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When French energy giant TotalEnergies became the first offshore wind developer to take up Trump on his offer of $1 billion to abandon two projects back in March, the administration’s effort to kill off an industry Trump has personally opposed since long before he gained political power seemed to finally be catching a foothold following a series of legal retreats. By April, however, blowback to the deal had started building. Reporting from Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo found that the U.S. government’s agreement with Total didn’t actually mandate any new investments in fossil fuels, as the administration strongly implied, and that and that the payment may not have actually met the requirements to be drawn from a federal coffer designed to fund legal settlements. Shortly afterward, House Democrats announced plans to investigate Total’s contract with the government. This week, California regulators launched their own probe into one of two new developments that took up Trump’s offer, a floating offshore wind project that was set to be the first such project on the West Coast. Now one of the largest U.S. pension funds is reconsidering its stake in Total. Citing “significant concerns” over Total’s decision to cancel its two offshore wind leases and double down on fossil fuels, the New York State Common Retirement Fund said it would evaluate selling the $1.6 million stake in the company.
In a letter to Total CEO Patrick Pouyanné that the Financial Times reviewed, Thomas DiNapoli, the New York State comptroller and trustee of the retirement fund, said: “As the fund continually evaluates companies based on credible transition plans, portfolio companies’ backtracking may impact the fund’s risk assessment results and proxy voting decisions.” While “TotalEnergies had sought to be a leader in [the] energy transition,” he added, “now investors are left scratching their heads over how the board came to this decision to abandon that strategy and what it means for the future of the company and our stake in it.” In Total’s home country, the picture for offshore wind looks quite different. While Paris remains committed to expanding its world-leading nuclear fleet, a new floating offshore wind farm off France just started pumping electricity onto the grid.
Occidental Petroleum has once again pushed back the opening of the world’s largest carbon removal facility, with executives warning that they’re uncertain how quickly the delay can be resolved. Construction on the direct air capture megaproject in West Texas, known as Stratos, has been mostly complete for months. Last August, the company revised the start date to the end of the year. In February, Occidental said the operations would begin by the second quarter of this year. But in its first-quarter earnings call Wednesday, Richard Jackson, Occidental’s chief operating officer, who will take over for CEO Vicki Hollub when she retires at the end of this month, told analysts “the technology and process unit operations performed as expected.” He said the company had “identified an issue related to non-process components of the facility, unrelated to the technology” and was “currently evaluating the repair timeline and assessing the impact on the operations schedule,” according to Occidental’s official transcript of his remarks. When I emailed the company to ask for more details on what issues and specific components are holding up the project, a spokesperson responded: “We have nothing to offer beyond what Richard said that it’s non-process and we’ll provide an update next quarter.”
Make no mistake, it’s not all doom and gloom for DAC. Colorado and Wyoming this week signed an agreement to work together on carbon storage infrastructure. And a major breakthrough in Kenya “signals a new era” for geological storage of carbon dioxide, so heralded the Carbon Herald.
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The largest nickel processing facility in Cuba, the Moa plant.STR/AFP/GettyImages
The United States has expanded its sanctions on Cuba, forcing the Canadian miner that had been the Caribbean nation’s biggest foreign investor to flee as the Trump administration ramps up its effort to topple the 67-year-old communist regime and reassert Washington’s suzerainty over the island just 90 miles south of Florida. The new sanctions on Thursday, which came days after Trump broadened the U.S. embargo on Cuba, sent the price of shares in Canada’s Sherritt International Corporation tumbling 41% by the time the market closed in North America. For the past 32 years, the company has operated a nickel and cobalt mining operation on the island, providing one of Cuba’s few commercial lifelines into the global economy. While Sherritt said it had not yet been designated for sanctions, a listing “could occur at any time,” the company warned, and banks and other vendors might be “unable or unwilling” to keep supplying the firm. “In any event, the mere issuance of the executive order itself creates conditions that materially alter the corporation’s ability to operate in the ordinary course, including activities related to Sherritt’s Cuban joint venture operations,” Sherritt said in a statement on its website. “This is a massive blow to an already sinking economy,” Ricardo Torres, a leading Cuban-born economist at the American University in Washington, told the Financial Times.
The internal combustion engine is still the profit motor for Volkswagen. But when the world’s second-largest automaker reported its first-quarter earnings last week, the company said its latest electric vehicles are up to 80% as profitable as gasoline-powered alternatives. That’s according to a nugget InsideEVs highlighted this week from the investor update. Once Volkswagen launches its newest modular blueprint for its electric vehicle offerings — known internally as the Scalable Systems Platform, or SSP — the margins are expected to align more closely, said Arno Antlitz, the German auto giant’s chief financial officer. “We expect the margin to be fully comparable only with our future SSP platform,” he said.
Things are looking sunnier for what has long been the weakest sector of the American solar industry. SEG Solar, a Houston-based manufacturer, has announced plans to add 4 gigawatts of module production capacity to its factory in Texas’ largest city, creating a 6-gigawatt facility. The move comes as Elon Musk has vowed to dramatically scale up Tesla’s solar manufacturing capacity and First Solar builds its own 4-gigawatt facility.
While both of these stats represent new peaks — as is almost always the case with electricity prices over time — the overall growth in prices in April was not unusual, Emily wrote. “National average electricity prices have been increasing at a similar rate this year as they have during the past five years, with the exception of 2022, when there was a significant spike in the cost of natural gas. Natural gas plants generate the largest proportion of U.S. power, and the cost of the fuel has an outsized influence on our electricity prices.”
But some places, such as New Jersey and Washington, D.C., saw 21% and 25% increases, respectively, in their 12-month trailing averages due to strained dynamics in PJM, the electricity market they are part of, where power demand is outstripping supply. But Emily writes that: “The new April data also shows how sometimes electricity prices undergo big fluctuations for more arbitrary, and ultimately temporary reasons.” For example, some states such as California and Massachusetts issued dividends or rebates that reduced bills during hotter months when electricity costs typically rise.
See the data for yourself here..
We all know that the backlash to data centers is mounting. As I reported for Heatmap in February, the proportion of voters who strongly oppose developing server farms grew by an eye-popping 50% in just a few months. Now Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has some exclusive data via our intelligence platform Heatmap Pro that really puts a fine point on how effective that political pushback has become. At least 20 proposed data centers were canceled amid local pushback during the first three months of 2026, smashing a record set only in the previous quarter. “The cancellations,” Rob wrote, “reveal the rapidly expanding backlash to data center construction has not yet peaked.” About 100 new data center fights were also added to Heatmap Pro’s database during the first quarter, another new record.
It’s no wonder why. Even the data centers owned by the richest man in the world aren’t fulfilling basic promises made to voters about the sustainability of the projects. Elon Musk pledged two years ago to build a state-of-the-art water recycling plant in Memphis, Tennessee, to guarantee that his xAI servers wouldn’t deplete the city’s groundwater. Now that Musk’s first data center dedicated to his AI chatbot is up and running, construction on the recycling facility has come to an abrupt halt.
Add this to the list of achievements for China’s booming offshore wind industry. China Three Gorges Corporation announced that it has completed the installation of a 16-megawatt floating offshore wind turbine off the coast of Guangdong province, in what offshoreWIND.biz described as “the world’s largest single-unit floating wind turbine platform.” The pilot project is located in waters nearly 44 miles offshore at depths of close to 165 feet. The developer called the installation a milestone toward deep-sea floating wind technology that could harness stronger air flows and expand the footprint of offshore wind into areas of the Pacific coastline where the continental shelf drops off steeply and close to shore. As in sectors such as solar panels and batteries, the floating wind industry is driven by fierce internal competition in China.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the developer that had planned to build the nation’s first floating offshore wind farm off central California just took a payout from the Trump administration in exchange for abandoning its federal lease. Golden State Wind was among two companies that followed French energy giant TotalEnergies in taking refunds from the Department of the Interior while promising to halt all offshore wind development in the future, as I wrote last month. And as I told you on Tuesday, California regulators are now investigating the developer.
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As the nation’s largest federally owned utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority is, in many ways, the closest thing the U.S. has to one of the giant state companies that handle nuclear construction in countries with major atomic energy sectors such as France, South Korea, or Japan. The TVA has recently refashioned itself as a testing ground for new American reactor technologies. The world’s second BWRX-300, the 300-megawatt boiling water reactor from GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy, is set to be built at the TVA’s Clinch River site. The first power purchase agreement between a next-generation reactor developer and a U.S. utility was Kairos Power’s Google-backed deal to sell electricity from its first commercial molten salt reactor to the TVA. The White House is even giving the TVA an early look at new rules coming out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So it’s fitting that now the TVA is generating far more electricity from nuclear energy than this time last year. The utility’s nuclear fleet supplied 41% of its power in the first half of this year, compared to 31% in the same six-month window of 2025, Utility Dive reported. The milestone comes as Mike Skaggs, the TVA’s interim chief executive since CEO Don Moul announced his retirement last month, names nuclear as a top priority.
Type One Energy, a U.S.-based fusion company backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has made a deal to develop its first commercial power plant in the United Kingdom within a decade. The consortium includes the U.S. engineering firm Aecom and the British fusion supplier Tokamak Energy. Type One is already in “very early conversations with several potential customers,” CEO Chris Mowry told the Financial Times. The move comes just weeks after Gates’ fission company, TerraPower, began construction on its first plant in Wyoming, as I wrote last month.
Meanwhile, another clean energy venture in the U.K. is going under. Morrow Batteries, a lithium-ion manufacturer in Europe, filed for bankruptcy Wednesday. “It’s a tough outcome after years of building with over €400 million invested, strong technology, real products in the field, and an outstanding team that stands together through tremendous challenges,” CEO Jon Fold von Bülow wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “I firmly believe this is not the end.” He said he’s hoping to sell to a buyer who will take the technology forward.
Everything is bigger in Texas. John Bistline
I’ll let this chart from the sustainability research service Watershed speak for itself. As Watershed’s head of science John Bistline put it on X: “Texas just passed California in utility-scale solar. And it's not close in wind or energy storage.”
