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The Trump administration just unveiled one of its biggest bets on nuclear power yet. The Department of Energy announced $17.5 billion in low-interest loans for utilities to pay for the equipment needed to order new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. The program marks arguably the most significant effort yet to reclaim U.S. control over its flagship reactor design. While the two 1,100-megawatt units completed at Southern Company’s Alvin W. Vogtle Generating Station in 2023 and 2024 were the first installed in the U.S., China has been building its own version of the reactors at an industrial scale for years. The program will support up to 10 reactors, including two per venture with as many as five utilities. The power companies, currently in talks with the administration, have not yet been named. But Dan Sumner, the chief executive of Westinghouse Electric, told The Wall Street Journal the deal “really kick-starts fleet-scale nuclear development in the United States.” As my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last night: “I hesitate to praise the project's climate bonafides at the risk of discouraging the Trump administration, but it is worth noting that if this project were to succeed, it would be one of the largest state-assisted build-outs of zero-carbon electricity in recent American history. But it would still take some time to arrive: These reactors aren’t forecast to come online til 2035.”
Yet another behemoth solar farm has come online. On Tuesday, the developer rPlus Energies said its Green River Energy Center had started operations. The facility in central Utah with 400-megawatts of solar panels and 1,600 megawatt-hours of batteries is now the largest solar-and-storage plant within PacifiCorp’s six-state territory out west, including Oregon, Washington, California, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. “Operation Gigawatt is about ensuring Utah has the reliable, homegrown energy needed to power opportunity for generations,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, said in a statement. “Green River Energy Center represents the kind of large-scale energy investment we need to deliver reliable energy, support rural Utah, and help power the next generation of prosperity across our state.”
The opening comes as solar is now generating more U.S. power than coal, as I told you recently.
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Lights out in Cuba. Magdalena Chodownik/Anadolu via Getty Images
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Exxon Mobil has the right to sue a Cuban-owned company to recoup more than $70 million in 1960 dollars from an oil complex seized by the Cuban government after Fidel Castro’s revolution. Havana later transferred the ownership of the refinery, terminals, plants, and service stations to Corporación Cimex, the state-owned conglomerate. The lawsuit could now see the oil major try to recover more than $1 billion in losses. “Today’s decision is a critical moment in a 60 year effort to be compensated for what the Cuban government illegally seized,” Exxon spokesperson Todd Spitler told E&E News in an emailed statement. “It reflects two things: the merits of our argument and the fact that our company will fight a good fight for as long as it takes.”
The Trump administration understands the importance of refining cobalt — that’s why, as I reported last year, the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency is pumping money into a startup that promises a new and cheap way to process the mineral. Canada’s Sherritt International started shutting down its Fort Saskatchewan refinery after the U.S. expanded sanctions on Cuba, halting exports of a feedstock supply needed for the plant in Alberta, Canada. The move, in addition to the Supreme Court ruling, come amid intensifying pressure by Washington on the Cuban regime.
California is once again following a New York trend. Just weeks after Albany sued to stop the Trump administration’s bid to pay TotalEnergies to give up its offshore wind projects, Sacramento is joining the litigation. “At a time when the country needs more reliable and sustainable power supply, the Trump Administration is busy using taxpayer money to strike backroom buyouts that make clean-energy projects disappear,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “California won’t stand idly by as the Trump Administration illegally strikes deals to kill offshore wind projects and replace them with more windfalls for his fossil fuel friends; we’re putting the Administration on notice that we intend to sue.”
In other macroeconomic news: The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it was leaving its benchmark interest rate unchanged for the fourth straight time. Speaking at his first policy meeting since taking office, Kevin Warsh, Trump’s newly appointed Fed chairman, promised to “deliver price stability.” But CNN noted that most of Warsh’s colleagues signaled in their economic outlooks that they anticipated hiking rates again later this year. Rate cuts, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has written, are key to boosting renewables, whose upfront costs make them sensitive to interest rates on capital.
The Department of the Interior has agreed to pay the developer Invenergy $765 million to cancel its four offshore wind leases, an amount equal to what the company paid the federal government for access to the areas. Like the administration’s previous deals to kill off as-yet-unbuilt offshore wind projects, Invenergy’s agreement is structured as a legal settlement. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explained, the deal follows a similar $928 million arrangement with TotalEnergies announced in March, and an $885 million agreement with several joint ventures in April. That brings the total amount the administration has agreed to pay to end offshore wind leases to more than $2.5 billion to date.
A group of state attorneys general filed a legal challenge to those previous deals earlier this month that questions their use of the Judgment Fund, a functionally unlimited well of cash the federal government can use to settle ongoing or imminent lawsuits. Here’s Emily with more on the Judgment Fund and why using it may be tricky for the administration to defend.
Among the most poignant critiques of solar energy are its intermittency and the amount of land needed to generate vast quantities of power. Batteries are quickly solving the first part of that equation. But data from a new interactive map the Solar Energy Industries Association published this morning shows that solar today takes up just 0.04% of the total U.S. land area, and 0.07% of prime American farmland. There were zero states where solar used more than 0.5% of prime farmland, according to the data, which was shared exclusively with Heatmap. In fact, nearly every state has more abandoned prime farmland than solar-developed parcels. Nationally, there are 43 acres of abandoned prime farmland for every acre of solar on prime farmland. As a particularly jarring point of comparison, golf courses alone use 2.6 times as much prime farmland as solar, while suburban development just since 2014 uses roughly six times as much. “America depends on our land to grow our food, build our communities, and power our lives,” Tim Pawlenty, the newly-appointed chief executive of SEIA and a former Republican governor of Minnesota, told me in a statement. “Responsible land use means balancing all of those needs. This map helps provide important context by showing that solar and agriculture can thrive together. Solar development uses a very small amount of farmland compared to many other common land uses, while also delivering affordable energy, local tax revenue, and reliable income for farmers and landowners.”
California beamin'.EIA
Solar, meanwhile, hit a major milestone in California. In the first five months of 2026, utility-scale solar generation in the California Independent System Operator surpassed natural gas power, according to a new analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Compared to the same five-month period in 2024, this year saw a 21% increase in solar generation. Gas-fired generation, meanwhile, sank by 60%.
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Estonia’s parliament has passed a new bill creating the Baltic nation’s first complete set of rules for producing nuclear energy and overseeing its safety, NucNet reported, a key step toward building the NATO country’s first atomic power station. Meanwhile, Swiss lawmakers just rejected a bid to slow down legislation to allow for construction of new reactors again. Switzerland’s Council of States, its upper house of parliament, blocked a motion to refer a nuclear bill to the Federal Council ahead of a planned vote later this week.
In Sweden, the parliament approved legislation to streamline permitting for mining and processing uranium. The bill also included an amendment to open up more coastal sites to reactor development, World Nuclear News reported.
The U.S. is seeing the start of a solar manufacturing boom, perhaps best exemplified by the opening of the first fully integrated plant in Qcells’ factory. Now Soltec, a startup that manufactures tracking equipment to maximize power production, has launched a new line of hardware that it says is completely compliant with new restrictions on foreign imports. The company said it had spent the past year “reorganizing its U.S. supply chain with a clear objective: to provide customers with a highly localized supply network capable of meeting the domestic content requirements” of new federal rules. “By localizing its U.S. supply chain, Soltec helps customers pursue Made-in-USA tax benefits while improving cost competitiveness, delivery certainty, and resilience against tariffs, freight volatility and broader geopolitical disruptions,” Mariano Berges, Soltec’s chief executive, said in a statement. “The objective is to protect U.S. customers and provide greater execution certainty for their projects in an increasingly complex market environment.”
In case you were wondering where former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem may turn up, here’s your answer: copper mining. The current special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a pact of right-leaning Western Hemisphere countries, has joined NovaRed Mining, a junior miner that holds two early-stage copper exploration assets in Canada. Noem, who is taking an adviser role, boasts “extensive experience spanning economic development, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, national security and public-private collaboration,” the company said in a press release.
