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Economy

A Quick Roundup of This Week’s DOE Funding News

On solar panel factories, heat pumps, and grid resilience

A Quick Roundup of This Week’s DOE Funding News
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Japan has issued its first-ever “megaquake” caution after a temblor rattled its southern coast yesterday • The remnants of Tropical Storm Debby could bring tornadoes to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast • India’s record heat has been mentioned at least 80 times in quarterly earnings calls.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Solar panel company Qcells secures $1.45 billion DOE loan

The Biden administration announced yesterday a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee of up to $1.45 billion for solar panel maker Qcells to support the construction of the company’s new manufacturing facility in Cartersville, Georgia. The plant would be Qcell’s second in Georgia, but the largest of its kind in the U.S., churning out solar panel components like silicon ingots and wafers, as well as finished solar panels. Its completion will “re-establish critical parts of the domestic solar supply chain and reinforce the United States’ status as a global clean energy leader,” the Department of Energy said in a statement. The plant will create 1,950 jobs, and is expected to make 3.3 gigawatts of panels each year, enough to power half a million homes. And it will be eligible for the IRA’s clean-energy tax credits.

In other government funding news this week, the DOE announced $10.2 million to advance the “cost effective and environmentally responsible” production of critical minerals and materials in the U.S., $85 million to boost domestic heat pump manufacturing, and $2.2 billion to shore up the grid.

2. Glacial dam outburst floods Alaska’s capital

Alaska’s capital of Juneau has been inundated by flooding from a glacial dam outburst this week. More than 100 homes have been damaged in the Mendenhall Valley after the Suicide Basin, which holds meltwater from Suicide Glacier, began to overflow on August 1 and sent water pouring into the Mendenhall River. Climate change is melting glaciers, putting nearby communities in danger. Recent research shows the number of glacial lakes has grown by more than 50% since 1990, and more than 15 million people globally are at risk.

Facebook/Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management

3. Canadian nuclear fusion firm gets government backing

Canadian nuclear fusion company General Fusion this week raised about $14.6 million in a Series F funding round from two government agencies, the Business Development Bank of Canada and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. The injection brings the company’s funding total to more than $320 million, with backers including Jeff Bezos. As Bloombergexplained, General Fusion “uses mechanically driven pistons to compress a cloud of plasma as a means to generate energy,” and the company said this money will help it move toward compressing plasmas at large scale, which is “a key milestone on our path to reach transformational results for commercialization.”

4. L.A. could soon get an air taxi network

California-based eVTOL developer Archer Aviation is planning an “air mobility network” that will bring flying electric taxis to Los Angeles as early as 2026. Customers would be able to skip the L.A. traffic by hopping into one of Archer’s Midnight aircraft and travelling in a matter of minutes to one of the company’s vertiports, which will be located near various popular destinations including LAX, USC, and perhaps the SoFi Stadium. Here’s what the network could look like:

Archer Aviation

The Midnight electric aircraft can carry four passengers at a time and travel at 150 mph. The company recently announced plans for a similar network in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stellantis is planning to help Archer ramp up production of the Midnight aircraft by covering some $370 million in labor-related costs.

5. Study reveals how past volcanic eruptions affected climate, plants

A new study published in the journal Science examines how the Earth’s plants and carbon cycle have responded in the past to climate change caused by huge releases in carbon dioxide from volcanic activity. They find that the severity of the fallout depended on how quickly the Earth could sequester the carbon and remove it from the atmosphere, but also how well plants could adapt to the resulting temperature changes. After past volcanic eruptions, some plant species evolved to survive, some migrated to cooler climates, but others were wiped out entirely. The authors found that damages to vegetation made global warming worse in the past. “This study, in my perspective, serves as a ‘wake-up call’ for the global community,” said co-author Loïc Pellissier, a professor of ecosystems and landscape evolution at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research. “We are currently releasing greenhouse gases at a faster rate than any previous volcanic event. We are also the primary cause of global deforestation, which strongly reduces the ability of natural ecosystems to regulate the climate.”

THE KICKER

Satellite data suggests deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is now at its lowest levels since 2016.

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Politics

The Climate Election You Missed Last Night

While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.

Climate voting.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.

Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.

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Green
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Exclusive: Trump’s Plans to Build AI Data Centers on Federal Land

The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.

A data center and Nevada land.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.

The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.

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Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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