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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On Qatari aluminum, floating offshore wind, and Taiwanese nuclear
On the solar siege, New York’s climate law, and radioactive data center
On nuclear tax credits, BLM controversy, and a fusion maverick’s fundraise
Current conditions: A third storm could dust New York City and the surrounding area with more snow • Floods and landslides have killed at least 25 people in Brazil’s southeastern state of Minas Gerais • A heat dome in Western Europe is pushing up temperatures in parts of Portugal, Spain, and France as high as 15 degrees Celsius above average.
The cooling towers for the two older reactors at Plant Vogtle.Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images
The Department of Energy’s in-house lender, the Loan Programs Office — dubbed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing by the Trump administration — just gave out the largest loan in its history to Southern Company. The nearly $27 billion loan will “build or upgrade over 16 gigawatts of firm reliable power,” including 5 gigawatts of new gas generation, 6 gigawatts of uprates and license renewals for six different reactors, and more than 1,300 miles of transmission and grid enhancement projects. In total, the package will “deliver $7 billion in electricity cost savings” to millions of ratepayers in Georgia and Alabama by reducing the utility giant’s interest expenses by over $300 million per year. “These loans will not only lower energy costs but also create thousands of jobs and increase grid reliability for the people of Georgia and Alabama,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement.
Over in Utah, meanwhile, the state government is seeking the authority to speed up its own deployment of nuclear reactors as electricity demand surges in the desert state. In a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dated November 10 — but which E&E News published this week — Tim Davis, the executive director of Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality, requested that the federal agency consider granting the state the power to oversee uranium enrichment, microreactor licensing, fuel storage, and reprocessing on its own. All of those sectors fall under the NRC’s exclusive purview. At least one program at the NRC grants states limited regulatory primacy for some low-level radiological material. While there’s no precedent for a transfer of power as significant as what Utah is requesting, the current administration is upending norms at the NRC more than any other government since the agency’s founding in 1975.
Building a new nuclear plant on a previously undeveloped site is already a steep challenge in electricity markets such as New York, California, or the Midwest, which broke up monopoly utilities in the 1990s and created competitive auctions that make decade-long, multibillion-dollar reactors all but impossible to finance. A growing chorus argues, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote, that these markets “are no longer working.” Even in markets with vertically-integrated power companies, the federal tax credits meant to spur construction of new reactors would make financing a greenfield plant is just as impossible, despite federal tax credits meant to spur construction of new reactors. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis by a trio of government finance researchers at the Center for Public Enterprise. The investment tax credit, “large as it is, cannot easily provide them with upfront construction-period support,” the report found. “The ITC is essential to nuclear project economics, but monetizing it during construction poses distinct challenges for nuclear developers that do not arise for renewable energy projects. Absent a public agency’s ability to leverage access to the elective payment of tax credits, it is challenging to see a path forward for attracting sufficient risk capital for a new nuclear project under the current circumstances.”
Steve Pearce, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, wavered when asked about his record of pushing to sell off federal lands during his nomination hearing Wednesday. A former Republican lawmaker from New Mexico, Pearce has faced what the public lands news site Public Domain called “broad backlash from environmental, conservation, and hunting groups for his record of working to undermine public land protections and push land sales as a way to reduce the federal deficit.” Faced with questions from Democratic senators, Pearce said, “I’m not so sure that I’ve changed,” but insisted he didn’t “believe that we’re going to go out and wholesale land from the federal government.” That has, however, been the plan since the start of the administration. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote last year, Republicans looked poised to use their trifecta to sell off some of the approximately 640 million acres of land the federal government owns.
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At Tuesday’s State of the Union address, as I told you yesterday, Trump vowed to force major data center companies to build, bring, or buy their own power plants to keep the artificial intelligence boom from driving up electricity prices. On Wednesday, Fox News reported that Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI planned to come to the White House to sign onto the deal. The meeting is set to take place sometime next month. Data centers are facing mounting backlash. Developers abandoned at least 25 data centers last year amid mounting pushback from local opponents, Heatmap's Robinson Meyer recently reported.
Shine Technologies is a rare fusion company that’s actually making money today. That’s because the Wisconsin-based firm uses its plasma beam fusion technology to produce isotopes for testing and medical therapies. Next, the company plans to start recycling nuclear waste for fresh reactor fuel. To get there, Shine Technologies has raised $240 million to fund its efforts for the next few years, as I reported this morning in an exclusive for Heatmap. Nearly 63% of the funding came from biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who will join the board. The capital will carry the company through the launch of the world’s largest medical isotope producer and lay the foundations of a new business recycling nuclear waste in the early 2030s that essentially just reorders its existing assembly line.
Vineyard Wind is nearly complete. As of Wednesday, 60 of the project’s 62 turbines have been installed off the coast of Massachusetts. Of those, E&E News reported, 52 have been cleared to start producing power. The developer Iberdrola said the final two turbines may be installed in the next few days. “For me, as an engineer, the farm is already completed,” Iberdrola’s executive chair, Ignacio Sánchez Galán, told analysts on an earnings call. “I think these numbers mean the level of availability is similar for other offshore wind farms we have in operation. So for me, that is completed.”
On Cybertruck deaths, Texas wind waste, and American aluminum
Current conditions: Yet more snow is dusting New York City with at least an inch fallen already, though that’s set to turn into rain later in the morning • Authorities in Saudi Arabia issued a red alert over a major sandstorm blasting broad swaths of the desert nation • Heavy snow blanketed Romania, halting transportation and taking down power lines.
President Trump speaks delivers the State of the Union address. Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images
In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Donald Trump unveiled what he called the new “ratepayer protection pledge.” Under the effort, the White House will tell “major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs.” By mandating the bring-your-own-generation approach, the Trump administration is endorsing a push that’s been ongoing for months. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the U.S. grid watchdog, called for data centers to build their own generators. An industry-backed proposal in the nation’s largest power grid would do something similar. “This is a unique strategy,” Trump said. “We have an old grid that could never handle the [amount] of electricity that’s needed.” With tech companies constructing new power plants, Trump said, towns should welcome data center projects that could end up lowering electricity rates by inviting more power onto the local grid.
The political blowback to data centers is gaining strength. It is, as my colleague Jael Holzman wrote recently, “swallowing American politics.” On the right, Senator Josh Hawley, the populist Republican from Missouri, introduced legislation this month to restrict data center construction. On the left, Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, reiterated his proposal this week to halt all data center projects. In the center, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat with unusually strong support among his state’s GOP voters, recently outlined plans for a more “selective” approach to data centers, as I reported in this newsletter.
Trump isn’t the only Republican pushing back against the data center blowback. On Tuesday, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves delivered an impassioned defense of his state’s data center buildout. “I understand individuals who would rather not have any industrial project in their backyard. We all choose where to live, whether it’s urban, suburban, agrarian, or industrial. I do not understand the impulse to prevent our country from advancing technologically — except as civilizational suicide,” Reeves wrote in a post on X. “I don’t want to go gently. I love this country, and want her to rise. That’s why Mississippi has become the home of the world’s most impressive supercomputers. We are committed to America and American power. We know that being the hub of the world’s most awesome technology will inevitably bring prosperity and authority to our state. There is nobody better than Mississippians to wield it.”
Replying to Sanders’ proposal, Reeves said he’s “tempted to sit back and let other states fritter away the generational chance to build. To laugh at their short-sightedness. But the best path for all of us would be to see America dominate.”
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The subcompact Ford Pinto gained infamy in the 1970s for its tendency to explode when the gas tank ruptured in a crash. The Ford Motor Company sold just under 3.2 million Pintos. By the official death toll, 27 people died as a result of fires from the vehicles exploding. Tesla has sold more than 34,000 Cybertrucks; already, five people have died in fire fatalities.
That, according to a calculation by the automotive blog Fuel Arc, means the Tesla Cybertruck has 14.52 deaths per 100,000 units, compared to the Ford Pinto’s 0.85 deaths. “The Cybertruck is far more dangerous (by volume) than the historic poster child for corporate greed and grossly antagonistic design,” Fuel Arc’s Kay Leadfoot wrote. “I look forward to the Cybertruck being governmentally crash-tested by the NHTSA, which it has not been thus far. Until then, I can’t recommend sitting in one.” That is, however, based on the lower death toll figure for the Pinto. Back in 1977, Mother Jones published a blockbuster cover story under the headline “Pinto Madness” claiming that the number of deaths could be as high as 900.
Texas accused the recycling company Global Fiberglass Solutions of illegally dumping thousands of wind turbine blades near the central town of Sweetgrass. The company allegedly hired several subcontractors to break down, transport and recycle the blades, but failed to properly dispose of the waste and instead created what Windpower Monthly called a “stockpile” of more than 3,000 blades across two sites in the town. Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, seized on a Trumpian critique of the energy source, saying the dumps damage “beautiful Texas land and threaten surrounding communities.”
Off the Atlantic Coast, meanwhile, Orsted is at a transitional moment for two of its offshore wind projects. The Danish developer just brought the vessel Wind Scylla to port after completing the installation of turbines at its Revolution Wind project in New England. The boat is headed to New York next to start installing the first wind turbine at Sunrise Wind, according to OffshoreWIND.biz.
Last month, I told you that Century Aluminum inked a deal with Emirates Global Aluminum to build the first smelter in the U.S. in half a century in Oklahoma. On Tuesday, the U.S. Aluminum Company, a local firm in the state, joined the project, signing an agreement to “explore the development of an aluminum fabrication plant near the new smelter.” If completed, the project — already dubbed Oklahoma Primary Aluminum — would roughly double U.S. primary production of the metal.
The Biden administration had placed what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called “a big bet on aluminum” back in 2024. By spring of last year, our colleague Katie Brigham was chronicling the confusion over how Trump’s tariffs on aluminum would work. With the recent Supreme Court ruling upending Trump’s trade policies, that one may remain a headscratcher for a little while longer.
Another day, another landmark energy investment from Google. This time, the tech giant has made a deal with the long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy to deploy what Katie wrote “would be the largest battery in the world by energy capacity: an iron-air system capable of delivering 300 megawatts of power at once while storage 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, enabling continuous discharge for 100 hours straight.” The project will power a data center in Minnesota. “For all of 2025, I believe the installed capacity [added to the grid] in the entire U.S. was 57 gigawatt-hours. And in one project, we’re going to install 30 gigawatt-hours,” Form CEO Mateo Jaramillo told Katie. “What it highlights is, once you get to the 100-hour duration, you can really stop thinking about energy to some extent. “
