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Things may be looking up for embattled renewables. Offshore wind companies have, so far, won every challenge to President Donald Trump’s orders to halt construction. As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, Katie Miller, the right-wing influencer and wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has for the past two days promoted the value of solar and batteries in posts on X. Another data point: The Wall Street Journal just reported that the chief financial officer of the posh home-exercise bike company Peloton is jumping ship to the solar company Palmetto.
A federal judge in Texas struck down a 2021 law barring state agencies from investing in firms accused of boycotting fossil fuel companies, ruling that the statute was unconstitutional. In his decision, Judge Alan D. Albright of the U.S. District Court in Austin blocked the state from enforcing the law, known as SB 13, which he ruled was targeting activities protected by free speech rights. “SB 13 is impermissibly vague in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment because it fails to provide persons of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what conduct is prohibited and does not provide explicit standards for determining compliance with the law,” Albright wrote in a 12-page decision. “Thus, the law is unconstitutional and unenforceable.” The decision, The New York Times reported, was part of a lawsuit filed in 2024 by the American Sustainable Business Council on behalf of two companies, Ethos Capital and Sphere, which claimed they were put on a blacklist.
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Spent nuclear fuel stored in dry casks and in-ground vaults at the Idaho National Laboratory. DOE
For France, Russia, and Japan, nuclear waste isn’t waste at all — spent fuel is reprocessed to separate out the harmful byproducts caused by fission and extract some of the roughly 95% of uranium left behind after a used fuel assembly comes out of a reactor. The U.S., too, would be in that club of nations were it not for former President Jimmy Carter’s decision to kill off what was supposed to be America’s first commercial recycling plant for nuclear waste back in the 1970s. Since then, no one has seriously attempted to revive the industry. That is, until now. Last month, as I reported here, the Department of Energy announced plans to set up nuclear fuel campuses where startups could test out recycling technology. On Thursday, the agency awarded $19 million to five startups to hasten development of recycling technology. “Used nuclear fuel is an incredible untapped resource in the United States,” Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish said in a statement. “The Trump Administration is taking a common-sense approach to making sure we’re using our resources in the most efficient ways possible to secure American energy independence and fuel our economic growth.” One of those companies, Curio Solutions, told me the funding shows the technology is “now moving decisively toward scaling up for ultimate full commercialization.”
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Amazon outbid Puget Sound Energy last month in an auction for a 1.2-gigawatt solar farm in Oregon in a move the Seattle Times warned left “the utility concerned about a larger competition for resources with energy-hungry artificial intelligence companies.” The tech giant agreed to pay $83 million for the facility, which could end up as one of the largest solar projects in the U.S. The project, which would span 9,442 acres, plans to build an equal amount of battery storage capacity. The bidding war was close. PSE’s final offer was $82 million. “We are used to being kind of the only buyers for these things as utilities, and now there are other buyers who are a little bigger than we are,” Matt Steuerwalt, senior vice president of external affairs at PSE, told the newspaper Thursday.
Amazon said Thursday it plans to spend an eye-popping $200 billion — with a B — on AI infrastructure this year alone. It’s not alone in the big spending. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced Wednesday that it expects to spend between $175 billion to $185 billion on data centers, energy, and other AI investments this year, roughly double what it paid in 2025. But as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted, Google’s spending spree is “fabulous news for utilities.” Just last week, utility and renewable developer NextEra told investors on its quarterly earnings call that it expects to bring 15 gigawatts of power to serve data centers over the next decade. “But I’ll be disappointed if we don’t double our goal and deliver at least 30 gigawatts through this channel by 2035, NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said.
Chronic exposure to fine particulate matter from wildfires is killing an average of 24,100 people in America’s lower 48 states each year, according to a new study. The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, examined the period from 2006 to 2020 and found that long-term exposure to the tiny particulates from the blaze is linked to at least that many deaths. “Our message is: Wildfire smoke is very dangerous. It is an increasing threat to human health,” Yaguang Wei, a study author and assistant professor in the department of environmental medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told the Associated Press. A scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles who was not involved in the study described the findings as “reasonable” and called for further research. A paper from 2024, which Heatmap’s Jeva Lange covered at the time, found a 10-fold increase in deaths from wildfire smoke from the 1960s to the 2010s.
Much like the classic animated movie about a bunch of zoo animals from New York City that end up stranded on Africa’s largest island, a non-native species is messing with Madagascar’s lemurs. New research from Rice University found that strawberry guava, an invasive plant from Brazil, can prevent forests from naturally regenerating. The plant, whose fruit lemurs often eat, was introduced to Madagascar during the colonial era in the 1800s and tends to take hold in areas where the rainforest canopy is damaged. Once established, the strawberry guava can stall native trees’ regrowth by decades.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. attempted to coordinate a network of trading partners, to make up for the minerals American mines no longer produced. The Treasury Department allowed automakers that sourced battery minerals to countries with which the U.S. had a free trade agreement to benefit from the most valuable version of the landmark electric vehicle tax credit reserved for power packs made with domestically-sourced metals. The White House worked with Republicans in Congress to eliminate the tax credit last year, demonstrating what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin referred to as the “paradox” of Trump’s push for more domestic mining: A push to increase supply while eliminating one of the biggest sources of demand. The on-again, off-again tariff wars with allies haven’t done much to rally the spirit of camaraderie among America’s traditional trade partners either. Since then, as I have covered repeatedly in this newsletter, Trump has gone on a shopping spree for equity stakes in mining companies, shelled out grants through the military to mineral startups, and, most recently, created a $12 billion federal stockpile. Yet it’s come with plenty of missteps, as a former Department of Energy official told our colleague Robinson Meyer in his latest Shift Key podcast. Still, Congress is backing up the mining push. The House voted 224-195 Wednesday to approve legislation meant to speed up mining on federal lands.
Despite President Donald Trump’s threats to eliminate its funding, Congress has spared the long-running federal program that helps low-income Americans pay for heating and electric bills. The budget deal the president signed Tuesday to fund most federal agencies through September added $20 million to the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, bringing the total funding to just over $4 billion. It’s a full reversal of Trump’s position in May, when the administration asked Congress to completely eliminate the funding, Utility Dive reported. A second appropriations package Trump signed last month also included a small increase in funding for a separate program that subsidizes weatherization projects and other energy efficiency renovations for low- and moderate-income households.
President-elect José Antonio Kast, Chile's most right-wing leader since Augusto Pincohet's dictatorship, smiles alongside President Gabriel Boric, the most left-wing president since Salvador Allende. Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images
Last week, I told you about copper prices soaring to a record — and seemingly unsustainable — high. While Goldman Sachs analysts expected the price for the metal needed for virtually anything electric to fall, it was still forecast to level off well above the average for the past few years. Well, that’s good news José Antonio Kast, the far-right leader scheduled to be inaugurated president of Chile next month. His incoming finance minister told the Financial Times the government plans to deliver economic growth rates of 4% and balance the country’s budget by 2029. If that proves possible, it’s only because Chile is the world’s largest producer of the red metal.
The U.S., meanwhile, is seeing early fruits of its global mineral diplomacy. The federal government’s International Development Finance Corporation said Wednesday that a U.S.-backed venture will begin shipping 50,000 tons of copper from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The export package comes a month after the same Congolese project pledged to send 100,000 tons to the U.S. The lending agency’s chief executive, Ben Black, said the partnership between Washington and Kinshasa “ensures valuable critical minerals are directed to the U.S. and our allies.”
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Newcleo, the best-known European nuclear startup promising to build fourth-generation small modular reactors, just netted $85 million in its latest financing round, bringing its total fundraising for the past 12 months to more than $125 million. The financing round includes venture funds Kairos and Indaco Ventures, asset manager Azimut Investments, the CERN pension fund, and industrial giants such as steelmaker Danieli, concrete manufacturer Cementir Holding, and components producers such as Walter Tosto and Orion Valves. The money will “accelerate our expansion into the U.S.,” a nascent effort that has included brokering a partnership with fellow next-generation reactor startup Oklo. Unlike the California company, whose microreactor design uses liquid sodium instead of water as a coolant, Paris-based Newcleo has proposed building a lead-cooled unit. The design has already gained approval in the United Kingdom. “Our ability to deliver impactful low-carbon energy solutions for energy-intensive firms is proving an attractive investment rationale for both industrial and financial investors,” said Newcleo CEO Stefano Buono.
Last week, I told you about the trouble brewing for the controversial wood-pellet giant Drax, which built its business on government subsidies predicated on the idea that burning felled trees for electricity could somehow provide a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels. Facing overdue scrutiny of its green credentials, the British company had hoped Japan, the world’s No. 2 importer of wood pellets, would provide a growth market. But Tokyo indicated it’s cutting off the subsidy spigot. Then, two days ago, I told you that a former Drax employee admitted the company misled the public when claiming it wasn’t felling old-growth trees to make its wood pellets. Now the union that represents its British workers, Unite, has blasted Drax for the “shameful betrayal” of threatening to cut as many as 350 jobs. That could total up to 10% of the workforce. “It is shameful that a firm making billions such as Drax is choosing to target its staff,” Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, said, according to Energy Voice. “It is morally wrong that workers, their families, and local communities pay the price for corporate greed.”
Over at The Washington Post, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ management team just gutted the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning climate desk. The paper sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told veteran beat reporter Sammy Roth for his Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter. The pink slips included eight writers and reporters, an editor, and several video, data, and graphics journalists. I’ll echo Sammy’s sentiment with the highest compliment I can give: I was routinely jealous of the top-notch reporting the climate team published at the Post. Losing that nuanced, complex reporting, at this particular juncture in the history of our nation and our atmosphere, is devastating. It’s also infuriating when you read the back-of-the-napkin math New York Times reporter Peter Baker posted on X yesterday: “Last reported annual losses of Post: $100 million,” he wrote. “Number of years Bezos could absorb those losses with what he makes in a single week: 5.”
Take a guess who wrote this on X yesterday morning: “Solar energy is the energy of the future. Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky — we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” Go ahead, I’ll wait. Whomever you were going to name, you’re probably wrong. The answer, astonishingly, is Katie Miller, the right-wing influencer wife of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller. A regular feature of White House social media content, Katie Miller posted her praise for an industry her husband’s boss has done much to stymie in response to an Axios article on a poll that found strong support for solar among GOP voters. The survey, commissioned by the panel manufacturer First Solar, comes as the solar industry says that the administration is throttling its permitting. While Trump seems unlikely to let up on wind, it could be a sign of a brighter future for America’s fastest-growing source of electricity.
