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The Department of Justice, meanwhile, is preparing to weigh in on whether Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is operating an illegal gas electrical plant to power its data center in Southaven, Mississippi. Last month, the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center accused xAI of operating 27 gas turbines without pollution controls or Clean Air permits at the server farm, known as Colossus 2. Last week, the groups asked the federal court for a preliminary injunction to stop pollution from what E&E News described as “tractor-trailer-sized generators.” In response, the Justice Department cited President Donald Trump’s support for AI and said it was “evaluating possible intervention or amicus participation in this lawsuit.” It’s not the only agency riding in to aid Musk and his ilk. As I told you last week, the Environmental Protection Agency just proposed a new rule that would allow data centers and power plants to begin construction without air permits.
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed two separate rules to delay and rescind drinking water limits on four “forever chemicals,” the class of cancer-causing compounds that spread in water and accumulate in the human body. The rules, as The Guardian noted, “must go through an approval process that can take several years, and almost certainly will be challenged in court.” Over the past decade, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, were discovered to be pervasive in the drinking water of some 176 million Americans. The chemicals — which are linked to kidney cancer, immune system suppression, and developmental delays in infants — are estimated to be in nearly 99% of Americans’ blood. In 2024, the Biden administration established limits on six substances, as Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported at the time. But the Trump administration will now ax protections for four of the substances and provide companies with an extra two years to comply with rules on the other two. The move, The New York Times reported, has already “sparked fury within the Make America Healthy Again movement, a diverse group of anti-vaccine activists, wellness influencers and others who make up a key part” of Trump’s base.
The Kudankulam nuclear power plant, India’s largest atomic station. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images
India was once a forbidden prize for nuclear exporters. The world’s most populous nation, its metropoles choked by coal smog, operates two dozen commercial nuclear reactors — and wants more. But until earlier this year, the country was hamstrung by the haunting memory of Union Carbide’s 1984 accident at its Bhopal plant, where a leak killed thousands of Indians and the American chemical giant avoided any serious liability. To prevent a similar dynamic in the nuclear sector, New Delhi passed a law in 2010 that put developers on the hook for any accidents. The statute effectively banned American, European, or East Asian companies from attempting to build any reactors, lest they risk bankruptcy; only Russia’s state-owned nuclear company was willing to sell its wares on the subcontinent. In December, as I told you at the time, the Indian parliament passed legislation to reform the liability law and welcome more foreign developers into its market. Already, as I reported in a scoop for Heatmap last month, a Chicago-based fuel startup is making moves to sell its product in India.
Fast forward to this week: On Monday, a high-level delegation of U.S. industry officials flew to New Delhi to meet with Indian science minister Jitendra Singh and discuss “private investment opportunities” to export small modular reactors and other American nuclear technology, NucNet reported.
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Ford Energy, the wholly owned battery storage business forged out of Ford Motor’s electric vehicle efforts, has landed its first big deal. On Monday, the company announced a five-year framework agreement with French utility giant EDF’s North American renewables division to design battery storage systems for the multinational. As part of the deal, EDF will buy up to 4 gigawatt-hours of battery blocks per year, totaling up to 20 gigawatt-hours by the end of the contract. The first deliveries are expected in 2028. Lisa Drake, Ford Energy’s president, said the deal “validates the market’s need for” a battery storage supplier “that combines industrial-scale manufacturing discipline with full lifecycle accountability.” In a statement, EDF said Ford’s “commitment to domestic manufacturing and its rigorous approach to traceability and lifecycle support align with the standards we hold across our portfolio.”
Last August, I told you that Anglo American’s deal to sell the U.S. giant Peabody Energy its Australian coal business for $3.8 billion collapsed. Well, nine months later, the London-based mining behemoth has found a new buyer for the same price. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Anglo American would sell the Australian coal mining operations to Dhilmar, a little-known and privately held company that was formed out of some Canadian mining assets and incorporated in London in 2024. The value of the deal? $3.88 billion. The agreement, which faces years of arbitration, closes what the newspaper called “a difficult chapter for Anglo” after last year’s sale to Peabody fell apart following an explosion at one of the mines included in the deal.
India isn’t the only country getting its act together on new nuclear plants. On Monday, Sweden’s next-generation reactor champion, the startup Blykalla, submitted the first-ever application to regulators in Stockholm to build the nation’s first commercial advanced nuclear reactor park two hours north of the capital. The 330-megawatt facility would include six lead-cooled units Blykalla called “advanced modular reactors,” or AMRs. “This application is a historic first for Sweden,” Blykalla CEO Jacob Stedman said in a statement. “We’re not just planning an advanced reactor park — we’re building Sweden’s energy future and putting the country at the forefront of the global nuclear power renaissance.”
The weekend brought a grave new energy concern over the conflict’s kinetic warfare. On Sunday, the United Arab Emirates condemned a drone strike it referred to as a “treacherous terrorist attack” that caused a fire near Abu Dhabi’s Barakah nuclear station. The UAE’s top English-language newspaper, The National, noted that the government’s official statement did not blame Iran explicitly. The attack came just a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency raised the alarm over drone strikes near nuclear plants after a swarm of more than 160 drones hovered near key stations in Ukraine last week.
We are apparently now entering the megamerger phase of the new electricity supercycle. On Friday, the Financial Times broke news that NextEra Energy is in talks with rival Dominion Energy for a tie-up that would create a more than $400 billion utility behemoth in one of the biggest deals of all time. The merger talks, which The Wall Street Journal confirmed, could be announced as early as this week. The combined company would reach from Dominion’s homebase of Virginia, where the northern half of the state is serving as what the FT called “the heartland of U.S. digital infrastructure serving the AI boom,” down to NextEra’s home-state of Florida, where the subsidiary Florida Power & Light serves roughly 6 million customers. While Dominion dominates data centers in Northern Virginia, NextEra last year partnered with Google to build more power plants and even reopen the Duane Arnold nuclear station in Iowa.
Pre-construction Thacker Pass.Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Trump digs lithium. In fact, he’s such a fan of Lithium Americas’ plan to build North America’s largest lithium mine on federal land in Nevada that he renegotiated a Biden-era deal to finance construction of the Thacker Pass project to secure a 5% equity stake in the publicly-traded developer. Yet the White House’s macroeconomic policies are pinching the nation’s lithium champion. During its first-quarter earnings call with investors last week, Lithium Americas cautioned that the Trump administration’s steel tariffs, coupled with inflation from disrupted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, could add between $80 million and $120 million to construction costs at Thacker Pass. Most of the impact, Mining.com noted, is expected this year. Once mining begins, the project could spur new discussion of a strategic lithium reserve, the case for which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin articulated here.
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The Department of Energy has selected Travis Kavulla, an energy industry veteran, as the 17th chief executive and administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration, NewsData reported. Founded under then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, the federal agency is a holdover from the New Deal era before utilities had built out electrical networks in rural parts of the U.S. Unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority — which functions as a standalone utility that owns and sells power, though it’s wholly owned by the federal government and its board of directors is appointed by the White House — the BPA, as it’s known, is a power marketing agency that sells electricity from hydroelectric dams owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. Kavulla currently serves as the head of policy for Base Power, the startup building a network of distributed batteries to back up the grid. He previously worked as the regulatory chief at the utility NRG Energy, and as a state utility commissioner in his home state of Montana. NewsData, a trade publication focused on Western energy markets, cautioned that the Energy Department may hold off on announcing the appointment for “the next few days or weeks” as sources warned that “it might be delayed while the department conducts a background check, or to allow the new undersecretary of energy, Kyle Haustveit, to be confirmed.”
Reached Sunday night via LinkedIn message, Kavulla politely declined to comment on whether he was appointed to lead the BPA.
Offshore wind may be spinning in reverse in the U.S. as the Trump administration attempts to, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman put it, “murder” an industry through death by a thousand cuts. But elsewhere in the world, offshore wind is booming. Just look at Azerbaijan. Despite its vast reserves of natural gas, the nation on the Caspian Sea is looking into building its first offshore turbines. On Friday, offshoreWIND.biz reported that the Azerbaijan Green Energy Company, owned by the Baku-based industrial giant Nobel Energy, had commissioned a Spanish company to design a floating LiDAR-equipped buoy for the country’s first turbines in the Caspian. The debut project, backed by the Azeri government, would start with 200 megawatts of offshore wind and eventually triple in size.
Before the wealthy software entrepreneur Greg Gianforte ran to be governor of Montana, he donated millions of dollars to a Christian-themed museum that claims humans walked alongside dinosaurs and the Earth is just 6,000 years old. After winning the state’s top job, the Republican set about revoking virtually all policies related to climate change, including banning the projected effects of warming from state agencies’ risk forecasts. With drought withering the state, however, Gianforte has turned to perhaps the most ancient policy approach humanities leaders have called upon to fix devastating weather patterns: Pray. On Sunday, Gianforte declared an official day of prayer for rain. “Prayer is the most powerful tool we have,” he wrote in a post on X. “I ask all who are faithful to come to God with thanks and pray.”
