Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
“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.
The new blanket policy is likely to slow progress on passing the big bipartisan federal permitting reform bill. The SPEED Act (if you need an explainer, read this one from Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo) passed in the House last week. But key Senate Democrats said they would not champion a bill with provisions they might otherwise support unless the legislation curbed federal agencies’ power to yank already-granted permits, a move clearly meant to thwart Trump’s “total war on wind.” Republican leaders in the House stripped the measure out at the last moment. On Monday afternoon, the senators called the SPEED Act “dead in the water.”
The Department of the Interior and the Forest Service greenlit the 500-kilovolt Cross-Tie transmission project to carry electricity 217 miles between substations in Utah and Nevada. Dubbed the “missing pathway” between two states with fast-growing solar and geothermal industries, the power line had previously won support from a Biden-era program at the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office. Last week, the federal agencies approved a right-of-way for a route that crosses the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest and public land controlled by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management. In a press release directing the public to official documents, the bureau said the project “supports the administration’s priority to strengthen the reliability and security of the United States electric grid.”
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Google parent Alphabet bought the data center and energy infrastructure developer Intersect for nearly $5 billion in cash. Google had already held a minority stake in the company. But the deal, which also includes assuming debt, allows the tech behemoth to “expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive U.S. innovation and leadership,” Sundair Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement.
The acquisition comes as Google steps up its energy development, with deals to commercialize all kinds of nascent energy technologies, including next-generation nuclear reactors, fusion, and geothermal. The company, as Heatmap's Matthew Zeitlin noted this morning, has also hired a team of widely respected experts to advance its energy work, including the researcher Tyler Norris and and the Texas grid analyst Doug Lewin. But Monday’s deal wowed industry watchers. “Damn, big tech is now just straight up acquiring power developers to scale up data centers faster,” Aniruddh Mohan, an electricity analyst at The Brattle Group consultancy, remarked on X. In response, the researcher Isaac Orr joked: “Next they buy out the utilities themselves.”
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
The long duration energy storage developer Hydrostor has won final approval from California regulators for a 500-megawatt advanced compressed air energy storage project capable of pumping out eight hours of continuous discharge to the grid. With the thumbs up from the California Energy Commission, the Willow Rock Energy Storage Center will be “shovel ready” next year. The technology works by using electricity from wind and solar to power a compressor that pushes air into an underground cavern, displacing water, then capturing the heat generated during the compression and storing the energy in the pressurized chamber. When the energy is discharged, the water pressure forces the air up, and the excess heat warms the expanding air, driving a turbine to generate electricity. The plant would be Hydrostor’s first facility in the U.S. The company has another “late-stage” development underway in Australia, and 7 gigawatts of projects in the pipeline worldwide.
A chart showing the trio of South America nations' share of next year's oil production. EIA
The world is awash in oil and prices are on track to keep falling as rising supply outstrips demand. At just 0.8 million barrels per day, predictions for growth in 2026 are the lowest in the last four years. But Brazil, Guyana, and Argentina will account for at least half of the expected global increase in production of crude. In its latest forecast, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said the three South American nations will account for 0.4 million barrels per day of the 0.8 million spike projected for 2026. The three countries — oddly enough one of the only potential trios on the mostly Spanish-speaking continent with three distinct languages, given Brazil’s Portuguese and Guyana’s English — comprised 28% of all global growth in 2025.
A fungal blight that gets worse as temperatures rise is killing conifers, including Christmas trees. But scientists at Mississippi State University have discovered a unique Leyland cypress tree at a Louisiana farm with a resistance to Passalora sequoia, the fast-spreading disease that attacks the needles of evergreens. In a statement, Jeff Wilson, an associate professor of ornamental horticulture at Mississippi State University, said that, prior to the study, “there had not been any research on Christmas trees in Mississippi since the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, but there is a real need for the research today.” May all your endeavors in the new year be as curious, civic-minded, and fruitful as that. Wishing you all a merry Christmas, happy New Year, and what I hope is a restful time off until we return to your inbox in January.
