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The Trump administration’s efforts to paralyze wind and solar permits are once again withering in the cold light of the court room. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper ordered the end to a series of delays on renewable energy permits, delivering a victory to regional trade groups that had argued the administration was violating the Administrative Procedures Act by holding up approvals. Per Heatmap’s Jael Holzman, the ruling “is a potentially fatal blow” to “key methods the Trump administration has used to stymie federal renewable energy permitting.”
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In the race to build North America’s first small modular reactor, GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy is in the lead. Work is already underway on the world’s first deployment of the American-Japanese joint venture’s 300-megawatt boiling water reactor, the BWRX-300. The project at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington plant is 38% done, and it’s on track to produce electricity by 2030, said Roger Martella, GE Vernova’s head of government affairs and policy. The remark, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin highlighted on X, came one day before the energy giant reports its latest earnings.
Meanwhile, one of Barack Obama’s early moves as president was to halt construction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, effectively blocking any plan by the federal government to deal with radioactive spent fuel. Since then, no state has stepped up as an alternative; either way, federal law stipulates that the site in Nevada must be the United States’ first permanent tomb for nuclear waste. But what if nuclear waste wasn’t treated as waste at all? That was the Trump administration’s new pitch earlier this year when it invited states to submit applications to host so-called nuclear innovation campuses, sites where reactors, fuel enrichers, and waste recyclers can all set up shop. It’s a good sell. At least 28 states have so submitted applications, according to Exchange Monitor.
Project Vault, the effort the Trump administration set up to create a critical minerals reserve for U.S. manufacturers to weather Chinese trade restrictions on key metals, will soon close its first funding tranche. The program, announced in February, will combine $2 billion in private funding with a $10 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The project “was not designed to be a stockpile alone,” John Jovanovic, the head of the Ex-Im Bank, told Reuters. “What it was designed to do was actually solve problems that the market faces … What we want to do is let it be dynamic and let it help try to solve a bunch of these problems.”
The new California factory. Tandem PV
“Perovskites hold a place of honor in the pantheon of much-heralded clean energy breakthroughs that have yet to actually arrive, alongside small modular nuclear reactors and solid-state batteries,” Canary Media reporter Julian Spector wrote yesterday. “In theory, these crystal structures could radically improve solar panels’ capabilities by absorbing wavelengths of light that conventional silicon cells can’t catch. But the stunning advances in R&D specimens have yet to infiltrate the cold, hard world of commercial solar manufacturing.” Until now, at least. On Tuesday, the startup Tandem PV officially opened its new factory in Fremont, California. The company aims to produce large panels of glass treated with a photovoltaic perovskite crystal coating that can increase how efficiently panels convert the sun’s rays into electricity by nearly 40%.
“We’re going to emphasize quality and speed over cost,” Tandem PV CEO Scott Wharton told Matthew last year. “If we do this right, then the theory is, we’ve become the next First Solar — that’s our intention. We want to take back solar leadership from China, which is a bold statement, but I think we’re on the journey.”
Over the next three nights, an eye-popping 723 million birds are expected to be migrating across the U.S. In Michigan alone, at least 5.3 million birds are likely to fly overhead. “Most of these birds will be in flight while we sleep. They are guided by stars, the magnetic field, and sounds,” a meteorology account called Michigan Storm Chasers wrote on X. “You can help these birds migrate by turning off any unnecessary outdoor lighting, especially between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.!”
Nearly two weeks ago, Vineyard Wind sued one of its suppliers, GE Vernova, to keep the industrial giant from exiting the offshore wind project off the coast of Nantucket in Massachusetts. Now a U.S. court has ordered GE Vernova to finish the job, saying it would be “fanciful” to imagine a new contractor could complete the installation. GE Vernova had argued that Vineyard Wind — a 50/50 joint venture between the European power giant Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — owed it $300 million for work already performed. But Vineyard Wind countered that the manufacturer remains on the hook for about $545 million to make up for a catastrophic turbine blade collapse in 2024, according to WBUR. “The project is at a critical phase and the loss of [Vineyard Wind]’s principal contractor would set the project back immeasurably,” the Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp wrote in his decision, repeatedly using the name of GE Vernova’s renewables subsidiary. “To pretend that [Vineyard Wind] could go out and hire one or more contractors to finish the installation and troubleshoot and modify [GE Renewables’] proprietary design without [GE Renewables’] specialized knowledge is fanciful.”
Charlotte DeWald fears the world is sleepwalking into tipping points beyond which the Earth’s natural carbon cycles will render climate change uncontrollable. By the time we realize what it means for global weather and agricultural systems that there’s no sea ice in the Arctic sometime in the 2030s, for example, it may be too late to try anything drastic to buy us more time. Much of the discourse around what to do concerns a specific kind of geoengineering called stratospheric aerosol injections, essentially spraying reflective particles into the sky to block the sun’s heat from permeating the increasingly thick layer of greenhouse gases that prevent that energy from naturally radiating back into space. That’s something DeWald, a former Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researcher and climate scientist by training who specialized in modeling aerosol-cloud interactions, knows all about. But her approach is different, using a technology known as mixed-phase cloud thinning, a process similar to cloud seeding. “The idea is that you could dissipate clouds over the Arctic to release heat from the surface to, for example, increase sea ice extent or thickness or integrity,” she told me. “There’s some early modeling that suggests that it could yield significant cooling over the Arctic Ocean.”
With all that context, you can now appreciate the exclusive bit of news I have for you this morning: DeWald is launching a new nonprofit called the Arctic Stabilization Initiative to “evaluate whether targeted interventions can slow dangerous” warming near the Earth’s northern pole. So far, ASI has raised $6.5 million in philanthropic funding toward a five-year budget goal of $55 million to study whether MCT, as mixed-phase cloud thinning is known, could help save the Arctic. The nonprofit has an advisory board stacked with veteran Arctic scientists and put together a “stage-gated” research plan with offramps in case early modeling suggests MCT won’t work or could cause undue environmental damage. The project also has an eye toward engaging with Indigenous peoples and “will ground all future work in respect for Indigenous sovereignty, before any field-based research activity is pursued.” The statement harkens to Harvard University’s SCoPEx trial, a would-be outdoor experiment in spraying reflective aerosols into the atmosphere over Sweden that ran aground after researchers initially failed to consult local stakeholders and a body representing the Indigenous Saami people in the northern reaches of Nordic nations came out against the testing. (By repeatedly invoking ASI’s nonprofit status, DeWald also seemed to draw a contrast with for-profit stratospheric aerosol injection startup Stardust Solutions, which last year Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported had raised $60 million.) “We are continuing to move toward critical planetary thresholds without a viable plan for things like tipping points,” DeWald said. “That was the inflection point for me.”
Modern lighting on an old building in the Qingzhou section of Weifang, which is getting modern molecules in an old gas system.VCG/VCG via Getty Images
China just took yet another step closer to energy independence, despite its relatively tiny domestic reserves of oil and gas, kicking off the world’s largest project to blend hydrogen into the natural gas system. As part of the experiment, roughly 100,000 households in the center of the Weifang, a prefecture-level city in eastern Shandong province between Beijing and Shanghai, will receive a blend of up to 10% hydrogen through existing gas pipes. The pilot’s size alone “smashes” the world record, according to Hydrogen Insight. Whether that’s meaningful from a climate perspective depends on how you look at things. A fraction of 1% of China’s hydrogen fuel comes from electrolyzer plants powered by clean renewables or nuclear electricity. But the People’s Republic still produces more green hydrogen than any other nation. Last year, the central government made cleaning up heavy industry with green hydrogen a higher priority — a goal that’s been supercharged by the war in Iran. Therein lies the real biggest motivator now. While China relies on imports for natural gas, swapping out more of that fuel for domestically generated hydrogen allows Beijing to claim the moral high ground on emissions and air pollution — all while becoming more energy independent.
Meanwhile, China’s container ships are the latest sector to experiment with going electric and forgoing the need for costly, dirty bunker fuel. A 10,000-ton fully electric cargo vessel capable of carrying 742 shipping containers just started up operations in China this week, according to a video posted on X by China’s Xinhua News service.
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The ability of electric vehicles to serve as distributed energy resources, charging in times of low demand and discharging back onto the grid when demand peaks, has long been a dream of EV enthusiasts and DER advocates alike. California’s PG&E utility launched a small bi-directional charging program in 2023, allowing owners of Ford F-150 Lightnings to use their trucks as home backup power, and eventually feed energy back onto the grid. The utility added a host of General Motors EVs to the program back in 2025. On Monday, it announced its latest vehicle participant: Tesla’s Cybertruck. The Tesla vehicle will be the first in the program to run on alternating current, which simplifies the equipment necessary and lowers costs for consumers, according to PG&E’s announcement.
In January, I told you about the then-latest company to benefit from President Donald Trump’s dabbling in what you might call state capitalism with American characteristics: USA Rare Earth. The vertically integrated company, which aims to mine rare earths in Texas, took big leaps forward in the past year toward building factories to turn those metals into the magnets needed for modern technologies. For now, however, the company needs ore. On Monday, USA Rare Earth announced plans to buy Brazilian rare earth miner Serra Verde in a deal valued at $2.8 billion in cash and shares. The transaction is expected to be complete by the end of the third quarter of this year. The company pitched the move as a direct challenge to China, which dominates both the processing of rare earths mined at home and abroad. “The world has become too dependent on a single source and it’s high time to break that dependency,” USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.
As if we needed more evidence that the data center backlash is “swallowing American politics,” here’s Heatmap’s Jael Holzman with yet another data point: According to tracking from the Heatmap Pro database, fights against data centers now outnumber fights against wind farms in the U.S. That includes both onshore and offshore wind developments. “Taken together,” Jael wrote, “these numbers describe the tremendous power involved in the data center wars.”
