Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
It’s not the only government betting that the various attempts to commercialize fusion as an energy source will pan out in the near future. On Monday, NucNet reported that the British government had drafted legislation to “create conditions” for deploying fusion technology.
Typically, the rule of thumb in journalism is that the answer to a question headline is almost always “no,” otherwise the headline would simply state the fact. But this one is a genuine open question that climate-tech investor Shanu Mathew raised Monday in a post on X: Could PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, break apart? The speculation traces back to a Bloomberg article from last week in which unnamed federal officials suggested that the operator, which runs the grid from the Illinois prairie to the Jersey Shore, could split up as data centers put strain on the 13-state system’s electricity supplies.
The talks are happening as two of the largest utilities in PJM, NextEra and Dominion, discuss a potential $420 billion megamerger that would create, among other things, a storage giant, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported. The discussions are also occurring against the backdrop of major artificial intelligence companies going public, with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI following Claude-developer Anthropic in filing a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week.
Nuclear is booming in China.EIA
In the United States, you can’t build a single commercial nuclear reactor in a decade. In China, you can apparently double the size of your entire fleet in that time. Between 2016 and 2024, China’s nuclear generation capacity soared by 76%, according to a new Energy Information Administration analysis. That’s equal to 24 gigawatts. In 2025, China added another 1.1 gigawatts, followed by 2.2 gigawatts more this year just through May. The country has at least 36 other reactors under construction, accounting for nearly half of the world’s ongoing nuclear projects.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Just five years ago, the global aviation industry made a landmark pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Now the head of the industry’s global body says that goal is likely already out of reach. Willie Walsh, the director of the International Air Transport Association, told The Guardian that “hope was fading fast” and a new “realistic timeline” needed to be established. More than half of the planned decarbonization of air travel relied on the development of sustainable aviation fuels that remain nascent at best. Money is pouring into the technology, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported. But uptake so far “is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told her.
One cold autumn morning three years ago, I made my way across downtown Ulaanbaatar to an American-style diner called Millie’s Espresso to meet with a Mongolian mining executive who was thrilled about Western countries’ recent investments in his industry. Landlocked between Russia and China, the geographically huge but sparsely populated democracy hoped to shore up its sovereignty by forging deals with the U.S., Europe, South Korea, and Japan to satisfy soaring demand for minerals. Already Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s largest copper mines, was underway in the country’s Gobi desert south, and that year the French government inked a deal to start producing lithium and uranium in Mongolia. Now the uranium part of that agreement is moving forward. On Monday, World Nuclear News reported that the French state-backed nuclear fuel producer Orano had broken ground on its first mine in the Central Asian nation. The project raised some eyebrows among Mongolians who complained that Soviet-era Russian uranium mining left behind nasty pollution, and the terms of Ulaanbaatar’s deal with Rio Tinto over the new copper mine have been politically contentious. But the sprawling, smog-choked capital city — the only major urban development in the rural nation — is in need of more power.
Russia had promised to help meet that power by building Mongolia’s first nuclear power plant. A politically well-connected businessman from Ulaanbaatar, whom I caught up with last night over text to ask about the mood in the country, said Moscow’s bid had drawn more positive attention than France’s plans to mine fuel for their own reactors. “In Ulaanbaatar, we experienced electricity shortages last winter that caused apartment heating to stop during the winter. It was crazy,” the executive told me. While he’s typically a critic of the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, which formed out of the old Communist Party apparatus following the fall of the Soviet Union, the executive told me the government’s actions were “good and brave” steps to “diversify investment in Mongolia.”
I hate to close out on a bad note, but this one felt important to include: America’s screwworm problem is getting worse. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the first case of the flesh-eating parasite in a dog in New Mexico, in addition to four cases in total in Texas. “This situation is evolving, and we expect new information to emerge as our investigation continues,” Dudley Hoskins, USDA’s under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said in a statement.
While significant, the decision — which was effective immediately — doesn’t change the Trump administration’s restrictions on using tax credits for projects made with Chinese imports. And Crux Climate, the tax credit marketplace, cautioned that few developers may be able to spring into action to seize on the ruling in the next 26 days before the rebates officially end.
New York State lawmakers passed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction that would pause permits on the facilities and require the state to create new rules on energy use, community investment, and labor standards for server farms. But News10, Albany’s ABC affiliate, warned that Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, had not yet indicated whether she would sign the bill.
The move came as NBC News reported that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, another Democrat, outlined plans to temporarily halt tax breaks to data centers ahead of a call to state lawmakers to come up with a new framework for how the facilities should be developed. The data center backlash, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote, is becoming impossible to miss, with roughly 70% of Americans now opposing server farms built near their homes. More than 60% of Americans now support placing a moratorium on data center construction.
San Diego’s desalination plant. Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images
Desalination, as my colleague Katie Brigham put it in March, is “having a moment.” It’s not hard to see why. The San Diego County Water Authority is generating so much water from a desalination plant the utility opened a decade ago that it has not only ended its own shortfalls, it has produced a surplus. Now, as a result, the California city is poised to sell some of its rights to Colorado River water to Arizona and Nevada under the first large-scale deal to trade water between the states entitled a share of what flows through the nation’s fifth-longest river. The agreement highlights how desalination could “help parched inland states fill a widening gap between water supply and demand,” The New York Times reported.
It’s a welcome development. Just last week, experts told the Utah News Dispatch that the Colorado River’s largest reservoirs are approaching a “system crash.”
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
New York’s Legislature might have backed its Democratic governor’s bid to weaken the state’s climate law, but Rhode Island is taking a different approach. Lawmakers in New England’s smallest state rejected Democratic Governor Dan McKee’s proposal to slash Rhode Island’s climate programs in the name of affordability. On Friday, E&E News reported that the state budget lawmakers advanced last week nixed the changes to clean energy policies.
In January, the United Kingdom, Norway, and several major European Union nations including Germany and Denmark agreed to a pact to build out a sweeping array of wind turbines in the North Sea, turning the waterway into “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir.” If the pledge holds, roughly 11% of the 222,000-square-mile sea could be covered in turbines. That’s the finding of a new study from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. Under the current target, the North Sea would host a total of about 19,400 turbines by the middle of this century. By 2030, the U.K. alone is on track to have roughly 4,200 turbines, followed by Germany with about 2,700, and the Netherlands with 1,700, according to Renewables Now. The Dutch would claim the highest offshore wind density, with wind farms covering around 19% of its North Sea waters by 2050, followed by Belgium at 18%.
President Sheinbaum drives an Olinia.Office of the President of Mexico
There’s been much ado about Chinese electric vehicles being built in Mexico. But on Sunday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum unveiled the Olinia — a 100% domestically designed electric van that looks a bit like Toyota’s Kayoibako EV minivan. In a post on X, she proudly called it “the electric car created by young Mexican women and men.” The name harkens to the Nahuatl word for “movement.”
