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Sparks

Chris Wright Is Overhauling $83 Billion of Loans. He Won’t Say Which Ones.

The Secretary of Energy announced the cuts and revisions on Thursday, though it’s unclear how many are new.

The Energy Department logo holding money.
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The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it has eliminated nearly $30 billion in loans and conditional commitments for clean energy projects issued by the Biden administration. The agency is also in the process of “restructuring” or “revising” an additional $53 billion worth of loans projects, it said in a press release.

The agency did not include a list of affected projects and did not respond to an emailed request for clarification. However the announcement came in the context of a 2025 year-in-review, meaning these numbers likely include previously-announced cancellations, such as the $4.9 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express transmission line and the $3 billion partial loan guarantee to solar and storage developer Sunnova, which were terminated last year.

The only further detail included in the press release was that some $9.5 billion in funding for wind and solar projects had been eliminated and was being replaced with investments in natural gas and building up generating capacity in existing nuclear plants “that provide more affordable and reliable energy for the American people.”

A preliminary review of projects that may see their financial backing newly eliminated turned up four separate efforts to shore up Puerto Rico’s perennially battered grid with solar farms and battery storage by AES, Pattern Energy, Convergent Energy and Power, and Inifinigen. Those loan guarantees totalled about $2 billion. Another likely candidate is Sunwealth’s Project Polo, which closed a $289.7 million loan guarantee during the final days of Biden’s tenure to build solar and battery storage systems at commercial and industrial sites throughout the U.S. None of the companies responded to questions about whether their loans had been eliminated.

Moving forward, the Office of Energy Dominance Financing — previously known as the Loan Programs Office — says it has $259 billion in available loan authority, and that it plans to prioritize funding for nuclear, fossil fuel, critical mineral, geothermal energy, grid and transmission, and manufacturing and transportation projects.

Under Trump, the office has closed three loan guarantees totalling $4.1 billion to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, upgrade 5,000 miles of transmission lines, and restart a coal plant in Indiana.

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Sparks

The Startup Behind Lamppost-Mounted EV Chargers Pulls Into the Garage

Voltpost announced two new models today designed to mount on walls and ceilings.

Voltpost chargers.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Voltpost, the company putting electric vehicle chargers on lampposts, is now expanding to parking garages.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled two new configurations that can attach to the walls and ceilings of parking garages, lots, and other locations without easy access to streetlights or utility poles. Like Voltpost’s signature pole-mounted design, the ceiling- and wall-mounted options avoid the expensive construction work required by freestanding charging infrastructure. In theory at least, that should allow the company to deploy more chargers faster.

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Wind turbines and a farm.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Democrats in Congress claim that a new Trump administration proposal will have a chilling effect on the energy sector by subjecting renewables and fossil fuel pipelines alike to an obscure, rarely cited Cold War-era law requiring detailed information on foreign farmland ownership be submitted to the Agriculture Department.

In late June, the Agriculture Department released a proposal to change implementation of the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978, which requires companies to provide information to the federal government on foreign investors in farmland holdings, acquisitions, and sales. If finalized, the new rule would expand the definition of “agricultural land” in regulation to include all renewable energy facilities and pipeline corridors by explicitly tying the term to those industries’ formal codes under the North American Industry Classification System.

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Electricity Bills Were Higher Than Ever in July

Americans paid $217 on average for electricity last month, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub.

A plug graph.
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July is typically the season of high electricity bills, and this year is no exception.

Nationally, the average electricity bill spiked to $217, an all-time high, according to new data from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. That’s up from $177 in June, and $215 last July. Meanwhile, electricity rates were 19 cents per kilowatt-hour, virtually unchanged from June and slightly higher than July of last year.

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