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While Trump may have hoped that the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz would put Beijing in a more desperate position by the time the summit started, China’s oil market has shown “signs of resilience” that “should concern U.S. officials” as efforts to prop up the domestic supply provide more buoyancy than expected, Semafor reported.
Fervo Energy, until now the hottest startup in the next-generation geothermal industry, is now the hottest stock on the market. On Wednesday, the Houston-based company’s stock began trading on the Nasdaq, where share prices surged nearly 40% by market close. “Geothermal is so hot right now,” Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s senior vice president of strategy, told me in a Q&A for Heatmap. “The IPO is not a finish line for Fervo. It is a financing milestone that facilitates the build out of more clean, firm, reliable, affordable energy. That is what we are most excited about as we ring the bell in Nasdaq. As we celebrate, we are more excited than anything to get back to work, to put clean megawatts in the grid.”
The company, she said, expects to start making overseas development deals soon, and indicated that Fervo may build its first geothermal plants on the East Coast, where hot rocks have historically been too deep to tap into, within a decade.
Nearly 16 years after it was first proposed, New York City’s biggest new source of clean energy has come online, meaning its 1,250 megawatts of capacity will be available to shore up the grid as summer heat waves roast the nation’s largest metropolis. Until recently, New York State regulators had planned for the Champlain Hudson Power Express to enter into service in August. But last weekend, the 339-mile project stretching from Lake Champlain down the Hudson River to the electrical substations in northwestern Queens managed to complete testing just before the state’s hard deadline of May 10 at 5 p.m. ET, after which the developer would have to wait two months before finishing the bureaucratic process to start the clock on the contract between the state and Hydro Quebec, the French-speaking Canadian province’s state-owned utility. That means if prices soar high enough between now and the end of May, Hydro Quebec could choose to bid into the market. But the real milestone is that, starting June 1, the utility’s contract will take effect.
“We didn’t think it was possible. The state didn’t think it was possible. We were counting on capacity coming online in August, but that’s way too late,” Peter Rose, the senior director of stakeholder relations for Hydro Quebec, told me on a call last night. “We have heat waves in July. It’ll be good for New York City to count on that 1,250 megawatts of capacity going into July.” Since the Blackstone-backed project’s inception, its proponents have suggested hydropower from Quebec would ultimately supply 20% of New York City’s power needs. But two weeks ago, when Hydro Quebec ran 13 hours of trial runs to stress test its equipment, the line provided more than 33% of the city’s power for a part of that duration. That, Rose cautioned, was probably due to relatively low load. Still, he said, “Unbeknownst to everybody during the testing regime, a third of our consumption in New York City was coming from this project. Those were specific conditions. But still pretty remarkable.”
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Solar is now the third-largest electricity source in Texas.EIA
Texas, newly-crowned the nation’s No. 1 solar market, has installed enough panels that the state is now generating more electricity from photovoltaics than coal for the first time. Solar generation is expected to reach 78 billion killowatt-hours in 2026 in the grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, according to the latest forecast from the Energy Information Administration. That comes to just 60 billion kilowatt-hours for coal. As Texas’ solar boom continues, the federal researchers projected that about 40% of all solar installations in the U.S. this year will occur in the Lone Star State. Among the developments poised to come online this year is the solar and battery megaproject Tehuacana Creek 1 Solar farm. The 837-megawatt project will be the largest solar facility of its kind to enter into service this year. Meanwhile, Texas has no current plans for new coal plants.
The U.S. is going to need a lot more projects coming online. New forecasts from the National Electrical Manufacturers Association project U.S. electricity demand to surge 55% by 2050. Data centers are the biggest source of near-term demand growth, with a projected 300% surge in electricity demand over the next 10 years. But electric vehicles of all kinds are on track to keep the party going by spiking power demand 2,000% by the middle of the century. To meet that demand, storage, wind, and solar generation are on track to increase by 300% as renewables start making up a majority of the generation in the American West, New York, and the Southeast.
As I told you two weeks ago, Belgium is not only abandoning its plans to phase out its remaining nuclear power stations, it’s nationalizing the fleet. Now Brussels is entering into a deal with the pro-nuclear neighboring Netherlands to work together on building new reactors. The memorandum of understanding — signed Wednesday at a binational summit by Belgium’s energy minister Mathieu Bihet and Dutch climate and green growth chief Jo-Annes de Bat — establishes periodic meetings between the two nations, where the Netherlands can tap into Belgium’s existing knowledge from operating a larger fleet of reactors, and the Belgians can in turn garner tips on building new reactors as the Dutch embark on a construction program.
Pakistan’s solar boom has so far insulated the country from the full effects of losing access to oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz. Now Islamabad is going all in. Pakistan is now targeting 95% renewable electricity by 2040, and 60% by 2030, according to a document seen by the business news site ProPakistani.
Now it’s coming closer. On Tuesday, KHNP inked a memorandum of understanding with the nuclear division of U.S. utility giant Southern Company to work together on engineering atomic power stations. It’s not a financing deal. Signed at KHNP’s headquarters in Gyeongju, the companies said the partnership would involve technology exchanges, workshops, and sharing best practices. “This agreement is expected to serve as an opportunity for KHNP engineers to expand their horizons globally and provide a growth chance for the domestic engineering system to take a leap forward,” Kim Young-seung, the head of KHNP’s engineering division, World Nuclear News. “We will continue to do our utmost to complete the Korean-style engineering system through close cooperation with overseas operators and international organisations.”
The Environmental Protection Agency has come up with a new way to speed up construction of data centers, power plants, and other industrial facilities: Let them start building before they obtain required federal air permits. The proposal would “bring flexibility to building non-emitting components or structures,” including cement pads and wiring, piping, and support structures. “Today’s proposal works to provide solutions to issues that have held up critical American infrastructure and advance the next great technological forefront,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement. “Through commonsense permitting reform, the Trump EPA is fixing the broken system of government interference, while continuing to uphold our core mission to protect human health and the environment.”
Surging demand and shortages of raw materials are pushing lead times for high-capacity electrical transformers to as long as four years, PricewaterhouseCooper analysts said at a Reuters event this week. Demand for step-up transformers, which increase the voltage of electricity as it travels across power lines, increased by 274% between 2019 and 2025, while demand for substation transformers soared by 116%. Prices for essential components, meanwhile, have jumped by roughly 80% in five years. As a result, according to PV magazine, some firms are now paying premiums for production slots on projects that aren’t even finalized yet, while others buy refurbished as a stopgap until newer units arrive.
Transformers aren’t the only grid equipment attracting investment. Just this morning, TS Conductor, a manufacturer of advanced conductors that can bolster the capacity of existing power lines, announced the grand opening of its newest factory in South Carolina. The $134 million facility is now “poised to strengthen U.S. domestic supply chains as utilities work toward building a stronger, higher-capacity, more-efficient power grid — all with the speed that American industry needs and the affordability that American ratepayers deserve,” the company said.
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The Trump administration has removed the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, replacing the political appointee with a 30-year agency veteran who held senior positions in several previous administrations. On Tuesday, E&E News reported that the exit of Karen Evans, a political appointee put in charge of the embattled agency in December, would be the third such departure since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Her temporary replacement as acting administrator is Robert Fenton, who began work as a regional administrator in 1996 and held the acting chief job twice under the first Trump and Biden administrations — for six months in 2017 and four months in 2021. “I know this year has been challenging for many across the agency,” Fenton wrote in a staff memo Tuesday, a copy of which the newswire obtained.
FEMA has struggled under Trump. As I told you last summer, the agency cracked down aggressively on internal dissent from staffers. Meanwhile, the funding shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, where FEMA is housed alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “starved” local disaster responses, Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported in February..
Alsym Energy, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last year, “thinks it can break the U.S. battery manufacturing curse.” And not just by besting the incumbents already producing the market’s lithium-ion packs, but actually commercializing a whole new type of battery chemistry that instead relies on cheaper and far more abundant sodium as the main energy carrier. On Tuesday, the Massachusetts-headquartered startup inked a deal with the renewable developer Juniper Energy to deploy 500 megawatt-hours of Alsym’s battery systems in California. The deal, the companies said in a press release, “marks a significant shift away from fire-prone lithium-ion dependencies, prioritizing safety, domestic production, and operational efficiency in some of the United States’ most demanding climates.”
Star Catcher transfers energy down Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility to commercial off-the-shelf solar panels commonly found on spacecraft. Star Catcher Industries
If you thought building batteries or transformers was tricky, how about an electricity distribution network in space? That’s what Star Catcher Industries is promising to do. The Jacksonville, Florida-based startup said Tuesday it had raised $65 million in an oversubscribed Series A round. The investment — led by venture capital firms B Capital, Shield Capital, and Cerberus Ventures — brings Star Catcher’s total capital raised so far to $88 million. Founded less than two years ago, the company is developing space-based infrastructure that can deliver electricity on demand to satellites and spacecraft using optical power beaming, a wireless technology involving high-intensity laser light. “This investment underscores the conviction that orbital infrastructure is now as fundamental as terrestrial infrastructure,” Andrew Rush, co-founder and chief executive of Star Catcher, said in a statement. “Every major application driving the space economy — connectivity, computing, security, sensing — is power-limited today. Star Catcher is lifting that ceiling — making it possible to build in orbit at the scale the next century of life on Earth will demand.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the location of Terrapower’s isotope plant.
