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Opposing data centers is emerging as a touchstone political test on the left. On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist independent from Vermont, posted a video on his X account in which he argued that “a moratorium” on building new data centers nationwide “will give democracy a chance to catch up, and ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1%.” Polling suggests the political issue has populist appeal. Just 44% of Americans said they would support a data center built nearby in a September survey from Heatmap Pro.
The House of Representatives voted 215-209 Tuesday to advance the bipartisan permitting reform bill known as the SPEED Act, despite mounting opposition from Republicans to provisions meant to protect already-licensed projects from the type of legal assault the Trump administration has unleashed on offshore wind. Republican critics of the bill, including Maryland Congressman Andy Harris and New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew, vowed to vote against any legislation that included measures that might defend offshore turbine developers from Trump’s “total war on wind.”
Yet, “while the bill is alive for now, the outcome casts a pall over the prospects for any permitting deal this Congress,” as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last night, because “there is little shot of a grand deal on NEPA reform without exactly the sort of executive power restrictions Republican objectors feared.”
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The nationwide transformer shortage is getting worse as extreme weather destroys the existing grid and data centers demand the buildout of power infrastructure at a rate not seen in decades. A new Wall Street Journal feature on the manufacturers racing to churn out the big transformers featured a fresh statistic from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie that illustrates just how bad the problem has become. Orders for large transformers exceeded supply by about 14,000 units so far this year. The Biden administration made the transformer crisis worse by proposing — then revoking — a regulation to increase the energy efficiency of the equipment at the cost of requiring manufacturers to decide between investing in compliant assembly lines by 2027 or additional output to match today’s demand. The Trump administration has made the problem worse still by imposing strict trade tariffs on the very material transformers need most, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote.
A rendering of one of Last Energy's power plants.Last Energy
In the race to build the nation’s first small modular reactor, there are startups that developed designs based on less-powerful models of existing light water reactors and startups that are pursuing next-generation technologies shrunken down to a tiny fraction of a normal atomic power plant’s size. Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy is doing both. The company, founded by the entrepreneur and nuclear podcaster Bret Kugelmass, started out by proposing to build 20-megawatt light water reactors in Europe, before embarking on a U.S. project after the Trump administration vowed to ease the way for new nuclear reactors. On Tuesday, in a sign of investors’ confidence in the new trans-Atlantic direction, Last Energy announced a $100 million fundraising round. “For the first half a decade that I was telling people I was doing nuclear, I had to convince them, ‘Hey, here’s why nuclear is important,’” Kugelmass told TechCrunch. “Now everyone just comes to us saying, ‘Oh yeah, of course nuclear is a key part of the solution.’ I’m like, okay, great, I’m glad everyone’s caught up now.” The company is among the 10 startups in the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program, meant to speed up deployments of new technologies by bringing at least three to the atom-splitting phase of development by next July 4.
The fundraising news came as the Trump administration took yet another stake in a private minerals company. On Tuesday, the military announced a deal to take a 40% share of the nearly $8 billion mineral processing plant the South Korean industrial company Korea Zinc promised to build in Tennessee.
BlackRock’s retreat from sustainable investing has cost the world’s largest asset manager the business of at least two European pension funds. On Tuesday, the PME group, which manages more than $69 billion in retirement savings for Dutch workers in the metal and technologies sectors, said it had “decided to end our relationship with BlackRock,” the Financial Times reported. The move comes after the Dutch healthcare workers pension group PFZW withdrew about more than $16 billion from the financial giant, though its money-market funds are still under BlackRock’s management. It’s not just BlackRock facing backlash for its softening position on emissions. In February, the United Kingdom-based People’s Pension yanked nearly $38 billion from State Street, saying it was prioritizing “sustainability, active stewardship, and long-term value creation.”
For penguins, bad weather is good news. In a new study in Nature Geoscience, researchers from the University of Gothenburg showed that storms in the Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica regulate the Earth’s climate by moving heat, carbon, and nutrients out in the world’s oceans. The effect amounts to what scientists called “a critical climate service” marked by “absorbing 75% of the excess heat generated by humans globally.”
The Ford Motor Company expects to pay roughly $19.5 billion in charges, primarily from its electric vehicle business. In a press release, the automaker said it would refocus on hybrids and “efficient gas engines,” ramp up manufacturing of batteries for a standalone business, and boost truck production. The battery business aims to churn out 20 gigawatts of capacity every year starting in 2027. But the charges the company faces stem from its decision to abandon multibillion-dollar investments the carmaker made in new assembly lines for electric vehicles, demand for which slowed last year and dipped at the end of this year after the Trump administration phased out federal tax credits in September. “This is a customer-driven shift to create a stronger, more resilient and more profitable Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a press release. “The operating reality has changed, and we are redeploying capital into higher-return growth opportunities: Ford Pro, our market-leading trucks and vans, hybrids and high margin opportunities like our new battery energy storage business.”
Ford isn’t the only one accelerating in reverse away from electric vehicles. Last week I told you about the deal the European Union struck between its center-right and far-right lawmakers to curb environmental regulations. Now the bloc has moved to scrap its 2035 target to ban sales of new combustion-engine vehicles. The move would have marked a dramatic sea change in the West’s transportation policy, all but eliminating sales of traditional gasoline-powered cars in favor of battery-propelled alternatives. It’s a sign of Brussels’ broader effort to pull back from green mandates that European President Ursula von der Leyen blames for the continent’s economic malaise.
An old copper mine in Arizona. John Moore/Getty Images
It could have been worse. The Treasury guidance issued Friday dictating what wind and solar projects will be eligible for federal tax credits could have effectively banned developers from tapping the write-offs set to start phasing out next July. In the weeks before the Internal Revenue Service released its rules, GOP lawmakers from states with thriving wind and solar industries, including Senators John Curtis of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, publicly lobbied for laxer rules as part of what they pitched as the all-of-the-above “energy dominance” strategy on which Trump campaigned. Grassley went so far as to block two of Trump’s Treasury nominees “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent,” as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered earlier in August.
Since the guidance came out on Friday, both Grassley and Curtis have put out positive statements backing the plan. “I appreciate the work of Secretary [Scott] Bessent and his staff in balancing various concerns and perspectives to address the President’s executive order on wind and solar projects,” Curtis said, according to E&E News. Calling renewables “an essential part of the ‘all of the above’ energy equation,” Grassley’s statement said the guidance “seems to offer a viable path forward for the wind and solar industries to continue to meet increased energy demand” and “reflects some of the concerns Congress and industry leaders have raised.”
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Virginia’s outgoing Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed more energy bills than he signed last year, killing legislation designed to increase rooftop solar and energy storage, boost utility planning requirements, and make efficiency improvements more available to low-income residents. Now that Democrat Abigail Spanberger is coming in to replace Youngkin as the next governor, those bills are coming back, the Virginia Mercury reported. In a column, lawyer and environmentalist Ivy Main called on Democrats to dream bigger. “Data center development is so far outstripping supply side solutions that if legislators aren’t more aggressive this year, next year they will find themselves further behind than ever,” Main wrote. “As more bills are filed over the coming weeks, we are likely to see plenty of bold proposals. Hopefully, legislators now understand the urgency, and will be ready to act.”
Data centers are now “swallowing American politics,” Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote recently. Just 44% of Americans would welcome a data center nearby, according to a poll from September by Heatmap Pro.
The 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster in India never resulted in any serious ramifications for Union Carbide, the Dow Chemical subsidiary responsible for the accident that left more than 3,700 dead from exposure to toxic gases. In 2010, India passed a law that threatened to impose full civil penalties on any private nuclear company that suffered an accident somehow. That legislation has prevented all but Russia’s state-owned nuclear company from entering the Indian market. Hoping to lure American small modular reactor companies to India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed all year to overhaul the civil liability law. On Monday, Modi-aligned lawmakers proposed legislation to reform the nuclear sector and free foreign vendors from financial responsibility for anything that could potentially happen with their equipment.
The renewables industry, meanwhile, is continuing to boom on the subcontinent. The Japanese industrial giant agreed to invest $1.3 billion into renewable power in India in its latest push into green energy in South Asia, Bloomberg reported.
There’s green hydrogen, made from blasting freshwater with electricity made by renewables. There’s blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel that comes from natural gas mitigated with carbon capture equipment. Gray hydrogen is the traditional kind made with natural gas that spews pollution into the atmosphere. And then there’s pink hydrogen, made like the green kind with clean electricity except generated by a nuclear reactor. Orange is the latest color in the hydrogen rainbow, referring to the version of the gas that comes from a chemical process that accelerates production of the gas in natural formations underground. The startup Vema has announced a 10-year conditional offtake agreement with the off-grid data center power provider Verne to supply over 36,000 metric tons per year of “orange” hydrogen for server farms, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported.
