Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
The news came just days after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan dismissed a lawsuit challenging the procedure by which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Palisades’ restart. Started under the Biden administration, the revival project was one of the first the Trump administration allowed to move forward after taking office, part of a broader effort by the Department of Energy to spur a resurgence of reactor construction in the U.S.
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked a challenge to California’s rules on emissions from industrial boilers, the latest legal victory for local regulations on planet-heating pollution from buildings. In 2024, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the air pollution agency in charge of broad swaths of Southern California, set new restrictions on smog-causing nitrogen oxide from industrial boilers, appliances that either burn a fossil fuel such as gas or oil or use electricity to heat up water. The policy — which would slash the equivalent of half the nitrogen oxide produced by every car in Los Angeles combined — is part of the state’s long-standing effort to curb pollution. It’s not the only win for the fight to curb emissions from buildings. Since 2024, federal courts have repeatedly upheld local and state authority to regulate pollution from buildings in New York, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
On Thursday, meanwhile, the Trump administration proposed a new rule to gut money-saving standards for appliances nationwide. “While the agency portrayed the move as bringing an end to appliance standards writ large, that is not, in fact, what it is doing,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote last week. “The proposal would update the DOE’s so-called ‘Process Rule,’ which governs how the agency develops standards, adding onerous requirements that will make it much more difficult to make any changes at all.” When I spoke to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy about the changes, the advocacy group told me the proposal would set minimum savings thresholds below which the new rule wouldn’t find federal support. It would also add a mandatory 180-day waiting period between before proposing new appliance standards based on novel testing procedures, require the Energy Department to show deference to industry-established standards, and force regulators to carry out extra analyses and rulemaking processes before enacting new rules.
Senator Angus King, the independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, has urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject the proposed utility megamerger between NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy. In a letter last week to the agency, King said the combination of the two giants risked putting too much power in the hands of one company. “The combination would create the largest electric utility in the United States, concentrating an unprecedented mix of merchant generation, rate-based generation, and transmission assets in the hands of a single company with a documented record of using its market position and political resources to suppress competition that threatens its merchant revenues,” King said in the letter, according to Utility Dive. Specifically, he cited NextEra’s lobbying to derail the New England Clean Energy Connect project in 2021, a transmission line to connect the Northeast’s grid to the almost entirely renewable hydroelectric system in Quebec.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency put out new regulatory guidance on the president’s “freedom to fix” agenda, reminding automakers of their “long-standing legal obligation to release the service information, training information, and tools necessary to diagnose and repair vehicles,” even if the driver could use what they learn to tamper with the emissions controls. Meanwhile, on Friday, President Donald Trump announced that he’d pardoned six people “who were persecuted by the Biden administration” and were either in prison or headed there for violating Clean Air Act prohibitions against rigging the vehicles’ emissions control systems. “While I know this sounds ridiculous, it is nevertheless a fact, and part of the Weaponization and Stupidity that our Country had to endure during four long years of Sleepy Joe Biden,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I AM SETTING THEM ALL FREE, RIGHT NOW!”
In non-emitting vehicle news, Rivian is eyeing a better sales year than expected. While the electric automaker previously said it would ship between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles this year, it told investors on Thursday that it now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles, in what TechCrunch called “a small but potentially meaningful bump.” The announcement came the same week BYD crushed Tesla’s deliveries yet again, as I told you in my last newsletter.
Chilean President José Antonio Kast. Santiago Mazzarovich / AFP via Getty Images
Back in March, I told you that Chile’s most right-wing president since the fall of dictator Augusto Pinochet could take the country’s budding green hydrogen business in a different direction. Now President José Antonio Kast is doing just that. Last week, Chile’s state-owned Production Development Corporation, known by its Spanish acronym CORFO, announced plans to refocus the country’s strategy for green hydrogen on domestic use rather than exports, Hydrogen Insight reported.
China, as I have reported for you many times before, is going hard on green hydrogen, especially since the Iran War forced Beijing to ramp up efforts to find alternatives to imported fossil fuels. Here’s yet another data point: China just laid out plans to build the world’s largest green hydrogen plant using solid-oxide electrolyzers, which operate at higher temperatures. The facility will also produce, methanol, which uses hydrogen as a key ingredient. At peak capacity, the facility in rural Gansu province will produce 100,000 metric tons of renewable methanol per year for use in international shipping. Meanwhile, Spain is investing nearly $21 million into grants for hydrogen projects as the country seeks to make use of its booming solar industry. As I wrote last week, the surge in solar panels is creating problems for Spain, since its grid can’t handle all that power during peak daytime hours. Funneling that electricity into electrolyzers to make molecules that can be cleanly burned later may offer a solution.
Last month, I told you about a catchier term for the very small-scale solar panels being legalized to go on windowsills and balconies, opening the door to more apartment dwellers generating a small share of electricity themselves. That term, which I first read in Inside Climate News, is “guerilla solar.” Well, that solar rebel mindset is coming to the “Live Free or Die” state. On Thursday, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, put out a list of 74 bills she signed into law before Fourth of July weekend. Among them was SB-540, legalizing plug-in solar panels. The law will take effect on July 27, according to PluginSolarUS, an advocacy group.
The announcement came the same day the Department of Energy reached a milestone in its reactor pilot program. Launched last year, the program set a goal of three of its 10 participating companies building test reactors and splitting atoms for the first time by July 4. On Wednesday, the startup Deployable Energy, which is seeking to commercialize a 1-megawatt reactor, said it had reached criticality on its Unity test reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, becoming the third developer after fellow microreactor companies Aalo Atomic and Valar Atomics to sustain a chain reaction within its reactor. “Yesterday, we accomplished a significant milestone on a timeline many thought was unachievable,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “Advanced nuclear technologies like Unity will help power the next generation of American industry, strengthen our energy security, and ensure the United States remains the world’s nuclear innovation leader.”
PJM Interconnection’s struggle to muster up enough electricity generation to meet surging demand from data centers and air conditioners is well known at this point. But the difficulty the nation’s largest power grid system has just predicting how much electricity it will need raises real concerns over whether PJM can keep the lights on. Between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. ET today, demand for electricity in PJM Interconnection could top out at 166 gigawatts, according to the energy consultancy ICF. That’s roughly 10 gigawatts higher than PJM’s projected summertime peak of 156 gigawatts for all of this year. “Because PJM’s planning methodology relies on a rolling 30-year historical weather average, it operates under the assumption that the future will resemble the past,” ICF wrote in a memo. “This modeling creates systemic risk, underestimating the frequency and severity of future extreme weather events.” As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, PJM territories such as New Jersey have seen average bills soar from about $91 to $140 over the past five years, while prices are up some 52%, per data from the Heatmap-MIT Electricity Price Hub.
In New York City, meanwhile, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has urged residents in the five boroughs to keep air conditioners set to 78 degrees to conserve electricity and avoid brownouts. “A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved,” he wrote in a post on X. “Let’s ease demand — and get through the heat — together.” New York’s statewide grid operator has warned for months that the zone that includes New York City and its surrounding suburbs is at risk of outages due to a gap between supply and demand that virtually matches the output of the Indian Point nuclear plant that shut down in 2021.
A generator lights a home on a dark street in San Isidro, Puerto Rico.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Of the $14.3 billion the federal government earmarked for the reconstruction of Puerto Rico’s grid, 75% of the funding remains unspent nearly a decade after Hurricane Maria laid waste to the U.S. territory’s electrical system. The Federal Emergency Management Agency alone is sitting on $8.4 billion, and just 400 of the 16,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines that were slated for tree trimming have had overgrown vegetation cleared. That’s all according to the findings of a new report from the Government Accountability Office, an independent federal watchdog within the government. One bright spot for Puerto Ricans has been the success of residential solar panels and batteries in supplying power during frequent outages. But the report notes that the Energy Department canceled up to $350 million in grants for installing solar panels on the homes of disabled and low-income Puerto Ricans. “The GAO report confirms what we’ve been saying for months: This administration’s shortcomings and the lack of coordination among all stakeholders have delayed the disbursement of funds,” Representative Pablo José Hernández Rivera, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, a nonvoting delegate to the U.S. Congress, said in a statement. “Puerto Rico needs less division and excuses and more teamwork with results.”
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Last year, Wyoming, the country’s top coal-producing state, announced that its first new coal mine to open in decades would also produce rare earths. Now West Virginia, where the waning coal industry nevertheless remains a central part of the culture and economy, is getting in on the rare earths game. On Wednesday, an investment company led by the Trump administration’s former critical minerals czar unveiled plans to develop a new hub for refining rare earths out of ore in Rupert, a tiny mountain town in southeastern West Virginia. The project is being developed by the White House and led by Drew Horn, who worked as an adviser to the Energy Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term. Described as a “partnership,” the deal includes the Houston-based rare earths refiner Flash Metals USA, the industrial giant AmForge, and the Greenbrier Smokeless Coal Company, which already operates a metallurgical coal mine in Rupert.
“The initiative is backed entirely by private investment — not state government subsidies, taxpayer funding, or state incentives,” GreenMet, the investment company leading the project, said in a statement. “Instead, private investors recognized West Virginia’s abundant natural resources, skilled workforce, and strategic advantages, committing approximately $150 million to launch this first-of-its-kind processing hub.” While the future refineries aim to extract traces of rare earths left behind in coal mine waste, the project has already secured deals to buy more ore from Greenland, Canada, and Cameroon to beef up its output.
There was once a time when hydrogen fuel cells seemed like a serious rival to lithium battery packs as the energy source to power future passenger vehicles. But over the past decade, battery-powered electric vehicles won the market as prices came down and the infrastructure for buying hydrogen fuel lagged. Still, the limits of batteries — which are already very heavy in passenger cars, and weigh multiple tons when large enough to propel trucks — to affordably power tractor-trailer trucks seemed to leave the heavy-duty vehicle market open to hydrogen. But an article in the in-house magazine of Sinopec, China’s state-owned oil company, now calls into question hydrogen’s future in trucking in the People’s Republic, which has one of the most built-out networks for using the technology anywhere in the world. “In the past, it was generally assumed that electric vehicles would replace gasoline and hydrogen vehicles would replace diesel,” the Mandarin-language article reads, according to a translation I ran through Claude. “But with advances in EV technology and the development of charging and battery-swapping infrastructure, the traditional hydrogen vehicle scenarios of ‘medium-to-heavy loads and long range’ are now also trending toward being taken over by battery-electric heavy trucks.”
Meanwhile, in the inland Henan province, a pair of deep geothermal wells were connected to create a closed-loop system. The wells, dug nearly 11,500 feet deep, reach a temperature of nearly 245 degrees Fahrenheit. Once completed, the wells will be part of seven separate systems designed by developer Wanjiang New Energy to provide district heating. The technology, Think Geo Energy noted, “unavoidably draws comparisons to the closed-loop geothermal technology designed and built by Eavor Technologies,” whose CEO Mark Fitzgerald joined Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast last year.
Build Your Dreams? More like Beat Your Deliveries. Chinese auto giant BYD delivered 557,090 fully electric vehicles in the second quarter of 2026 — trouncing the roughly 400,000 deliveries Tesla is expected to report for the same quarter, according to Electrek. We’ll find out later today when Tesla announces its latest earnings.
