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current “legal and commercial constructs” and “frameworks” make the country “uninvestable.” The country’s basic systems need “significant changes,” and its hydrocarbon laws need to be overhauled before the Texas behemoth thinks it can put money into rebuilding the infrastructure in the South American nation. Still, Woods said he was “confident that with this administration and President Trump working hand-in-hand with the Venezuelan government that those changes can be put in place.” As my colleague Robinson Meyer noted in a recent interview for the Shift Key podcast, Trump’s push for imperial resource ventures generally might be a tough sell for actual oil companies.
Exxon’s main U.S. rival, the No. 2 producer Chevron Corp., has invested heavily in Venezuela over the years. Exxon, by contrast, has developed what’s considered the most significant new oil patch in the world, the offshore drilling operations in Guyana. But Exxon still benefits from the Trump administration’s intervention in Caracas. Venezuela has long argued that Essequibo, the sparsely populated jungle province comprising the western half of Guyana, rightfully belongs under Caracas’ rule. The move to threaten Essequibo and Exxon drilling platforms off its waters with the Venezuelan military in recent years drew fierce blowback. Now it seems unlikely such agitation will happen again anytime soon. Meanwhile, Trump said Sunday he may exclude Exxon from the Venezuela spoils, claiming “they're playing too cute.”
Until now, Meta has been the most cautious nuclear investor of its tech peers, brokering just one major deal to buy power from an existing atomic power station. By contrast, Amazon bought a stake in the reactor developer X-energy and put up the money for its first power plant; Microsoft pumped billions into reopening the working reactor at Three Mile Island; and Google is both bringing another reactor back online and investing in the next-generation reactor company Kairos Power. On Friday, the Facebook owner announced a sweeping deal to buy power from the nuclear utility Vistra, help build reactors with the Bill Gates-backed startup TerraPower, and pay cash upfront to finance the purchase of fuel for microreactor developer Oklo’s first power plants in Ohio. “Our commitments to Oklo and TerraPower support the next generation of American developers creating safer, advanced nuclear reactors and accelerating the development of nuclear technologies,” the company said in a statement. “Through our partnership with Vistra, we’re providing financial support for operating nuclear power plants, extending the operational lifespan.”
Constellation's Clinton Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Clinton, Illinois. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Illinois is the most nuclear-powered state in the nation, with atomic stations supplying nearly all of Chicago’s power at times. Yet the state put a moratorium on new reactors in the 1980s. That is, until last week when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed legislation lifting the ban. In 2023, Pritzker signed a bill that would allow for construction of more speculative technology, like small modular reactors, but maintained the ban on large-scale units. At the time, the Democrat vetoed separate legislation to legalize large-scale reactors, insisting they “are so costly to build that they will cause exorbitant ratepayer-funded bailouts.” Since no one has yet built an SMR in the U.S., there’s no way of really knowing how much the smaller units will cost. But more recent research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Koroush Shirvan finds the opposite. Building another gigawatt-sized Westinghouse AP1000 — the same type of machine that had major cost overruns in Georgia over the past decade — would be cheaper than building a first-of-its-kind SMR, since the supply chains and design are established.
“It’s striking that the same rationale Gov. Pritzker used to veto lifting the nuclear moratorium in 2023 — the prospect of new large-scale reactors in Illinois — is now being celebrated by his administration as a major win,” Madi Hilly, the managing director of the Chicago-based consultancy Radiant Energy Group, told me for this newsletter. “This reversal is a positive signal for future growth and long-term prosperity in Illinois.”
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China went from spending virtually nothing on nuclear fusion in 2021 to investing more than the rest of the world combined, as I told you last month. Well, it’s working. Last week, China’s leading fusion project, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, or EAST, pulled off a “novel high-density operating scheme” in the reactor. In the past, exceeding the limits of how dense the plasma that powers the fusion reactor could get ended up causing disruptions. “The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices,” study co-lead author Ping Zhu, an engineering professor at the University of Science and Technology in China, said in the statement to Live Science.
China plans to end its value-added tax export rebate on solar products on April 1. The finance ministry said the VAT export rebates for battery products will fall to 6% from 9% between April and December and phase out entirely at the end of this year. In a statement on the change, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association acknowledged that some Chinese exporters were, as Reuters put it, “using rebates as a price discount for foreign buyers.” This won few friends in Europe or North America, where governments who wanted strategic solar manufacturing industries saw factories close in the face of overwhelmingly cheap Chinese imports. Analysts told the South China Morning Post the policy is a signal “that Beijing is interested in serious trade relations and is a good partner.”
Biodegradable plastics are not always safer for rivers and oceans. When researchers at East China Normal University compared how microbial cities formed on the surfaces of traditional plastics and biodegradable materials after 88 days in a tidal river in Shanghai, they found that drug-resistant bacteria proliferated on both non-biodragable and biodegradable plastics, but saw a particularly intense but short-lived spike in pathogens developing on the so-called greener material. “Our findings show that biodegradable plastics do not simply dissolve into the environment without consequence,” Yinglong Su, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “They create a different kind of risk that peaks during degradation and should not be ignored in environmental policy.”
Homes in Greenland's snowbound capital of Nuuk. Leon Neal/Getty Images
It’s not the kind of thing anyone a decade ago would have imagined: a communique signed by most of Western Europe’s preeminent powers condemning Washington’s efforts to seize territory from a fellow NATO ally. But in the days since the United States launched a surprise raid on Venezuela and arrested its long-time leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump has stepped up his public lobbying of Denmark to cede sovereignty over Greenland to the U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Democrat from New Hampshire, put out a rare bipartisan statement criticizing the White House’s pressure campaign on Denmark, “one of our oldest and most reliable allies.” While Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-line deputy chief of staff, declined to rule out an invasion of Greenland during a TV appearance this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that the goal of the administration’s recent threats against the autonomously-governed Arctic island were to press Denmark into a sale.
The U.S. unsuccessfully tried acquiring Greenland multiple times during the 20th century, and invaded the island during World War II to prevent the Nazis from gaining a North American foothold after Denmark fell in the blitzkrieg. Indeed, Washington purchased the U.S. Virgin Islands, its second largest Caribbean territory, shortly after the 1898 Spanish-American war that brought Puerto Rico under American control. But the national-security logic of taking Greenland now, when the U.S. already maintains a military base there, is difficult to parse. “Greenland already is in the U.S. sphere of influence,” Columbia University political scientist Elizabeth N. Saunders wrote in a post on Bluesky. “It’s far cheaper for the U.S., in material, security, and reputational terms, to have Denmark continue administering Greenland and work within NATO on security.” One potential reason Trump might want the territory, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last fall, is to access Greenland’s mineral wealth. But the logistics of getting rare earths out of both the ground and the Arctic to refineries in the U.S. are challenging. Meanwhile, in other imperialistic activities, Trump said Tuesday evening in a post on Truth Social that Venezuela would cede between 30 million and 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S., though the legal mechanism for such a transfer remains murky, according to The New York Times.
I told you last month about the in-house market monitor at the PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest power grid, urging federal regulators to prevent more data centers coming online within its territory until it can sort out how to reliably supply them with electricity. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote days later, “everyone wants to know PJM’s data center plan.” On Tuesday, E&E News reported that PJM is expected to ratchet down its forecasts for how much power demand artificial intelligence will add on the East Coast. When the grid operator’s latest analysis of future needs comes out later this month, PJM Chief Operating Officer Stu Bresler said during a call last month that the projections for mid-2027 will be “appreciably lower” than the current forecast.
The merger of the parent company of Trump’s TruthSocial website and the nuclear fusion developer TAE Technologies, as I reported in this newsletter last month, is “flabbergasting” to analysts. And yet the pair’s partnership is advancing. On Tuesday, the companies announced that site selection was underway for a pilot-scale power plant set to begin construction later this year. The first facility would generate just 50 megawatts of electricity. But the companies said future plants are expected to pump out as much as 500 megawatts of power.
Meanwhile, the rival startup widely seen as the frontrunner to build America’s first fusion plant unveiled new deals of its own. Over at the CES 2026 electronics show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Commonwealth Fusion Systems — which analysts say is taking a more simplified and straightforward pathway to commercializing fusion power than TAE — touted a new deal with microchip giant Nvidia and told the crowd at the conference that it had installed the first magnet at its pilot reactor, TechCrunch reported.
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Scott Wiener, the California state senator making a bid for Representative Nancy Pelosi’s long-held House seat, introduced two new bills he said were designed to ease rising energy costs. The first bill is meant to “get rid of a bunch of that red tape” that makes installing a heat pump expensive and challenging in the state, the Democrat explained in a video posted on Bluesky. The second piece of legislation would clear the way for renters to install small, plug-in solar panels on apartment balconies. “Right now, in California, it is way, way, way too hard, if not impossible, to install these kinds of units,” Wiener said. “We have to make energy more affordable for people.”
Sunrun is forming a new joint venture with the green infrastructure investor HASI to finance deployment of at least 300 megawatts of solar across what the companies billed as “more than 40,000 home power plants across the country.” As part of the deal, which closed last month, HASI will invest $500 million over an 18-month period into the new company, allowing the nation’s largest solar installer to “retain a significant long-term ownership position” in the projects. As I reported for exclusively Heatmap in October, a recent analysis by the nonprofit Permit Power, which advocates for easing red tape on rooftop solar, found that the cost of solar panels in the U.S. was far higher than in Australia or Germany due to bureaucratic rules. The HASI investment will help bring down the costs for Sunrun directly as it installs more panels.
Total U.S. utility-scale solar installations for 2025 were on track last month to beat the previous year, as I reported in this newsletter. But the phaseout of federal tax credits next year is set to dim the industry somewhat as projects race to start construction before the expiration date.
In another session at CES 2026, the electric transportation company Donut Labs claimed it’s made an affordable, energy-dense solid state battery that’s powering a new motorcycle and charges in just five minutes. The startup hasn’t yet produced any independent verification of those promises. But the company is known for what InsideEVs called its “sci-fi wheel-in electric motor” for its bikes.
