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The Department of the Interior has struck a deal with Duke Energy to pay the utility $129 million in exchange for abandoning a lease for an offshore wind project in federal waters off North Carolina. In a statement Monday, Duke’s chief executive in the Carolinas, Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe, said the company would reinvest nearly all the money the federal government refunded into new generating capacity, “which may include advancing new nuclear and natural gas generation, and grid enhancements to strengthen reliability.” The announcement came less than two weeks after the Trump administration unveiled a $765 million deal with Invenergy to quash four proposed offshore wind sites, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported.
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the White House has the power to fire commissioners at independent agencies without showing cause, overturning a nearly century-old precedent and granting President Donald Trump new powers over the federal regulatory state. That, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote yesterday, directly overhauls the historical separation of powers at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose members the president appointed but whose culture of not answering to the White House directly created the appearance of being above short-term political concerns. “Agencies like FERC tend not to be as explicitly politicized or partisan as, say, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is led by a single administrator who serves at the pleasure of the president, or the National Labor Relations Board or Federal Election Commission, which oversee areas of law and policy with stark partisan and ideological stakes,” Matthew wrote. “This is partly because FERC justifies decisions on electricity and natural gas policy with reference to ‘technical expertise.’” In the near term, that won’t mean much since the current leadership of FERC and the NRC are closely aligned with the Trump administration. But in an era of eroding institutional trust, the new dynamic could eat away at the credibility of key regulators.
In Texas, regulators are weighing challenges to a transmission line from landowners who say the wires follow a route that unnecessarily intersects with their properties. In North Dakota, however, utility regulators last week passed that point, instead issuing a route permit for a controversial high-voltage transmission line in the eastern half of the state. Utilities first proposed the route for the 92-mile JETx line last summer. “This decision, as with any other decision, has to be based on the law, and then the record and the facts of the case,” Public Service Commissioner Jill Kringstad told the North Dakota Monitor.
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U.S. emissions surged 3.2% last year on the back of a 13% spike in coal-fired power generation, a sign of soaring demand for electricity. Still, solar offered a bright spot, growing by 28% last year. That’s all according to the latest data from the Energy Institute’s annual Statistical Review of World Energy. But the big takeaways were in fossil fuels. Among them: The U.S. remains the world’s top producer of oil and gas, and Canada has consolidated its positions as the world’s No. 4 driller of crude. As a result, “the center of gravity of global oil supply has structurally shifted,” Wafa Jafri, the British lead for energy and natural resource strategy at the accounting giant KPMG, said in a statement. “The Americas now produce 20% more oil than the Middle East, a shift that would have been unthinkable at the start of the century.”
Meanwhile, small-scale solar is making an impact in New York. New analysis by the Energy Information Administration shows that electricity demand falls midday in the state, a phenomenon the agency attributes to the rise of small solar installations in the state. The merits of distributed solar are even more obvious in places like Pakistan, where the grid is prone to going down. The country added a whopping 27 gigawatts of rooftop solar between 2023 and 2025, according to new data in PV Tech.
Just building intermittent renewables without storage is going out of fashion. Investment behemoth Brookfield Asset Management now says that contracts that pair new generation with battery storage are replacing pure renewables deals. In an interview with Bloomberg, Arnaud Jouvin, the head of Brookfield’s global energy strategy, said customers increasingly demand access to solar or wind systems with batteries. “There’s a lot of renewables being built in many markets, and the attractiveness of these renewable megawatt-hours in the middle of the day is declining to a point where many large offtakers no longer want standalone solar,” he said.
Police outside the Arcom headquarters. Rodrigo BUENDIA / AFP via Getty Images
If the U.S. had hoped to secure the minerals it needs from Latin America instead of China, it may have to reconsider at least two Andean nations. Bolivia is in the midst of fierce protests and boycotts designed to thwart the new government’s efforts to develop a private mining industry. Now one of Ecuador’s mineral agencies has suffered a bomb attack. Early Monday morning, a bomb went off at the Quito headquarters of the country’s mining regulator, Arcom, blowing out several floors of windows.
Current conditions: France paused production at two nuclear reactors to avoid violating environmental rules against spewing warm water from the plant’s cooling systems during heatwave conditions • A pair of tropical storms named Mekkhala and Higos are barreling toward Japan’s eastern coast • The death toll from Venezuela’s twin earthquakes has reached nearly 200.
The Polestar 4 SUV at the 2025 Chicago Auto Show. Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images
As I have written before, my father and grandfather sold automobiles in New York City, so I grew up with an eye to the other cars on the road. I still remember the first time I realized there was a whole new brand on American streets, when I came upon the Polestar dealership near Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Finding out that a Chinese company was behind Polestar’s sleek sedans and growing slate of electric vehicles only piqued my interest that much more. An East Asian importer’s glow-up is one thing. East Asia’s new automotive Goliath finding a beachhead in the American market is quite another story. That story has now reached an abrupt climax as Polestar veers for the exit from the U.S. market. On Thursday, the company announced plans to quit the U.S. following a Department of Commerce decision to ban Polestar from selling new cars in the country. The move represents what The Wall Street Journal described as “the first major casualty of a U.S. rule to ban Chinese software in new vehicles that connect to the internet.”
At issue? The fact that the cameras and GPS equipment in cars could be exploited by certain foreign adversaries. The company, which is controlled by the Chinese auto giant Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, had requested the Trump administration’s permission to sell vehicles under a process that would have complied with the rule. But regulators said no. Polestar isn’t completely disappearing. The company said it would sell off its remaining stock of vehicles and keep open service centers for repairs, potentially retaining the infrastructure to redeploy if political winds shift. It bears mentioning, then, that the new rule was a product of the Biden administration. Here’s my colleague Robinson Meyer with more on the logic behind it.
If you buy a parcel of land in Texas, there’s a reasonably good chance you can do what you want with it, unlike other parts of the U.S. with more restrictive zoning rules. As a result, Texas is a top destination for data centers, and the top destination for wind and solar developers. But the same cultural deference to property rights that allows companies to build stuff in Texas also grants landowners ample opportunity to challenge the sort of project that proves difficult in any American jurisdiction because it spans so many different tracts and municipalities: Transmission lines. On Thursday, Utility Dive reported that several hundred landowners in Central Texas had filed a petition with the Public Utility Commission of Texas, asking the regulator to pause permitting on a proposed 765-kilovolt transmission line that would stretch roughly 200 miles across the middle of the state from Big Hill, near where a 200-megawatt wind farm started up a few years ago, to Bell County, just north of Austin. Transmission lines are notoriously difficult to build in the U.S., and making construction easier is a key demand of clean energy supporters for any kind of federal permitting overhaul. Whether Republican support for streamlining the federal approval process can weather the winds of American politics long enough to counter the effects of the not-in-my-backyard types remains unclear. But opposition to the Texas power line grew after state Representative Brad Buckley, a Republican, joined 42 other lawmakers in filing an amicus brief supporting the group American Stewards of Liberty, a nonprofit that supports property rights.
In New York, meanwhile, Albany’s in-house energy innovation agency is putting up money to refresh the aging statewide grid. On Thursday, the New York Research and Development Authority unveiled $24 million in funding for projects to modernize the state’s poles and wires. “As New York’s electricity system evolves, improving how electricity is managed, delivered, and utilized will be critical to maximizing the performance of our existing grid infrastructure and delivering greater value to consumers,” Doreen Harris, NYSERDA’s chief executive, said in a statement.
First came the Trump administration’s scrutiny of its offshore wind business. Then the federal deal to blow off its U.S. projects and refocus on gas drilling drew Democrat’s scrutiny. Now French energy giant TotalEnergies’ decision to take $1 billion from the Trump administration to back out of its two wind projects off U.S. coasts could draw a leery eye from authorities in its home country. On Thursday, a Paris court ruled that the company had to tighten its climate reporting by accounting for the planet-heating emissions produced when customers burn the oil and gas it sells.
The decision comes amid an unprecedented heat wave that saw France record its hottest temperature ever when, as I told you yesterday, thermometers nearly topped 111 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. The case is the first to test whether France’s 2017 so-called corporate duty of vigilance law could be applied to climate change. The court ruled that the law is not intended to make companies “responsible for the risks linked to climate change, which result from all human activity on the planet since the Industrial Revolution,” the Associated Press quoted from the decision. But the statute does request that companies act “according to their own situation.” The ruling stopped short of ordering Total to reduce its output of oil and gas, but directed the company to complete an assessment of the emissions from its consumers in the next six months. It’s unclear whether the company will be able to meet that requirement, or what may come next as a result. But a growing renewables division to offset the emissions from elsewhere in its business probably wouldn’t hurt.
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In the United States, the Department of Energy is racing to create nuclear “campuses” where startups can experiment with ways to affordably reprocess spent fuel to recycle the uranium in reactors and extract rare isotopes for medical treatments. The effort to establish a whole new industry to recycle nuclear waste comes more than half a century after then-President Jimmy Carter killed the nascent private-sector effort to reprocess atomic fuel, a technological capacity that significantly reduces the stockpile of highly radioactive fission byproducts but lays the groundwork for more enrichment of weapons-grade material. All the while, Russia emerged as one of the top nuclear recyclers. Now Moscow is looking to expand its dominance. This week, World Nuclear News reported that the Kremlin’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom is planning a new reprocessing facility that aims, for the first time in the industry’s history, to have a modular design that makes expansion easy. The first module will have a capacity to produce 400 metric tons of new reactor fuel per year. “Industrial nuclear recycling technologies and a developed infrastructure are not only a solution to a pressing environmental challenge in our country,” Andrey Nikipelov, Rosatom’s deputy director general for mechanical engineering and industrial solutions, said in a statement. The project, the largest ever built in the country, would “provide Russia with a unique opportunity to cement its leadership in the global nuclear solutions market,” he said.
Los Bronces mine in Chile. ARIEL MARINKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images
Yesterday I told you that the widening gap between future supply and demand of copper, which is needed for virtually every electric thing imaginable, was prompting a growth in output from two existing mines owned by a joint venture between Anglo American and the Chilean state-owned company Codelco. Another sign of bullishness on copper: The Canadian mining company Hudbay Minerals just bought all the remaining shares it didn’t already own of the Arizona Sonoran Copper Company. The deal establishes the third-largest copper district, as regions with mining operations are known, in the U.S. In a press release, the company pitched the new combined portfolio as an asset to battery manufacturers looking for all-American mineral supplies.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is making land on bases available to mining companies to speed up the domestic processing of more critical minerals. On Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal broke news that the U.S. Army had awarded long-term leases to mining and extraction companies Titan Mining Corporation, EnergyX, Ioneer, and REalloys for refining minerals needed for American manufacturing.
Here’s a peek inside one of my daily groupchats: While discussing New York’s Democratic primary election results this week, my friend defended the progressive left’s energy record by pointing out Assemblymember Emily Gallagher’s recent victory in passing a law to legalize balcony solar. An apartment dweller himself, he was excited at the prospect of how generating a small amount of solar power might change how he thought about electricity. (Playing the cynic, I complained that there wasn’t enough widespread support for large-scale generating projects like restarting the Indian Point nuclear plant, building new reactors upstate, or celebrating the forthcoming transmission line to connect the five boroughs to Quebec’s hydroelectric system.) But if this is to catch on, it may be helped by different terminology. Let me introduce you to: Guerilla solar. Reading this latest piece from Dan Gearino at Inside Climate News, I was struck by just how much catchier the slick two-word name is than “balcony solar.”
