean energy sector.”
The home electrification company Jetson, which makes smart thermostats and heat pumps, has raised $50 million in a Series A round. Founded less than two years ago, the company pulled in first-time funding from venture firms including Eclipse, 8VC, and Activate Capital, and saw at least two existing investors put in more money. “Heat pumps have worked for decades, but their cost and complexity have put them out of reach of most homeowners,” Stephen Lake, Jetson’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “We’re removing the friction by making the process digital, fast, and affordable while fully managing the purchase from start to finish. This funding will help us quickly bring this experience to more homeowners across the U.S. and Canada.”
The move comes days after Trump teased forthcoming reforms on Truth Social in which he said companies would be encouraged to build their own generation, as I wrote earlier this week.
A federal court lifted President Donald Trump’s stop-work order on the Empire wind project off the coast of New York, marking the administration’s second defeat this week as his latest attempt to halt construction of offshore turbines on the East Coast flounders. District Judge Carl Nichols — whom my colleague Jael Holzman noted is a Trump appointee — sided with Norwegian energy giant Equinor Thursday morning, granting its request to lift the Department of the Interior’s order to terminate construction.
The ruling comes just days after another federal judge found that the national security concerns the Interior Department cited to justify the work stoppage were insufficient to halt another already-permitted project midway through construction. That judge, too, allowed the Danish developer Orsted’s Revolution Wind project in New England to move forward, as Jael explained here. And the lawsuits just keep coming. Now yet another New England project, Vineyard Wind, has sued the administration.
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BYD on display at a German automotive show last year. Johannes Simon/Getty Images
Ford and BYD are in discussions on a partnership in which the American carmaker would buy batteries from the Chinese auto giant for some of the former’s hybrid-vehicle models, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday night. The newspaper cautioned that the talks are ongoing and a deal may not materialize, but a tie-up would mark the most significant beachhead China’s leading automaker has gained in the U.S. market yet. It’s worth revisiting how BYD got so big, which Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast dove deep into back in April. A month earlier, my colleague Robinson Meyer explained how the company’s promise of charging a car’s batteries in five minutes was just the latest example of the company “shocking the world.”
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Type One Energy, the fusion power startup backed by Bill Gates, is raising a $250 million Series B round at a $900 million valuation, TechCrunch reported. The company is pursuing an approach to fusion known as magnetic confinement. The design is called a stellarator, in which magnets are arranged in a doughnut shape that’s twisted and turned according to the demands of the plasma. Type One signed a deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority last year to build a fusion power plant at the site of a former coal station.
It’s yet another sign, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in 2024, that “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.” There are plenty of startups in the mix. Thea Fusion, as Katie has covered, is raising millions for a simplified stellarator design. Avalanche Energy, meanwhile, is pursuing fusion microreactors. But as I wrote last month, the race may really be with China, which is outspending the whole world on fusion.
The Chinese-Canadian solar manufacturer Canadian Solar declared a “decisive victory” in a patent fight against its Singapore-based rival Maxeon. After a nearly two-year legal fight, the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled in Canadian Solar’s favor this week, dismissing Maxeon’s claims of alleged infringement of intellectual property as “invalid.” In a statement to PV Magazine, Canadian Solar president Colin Parkin said “we firmly oppose the misuse or weaponization of patents — particularly those lacking patentability or practical value.” The ruling clears the way for the manufacturer to expand its presence in the U.S. as the company looks to capitalize on new restrictions from the Trump administration on imported panels. Maxeon, however, told Reuters it’s still considering an appeal.
Tucked in a valley that contains pollution, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s coal-smoked capital city, has some of the dirtiest air in the world. When you visit, you can see the smog from a distance on the way from the airport. A solution may be on the way: The country is considering working with Russia to build its first nuclear power plant, a small modular reactor-based facility somewhere in the middle of the city. Last month, the Kremlin-owned Rosatom touted plans to build an SMR plant in Yakutia, part of Russian Siberia. Now Moscow is in talks with its former suzerainty to build the same style facility in Ulaanbaatar, NucNet reported Thursday. Mongolia has a leg up in one area: The country previously mined uranium during the Soviet era, and has large deposits that could be tapped again for a domestic fuel source.
