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Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei and Sungrow currently dominate the inverter market. Earlier this year, SolarEdge started shipping inverters from its factory in Austin to buyers in Europe. But the global inverter market was on track to contract by 2% this year as policy changes in China, the U.S., and Europe created more uncertainty for solar.
The self-described “free state” of Florida has stripped municipalities of their right to set targets for bringing the local economy’s planet-heating emissions to net zero. A new law known as HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero goals, though legal experts said the legislation will not necessarily upend existing climate targets in at least 10 cities and counties including Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando, and Leon County, where the capital city of Tallahassee is located. “It’s certainly meant to scare municipalities and local governments from trying to do things to further net-zero policies,” Bradley Marshall, senior attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice, told Inside Climate News. “Now, its exact impact and what it exactly prohibits is probably up for some debate. Things that are adjacent to it — emissions reductions and even climate change reduction policies — on their face will not run afoul at all of a ban on adopting a net zero policy.” The move comes two years after Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill stripping the words “climate change” from state policies.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has accused New York State of violating U.S. Department of Agriculture standards to make prime farmland available for large-scale solar development. In a letter sent last week to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins warned the state against fast-tracking solar projects on prime farmland, and gave Albany 30 days to “explain why New York is moving away from USDA’s prime farmland standards and what it’s doing to protect these irreplaceable agricultural resources.”
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The pain in Spain is felt mainly by the investors who paid to build out all the solar panels now harvesting the sun on the plain. In just the past six months, the European country has already surpassed its annual record for the number of hours when the owners of solar farms must pay users to take electricity during sunny peak hours, when the sheer volume of panels now turning sunshine into power pushes midday prices well below zero. The glut has kept electricity prices in Spain among the lowest in Europe, with rates roughly half of what Germans pay. But at least four Spanish projects or companies have gone up for sale, according to a Bloomberg tally. The head of Catalonia’s regional utility, L’Energètica, said: “The economics have deteriorated so sharply that investors are trying to exit at steep discounts.”
Investors in the sector had expected that Spain would upgrade its grid and deploy more batteries as the country’s solar sector boomed. But the mismatch between the volume of generation and the capacity of wires, batteries, and offtakers to distribute or make use of that electricity has only grown since the April 2025 blackout that plunged most of Spain and Portugal into darkness. Since then, Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, has grown more aggressive in ordering solar farms offline to avoid disruptions to the frequency and voltage of the distribution system. The country has vowed to undertake more than $34 billion in grid upgrades by 2030.
Priority Group A reactors could be online within five years. Radiant Energy Group
In the three years since Germany shut down its last nuclear power station, the country’s leaders have repeatedly called the phase out a mistake, but seesawed on whether the plants that haven’t yet seen the wrecking ball could be restored to operation. A new study by the nuclear consultancy Radiant Energy Group has found that the most recently shuttered five reactors, all pressurized water reactors, could be returned to service in 2031. “Germany’s nuclear phaseout was presented as permanent and irreversible. In reality, it is neither,” the report concludes. “The shuttered fleet remains to a large degree intact, with most of the value in each site preserved; every major component can be repaired or replaced using procedures demonstrated at comparable plants worldwide; and the economic case for restart is strong.”
Well over half of Argentinians claim Italian ancestry. The South American nation’s future natural gas molecules might now declare a similar background. Eni, the Milan-based national oil company of Italy, inked a deal last week to buy a 32% stake in three upstream blocks of Argentina’s Vaca Muerta basin. Located in the mountainous western province of Neuquén, the discovery is widely considered the most promising natural gas find in Latin America, so vast The Rio Times said it could “reshape South America’s energy map.” In a statement, Eni’s chief operating officer, Guido Brusco, said: “Vaca Muerta is one of the world's richest unconventional basins in terms of resources: our participation positions us across the entire value chain, from Argentine upstream to the supply of LNG to international customers, creating value while contributing to global energy security.”
Meanwhile, Brazil’s national oil company just notched a record output from at the flagship field of its Santos Basin offshore basin. The field is now producing a record 1.1 million barrels of oil daily, surpassing the previous peak set in October of a million barrels per day, according to Oil Price. The milestone comes as Brazil ramps up production of oil and gas, despite its left-wing government’s expressed concern over climate change.
Before there was the drill bit, there was the axe.EIA
New analysis by the Energy Information Administration shows this nation was founded on … renewables. Now, of course, that was primarily wood until hydropower came around in roughly the 1880s. But coal, which surpassed wood in 1885, was the real innovation behind the energy transition away from chopped trees. At a combined 18% of total energy consumption in the U.S., non-fossil sources such as wind, water, and nuclear reached what appears to be the highest point since 1900 last year.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the description of Solaredge.
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.
