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Energy

Scribbling over renewable energy
Politics

One Big Beautiful Cheat Sheet

From the Inflation Reduction Act to the Trump mega-law, here are 20 years of changes in one easy-to-read cheat sheet.

Climate

AM Briefing: Trump Grants Regulatory Break to Coal Plants

On presidential proclamations, Pentagon pollution, and cancelled transmission

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Climate Tech

Why Is Thea Energy, the Fusion Company, in New Jersey?

The birthplace of electricity has more recently been known more for smokestacks and traffic jams than world-changing energy breakthroughs. But that could be about to change.

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Politics

Internal Agency Memo Calls for Political Reviews of Solar, Wind Projects

The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.

AI and oil drilling.

AI Could Help Decarbonize the Grid. It’s Already Helping Find More Oil.

Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.

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Donald Trump and Mike Johnson.

Climate Policy in America: Where We Go From Here

Rob does a post-vacation debrief with Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman on the One Big Beautiful Bill.

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Politics

AM Briefing: NRC Expected to ‘Rubber Stamp’ New Reactors

On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI

NRC Expected to ‘Rubber Stamp’ New Reactors
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

Current conditions: Air quality alerts will remain in place in Chicago through Tuesday evening due to smoke from Canadian wildfiresThere is a high risk of a tropical depression forming in the Gulf this weekThe rain is clearing on the eastern seaboard after 2.64 inches fell in New York’s Central Park on Monday, breaking the record for July 14 set in 1908. 

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump admin expects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ‘rubber stamp’ new reactors

The Trump administration is putting pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “rubber stamp” all new reactors, Politico reports based on conversations with three people at the May meeting where the expectation was relayed. The directive to the NRC’s top staff came from Adam Blake, a representative of the Department of Government Efficiency, who apparently used the term “rubber stamp” specifically to describe the function of the independent agency. NRC’s “secondary assessment” of the safety of new nuclear projects would be a “foregone conclusion” following approval by the Department of Energy or the Pentagon, NRC officials were made to believe, per Politico.

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Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
<p>Justin Renteria/Getty Images</p>

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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