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On a California chem leak, solar manufacturing, and BHP’s climate retreat
On Exxon’s Venezuela flipflop, SpaceX’s fears, and a nuclear deal spree
With both temperatures and electricity prices rising, many who are using less energy are still paying more, according to data from the Electricity Price Hub.
Two new reports out this week create a seemingly contradictory portrait of the country’s energy transition progress.
Mounting evidence shows that Republican voters are rapidly turning against artificial intelligence.
John Berger’s new company, Otovo, is eyeing a U.S. listing by the end of the year.
Here’s a little secret I learned from my father and grandfather, both of whom spent decades-long careers selling cars around New York City: Dealerships make real money not from sales and leases, but from providing the repairs, oil changes, and tune-ups on those vehicles long after they’re driven off the lot. It’s a big business. While AAA does not release its national revenue figures, the nonprofit federation of automotive clubs that provide speedy service to drivers stranded with a flat tire or overheated engine is estimated to pull in billions of dollars per year.
That’s the kind of business John Berger set out to build during his 13 years as chief executive of Sunnova. But the Houston-based rooftop solar giant racked up so much debt from the leasing business that the publicly-traded firm filed for Chapter 11 protections last June after the Trump administration canceled a $3 billion loan. His dream of deploying enough panels to sustain the company on servicing subscriptions fizzled.
Three months after Sunnova’s collapse, Berger returned to the industry with a new startup dedicated to providing round-the-clock maintenance for solar, battery, and generator systems. The new startup, Otovo, built off the existing name and business model of an eponymous Norwegian company that merged with Berger’s Texas-based American firm in December.
Now, Heatmap has learned, the company has hit a major milestone.
As of Thursday morning, Otovo has racked up 30,000 customers, two-thirds of whom are paying recurring subscription fees ranging from $9 to $49 per month for maintenance service, with the pricier memberships providing the fastest guaranteed fixes.
Otovo’s first-year growth — which exceeded the company’s own initial estimates — may say as much about the state of the solar market as it does about the startup itself.
Surging inflation, supply chain shocks from the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and seesawing policy incentives in the United States have put the squeeze on many solar installers, spurring a wave of bankruptcies on both sides of the Atlantic. Berger — no stranger to how it felt to be the insolvent counterparty on the other side of the negotiating table — seized on the opportunity. As installers such as California’s Solar Service Professionals, Germany’s Zolar, the Netherlands’ Soly, or Norway’s Solcellespesialisten went under, Otovo bought their customer books.
“All these orphaned customers? Well over 37 million exist between the European Union and the United States,” Berger told me. “That’s an enormous market, and it’s an enormous amount of pain when you have rising power bills.”
That orphaned customer figure, he said, was an estimate based on data from the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie, and individual companies such as generator giant Generac, whose units run on natural gas, propane, and diesel.
For now, about two-thirds of Otovo’s customers are in Europe, where the company has traded on the Oslo stock exchange since before Berger’s involvement. But Berger said the long-term goal is to see its subscriber base split evenly between the U.S. and Europe.
That could be a challenge. While the European subsidies for solar vary by country, the continent is typically more “methodical and deliberate” about government policy, he said, meaning those nations avoid the “whipsaw” of American politics, where Democrats lavish support on solar and batteries and Republicans yank that funding away.
“It wouldn’t surprise me the least bit,” he said, if Congress brings back an enhanced 25D, the Biden-era tax credit for rooftop solar systems that President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed last year, sometime after the midterm elections.
“It was a really crazy political decision by the Republicans to kill 25D,” Berger said. “These are the people, the homeowners, that pay the taxes that then fund the tax credits for the utilities, the monopolies, and all the big companies in an affordability crisis.” He also called axing the credit “political suicide.”
Either way, he said, building new solar panels in the U.S. is getting more expensive, making it all the more important to maintain existing units. He’s optimistic about future growth.
“We continue to sell memberships every single day in all of our territories,” Berger said. “In fact, we’re gearing up to ramp that up with a significant sales effort across the board in both Europe and the U.S.”
Otovo is planning to go public in a dual listing on a U.S. stock exchange by December.
“We feel pretty good that, over the next several months, we’ll be able to pop out here and have a pretty good listing in the United States,” he said. “If it’s not before the end of the year, it’ll be very shortly after the new year. But as any CEO will tell you, taking a company public, which I’ve done before, involves a good bit of luck.”
Emails raise questions about who knew what and when leading up to the administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies.
The Trump administration justified its nearly $1 billion settlement agreement with TotalEnergies to effectively buy back the French company’s U.S. offshore wind leases by citing national security concerns raised by the Department of Defense. Emails obtained by House Democrats and viewed by Heatmap, however, seem to conflict with that story.
California Representative Jared Huffman introduced the documents into the congressional record on Wednesday during a hearing held by the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“The national security justification appears to be totally fabricated, and fabricated after the fact,” Huffman said during the hearing. “DOI committed to paying Total nearly a billion dollars before it had concocted its justification of a national security issue.”
The email exchange Huffman cited took place in mid-November among officials at the Department of the Interior. On November 13, 2025, Christopher Danley, the deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources, emailed colleagues in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the secretary’s office an attachment with the name “DRAFT_Memorandum_of_Understanding.docx.”
According to Huffman’s office, the file was a document entitled “Draft Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of the Interior and TotalEnergies Renewables USA, LLC on Offshore Wind Lease OCS-A 0545,” which refers to the company’s Carolina Long Bay lease. (The office said it could not share the document itself due to confidentiality issues.)
While the emails do not discuss the document further, the November date is notable. It suggests that the Interior Department had been negotiating a deal with Total before BOEM officials were briefed on the DOD’s classified national security concerns about offshore wind development.
Two Interior officials, Matthew Giacona, the acting director of BOEM, and Jacob Tyner, the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, have testified in federal court that they reviewed a classified offshore wind assessment produced by the Department of Defense on November 26, 2025, and then were briefed on it again by department officials in early December. They submitted this testimony as part of a separate court case over a stop work order the agency issued to the Coastal Virginia Offshore wind project in December.
“After my review of DOW’s classified material with a secret designation,” Giacona wrote, “I determined that CVOW Project’s activities did not adequately provide for the protection of national security interests,” leading to his decision to suspend ongoing activities on the lease.
Giacona and Tyner are copied on the emails Huffman presented on Wednesday, indicating that the memorandum of understanding between Total and the Interior Department had been drafted and distributed prior to their reviewing the classified assessment.
The final agreement both parties signed on March 23, however, justifies the decision by citing a series of events that it portrays as taking place after officials learned of the DOD’s national security concerns.
The Interior Department paid Total out of the Judgment Fund, a permanently appropriated fund overseen by the Treasury Department with no congressional oversight that’s set aside to settle litigation or impending litigation. The final agreement describes the background for the settlement, beginning by stating that the Interior Department was going to suspend Total’s leases indefinitely based on the DOD’s classified findings, which “would have” led Total to file a legal claim for breach of contract. Rather than fight it out in court, Interior decided to settle this supposedly impending litigation, paying Total nearly $1 billion, in exchange for the company investing an equivalent amount into U.S. oil and gas projects.
But if the agency had been negotiating a deal with Total prior to being briefed on the national security assessment, it suggests that the deal was not predicated on a threat of litigation. During the hearing, Eddie Ahn, an attorney and the executive director of an environmental group called Brightline Defense, told Huffman that this opens the possibility for a legal challenge to the deal.
I should note one hiccup in this line of reasoning. Even though Interior officials testified that they were briefed on the Department of Defense’s assessment on November 26, this is not the first time the agency raised national security concerns about offshore wind. When BOEM issued a stop work order on Revolution Wind in August of last year, it said it was seeking to “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.”
During the hearing, Huffman called out additional concerns his office had about the settlement. He said the amount the Interior Department paid Total — a full reimbursement of the company’s original lease payment — has no basis in the law. “Federal law sets a specific formula for the compensation a company can get when the government cancels an offshore lease,” he said, adding that the settlement was for “far more.” He also challenged a clause in the agreement that purports to protect both parties from legal liability.
Huffman and several of his fellow Democrats also highlighted the Trump administration’s latest use of the Judgment Fund — to create a new $1.8 billion legal fund to issue “monetary relief” to citizens who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, such as those charged in connection with the January 6 riot.
“Now we know that that was just the beginning,” Maxine Dexter of Oregon said. “This president’s fraudulent use of the judgment fund is the most consequential and damning abuse of taxpayer funds happening right now.”
