Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
While it’s still difficult to link specific weather events to climate change, federal researchers have connected intensified atmospheric rivers to the planet’s rising temperatures. But the record heat the world has experienced over the past three years isn’t necessarily due entirely to global warming. In a new analysis published in Carbon Brief, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather found that the main culprits turn out to be a combination of El Niño effects, declining sulfur emissions from Chinese coal plants and global shipping no longer masking warming, and stronger than usual solar radiation.
Solar panels and wind turbines in Zhangjiakou in China's Hebei province.Photo by VCG
China’s success at building new power plants has earned the country the title of the world’s first “electrostate,” a play on the old petrostate moniker afforded to nations where vast domestic oil and gas resources dominate the economy and politics. In the People’s Republic, blue-gray solar panels glaze entire mountainsides, nuclear reactors come online faster than the U.S. can pick a site for one, and wind turbines spring from the ground. In America, meanwhile, power-thirsty data centers are forced to jury-rig on-site power plants made of old jet engines. But that’s not how President Donald Trump sees it. In response to a Wall Street Journal story outlining how China’s vast grid is boosting Beijing’s artificial intelligence ambitions, Trump posted on his Truth Social website that the newspaper was “WRONG.” He went on: “Every AI plant being built in the United States is building its own Electric Generating Facilities. The approvals are being given carefully, but very quickly, a matter of weeks. Any excess Electricity being produced is going to our Electric Grid, which is being strengthened, and expanded, for other purposes than AI, like never before. In other words, AI has far more Electricity than they will ever need.”
The outburst came as Trump’s approval ratings on the economy sunk to the lowest point ever recorded by an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll taken while he’s been in office. Just 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, down from 40% in March.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Like Tesla, electric vehicle giant Rivian is making a bet on self-driving cars. On Thursday, the company outlined what TechCrunch called “an ambitious effort that includes new hardware, including lidar and custom silicon, and eventually, a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market.” The automaker made the announcements at its inaugural “Autonomy & AI Day” event in Palo Alto, where the publication said the company sent “a very public signal to shareholders that it’s keeping pace, or even exceeding, the automated-driving capabilities of industry rivals like Tesla, Ford, General Motors, as well as automakers from Europe and China.”
It’s just the latest extension of Rivian’s empire. In March, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported that the company spun off its micromobility division. The startup, named Also, announced a $105 million Series B round on the same day it went independent.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
The Republican-led House of Representatives voted largely along partisan lines to pass three bills Thursday designed to speed up permitting for energy projects. While Politico noted the bills are unlikely to be taken up in the Senate, the package managed to pick up six Democrats’ votes in favor of a provision to ease Section 401 Clean Water Act rules and boost pipeline construction. Earlier this week, a bipartisan bill to modernize the federal permitting process and prepare to digitize the experience passed unanimously.
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman broke the news this week that the top three Senate Democrats focused on climate issues oppose another permitting reform bill with bipartisan support, the SPEED Act, on the grounds that it did too little to clear bottlenecks for renewables and transmission lines. For those hoping a long-anticipated bipartisan legislative push may finally come to fruition before tax credits expire for solar and wind projects, at least one thing is clear: A negotiation is underway.
The European Commission proposed what PV Tech called a “two-pronged approach to improving Europe’s energy infrastructure.” The plan aims to speed up and make more transparent the process for permitting projects related to the grid. The proposal also calls for establishing eight new “energy highways” to deliver transmission capacity to areas of “strategic importance” in the 27-nation bloc. The first part, called the “European Grids Package,” calls for creating the Trans-European Network for Energy, or TEN-E, that was first proposed in 2013. The report also noted how far behind Europe was on its previous targets. Despite a goal of 88 gigawatts of new cross-border electricity transmission capacity by 2030, the EU is on pace to build just 41 gigawatts.
The move comes days after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen notched a victory for her deregulatory agenda when her center-right coalition in the European Parliament broke taboos and teamed up with the far-right to pass legislation easing environmental rules on most companies. As a result of the change, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, 80% of businesses operating in the EU will no longer have to track and report their own environmental impacts.
Deep in the cloud forests of the Serra do Quiriri mountains in the southern Brazilian Atlantic Forest, scientists discovered an entirely new species of frog. Named Brachycephalus lulai, the tiny amphibian has pumpkin-orange skin with green and brown freckles and obsidian eyes. Males max out at a little over 11 millimeters, while females grow nearly 14 millimeters. They are, according to Phys.org, “among the smallest four-legged animals on Earth.” What makes the discovery so interesting is that the researchers identified the so-called “pumpkin toadlet” by its unique mating song, unlike any known species in its genus, which consists of two short bursts of sound, according to their paper in the journal PLOS One.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In June, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained how New York State was attempting to overcome the biggest challenge to building a new nuclear plant — its deregulated electricity market — by tasking its state-owned utility with overseeing the project. It’s already begun staffing up for the nuclear project, as I reported in this newsletter. But it’s worth remembering that the New York Power Authority, the second-largest government-controlled utility in the U.S. after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, gained a new mandate to invest in power plants directly again when the 2023 state budget passed with measures calling for public ownership of renewables. On Tuesday, NYPA’s board of trustees unanimously approved a list of projects in which the utility will take 51% ownership stakes in a bid to hasten construction of large-scale solar, wind, and battery facilities. The combined maximum output of all the projects comes to 5.5 gigawatts, nearly double the original target of 3 gigawatts set in January.
But that’s still about 25% below the 7 gigawatts NYPA outlined in its draft proposal in July. What changed? At a hearing Tuesday morning, NYPA officials described headwinds blowing from three directions: Trump’s phaseout of renewable tax credits, a new transmission study that identified which projects would cost too much to patch onto the grid, and a lack of power purchase agreements from offtakers. One or more of those variables ultimately led private developers to pull out at least 16 projects that NYPA would have co-owned.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
During World War II, the Lionel toy train company started making components for warships, the Ford Motor Company produced bomber planes, and the Mattatuck Manufacturing Company known for its upholstery nails switched to churning out cartridge clips for Springfield rifles. In a sign of how severe the shortfall of equipment to generate gas-powered electricity has become, would-be supersonic jet startups are making turbines. While pushing to legalize flights of the supersonic jets his company wants to build, Blake Scholl, the chief executive of Boom Supersonic, said he “kept hearing about how AI companies couldn’t get enough electricity,” and how companies such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI “were building their own power plants with large arrays of converted jet engines.” In a thread on X, he said that, “under real world conditions, four of our Superpower turbines could do the job of seven legacy units. Without the cooling water required by legacy turbines!”
The gas turbine crisis, as Matthew wrote in September, may be moving into a new phase as industrial giants race to meet the surging demand. In general, investors have rewarded the effort. “But,” as Matthew posed, “what happens when the pressure to build doesn’t come from customers but from competitors?” We may soon find out.
It is, quite literally, the stuff of science fiction, the kind of space-based solar power plant that Isaac Asimov imagined back in 1940. But as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported in an exclusive this morning, the space solar company Overview Energy has emerged from stealth, announcing its intention to make satellites that will transmit energy via lasers directly onto Earth’s power grids. The company has raised $20 million in a seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital, Prime Movers Lab, and Engine Ventures, and is now working toward raising a Series A. The way the technology would work is by beaming the solar power to existing utility-scale solar projects. As Katie explained: “The core thesis behind Overview is to allow solar farms to generate power when the sun isn’t shining, turning solar into a firm, 24/7 renewable resource. What’s more, the satellites could direct their energy anywhere in the world, depending on demand. California solar farms, for example, could receive energy in the early morning hours. Then, as the sun rises over the West Coast and sets in Europe, ‘we switch the beam over to Western Europe, Morocco, things in that area, power them through the evening peak,’” Marc Berte, the founder and CEO of Overview Energy, told her. He added: “It hits 10 p.m., 11 p.m., most people are starting to go to bed if it’s a weekday. Demand is going down. But it’s now 3 p.m. in California, so you switch the beam back.”
In bigger fundraising news with more immediate implications for our energy system, next-generation geothermal darling Fervo Energy has raised another $462 million in a Series E round to help push its first power plants over the finish line, as Matthew wrote about this morning.
When Sanae Takaichi became the first Japanese woman to serve as prime minister in October, I told you at the time how she wanted to put surging energy needs ahead of lingering fears from Fukushima by turning the country’s nuclear plants back on and building more reactors. Her focus isn’t just on fission. Japan is “repositioning fusion energy from a distant research objective to an industrial priority,” according to The Fusion Report. And Helical Fusion has emerged as its national champion. The Tokyo-based company has signed the first power purchase agreement in Japan for fusion, a deal with the regional supermarket chain Aoki Super Co. to power some of its 50 stores. The Takaichi administration has signaled plans to increase funding for fusion as the new government looks to hasten its development. While “Japan still trails the U.S. and China in total fusion investment,” the trade newsletter reported, “the policy architecture now exists to close that gap rapidly.”
Another day, another emerging energy or climate technology gets Google’s backing. This morning, the carbon removal startup Ebb inked a deal with Google to suck 3,500 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Ebb’s technology converts carbon dioxide from the air into “safe, durable” bicarbonate in seawater and converting “what has historically been a waste stream into a climate solution,” Ben Tarbell, chief executive of Ebb, said in a statement. “The natural systems in the ocean represent the most powerful and rapidly scalable path to meaningful carbon removal … Our ability to remove CO2 at scale becomes the natural outcome of smart business decisions — a powerful financial incentive that will drive expansion of our technology.”
