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On Michael Bloomberg’s big climate gift, SMRs in Ohio, and the consequences of a “Super El Niño”
An exclusive interview with Senator Martin Heinrich on SunZia, the largest renewables project in U.S. history, which is now — finally — fully operational.
But there’s still plenty of room for regional grid operators to set their own rules.
On Estonian nuclear, solar’s land use, and Kristi Noem’s mining gig
The deal with developer Invenergy includes a commitment to build geothermal generation in addition to natural gas.
That may be not be the case for long, though, as the AI company poaches energy talent from Google, Meta, the DOE, and others.
On carbon removal funding, Chinese nuclear, and Hawaiian solar
Current conditions: The powerful earthquake that killed at least 61 people in the Philippines last week raised the seabed by as much as 7 feet • Raja Ampat, the archipelago off Indonesia’s Southwest Papua province, is enduring days of intense thunderstorms • The Gulf Coast of Texas is bracing for what could become a tropical cyclone set to dump heavy rain across the region.
A Syrian oil field. Kasim Yusuf/Anadolu via Getty Images
On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that ConocoPhillips was on the brink of announcing a deal to become the first U.S. oil company to reenter Syria since President Ahmed al-Sharaa officially took office last year. The deal, expected to be formalized this week, would be a sign of regrowth after 14 years of brutal civil war that finally ended with the surrender of longtime president and de facto dictator Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian government said last year that a potential deal could increase output of gas by up to 5 million cubic meters per day within a year, a major leap toward restoring an industry that once produced a prewar high of 30 million cubic meters per day in 2011.
When Frontier launched in 2022 as a vehicle for those who want to fund carbon removal from the atmosphere, there were barely a dozen companies working to crack the technology. Now there are hundreds of startups taking nearly two dozen different approaches. And Frontier is pulling in more money to spread among them. The company said Wednesday that its buyers committed $915 million to invest in carbon removal companies. Anthropic, one of the leading developers of artificial intelligence models, is among the new buyers. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI, Anthropic’s peer and rival, has made any kind of public climate-related commitment, making the AI giant’s entry into the group particularly notable.
It’s a sign, perhaps, that the old way of thinking about corporate climate actions — a single-minded focus on carbon accounting — is giving way to more substantive solutions.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo put it this week, a growing chorus of experts says that carbon accounting is “not just inadequate, but actively harmful to bringing about the systems-level change required to decarbonize the economy.”
The Department of Justice has officially weighed in to defend Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup against a lawsuit in which the NAACP accused the company of building its Colossus Gas Plant in mostly Black neighborhoods between Tennessee and Mississippi. In court papers filed Monday and covered by E&E News and Wired, the Justice Department said the civil rights group’s litigation threatened the U.S. military’s ability to “meet its national security mission and keep pace with adversaries” using xAI’s Grok chatbot. Grok’s ability to operate “is a matter of paramount national security” because it is one of only four cutting-edge AI models that can support national security applications, and one of just three suitable for “mission-critical operations across Secret and Top-Secret classified networks,” the agency told U.S. District Judge Debra Brown, who is presiding over the lawsuit in federal court in Mississippi.
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Regular readers of this newsletter know that I like to cover the major steps in any reactor’s construction, but especially those in China. When I think back to previous newsletters and the specific updates in them, I struggle to pinpoint exactly when I wrote what, given how frequently the basic facts of the stories repeat themselves. The effect of this, I hope, is to leave you with the accurate impression that China is building a lot of reactors very quickly and efficiently — and to give you pause about how seldom you hear about similar milestones coming out of any other countries. Well, in that spirit, here’s the latest. On Monday, World Nuclear News reported that China General Nuclear Power, the country’s biggest state-owned reactor firm, just lifted the outer dome into place at its fifth reactor at the Ningde Nuclear Power Plant in Fujian province. The 270-metric-ton dome will cap off the containment vessel for the latest Hualong One, China’s flagship reactor with a domestic design.
Last month, Hawaii passed a law that slashed tax credits for both utility-scale and residential solar projects, limiting the amount available each year until a phase-out in 2030. Those changes were set to apply retroactively to projects built in 2026. But Governor Josh Green, a Democrat, just signed an executive order preserving the solar tax credit throughout the end of the year. “Distributed solar energy has been, and will continue to be, a leading contributor to the state’s sustainability and resiliency goals,” the executive order states, according to KHON-2, a local TV station.
Tesla is expanding its VPP efforts. The company said Tuesday that its Powerwall battery leasing program would now include a built-in participation in a virtual power plant. That’s without any additional enrollment or management by the customer. The pilot is rolling out first in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Or, the Senate releases its latest attempt at bipartisan permitting reform.
Are we getting closer to a viable permitting reform proposal?
At least one part is falling into place: This morning, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Senator Tom Cotton released a bipartisan bill that would keep future presidents from messing with already permitted energy projects. The House has already published its version, dubbed the FREEDOM Act — we scooped it in February — and now the Senate has had their go.
President Trump’s interference with onshore and offshore wind projects has made this kind of legislation a priority for Democrats, and I see its inclusion as essential to any kind of final permitting deal. Of course, Republicans have wanted to limit the executive branch’s interference with energy projects since President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on the first day of his term. Harsh experience — or canny gamesmanship on the Trump administration’s part — has made permitting certainty a bipartisan priority. Lawmakers have come to recognize, too, that the government doesn’t need to revoke the permits for an energy project in order to effectively wage extrajudicial war on it — in other words, as George Michael might have sung, sometimes a “slow” can amount to a ban.
The new Senate bill makes a few key breaks with the House version. Most importantly, it jettisons a de-risking compensation program. In the original House version, developers would be eligible to receive up to $5 million in public funding if the government revoked a permit, missed a permitting deadline, or ran out the clock on a project. An agency that missed a deadline also faced stiff financial penalties.
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That mechanism is now stripped from the bill. In the new Senate version, when a court decides a federal agency has waylaid a permit, it can appoint a court-approved contractor to finish the job. The bill establishes a new fund to pay for that contractor’s work, but it doesn’t fund the fees from agency penalties — and it doesn’t financially compensate developers.
There's one more change to the bill worth noting. The original House version of the proposal covered any project that would “develop, produce, generate, store, transport, or distribute energy” — great verbs! — as well as mineral and carbon capture infrastructure. The Senate adopts that definition in full, but adds that it covers projects on the “Outer Continental Shelf” — that is, offshore wind.
The FREEDOM Act doesn’t cover everything that I expect an eventual permitting reform bill would need to do, although it is getting closer. The bill’s final section, for instance, allows enhanced geothermal projects, like those developed by Fervo or Eavor, to benefit from the same exclusion from some federal rules that fracking wells already enjoy. Any final bipartisan effort will need to include transmission reforms and perhaps, as Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah hopes, potential changes to federal historic preservation law.
But one thing I’d call out is Senator Tom Cotton’s cosponsorship of this bill. Cotton has become more of a presence on energy policy than I can remember from recent years.
He proposed a bill earlier this year that would allow data center developers to build their own independent power plants and transmission lines, provided they didn’t connect them to the grid. And he wrote a Washington Post op-ed in April tying the country’s failure to “build the physical foundations of power and defense” to its “broken permitting system.” He also cosponsored a partisan permitting bill back in 2020. But this is the first time I can remember the hard-right senator joining a Democrat to put out an energy-related proposal.
We’ll be tracking all that and more at Heatmap.
