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The new rule follows the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA, which said that only waterways “with a ‘continuous surface connection’ to a ‘relatively permanent’ body of water” fell under the Clean Water Act’s protections, according to E&E News. What “relatively permanent” means, however, the court didn’t say, nor did Biden’s EPA. The two EPA staffers, who were granted anonymity to avoid retribution, “said they believed the proposal was not based in science and could worsen pollution if finalized,” Willson wrote.
Investors are hot on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff promising to make fusion energy a reality. Commonwealth Fusion Systems netted an eye-popping $863 million in its latest fundraising round. In a press release Thursday, the company said that its “oversubscribed round of capital is the largest amount raised among deep tech and energy companies since” its $1.8 billion financing deal in 2021. Commonwealth Fusion will use the funds to complete its demonstration project and further develop its proposed first power plant in Virginia. To date, the company said, it has raised close to $3 billion, “about one-third of the total capital invested in private fusion companies worldwide.” It’s a sign that investors recognize Commonwealth Fusion “is making fusion power a reality,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said.
The fusion industry has ballooned over the past six years. “It is finally, possibly, almost time” for the technology to arrive, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, noting: “For the ordinary optimist, fusion energy might invoke a cheerful Jetsons-style future of flying cars and interplanetary colonization. For the cynic, it’s a world-changing moment that’s perpetually 30 years away. But investors, nuclear engineers, and physicists see it as a technology edging ever closer to commercialization and a bipartisan pathway towards both energy security and decarbonization.”
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A record 75 gigawatts of new generating capacity hooked up to the U.S. power grid last year, a 33% surge from the previous year, thanks to new federal regulations aimed at streamlining the process. That’s according to new data from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie published Thursday. The report found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order No. 2023, issued in July 2023, along with other reforms by independent system operators, have had a “considerable impact on processing interconnection agreements, by driving improvements through reducing speculative projects and clearing queue backlogs.” While connections increased, regional grid operators received 9% fewer new project entries and saw a 51% uptick in non-viable projects since 2022.
Solar and storage technologies made up 75% of all interconnection agreements in 2024, equaling about 58 gigawatts. Wood Mackenzie projected that the sectors will retain a similar market share in 2025. Natural gas saw an increase in interconnection requests since 2022, adding 121 gigawatts of capacity. New gas applications are already breaking annual records this year. But overall the number of gas projects that successfully hook up to the grid is down 25% since 2022.
Almost 200 people have left the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, according to new estimates published Thursday in the Financial Times. Of the 28 officials in senior leadership positions, nearly half are working in an “acting” capacity, and only three of the five NRC commissioner roles are filled. “It is an unprecedented situation with some senior leaders having been forced out and many others leaving for early retirement or worse, resignation,” Scott Morris, the former NRC deputy executive director of operations, who retired in May, told the newspaper. “This is really concerning for the staff and is one of the factors causing many key staff and leaders to leave the agency they love ... creating a huge brain drain of talent.”
The exodus comes as Trump is pressing the agency to dramatically overhaul and speed up its review and approval process for new reactors. Supporters of the president’s effort say the NRC has stymied the nuclear industry for decades, and a future buildout of new reactors requires clearing house. But skeptics of the burn-it-all-down approach warn that the atomic energy industry’s success in avoiding major accidents since the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island is owed to NRC oversight, and that the agency’s processes have actually protected nuclear developers by avoiding frivolous lawsuits and not-in-my-backyard types.
Geothermal giant Ormat has reigned over the global industry of harvesting energy from hot underground reservoirs for the past 60 years. Now a new generation of companies is promising to tap the Earth’s heat even in places without water by using fracking technology to drill much deeper, vastly expanding the potential for geothermal. And Ormat has placed a big bet on one. On Thursday, the company inked a strategic partnership with Houston-based Sage Geosystems. As part of the deal, Sage will build its first commercial power plant at an existing Ormat facility in Nevada or Utah, significantly speeding up the timeline for the debut generating station. Sage CEO Cindy Taff told me the plant could be online by next year. “Ormat’s chosen a winner,” Yakov Feygin, a researcher at the Center for Public Enterprise who co-authored a report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
A majority of U.S. voters are still unfamiliar with geothermal power, according to a new poll from Data for Progress I reported on this week. When exposed to details about how the technology works, however, support grows among voters across the political spectrum. Republicans in particular are supportive.
A recent poll shows a lack of familiarity with geothermal.Data for Progress
The Grammy- and Oscar-award winning New Orleans jazz and funk singer Jon Batiste released a new song to mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the catastrophic storm that flooded his home city. Dubbed “Petrichor,” a word that describes the scent of earth after rain, the lyrics unfold like a haunting hymn over a driving beat. “Help me, Lord / They burning the planet down / No more second linin' in the street / They burning the planet down, Lord / Help me, Lord / No more plants for you to eat.” In an interview published in The Guardian, Batiste said the song was meant to be a statement. “You got to bring people together. People power is the way that you can change things in the world,” he said. “It’s a warning, set to a dance beat.”
The letter, sent Monday, came days before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In it, staffers slammed President Donald Trump’s proposal to dramatically downsize FEMA, shifting more responsibility and cost for disaster response to the states. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office and our mission of helping people before, during and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the agency employees wrote.
Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the green light to restart a permanently shuttered nuclear plant for the first time in U.S. history, with plans to bring the Palisades atomic station in Michigan back online later this year. Now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has started the process to restart a second nuclear plant, the Duane Arnold station. The agency approved a waiver request on Monday that will allow utility NextEra Energy to restart the single-reactor nuclear plant in Iowa by the end of 2029.
NextEra closed down the plant in 2020 amid mounting financial challenges for the nuclear facility. But surging electricity demand and a newfound societal appreciation of the 24-hour, zero-carbon power atomic energy produces has put a new premium on keeping existing plants running, particularly given the high costs and long timelines associated with building new reactors. Last year, Microsoft agreed to spend $16 billion to reopen the idled reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania to power its data centers. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote at the time of the deal, “The days of nuclear power plants shuttering not because of old age, safety concerns, or local opposition, but because of the economics of subsidized wind and solar and cheap natural gas, are likely over.” On Monday, the Palisades plant officially transitioned from decommissioning status back to operations status.
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Yet another startup is joining the race to develop power plants with nuclear fusion. Launched Wednesday morning, Inertia Enterprises aims to commercialize the technology that led to the breakthrough at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in December 2022, when humanity successfully generated more energy from fusion than it took to ignite the reaction for the first time. While the vast majority of public funding into fusion energy research had gone into magnetic fusion, which depends on large doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors, the breakthrough came through inertial fusion, using lasers.
The company — founded by fusion scientist Andrea Kritcher, fusion power plant designer Mike Dunne, and tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson — aims “to take the most direct, scientifically-proven path from what is working today at LLNL to commercial energy,” according to a press release. To do so, the company is developing “a new generation of mass-produced, low cost lasers and fuel targets that leverage the groundbreaking scientific result of fusion ignition,” and has licensed nearly 200 patents. “The goal of delivering limitless fusion energy has attracted tens of billions of dollars in government investment and decades of research, culminating in the achievement of ignition just a couple of years ago,” Lawson, who will serve as Inertia’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Standing on the shoulders of giants, we see a clear path from big science to commercial energy by scaling up the industrial base to the scale needed for laser inertial fusion.”.
Bill Gates-backed nuclear startup TerraPower signed an agreement with the Utah government on Monday to develop a potential atomic energy station using the company’s fourth-generation sodium-cooled reactor. As part of the deal, TerraPower will work with the Utah Office of Energy Development as part of Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s “Operation Gigawatt” program to build out transmission capacity and invest in clean-firm electricity sources such as nuclear power and geothermal energy. “Today marks an important step forward for energy in Utah,” Cox said in a statement. “Operation Gigawatt is about adding capacity from diverse sources — nuclear, natural gas, geothermal and more — so families and businesses have power that is affordable, reliable and clean.”
The move comes months after rival nuclear developer Holtec International inked a deal with the Utah government to establish a manufacturing and worker-training hub for its buildout of small modular reactors across the Mountain West in the Beehive State.
Solar imports are surging, especially in South Africa. Ember
Over the past 12 months, Africa’s imports of Chinese solar panels soared 60%, to more than 15 gigawatts, according to a report released Tuesday by the clean energy research firm Ember. In that same time period, 20 countries on the continent set new records for solar imports. If installed, the panels could radically upend power generation in some countries. Sierra Leone could generate volumes of electricity equivalent to 61% of its total output in 2023 just from the panels imported in the past year.
A chart showing solar imports in 20 African countriesEmber
“The take-off of solar in Africa is a pivotal moment,” Dave Jones, the chief analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “This report is a call to action, urging stronger research, analysis and reporting on solar’s rise — to ensure the world’s cheapest electricity source, fulfills its vast potential to transform the African continent.”
A team of astronomers detected for the first time a growing planet outside our solar system, embedded in a cleared gap of multi-ringed dust and gas. “Dozens of theory papers have been written about these observed disk gaps being caused by protoplanets, but no one’s ever found a definitive one until today,” Laird Close, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said in a press release. He called the discovery a “big deal” because the absence of planet discoveries in places where they should be has prompted many in the scientific community to invoke alternative explanations for the ring-and-gap pattern found in many protoplanetary disks.
