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As soon as Friday, the Biden administration could announce who will advance to the next phase of its “clean hydrogen hubs” program, a $7 billion experiment to find out whether and to what extent hydrogen can become a competitive replacement for fossil fuels.
The eventual hubs could touch every corner of the country, but the Department of Energy, which is administering the program, and the applicants themselves, have kept the proposed plans mostly confidential. Each one could include a dozen or more individual projects, but little has been disclosed about what the proposed projects are, where they will be, or what the public process will look like around their development. The awards could help clarify the direction of a massive government program that, right now, contains more questions than answers.
Earlier this week, sources familiar with the Department of Energy’s plans told Bloomberg that Biden is expected to announce the initial winners on Friday when he visits Pennsylvania. On Thursday morning, Reuters reported on a tip that one of the grants would go to the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub, a partnership between Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, while another would go to the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub, led by West Virginia, but involving partners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky as well.
Per the bipartisan infrastructure law, which created the program, the DOE must support the development of at least four hydrogen hubs. Collectively, they have to contain projects that test the use of hydrogen in transportation, power generation, residential and commercial heating, and industry. There also have to be projects that demonstrate different ways to make hydrogen, including using renewable electricity, nuclear energy, and natural gas with carbon capture.
Biden’s announcement will just be the start of a process that will play out over the next five to 10 years. The funding will be rolled out over the course of four phases, and the initial batch of winning proposals will not necessarily all continue to receive support beyond the first phase. Each hub will receive a relatively small grant to conduct planning and analysis over the course of the next 12 to 18 months to ensure their “concept is technologically and financially viable, with input from relevant local stakeholders.” (The DOE’s funding announcement estimated initial grants of $20 million, although Reuters reported the Pennsylvania hub will receive $750 million.) After that point, each will be subjected to a “go/no-go review” to determine whether it can advance to the next phase.
“I think it's important to emphasize that what DOE is announcing is an invitation to negotiate potential funding awards,” Jill Tauber, the vice president of climate and energy at Earthjustice, told me. “So this is not an announcement of final decisions and awards. There are still approvals to be secured.”
Hydrogen is incredibly divisive. Most experts who study decarbonization agree that it holds a lot of promise as a climate solution. It can be burned to provide heat or power to any number of processes, similar to natural gas, without releasing any carbon emissions. But it requires a lot of energy to make hydrogen in the first place, and no one knows yet exactly which applications will make sense.
Climate advocates are wary of two big risks. One is that the process of making hydrogen, whether from electricity or natural gas, could emit so much carbon that it ultimately will be worse for the climate. The other is that even if the production is clean, the hydrogen could be wasted on something like residential heating, which already has more efficient solutions available, rather than reserved for processes that are truly hard to decarbonize.
That’s why the biggest questions for the hydrogen hubs are not just where they will be, but which energy sources they will use and which end-uses they will focus on.
“Hydrogen certainly has the potential to be a clean energy solution that delivers benefits, including economic benefits,” said Tauber. “But it can also drag us deeper into the climate crisis and hurt communities. So both things are on the table right now.” These concerns have already made national news in relation to a high-stakes battle over the rules for the clean hydrogen tax credit, a subsidy that was created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The term “hubs” might bring to mind a few city blocks of bustling activity, but the hydrogen hubs are shaping up to be far more expansive. Many of the applicants are unlikely alliances between multiple state governments, companies, and universities across wide swathes of the country. For example, a potential hub in the Northeast could involve more than a dozen projects stretched across seven states.
Nearly 80 such groups submitted initial concept papers for hubs to the Department of Energy when it first opened up the application process. Of those, the DOE encouraged 33 groups to file full applications, which were due in April, and the agency will be selecting six to 10 for the first phase of the awards.
Just one of the applicants, a partnership between Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming called the Western Interstate Hydrogen Hub, released its initial concept paper to the public, though with a number of redactions. While the hubs will all be different and designed to the specific circumstances of their region, the document is still helpful for demonstrating what kinds of projects are under consideration.
The document lists eight specific projects. Several are hydrogen production facilities — some would use electricity to make the fuel, others would use gas. A company called Libertad Power would buy hydrogen for a network of hydrogen fueling stations for long-haul trucks that it is planning to build between Texas and California. Xcel Energy, the dominant utility in Colorado, wants to blend hydrogen into the natural gas that it burns in its power plants and delivers to residential and commercial customers. There’s also a 275,000-acre farm on Navajo Nation that would run its tractors and other equipment on hydrogen fuel. Companies would construct pipelines and design trucking routes to transport hydrogen around the region.
In addition to getting more detailed information about the different components of the proposals, advocates like Tauber want DOE to more clearly spell out how it will engage with affected communities as the program progresses. “None of that is clear right now, and hopefully we'll see some of that clarity in the announcement,” she said.
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In a press conference about the newly recast program’s first loan guarantee, Energy Secretary Chris Wright teased his project finance philosophy.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Thursday announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for American Electric Power to replace 5,000 miles of transmission lines with more advanced wires that can carry more electricity. He also hinted at his vision for how the Trump administration could recast the role of the department's Loan Programs Office in the years to come.
The LPO actually announced that it had finalized an agreement, conditionally made in January under the Biden administration, to back AEP’s plan. The loan guarantee will enable AEP to secure lower-cost financing for the project, for an eventual estimated saving to energy consumers of $275 million over the lifetime of the loan.
“These are the kind of projects where we’re going to partner with businesses to make our energy system more efficient, more reliable, ultimately lower cost,” Wright said on a call with reporters.
And yet in the past few months, the department has also canceled loan guarantees and grants for other transmission projects that were expected to provide those same benefits — including the Grain Belt Express, an 800-mile line set to bring low-cost wind power from Kansas to the Chicago metropolitan area in Illinois.
“We don’t care about authorship,” Wright told reporters, acknowledging that the AEP loan was conditionally approved by the Biden administration. “Not all of them were nonsense. The ones that are in the interest of the American taxpayers, in the interest of the American ratepayers, and there’s a helpful role for government capital — we’re happy to support those.”
When asked specifically why AEP’s proposal met his criteria while the Grain Belt Express didn’t, Wright first made an argument about cost. “I have nothing against the Grain Belt Express,” he said. “I suspect it’ll still be developed. But it’s far more expensive on a per mile basis since it’s a brand new transmission line.”
His subsequent comments, however, hinted at a more significant shift in approach. He went on to argue that the project came with an unacceptable amount of risk since the developers didn’t have buyers yet for the power coming down the line. It was trying to “close on arbitrage,” he said, by buying up cheap wind power that was stranded in Kansas and bringing it to a larger market. “It’s a more commercial enterprise,” he said. “That’s done with private entrepreneurs and private capital.”
It’s important to note that the Grain Belt Express loan guarantee would have been issued under an innovation-focused program within the Loan Programs Office that was specifically geared toward higher risk projects that banks won’t otherwise touch. The AEP project is part of a different program focused on more mature technologies, with a goal of reducing the cost of major utility infrastructure upgrades to ratepayers.
When I floated Wright’s comments by Jigar Shah, the former head of the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration, he was flummoxed. “It’s nonsensical,” he said. To Shah, taking Wright’s risk aversion to its logical conclusion would mean, for instance, that the office should not fund any nuclear energy projects. “If this becomes a new standard, that means nuclear is dead in the United States,” he said.
AEP is the first developer to secure a loan guarantee under the Energy Dominance Financing Program, Congress’ new name a Biden-era program within LPO that offered loan guarantees to utilities to “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace energy infrastructure.” Initially called the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Financing Program and created by the Inflation Reduction Act, it focused on projects with climate benefits, like making efficiency upgrades to power plants or installing renewables on the site of a former coal plant.
In the Biden administration’s view, AEP’s project would “contribute to emissions reductions by supporting existing and new clean generation by expanding transmission capacity in the regions in which they operate.”
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act rebranded the program and removed any requirements that projects reduce emissions. On Thursday’s call, Wright seemed to imply that it wasn’t just the Biden-era loan program that had been renamed. “The Loan Program Office is being rechristened the Energy Dominant Financing — it is the rechristening of the same department,” he said in response to a question about the office’s remaining loan authority. The Department of Energy did not respond to my request for clarification.
None of that means that the potential emissions benefits from AEP’s project won’t materialize. Limited transmission capacity is one of the biggest obstacles for bringing new wind and solar power online, and reconductoring could also reduce line losses, making the overall grid more efficient.
The transmission project — which includes plans to rebuild some power lines and reconductor others — will ultimately increase capacity by more than 100%, a spokesperson for AEP told me. The first phase will involve upgrades to about 100 miles of wires across Ohio and Oklahoma, while future phases will tackle lines in Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia, with the intent of meeting growing demand from data centers and manufacturing development, according to a press release.
When reporters asked Wright about the other conditional loan guarantees the Biden administration had issued under the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program that are still pending, the secretary stressed that he was looking for applicants that had identified a clear set of projects they would implement. “Many were done in a hurry, without really even having the projects that the loans would be associated with identified. You can end up with a grab bag of projects without a lot of say for where the money went,” he said.
Wright accused the Biden administration of failing to ask applicants to detail the impact the projects would have on taxpayers and ratepayers — a key question his colleagues are now asking.
Shah disagreed with that portrayal. The whole point of the program was to reduce interest rates for utilities and require them to pass on the benefit to ratepayers. All of the projects awarded conditional commitments met that bar, he said.
He warned that if the Trump administration didn’t honor the remaining conditional commitments to utilities under the program — all 10 of them — it risked losing the trust of any new companies it attempts to make similar deals with.
“Most of the nuclear projects that they’re looking to chase are not going to get closed until 2028. And so what signal are they sending? That projects that get approved in the last year of an administration are not going to be honored in the next administration?”
On a new loan guarantee, a Nord Stream 2 revival, and AI-aided oil recovery
Current conditions: As Tropical Storm Lorenzo looks likely to dissipate over water by Friday, AccuWeather has slashed the season’s forecast to six hurricanes from nine • Severe thunderstorms near Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, are likely too spotty to relieve long-standing drought in the Mississippi River Basin • The Netrokona district of northeastern Bangladesh is scorching in temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
A rendering of the future Cascade Advanced Energy Facility. Amazon
A year after Amazon invested in the small modular reactor developer X-energy, the tech giant has unveiled its plans to build a nearly gigawatt-sized plant in southeastern Washington, where it will install the nuclear company’s next-generation technology for the first time. The Cascade Advanced Energy Facility is set to begin construction “by the end of this decade,” with hopes of generating power from up to a dozen of X-energy’s 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactors sometime “in the 2030s.” Amazon plans to build the plant in three phases, with four reactors at each stage, eventually reaching 960 megawatts in capacity. Located in Richland, Washington, along the Columbia River, the facility will nearly double the output of the Pacific Northwest’s only nuclear plant, the nearby Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station.
In a sign of what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called “the nuclear dealmaking boom” back in August, rival microreactor developer Oklo suggested at a recent public meeting in Tennessee that it may propose building some of its reactors near the Oak Ridge site of its debut nuclear waste recycling project, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported Monday. On Tuesday, meanwhile, the U.S. Army announced its new Janus program, which aims to supply bases by 2028 with microreactors like the ones Oklo aims to build, which generate 20 megawatts of electricity or less. The reactors would be owned and operated by private companies. “What resilience means to us is that we have power, no matter what, 24-7,” Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army, told The Wall Street Journal.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has largely revoked deals made under the previous administration since President Donald Trump returned to office. But on Thursday morning, the agency’s in-house lender announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to a subsidiary of utility giant American Electric Power to upgrade and rebuild about 5,000 miles of transmission lines across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. “This loan guarantee will not only help modernize the grid and expand transmission capacity but will help position the United States to win the AI race and grow our manufacturing base,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release.
The move came a day after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to fire thousands of federal workers amid the ongoing government shutdown. At a hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee based in California, granted labor unions’ request for a temporary restraining order to halt the dismissals. The hearing took place at the same time White House budget director Russ Vought appeared on the late conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s podcast to preview his plans to lay off as many as 10,000 federal workers as the shutdown continued. The hearing will pause the job cuts for the roughly 4,000 workers who received notice so far. Illson said during the hearing that she granted the temporary restraining order because administration officials had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, government functioning, to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and that they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like,” News From The States reported. “Things are being done before they’re thought through — very much ready, fire, aim.” Nearly 200 employees at the Department of Energy began receiving notices last week, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter.
The underwater explosion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting Germany to Russia’s gas supply remains one of the world’s biggest geopolitical whodunnits, and Berlin’s fellow European Union members seem keen to keep it that way. In just the past two days, Poland and Italy blocked extradition requests to send suspected saboteurs to Germany for trial. But the Germans aren’t just looking to figure out who’s responsible for destroying the megaproject. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is considering restarting the certification process for the pipeline, the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported Wednesday. The previous German government had ruled out a restart of the pipeline in March after news broke that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s business allies were angling to restore the project. In June, the new government under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz began examining legal avenues to block any future plans to reactivate the pipeline, the Financial Times reported at the time. But under current law, the economic ministry said this week a restart “cannot be ruled out in the medium term.”
Ohio passed a new law to fast-track energy projects on former coal mines and brownfields, Canary Media reported Wednesday. Called House Bill 15, the legislation took effect in August and lets the state’s Department of Development designate the former industrial sites as “priority investment areas” at the request of local governments. Roughly a third of Ohio’s 88 counties ban wind, solar, or both, but the language in the bill makes clear that “it was meant to be technology-neutral,” Rebecca Mellino, a climate and energy policy associate at The Nature Conservancy, told Canary’s Kathiann M. Kowalski.
A transition from coal could yield significant health benefits, as The New York Times reported on Tuesday. A recent study found that, when a coal-processing facility near Pittsburgh shut down, the number of emergency room visits for respiratory issues in the surrounding area dropped by about 20% in the month following the closure.
The world’s annual consumption of oil isn’t expected to peak until the mid-2030s, and by 2050 it will reach a cumulative 1 trillion barrels, according to the consultancy Wood Mackenzie’s forecast. But production that’s either already onstream or ready for development is expected to gradually decline to 650 billion barrels per year by the mid century. What will make up the difference? “Traditional exploration will play its part but can’t get anywhere near bridging a gap of this scale,” Wood Mackenzie analysts wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “Even the 21st century’s biggest new play, Guyana, with 15 billion barrels of oil, barely makes a dent.” To identify potential new resources, Wood Mackenzie rolled out a new AI-powered benchmark called Analogues, which “uses a machine learning method known as clustering to identify each field’s closest matches across 60 different attributes spanning rock properties, fluid characteristics, and commercial factors.” The AI tool could increase the share of recoverable conventional oil reserves by nearly 42%.
A chart showing how the AI "analogues" could bolster oil drilling. Wood Mackenzie
Fusion energy is rapidly accelerating in the U.S., and the Department of Energy is poised to release a national plan for speeding up the deployment of the technology. In the meantime, states can prepare by beefing up regulatory capacity, speeding up permitting, clearing interconnection queues, and creating special tax credits. That’s according to a new roadmap from the Clean Air Task Force. “As fusion energy moves closer to commercial reality, states have a window of opportunity to prepare,” Jack Moore, a fusion policy consultant at CATF, wrote in a blog post. “Proactive policy design today can help states position themselves to create an effective environment for fusion energy deployment tomorrow.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated accurately reflect oil demand by 2050.
This thing is a certified clunker.
Americans certainly got the message about the end of the EV tax credit. With the $7,500 benefit set to disappear at the end of September, electric vehicle sales surged to record numbers in the third quarter of 2025 as buyers raced to beat the deadline.
The rising tide lifted just about all EVs — but not the struggling Tesla Cybertruck. According to new numbers from Kelley Blue Book, Tesla sold just 5,385 Cybertrucks from July to September, less than half as many as it delivered during the same period in 2024. The company is now expected to sell around 20,000 of the metal EVs this calendar year. That’s down from around 50,000 last year, and less than 10% of the 250,000 total Elon Musk once predicted as the truck’s annual sales figure.
Cybertruck was well on its way to flop status before these sales numbers. With its purposefully jarring aesthetic, the EV for edgelords was never going to be as popular as Musk proclaimed, and that was before his relationship to Donald Trump and online provocations pushed many more people away from the Tesla brand. Cost didn’t help, either. Tesla once said it would sell a $40,000 basic version of Cybertruck, a price point that might have enticed some buyers beyond the Musk fanboys who became early adopters, but the cheapest one you can actually buy today is around $60,000.
Still, the vehicle’s third-quarter performance is particularly damning in comparison to nationwide EV sales, where the tax credit’s demise ignited a fire sale. Americans bought more than 430,000 EVs during the quarter, an increase of about 40% from the second quarter of 2025 and about 30% from the third quarter of last year. Popular vehicles including the Chevy Equinox EV, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Honda Prologue surged to sales of more than 20,000 during the quarter. Electric trucks including the Rivian R1T, Ford F-150 Lightning, and GMC Hummer EV saw sales increases despite having high prices that rival the Cybertruck’s.
Tesla itself, despite months of bad press, did well, too. The brand’s share of the overall EV market continues to wane, reaching a new low of 41%. But the surge temporarily stabilized its tumbling sales, with plenty of people snatching up Model 3s and Model Ys while the getting was good. Those two vehicles remained the two best-selling EVs in America, with Tesla selling more than 114,000 Model Ys and more than 53,000 Model 3s.
Yet the good times did nothing to spur driver interest in Cybertruck. In fact, public enthusiasm for the vehicle might be even lower than it seems, because it turns out that one of the top customers for Musk’s electric tank is Musk himself. Electrek reports that his other companies, such as SpaceX and xAI, have been accumulating Cybertrucks as their company cars. Tesla is replacing some of its own fleet with Cybertrucks, as well.
The move makes sense for Musk. Because of weak overall demand, Cybertrucks are sitting idle on lots; selling them to his businesses at least puts them to work. The scheme also might improve the appearance of Tesla’s sales numbers, Electrek speculates. By locking in some of these sales with a downpayment before the end of September, Tesla can deliver Cybertrucks to Musk’s other business in the weeks to come and still get the tax credit on them. The approach could boost sales numbers for a fourth quarter that’s likely to be difficult with the disappearance of the federal incentive.
Now that Cybertruck has become Elon’s Edsel, Tesla’s hopes for an EV sales revival lie largely with the new “Standard” versions of its two best-sellers. These trim levels strip away some of the amenities from the Models 3 and Y to bring their starting prices down to $37,000 and $40,000, respectively. It’s far from clear that this will succeed. Anyone shopping for an EV solely on price could wait for the upcoming new versions of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt, which are expected to come in at $30,000 or less. The Equinox’s $35,000 starting price, five-grand less than even the budget Model Y crossover, has spurred its recent success.
Still, with 320-plus miles of estimated range and at least some of Tesla’s best features, the budget versions could be compelling cars at those prices. At the very least, they’ll speak to more drivers than the Cybertruck does.