Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Nuclear generation set a new global record in 2025, the International Energy Agency said in its latest electricity outlook published last Friday. That’s largely thanks to Japan restarting reactors idled after Fukushima, France ramping up generation at its fleet, and China and India opening new plants. By 2030, however, China will account for 40% of the global increase in nuclear generation. You can see the difference in the growth rate already. Nuclear power worldwide is on track to grow by an average of 2.8% per year, more than double the 1.3% pace of the previous four years. China’s nuclear capacity, by contrast, will grow by an average of 6% per year through the end of the decade.
A chart showing U.S. sales of battery electric and plug-in hybrid sales diverging from hybrid electric at the end of last year. EIA
Roughly 22% of light-duty vehicles sold last year in the U.S. were hybrid and battery electric, up from 20% in 2024. While sales of battery-powered vehicles have fallen, demand for hybrids has only increased, according to estimates from the research firm Omdia that the U.S. Energy Information Administration highlighted in a new analysis. Electric vehicles accounted for just 2% of all registered light-duty vehicles on U.S. roads in 2024, the most recent year for which annual data is available. Sales for 2025 will show a spike, especially around September when Americans rushed to cash in on electric vehicle tax credits before Trump’s phaseout took effect.
The Department of Transportation, meanwhile, proposed boosting the domestic content requirements for federally funded electric vehicle charging stations from 55% to 100%. The Biden administration had waived some “Buy American” requirements for the $5 billion federal program to fund the infrastructure buildout. The proposal would set steep hurdles for projects, likely slowing the rollout of chargers. The agency, Reuters reported, said it believes it must “protect Americans from foreign-made EV charger components that use technology with cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Equinor is scaling back its near-term investments in carbon capture and sequestration projects as prices go up and customer demand stagnates. Despite its reputation as what the Carbon Herald called “one of the global standard-bearers for carbon capture and storage,” the Norwegian energy giant said the commercial conditions needed to justify more large-scale investments in carbon pipelines and wells were not yet there. CEO Anders Opedal said during the company’s latest earnings call that, because CCS markets were growing more slowly than previously thought, Equinor would hold off on committing more capital to new projects.
CCS had something of a moment last fall when Google agreed to finance construction of a gas plant equipped with carbon capture technology, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote. But Trump’s plan to go for the climate killshot, repealing the legal underpinning of all federal regulations on planet-heating emissions, would really dampen demand for CCS in the U.S.
The new U.S.-India trade deal that will lower tariffs on Indian goods to 18% from 25% is set to bolster the country’s booming solar manufacturing industry. The pact represents what Prashant Mathur, chief executive of the solar manufacturer Saatvik Green Energy, described to PV-Tech as a “strategic turning point.” Cutting tariffs by seven percentage points “materially improves cost competitiveness, making U.S. projects more profitable and creating new demand for high-efficiency, Made-in-India products.” Gyanesh Chaudhary, the managing director of Vikram Solar, called the deal a “structural inflection point.” But the trade agreement won’t fix all the problems for Indian solar exporters. New restrictions known as Section 232 tariffs, which raise prices on imports that threaten national security by undercutting domestic manufacturers, are expected to come into effect on India’s exports of polysilicon. A separate antidumping and countervailing duty investigation into whether India is unfairly flooding the U.S. market with cheap crystalline silicon solar cells called for a duty of 123.04%, though nothing has yet been imposed.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, is setting the stage for more coal in the U.S. On Wednesday, according to Bloomberg, Trump plans to sign an executive order directing the military to buy more power from coal-fired plants in a bid to prop up the sector.
Despite Trump’s best attempts to stop it, Orsted is finishing its offshore wind farms in New England and, after that, is expected to save its money for new projects overseas. In its native Europe, the energy giant is preparing for a big multinational buildout in the North Sea. Now the Danish developer is charging ahead in a new market. Australia does not have any operating offshore wind farms. But Orsted just submitted an application for an environmental review of a 2.8 gigawatt project proposed off the coast of Gippsland, Victoria. Together with a second site Orsted started lining up in 2024, the area could host a combined 4.8 gigawatts of turbine capacity, according to Renewables Now.
Yet another fusion energy startup has officially entered the race. Inertia Enterprises, a fusion startup aimed at mimicking the technology that managed for the first time in history to generate more energy than it took to start the reaction, has raised $450 million in a Series A round. The venture firm Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with backing from Google Ventures, Modern Capital, and Threshold Ventures. “Inertia is building on decades of science and billions of dollars invested to reach the ignition milestone that proved the science,” Jeff Lawson, the co-founder and chief executive of Inertia, said in a statement.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that provides the legal basis for virtually all federal regulations of planet-heating emissions, marking what The Wall Street Journal called “the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.” The 2009 “endangerment finding” concluded that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, calling for cuts to emissions from power plants and vehicle tailpipes. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the newspaper the move “amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.” In an interview with my colleague Emily Pontecorvo last year, Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman said rescinding the endangerment finding would do “more serious and more long term damage” and “could knock out a future administration from trying to” bring back climate policy. But that, Freeman said, would depend on the Supreme Court backing the administration. “I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s possible,” she said.
At issue is the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, which determined that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. As Emily wrote last week, “the agency claims that its previous read of Massachusetts v. EPA was wrong, especially in light of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, such as West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright v. Raimondo. The former limited the EPA's toolbox for regulating power plants, and the latter ended a requirement that courts defer to agency expertise in cases where the law is vague.” An earlier report in The Washington Post questioned whether the agency would proceed with the repeal at all, fearing these arguments would pass muster in the nation’s highest court.
BYD has sued the United States government over the 100% tariff on Chinese electrics that serves as an effective ban on Beijing’s booming auto exports. Four U.S.-based subsidiaries of the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s trade levies. The litigation marks what the state-backed tabloid Global Times called “the first instance of a Chinese automaker directly and actively challenging U.S. tariffs, setting a precedent and carrying significance for Chinese enterprises to protect their legitimate rights and interests through legal means.”
Outside the U.S., BYD is booming. China’s cheap electric cars are popular all over the world, as Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast covered in December. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s deal to increase trade with China will bring the battery-powered vehicles to North American roads. And the Chinese edition of the trade publication Automotive News just reported that BYD is planning a factory expansion in Europe and Canada.
Hot off last month’s news that it plans to go public, Fervo Energy has drilled its highest-temperature well yet. The drilling results confirm that the next-generation geothermal startup tapped into a resource with temperatures above 555 degrees Fahrenheit at approximately 11,200 feet deep. The company announced the findings Monday of an independent assessment using appraisal data from the drilling. The analysis found that the Project Blanford site in Millard County, Utah, has multiple gigawatts of heat that can be harnessed. Its completion will be a breakthrough for enhanced geothermal systems, one of two leading approaches to the next-generation geothermal sector that Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin outlined here. “This latest ultra-high temperature discovery highlights our team’s ability to detect and develop EGS sweet spots using AI-enhanced geophysical techniques,” Jack Norbeck, Fervo’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Chinese scientists have for the first time discovered natural hydrogen sealed in microscopic inclusions near Tibet. The finding, which the Xinhua news agency called “groundbreaking,” fills what the China Hydrogen Bulletin called “a major domestic research gap and points to a new geological pathway for identifying China’s next generation of clean energy resources.” Natural, or geological, hydrogen could provide a cheap source of the zero-carbon fuel and give oil and gas drillers a natural foothold in a new, clean industry. In the color spectrum associated with hydrogen, the rare, naturally formed stuff is called white hydrogen. But as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in December, a new color has joined the rainbow. Orange hydrogen refers to a family of technologies that naturally spur production of the gas, as the startup Vema is now attempting to do.
China’s coal-fired power generation decreased 1.9% last year, marking what the consultancy Wood Mackenzie called “a historic shift driven by new non-fossil generation that has finally outpaced demand growth.” Power demand surged 5% in China last year, but for the first time in a decade that wasn’t propelled by coal plants. Instead, that new demand was supplied by renewables, nuclear, and hydro, all of which Beijing has rapidly deployed. Over that time, the levelized cost of energy — a widely used though, as Matthew wrote last year, far-from-perfect metric — fell 77% for utility-scale solar and 73% for onshore wind. “At the heart of this transformation is the unprecedented expansion of renewable energy capacity,” Sharon Feng, a senior research analyst for Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “China’s wind and solar capacity had risen more than ten-fold to 1,842 gigawatts over the past decade.”
Gone are the days when the oil industry seemed to be on track for a lucrative decline. Demand for crude will take longer to peak than previously estimated as governments prioritize growth and energy security over efforts to curb consumption. That’s according to a report issued Sunday by Vitol Group, the world’s largest independent oil trader. “Over the past year, decarbonisation policies have become a less decisive driver of efforts to curb oil consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” the report stated, according to Bloomberg. “Policy priorities have increasingly been reframed around economic competitiveness and geopolitical strategy.”
The race for a long-duration energy storage solution has a new competitor. The Dutch startup Ore Energy has deployed its iron-air storage technology successfully on the grid for a technical pilot of its system that can store for 100 hours of power. The pilot, the first of its kind in Europe, demonstrated that the company’s technology can store and discharge energy for up to four days. “This pilot allowed us to evaluate iron-air performance under European operating profiles and real-world grid conditions,” Aytaç Yilmaz, co-founder and CEO of Ore Energy, said in a statement.
