Sparks
Federal Judge Breaks Trump’s Permitting Blockade
The opinion covered a host of actions the administration has taken to slow or halt renewables development.
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The opinion covered a host of actions the administration has taken to slow or halt renewables development.
On China’s H2 breakthrough, vehicle-to-grid charging, and USA Rare Earth goes to Brazil
Fights over AI-related developments outnumber those over wind farms in the Heatmap Pro database.
The enhanced geothermal darling is spending big on capex, but its shares will be structured more like a software company’s.
There was no new investment required from TotalEnergies, according to newly disclosed terms.
How China emerged the victor of the war with Iran.
The Strait of Hormuz appears to maybe be opening up eventually — and the price of oil is collapsing.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday morning that the waterway was “completely open,” shortly before President Trump declared on Truth Social that the strait was “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE,” though the president also clarified that “THE NAVAL BLOCKADE WILL REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN.”
Eurasia Group analyst Greg Brew cautioned me that, as was the case when Trump announced a ceasefire last week, the actual status of the Strait of Hormuz has remained unchanged. Iran’s position is that traffic from non-hostile countries can go through the strait as long as ships coordinate with its government and follow a route that hugs its coastline; the U.S. has insisted for over a week that the strait is open, and has been blockading traffic from Iran.
That’s not to say today’s announcement was meaningless. “There has been movement from both the U.S. and Iran on the issues that matter — namely, Iran’s nuclear program,” Brew told me. Meanwhile, “there’s a lot of ambiguity, and there’s a lack of clarification on the status of the strait. The upshot of that is shippers don’t feel secure in using the strait.”
As for the mutual statements, Brew said they were a sign that “both sides have acknowledged a mutual interest in having the strait reopen.” The market, meanwhile “is responding to the positive vibes that the president and, to some extent, the Iranians are putting out regarding the status of Hormuz moving forward.” Oil prices fell substantially Friday, with the West Texas Intermediate benchmark price down 10.5% to around $85 per barrel.
While the final disposition of the conflict between the U.S. and Iran — and thus the flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — remains unclear, the global energy system may be at the beginning of the end of the crisis that started at the end of February.
This doesn’t mean an immediate return to the status quo from the beginning of the year, however, which saw a glut of fossil fuels depressing global prices. Several hundred million barrels of oil that would otherwise have been pumped in the Persian Gulf remain in the ground after producers shut in production, temporarily suspending operations to protect their infrastructure and minimize their exposure to the conflict. This has created what Morgan Stanley oil analyst Martijn Rats called an “air pocket” in the market — and anyone who’s watched a hospital drama knows how dangerous an air pocket can be.
As happened with Russia’s war against Ukraine, the consequences of the Hormuz closure cannot simply be undone. That leaves countries — especially poorer countries dependent on fossil fuel imports — with a stark choice about how to fuel their future economic growth. The crisis may have tipped the balance towards renewable and storage technology from China over oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf, Russia, or the United States.
“There is a huge shift in total supply available in the fossil system,” Jeremy Wallace, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “I think the fossil system has been demonstrated to be vastly less reliable, riskier than it was seen to be in February.”
For gas specifically, recovering from Iranian attacks on Qatar could take years, not just the weeks and months necessary to clear the backlog in the Persian Gulf.
That will serve to reinforce China’s dominant position as a producer and exporter of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. “It’s hard for me to not see this as a huge win for Chinese firms that produce these products, upstream and downstream in those supply chains — as well, arguably, for the Chinese government itself,” Wallace said.
There’s already been some institutional movement away from fossil fuel investments and towards clean energy as well. A Vietnamese conglomerate, for instance, has proposed scrapping a planned liquified natural gas terminal for a solar and renewables project, while the county has also signed a deal with Russia to build the region’s first operational nuclear plant. And even as electric vehicle sales in China have slowed down, the share price of the battery giant CATL has surged since the war began despite rising costs of metals due to disruptions of chemicals necessary for refining from the closure of the strait.
Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and economic policy, summed up the situation by calling the energy shock of the war “the best marketing program you could possibly imagine for China’s clean tech sector.”
It’s not just China’s technology that is likely to be more attractive in light of this latest energy crisis, but also its energy model, which fuses energy security and decreasing dependence on imported fossil fuel (thanks, in part, to domestic coal supplies and hydropower) with a vast buildout of renewables and nuclear energy.
“The way that China has weathered the Iran war energy shock so far has really validated its strategy of investing heavily in alternative energy,” Chan said.
Going forward, Asian countries will have to decide on future investments in energy infrastructure, especially the extent they want to build out infrastructure for importing and processing oil and especially liquefied natural gas.
While the United States, especially under Trump, is more than happy to sell LNG to any taker, the fact that oil and LNG are global markets could make countries leery of depending on it at all if it’s risky to supply and price shocks, even if U.S. exports are dramatically less likely to get bottled up in the Gulf of Mexico.
“It seems like once in 100-year storms happen every year. Now it feels like that in the fossil energy system,” Wallace told me. “We’ve been talking about the crises of the 1970s for 50 years afterwards. We don’t need to be talking about those now.”
The 1970s saw major investments in non-oil energy generation, especially nuclear power, in Japan and France and large scale investments in energy efficiency. Today, Wallace said, “the alternatives are much more attractive.”
“In the months to come, I think we will see a lot of bottom up industrialists and probably wealthy consumers in Southeast Asia and South Asia who are going to vote for energy security of their own as best they can,” he told me, pointing to the mass adoption of solar in Pakistan since 2022.
But Asian countries embracing renewables and storage will not have entirely freed themselves from geopolitics. While batteries, solar panels, and electric vehicles do not require a flow of fuel from abroad the same way oil and gas infrastructure does, China has shown itself to be perfectly willing to use economic leverage to achieve political ends.
Relations between China and Japan, the second largest Asian economy and a close American ally, quickly devolved into crisis following the ascent of Sanae Takaichi to Prime Minister of Japan in October, after the new leader suggested that if China were to blockade Taiwan, it would constitute “an existential threat.” China responded with an array of economic punishments, including discouraging Chinese tourism in Japan and restricting shipments of rare earths elements and magnets.
China’s economic coercion, Chan told me, “reminds everyone that while you can buy all this really affordable, highly scaled-up clean energy equipment, China has been able to and has been willing to leverage that supply chain dominance in certain ways. There’s a degree of trust that you can’t really make up for.”
Countries embracing Chinese energy technology will “always have to have a Chinese-hedging discount in the back of their minds,” he said.
On Minnesota mining, DAC being back, and desalination dividends
Current conditions: A broad swath of the United States stretching from South Texas to Chicago is being bombarded by the Central U.S. with severe storms and more than two dozen tornadoes so far • The thunderstorms pummeling Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are expected to stretch into the weekend • Kigali is also in the midst of a days-long stretch of heavy storms, testing the Rwandan capital’s recent wetland overhaul.
SunZia Wind, the largest renewable energy project of its kind ever built in the U.S., has started generating electricity, nearly capping off a two-decade effort to supply Californians with wind power generated in New Mexico. The developer has begun testing the project’s 916 turbines ahead of planned full-scale commercial operations later this quarter, unnamed sources told E&E News. The project includes 3.5 gigawatts of wind and 550 miles of transmission line to funnel the electricity west from the desert state to the coast. “The impact is already evident,” the newswire wrote. “California broke its record for wind generation eight times in the last four weeks.”
When Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer visited SunZia’s construction site in August 2024, he observed that, once it started running at full blast, the project would “generate roughly 1% of the country’s electricity needs.” Its success in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks on wind could “lay the model” for a new paradigm in which “clean energy buildings and environmental protectors work together to find the best solution for the environment and the climate,” Rob wrote. “We will need many more success stories like it if America is to meet its climate goals — 99 more, to be exact.”
The U.S. Senate voted 50-49 on Thursday to repeal a mining ban on land near the Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, declaring what Heatmap’s Jeva Lange called “open season” on public lands. In what the public lands news site Public Domain called “an unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act,” the vote slashes protections for the iconic nature preserve. Inspiring even fiercer political pushback is the fact that Republicans championed the effort largely to benefit an overseas corporation: Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta, which has for years sought to establish a copper-nickel mine on national forest land near the wilderness area. “The Boundary Waters belong to everyone,” Julie Goodwin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, said in a statement. “They should be protected and enjoyed by all, not jeopardized to benefit a wealthy foreign company.”
At the same time, global demand for both nickel and copper are surging — and a successful effort to decarbonize the world economy through greater electrification will require a lot more of both metals.
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The good news: The Department of Energy is allowing the Direct Air Capture hub program started under the Biden administration to move forward. In documents submitted to Congress this week, the agency listed as approved the up to $1.2 billion the program awarded to two projects: Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub, and Climeworks and Heirloom’s joint Project Cypress in Louisiana. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo noted: “This fate was far from certain.” After the Energy Department cut funding for 10 of the original 21 projects last fall, a leaked list of projects suggested the Louisiana and Texas hubs would be targeted in a second wave of rescissions. The bad news: Last week, Rob had a scoop that Microsoft — whose carbon removal buying made up roughly 80% of the industry — was pausing its purchases. And as he wrote yesterday, even if it’s just temporary, the pause will ripple through the nascent market.
Other technologies that once seemed like science fiction are, in fact, moving forward. In an exclusive for Heatmap, I reported that Clean Core Thorium Energy, a Chicago-based company designing thorium fuel bundles that works in existing reactors, inked a deal to manufacture its first four units. In addition to assembling the bundles, the Canadian National Laboratories will supply the small amount of a special kind of uranium fuel needed to be blended into Clean Core’s mix and that serves as a spark plug for the reaction.
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Last October, the Energy Department asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to set rules for patching data centers, advanced factories, and other large loads onto the grid. The move, as Utility Dive reported at the time, sparked controversy over whether it represented a Washington power grab given that the landmark Federal Power Act gives states jurisdiction over retail electricity interconnections. Now FERC has said it plans to respond. On Thursday, Robin Millican, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, posted on X that FERC announced a notice of intent to act on the Energy Department’s request, with a ruling expected in June. “Good,” she wrote. “Ensuring interconnection costs from data centers, advanced manufacturing, and big electrification projects aren’t passed to retail customers is overdue.”
Back in January, I told you that two geothermal startups raised a combined $212 million: Zanskar, which uses artificial intelligence to hunt down previously undetected conventional geothermal resources underground; and Sage Geosystems, a next-generation startup using fracking technology to drill for geothermal heat in places that conventional resources can’t tap. This week we saw two geothermal companies once again net a nine-digit number. Once again, Zanskar — considered by experts Heatmap surveyed to be one of the most promising climate-tech companies in the game right now for a reason, after all — announced the closing of another $40 million fundraise. Just Capital and Spring Lane Capital led the round, with an additional investment from Tierra Adentro Growth Capital. Zanskar said the round was a development capital facility, a type of deal that usually involves equity or debt to fund a company’s growth. It is “among the first ever structured for early-stage geothermal development, drawing on the best practices from the renewables and natural resource sectors,” the company said Thursday in a press release. The financing will help establish a revolving line of credit “designed to accelerate project development.”
On Wednesday, another competitor in the next-generation geothermal space, Mazama Energy, pulled in a fresh round of capital. The Frisco, Texas-based company, which last year boasted a system that reached hotter temperatures than any other geothermal company, just raised $100 million, according to Axios.

San Diego, once the poster child for a drought-parched Southern Californian city, is now looking to become a water exporter, The Wall Street Journal reported. North America’s largest desalination plant is producing so much freshwater for the San Diego County Water Authority that the city is working on a deal to sell millions of gallons to Arizona and Nevada. The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, which opened in 2015 and is owned by an infrastructure investment firm, may produce more expensive than average water, but “it is important to note that it is more reliable than other sources,” Keith R. Solar, a water attorney from the seaside neighborhood of Point Loma, wrote in the Voice of San Diego last year. “Its value as insurance against disruption of supplies from other sources makes it a critical part of our future.”