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The PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, made a rare foray into a hotly political lawsuit Tuesday, filing an amicus brief in defense of Dominion Energy’s offshore wind projects as the Virginia utility challenges the Trump administration’s blanket decision last month to halt construction on all seaborne turbines. “It is widely recognized, including by the current administration, that there is a pressing need for additional electric generation in PJM’s region to meet rising demand and ensure the reliability of the interstate transmission grid,” PJM’s lawyers wrote in the brief. The project Trump is trying to cancel “will provide such generation,” and “has been in planning and development for many years.” As such, PJM urged the court to grant the preliminary injunction Dominion requested.
That strategy is working elsewhere. On Monday, a federal court granted such an injunction to Orsted for its Revolution Wind project off New England, as I reported in yesterday’s newsletter.
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Just six months since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act through the reconciliation process, Republicans have their eyes on legislating more big energy changes through what they’re calling “reconciliation 2.0.” A framework for the bill released Tuesday “does not mention renewables or energy sources with broad bipartisan support, such as nuclear and geothermal,” E&E News noted. Instead, the bill focuses on streamlining permitting for fossil fuels, killing off energy efficiency programs, and implementing new fees on plaintiffs who sue the federal government for alleged violations of “procedural environmental laws.”
That comes despite the fact that U.S. emissions reversed their last two years of declines to rise 2.4% on the back of more coal-fired generation in 2025, according to new data from the Rhodium Group consultancy.
In yet another sign of the growing backlash against data centers, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs called for curtailing her state’s lucrative tax incentives for server farms and imposing new water use fees on the industry. The Democrat, who is running for reelection in November, called the tax break a “$38 million corporate handout” and urged legislators to eliminate it. “It’s time we make the booming data center industry work for the people of our state, rather than the other way around,” she said in her state-of-the-state address opening the state legislature’s 2026 session, according to Politico.
Just 44% of Americans said they’d welcome a data center in their neighborhood in a Heatmap Pro poll from September. And as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote in November, data center opposition is “swallowing American politics,” driving activists on both the left and right.
Slovakia's Mochovce nuclaer power plant.Janos Kummer/Getty Images
Nuclear developers of all kinds have promised to deploy new kinds of reactors by 2030. But the Department of Energy is now planning to build its first atomic generator on the moon in just four years. “History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release Tuesday evening. “This agreement continues that legacy.”
In a more conceivable near-term goal, the U.S. is also looking to broker a nuclear agreement with Slovakia, expanding Washington’s grip over Russia’s former sphere of atomic influence. The U.S. nuclear champion Westinghouse already produces American-made fuel for Slovakia’s Russian-made reactors. But NucNet reported this week that Prime Minister Robert Fico has confirmed the Central European nation is planning to sign a sweeping partnership deal with the U.S. that would clear the way for construction of new American-made reactors, likely Westinghouse AP1000s like those under construction in Poland.
When I first traveled to the Brazilian Amazon in 2019 to visit Indigenous villages affected by then-President Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to encourage illegal mining in the rainforest, I found children with rashes from exposure to mercury dumped in the river they depended on for bathing and food by gold panners who used the toxic metal to sift through mud for precious metal. In a new analysis for the conservation site Mongabay, ecologist Timothy J. Killeen argues that finding a way to formalize the business could allow the industry to “finance its own remediation while creating more than 200,000 jobs that transform illegal extraction into a regulated industry.” While he admitted it’s a “substantial if,” failing to do something raises the risk that “the tailings will remain, mercury will continue leaching into watersheds, and another generation will ask why available solutions were not deployed to solve a problem that everybody agrees is intolerable and unnecessary.”
In a post on Truth Social last night, President Donald Trump said he’s “working with major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People” and shift the burden of financing the data center buildout away from ordinary consumers. “First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don’t ‘pick up the tab’ for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher utility bills.” He said more announcements were coming in the weeks ahead. While “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE,” he said “Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”
Hours earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg set the stage for a similar announcement when he posted on Threads that the company was establishing a new “top-level initiative” aimed at building “tens of gigawatts” of power for the Facebook owner’s data centers.
A federal judge has overturned President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to kill New England’s Revolution Wind project. On Monday evening, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction suspending the Trump administration’s order halting construction on the nearly complete joint venture from Danish wind giant Orsted and Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables. The decision allows construction to restart immediately while the underlying lawsuit challenging multiple attempts by the Department of the Interior to yank its permits continues in court. In a statement, Orsted said it would resume construction as soon as possible. “Today’s ruling is a decisive win for energy reliability and the hundreds of thousands of families counting on Revolution Wind,” Kat Burnham, the industry group Advanced Energy United’s senior principal and New England policy lead, said in a statement. “The court rightly saw through a politically motivated stop-work order that would have caused real harm: driving up costs, delaying power for Rhode Island and Connecticut, and putting good-paying jobs at risk. It’s good news for workers, ratepayers, and anyone who recognizes the need for a fair energy market.” To glean some insights into how the White House’s most recent effort fell short, it’s worth reviewing my colleague Jael Holzman’s coverage of the last failure and this time.
The Environmental Protection Agency is scrapping the decades-long practice of calculating the health benefits of reducing air pollution by estimating the cost of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to justify clean-air rules. Citing internal documents, The New York Times reported Monday that the Trump administration plans to stop tallying the health benefits from curbing two of the most widespread, deadly pollutants: fine particulate matter and ozone. The newspaper called the move “a seismic shift that runs counter to the EPA’s mission statement.” The overhaul could make slashing limits on pollution from coal-burning plants, oil refineries, and steel mills easier. It’s part of a broader overhaul of the EPA’s regulatory system to disregard the scientific realities that few, if any, credible scientists challenged before. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked in July when the agency dispensed with the idea that carbon emissions are dangerous, “what comes next?”
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A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration’s decision to slash $8 billion in energy grants to recipients in mostly Democratic-led states was illegal. In his decision, Amit Mehta, whom Obama appointed to the bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote that the “terminated grants had one glaring commonality: all the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Trump in the 2024 election.” The ruling called on the Department of Energy to reverse its decision to rescind all awards mentioned in the case. The case only covered seven grants, leaving funding for more than 200 other projects up in the air. But as NOTUS noted, the Energy Department’s internal watchdog announced an audit into the cancellations last month.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul.John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Annual Summit
New York Governor Kathy Hochul positioned herself as one of the most ambitious Democratic governors on nuclear power last summer when, as Heatmap’s Mattew Zeitlin covered at the time, she directed the state-owned New York Power Authority to facilitate construction of at least a gigawatt of new atomic power reactors by 2040. Last week, as we covered here, her administration unveiled 23 potential commercial partners, including Bill Gates’ TerraPower and the utility NextEra, and eight possible communities in which to site the state’s next nuclear plant. Now the governor’s office has told the Syracuse Post-Standard that the administration aims to up the goal from 1 gigawatt to 5 gigawatts of new reactors.
The move comes as Hochul prepares to announce another initiative Tuesday to force data centers to pay for their own energy needs. Piggybacking off Trump’s push, the effort will require “that projects driving exceptional demand without exceptional job creation or other benefits cover the costs they create – through charges or supplying their own power,” according to Axios.
Brazil and Argentina are South America’s only two countries with commercial nuclear power. Despite having governments on opposite sides of the continent’s political divide, the two nations are collaborating on maritime nuclear, using small modular reactors to power ships or produce power from floating plants. “The energy transition process we are experiencing guides us to work together to evolve nuclear regulations and their necessary harmonization, with a view to the use of nuclear reactors on board ships worldwide and, especially, in our jurisdictional waters,” Petronio Augusto Siqueira De Aguiar, the Brazilian admiral from the Naval Secretariat for Nuclear Safety and Quality, said in a statement.
