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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
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
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.
On copper prices, nuclear’s jellyfish woes, and Leo DiCaprio’s Chilean NIMBYism
Current conditions: The death toll from Colombia’s earthquake has risen beyond 250 • A severe thunderstorm flipped a car in Columbus, Ohio, as a large system swept across the Midwest • A partial solar eclipse is set to occur the Northeast.
David Crowley. Scott Olson/Getty Images
David Crowley, a moderate Democrat and local official in Milwaukee, narrowly defeated Francesca Hong, a leftist state lawmaker and former ramen chef, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin last night. The race marked one of the most significant tests of Democratic voters’ willingness to elect a member of the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, now the most popular socialist group in U.S. history. Her campaign promised to make childcare and school lunches free, repeal anti-union laws, and give renters more protections against eviction. She also pitched what she called her “control-alt-delete” plan to eliminate tax credits for data centers and put a statewide moratorium on permits for new artificial intelligence facilities.
Ahead of Tuesday’s primary, the AI developers Vantage, Oracle, and OpenAI announced a $60,000 community investment in Port Washington, which my colleague Jael Holzman described as “the most controversial data center development area in the state.”
Just last week, the Trump administration agreed to pay the energy giant RWE more than $1.2 billion to abandon an offshore wind project, the latest in a series of deals in which taxpayers hand over billions to not receive new sources of clean electricity they badly need. On Tuesday, Senators Alex Padilla, the California Democrat, and Angus King, the independent from Maine, introduced a bill that would give companies that reject Trump’s payouts an expedited route to more development. “The Trump Administration is doing everything it can to kill California’s offshore wind future, handing energy companies billions of taxpayer dollars to walk away from projects that would have powered millions of homes,” Padilla said in a press release. “This bill makes sure their destructive approach doesn’t waste what’s already been invested so we can get these leases back to work, create the jobs Trump killed, and keep energy bills low for working families instead of letting his war on renewables cost Californians even more.”
The bill has one potential flaw, other than the fact that Republicans are unlikely to pass it and President Donald Trump is even less likely to sign it. That, as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote this week, is that the roughly $4 billion in payouts so far went to projects that were “already dead or dying.” The money spent, in other words, is “for nothing.”
Please read the following two sentences in the tone of the famous scene of Tony Soprano defending Christopher Columbus: In this newsletter, Ea-nāṣir, the Mesopotamian copper merchant from Bronze Age-era Ur whose stone-carved complaints about a subpar metal shipment remain readable millennia later, is a hero. End of story! Why, you might ask? Because we are once again living through an age where copper, the basic building block of all things electric, is in high demand. Copper soared back to within half a cent of its record high Tuesday of nearly $14,000 per metric ton after an outage at a major smelter in Indonesia rattled global prices, Mining.com reported.
The fight over North America’s only major cobalt refinery, meanwhile, is heating up. The mining giant Glencore made a bid for control of Sherritt International, which has taken a beating from U.S. sanctions due to its 50% stake in Moa, a joint venture with the Cuban government. The joint venture’s assets include the Canadian refinery and Moa nickel-cobalt mine in Cuba. The Glencore-backed consortium is up against Gillon Capital, the family office of Ray Washburne, a Republican fundraiser and former Trump official, according to the Financial Times.
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Weeks after Europe’s latest heat wave forced inland nuclear stations to pare down output for lack of cooling water in the continent’s rivers, a “massive influx” of jellyfish has forced France’s EDF to shut down three units at its Gravelines nuclear station and cut power from a fourth. That’s taken at least 3.2 gigawatts of capacity offline, Bloomberg reported, right as temperatures are expected to surpass 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days. The unusually hot temperatures off France’s shores have encouraged jellyfish populations to “bloom,” clogging the pumping stations through which coastal nuclear plants like Gravelines pull in cooling water.
In Egypt, meanwhile, construction crews working on the country’s first nuclear station hit a critical milestone. The containment vessel for the Russian-designed El Dabaa plant’s first unit is nearly completed, according to World Nuclear News.
Digging deep enough into the bedrock around New York City to tap into lava-hot rocks for electricity production is probably still years away, despite the progress that next-generation geothermal companies such as Fervo Energy have recently made. But thermal networks that maintain a steady environment year-round by circulating air at a constant temperature are increasingly popular ways for New Yorkers in private homes outside the city to stay warm in winter and cool in summer. Now the city itself is seeing whether a large-scale version could work for the subway system and municipal buildings. A study is set to begin soon into whether a thermal energy network could be built along subway routes to capture, store, and redirect excess heat that accumulates in the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and Chambers Street station complex to municipal buildings above ground. “Radiant cooling technology will absorb heat from the subway platforms and transfer it to geothermal boreholes drilled beneath Chambers Street,” reporter Carlo Cariaga wrote for Think Geo Energy. “This excess heat will then be stored underground until it can be used for supply to nearby municipal buildings during winter.” The contract for the feasibility study is due to be awarded in the fall, with work scheduled to start in early 2027.
“It seems like it’s a good place to test geothermal solutions because it sounds like there is a part of the tracks that isn’t being used, so they don’t have to stop service,” Jack Klein, the citizen researcher who conducted his own gonzo Subway heat study last year, told my colleague Jeva Lange this week.
Leonardo DiCaprio has long been a major donor to environmental causes. But rarely has the actor taken as clear a stance against green development if it comes at any ecological cost as this. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Oscar winner had told his nearly 60 million Instagram followers that fewer than 1,000 Pehuenche spiny-chest frogs remain in the wild, and that construction of the proposed Chile-Argentina transmission line threatens the amphibians’ habitat. “Conservationists are not asking for the transmission project to be stopped,” the celebrity wrote in the post over the weekend. “They are asking for it to be built where it does not put a Critically Endangered species at even greater risk.”
