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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.”
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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.”
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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.
