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It’s the GOP’s latest contribution to President Donald Trump’s effort to sentence the offshore wind industry to what I called earlier this month a death by a thousand cuts. The move comes as offshore wind projects keep coming online, despite the Trump administration pulling out all stops to try to thwart their development. The White House’s latest effort to halt construction on offshore turbines — paying off developers to abandon projects — is attracting increased scrutiny, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has extensively reported of late.
Hot off the hottest initial public offering of the year so far (though soon to be eclipsed by SpaceX, no doubt), next-generation geothermal pioneer Fervo Energy has suffered a potential setback. On Thursday, Axios reported that the company had experienced a blowout at its first commercial power plant in Utah. The extent of the damage was not yet clear last night. But the accident — not uncommon at geothermal sites — could potentially delay the closely-watched project to build its debut plant at Cape Station in southwestern Utah. “From time to time, we experience operational incidents like any other prudent operator,” Fervo spokesperson Melissa Mahoney said in a statement. “Fervo contained the flow of fluid and is no longer experiencing a well-control incident. We would like to reiterate that there were no injuries, no environmental damage, no pause in Cape Phase I construction and commissioning, and there will be no material impact to either cost or schedule of the project.”
Still, things are looking bright for geothermal. The House plans to vote on a bipartisan package of bills next week designed to ease permitting rules on the renewable energy source lauded by Republicans for its synergies with oil and gas and by Democrats for its 24/7 output of carbon-free electricity. The package will include a mix of bills authored by lawmakers in both parties and passed in March via unanimous consent, according to Politico.
Until recently, the phrase nuclear renaissance has described something aspirational. But the real money is starting to flow into the once-moribund atomic energy industry. New data from the International Energy Agency pegged annual investment into nuclear energy at more than $80 billion each year now, with close to 80 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity under construction across 15 countries. The bulk of that is either in China or made up of Russian technology in countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt, and Turkey.
As I told you last month, America’s nuclear dry spell is over, with two new commercial reactors breaking ground in April. And companies are on something of a nuclear deal spree. Corporate power purchase contracts for nuclear power, meanwhile, are booming.
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Just compare next year's forecast to a decade ago.EIA
This summer is going to be a hot one. But natural gas consumption for power production this summer will remain near recent highs, according to the latest outlook from the Energy Information Administration. Despite a 2% increase in overall U.S. electricity demand this summer, new generation from renewables will offset the spike and keep gas-fired generation relatively flat. That is, until next year. In 2027, the EIA expects electricity from gas to hit a new record.
The world’s most populous nation is also one of its most coal-addicted. But India is racing to build enough alternatives to offset its demand for a fuel so widely burned that major metropoles on the subcontinent are artificially cooled by the sulfur coal spews in the air. New data from the Indian consultancy JMK Research found that India added 14.2 gigawatts of solar energy capacity in the first three months of 2026, a 95% increase from the previous quarter. That includes 12.1 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and 2 gigawatts of rooftop solar units, PV Tech reported.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., new large-scale solar projects are advancing. The U.S. developer BrightNight announced this week that it had secured financing for its 120-megawatt Frontier solar project in Kentucky. “This milestone reflects not only the strength of this project, but also our ability to consistently bring complex projects from concept to fully financed reality,” BrightNight CEO Martin Hermann said in a statement.
It’s looking sunny in New York. On Thursday, the Empire State passed a bill to legalize plug-in solar panels that can go on renters’ balconies, clearing the way for the majority of city residents to harness the benefits of photovoltaics. “Balcony solar will reduce New Yorkers’ utility bills AND their emissions,” state Representative Emily Gallagher, the Brooklyn progressive who authored the legislation, wrote in a post on X. “It will dramatically expand who has access to the solar economy and strengthen the power of the renewable movement.”
Editor’s note: Updates with statement from Fervo.
Yet another U.S. reactor startup hoping to build a prototype plant under the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program has won the agency’s approval for its safety blueprint. On Thursday, Last Energy plans to announce the regulator’s official endorsement of the microreactor developer’s preliminary documented safety analysis — a key procedural step known as PDSA — for its 5-megawatt demonstration reactor at Texas A&M University. The reactor, set to be a quarter the size of Last Energy’s commercial-scale model, is designed to show regulators the technology can safely split atoms and generate heat for electricity production. The approval is only from the Energy Department and limited to the pilot project. To produce commercial electricity, Last Energy still needs to go through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license. But the data from this pilot project is likely to count for Last Energy’s eventual application to the NRC for its first commercial plant. “Last Energy’s PWR-5 uses the same physical reactor geometry as the company’s commercial PWR-20, with reduced fuel enrichment scaled for 5 megawatts of electrical output,” the company told me. “The PWR-5 pilot project is a direct bridge to Last Energy’s commercial PWR-20 deployment.”
The approval makes Last Energy at least the fourth company so far to pass the PDSA phase after rival microreactor developers Antares, Radiant, and Deployable Energy. But it isn’t the only one. On Wednesday afternoon, an official at the Idaho National Laboratory posted on LinkedIn that he had approved the PDAS for two reactors in the Energy Department’s pilot program. It wasn't immediately clear which company was the second after Last Energy. “I couldn’t be prouder of the exemptional nuclear safety review team,” wrote Bob Boston, the Energy Department’s Idaho operations manager. “The public can rest assured that any and all approvals for new reactors under DOE will be safe.”
Two of the most populous states in the nation’s largest electric grid just released new rules for data centers looking to set up shop. In Pennsylvania, the largest state in PJM Interconnection, Governor Josh Shapiro issued a new set of standards for companies seeking to fast-track development, including requiring developers to generate their own electricity, give out millions of dollars in local support, and follow stricter sustainability rules on water. The Democrat, per the public radio station WVIA, “also wants to change a tax exemption program for data center owners and operators” to require companies to meet the new standards to qualify for tax breaks. The idea mirrors a proposal from Searchlight Institute senior fellow Jane Flegal, who argued last month for conditioning tax incentives on meeting best-practice industry standards for data centers. In New Jersey, the sixth-largest of PJM’s 13 states, Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill released her own set of guidelines for data center companies that includes requiring public reporting of water and electricity usage and plans to develop “strong statewide standards” that provide “state resources to ensure municipalities can negotiate from positions of strength, ensuring data centers address impacts like light, noise, and pollution while making meaningful local investments” and “delivering good-paying jobs.”
Meanwhile in Alaska, where the Trump administration is clearing the way for all kinds of new infrastructure, the Anchorage-based startup Stak Energy is proposing one of the largest data centers in the nation on the Arctic North Slope. The $500 million project would take up an entire square mile with multiple buildings off the Dalton Highway, where proponents say cold temperatures and an abundant supply of land and natural gas for power can bolster the facility. The project could, according to the Northern Journal, produce up to 3 gigawatts of power for its own use, “making it competitive with some of the largest data centers under development in the Lower 48.” In a Tuesday segment on Alaska Public Radio, Northern Journal reporter Nathaniel Herz said the below-freezing average temperature on the North Slope meant the project would “be using what they expect to be 90% less water than a facility in the Lower 48.” Perhaps the biggest benefit though is the sparse population in the Arctic. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained of the latest Heatmap Pro data, the number of data center projects being canceled due to public backlash is soaring.
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Deep under California’s traffic-clogged streets, rolling farmland, and sprawling deserts are vast caverns — many the legacy of wells drained of oil during the heyday of Chevron’s Great Depression-era homestate drilling bonanza — capable of storing carbon dioxide captured before it enters the atmosphere. Until now, the state could only theoretically return carbon to the Earth’s crust. But on Tuesday, the oil and carbon management developer California Resources Corporation injected its maiden load of carbon dioxide into a depleted oil reservoir, marking the first time a carbon capture and storage project has come online in the state’s history. The project, called Carbon TerraVault I, is located in Kern County, the vast inland stretch northeast of Santa Barbara that’s home to California’s largest active oil fields. The site will draw out the dregs of oil left in the depleted wells in the Elk Hills Field by permanently returning up to 30 million tons of carbon dioxide to the formation roughly a mile deep underground. It’s part of a vertically integrated operation. California Resources Corporation, which calls itself CRC, operates a nearby cryogenic gas plant. The company captures the carbon dioxide from the facility and ships it to the so-called Class IV well in the oil and gas field. The first injection “demonstrates that California can lead on climate solutions that are practical, scalable, and cost-effective,” CRC CEO Francisco Leon said in a statement. Investors remain skeptical. Shares of CRC fell nearly 3% yesterday.
With gas turbines selling faster than manufacturers can keep up, technology that could capture carbon from gas-fired plants and thus preserve their value even in a scenario where the government prices emissions commands a new premium. It wasn’t long ago that activists uniformly dismissed the technology as a “false solution,” and experts cautioned that carbon capture and storage would be limited to hard-to-abate industrial sectors. But last October, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Google backed a project to build a gas plant with CCS, launching what may be one of the most promising efforts yet to commercialize the technology.
Fresh off wrangling a biting pair of eastern racer snakes he grabbed off the patio of Dr. Oz’s vacation home, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is trying to find ways to round up and get rid of the microscopic plastic particles circulating in Americans’ bodies. A new $144 million program, launched last month but featured in E&E News on Wednesday, aims to measure, understand, and remove micro- and nanoplastics, and marks the biggest federal investment to date in a field of study that coalesced just five years ago.
While the move was “welcomed by researchers, industry, environmental, and Make American Healthy Again advocates as well as online wellness gurus promoting nascent ‘detoxification’ methods,” the newswire quoted Kennedy’s own experts, who said the controversial health government chief was “focused on the wrong questions.” Marcus Eriksen, a marine plastics scientist who heads up the nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute and has advised Kennedy for years, said: “Getting it out of our bodies? That seems extremely tough to me.” So, why put resources there? Well, Eriksen said, it’s politically easier to sell than cracking down on the fossil fuel companies with growing businesses producing the ingredients for plastics. “I get that’s kind of the narrative that’s going to fly with this administration — focus on the downstream stuff, less on the prevention side,” he said.
The world's first floating nuclear plant and SMR: the Akademik Lomonosov. Rosatom
For all the hype around small modular reactors, only two of the 440 some-odd commercial nuclear reactors in operating in the world today would qualify. One of them is a high-temperature gas-cooled plant in China, which generates 210 megawatts of electricity. (The cutoff for what qualifies as an SMR is widely agreed to be under 300 megawatts but over 20 megawatts, the threshold for microreactors.) The other was the world’s first SMR: Russia’s floating nuclear plant on a barge in the Siberian Arctic, capable of generating 70 megawatts of power. Nearly seven years after the vessel Akademik Lomonosov started producing electricity, Russia’s state-owned nuclear firm is preparing for another floating nuclear station. On Wednesday, World Nuclear News reported that Rosatom had finished manufacturing a 58-megawatt reactor for a serialized floating power station set to power a copper mining complex in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, in the country’s northeasternmost corner. “Rosatom continues to expand its range of floating power units, and the completion of the first reactor for the lead floating nuclear power unit is a significant milestone,” Alexey Likhachev, the director general of Rosatom, said in a statement. “Today, Russia is the only country with an operating floating nuclear power plant, and we intend to maintain our leadership in the development of small-scale technologies.”
