Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
On ‘draconian’ water cuts, Tesla’s China business, and Italian nuclear
On Trump’s inverter ban, American antimony, and thermal batteries
On ‘precariously low’ oil stockpiles, China’s ammonia milestone, and a PFAS destroyer
On nuclear waste, a Nevada solar farm, and lithium-harvesting nanorobots
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol released updates on its looming new emissions accounting rules. Here’s what they mean.
On Yucca Mountain, Europe’s inverter boom, and Romanian offshore wind
Current conditions: The wildfires in Spain and France are burning so hot they’re creating rare pyrocumulonimbus clouds • Hurricane Genevieve has strengthened into the first Category 5 storm of 2026 as the monster cyclone rampages across the open Pacific with no immediate destination to make landfall • A tornado in Wisconsin toppled power lines, cutting off electricity to nearly 350,000 people.
Beachgoers on the shore of Lake Lacanau in southwest FranceMaximilien LAMY / AFP via Getty Images
The back-to-back record heat waves that roasted Western Europe last month killed thousands in France and Germany. The heat also dried out forests, turning woodlands on opposite sides of the Pyrenees into tinderboxes that are now ablaze in some of the worst wildfires the European Union has faced in modern history. With another heat wave now looming, firefighters are racing to contain the flames as hundreds of thousands evacuate in France and Spain. “We need to realize that we’re facing a totally unprecedented fire,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters Monday during a visit to the fire department of Bordeaux. “The situation we’re facing today is the hardest we’ve ever recorded, the hardest since World War II.” In Spain’s Valencia region, the flames are detonating buried ordinances leftover from the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s, Reuters reported.
The other week, I told you when PJM Interconnection once again hit its price cap at its latest capacity auction — and still came up short of the generation needed to meet demand in 2028. On Monday, the board of the nation’s largest grid operator said in a public letter it would hold another emergency auction to find nearly 7 gigawatts of power generation to make up for the shortfall. “The board believes this reliability threat requires decisive action,” the letter stated. The move comes just weeks after PJM shattered its peak demand record after underestimating just how much electricity the grid could need during a recent heat wave in the American Northeast. It’s yet another sign of the mounting stress on the system covering 13 states as everyone from governors to the grid operator itself strive for reforms, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Nuclear waste is a political paradox. Critics of atomic energy say that the radioactive waste produced during fission cancel out the benefits of using the most efficient source of carbon-free power humanity has yet harnessed. In the 1980s, the federal government took control of nuclear waste and set about building the world’s first permanent repository to store spent fuel underground for centuries. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated as the debut location for such a facility. Opponents in the Silver State fought back, imagining that Washington was subjecting Nevada to dangers akin to the atomic bomb tests that once took place in its deserts. In 2010 — in a move that nonpartisan Government Accountability Office later pegged as an entirely political, rather than technical, motive — President Barack Obama halted work on a project the then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted kiboshed. The problem is that federal law dictates Yucca Mountain be completed as the first nuclear waste repository before other sites can be considered. No one in Congress has stepped up to make the change. As a result, the U.S. — operator of the world’s largest nuclear fleet and wannabe exporter to countries who want to get into the atomic energy game — has had no clear long-term plan for dealing with nuclear waste in 16 years.
The Trump administration is trying to change that. The Department of Energy has floated plans for nuclear innovation campuses where cutting-edge recycling companies could test out new technologies to reprocess waste into medical isotopes and fresh fuel. But E&E News reported Monday that the administration is poised to press Congress to update federal law to allow the U.S. to finally move on from Yucca Mountain. A leaked document the newswire obtained outlines the administration’s plans to instead press states to take on waste repositories and recycling facilities, in line with the Energy Department’s campus idea. That may not be easy. Even Texas, whose government has sought to roll out the red carpet for nuclear developers recently unsuccessfully sued federal regulators to the Supreme Court to block construction of a waste storage facility.
Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of President Donald Trump’s right to fire commissioners from previously independent agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees pipelines and the grid. On Monday, E&E News published a feature examining the implications for FERC at a particularly sensitive time in its history, when a once-sleepy agency is increasingly facing scrutiny over the health of the U.S. grid. Experts were mixed on the effects. Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, called Trump “a loose cannon” with “no justification for firing any FERC Commissioner.” Commissioner David LaCerte, a Republican, cheered the Supreme Court for overturning what he said was an unlawful restriction put in place a century ago that limited the White House’s ability to fire any commissioners for anything beyond poor performance. “If a commissioner is going to buckle under that pressure and compromise their integrity because they are afraid of being fired, well, they probably didn’t deserve to be in this job in the first place,” he said during the FERC meeting. But fellow Republican Mark Christie, who previously served as FERC chair and whom Matthew dubbed “the most interesting man” on the commission, said that while he agrees with the court’s decision, open requisitions remain as to what it would mean in practice. “If FERC is now completely under the supervision of the president, is the executive branch going to say how to decide a rate case?” said Christie. “That to me is the single biggest question.”
The Department of Transportation, meanwhile, is gutting funding for public transit, walkways, and bike lanes. In a letter outlining the agency’s spending priorities to the Senate, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed eliminating the Highway Trust Fund’s mass transit account and slashing funding for infrastructure that provides for the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, bike lanes, and grants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. That’s not all: Smart Cities Dive reported that a competitive grant program to fund solutions to traffic safety would scrap options that include public transit improvements and tolling from even being considered.
China produces most of the world’s inverters for solar panels. It’s increasingly a problem. Last year, Reuters reported that the U.S. had found “killswitch” devices in some inverters, suggesting that Beijing could — in theory — remotely disable solar panels when demand is high on the grid, or try to cause frequency problems like those that triggered the great Iberian blackout of 2025. At the start of this month, I told you the Federal Communications Commission was weighing a ban on Chinese inverters. If you share the Trump administration’s concerns, there’s good news: China’s command over the global inverter market peaked in 2024, according to new data from the research division at PV Tech. Europe, meanwhile, has emerged as a major manufacturer, hitting over 100 gigawatts of factory capacity this year. The U.S. is now at 40 gigawatts, while India is at 20 gigawatts. You’d be reasonable to wonder if these are just Chinese companies setting up shop in Europe. But you’d be wrong. “What distinguishes Europe’s inverter manufacturing expansion from other sectors, particularly solar modules, is the composition of its manufacturing base,” analyst Mollie McCorkindale wrote in the magazine. “As of 2026, over 90% of Europe’s 100-gigawatt manufacturing capacity comes from European-headquartered companies.”
Everyone knows the U.S. is veering away from offshore wind, and diligent readers of this newsletter (for whom I feel such affection) may recall that Japan is on a parallel trajectory. Elsewhere, however, offshore wind is booming. Romania, whose coastline makes up a single-digit percentage of its mostly landlocked borders, is the latest country to make big plans for seaward turbines. Bucharest is now targeting nearly 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, Renewables Now reported.
Current conditions: Hurricane Genevieve formed into the first major storm of the season, strengthening to Category 4 off Mexico’s Pacific Coast on Sunday but steering clear of any land for now • Hurricane Fausto, meanwhile, is weakening as it heads toward Hawaii • China evacuated hundreds of thousands of people as Typhoon Noul made landfall.
French firefighters near Bordeaux on Sunday. ALAIN JOCARD / AFP via Getty Images
Wildfires in France and Spain forced roughly 300,000 people to evacuate their homes in what the French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called an “unprecedented” blaze. In Spain, the central western province of Avila suffered what the broadcaster France24 described as its “worst blaze in recent history” as Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez directly linked the disaster to climate change. By Sunday evening, in France, flames had come within nine miles of the southwestern city of Bordeaux in the heart of the nation's storied winelands as President Emmanuel Macron vowed to “rebuild.” Others saw the disaster as a sign of overdue lifestyle and infrastructure changes in the face of a warming planet. In Le Monde, the newspaper of record, the philosopher Cynthia Fleury and the Socialist mayor of the town of Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, Stéphane Delpeyrat-Vincen, argued: “What is burning is not just forests, but a way of inhabiting the land that is no longer possible.” The fires come weeks after a series of historic heat waves in Europe, including the hottest June on record, which made tinderboxes of parched woodlands.
President Donald Trump last week announced a landmark deal with Saudi Arabia to help build the kingdom’s first nuclear power station, besting the Russians and the Chinese in a race to tap into one of the world’s most coveted new export markets for atomic power technology. While the White House has yet to release all the details on the geopolitically meteoric agreement with Riyadh, sources with knowledge of the deal have confirmed to me what’s been reported elsewhere — that the deal will almost certainly include new large-scale Westinghouse AP1000s. Over the weekend, The New York Times identified another element to the partnership: Trump’s family and personal friends may benefit. The newspaper pointed to ties between a firm owned by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s sons and Westinghouse; links between Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s investments into quantum computing and former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Fermi America project to build AP1000s in Texas; and suggested that TAE Technologies, the fusion company merging with the corporate parent of Trump’s Truth Social platform, could see potential benefits from the Saudi deal. “There is no evidence at this point that Mr. Trump’s friends or family helped orchestrate the Saudi nuclear deal,” reporters Eric Lipton and Kate Kelly wrote. “Yet a number of the president’s allies and relatives, including members of his cabinet, stand to benefit if his big bet on nuclear power pays off. Certain investors with ties to these deals are positioned to profit, even if the delivery of large new loads of nuclear-powered electricity remains years away.”
The Trump administration is, in fact, making a real attempt at building new AP1000s at home. As my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last month, a major Department of Energy deal would help utilities buy the parts needed to build more Westinghouse reactors.
Chip giant Nvidia is considering providing a $250 billion backstop to fund OpenAI’s data center project in southern Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The deal would guarantee up to half of the capital needed to lease SoftBank’s 10-gigawatt data center to supply computing power to the ChatGPT maker.
GE Vernova’s backlog of orders for gas turbines, meanwhile, now stretches to 2031 and accounts for a cumulative 116 gigawatts of power-producing capacity. In its latest earnings call, covered in Utility Dive at the end of last week, the company posted double-digit revenue and order growth in the division that supplies equipment for gas, hydro, nuclear, and grid facilities.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Back in February, I told you that Japan was stepping up its efforts to extract rare earths from seabed minerals. On Friday, Tokyo confirmed it had discovered that medium and heavy rare earth elements accounted for about 54% of the rare earths mined from mud recovered from a remote Pacific island, Mining.com reported. The finds come after the government-backed vessel Chikyu sucked nearly 50 metric tons of mud from Minamitori Island, an uninhabited atoll located closer to Wake Island than Tokyo. Heavy rare earths, such as dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium — and medium rare earths such as samarium, europium, and gadolinium — are trickier to process. China controls the market for both categories by a wider margin than for light rare earths. That makes Japan’s discovery so exciting. Separating metals out of the mud could be an easier process than from other ores, potentially supplying the democratic world with a new source of non-Chinese minerals.
When the Biden administration tried putting rules in place for producing clean hydrogen, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explained nicely at the time, the regulations posed a problem for efforts to make fuel through nuclear-powered electrolysis. That’s because the incentives to ensure developers built new solar and wind rather than cannibalizing existing grid resources for hydrogen production made it impossible for nuclear reactors to qualify. Companies such as Constellation Energy, which had the nation’s leading experiment in nuclear-powered hydrogen production, protested. It all turned out to be for nought, since Trump ultimately wiped out the tax credits. As with so much nuclear technology that faces political tumult in America, South Korea is moving in to try its hand at hydrogen fuel production. Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, the country’s state-owned nuclear giant, said it will launch a pilot program to produce hydrogen using heat and electricity from reactors, Hydrogen Insight reported last week.
India, meanwhile, is beefing up its plans for small modular reactors. Earlier this month, I reminded you about New Delhi’s plans to open its nuclear sector to foreign investments after years of icing out all but Russia’s state nuclear vendor. That isn’t to say India isn’t looking to continue building its own indigenously-designed units. On Friday, NucNet reported that the country plans to develop and operate at least five of its own SMR designs by 2033.
Last week, Heatmap editorial fellow Ameya Hadap broke news that Koloma, a startup seeking to spur natural production of hydrogen, had inked a deal to look for gas deposits across 817 square miles of the Philippines’ largest island, Luzon. It’s not the only subsurface search for clean energy. Last week, the country’s Economy and Development Council approved the Philippines’ first financing package to de-risk geothermal investments, Think Geo Energy reported.
