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On uranium challenges, Cadillac’s EV dreams, and a firefighter’s firestorm
Current conditions: Atlantic hurricane season enters its peak window and a zone west of Africa is under close monitoring for high risk tropical storm development this week • A polar air mass came down from Canada and dropped temperatures 15 degrees below historical averages in the Great Plains and the Northeastern U.S. • Croatia braces for floods as up to 11 inches of rain falls on the Balkans.
Add the Department of Transportation to the list of federal agencies waging what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind.” The Transportation Department said Friday it was eliminating or withdrawing $679 million in federal funding for 12 projects across the country designed to buttress development of offshore turbines. The funding included $427 million awarded last year for upgrading a marine terminal in Humboldt County, California, meant to be used for building and launching floating wind turbines. The list also included a $48 million offshore wind port on Staten Island, $39 million for a port near Norfolk, Virginia, and $20 million for a staging terminal in Paulsboro, New Jersey. “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a statement. “Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg bent over backwards to use transportation dollars for their Green New Scam agenda while ignoring the dire needs of our shipbuilding industry.”
It’s just the Trump administration’s latest attack on wind. The Department of the Interior has led the charge, launching a witch hunt against any policies perceived to favor wind power, de-designating millions of acres of federal waters for offshore wind development, and kicking off an investigation into bird deaths near turbines. Last month, the Department of Commerce joined the effort, teeing up future tariffs with its own probe into whether imported turbines pose a national security threat to the U.S. In response, the Democratic governors of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey on Monday issued a statement calling on the administration “to uphold all offshore wind permits already granted and allow these projects to be constructed.”
Only a tiny percentage of plastic waste is recycled.Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
In what the New York Times called a “sharp escalation” of its legal strategy to fend off liability for pollution, Exxon Mobil has countersued California, accusing the state’s landmark litigation over plastic waste of defaming the oil giant. At a court hearing last month, Exxon attorney Michael P. Cash described the lawsuit California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a cadre of environmental groups first filed last year as “an attack” aimed at the oil company’s home state of Texas and said the issue should be litigated there. As Times reporter Karen Zraick noted, Cash illustrated his point by displaying “a graphic showing a missile aimed at Texas from California” and by comparing Bonta and his nonprofit allies to “The Sopranos.”
Backed by a parallel lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, and the Surfrider Foundation, Bonta sued Exxon in state court on the grounds that the company had deceived Californians by “promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis,” alleging that the pollution had created a public nuisance and sought damages worth “multiple billions of dollars.” The lawsuit mirrors past litigation over planet-heating emissions, but targets the petrochemical division that has been one of the fastest-growing for Exxon and other oil giants. The courtroom drama came right as international negotiations in Geneva over a global treaty to curb plastic pollution failed after the United States joined Russia and other petrostates to block measures supported by more than 100 other nations that would have curbed production.
In North America, nuclear fuel may soon become harder to come by. Canadian uranium giant Cameco has warned that delays in ramping up production at its McArthur River mine in Saskatchewan could shrink its forecast output for the year. The move came just a week after one of the world’s other major suppliers of uranium, Kazakhstan’s state-owned miner Kazatomprom, announced plans to slash its production by 10% next year.
The pullback is happening right as the U.S. nuclear industry’s dealmaking boom is taking off. Now that Trump’s tax law assured that support for atomic energy would continue, Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that more reactor plans are coming. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told Katie. That includes Europe. Despite similarly lethargic construction of reactors over the last three decades, France and Germany have finally united around the need for more atomic energy to power the continent’s energy transition. A pact signed at last week’s Franco-German summit “appears to herald rapprochement on reactors,” the trade publication NucNet surmised.
Once a stodgy gas-guzzling automaker, Cadillac refashioned itself as a luxury electric vehicle maker in recent years, rising alongside Chevrolet to put General Motors in the No. 2 slot behind Tesla. Roughly 70% of buyers who purchased the electric versions of the Cadillac Optiq or Lyriq switched from other luxury brands, including 10% who previously owned Tesla. That number could rise with Tesla’s brand loyalty nosediving, as this newsletter previously reported. “We’re in a position of great momentum,” John Roth, the global vice president of Cadillac, told The New York Times. “We offer more electric S.U.V.s than any luxury manufacturer, all with more than 300 miles of driving range.” But as Times reporter Lawrence Ulrich wrote, “that moment will soon be tested” as the electric car industry reels from the repeal of tax credits in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
The challenges ahead are best illustrated through the Escalade, Cadillac’s iconic luxury SUV. The company sold just 3,800 electric Escalade IQs in the first six months of the year. While that’s a strong showing for a three-row SUV starting around $130,000, the V-8 engine gas-powered Escalade starts at about $87,000, and sold about 24,000 vehicles – roughly six times as many as the electric version.
Lawyers in Oregon are demanding the release of a firefighter arrested last week by Border Patrol while fighting a wildfire in Washington state. The man, whose name hasn’t been released, was among two firefighters cuffed in the Olympic National Forest as they fought to contain the Bear Gulch Fire that had burned about 14 square miles as of Friday and forced evacuations. The arrests sparked a political firestorm over what critics saw as a jarring example of the warped priorities of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That’s particularly so in the case of this firefighter, who attorneys said had received his U-Visa certification from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oregon in 2017 and had submitted his U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services application the following year.
When the AP asked the Bureau of Land Management why its contracts with two firefighting companies were terminated and 42 firefighters were escorted away from Washington’s largest wildfire, the agency declined to comment. The decisions came as the American West is essentially a tinderbox. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, Washington and Oregon are both at high risk of a megafire igniting this fall.
Turns out mammoths weren’t just in the icy tundra. Scientists in Mexico discovered mammoth bones, shedding light on a once-obscure population of extinct tropical elephantids that ranged as far south as Costa Rica. In a paper published this week in Science, National Autonomous University of Mexico paleogenomicist Federico Sánchez Quinto documented the previously unknown lineage of the Santa Lucía mammoths, which he said split from northern Columbian mammoths hundreds of thousands of years ago. “If you had told me 5 years ago that I would be collecting these samples, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” he said. “This paper really is an exciting beginning of something.”
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On permitting reform, Warren Buffett’s BYD exit, and American antimony
Current conditions: Super Typhoon Ragasa, the most powerful storm in the world so far this year, made landfall over the northern Philippines as it progresses toward southern China and Taiwan • Hurricane Gabrielle is forecast to rapidly intensify into a major storm while tracking northwest through the central Atlantic, but is unlikely to have direct impacts on land beyond creating dangerous riptides along the East Coast • Puerto Rico’s densely populated San Juan metropolitan area is bracing for flash flooding amid heavy rain.
A federal judge lifted President Donald Trump’s stop-work order for the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported Monday. Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan-era Republican appointee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted a motion for a preliminary injunction at the hearing, allowing construction to continue as the government conducts a review of its concerns over the project. “There is no question in my mind of irreparable harm to the plaintiff,” Lamberth said. As I previously reported in this newsletter, the project’s owners, Danish energy giant Orsted and the developer Skyborn Renewables, filed a lawsuit earlier this month. Analysts never expected Trump’s order to hold, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, though the cost to the project’s owners was likely to rise. The Trump administration has enlisted at least half a dozen agencies in a widening attack meant to stymie the offshore wind industry, despite its growth overseas in Europe and Asia.
In an interview with Axios, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright insisted the assault on offshore wind and the use of the federal permitting apparatus to stall projects, is “a one-off exception, or one-off complication.” Overall, he said, building infrastructure is “going to be massively easier than it has been in a long time.”
“The biggest remaining thing” in the Trump administration’s energy agenda that has yet to come to fruition? “Permitting reform,” Wright told Axios. “We’re building big infrastructure, but that’s still much slower and clumsier than it should be.” The will to find compromise on a new permitting reform bill may be limited. Republicans in Congress are reluctant to fuse energy legislation into the next reconciliation bill, as I wrote here yesterday. Last week, I reported that Representative Scott Peters, a key Democrat championing a federal permitting reform bill, warned that he wouldn’t move forward while the Trump administration blocked solar projects in California. But Wright said he’s been talking to Republicans and Democrats and said the political window may “quite possibly” open this year.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.Alex Kent/Getty Images
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro stepped up his threats to withdraw from the PJM Interconnection if the nation’s largest grid operator doesn’t speed up interconnections of new supply and find ways to curb electricity price hikes. In a speech at a summit convened in Philadelphia to bring together the 13 states in the grid system, the Democrat said that PJM’s “slow, reactive approach” to addressing rising power demand “is no longer working for our states,” particularly “at a time when the Trump administration is cutting funding for energy projects.” Separately, in a Monday interview on Bloomberg TV, Shapiro said, “If PJM is not willing to look in the mirror and really reform itself, then I’m willing to go my own way, and Pennsylvania can stand alone in this effort.”
It’s not the first time he’s threatened to leave. In January, Shapiro said something similar while criticizing PJM’s “market failure.” In the meantime, on Monday, he pitched what he called the PJM Governors’ Collaborative to coordinate leaders of the dozen other states in the grid system to advocate for better rates. Shapiro isn’t the only one asking questions about PJM. As Matthew wrote yesterday, “the system as it’s constructed now may, critics argue, expose retail customers to unacceptable cost increases — and greenhouse gas emissions — as it attempts to grapple with serving new data center load.”
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has fully exited Chinese automaker BYD, ending what Reuters described as a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value in that period. The selloff, revealed in a filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary, recorded the value of the investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024. The company initially invested in BYD in 2008, when it bought a roughly 10% share of the Shanghai-based automaker. In August 2022, Berkshire started paring back its position. By June of last year, Berkshire had sold off almost 76% of its stake, bringing it to just under 5% of BYD’s outstanding shares, CNBC reported. Buffett has not explained why he started selling his BYD stake. But in 2023, he told CNBC’s Becky Quick that BYD is an “extraordinary company” being run by an “extraordinary person,” but “I think that we’ll find things to do with the money that I’ll feel better about.” Around the same time, Berkshire sold most of the company’s shares in Taiwan’s leading semiconductor manufacturer, TSMC.
The U.S. has granted Perpetua Resources permission to begin construction on a mine in Idaho that will produce gold and antimony, a brittle, silvery-white metal used in semiconductors, batteries, and high-tech military equipment, Reuters reported. China controls the global market for antimony, generating nearly four times the supply of the second-place producer, Tajikistan, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. The U.S., by contrast, has no active antimony mines.
Perpetua’s Stibnite project, about 138 miles north of Boise, could change that. The U.S. Forest Service gave Perpetua a conditional notice to proceed, and construction is slated to start next month. Once complete, Stibnite could supply up to 35% of America’s needs. “Completing federal permitting for Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite Gold Project is a major step towards unlocking America’s critical minerals resources,” Emily Domenech, executive director of the government's permitting council, told Reuters.
A University of Delaware-led research team has developed a new type of catalyst that can help convert plastic waste into liquid fuels without the unwanted byproducts from current methods. Traditional catalysts have a hard time working on bulky polymers because the molecules don’t interact with the active parts of a catalyst, where the chemical reaction takes place. To address this, the scientists transformed a nanomaterial called MXenes (pronounced max-eens) to have larger, more open pores. As a result, the catalyst triggered a reaction nearly two times faster than traditional catalysts. “Instead of letting plastics pile up as waste, upcycling treats them like solid fuels that can be transformed into useful liquid fuels and chemicals, offering a faster, more efficient and environmentally friendly solution,” Dongxia Liu, a professor at the University of Delaware's College of Engineering and the senior author on the study, said in a press release.
Why regional transmission organizations as we know them might not survive the data center boom.
As the United States faces its first significant increase in electricity demand in decades, the grid itself is not only aging, but also straining against the financial, logistical, and legal barriers to adding new supply. It’s enough to make you wonder: What’s the point of an electricity market, anyway?
That’s the question some stakeholders in the PJM Interconnection, America’s largest electricity market, started asking loudly and in public in response to the grid operator’s proposal that new large energy users could become “non-capacity backed load,” i.e. be forced to turn off if ever and whenever PJM deems it necessary.
PJM, which covers 13 states from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, has been America’s poster child for the struggle to get new generation online as data center development surges. PJM has warned that it will have “just enough generation to meet its reliability requirement” in 2026 and 2027, and its independent market monitor has said that the costs associated with serving that new and forecast demand have already reached the billions, translating to higher retail electricity rates in several PJM states.
As Heatmap has covered, however, basically no one in the PJM system — transmission owners, power producers, and data center developers — was happy with the details of PJM’s plan to deal with the situation. In public comments on the proposed rule, many brought up a central conflict between utilities’ historic duty to serve and the realities of the modern power market. More specifically, electricity markets like PJM are supposed to deal with wholesale electricity sales, not the kind of core questions of who gets served and when, which are left to the states.
On the power producer side, major East Coast supplier Talen Energy wrote, “The NCBL proposal exceeds PJM’s authority by establishing a regime where PJM holds the power to withhold electric service unlawfully from certain categories of large load.” The utility Exelon added that owners of transmission “have a responsibility to serve all customers—large, small, and in between. We are obligated to provide both retail and wholesale electric service safely and reliably.” And last but far from least, Microsoft, which has made itself into a leader in artificial intelligence, argued, “A PJM rule curtailing non-capacity-backed load would not only unlawfully intrude on state authority, but it would also fundamentally undercut the very purpose of PJM’s capacity market.”
This is just one small piece of a debate that’s been heating up for years, however, as more market participants, activists, and scholars question whether the markets that govern much of the U.S. electric grid are delivering power as cheaply and abundantly as they were promised to. Some have even suggested letting PJM utilities build their own power plants again, effectively reversing the market structure of the past few decades.
But questioning whether all load must be served would be an even bigger change.
The “obligation to serve all load has been a core tenet of electricity policy,” Rob Gramlich, the president of Grid Strategies LLC, told me. “I don’t recall ever seeing that be questioned or challenged in any fundamental way” — an illustration of how dire things have become.
The U.S. electricity system was designed for abundance. Utilities would serve any user, and the per-user costs of developing the fixed infrastructure necessary to serve them would drop as more users signed up.
But the planned rush of data center investments threatens to stick all ratepayers with the cost of new transmission and generation that is overwhelmingly from one class of customer. There is already a brewing local backlash to new data centers, and electricity prices have been rising faster than inflation. New data center load could also have climate consequences if utilities decide to leave aging coal online and build out new natural gas-fired power plants over and above their pre-data center boom (and pre-Trump) plans.
“AI has dramatically raised the stakes, along with enhancing worries that heightened demand will mean more burning of fossil fuels,” law professors Alexandra Klass of the University of Michigan and Dave Owen at the University of California write in a preprint paper to be published next year.
In an interview, Klass told me, “There are huge economic and climate implications if we build a whole lot of gas and keep coal on, and then demand is lower because the chips are better,” referring to the possibility that data centers and large language models could become dramatically more energy efficient, rendering the additional fossil fuel-powered supply unnecessary. Even if the projects are not fully built out or utilized, the country could face a situation where “ratepayers have already paid for [grid infrastructure], whether it’s through those wholesale markets or through their utilities in traditionally regulated states,” she said.
The core tension between AI development and the power grid, Klass and Owen argue, is the “duty to serve,” or “universal service” principle that has underlain modern electricity markets for over a century.
“The duty to serve — to meet need at pretty much all times — worked for utilities because they got to pass through their costs, and it largely worked for consumers because they didn’t have to deal very often with unpredictable blackouts,” Owen told me.
“Once you knew how to build transmission lines and build power plants,” Klass added, “there was no sense that you couldn’t continue to build to serve all customers. “We could build power plants, and the regulatory regime came up in a context where we could always build enough to meet demand.”
How and why goes back to the earliest days of electrification.
As the power industry developed in the late 19th and early 20th century, the regulated utility model emerged where monopoly utilities would build both power plants and the transmission and distribution infrastructure necessary to serve that power to customers. So that they would be able to achieve the economies of scale required to serve said customers efficiently and affordably, regulators allowed them to establish monopolies over certain service territories, with the requirement that they would serve any and everyone in them.
With a secure base of ratepayers, utilities could raise money from investors to build infrastructure, which could then be put into a “rate base” and recouped from ratepayers over time at a fixed return. In exchange, the utilities accepted regulation from state governments over their pricing and future development trajectories.
That vertically integrated system began to crack, however, as ratepayers revolted over high costs from capital investments by utilities, especially from nuclear power plants. Following the deregulation of industries such as trucking and air travel, federal regulators began to try to break up the distribution and generation portions of the electricity industry. In 1999, after some states and regions had already begun to restructure their electricity markets, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission encouraged the creation of regional transmission organizations like PJM.
Today some 35 state electricity markets are partially or entirely restructured, with Texas operating its own, isolated electricity market beyond the reach of federal regulation. In PJM and other RTOs, electricity is (more or less) sold competitively on a wholesale basis by independent power producers to utilities, who then serve customers.
But the system as it’s constructed now may, critics argue, expose retail customers to unacceptable cost increases — and greenhouse gas emissions — as it attempts to grapple with serving new data center load.
Klass and Owen, for their part, point to other markets as models for how electricity could work that don’t involve the same assumptions of plentiful supply that electricity markets historically have, such as those governing natural gas or even Western water rights.
Interruptions of natural gas service became more common starting in the 1970s, when some natural gas services were underpriced thanks to price caps, leading to an imbalance between supply and demand. In response, regulators “established a national policy of curtailment based on end use,” Klass and Owen write, with residential users getting priority “because of their essential heating needs, followed by firm industrial and commercial customers, and finally, interruptible customers.” Natural gas was deregulated in the late 1970s and 1980s, with curtailment becoming more market-based, which also allowed natural gas customers to trade capacity with each other.
Western water rights, meanwhile, are notoriously opaque and contested — but, importantly, they are based on scarcity, and thus may provide lessons in an era of limited electricity supply. The “prior appropriation” system water markets use is, “at its core, a set of mechanisms for allocating shortage,” the authors write. Water users have “senior” and “junior” rights, with senior users “entitled to have their rights fulfilled before the holders of newer, or more ’junior,’ water rights.” These rights can be transferred, and junior users have found ways to work with what water they can get, with the authors citing extensive conservation efforts in Southern California compared to the San Francisco Bay area, which tends to have more senior rights.
With these models in mind, Klass and Owen propose a system called “demand side connect-and-manage,” whereby new loads would not necessarily get transmission and generation service at all times, and where utilities could curtail users and electricity customers would have the ability “to use trading to hedge against the risk of curtailments.”
“We can connect you now before we build a whole lot of new generation, but when we need to, we’re going to curtail you,” Klass said, describing her and Owen’s proposal.
Tyler Norris, a Duke University researcher who has published concept-defining work on data center flexibility, called the paper “one of the most important contributions yet toward the re-examination of basic assumptions of U.S. electricity law that’s urgently needed as hyperscale load growth pushes our existing regulatory system beyond its limits.”
While electricity may not be literally drying up, he told me, “when you are supply side constrained while demand is growing, you have this challenge of, how do you allocate scarcity?”
Unlike the PJM proposals, “Our paper was very focused on state law,” Klass told me. “And that was intentional, because I think this is trickier at the federal level,” she told me.
Some states are already embracing similar ideas. Ohio regulators, for instance, established a data center tariff that tries to protect customers from higher costs by forcing data centers to make minimum payments regardless of their actual electricity use. Texas also passed a law that would allow for some curtailment of large loads and reforms of the interconnection process to avoid filling up the interconnection queue with speculative projects that could result in infrastructure costs but not real electricity demand.
Klass and Owen write that their idea may be more of “a temporary bridging strategy, primarily for periods when peak demand outstrips supply or at least threatens to do so.”
Even those who don’t think the principles underlying electricity markets need to be rethought see the need — at least in the short term — for new options for large new power users who may not get all the power they want all of the time.
“Some non-firm options are necessary in the short term,” Gramlich told me, referring to ideas like Klass and Owen’s, Norris’s, and PJM’s. “Some of them are going to have some legal infirmities and jurisdictional problems. But I think no matter what, we’re going to see some non-firm options. A lot of customers, a lot of these large loads, are very interested, even if it’s a temporary way to get connected while they try to get the firm service later.”
If electricity markets have worked for over one hundred years on the principle that more customers could bring down costs for everyone, going forward, we may have to get more choosy — or pay the price.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.