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At the same time, the blowback to the so-called climate killshot the EPA took by rescinding the endangerment finding has just begun. Environmental groups just filed a lawsuit challenging the agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act to cover only the effects of regional pollution, not global emissions, according to Landmark, a newsletter tracking climate litigation.
Copper prices — as readers of this newsletter are surely well aware — are booming as demand for the metal needed for virtually every electrical application skyrockets. Just last month, Amazon inked a deal with Rio Tinto to buy America’s first new copper output for its data center buildout. But new research from a leading mineral supply chain analyst suggests the U.S. can meet 145% of its annual demand using raw copper from overseas and domestic mines and from scrap. By contrast, China — the world’s largest consumer — can source just 40% of its copper that way. What the U.S. lacks, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, is the downstream processing capacity to turn raw copper into the copper cathode manufacturers need. “The U.S. is producing more copper than it uses, and is far more self-reliant than China in terms of raw materials,” Benchmark analyst Albert Mackenzie told the Financial Times. The research calls into question the Trump administration’s mineral policy, which includes stockpiling copper from jointly-owned ventures in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and domestically. “Stockpiling metal ores doesn’t help if you don’t have midstream processing,” Stephen Empedocles, chief executive of US lobbying firm Clark Street Associates, told the newspaper.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images
Illinois generates more of its power from nuclear energy than any other state. Yet for years the state has banned construction of new reactors. Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, partially lifted the prohibition in 2023, allowing for development of as-yet-nonexistent small modular reactors. With excitement about deploying large reactors with time-tested designs now building, Pritzker last month signed legislation fully repealing the ban. In his state of the state address on Wednesday, the governor listed the expansion of atomic energy among his administration’s top priorities. “Illinois is already No. 1 in clean nuclear energy production,” he said. “That is a leadership mantle that we must hold onto.” Shortly afterward, he issued an executive order directing state agencies to help speed up siting and construction of new reactors. Asked what he thought of the governor’s move, Emmet Penney, a native Chicagoan and nuclear expert at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, told me the state’s nuclear lead is “an advantage that Pritzker wisely wants to maintain.” He pointed out that the policy change seems to be copying New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s playbook. “The governor’s nuclear leadership in the Land of Lincoln — first repealing the moratorium and now this Hochul-inspired executive order — signal that the nuclear renaissance is a new bipartisan commitment.”
The U.S. is even taking an interest in building nuclear reactors in the nation that, until 1946, was the nascent American empire’s largest overseas territory. The Philippines built an American-made nuclear reactor in the 1980s, but abandoned the single-reactor project on the Bataan peninsula after the Chernobyl accident and the fall of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship that considered the plant a key state project. For years now, there’s been a growing push in Manila to meet the country’s soaring electricity needs by restarting work on the plant or building new reactors. But Washington has largely ignored those efforts, even as the Russians, Canadians, and Koreans eyed taking on the project. Now the Trump administration is lending its hand for deploying small modular reactors. The U.S. Trade and Development Agency just announced funding to help the utility MGEN conduct a technical review of U.S. SMR designs, NucNet reported Wednesday.
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Despite the American government’s crusade against the sector, Europe is going all in on offshore wind. For a glimpse of what an industry not thrust into legal turmoil by the federal government looks like, consider that just on Wednesday the homepage of the trade publication OffshoreWIND.biz featured stories about major advancements on at least three projects totaling nearly 5 gigawatts:
That’s not to say everything is — forgive me — breezy for the industry. Germany currently gives renewables priority when connecting to the grid, but a new draft law would give grid operators more discretion when it comes to offshore wind, according to a leaked document seen by Windpower Monthly.
American clean energy manufacturing is in retreat as the Trump administration’s attacks on consumer incentives have forced companies to reorient their strategies. But there is at least one company setting up its factories in the U.S. The sodium-ion battery startup Syntropic Power announced plans to build 2 gigawatts of storage projects in 2026. While the North Carolina-based company “does not reveal where it manufactures its battery systems,” Solar Power World reported, it “does say” it’s establishing manufacturing capacity in the U.S. “We’re making this move now because the U.S. market needs storage that can be deployed with confidence, supported by certification, insurance acceptance, and a secure domestic supply chain,” said Phillip Martin, Syntropic’s chief executive.
For years now, U.S. manufacturers have touted sodium-ion batteries as the next big thing, given that the minerals needed to store energy are more abundant and don’t afford China the same supply-chain advantage that lithium-ion packs do. But as my colleague Katie Brigham covered last April, it’s been difficult building a business around dethroning lithium. New entrants are trying proprietary chemistries to avoid the mistakes other companies made, as Katie wrote in October when the startup Alsym launched a new stationary battery product.
Last spring, Heron Power, the next-generation transformer manufacturer led by a former Tesla executive, raised $38 million in a Series A round. Weeks later, Spain’s entire grid collapsed from voltage fluctuations spurred by a shortage of thermal power and not enough inverters to handle the country’s vast output of solar power — the exact kind of problem Heron Power’s equipment is meant to solve. That real-life evidence, coupled with the general boom in electrical equipment, has clearly helped the sales pitch. On Wednesday, the company closed a $140 million Series B round co-led by the venture giants Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. “We need new, more capable solutions to keep pace with accelerating energy demand and the rapid growth of gigascale compute,” Drew Baglino, Heron’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Too much of today’s electrical infrastructure is passive, clunky equipment designed decades ago. At Heron we are manifesting an alternative future, where modern power electronics enable projects to come online faster, the grid to operate more reliably, and scale affordably.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright.Jesus Vargas/Getty Images
Wright didn’t, however, just come to Paris to chastise the Europeans. Prompted by a remark from Jean-Luc Palayer, the top U.S. executive of French uranium giant Orano, Wright called the company “fantastic” and praised plans to build new enrichment facilities and bring waste reprocessing to America. While the French, Russians, and Japanese have long recycled spent nuclear waste into fresh fuel, the U.S. briefly but “foolishly” banned commercial reprocessing in the 1970s, Wright said, and never got an industry going again. As a result, all the spent fuel from the past seven decades of nuclear energy production is sitting on site in swimming pools or dry cask storage. “We want to have a nuclear renaissance. We have got to get serious about this stuff. So we will start reprocessing, likely in partnership with Orano,” Wright said. Designating Yucca Mountain as the first U.S. permanent repository for nuclear waste set the project in Nevada up for failure in the early 2000s, Wright added. “In the United States, we’ve tried to find a permanent repository for waste and we’ve had, I think, the wrong approach,” he noted. The Trump administration, he said, was “doing it differently” by inviting states to submit proposals for federally backed campuses to host nuclear enrichment and waste reprocessing facilities. Still, reprocessing leaves behind a small amount of waste that needs to be buried, so, Wright said, “we’re going to develop multiple long-term repositories.”
The Trump administration could tweak tariffs on metals and other materials, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Tuesday. During an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Greer said he’d heard from companies who claimed they needed to hire more workers to navigate the tariffs. “You may want to sometimes adjust the way some of the tariffs are for compliance purposes,” he said. “We’re not trying to have people deal with so much beancounting that they’re not running their company correctly.” Still, he said, the U.S. is “shipping more steel than ever,” and has, as I reported in a newsletter last month, the first new aluminum smelter in the works in half a century. “So clearly those [tariffs] are going in the right direction and they’re going to stay in place.”
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California Governor Gavin Newsom, widely seen as a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nod in two years, is already staking out an alternative energy approach to Trump. During a stop in London on his tour of Europe, Newsom this week signed onto a new pact with British Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, pledging to work together with the United Kingdom on deploying more clean energy technologies such as offshore wind in the nation’s most populous state. One of the biggest winners of the deal, according to Politico, is Octopus Energy, the biggest British energy supplier, which is looking to enter the California market. But the agreement also sets the stage for more joint atmospheric research between California and the U.K. “California is the best place in America to invest in a clean economy because we set clear goals and we deliver,” Newsom said. “Today, we deepened our partnership with the United Kingdom on climate action and welcomed nearly a billion dollars in clean tech investment from Octopus Energy.”
France, meanwhile, is realigning its energy plan for the next nine years in a way the Trump administration will like. The draft version of the plan released last year called for 90 gigawatts of installed solar capacity by 2035. But the latest plan published last week reduced the target to a range of 55 to 80 gigawatts. Onshore wind falls to 35 to 40 gigawatts from 40 to 45 gigawatts. Offshore wind drops to 15 gigawatts from 18 gigawatts. Instead, Renewables Now reported, the country is betting on a nuclear revival.
When Democrats unseated two Republicans on Georgia’s five-member Public Service Commission, the upsets signaled a change to the state’s utility regulator so big one expert described it to Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo at the time as “seismic.” Now one of the three remaining Republicans on the body is stepping aside in this year’s election. In a lengthy post on X, Tricia Pridemore said she would end her eight-year tenure on the commission by opting out of reelection. “I have consistently championed common-sense, America First policies that prioritize energy independence, grid reliability, and practical solutions over partisan rhetoric,” wrote Pridemore, who both championed the nuclear expansion at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle and pushed for more natural gas generation. “These efforts have laid the foundation for job creation, national security, and opportunity across our state. By emphasizing results over rhetoric, we have positioned Georgia as a leader in affordability, reliability, and forward-thinking energy planning.”
BHP, the world’s most valuable mining company, reported a nearly 30% spike in net profits for the first half of this year thanks to soaring demand for copper. The Australian giant’s chief executive, Mike Henry, said the earnings marked a “milestone” as copper contributed the largest share of its profit for the first time, accounting for 51% of income before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. The company also signed a $4.3 billion deal with Canada’s Wheaton Precious Metals to supply silver from its Antamina mine in Peru in a deal the Financial Times called “the largest of its kind for so-called precious metals streaming, where miners make deals to sell gold or silver that is a byproduct of their main business.”
The mining companies the Trump administration is investing in, on the other hand, may have less rosy news for the market. Back in October, I told you that the U.S. was taking a stake in Trilogy Metals after approving its request to build a mining road in a remote corner of Alaska that’s largely untouched by industry. On Tuesday, the company reported a net loss of $42 million. The loss largely stemmed from what Mining.com called “the treatment of the proposed U.S. government’s investment as a derivative financial instrument” under standard American accounting rules. The accounting impact, however, had no effect on the cash the company had on hand and “is expected to resolve once applicable conditions are met.”
“It’s an environmental catastrophe.” That’s how Brett Davis, the head of a nonprofit that advocates for less pollution at Mardi Gras, referred to the waste the carnival generates each year in New Orleans. Data the city’s sanitation department gave The New York Times showed that the weekslong party produced an average of 1,123 tons of waste per year for the last decade. Reusing the plastic beads that became popular in the 1970s when manufacturing moved overseas and made cheap goods widely accessible just amounts to “recirculating toxic plastic junk no one wants,” Davis told the newspaper. Instead, he’s sold more than $1 million in more sustainable alternative items to throw during the parade, including jambalaya mix, native flower start kits, and plant-based glitter.
