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It’s a sign, perhaps, of the counterintuitive but optimistic conclusion of a new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Entitled “Glass Half Full,” the report — which my colleague Robinson Meyer published as an exclusive — compared the tax and spending laws passed under the Biden and Trump administrations and also analyzed each administration’s environmental rules. The analysis concludes that 74% of new clean energy capacity that would have gotten built under the Biden administration’s policy by 2035 will still get built under Trump’s policies by that same year. Those new renewables and nuclear plants will generate about 71% of the electricity that would have been expected had Biden’s policies remained law. Roughly 67% of the climate pollution that would have fallen under Biden’s policies will still drop under the trajectory Trump set. “The glass is substantially full,” Lily Bermel, the report’s author and a visiting fellow at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy, told Rob. “It’s not barely half full. It’s like three-quarters full.”
The U.S. grid needs to increase its supply of reliable electricity as quickly as possible. But regulators are stretched so thin racing to approve new projects that they can’t risk diverting attention to fast track last-minute design changes to a $2 billion gas-fired plant in the nation’s largest and arguably most stressed grid system. On Monday, Utility Dive reported that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission decided last week to reject a request for a waiver to allow Advanced Power Services’ Chestnut Run project in eastern Ohio to hook up to the PJM Interconnection system while bypassing certain rules. PJM included the plant — the parent company of which is ArcLight Capital Partners, which in turn sold itself in May to the data center developer DigitalBridge for $1.1 billion — in the initial 51 projects designated under the Reliability Resource Initiative, a program to fast-track roughly 12 gigawatts of additional generation from new and existing power stations.
In a dynamic that echoes what went wrong with Westinghouse’s buildout of two AP1000s at Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle, the process for the program barred any changes to a project’s size and capacity in its interconnection rights. With gas turbines in short order, Advanced Power couldn’t get critical equipment. The Boston-based independent power producer told FERC it had found alternative turbines, but that the new units would change the plant’s configuration, shaving off a modest 55 megawatts from its maximum output of more than 1.2 gigawatts of electricity. It’s barely a 4% difference. But FERC said that “studies resulting from the equipment changes would introduce substantial delays” and “have a ripple effect” on other projects in the queue.
A mock-up of the factory, located in the Sohar Free Zone in northern Oman. United Solar
Back in February, Oman’s United Solar opened the Middle East’s largest polysilicon plant. At full capacity, the facility will churn out 100,000 metric tons of polysilicon per year, enough to produce 40 gigawatts of solar panels. That makes the plant the largest of its kind outside China. Initially backed by Oman’s sovereign wealth fund, United Solar has already received $30 million in backing from Waaree Solar Americas, the U.S. subsidiary of an Indian solar giant that Semafor reported was championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in recent trade talks in Muscat. On Monday, the Oman Observer reported that United Solar had closed a $1.6 billion deal with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. In a statement, the company described the investment as an endorsement of United Solar as a supplier of material that can comply with mounting American and European trade restrictions on Chinese solar panels.
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Cuba’s entire power grid went offline Monday as the Caribbean nation’s energy crisis devolves into catastrophe amid Washington’s blockade on fuel shipments. Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy told CNN that officials were working to restore energy and that they’ve already activated emergency “microsystems” that supply electricity to critical services. In a plea to the United Nations in May, Francisco Pichón, the highest ranking officer in the Havana office of the U.N.’s Development System, said “time is running out, we need fuel now to save lives.” As in neighboring Puerto Rico, the ongoing grid disaster has spurred a boom in rooftop solar. But NBC News reported that Cubans are also turning to dirtier energy sources such as charcoal to cook indoors, subjecting themselves to dangerous smoke.
I find the comparison to Puerto Rico particularly poignant. Both islands were colonized around the same time, forming the beachhead of Spain’s early empire in the Americas, and rebelled against Madrid’s rule around the same time. Both fell under Washington’s suzerainty after the Spanish-American War of 1898, although the Americans granted Cubans self rule while seizing Puerto Rico as a colony. After the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. invested in Puerto Rico as a manufacturing hub and a symbol of the American system’s superiority. But as the memory of the Cold War faded into the 1990s, the U.S. cut key support for Puerto Rico, flipping over the first domino in a process that ultimately led to the island’s bankruptcy and the total collapse of its electrical system. The islands had opposite experiences of the so-called American Century. Neither one can keep the lights on.
In the early hours of July 4, the microreactor developer Aalo Atomics split atoms at its test reactor for the first time, becoming the fourth company in the Trump administration’s reactor pilot program to go critical. Criticality, on its own, is not a huge deal. But the program supported 10 companies to build test reactors that could generate data that the developers can use in their applications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Department of Energy, which administered the program, set a July 4 deadline for at least three companies to split atoms for the first time. First came Antares Nuclear, whose microreactor — designed for the military and space — went live at the Idaho National Laboratory early last month. Two weeks later, the gas-cooled microreactor maker Valar Atomics fired up its test reactor at the San Rafael Energy Lab in Utah. A week ago, as I told you, Deployable Energy went critical with its “nuclear battery,” also at the Idaho National Lab. In a statement, Aalo Atomics CEO Matt Loszak called reaching criticality “our most significant milestone to date, as it paves the way for the deployment of” the full-scale power units by smoothing the pathway to NRC approval.
I hope you were soothed by that chaser, because here’s the acrid shot: While we split atoms at test reactors, China just hooked up a whole new gigawatt-scale reactor to its grid. Last week, I told you that the second of six new Hualong One reactors — essentially China’s standardized version of the American AP1000 with an all-domestic supply chain — had hit a critical juncture. Well, now it’s hit the most critical juncture of all: It’s officially supplying power to the grid. Onto the next one.
The offshore wind industry may be in retreat in the U.S., but it’s just picking up in Europe. On Monday offshoreWIND.biz reported that the Netherlands’ 760-megawatt Hollandse Kust West VI offshore wind farm has officially connected to the grid. The 52-turbine plant is expected to reach full capacity by the end of this year.
The news came just days after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan dismissed a lawsuit challenging the procedure by which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Palisades’ restart. Started under the Biden administration, the revival project was one of the first the Trump administration allowed to move forward after taking office, part of a broader effort by the Department of Energy to spur a resurgence of reactor construction in the U.S.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked a challenge to California’s rules on emissions from industrial boilers, the latest legal victory for local regulations on planet-heating pollution from buildings. In 2024, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the air pollution agency in charge of broad swaths of Southern California, set new restrictions on smog-causing nitrogen oxide from industrial boilers, appliances that either burn a fossil fuel such as gas or oil or use electricity to heat up water. The policy — which would slash the equivalent of half the nitrogen oxide produced by every car in Los Angeles combined — is part of the state’s long-standing effort to curb pollution. It’s not the only win for the fight to curb emissions from buildings. Since 2024, federal courts have repeatedly upheld local and state authority to regulate pollution from buildings in New York, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
On Thursday, meanwhile, the Trump administration proposed a new rule to gut money-saving standards for appliances nationwide. “While the agency portrayed the move as bringing an end to appliance standards writ large, that is not, in fact, what it is doing,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote last week. “The proposal would update the DOE’s so-called ‘Process Rule,’ which governs how the agency develops standards, adding onerous requirements that will make it much more difficult to make any changes at all.” When I spoke to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy about the changes, the advocacy group told me the proposal would set minimum savings thresholds below which the new rule wouldn’t find federal support. It would also add a mandatory 180-day waiting period between before proposing new appliance standards based on novel testing procedures, require the Energy Department to show deference to industry-established standards, and force regulators to carry out extra analyses and rulemaking processes before enacting new rules.
Senator Angus King, the independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, has urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject the proposed utility megamerger between NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy. In a letter last week to the agency, King said the combination of the two giants risked putting too much power in the hands of one company. “The combination would create the largest electric utility in the United States, concentrating an unprecedented mix of merchant generation, rate-based generation, and transmission assets in the hands of a single company with a documented record of using its market position and political resources to suppress competition that threatens its merchant revenues,” King said in the letter, according to Utility Dive. Specifically, he cited NextEra’s lobbying to derail the New England Clean Energy Connect project in 2021, a transmission line to connect the Northeast’s grid to the almost entirely renewable hydroelectric system in Quebec.
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Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency put out new regulatory guidance on the president’s “freedom to fix” agenda, reminding automakers of their “long-standing legal obligation to release the service information, training information, and tools necessary to diagnose and repair vehicles,” even if the driver could use what they learn to tamper with the emissions controls. Meanwhile, on Friday, President Donald Trump announced that he’d pardoned six people “who were persecuted by the Biden administration” and were either in prison or headed there for violating Clean Air Act prohibitions against rigging the vehicles’ emissions control systems. “While I know this sounds ridiculous, it is nevertheless a fact, and part of the Weaponization and Stupidity that our Country had to endure during four long years of Sleepy Joe Biden,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I AM SETTING THEM ALL FREE, RIGHT NOW!”
In non-emitting vehicle news, Rivian is eyeing a better sales year than expected. While the electric automaker previously said it would ship between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles this year, it told investors on Thursday that it now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles, in what TechCrunch called “a small but potentially meaningful bump.” The announcement came the same week BYD crushed Tesla’s deliveries yet again, as I told you in my last newsletter.
Chilean President José Antonio Kast. Santiago Mazzarovich / AFP via Getty Images
Back in March, I told you that Chile’s most right-wing president since the fall of dictator Augusto Pinochet could take the country’s budding green hydrogen business in a different direction. Now President José Antonio Kast is doing just that. Last week, Chile’s state-owned Production Development Corporation, known by its Spanish acronym CORFO, announced plans to refocus the country’s strategy for green hydrogen on domestic use rather than exports, Hydrogen Insight reported.
China, as I have reported for you many times before, is going hard on green hydrogen, especially since the Iran War forced Beijing to ramp up efforts to find alternatives to imported fossil fuels. Here’s yet another data point: China just laid out plans to build the world’s largest green hydrogen plant using solid-oxide electrolyzers, which operate at higher temperatures. The facility will also produce, methanol, which uses hydrogen as a key ingredient. At peak capacity, the facility in rural Gansu province will produce 100,000 metric tons of renewable methanol per year for use in international shipping. Meanwhile, Spain is investing nearly $21 million into grants for hydrogen projects as the country seeks to make use of its booming solar industry. As I wrote last week, the surge in solar panels is creating problems for Spain, since its grid can’t handle all that power during peak daytime hours. Funneling that electricity into electrolyzers to make molecules that can be cleanly burned later may offer a solution.
Last month, I told you about a catchier term for the very small-scale solar panels being legalized to go on windowsills and balconies, opening the door to more apartment dwellers generating a small share of electricity themselves. That term, which I first read in Inside Climate News, is “guerilla solar.” Well, that solar rebel mindset is coming to the “Live Free or Die” state. On Thursday, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, put out a list of 74 bills she signed into law before Fourth of July weekend. Among them was SB-540, legalizing plug-in solar panels. The law will take effect on July 27, according to PluginSolarUS, an advocacy group.
