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On Saturday, right before Winter Storm Fern began, the Department of Energy issued its first emergency order of the year to deploy backup generation in Texas in hopes of avoiding a repeat of Uri. As of Sunday evening, data from Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, showed natural gas providing nearly 60% of the electricity on the wires, with coal and wind neck-and-neck for second place and solar in a close fourth. It’s a relief that the grid is holding. But the overreliance on fossil fuels isn’t a good long-term strategy. While “climate change deniers love to use major winter storms as ‘proof’ that global warming isn’t real,” my colleague Jeva Lange wrote last week, “in the case of this weekend’s polar vortex, there is evidence that Arctic warming is responsible for the record cold temperature projections across the United States.”
A look at The Metals Company's proposed mining operation.The Metals Company
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finalized a rule last week clearing the way for companies to apply for the right to mine the deep ocean floor. Under the new rules, applications for commercial and exploratory licenses are streamlined into a single process, cutting the number of required environmental assessments and public comment hearings in half. The day after the final rule came out, The Metals Company, the leading startup racing to collect mineral-rich nodules from largely unexplored depths of international waters, submitted an application to mine an area roughly twice the size of its original plans. “Nearly 50 years after this industry took shape, it’s ready to move forward,” the company told The New York Times. But opposition to deep-sea mining is mounting as environmentalists highlight the risk the industry poses to a scarcely understood and still remarkably untouched ecosystem. A corporate campaign to oppose deep sea mining just added the solar giant Sunrun to its petition, as I told you last week.
Tesla has officially discontinued Autopilot, its basic self-driving software, in the U.S. and Canada. All new car purchases now come with standard Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Sawyer Merritt, a self-described Tesla investor with a prolific social media presence, wrote in a post on X. The move, according to TechCrunch, is designed to boost adoption of Tesla’s more advanced Full Self-Driving setting. But it’s also in response to a courtroom loss in the company’s biggest market. Last month, a judge in California ruled that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing by overstaying the capabilities of both Autopilot and FSD for years. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which originally brought the case, gave Tesla two months to comply with the ruling by dropping the Autopilot name.
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul is going all in on nuclear power. She started off last year at the helm of a new multi-state alliance working on building more reactors. Over the summer, she directed the state-owned power authority to oversee construction of New York’s first new reactor since the 1980s. More recently, she inked a deal with Ontario to work together on building new plants and expanded her target fivefold to 5 gigawatts of new atomic energy in the state. Now she’s backed something a little more traditional but no less important. Last week, the state’s utility regulators extended subsidies for existing nuclear plants by another two decades in hopes of keeping aging reactors open until at least 2049.
In Denmark, meanwhile, the government has officially started considering building small modular reactors and lifting the nuclear ban the parliament put into effect 40 years ago. “Green energy from solar and wind is now and will continue to be the backbone of the Danish energy supply, but we can also see that it cannot stand alone,” Lars Aagaard, Denmark’s climate, energy and utilities minister, said in a statement. “We must be open to examining whether other technologies can provide us with green energy in the future. Small modular nuclear reactors may be an option.”
Standard Nuclear, a startup producing TRISO atomic fuel required by several of the nation’s leading small modular reactor designs, has raised $140 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Decisive Point, with first-time backing from Chevron Technology Ventures, StepStone Group, and XTX Ventures. Several existing investors, including Fundomo, Andreessen Horowitz, and Crucible Capital, increased their stakes. The financing will support Standard Nuclear’s plans to expand TRISO production to over 2 metric tons per year at multiple sites across the country. The timeline, the company said, is “rapid” and will take place by mid-2026. “With this funding, we are positioned to accelerate our roadmap, scale operations, and deliver on the promise to fuel the next generation of reactors powering industry, defense, and space,” Kurt Terrani, Standard Nuclear’s chief executive, said in a statement.
While TRISO was invented decades ago, the fuel — which has extra layers of ceramic coating that are meant to make a meltdown virtually impossible — is making a comeback as the go-to material for next-generation reactors designed to reach higher temperatures by using coolants other than water. Standard Nuclear has also inked a deal with the nuclear recycling company SHINE Technologies to work on reprocessing radioactive waste into fresh fuel.
Years ago, at a lecture about the spread of Lyme disease in the New York area, I learned that opossums eat thousands of ticks every season. That information totally changed my perception of a rodent that previously creeped me out. Well, it turns out kestrels — colorful, predatory birds — serve a similar function on fruit farms. New research in the Journal of Applied Ecology suggests kestrels keep harmful pathogens off fruit by eating and scaring off small birds that carry those diseases. Orchards that housed the birds in nest boxes saw fewer cherry-eating birds than orchards without, translating to what Inside Climate News described as a 81% reduction in crop damage.
Fervo isn’t the only big IPO news. General Fusion, the Canadian fusion energy startup TechCrunch describes as “struggling,” announced plans for a $1 billion reverse merger deal to go public on the Nasdaq. The move comes almost exactly a month after President Donald Trump’s social media company, the parent firm of Truth Social, inked a deal to merge with the fusion startup TAE Technologies and create the first publicly-traded fusion company in the U.S. Analysts I spoke to about the deal called it “flabberghasting,” and warned that TAE’s technology represented a more complex and dubious approach to commercializing fusion than that taken by rival companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Still, the IPO deals highlight the growing excitement over progress on generating power from a technology long mocked as the energy source of tomorrow that always will be. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham artfully put it in 2024, “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion.”
General Motors plans to move manufacturing of the next generation of its Buick Envision SUV from China to the U.S. in two years and end production of the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt. The Detroit auto giant makes just one of its four SUV models in the U.S., leaving the cars vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs. The worst hit was the Envision, which is currently built in China. Starting in 2028, the latest version of the Envision will be produced in Kansas, taking over the assembly line that is currently churning out the Bolt.
It's a blow to GM's electric vehicle line. Chevy just brought back the Bolt in response to high demand after initially canceling production in 2023, because as Andrew Moseman put it in Heatmap, it's “the cheap EV we've needed all along.” While Chevy had always framed the return as a limited run, it was not previously clear how limited that would be.
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The Department of Energy said Thursday its newly rebranded Office of Energy Dominance Finance, formerly the Loan Programs Office, is “restructuring, revising, or eliminating more than $83 billion in Green New Scam loans and conditional commitments.” The move comes after “an exhaustive first-year review” of the $104 billion in principal loan obligations the Biden administration shelled out, including $85 billion the Trump administration accused of being “rushed out the door in the final months after Election Day.” In a statement, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said the changes are meant to “ensure the responsible investment of taxpayer dollars.” While it’s not yet clear which projects are affected, the agency said the EDF eliminated about $9.5 billion in support for wind and solar projects and redirected that funding to natural gas and nuclear energy. But as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo noted last night, the Energy Department hasn’t yet said which loans are set to be canceled as part of the latest cuts. The announcement may include loans that have already been canceled or restructured.
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If you know anything about surging electricity demand, you’re likely to finger a single culprit: data centers. But worldwide, air conditioning dwarfs data centers as a demand driver. And in California, electric vehicles are on pace to edge out data centers as a bigger driver of peak demand on the grid. That’s according to a new report from the California Energy Commission. Just look at this chart:
A chart showing nearly twice as much expected load growth from electric vehicles as from data centers.CEC
As the Golden State tries to get a grip on its electricity system, Representative Ro Khanna, the progressive Silicon Valley congressman often discussed as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, has doubled down on his calls to break up the state’s largest utility. On Thursday, Khanna posted on X that PG&E “should be broken up and owned by customers, not shareholders. They are ripping off Californians by buying off politicians in Sacramento.” The Democrat has been calling for PG&E’s demise since at least 2019, when the utility was on the hook for billions of dollars in damages from a wildfire sparked by its equipment. But the idea hasn’t exactly caught on.
New energy technologies such as batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines are driving demand for minerals and spurring a controversial push for new mines on virgin lands. But a new study by researchers at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute found that a production boom is already underway at existing mines. The peer-reviewed paper, which is the first comprehensive global analysis of brownfield mining expansion, found that existing mines are growing in size and scale. Just because the mines are already there doesn’t mean the new production doesn’t come with some social cost. Nearly 78% of the 366 mines analyzed in the study “are located in areas facing multiple high-risk socioeconomic conditions, including weak governance, poor corruption control, and limited press freedom,” the study found.
The Department of the Interior has a new coal mascot. On Thursday, the agency posted an animated picture of a cartoonish, rosy-cheeked, chicken nugget-shaped lump of coal clad in a yellow hardhat and construction gear. His name? Coalie. The idea isn’t original. Australia’s coal-mining trade group rolled out an almost identical mascot a few years ago — same anthropomorphic lump of coal, same yellow attire. The only difference? His name was Hector, and he wore glasses.
