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The U.S. could be seeing the start of a small solar boom. Last year alone, at least 30 new utility-scale solar factories came online, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported last month.
Over the weekend, as I told you on Monday, a federal court blocked the Trump administration’s rules for using the soon-to-expire tax writeoffs for investing in or producing electricity from solar panels and wind turbines. But with just 24 days to go until the tax credits officially end, few developers are likely to move quickly enough to benefit from the ruling. “Practically speaking, I don’t think this is likely to have much impact on the market or behavior in the coming weeks,” Heather Cooper, a tax lawyer at McDermott Will & Schulte, told E&E News. “The deadline is less than four weeks away.”
Investments into electrical grids are on track to surpass $650 billion globally this year, according to new data from the consultancy Rystad Energy. That’s up 5% from last year and more than double the investments recorded in 2020, PV Magazine reported. The high cost comes as long lead times and pricy components for transformers, high-voltage circuit breakers, and switchgears strain and stall upgrades and expansions to power systems all over the world. The soaring growth of wind and solar is propelling grid investments, which are needed to patch more intermittent and often far-flung renewables onto the system. In 2010, wind and solar made up just 2% of global generation. By 2040, Rystad expects them to make up nearly half the mix.
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Everyone recognizes Canada as a major oil producer, metal miner, and hydroelectricity generator. But did you know the Canucks are not just a serious player in nuclear power, but actually have their own domestically-designed reactor that can run on raw uranium? Get this, it even has a catchy name: the CANDU. Pronounced CAN-do and short for Canada Deuterium Uranium, the pressurized heavy water reactors are among the only commercial designs in the world that can run on unenriched, natural uranium. The advantage, especially for a country like Canada with vast uranium deposits, is that they’re faster to build, cheaper to fuel, and free of the international scrutiny that comes with enriching uranium. The downside is that they break down faster than the light water reactors that make up the entirety of the U.S. fleet. But Canada is demonstrating that isn’t a big problem. On Monday, the Bruce nuclear power station brought its Unit 3 reactor back online, completing refurbishments seven months early and $107 million under budget, NucNet reported. You don’t need to know a lot about the American or European nuclear industries to know “early and under budget” aren’t words typically associated with any recent or ongoing projects.
The best-proven way to make truly green steel involves turning iron ore into direct reduced iron through a process that, when powered by green hydrogen instead of natural gas, significantly slashes any carbon emissions associated with its production. Assuming it’s finished off in an electric arc furnace, it’s green steel — and even greener if that final process was powered by renewables or nuclear. Yet despite some high-profile projects, green hydrogen has remained too expensive in the West, even as China’s industry starts to boom. That could be changing. On Tuesday, the German steelmaker Salzgitter inked its first major offtake agreement for green hydrogen from the supplier EWE, Hydrogen Insight reported. One of Germany’s largest steel producers, Salzgitter will buy roughly 10,000 metric tons of hydrogen per year from the electrolyzer plant EWE is building in Emden, near the Dutch border.
Meanwhile in America, U.S. Steel unveiled plans to invest up to $2.5 billion into upgrading the Mon Valley Works, southeast of Pittsburgh. The renovations come after Japanese steel giant Nippon’s takeover of the iconic American firm last year. To win President Donald Trump’s blessing, Nippon gave the federal government a “golden share” in the company. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last year, that could ultimately give a future administration leverage to press U.S. Steel to green its operations.
While spot prices are coming back down, they're still far above recent years. EIA
If you’re booking a flight right now, you might not yet be feeling the difference. But U.S. production of jet fuel has reached record highs as refiners scramble to respond to soaring prices following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. By the start of May, the four-week average estimate of fuel production surpassed 2 million barrels per day for the first time on record, according to new analysis by the Energy Information Administration. But with domestic inventories still relatively high, much of that increased production is being exported.
It’s not the only government betting that the various attempts to commercialize fusion as an energy source will pan out in the near future. On Monday, NucNet reported that the British government had drafted legislation to “create conditions” for deploying fusion technology.
Typically, the rule of thumb in journalism is that the answer to a question headline is almost always “no,” otherwise the headline would simply state the fact. But this one is a genuine open question that climate-tech investor Shanu Mathew raised Monday in a post on X: Could PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, break apart? The speculation traces back to a Bloomberg article from last week in which unnamed federal officials suggested that the operator, which runs the grid from the Illinois prairie to the Jersey Shore, could split up as data centers put strain on the 13-state system’s electricity supplies.
The talks are happening as two of the largest utilities in PJM, NextEra and Dominion, discuss a potential $420 billion megamerger that would create, among other things, a storage giant, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported. The discussions are also occurring against the backdrop of major artificial intelligence companies going public, with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI following Claude-developer Anthropic in filing a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week.
Nuclear is booming in China.EIA
In the United States, you can’t build a single commercial nuclear reactor in a decade. In China, you can apparently double the size of your entire fleet in that time. Between 2016 and 2024, China’s nuclear generation capacity soared by 76%, according to a new Energy Information Administration analysis. That’s equal to 24 gigawatts. In 2025, China added another 1.1 gigawatts, followed by 2.2 gigawatts more this year just through May. The country has at least 36 other reactors under construction, accounting for nearly half of the world’s ongoing nuclear projects.
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Just five years ago, the global aviation industry made a landmark pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Now the head of the industry’s global body says that goal is likely already out of reach. Willie Walsh, the director of the International Air Transport Association, told The Guardian that “hope was fading fast” and a new “realistic timeline” needed to be established. More than half of the planned decarbonization of air travel relied on the development of sustainable aviation fuels that remain nascent at best. Money is pouring into the technology, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported. But uptake so far “is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told her.
One cold autumn morning three years ago, I made my way across downtown Ulaanbaatar to an American-style diner called Millie’s Espresso to meet with a Mongolian mining executive who was thrilled about Western countries’ recent investments in his industry. Landlocked between Russia and China, the geographically huge but sparsely populated democracy hoped to shore up its sovereignty by forging deals with the U.S., Europe, South Korea, and Japan to satisfy soaring demand for minerals. Already Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s largest copper mines, was underway in the country’s Gobi desert south, and that year the French government inked a deal to start producing lithium and uranium in Mongolia. Now the uranium part of that agreement is moving forward. On Monday, World Nuclear News reported that the French state-backed nuclear fuel producer Orano had broken ground on its first mine in the Central Asian nation. The project raised some eyebrows among Mongolians who complained that Soviet-era Russian uranium mining left behind nasty pollution, and the terms of Ulaanbaatar’s deal with Rio Tinto over the new copper mine have been politically contentious. But the sprawling, smog-choked capital city — the only major urban development in the rural nation — is in need of more power.
Russia had promised to help meet that power by building Mongolia’s first nuclear power plant. A politically well-connected businessman from Ulaanbaatar, whom I caught up with last night over text to ask about the mood in the country, said Moscow’s bid had drawn more positive attention than France’s plans to mine fuel for their own reactors. “In Ulaanbaatar, we experienced electricity shortages last winter that caused apartment heating to stop during the winter. It was crazy,” the executive told me. While he’s typically a critic of the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, which formed out of the old Communist Party apparatus following the fall of the Soviet Union, the executive told me the government’s actions were “good and brave” steps to “diversify investment in Mongolia.”
I hate to close out on a bad note, but this one felt important to include: America’s screwworm problem is getting worse. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the first case of the flesh-eating parasite in a dog in New Mexico, in addition to four cases in total in Texas. “This situation is evolving, and we expect new information to emerge as our investigation continues,” Dudley Hoskins, USDA’s under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said in a statement.
