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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On Trump’ inverter ban, American antimony, and thermal batteries
On ‘precariously low’ oil stockpiles, China’s ammonia milestone, and a PFAS destroyer
On nuclear waste, a Nevada solar farm, and lithium-harvesting nanorobots
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol released updates on its looming new emissions accounting rules. Here’s what they mean.
On Yucca Mountain, Europe’s inverter boom, and Romanian offshore wind
Current conditions: Hurricane Genevieve formed into the first major storm of the season, strengthening to Category 4 off Mexico’s Pacific Coast on Sunday but steering clear of any land for now • Hurricane Fausto, meanwhile, is weakening as it heads toward Hawaii • China evacuated hundreds of thousands of people as Typhoon Noul made landfall.
French firefighters near Bordeaux on Sunday. ALAIN JOCARD / AFP via Getty Images
Wildfires in France and Spain forced roughly 300,000 people to evacuate their homes in what the French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called an “unprecedented” blaze. In Spain, the central western province of Avila suffered what the broadcaster France24 described as its “worst blaze in recent history” as Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez directly linked the disaster to climate change. By Sunday evening, in France, flames had come within nine miles of the southwestern city of Bordeaux in the heart of the nation's storied winelands as President Emmanuel Macron vowed to “rebuild.” Others saw the disaster as a sign of overdue lifestyle and infrastructure changes in the face of a warming planet. In Le Monde, the newspaper of record, the philosopher Cynthia Fleury and the Socialist mayor of the town of Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, Stéphane Delpeyrat-Vincen, argued: “What is burning is not just forests, but a way of inhabiting the land that is no longer possible.” The fires come weeks after a series of historic heat waves in Europe, including the hottest June on record, which made tinderboxes of parched woodlands.
President Donald Trump last week announced a landmark deal with Saudi Arabia to help build the kingdom’s first nuclear power station, besting the Russians and the Chinese in a race to tap into one of the world’s most coveted new export markets for atomic power technology. While the White House has yet to release all the details on the geopolitically meteoric agreement with Riyadh, sources with knowledge of the deal have confirmed to me what’s been reported elsewhere — that the deal will almost certainly include new large-scale Westinghouse AP1000s. Over the weekend, The New York Times identified another element to the partnership: Trump’s family and personal friends may benefit. The newspaper pointed to ties between a firm owned by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s sons and Westinghouse; links between Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s investments into quantum computing and former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Fermi America project to build AP1000s in Texas; and suggested that TAE Technologies, the fusion company merging with the corporate parent of Trump’s Truth Social platform, could see potential benefits from the Saudi deal. “There is no evidence at this point that Mr. Trump’s friends or family helped orchestrate the Saudi nuclear deal,” reporters Eric Lipton and Kate Kelly wrote. “Yet a number of the president’s allies and relatives, including members of his cabinet, stand to benefit if his big bet on nuclear power pays off. Certain investors with ties to these deals are positioned to profit, even if the delivery of large new loads of nuclear-powered electricity remains years away.”
The Trump administration is, in fact, making a real attempt at building new AP1000s at home. As my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last month, a major Department of Energy deal would help utilities buy the parts needed to build more Westinghouse reactors.
Chip giant Nvidia is considering providing a $250 billion backstop to fund OpenAI’s data center project in southern Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The deal would guarantee up to half of the capital needed to lease SoftBank’s 10-gigawatt data center to supply computing power to the ChatGPT maker.
GE Vernova’s backlog of orders for gas turbines, meanwhile, now stretches to 2031 and accounts for a cumulative 116 gigawatts of power-producing capacity. In its latest earnings call, covered in Utility Dive at the end of last week, the company posted double-digit revenue and order growth in the division that supplies equipment for gas, hydro, nuclear, and grid facilities.
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Back in February, I told you that Japan was stepping up its efforts to extract rare earths from seabed minerals. On Friday, Tokyo confirmed it had discovered that medium and heavy rare earth elements accounted for about 54% of the rare earths mined from mud recovered from a remote Pacific island, Mining.com reported. The finds come after the government-backed vessel Chikyu sucked nearly 50 metric tons of mud from Minamitori Island, an uninhabited atoll located closer to Wake Island than Tokyo. Heavy rare earths, such as dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium — and medium rare earths such as samarium, europium, and gadolinium — are trickier to process. China controls the market for both categories by a wider margin than for light rare earths. That makes Japan’s discovery so exciting. Separating metals out of the mud could be an easier process than from other ores, potentially supplying the democratic world with a new source of non-Chinese minerals.
When the Biden administration tried putting rules in place for producing clean hydrogen, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explained nicely at the time, the regulations posed a problem for efforts to make fuel through nuclear-powered electrolysis. That’s because the incentives to ensure developers built new solar and wind rather than cannibalizing existing grid resources for hydrogen production made it impossible for nuclear reactors to qualify. Companies such as Constellation Energy, which had the nation’s leading experiment in nuclear-powered hydrogen production, protested. It all turned out to be for nought, since Trump ultimately wiped out the tax credits. As with so much nuclear technology that faces political tumult in America, South Korea is moving in to try its hand at hydrogen fuel production. Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, the country’s state-owned nuclear giant, said it will launch a pilot program to produce hydrogen using heat and electricity from reactors, Hydrogen Insight reported last week.
India, meanwhile, is beefing up its plans for small modular reactors. Earlier this month, I reminded you about New Delhi’s plans to open its nuclear sector to foreign investments after years of icing out all but Russia’s state nuclear vendor. That isn’t to say India isn’t looking to continue building its own indigenously-designed units. On Friday, NucNet reported that the country plans to develop and operate at least five of its own SMR designs by 2033.
Last week, Heatmap editorial fellow Ameya Hadap broke news that Koloma, a startup seeking to spur natural production of hydrogen, had inked a deal to look for gas deposits across 817 square miles of the Philippines’ largest island, Luzon. It’s not the only subsurface search for clean energy. Last week, the country’s Economy and Development Council approved the Philippines’ first financing package to de-risk geothermal investments, Think Geo Energy reported.
On Meta quits, Elon Musk’s solar plans, and federal coal reserves
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Bertha washed out the majority of monitored sea turtle nests in the western part of the Florida Panhandle • Record rain in West Virginia swelled creeks that toppled bridges in the north central part of the state • In the Pacific, Tropical Depression Kiyapo is barreling toward the northern part of the Philippines’ Luzon island.
Aerial view this month of solar panels in China’s Zhejiang Province. VCG/VCG via Getty Images
China just quietly upped its target for renewable energy consumption, ratcheting up the goal 53% by 2030, rising to 1.8 billion tons of coal equivalent from 1.18 billion tons last year. That’s according to the latest five-year plan for renewables the National Development and Reform Commission published on its website. Wind and solar, paired with energy storage, are expected to provide 20% of electricity during the summer and winter evening peak periods, up from 10% currently, according to Bloomberg. By 2030, Beijing wants 300 gigawatts of peak capacity from renewables. Non-electric utilization of renewables, such as for heavy industry, is projected to rise to 150 million tons of coal equivalent from 60 million in 2025. The People’s Republic is betting on novel technologies to start taking off. By the start of the next decade, China wants to increase solar thermal capacity to 15 gigawatts from just under 2 gigawatts at the end of last year. The government wants marine energy, such as tidal and wave power, to go from virtually nothing today to at least 400 megawatts.
In the meantime, Beijing’s buildout of nuclear reactors continues apace. Per my promise to keep you abreast of all the big milestones, here’s the latest: China General Nuclear just installed the “supermodule” for the CAP1000 — the Chinese version of America’s Westinghouse AP1000 — at its Unit 2 project at the Lufeng Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong Province. The installation this week of a module that’s too big to be transported by rail or boat and thus needed to be fabricated on site “signifies that the construction of the reactor building” for the new unit “has entered a new phase.”
Meta has quit a top corporate initiative to promote clean energy as the Facebook parent company has built out at least a dozen gas-fired power stations to supply electricity to its data centers over the past year. While rivals such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft remain members of the RE100, a project of the British-headquartered nonprofit the Climate Group that former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair co-founded, Recharge News reported that Meta had left the initiative. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch it was a mutual decision, though Meta declined to comment on the exact reasoning.
The United States currently has a little over 70 gigawatts of capacity to manufacture solar panels each year. Tesla has plans to dramatically increase that number. “We are just going to multiply it [by] an order of magnitude,” Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s chief financial officer, said during an earnings call Wednesday night. “We’re going at a very rapid scale.” It was just one of the various investments the electric auto giant is banking on investors to support as billionaire CEO Elon Musk ramps up spending on manufacturing semiconductors and humanoid robots as part of its artificial intelligence buildout, while also tackling an energy source that the scale of China’s factories has largely brought down to a commodified price. The stock plunged nearly 15% on Thursday as CNBC cautioned that investors are increasingly spooked about spending on artificial intelligence. “Yes, this means that we are doing a lot of things all at the same time,” Taneja said. “And that’s why we just have to go as fast as … humanly possible, make things work in the real world.”
Adding to the company’s woes: The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen regulations on car door hands after federal filings linked electric door failures to at least 15 deaths in Tesla vehicles, Bloomberg reported.
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The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, surpassed $100 per barrel for the first time since May amid President Donald Trump’s threats to ramp up the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran and a resurgence of attacks from Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, finished out the day of trading at a little over $92 per barrel. Murban crude, out of the United Arab Emirates, soared nearly 20% to more than $107 per barrel. On Thursday, Trump told Axios he was close to a final decision on whether to launch a “massive attack” on Iran, “bigger than ever before.” The threat comes on what the Financial Times clocked as the 12th straight night of U.S. strikes against the Islamic Republic.
A new analysis from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie, meanwhile, showed the limits of Saudi Arabia’s main bypass for the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh redirected virtually all crude exports through its East-West Pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea after Iran closed the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf at the start of the war in February. Volumes flowing through the pipeline peaked at more than 4 million barrels per day in March. But by June, that flow declined to about 2.4 million barrels per day, a 41% decline. On the whole, crude exports out of the Persian Gulf fell 82% between January and June. That’s likely due to dropping production as the regional industry struggles to find sufficient outlets for its supply. The Red Sea corridor also also “faces a declared Houthi blockade that, if enforced, could reduce global oil supply considerably.”
The U.S. has 4.2 billion short tons of coal reserves in active mines and another 356 billion short tons in untapped deposits, according to an updated U.S. Geological Survey report the Department of the Interior released Thursday. If extracted and burned in a power plant, the coal could supply the nation’s needs for at least 600 years at the current rate of consumption, the agency said. “American Energy Dominance is more important than ever, and so is beautiful, clean coal’s role in the production of electricity needed to fuel our future prosperity,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. “Thanks to the USGS’s rigorous and independent assessment, we’re better equipped to manage America’s vast public lands responsibly while supporting energy security and economic opportunity.” Of the 34 coal mines on federal land, 14 are located in Wyoming, followed by Colorado with six, North Dakota and Utah with four mines each, and Alabama and Montana with three mines each. But Wyoming's mines contain 87% of the reserves associated with active mines on federal lands. As I told you last month, the Trump administration put up $850 million to support a coal revival. And the Iran War, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote in March, is only fueling more demand for coal.
Last month, I told you that Japan was the other country, besides the United States, bucking the global trend toward more, not less, offshore wind. Here’s a good reminder that, in most cases, such trends are directional, not definitive. The 315-megawatt Oga-Katagami-Akita offshore wind project just received its certification from Japanese regulators, “confirming that the design of its wind power generation facilities complies with” technical standards. It’s a major step toward building the array of 21 Vestas turbines off the coast of Akita Prefecture, per offshoreWIND.biz.
