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Artificial intelligence may extend coal’s useful life, but there’s no saving it.
Through at least 2034, if the state’s largest utility gets approval.
Whether Canadian tariffs would even apply to electricity is still a question — but if they did, things could get expensive.
PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
A federal judge temporarily blocked the move just before the freeze went into effect.
UPDATE: On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget rescinded the memo cited in this story, according to multiple reports.
The Trump administration has specifically targeted many large federal energy and climate programs in its sweeping freeze and review of grant funding, according to a list obtained by Heatmap News.
The list follows the release of a two-page memo dated January 27 and released Monday evening, in which the Office of Management and Budget ordered a pause on federal grant programs that “advance[s] Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” The memo was first reported by independent journalist Marisa Kabas and stated that the pause would go into effect at 5 p.m. ET Tuesday.
Targeted programs include vast swathes of the federal government most relevant to the energy sector, from major Energy Department cleantech research offices and labs to all implementations of energy tax credits, including those in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also includes essentially all work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a Commerce Department subagency that produces climate science and weather forecasting.
The document states that programs targeted by the administration will be reviewed to determine whether they “impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources.” Programs will also be reviewed to discover whether they’re funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act or implicated under the president’s Day One executive order to terminate activities related to “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility,” or whether they “promote gender ideology” — terms defined vaguely, if at all, in the document.
It’s too early to know how the legal system will handle this maneuver by the new administration, or how the U.S. political system will respond to the chaos. Already, impromptu protests are being convened outside of the White House, a group of high-powered plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit, and moderate Republicans — namely Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — are worrying publicly over the sweeping pause.
Heatmap has reached out to the Office of Management and Budget for comment on the document, and we will update this story if we receive it. The full list of targeted programs was first reported by Jennifer Shutt at States Newsroom. Among those named relating to the energy sector are:
This story is still developing. It was last updated Tuesday, January 28, at 6 p.m. ET.
It’s not just AI companies taking a beating today.
It’s not just tech stocks that are reeling after the release of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, which performs similarly to state-of-the-art models from American companies while using less expensive hardware far more efficiently. Energy and infrastructure companies — whose share prices had soared in the past year on the promise of powering a massive artificial intelligence buildout — have also seen their stock prices fall early Monday.
Shares in GE Vernova, which manufactures turbines for gas-fired power plants, were down 19% in early trading Monday. Since the company’s spinoff from GE last April, the share price had risen almost 200% through last Friday, largely based on optimism about its ability to supply higher electricity demand. Oklo, the advanced nuclear company backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, is down 25%, after rising almost 300% in the past year. Constellation Energy, the independent power producer that’s re-powering Three Mile Island in partnership with Microsoft, saw its shares fall almost 20% in early trading. It had risen almost 190% in the year prior to Monday.
“DeepSeek’s power implications for AI training punctures some of the capex euphoria which followed major commitments from Stargate and Meta last week,” Jefferies infrastructure analyst Graham Hunt and his colleagues wrote in a note to clients Monday. “With DeepSeek delivering performance comparable to GPT-4 for a fraction of the computing power, there are potential negative implications for the builders, as pressure on AI players to justify ever increasing capex plans could ultimately lead to a lower trajectory for data center revenue and profit growth.”
Investors fear that the proliferation of cheaper, more efficient models may hurt the prospects of technology companies — and their suppliers — that are spending tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence investments.
Just last week, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, announced huge new investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Altman’s OpenAI is part of Stargate, the joint venture with Microsoft and SoftBank that got a splashy White House-based announcement and promises to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure. There was already some skepticism of these numbers, with Altman-nemesis Elon Musk charging that certain members would be unable to fulfill their ends of the deal, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told CNBC from Davos, “I’m good for my $80 billion.”
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, said late last week that his company was building a data center “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” which would require 2 gigawatts of electricity to power. (For scale, reactors 3 and 4 of the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia are a little over 1 gigawatt each.) He also said that Meta had planned up to $65 billion of capital expenditure this year.
These escalating announcements have been manna to investors in any company that provides the building blocks for large artificial intelligence systems — namely chips and energy, with companies like Nvidia, the chip designer, and power companies and energy infrastructure companies posting some of the best stock market performances last year.
But exactly how cheaper artificial intelligence plays out in terms of real investment remains to be seen. Late Sunday night Redmond, Washington-time, Nadella posted a link on X to the Wikipedia page for Jevons Paradox. The idea dates from 19th century Britain, and posits that increased efficiency in using a resource (in Jevons’ case, coal) could actually accelerate its depletion, as the resource becomes cheaper for the same economic output, encouraging more use of it (in Jevons’ case, iron).
“Jevons paradox strikes again!,” Nadella wrote. “As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.”
Investors in chips and energy companies are hoping that’s the case; at least so far, the market doesn’t appear to agree.
