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The Fish and Wildlife Service has lifted its ban on issuing permits for incidental harm to protected eagles while also pursuing enforcement actions — including against operators that reported bird deaths voluntarily.
Pennsylvania is out, Virginia wants in, and New Jersey is treating it like a piggybank.
A new PowerLines report puts the total requested increases at $31 billion — more than double the number from 2024.
The battery recycling company announced a $425 million Series E round after pivoting to power data centers.
Amidst a two year-long slump in lithium prices, the Nevada-based battery recycling company Redwood Materials announced last summer that it had begun a new venture focused on grid-scale energy storage. Today, it’s clear just how much that bet has paid off.
The company announced a $425 million round of Series E funding for the new venture, known as Redwood Energy. That came from some big names in artificial intelligence, including Google and Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures. This marks the final close of the funding round, increasing the total from $350 million announced in October.
Redwood Energy adapts the company’s original mission — breaking down spent batteries to recover, refine, and resell critical minerals — to suit the data center revolution. Instead of merely extracting battery materials, the company can now also repurpose electric vehicle batteries that still have some life left in them as energy storage solutions for AI data centers, allowing Redwood to get value from the battery throughout its lifecycle.
“Regardless of where lithium prices are, if we can put [a lithium-ion battery] in a large-scale energy storage system, it can have a lot more value before we break it down into critical materials,” Claire McConnell, Redwood’s new VP of business development for energy storage, told me.
Over the past 12 to 18 months, she explained that the company had started to receive more and more used electric vehicle battery packs “in better condition than we initially anticipated.” Given the substantial electricity load growth underway, McConnell said the company saw it as “perfect moment” to “develop something that could be really unique for that market.”
At the time of Redwood Energy’s launch last June, the company announced that it had stockpiled over a gigawatt-hour of used EV batteries, with an additional 5 gigawatt-hours expected over the following year. Its first microgrid pilot is already live and generating revenue in Sparks, Nevada, operating in partnership with the data center owner and operator Crusoe Energy. That project is off-grid, supplying solar-generated electricity directly to Crusoe’s data center. Future projects could be grid-connected though, storing energy when prices are low and dispatching it when there are spikes in demand.
The company also isn’t limiting itself to used battery packs, McConnell told me. Plenty of manufacturers, she said, are sitting on a surplus of new batteries that they’re willing to offload to Redwood. The potential reasons for that glut are easy to see: already-slower-than-expected EV adoption compounded by Trump’s rollback of incentives has left many automakers with lower than projected EV sales. And even in the best of times, automakers routinely retool their product lines, which could leave them with excess inventory from an older model.
While McConnell wouldn’t reveal what percent of packs are new, she did tell me they make up a “pretty meaningful percentage of our inventory right now,” pointing to a recently announced partnership with General Motors meant to accelerate deployment of both new and used battery packs for energy storage.
While Redwood isn’t abandoning its battery recycling roots, this shift in priorities toward data center energy storage comes after a tough few years for the battery recycling sector overall. By last June, lithium prices had fallen precipitously from their record highs in 2022, making mineral recycling far less competitive. Then came Trump’s cuts to consumer electric vehicle incentives, further weakening demand. On top of that, the rise of lithium-iron phosphate batteries — which now dominate the battery storage sector and are increasingly common in EVs — have reduced the need for nickel and cobalt in particular, as they’re not a part of this cheaper battery chemistry.
All this helped create the conditions for the bankruptcy of one of Redwood’s main competitors, Li-Cycle, in May 2025. The company went public via a SPAC merger in 2021, aiming to commercialize its proprietary technique for shredding whole lithium-ion battery packs at once. But it ultimately couldn’t secure the funds to finish building out its recycling hub in Rochester, New York, and it was acquired by the commodities trading and mining company Glencore last summer.
“We started really early, and in a way we started Redwood almost too early,” JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and Tesla’s co-founder, told TechCrunch last summer. He was alluding to the fact that in 2017, when Redwood was founded, there just weren’t that many aging EVs on the road — nor are there yet today. So while an influx of used EV batteries is eventually expected, slower than anticipated EV adoption means there just may not be enough supply yet to sustain a company like Redwood on that business model alone.
In the meantime, Redwood has also worked to recycle and refine critical minerals from battery manufacturing scrap and used lithium-ion from consumer electronics. Partnerships with automakers such as Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors, as well as global battery manufacturer Panasonic, have helped bolster both its EV battery recycling business and new storage endeavor. The goal of building a domestic supply chain for battery materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper also remains as bipartisan as ever, meaning Redwood certainly isn’t dropping the recycling and refining arm of its business, even as it shifts focus toward energy storage.
For instance, it’s also still working on the buildout of a recycling and battery component production facility in Charleston, South Carolina. While three years ago the company announced that this plant would eventually produce over 100 gigawatt-hours of cathode and anode battery components annually, operations on this front appear to be delayed. When Redwood announced that recycling and refining operations had begun in Charleston late last year, it made no mention of when battery component production would start up.
It’s possible that this could be taking a backburner to the company’s big plans to expand its storage business. While the initial Crusoe facility offers 63 megawatt-hours of battery energy storage, McConnell told me that Redwood is now working on projects “in the hundreds of megawatt-hours, looking to gigawatt-hour scale” that it hopes to announce soon.
The market potential is larger than any of us might realize. Over the next five or so years, McConnell said, “We expect that repurposed electric vehicle battery packs could make up 50% of the energy storage market.”
On Vineyard Wind’s win, Hydro-Quebec, and the EU-India trade deal
Current conditions: Temperatures as low as 30 degrees Fahrenheit below average are expected to persist for at least another week throughout the Northeast, including in New York City • Midsummer heat is driving temperatures up near 100 degrees in Paraguay • Antarctica is facing intense katabatic winds that pull cold air from high altitudes to lower ones.
President Donald Trump, no fan of the Paris Agreement.Tom Brenner/Getty Images
The United States has, once again, exited the Paris Agreement, the first global carbon-cutting pact to include the world’s two top emitters. President Donald Trump initiated the withdrawal on his first day back in office last year — unlike the last time Trump quit the Paris accords, after a prolonged will-he-won’t-he game in 2017. That process took three years to complete, allowing newly installed President Joe Biden to rejoin in 2021 after just a brief lapse. This time, the process took only a year to wrap up, meaning the U.S. will remain outside the pact for years at least. “Trump is making unilateral decisions to remove the United States from any meaningful global climate action,” Katie Harris, the vice president of federal affairs at the union-affiliated BlueGreen Alliance, said in a statement. “His personal vendetta against clean energy and climate action will hurt workers and our environment.” Now, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, at “all Paris-related meetings (which comprise much of the conference), the U.S. would have to attend as an ‘observer’ with no decision-making power, the same category as lobbyists.”
America has not yet completed its withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching group through which the Paris Agreement was negotiated, which Trump initiated this month. That won’t be final until next year. That Trump is even planning to quit the body shows how much more aggressive the administration’s approach to climate policy is this time around. Trump remained within the UNFCCC during his first term, preferring to stay engaged in negotiations even after quitting the Paris Agreement.
Just weeks after a federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s stop work order on the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island’s shores, another federal judge has overturned the order halting construction on the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts. That, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote last night, “makes four offshore wind farms that have now won preliminary injunctions against Trump’s freeze on the industry.” Besides Revolution Wind, Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project and Equinor’s Empire Wind plant off Long Island have each prevailed in their challenges to the administration’s blanket order to abandon construction on dubious national security grounds.
Meanwhile, the White House is potentially starving another major infrastructure project of funding. The Gateway rail project to build a new tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York City could run out of money and halt construction by the end of next week, the project manager warned Tuesday. Washington had promised billions to get the project done, but the money stopped flowing in October during the government shutdown. Officials at the Department of Transportation said the funding would remain suspended until, as The New York Times reported, the project’s contracts could be reviewed for compliance with new rules about businesses owned by women and minorities.
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A new transmission line connecting New England’s power-starved and gas-addicted grid to Quebec’s carbon-free hydroelectric system just came online this month. But electricity abruptly stopped flowing onto the New England Clean Energy Connect as the Canadian province’s state-owned utility, Hydro-Quebec, withheld power to meet skyrocketing demand at home amid the Arctic chill. Power plant owners in New England and New York, where Hydro-Quebec is building another line down the Hudson River to connect to New York City, complained that deals with the utility focused on maintaining supplies during the summer, when air conditioning traditionally surges power to peak demand. Hydro-Quebec restored power to the line on Monday.
The storm represented a force majeure event. If it hadn’t, the utility would have needed to pay penalties. But the incident is sure to fuel more criticism from power plant owners, most of which are fossil fueled, who oppose increased competition from the Quebecois. “I hate to say it, but a lot of the issues and concerns that we have been talking about for years have played out this weekend,” Dan Dolan — who leads the New England Power Generators Association, a trade group representing power plant owners — told E&E News. “This is a very expensive contract for a product that predominantly comes in non-stressed periods in the winter,” he said.
Europe has signed what the European Commission president Urusula von der Leyen called “the mother of all deals” with India, “a free trade zone of 2 billion people.” As part of the deal, the world’s second-largest market and the most populous nation plan to ramp up exports of steel, plastics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. But don’t expect Brussels to give New Delhi a break on its growing share of the global emissions. The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism — the first major tariff in the world based on the carbon intensity of imports — just took effect this month, and will remain intact for Indian goods, Reuters reported.
The Department of the Interior has ordered staff at the National Park Service to remove or edit signs and other informational materials in at least 17 parks out West to scrub mentions of climate change or hardship inflicted by settlers on Native Americans. The effort comes as part of what The Washington Post called a renewed push to implement Trump’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Park staff have interpreted those orders, the newspaper reported, to mean eliminating any reference to historic racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, and climate change. Just last week, officials removed an exhibit at Independence National Historical Park on George Washington’s ownership of slaves.
Tesla is going trucking. The electric automaker inked a deal Tuesday with Pilot Travel Centers, the nation’s largest operator of highway pit stops, to install Tesla’s Semi Chargers for heavy-duty electric vehicle charging. The stations are set to be built at select Pilot locations along Interstate 5, Interstate 10, and several other major corridors where heavy-duty charging is highest. The first sites are scheduled to open this summer.
