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Last Energy just raised a $40 million Series B.
Nuclear energy is making a comeback, conceptually at least. While we’re yet to see a whole lot of new steel in the ground, money is flowing into fusion, there’s a push to build more standard fission reactors, and the dream of small modular reactors lives on, even in the wake of the NuScale disappointment.
All this excitement generally revolves around nuclear’s potential to provide clean, baseload power to the grid. But Washington D.C.-based Last Energy is pursuing a different strategy — making miniature, modularized reactors to provide power directly to industries such as data centers, auto manufacturing, and pulp and paper production. Size-wise, think small modular reactors, but, well, even smaller — Last Energy’s units provide a mere 20 megawatts of electricity, whereas a full-size reactor can be over 1,000 megawatts. SMRs sit somewhere in between.
Today the company announced its $40 million series B round, led by the Austin-based venture capital firm Gigafund. Last Energy aims to deploy its first microreactor by 2026, and CEO and founder Bret Kugelmass told me the company has already reached commercial agreements for 80 units, all in Europe. Nearly half of these will be deployed at data centers, the notoriously energy hungry server farms powering the AI boom.
Kugelmass told me the goal is for Last Energy’s reactor to be transportable in the back of a truck. “We decided to focus most of our specific design criteria based on supply chain and logistics constraints,” he said. Every part of the system is “built in a factory, first tested in a factory, mass manufactured in a factory, and then snaps together like a Lego set out in the field.”
There are currently no operational microreactors anywhere in the Western world, though other companies, including Radiant, Westinghouse, and BWX Technologies are also trying to build one. Last Energy’s investors are betting, however, that it could be one of the first to market.
As of now, the company has reached the permitting stage for some of its European projects. Kugelmass told me that Wales, England, Poland, and Romania are the company’s top markets, and that the decision to start in Europe was mainly financial. “Energy is so expensive in Europe compared to the U.S. — I mean, we're talking like two, three times higher for the exact same thing that we're going to deliver. We can make two or three times more money.”
The company estimates that its reactors can be fully manufactured and assembled onsite within two years. And while Kugelmass wouldn’t reveal an exact price, he said Last Energy will be cost-competitive with solar or wind plus storage. Problem is, there’s not really any precedent that would indicate how realistic these targets are, and nuclear doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to arriving on time or on budget.
At the very least, though, Kugelmass told me the reactor’s smaller size makes a meltdown “practically impossible,” meaning securing regulatory approval should be much simpler than it is for full-size plants. And building on the customer’s side of the meter also allows the company to supply power before it’s officially grid-connected, meaning Last Energy can work around the interminably long interconnection queues that plague the European clean energy market just as they do the U.S.
As manufacturing ramps, costs come down, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission streamlines its process for approving new projects, Kugelmass told me he could see Last Energy entering the domestic market in a few years. After all, with American companies driving the boom in AI and cloud computing, the U.S. has far more data centers than anywhere else on earth. Last Energy has aggressive plans to meet that demand, aiming to deploy 10,000 reactors in the next 15 years.
“But it doesn't stop there, because that's still only like 1% of global energy,” Kugelmass told me, saying that Last Energy’s ultimate goal is to “fundamentally transform global energy.” But that’s for tomorrow. For the unglamorous now, some more prototypes and permits are in order.
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It’s not just AI companies taking a beating today.
It’s not just tech stocks that are reeling after the release of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, which performs similarly to state-of-the-art models from American companies while using less expensive hardware far more efficiently. Energy and infrastructure companies — whose share prices had soared in the past year on the promise of powering a massive artificial intelligence buildout — have also seen their stock prices fall early Monday.
Shares in GE Vernova, which manufactures turbines for gas-fired power plants, were down 19% in early trading Monday. Since the company’s spinoff from GE last April, the share price had risen almost 200% through last Friday, largely based on optimism about its ability to supply higher electricity demand. Oklo, the advanced nuclear company backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, is down 25%, after rising almost 300% in the past year. Constellation Energy, the independent power producer that’s re-powering Three Mile Island in partnership with Microsoft, saw its shares fall almost 20% in early trading. It had risen almost 190% in the year prior to Monday.
“DeepSeek’s power implications for AI training punctures some of the capex euphoria which followed major commitments from Stargate and Meta last week,” Jefferies infrastructure analyst Graham Hunt and his colleagues wrote in a note to clients Monday. “With DeepSeek delivering performance comparable to GPT-4 for a fraction of the computing power, there are potential negative implications for the builders, as pressure on AI players to justify ever increasing capex plans could ultimately lead to a lower trajectory for data center revenue and profit growth.”
Investors fear that the proliferation of cheaper, more efficient models may hurt the prospects of technology companies — and their suppliers — that are spending tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence investments.
Just last week, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, announced huge new investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Altman’s OpenAI is part of Stargate, the joint venture with Microsoft and SoftBank that got a splashy White House-based announcement and promises to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure. There was already some skepticism of these numbers, with Altman-nemesis Elon Musk charging that certain members would be unable to fulfill their ends of the deal, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told CNBC from Davos, “I’m good for my $80 billion.”
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, said late last week that his company was building a data center “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” which would require 2 gigawatts of electricity to power. (For scale, reactors 3 and 4 of the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia are a little over 1 gigawatt each.) He also said that Meta had planned up to $65 billion of capital expenditure this year.
These escalating announcements have been manna to investors in any company that provides the building blocks for large artificial intelligence systems — namely chips and energy, with companies like Nvidia, the chip designer, and power companies and energy infrastructure companies posting some of the best stock market performances last year.
But exactly how cheaper artificial intelligence plays out in terms of real investment remains to be seen. Late Sunday night Redmond, Washington-time, Nadella posted a link on X to the Wikipedia page for Jevons Paradox. The idea dates from 19th century Britain, and posits that increased efficiency in using a resource (in Jevons’ case, coal) could actually accelerate its depletion, as the resource becomes cheaper for the same economic output, encouraging more use of it (in Jevons’ case, iron).
“Jevons paradox strikes again!,” Nadella wrote. “As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.”
Investors in chips and energy companies are hoping that’s the case; at least so far, the market doesn’t appear to agree.
The president is on his way to Los Angeles next.
On his fifth day back in office, President Trump is making the rounds to recent disaster zones —- North Carolina, which is recovering from Hurricane Helene, and later Los Angeles, where fires are still burning. In the immediate aftermath of both catastrophes, Trump was quick to blame Democrats for their response. Touching down in North Carolina earlier today, he sounded the same tune as he proposed overhauling or even eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for disaster preparation and recovery nationwide.
On the tarmac, Trump told the press that his administration was “looking at the whole concept of FEMA,” saying he would rather states be solely responsible for disaster recovery. Later, at a hurricane recovery briefing, Trump said that he planned to sign an executive order that would “begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA — or maybe getting rid of FEMA.” Trump dodged questions on details of the order or a timeline for implementation.
While speaking to a group of North Carolina families at a separate event, Trump told them, “Unfortunately, our government failed you, but it wasn’t the Trump government. It was a government run by Biden.” False claims about the hurricane response, stoked by Trump during the final month of his campaign against Kamala Harris, led FEMA to put up a “myth and fact” response page on its website to debunk swirling rumors.
It is true, however, that earlier this month, FEMA informed thousands of displaced North Carolina residents that their vouchers for temporary housing were about to expire for one of three reasons: their homes had been deemed “habitable,” the residents had not approved a FEMA inspection, or the agency couldn’t get in contact with them. Speaking to the families, Trump said this was unjustifiable given that “your government provided shelter and housing for illegal aliens from all over the world.” He claimed he would “surge housing solutions” to the state that went beyond FEMA’s temporary measures, but did not provide more details as to how.
After arriving in Los Angeles, where large swaths of the city have been devastated by still-active wildfires, President Trump met with Governor Gavin Newsom on the tarmac, striking a conciliatory tone as he said he wanted to “work together” to help L.A. recover. This disaster also prompted a flurry of misinformation when fire hydrants in the city temporarily ran dry. While the city’s water infrastructure simply wasn’t equipped to put out numerous simultaneous historic blazes, Trump put the blame squarely on Newsom and his previous opposition to a policy that would have redirected water from a river delta in Northern California to farms in the Central Valley and cities in Southern California, endangering a fish species called the Delta smelt.
Experts say this has nothing to do with the fires or the ability to put them out, as all water storage tanks were full and the blazes were due to a combination of drought and extreme winds. Yet Trump has continued to hold up the protection of the smelt fish as all that’s wrong with California’s fire response, even making it a feature of his recent executive order “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism To Provide Water Solutions To Southern California.”
After a tour of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and a photoshoot with L.A. firefighters, Trump met with city and state leaders and pledged to declare a national emergency that would allow him to waive all federal permits for rebuilding. “The federal permit can take 10 years. We’re not going to do that. We don’t want to take 10 days,” Trump said to applause. “I’d ask that the local permitting process be the same.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass agreed that she wanted to expedite the process but reiterated that before rebuilding efforts could begin in earnest, all the fire debris needed to be cleared. That’s an arduous process that the Army Corp of Engineers estimated could take 18 months to complete. While Bass vowed to speed up this timeline, Trump claimed that “the people are willing to clean out their own debris.”
Trump also repeated his promise to “open up the pumps and valves in the North,” though again, there’s no evidence that more piped water would have done anything to prevent these fires. “We want to get that water pouring down as quickly as possible. Let hundreds of millions of gallons of water flow down into Southern California, and that’ll be a big benefit to you.”
And he didn’t miss an opportunity to mention the smelt once more, telling the assembled leaders “it’s in numerous other areas. So it doesn’t have to be protected. The people of California have to be protected.”
Editor‘s note: This story has been updated to reflect Trump’s visit to Los Angeles.
A newly released memo from the Department of the Interior freezes the pipeline for 60 days.
The Department of Interior has issued an order suspending the ability of its staff, except a few senior officials, to permit new renewables projects on public land. The document, dated January 20, suspended the authority of “Department Bureaus and Offices” over a wide range of regular actions, including issuing “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.”
The suspension lasts for 60 days and can only be overridden by “a confirmed or Acting official” in a number of senior roles in the Department, including the secretary.
Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of the interior, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, cleared a Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee vote earlier this week, and will likely be confirmed by the full Senate soon. The suspension was signed by Walter Cruickshank, the acting secretary, a longtime public servant in the department.
“This step will restrict energy development, which will harm consumers and fail to meet growing electricity demand,” Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for American Clean Power, the clean energy trade group, said in an email. “We need an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy, not just a ‘some-of-the-above’ approach.”
The order is yet another early action taken by the Trump administration indicating its favoritism towards oil and gas (and some non-carbon-emitting energy sources such as geothermal and nuclear) and its hostility or indifference towards renewables.
An earlier executive order suspending permitting of new offshore wind projects was written broadly enough that industry officials told Heatmap it could affect more than half of all new wind projects, including those on- and offshore. Trump also halted a specific wind project, Idaho’s Lava Ridge, that was unpopular with Republican elected officials in the state. There are currently 12 renewable energy projects planned on federal lands in various stages of the permitting process, according to the Permitting.gov databased, including two that have been canceled.
“We don’t want windmills in this country,” President Trump said Thursday in an interview with Fox News. “You know what else people don’t like? Those massive solar fields, built over land that cover 10 miles by 10 miles, they’re ridiculous.”
While the vast majority of solar development happens on private land, the Biden administration set ambitious goals for solar deployment on public land, identifying some 31 million acres that could be used for utility-scale solar in the western United States. Between January 2021 and December 2024, the Biden administrationapproved 45 renewables projects on public lands, totaling some 33 gigawatts of capacity.
The order suspended a number of other Department of Interior activities, including new hiring, land sales, and altering land management plans. The order noted that the suspension of new permits for renewables projects “does not limit existing operations under valid leases.”
The order is part and parcel of a broad freeze on renewable energy and climate change programs, including funding for projects through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Former President Joe Biden issued a similar order on his first day in office,
halting new permits for oil and gas projects on public lands for 60 days except with permission by senior officials, followed up with a longer term pause on leasing in order to review the climate and environmental effects of oil and gas projects on public lands, which was eventually blocked by a federal judge. Like President Trump, Biden also killed off a specific energy project that many of his supporters opposed on his first day in office, the Keystone XL pipeline.