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That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from finding new ways to terminate other offshore wind projects. As I wrote yesterday, the Department of the Interior announced that two more projects — Bluepoint Wind off the coast of New Jersey and Golden State Wind off California — had taken the administration up on its offer to pay back the leasing costs up to a combined nearly $900 million in exchange for the developers abandoning the bids and agreeing not to pursue other offshore wind deals in the U.S. “We did not take this decision lightly,” Michael Brown, the CEO of Ocean Winds North America, told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo in an emailed statement. “But when the underlying conditions in a market change, we must adapt. In this case, receiving a refund for the lease payments we had invested and exiting on agreed terms was the right outcome for our shareholders and partners.”
The United Arab Emirates said Tuesday it would withdraw from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, shrinking the world’s biggest oil-producing cartel to just 11 nations. The decision takes effect on May 1. The announcement came ahead of Wednesday’s latest OPEC meeting in Vienna. Abu Dhabi said it will also quit the broader OPEC+ supergroup that includes non-members led by Russia. In a post on X, Sultan Al Jaber — who serves as the UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology, the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and the chairman the country’s leading clean energy firm Masdar — said his nation had “taken a sovereign decision in line with its long-term energy strategy, its true production capability, and its national interest.” The National, Abu Dhabi’s state-owned English-language newspaper, wrote that “independence from OPEC will give the UAE, which accounts for roughly 4% of global oil production, more flexibility and responsiveness in managing the oil market.”
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The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has issued a new categorical exclusion for geothermal, freeing developers from the requirement to carry out environmental reviews at yet another key step in the drilling process. The regulatory change marks the third new categorical exclusion for geothermal issued in the past two years. That comes after what Joel Edwards, the co-founder of the geothermal startup Zanskar, said in a post on X was a period of about 20 years “without any new” exclusions. In April 2024, pre-leasing and surveying got a categorical exclusion. In January 2025, a new categorical exclusion covered postleasing, drilling, and flow-testing on areas of up to 20 acres. Now this latest step will allow for an exemption on pre-leasing activities such as drilling up to 10 acres. “Very nice to see the agency continuing to streamline permitting,” Edwards wrote. “Still more bottlenecks to work out, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
On Tuesday, meanwhile, Senators Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, introduced legislation to boost federal funding for next-generation geothermal research, development, and commercialization. “The U.S. is at the forefront of geothermal energy innovation, and this bill has the potential to strengthen global leadership, boost competitiveness, and accelerate the next generation of clean firm technologies,” Terra Rogers, director for superhot rock energy at Clean Air Task Force, said in a statement. “This nation has vast, underutilized next-generation geothermal and superhot rock potential.”
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CATL, the world’s largest battery market, has signed the world’s largest-ever order for sodium-ion batteries, the technology widely discussed as a potentially cheaper and more abundant alternative to the lithium power packs that propel electric vehicles and increasingly back up the grid. The Chinese giant inked a deal for 60 gigawatt-hours of batteries with the energy storage integrator HyperStrong. The deal marks what CATL calls proof that it has “overcome the challenges of the entire sodium-ion battery mass production chains,” prompting some experts to describe the agreement to Electrek as a potential “DeepSeek moment,” a reference to the Chinese artificial intelligence model that shook up the global industry with its affordability and nimbleness.
Sodium-ion batteries have seemed like the “next big thing” for years now, but as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, the industry has faced something of a curse when it comes to manufacturing, though new startups are attempting to overcome that problem.
The debut nuclear station in 2023. Abdul GONI / AFP via Getty Images
Fuel loading has begun at Bangladesh’s first nuclear power station. The uranium rods could be in place in the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant, made up of two VVER-1200 reactors designed and built by Russia’s state-owned Rosatom, in as little as 45 days. The plant will vault Bangladesh into the group of 31 nations that harness the power of splitting atoms for electricity production. “Today, Bangladesh joined the club of countries using peaceful nuclear energy as a reliable source of sustainable development,” Rosatom Director General Alexei Likhachev said in a statement to World Nuclear News. “The Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant will undoubtedly become a vital element of the country's energy system. For Rosatom, this project is another important step in the development of global nuclear energy and in strengthening friendly relations with our international partners.” When the plant generates its first power for the grid later this year, it will complete a project first planned when the country was known as East Pakistan.
When my high school girlfriend made my first Facebook account, I never imagined that, about 20 years later, the social network’s parent company would be trying to harvest electricity for its servers from outer space. But this week, Meta announced a deal with the startup Overview Energy, which aims to beam light from thousands of satellites to solar farms that power data centers at night, effectively making solar a 24-hour power source. Overview CEO Marc Berte said the goal is to launch the satellites by 2030, with what TechCrunch called “a goal of flying 1,000 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, a high orbit in which each satellite remains fixed above the same point on Earth.”
On Monday, the Department of the Interior announced plans to spend a little under $1 billion — a combined $885 million — to recoup the leasing costs developers already paid from a proposed wind farm off New Jersey and another off California. BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners “has committed” to reinvest up to $765 million into a U.S.-based liquified natural gas project. In exchange, the Interior Department said it will cancel the firm’s lease for the Bluepoint Wind offshore project in federal waters off New Jersey and New York “and reimburse the company’s bid payment in the amount invested in the LNG project.” As part of the deal, Bluepoint Wind “has decided not to pursue any new offshore wind developments in the United States,” the agency said. Likewise, the floating wind farm developer Golden State Wind agreed to abandon its lease located in the federally designated Morro Bay Wind Energy Area located 20 miles off San Luis Obispo County. The company had hoped to build one of the first offshore wind facilities in California where the continental shelf drops off too steeply for the kinds of wind farms sited on the nation’s Atlantic coast. Under the deal, the developer can recover “approximately $120 million in lease fees after an investment has been made of an equal amount in the development of U.S. oil and gas assets, energy infrastructure, and/or LNG projects along the Gulf Coast.” As part of the agreement, Golden State has opted out of pursuing new offshore wind projects. In a statement, Michael Brown, the chief executive of Ocean Winds North America, credited for “the clarity they have provided with this decision and deal.” The 50% owner of both Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind added: “Our priority remains disciplined capital allocation and delivering reliable energy solutions that create long-term value for ratepayers, partners, and shareholders.”
The Department of Energy said Monday it will soon restart talks to pay out nearly $430 million in payments to American hydroelectric projects that were promised under a Biden-era program. The Trump administration paused the negotiations as the agency reorganized its hydro-related programs under the newly named Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright reassessed droves of investments his predecessors made into clean energy projects. The funding aims to support 293 projects at 212 facilities through a program to maintain and enhance the nation’s fleet of dams. “American hydropower is a key component of this Administration’s vision for an affordable, reliable energy system,” Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said in a statement. “These actions will modernize our hydropower fleet, bolster our domestic workforce, and bring us closer to realizing that vision.”
The future Fall Line Fusion Power Station (Tesla Model S not included). Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Hydropower is a renewable power source conservative critics of wind and solar tend to like because it operates 24/7 and provides large-scale, long-duration energy storage through pumped-storage systems. Similarly, commercializing fusion power, the so-called holy grail of clean energy, is another technological goal the Trump administration shares with advocates of a lower-carbon future. On Tuesday morning, Commonwealth Fusion Systems became the first fusion power plant developer to apply to join a major grid operator. By submitting its paperwork to link its generators to PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. wholesale electricity market, Commonwealth Fusion is showing it’s “on track to connect to the electricity grid in time to deliver power in the early 2030s.” The company also announced that it had named the first 400-megawatt ARC power plant it’s building in Chesterfield County, Virginia, the Fall Line Fusion Power Station. The name is a reference to the geological boundary where Virginia’s elevated Piedmont region drops to the Tidewater coastal plain, creating rapids on the James River that Virginians historically built mills on to harness the power from falling water.
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Xpansiv, the startup that manages a global exchange for trading carbon credits and renewable energy credits, has signed a deal to bring credits with precise data that allows buyers to match clean electricity consumption to generation on an hour-by-hour basis. The partnership with the software platform Granular Energy, which I can exclusively report for this newsletter, will allow buyers and sellers to access “high-integrity, time-stamped energy data with registry-issued energy attribute certificates through a single platform” for the first time. The push comes amid growing calls for tighter rules and more transparency to avoid greenwashing carbon credits as voluntary programs such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol draw scrutiny and the European Union’s world-first carbon tariff enters its fifth month of operation. “This integrated solution makes granular renewable energy more accessible and easier to manage for independent power producers, utilities, traders, brokers, and corporate buyers,” Russell Karas, Xpansiv’s senior vice president of strategic market solutions, told me in a statement.
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Earlier this month, I told you that SunZia, the nation’s largest renewable energy project ever, had come online. The behemoth project, which included 3.5 gigawatts of wind turbines in New Mexico and 550 miles of transmission lines to funnel the electricity to Arizona’s fast-growing population centers, took just three years to build once construction began in 2023. But “the permitting process took nearly 17 years — almost six times as long,” in a sign of how “a broken permitting system has choked the infrastructure growth that underwrites American strength.” You’d be mistaken for thinking these words came from someone like Senator Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat and climate hawk who long championed SunZia and more transmission lines to bring renewables online, but told Heatmap’s Jael Holzman last December that he wouldn’t vote for anything that failed to boost renewables. But their author is actually Senator Tom Cotton, the right-wing firebrand Republican from Arkansas. In a Monday op-ed in The Washington Post, Cotton argued that the U.S. “needs more electricity to support data centers, modern manufacturing, defense infrastructure, and economic growth,” in addition to more “domestic access to critical minerals” and processing plants and “a stronger industrial base.” To make that happen, “the country first needs straightforward, enforceable permitting standards and fast, efficient construction,” he wrote. He called for overhauling landmark laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and establishing “a single agency” to “oversee permitting reviews with firm deadlines and a clear, coordinated decision process.”
The push comes as Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives propose restoring tax credits for wind, solar, and other clean energy technologies that were curtailed by One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The American Energy Dominance Act, introduced Thursday, would remove the accelerated deadlines that Trump’s landmark legislation last year placed on the renewable energy production tax credit, known as 45Y, and the 48E investment tax credits. It would, according to Utility Dive, also make similar changes to the 45V clean hydrogen production credit.
Last month, New York utility executives gathered at a luxury hotel in Miami and boasted about banding together to influence a new state policy that would limit when power companies can turn off customers’ electricity during heat waves because of unpaid bills. A day later, Albany unveiled the policy. Ratepayers in New York City in particular “lost meaningful safeguards,” Laurie Wheelock, the head of the watchdog Public Utility Law Project, told The New York Times. Under its previous agreement with the state, ConEdison, the utility that serves the five boroughs and Westchester, was barred from terminating service for non-payment the day before a 90-degree forecast, the day of, and two days after. The new policy prohibits shutoffs only on the day of the forecast.
Meanwhile, in Seattle, residents of King County are bracing for a double-digit rate hike on sewage service. Following years of modest increases, the Seattle Times reported, county officials proposed a 12.75% spike in sewer rates for next year as the municipality looks for ways to pay for $14 billion in infrastructure upgrades over the next decade. The problem? The famously rainy cultural and financial capital of the Pacific Northwest is facing worsening floods from atmospheric rivers.
In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Governor Josh Shapiro is taking yet another step to deal with ballooning electricity costs in PJM Interconnection. In a Monday afternoon post on X, he said he’s appointing a new special counsel for energy affordability to be “our newest watchdog to hold utility companies accountable when they try to jack up Pennsylvanians’ energy bills.” The Democrat, widely considered a top contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2028, said the appointment “will support our efforts to lower costs and put money back in your pockets.”
