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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On mineral funding, Harold Hamm’s Argentina bet, and South Korea’s offshore wind
On America’s Great Corridors of Commerce, Texas geothermal, and North Dakota carbon capture
On electrolyte factories, Josh Shapiro's flip, and Canadian clean power
On Trump’s mineral deals, the gas turbine backlog, and Turkic offshore wind
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Lala could strengthen into a hurricane before hitting Hawaii’s Big Island, becoming the first such storm to make landfall there since 1900 • A glacial outburst at Suicide Basin near Juneau, Alaska, is raising the Mendenhall River • Temperatures surpassed 107 degrees Fahrenheit in Zaragoza, the inland capital of Spain’s Aragon region.
Getting fracked up. EIA
The United States is rapidly approaching a two-decade streak as the world’s No. 1 producer of natural gas. The country held the top spot between 2009 and 2024, the latest year for which the U.S. Energy Information Administration has data. But America pumped record volumes of natural gas last year. And now the federal energy research agency forecasts 2026 will be another record year. Marketed natural gas production — the total volume that actually makes it to market, minus what’s burned off or leaks as waste — is set to reach an average of 122.5 billion cubic feet per day in 2026, up from 2025’s record of 118.5 billion cubic feet per day. The new milestone is the result of expanded drilling in the Permian region that straddles Texas and New Mexico, and in the Haynesville area, between Texas and Louisiana.
When the Trump administration first started buying up equity stakes in mining companies, former officials from the Biden administration told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin they were “jealous” that the Republican White House had the guts to try something novel to compete with China on the metals needed for defense and energy technologies. Now, however, top Democrats are asking federal watchdogs to probe whether the American taxpayer is actually getting good deals. New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Representative Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, called on the Government Accountability Office to open an investigation into potential conflicts of interest. In a letter sent last week to Acting U.S. Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown and published Thursday on E&E News, the lawmakers accused the White House of violating rules to assess the financial risk of federal purchases. “These equity acquisitions also create potential conflicts of interest for federal agencies because a significant portion of the planned mining operations are located on federal lands,” they wrote. “With the executive branch now holding direct financial equity in these private mining operations, the federal government is required to act simultaneously as a mining investor and land-use regulator, an inherent conflict of interest.”
Mitsubishi’s backlog of orders for large-frame gas turbines is now more than twice its output from last year. In the 2025 fiscal year, the Japanese industrial giant delivered 16 gigawatts of gas turbines and had a backlog of 23 gigawatts. Just halfway through 2026, that backlog has ballooned to 35 gigawatts, executives told investors on the latest quarterly earnings call. The update, announced in Japan last week and covered in English by Utility Dive on Thursday, shows that “demand for large-frame gas turbines remains broadly in line with, or slightly above, the strong level we had anticipated,” Hiroshi Nishio,the chief financial officer of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Power electronics maker Heron Power, meanwhile, unveiled plans for a $100 million factory in Morgan Hill, California. The startup, led by a former Tesla executive, aims to produce next-generation transformers that can patch more solar panels and batteries on the grid and help ease some of the issues that arise from the direct current-based electricity sources. The first factory is designed to churn out 40 gigawatts of Heron Links, the transformer product, per year. “America's grid has to grow faster than it has in decades. We’re seeing new demand from AI and EVs, and at the same time new supply from solar and storage,” Drew Baglino, Heron Power’s chief executive and founder, said in a statement. “The equipment running the grid hasn’t changed in 50 years. Heron Factory One in Morgan Hill is how we fix that. We’re manufacturing the leapfrog technology our grid needs, at scale, in America first.”
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Offshore wind is in retreat in the U.S., where, as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote this week, the Trump administration is paying billions to kill projects that were already dead or dying. The industry’s tide is also ebbing in Japan, where the new right-wing government of Sanae Takaichi is putting a heightened focus on nuclear power. Elsewhere, however, offshore wind is booming. Europe is only expanding its plans. China is steadily dominating the industry. And East Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan are expanding their sectors.
Now two of the richest countries in the Turkic world are laying plans for more offshore turbines. Turkey announced plans this week for its first offshore wind tender in the first quarter of 2027, Renewables Now reported. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, this week formally designated a 275-square-mile section of water in the Caspian Sea for offshore wind development, per offshoreWIND.biz. The moves highlight the extent to which the U.S. government stands alone in its view that offshore wind has no role in a modern electricity mix. Turkey, after all, is doubling its domestic production of gas and completing its first nuclear plant. Azerbaijan is famously rich in natural gas and produces a decent amount of hydropower. Yet both countries are still charging ahead on offshore wind.
Deep-sea mining isn’t yet technically legal in international waters. But the Trump administration isn’t waiting, creating the regulatory frameworks for domestic approvals and opening the area around one of America’s Pacific territories to exploration. Japan has been eager to follow suit. Now Washington and Tokyo are planning to meet “centuries’ worth of industrial demand” by establishing what Mining.com called the world’s deepest undersea mine in a bid to take on China’s mineral dominance. The mineral extraction would take place more than 1,000 miles southeast of Tokyo on an uninhabited speck of land called Minamitorishima, where Japanese scientists carried out tests pulling rare earths out of mineral-rich mud.
China is actively building more reactors at home than all other countries combined and singlehandedly restarted the race for novel technologies after hooking the world’s only commercial high-temperature gas-cooled reactors up to the grid in 2023. So far, Beijing’s two state-owned nuclear companies have remained focused on building light water reactors. Just one new high-temperature gas-cooled unit, designed to have more than twice the output of the first version, is currently underway at a facility where the fourth-generation, helium-cooled technology will be paired with third-generation, water-cooled reactors. Now the developer, the China National Nuclear Corporation, has made plans to procure a contract for the reactor for the first time, laying the groundwork for future deals to purchase units specifically designed to reach high temperatures. The “first concrete” for the plant is expected to be poured by the end of 2026, World Nuclear News reported.
On transmission corridors, China’s Russian reactor, and long-duration energy storage
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Cristobal formed in the Atlantic yet poses no real threats to land, unlike another budding storm gathering strength in the southern Caribbean • Powerful storms spurred derecho winds that spawned tornadoes across the Midwest and left 800,000 without power yesterday morning • Britain’s Met Office issued an amber weather warning as temperatures across eastern England soared to nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Lost connections. DOE
In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Department of Energy set about clearing one of the biggest bottlenecks to expanding America’s aging electrical grid: Literally expanding the grid. You don’t need to have read excellent books like Russell Gold’s Superpower or features like my colleague Robinson Meyer’s deep dive into the SunZia saga to know that building transmission lines is a huge challenge in the United States. To address this, the Biden-era agency proposed three National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors — essentially a series of projects in mostly red and purple states that could now enlist the federal government’s help to speed through the typical hurdles in getting approvals from so many jurisdictions and landowners across hundreds of miles of a power line’s route. Not anymore. On Wednesday evening, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of all three corridors, declaring projects that would likely have helped shore up the grid amid surging demand from data centers to be part of Democrats’ “Green New Scam.”
“Transmission policy must serve the American people — not special interests or a climate-alarmist agenda that drives up costs, worsens reliability, and disregards the concerns of local communities,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. Still, his agency pointed to billions in loans it’s offered to utilities for grid upgrades and a study, released last month, highlighting what the Trump administration sees as the country’s future transmission needs. The rescission doesn’t necessarily mean the projects linked to the corridors are dead. When the Energy Department first announced the corridors in December 2024, the agency stressed that the designation didn’t guarantee federal approvals, merely speed projects on the pathway to getting answers. Those include NextEra Energy’s 73-mile Lake Erie Connector between Canada and Pennsylvania, two projects in the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, and the Transmission and Renewables Interstate Bulk Electric Supply Project in the Tribal Energy Access Corridor.
When Elon Musk announced plans last year to build out 100 gigawatts of solar manufacturing capacity, analysts and industry watchers scratched their heads. That’s more than double the amount of panels the U.S. installs each year at a time when photovoltaic factories face fierce competition from overseas competitors — namely China — and withering support domestically with the end of the federal tax credit designed to spur demand for American-made solar. Yet Musk is charging ahead with what Tesla has dubbed Project Crystal Sun. In a document submitted to Texas regulators, the company said it was “currently evaluating the feasibility of constructing its solar cell manufacturing facility at various locations across multiple U.S. states.” That includes the Lone Star State, to which Musk decamped from California. “Should Tesla make the decision to develop the proposed project in another state, Texas would miss the opportunity to attract billions of dollars in investment, help create thousands of full-time jobs for its residents, and become a hub for domestic solar cell manufacturing in the U.S.,” Tesla stated in the filing.
Things were also looking rosy for wind turbine manufacturers. Shares in Vestas closed nearly 20% higher on Wednesday after turbine orders bounced back, giving the company the liquidity to buy back its own stock. New orders for its turbines climbed from 2 gigawatts during the second quarter of 2025 to 3.35 gigawatts during the same period this year, the Financial Times reported.
The storms that barreled across the Midwest this week not only downed power for more than 800,000 people, they also left drivers without access to fuel. On Wednesday, the Northwest Indiana Times reported that gas stations in the region were running dry. “Today, we heard that this was open, and this is like the only thing that is open,” Mike Siedentopf, a resident of the Northwest Indiana town of Munster, told CBS News.
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The flagship reactors in China’s nuclear buildout are the Hualong One and the CAP1400, each of which borrows heavily from America’s Westinghouse AP1000. But it’s useful to remember that Beijing is diversifying its atomic fleet. One of the next reactors likely to enter into commercial operations is now Unit 7 at the Tianwan nuclear power station on China’s Yellow Sea coast. On Wednesday, NucNet and World Nuclear News reported that the plant had loaded its first fuel assembly into position in the core of the new reactor. This marks the first time fuel has been loaded into a next-generation Russian reactor in China. Like the AP1000 and China’s versions of it, Rosatom’s VVER-1200 is a third-generation pressurized water reactor, meaning it uses the standard technology for fission with state-of-the-art safety and cooling upgrades. CNNC, the plant’s operator, said it expects to begin commercial operation later this year.
With the battery market booming, the race to commercialize long-duration storage technologies has yielded plenty of attention-grabbing ideas. Form Energy’s approach is proving particularly magnetic for investors. The West Virginia-based startup is seeking to bring rust-powered batteries that last 100 hours to market. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a $750 million Series G financing round, bringing the total equity it’s raised so far to over $2 billion. Its iron-air batteries, which charge through a “reversible rusting” process, have already attracted deals with Google, utility Xcel Energy, and data center giant Crusoe.
Meanwhile, a company commercializing compressed air storage technology just raised another $230 million. Hydrostor uses electricity to compress air and store it in underground hard-rock caverns using water displacement. When the grid needs power, the stored air is reheated and expands, spinning a turbine that generates emissions-free electricity. The Canadian startup pulled in more funding from the Canadian government’s investment fund, Goldman Sachs, and Canada’s pension funds. Another backer in this round is the oilfield services giant Baker Hughes. “The grid needs bankable long-duration energy storage that can be deployed today to enable affordable and reliable electricity for all, and Hydrostor’s continued fundraising success is a testament to the potential of our A-CAES technology to get us there,” Hydrostor CEO Curtis VanWalleghem said in a statement.
A Dr. Phil-linked expedition to find oil in Greenland has been delayed as the island nation’s government rejects the consortium’s right to drill. On Wednesday, the United Kingdom’s 80 Mile exploration company announced the delay in its plans. “While we are disappointed that the timing of the Jameson drilling program has been impacted, the company remains fully committed to advancing this highly prospective project,” 80 Mile executive director Rod McIllree told the Financial Times.
