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John Berger’s new company, Otovo, is eyeing a U.S. listing by the end of the year.
Emails raise questions about who knew what and when leading up to the administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies.
The effort brings together leaders of four Mountain West states with nonprofit policy expertise to help speed financing and permitting for development.
On Tesla’s solar factory, Bolivia’s protests, and China’s hydrogen motorcycle
The maker of smart panels is tapping into unused grid capacity to help power the AI boom.
And just in the nick of time.
America’s largest renewable developer is swallowing up the utility at the heart of the data center boom.
NextEra Energy, which also owns the utility Florida Power & Light, announced Monday morning that it had agreed to acquire Dominion Energy, the utility that operates in Virginia and the Carolinas. The deal would create an energy giant valued at around $420 billion. It would also — importantly for Virginia and PJM Interconnection, the 13-state electricity market of which the state is a part — create a battery electric storage giant.
The companies said in a Monday presentation laying out the case for the merger to investors that the combined entity would be the largest power company in the United States and the third largest energy company behind just ExxonMobil and Chevron. The companies projected that, when combined, they would be the domestic leader in total generation, market capitalization, rate base, annual capital expenditure, total generation built, and, specifically, battery storage capacity.
NextEra is already a storage leader. Its Florida utility is planning to add 7.6 gigawatts of battery storage over the next decade, and its development arm added almost a gigawatt of storage to its backlog in just the first quarter of this year.
NextEra’s storage expertise couldn’t come at a better time for Dominion. Virginia passed a law in April mandating that the utility procure 16 gigawatts of short-duration storage and 4 gigawatts of long-duration storage by 2045, with 4 gigawatts of short-term storage coming by 2030. Compare that to a previous state target for Dominion of around 3 gigawatts of storage 2035 and the challenge becomes apparent.
“With NextEra Energy’s world leadership in battery storage, there’s a potential to accelerate Dominion Energy’s capital plan to meet Virginia’s storage goals,” NextEra Chief Executive John Ketchum said on a call with analysts discussing the merger plans.
The market Dominion operates in in Virginia, PJM Interconnection, has long been a laggard in bringing new storage resources onto its grid, thanks to its famously dysfunctional interconnection queue. Although its newly refreshed queue has seen a large increase in storage projects compared to when the organization closed it to new projects in 2022, the market is still well behind storage-friendly peers like California and Texas.
PJM has also become notorious more recently for its capacity market, which has fueled price increases across the region in the billions of dollars, and yet failed to procure the reserve margin PJM typically aims for in its most recent auction. “Given that we’re the world’s leader in battery storage and the legislation that was just passed by Virginia, there is a tremendous opportunity to meet that capacity short quickly by deploying battery storage in the right places,” Ketchum said Monday. “We know what a big impact battery storage can have, and how quickly it can have it on capacity-short positions. And so we look at a Dominion in Virginia with [a] short capacity position — I think there’s a real opportunity to accelerate investment.”
The proposed deal comes at a time of rising prices and public anger at utilities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and especially in the Mid-Atlantic. Dominion’s rates in Virginia have risen around 36% in the past four years, according to the Heatmap-M.I.T. Electricity Price Hub, while typical bills have risen from about $96 per month to $146 per month. Virginia’s rates have grown faster than average in PJM, but are still well below the increases in states like Maryland and New Jersey despite serving a fast-growing data center industry.
While elected Democrats in PJM states regularly bash utilities (see: New Jersey and Pennsylvania), it’s possible that both Virginians and Virginia might look favorably on NextEra, Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Monday. “If [NextEra] focuses on storage development under the new Democratic legislation recently passed, it could form a coalition of support; we believe this is [a] critical point that could make the deal approval process less bumpy than some other recent M&A deals.”
Morningstar analyst Andrew Bischof saw the deal as allowing each side to use the other’s expertise (and balance sheet) to ramp up investment. Dominion might be able “leverage NextEra’s strong balance sheet to accelerate investment, particularly in Virginia,” whereas NextEra “could accelerate its data center ambitions, which had trailed those of its regulated peers, by using Dominion’s expertise and relationships to expedite NextEra’s data center hub plans,” he wrote in a note to clients Monday.
Building out more storage could also be great for a regulated utility like Dominion, as it would get to put new resources into its rate base and garner a return on equity.
“The General Assembly just added new storage requirements for us, which we think are going to be great for our customers, being able to work with Nextera and this combined company on that,” Dominion chief executive Robert Blue said on the call. “I think this is really going to benefit our customers as we serve them better and will deploy capital faster that way.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the estimated value of the combined companies.
On Thacker Pass, the Bonneville Power Administration, and Azerbaijan’s offshore wind
Current conditions: New York City is bracing for triple-digit heat in some parts of the five boroughs this week • The warm-up along the East Coast could worsen the drought parching the country’s southeastern shores • After Sunday reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the war-ravaged Gaza, temperatures in the Palestinian enclave are dropping back into the 80s and 70s all week.
Assuming world peace is something you find aspirational, here’s the good news: By all accounts, President Donald Trump’s two-day summit in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping went well. Here’s the bad news: The energy crisis triggered by the Iran War is entering a grim new phase. Nearly 80 countries have now instituted emergency measures as the world braces for slow but long-predicted reverberations of the most severe oil shock in modern history. With demand for air conditioning and summer vacations poised to begin in the northern hemisphere’s summer, already-strained global supplies of crude oil, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel will grow scarcer as the United States and Iran mutually blockade the Strait of Hormuz and halt virtually all tanker shipments from each other’s allies. “We are taking that outcome very seriously,” Paul Diggle, the chief economist at fund manager Aberdeen, told the Financial Times, noting that his team was now considering scenarios where Brent crude shoots up to $180 a barrel from $109 a barrel today. “We are living on borrowed time.”
The weekend brought a grave new energy concern over the conflict’s kinetic warfare. On Sunday, the United Arab Emirates condemned a drone strike it referred to as a “treacherous terrorist attack” that caused a fire near Abu Dhabi’s Barakah nuclear station. The UAE’s top English-language newspaper, The National, noted that the government’s official statement did not blame Iran explicitly. The attack came just a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency raised the alarm over drone strikes near nuclear plants after a swarm of more than 160 drones hovered near key stations in Ukraine last week.
We are apparently now entering the megamerger phase of the new electricity supercycle. On Friday, the Financial Times broke news that NextEra Energy is in talks with rival Dominion Energy for a tie-up that would create a more than $400 billion utility behemoth in one of the biggest deals of all time. The merger talks, which The Wall Street Journal confirmed, could be announced as early as this week. The combined company would reach from Dominion’s homebase of Virginia, where the northern half of the state is serving as what the FT called “the heartland of U.S. digital infrastructure serving the AI boom,” down to NextEra’s home-state of Florida, where the subsidiary Florida Power & Light serves roughly 6 million customers. While Dominion dominates data centers in Northern Virginia, NextEra last year partnered with Google to build more power plants and even reopen the Duane Arnold nuclear station in Iowa.

Trump digs lithium. In fact, he’s such a fan of Lithium Americas’ plan to build North America’s largest lithium mine on federal land in Nevada that he renegotiated a Biden-era deal to finance construction of the Thacker Pass project to secure a 5% equity stake in the publicly-traded developer. Yet the White House’s macroeconomic policies are pinching the nation’s lithium champion. During its first-quarter earnings call with investors last week, Lithium Americas cautioned that the Trump administration’s steel tariffs, coupled with inflation from disrupted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, could add between $80 million and $120 million to construction costs at Thacker Pass. Most of the impact, Mining.com noted, is expected this year. Once mining begins, the project could spur new discussion of a strategic lithium reserve, the case for which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin articulated here.
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The Department of Energy has selected Travis Kavulla, an energy industry veteran, as the 17th chief executive and administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration, NewsData reported. Founded under then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, the federal agency is a holdover from the New Deal era before utilities had built out electrical networks in rural parts of the U.S. Unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority — which functions as a standalone utility that owns and sells power, though it’s wholly owned by the federal government and its board of directors is appointed by the White House — the BPA, as it’s known, is a power marketing agency that sells electricity from hydroelectric dams owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. Kavulla currently serves as the head of policy for Base Power, the startup building a network of distributed batteries to back up the grid. He previously worked as the regulatory chief at the utility NRG Energy, and as a state utility commissioner in his home state of Montana. NewsData, a trade publication focused on Western energy markets, cautioned that the Energy Department may hold off on announcing the appointment for “the next few days or weeks” as sources warned that “it might be delayed while the department conducts a background check, or to allow the new undersecretary of energy, Kyle Haustveit, to be confirmed.”
Reached Sunday night via LinkedIn message, Kavulla politely declined to comment on whether he was appointed to lead the BPA.
Offshore wind may be spinning in reverse in the U.S. as the Trump administration attempts to, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman put it, “murder” an industry through death by a thousand cuts. But elsewhere in the world, offshore wind is booming. Just look at Azerbaijan. Despite its vast reserves of natural gas, the nation on the Caspian Sea is looking into building its first offshore turbines. On Friday, offshoreWIND.biz reported that the Azerbaijan Green Energy Company, owned by the Baku-based industrial giant Nobel Energy, had commissioned a Spanish company to design a floating LiDAR-equipped buoy for the country’s first turbines in the Caspian. The debut project, backed by the Azeri government, would start with 200 megawatts of offshore wind and eventually triple in size.
Before the wealthy software entrepreneur Greg Gianforte ran to be governor of Montana, he donated millions of dollars to a Christian-themed museum that claims humans walked alongside dinosaurs and the Earth is just 6,000 years old. After winning the state’s top job, the Republican set about revoking virtually all policies related to climate change, including banning the projected effects of warming from state agencies’ risk forecasts. With drought withering the state, however, Gianforte has turned to perhaps the most ancient policy approach humanities leaders have called upon to fix devastating weather patterns: Pray. On Sunday, Gianforte declared an official day of prayer for rain. “Prayer is the most powerful tool we have,” he wrote in a post on X. “I ask all who are faithful to come to God with thanks and pray.”