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The biggest natural gas-producing region in the United States isn’t in Texas. It isn’t in the oil-rich Dakotas either. It’s abutting the densely populated Northeast, in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. Yet neighboring New England is the country’s largest destination for liquified natural gas imports arriving by tanker. Why bring in costly gas, often produced overseas, to the deepwater port in Massachusetts Bay, when American-made molecules are drilled just a few hundred miles away? Because, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has previously reported, there isn’t enough pipeline infrastructure to affordably pump gas from Pennsylvania into New York or New England, thanks in large part to policies from Democratic governors to halt pipeline infrastructure in the name of fighting climate change, even as the Northeast’s dependence on gas-fired electricity grew. That may soon change. Williams Companies broke ground on a new gas pipeline expansion in New York last month. Now the Calgary-based pipeline giant Enbridge is planning to extend the Algonquin Gas Transmission line, the company told the Trump administration’s National Energy Dominance Council, according to unnamed official cited by E&E News. It’s unclear when more details are due out, but Democratic governors that previously opposed pipelines are already signaling an openness to the infrastructure.
Oil exports from Alaska, meanwhile, are increasing as Asian buyers seek options for crude that don’t rely on passing the still mostly closed Strait of Hormuz. On Monday evening, Northern Journal reported that two tankers had departed the Alaskan port of Valdez for Asia in recent weeks. That’s the same number of crude shipments to Asia in all of 2025.
Another day, another large-scale Hualong One reactor begins construction in China. Crews poured the first major concrete for the fourth reactor at the Taipingling nuclear plant in Huizhou, in China’s southern Guangdong province. It’s the fourth of six Hualong Ones, Beijing’s flagship gigawatt-scale pressurized water reactor, planned at the site. Russia, meanwhile, remains so determined to move forward on international exports of its own gigawatt-sized pressurized water reactors that the Kremlin’s state-owned nuclear company, Rosatom, has said it’s still constructing the second two units at Iran’s first and only atomic power station, despite the ongoing conflict with the U.S. and Israel.
While at least two companies have broken ground on new commercial reactors in the U.S. in recent weeks, the U.S. industry’s most recent headlines offer a different snapshot of where the American atom is at. TerraPower, the Bill Gates-founded next-generation reactor developer that just began construction on its first power plant in Wyoming, has joined other nuclear startups in the race to generate early revenue by manufacturing and selling rare medical isotopes. Back in March, I broke news in this newsletter that the reactor startup Oklo had earned its first Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for a medical isotope facility. Now TerraPower is constructing its first medical isotope plant at a laboratory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the other end of the U.S. industry, Fermi America, the startup founded by former Texas Governor Rick Perry to build a record-breaking data center complex powered by a series of giant Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, is scrambling to save itself from total collapse following the firing of its chief executive officer. In a bid to avert disaster, the company’s second-largest shareholder, the investment firm Caddis Capital, told NucNet it supports Fermi’s attempt to turn things around.
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The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management will hold a lease auction for geothermal developers seeking federal land in New Mexico next month. The auction will cover 68 parcels spanning more than 197,000 acres across five counties of a state rich in hot rocks and eager to harvest more energy from underground. So far, the AI-enhanced geothermal startup Zanskar owns a site in New Mexico, and the next-generation company XGS Energy is planning its own 150-megawatt project. The lease sale will take place on June 16 for an hour starting at 10 a.m. ET, per Think GeoEnergy. The auction comes just three months after a new bipartisan bill to boost geothermal was introduced in Congress, as Matthew reported at the time.
Even in countries where the geothermal industry is well developed and generates much of the grid’s electricity, there are limits to how much hot rocks can meet surging demand from data centres. Microsoft had planned to build a $1 billion data center in Kenya to tap into the East African nation’s vast geothermal power network. But this week, Kenyan President William Ruto suspended the deal, which also included the United Arab Emirates-based AI firm G42, over concern that the gigawatt of electricity the data center would demand would devour more than a third of the country’s entire power supply.
The Lower Granite Lock and Dam on Washington’s Snake River.Greg Vaughn /VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Less than a year since the bipartisan Build More Hydro bill stalled in the House after passing the Senate in a unanimous vote, roughly 100 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity have been put on hold, and another 36 megawatts have been forced into limbo. Even more of the U.S. fleet is rapidly approaching a relicensing cliff in the coming years, with an uncertain future as the nation’s oldest and most reliable renewable plants suffer under a byzantine regulatory process that makes dam owners actually envy the notoriously heavily-regulated nuclear sector. Things just got slightly easier for a handful of U.S. hydroelectric plants. On Monday, Trump signed legislation directing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to extend construction deadlines for roughly three dozen stations delayed due to the pandemic and supply chain shortages.
“Today’s law is a breakthrough that delivers 2,600 megawatts of clean hydropower and $6.5 billion in private investment critical to powering American homes, businesses, and industries,” Malcolm Woolf, the president of the National Hydropower Association, said in a statement.
Offshore wind may be moving forward in Virginia, but the Trump administration’s assault on the sector has spurred a major waterfront development in Norfolk to pivot away from the seaward turbines and instead double down on shipbuilding. The shift, reported in The Virginian-Pilot, comes after the Trump administration yanked Biden-era funding meant to support the industry. But Richmond isn’t abandoning offshore wind. As I told you the other week, Governor Abigail Spanberger just signed a bill meant to support training and expansion of the state’s offshore wind workforce.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the location of Terrapower’s isotope plant.
Still, progress on ending the war the United States and Israel are waging on Iran remains limited. In a Sunday post on his Truth Social network, President Donald Trump said he had just read a “totally unacceptable” counter proposal to end the war “from Iran’s so-called ‘representatives.’” In the meantime, it’s not just hydrocarbon buyers feeling the pinch of higher prices. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported last month, the closure of the strait is squeezing both ingredients for battery storage and solar panels.
Data centers may represent big new buyers for electrical utilities. But Eversource Energy, the Massachusetts-based electrical power company serving nearly 5 million customers across New England, is betting against data centers. On a call with investors last week, Eversource CEO Joe Nolan said he’s “not interested” in developing new server farms across the company’s territory, as it’s “only going to drive up the price of energy,” according to Utility Dive. “It’s of no value to our residential customer — actually, any customer,” Nolan said. A limited buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure had kept prices steadier in New England’s grid than in PJM Interconnection, the mid-Atlantic system. “If you look at the volatility in ISO New England, there’s not a very volatile market compared to PJM,” he said. “So, I feel good about it.”
That position may align well with the push from some Democrats, particularly on the left, to halt data center construction amid a populist backlash to the projects. But this isn’t a blue state issue alone. The same day Nolan made the remarks, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a hard-line Republican, signed a bill mandating that utilities require large data centers to pay their own service costs and prevent those costs from being shifted to ratepayers. “You should not pay one more red cent for electricity because of a hyperscale data center as an individual,” DeSantis said, according to E&E News. “That’s just not right, for the most wealthy companies in the history of the world to come in and have individual Floridians or Americans subsidize these hyperscale data centers.”
One of the biggest early problems afflicting America’s next-generation nuclear industry is the fact that a key fuel many new reactor technologies need has, for years, only been manufactured commercially by Russian and Chinese state-owned nuclear companies. For companies pitching a return to fission as a way for the West to avoid Moscow’s gas and Beijing’s solar panels, batteries, and critical minerals, that posed a problem. But Washington has been racing to shore up a domestic supply of what’s known as high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. Now it’s tapping in one of its closest allies and partners in the atomic energy industry. On Friday, World Nuclear News reported that Japan had shipped 1.7 metric tons of HALEU to the U.S. as part of “the largest single international shipment of uranium in the history of the National Nuclear Security Administration.” The delivery joined together the U.S. Department of Energy’s NNSA, Japan’s top two nuclear regulatory agencies, and the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Transport Solutions and Civil Nuclear Constabulary. “This milestone accelerates our progress towards a secure and independent energy future, while reaffirming our commitment to nuclear nonproliferation,” Matthew Napoli, the NNSA’s deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said in a statement. “Through this partnership with Japan, we are fuelling the next generation of nuclear power, and solidifying America's energy dominance.”
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ITER is just about ready to eat. The world’s biggest nuclear fusion experiment, the globally-funded megaproject in France known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, has received the final shipment of components needed to assemble the giant magnet at the heart of the facility. As a result, the project is now back on schedule, NucNet reported last week.
The joint effort between the U.S., China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea was once considered the vanguard of the quest for the so-called holy grail of clean energy. But delays, bureaucracy, and funding pauses created repeated setbacks. Meanwhile, fusion has made major strides at small startups in the U.S., while China — as I have reported here — is outspending the entire world combined on research.
JinkoSolar is selling a 75.1% stake in its U.S. manufacturing subsidiary to the private equity firm FH Capital for an undisclosed sum. The deal, announced Friday, also includes the Chinese giant’s battery business. “FH Capital brings deep sector expertise, financing experience, and a deep understanding of the U.S. market,” Nigel Cockroft, U.S. general manager of JinkoSolar, said in a statement. “We believe this transaction provides the right ownership, management and strategic direction for this new venture to grow capacity and serve the growing demand for high performance U.S.-sourced renewable energy products.”
U.S. manufacturers have long struggled to compete against Chinese solar panel producers, which — as I told you two weeks ago — have seen exports more than double since the start of the Iran War. And as I also recently noted, new kinds of solar panels are getting a second look in the U.S. right now. But U.S. panel manufacturers don’t just struggle to compete on price. A new industry report highlighted last week in PV Magazine found that U.S. solar factories are struggling to meet high soldering standards.
Not chasing road runners. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Coyotes are the best animal, just in case you didn’t know or you weren’t sure. They are cunning, beautiful, and so clearly emblematic of the natural wonder of this continent that various Native Americans cultures revered the canine European settlers later renamed Canis letrans — “barking dog” in Latin — as a deity. They are wily, the trickster whose wit and determination to endure against bigger predators such as wolves and bears and survive a record-shattering onslaught by the U.S. government. If you ever want to fall in love with the biology and mythology of these creatures, read Coyote America by the environmental historian Dan Flores, or listen to one of his lectures on YouTube. What you’ll learn is that the coyote was subjected to the most extensive extermination campaign in American history, facing all kinds of creatively cruel new weapons especially after World War II as ranchers demanded the U.S. government eradicate one of the peskier pests for livestock, only to spread to more corners of North America than ever before. One of the worst innovations in coyote killing: Cyanide bombs. In 2023, the Biden administration banned the devices, which shoot liquid cyanide into the animal’s mouth causing a vicious but swift death. Now the Trump administration is bringing back cyanide bombs, despite concerns that the traps kill wolves, foxes, and unleashed dogs. It may kill off more individual canines. But it certainly will not eliminate coyotes.
