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On offshore wind wins, China’s ‘strong energy nation,’ and Japan’s deep-sea mining
On nuclear deregulation, Drax’s troubles, and NYC solar scammers
Current conditions: A bomb cyclone is headed up the East Coast, bringing more cold air and possible blizzard conditions to the Northeast, especially New England • Even Tampa Bay, where so-called snowbirds from the Northeast go to winter, could see snow by the end of this week • A storm system named Kristin is on track to bring thunderstorms, strong winds, and hail to Greece.
Workers assemble Volkswagen's ID.3 electric car on a production line at German car factory. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
Sales of electric vehicles in Europe surged 30% to a record high last year, with battery-powered models outselling gas-burning cars for the first time last month, the Financial Times reported. The increase came despite a 38% drop in Tesla’s annual sales on the continent as Chinese rival BYD zoomed past Elon Musk’s automaker. Electric vehicles now account for 17% of EU car sales, up from 14% in 2024.
Tesla, meanwhile, is shifting gears. During a quarterly earnings call Wednesday evening, Musk announced plans to end production of the Model S sedan, its first fully original car design, and Model X SUV. “It’s time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge, because we’re really moving into a future that is based on autonomy,” he said. “So if you’re interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it.” He said he would continue offering support for the existing models “for as long as people have the vehicles.” The big seller in the quarter, however, wasn’t any car at all. The company sold a record number of its utility-scale Megapack batteries. In a shareholder deck, the company told investors it had “achieved our highest quarterly energy storage deployments, driven by record Megapack deployments.” That brought revenue from the energy sector up 27% from 2024 to $12.8 billion.
The Department of Energy has overhauled a set of nuclear safety rules and shared them with companies it’s regulating without making the changes public. Citing leaked documents, NPR reported Wednesday that the agency had cut more than 750 pages from earlier versions of the rules, “leaving only about one-third of the number of pages in the original documents.” The changes include loosening rules on monitoring radiation leaks in groundwater and raising the threshold for an accident investigation. When I asked Emmet Penney, a nuclear historian and a senior fellow at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, what he made of the report, he said the cuts eliminated a number of dubiously useful rules, including reducing how much security is required at nuclear stations, and praised Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “Reducing costs burdens like unnecessary security for test reactors is a smart move from the DOE, as is clarifying vague radiation standards,” he told me. “These changes demonstrate Secretary Wright’s seriousness when it comes to catalyzing the nuclear renaissance.”
Also on Wednesday, the Energy Department announced a new initiative asking states to express interest in hosting “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses,” where companies across the nuclear fuel cycle could set up shop, including recycling used fuel.
Electric and gas utilities requested almost $31 billion worth of rate increases last year, according to a new analysis by the energy policy nonprofit PowerLines. That compares to $15 billion in 2024. “In case you haven’t already done the math: That’s more than double what utilities asked for just a year earlier,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote. Electricity prices went up by 6.7% in the past year, outpacing the 2.7% increase for prices overall. That makes power prices 37% more expensive than just five years ago. “These increases, a lot of them have not actually hit people's wallets yet,” PowerLines executive director Charles Hua told a group of reporters Wednesday afternoon. “So that shows that in 2026, the utility bills are likely to continue to rise, barring some major, sweeping action.” Those could affect some 81 million consumers, he said.
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Drax built its business off a loophole in carbon accounting. Under the international rules on how to quantify emissions, the carbon from losing a tree is counted in the country where it’s felled. That meant chopping down old-growth trees in forests in the American South and shipping the vitamin-sized wood pellets to England to burn in a power plant counted as low-carbon energy in the United Kingdom — even if the power plant had to burn twice as much wood to equal the energy from coal. At long last, European and American policymakers are waking up to the realities of the wood pellet energy industry. Enviva, a major wood pellet producer, went bankrupt in 2024. Drax, meanwhile, has been losing green-energy subsidies in its native U.K. Now the company is facing the potential loss of the new biggest market for its wood pellets. Japan, compensating for the nuclear reactors still sitting idle 15 years after the Fukushima disaster, is set to soon surpass the U.K. as the world’s largest pellet importer market. But Japanese policymakers are now considering pulling support for all projects over 10 megawatts. “The real intention is quite simple: no new government support, phasing out. We don’t see any clear path of bringing down costs in the foreseeable future,” one government official told the Financial Times. “Existing projects might survive but no new projects are coming.”
New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection filed a lawsuit late last week against Radiant Solar and its owner, William James Bushell, demanding $18 million in restitution and about $1.7 million in penalties for damaging New Yorkers’ homes and leaving the customers across the city in debt. It’s the largest sum the city has ever sought from a home improvement contractor. The city argued that Radiant, as The New York Times put it, “engaged in a dizzying array of mechanical and monetary malfeasance for years.” That included padding loans with undisclosed “dealer fees,” signing customers up for large loans they didn't ask for, failing to file paperwork for customers to receive tax credits, and neglecting city approval processes. The company even allegedly ran a bogus sweepstakes for a new Tesla.
Redwood Materials’ big transformation is bringing in the money. Amid a two-year slump in lithium prices, the battery recycling startup announced the launch of a new venture last summer to provide grid-scale storage from restored battery packs. Yesterday, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote, “it’s clear just how much that bet has paid off.” The company raised a $425 million round of Series E funding for the new venture, called Redwood Energy. The money came from such investors as Google and Nvidia’s venture capital arms
On Vineyard Wind’s win, Hydro-Quebec, and the EU-India trade deal
Current conditions: Temperatures as low as 30 degrees Fahrenheit below average are expected to persist for at least another week throughout the Northeast, including in New York City • Midsummer heat is driving temperatures up near 100 degrees in Paraguay • Antarctica is facing intense katabatic winds that pull cold air from high altitudes to lower ones.
President Donald Trump, no fan of the Paris Agreement.Tom Brenner/Getty Images
The United States has, once again, exited the Paris Agreement, the first global carbon-cutting pact to include the world’s two top emitters. President Donald Trump initiated the withdrawal on his first day back in office last year — unlike the last time Trump quit the Paris accords, after a prolonged will-he-won’t-he game in 2017. That process took three years to complete, allowing newly installed President Joe Biden to rejoin in 2021 after just a brief lapse. This time, the process took only a year to wrap up, meaning the U.S. will remain outside the pact for years at least. “Trump is making unilateral decisions to remove the United States from any meaningful global climate action,” Katie Harris, the vice president of federal affairs at the union-affiliated BlueGreen Alliance, said in a statement. “His personal vendetta against clean energy and climate action will hurt workers and our environment.” Now, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, at “all Paris-related meetings (which comprise much of the conference), the U.S. would have to attend as an ‘observer’ with no decision-making power, the same category as lobbyists.”
America has not yet completed its withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching group through which the Paris Agreement was negotiated, which Trump initiated this month. That won’t be final until next year. That Trump is even planning to quit the body shows how much more aggressive the administration’s approach to climate policy is this time around. Trump remained within the UNFCCC during his first term, preferring to stay engaged in negotiations even after quitting the Paris Agreement.
Just weeks after a federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s stop work order on the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island’s shores, another federal judge has overturned the order halting construction on the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts. That, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote last night, “makes four offshore wind farms that have now won preliminary injunctions against Trump’s freeze on the industry.” Besides Revolution Wind, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project and Equinor’s Empire Wind plant off Long Island have each prevailed in their challenges to the administration’s blanket order to abandon construction on dubious national security grounds.
Meanwhile, the White House is potentially starving another major infrastructure project of funding. The Gateway rail project to build a new tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York City could run out of money and halt construction by the end of next week, the project manager warned Tuesday. Washington had promised billions to get the project done, but the money stopped flowing in October during the government shutdown. Officials at the Department of Transportation said the funding would remain suspended until, as The New York Times reported, the project’s contracts could be reviewed for compliance with new rules about businesses owned by women and minorities.
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A new transmission line connecting New England’s power-starved and gas-addicted grid to Quebec’s carbon-free hydroelectric system just came online this month. But electricity abruptly stopped flowing onto the New England Clean Energy Connect as the Canadian province’s state-owned utility, Hydro-Quebec, withheld power to meet skyrocketing demand at home amid the Arctic chill. Power plant owners in New England and New York, where Hydro-Quebec is building another line down the Hudson River to connect to New York City, complained that deals with the utility focused on maintaining supplies during the summer, when air conditioning traditionally surges power to peak demand. Hydro-Quebec restored power to the line on Monday.
The storm represented a force majeure event. If it hadn’t, the utility would have needed to pay penalties. But the incident is sure to fuel more criticism from power plant owners, most of which are fossil fueled, who oppose increased competition from the Quebecois. “I hate to say it, but a lot of the issues and concerns that we have been talking about for years have played out this weekend,” Dan Dolan — who leads the New England Power Generators Association, a trade group representing power plant owners — told E&E News. “This is a very expensive contract for a product that predominantly comes in non-stressed periods in the winter,” he said.
Europe has signed what the European Commission president Urusula von der Leyen called “the mother of all deals” with India, “a free trade zone of 2 billion people.” As part of the deal, the world’s second-largest market and the most populous nation plan to ramp up exports of steel, plastics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. But don’t expect Brussels to give New Delhi a break on its growing share of the global emissions. The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism — the first major tariff in the world based on the carbon intensity of imports — just took effect this month, and will remain intact for Indian goods, Reuters reported.
The Department of the Interior has ordered staff at the National Park Service to remove or edit signs and other informational materials in at least 17 parks out West to scrub mentions of climate change or hardship inflicted by settlers on Native Americans. The effort comes as part of what The Washington Post called a renewed push to implement Trump’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Park staff have interpreted those orders, the newspaper reported, to mean eliminating any reference to historic racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, and climate change. Just last week, officials removed an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park on George Washington’s ownership of slaves.
Tesla is going trucking. The electric automaker inked a deal Tuesday with Pilot Travel Centers, the nation’s largest operator of highway pit stops, to install Tesla’s Semi Chargers for heavy-duty electric vehicle charging. The stations are set to be built at select Pilot locations along Interstate 5, Interstate 10, and several other major corridors where heavy-duty charging is highest. The first sites are scheduled to open this summer.
