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Last month, Stardust put out the first ethical guidelines to which it plans to hold itself. Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer broke the news in October that the company was emerging from stealth with $60 million in funding to support its commercialization. “The idea that certain interventions could reduce the chance of really bad climate outcomes, like collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, isn’t new. The Stardust patents show that these ideas are now moving from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the possible,” Hannah Safford, a climate expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said in a statement Thursday. “It’s time to take climate intervention strategies more seriously, and rigorously evaluate the risks of these strategies against the risks of failing to intervene.”
Cleveland, Ohio’s second-largest city, has rejected a permit application for a $1.6 data center on a 35-acre lot in the Slavic Village neighborhood. The city, the Cleveland Signal reported, “offered no details about why it was rejecting it.” In a statement, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said he held “serious concerns about hyperscale, standalone data centers being placed in residential neighborhoods.” The Democrat said he was echoing voters’ concerns about the computer farms.
Roughly 25 data centers were canceled in the first quarter of this year due to mounting local opposition, Rob reported in an exclusive earlier this month. Polling from Heatmap Pro, meanwhile, shows that public support for data centers has nosedived from even its paltry position last fall.
A man cooks with firewood during a blackout in Havana this week.Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images
The Cuban government announced that it has run out of diesel and fuel oil as the Caribbean nation enters its fifth month without a large shipment of crude oil. “We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said Wednesday in remarks carried on state-run broadcasters as protests gathered in Havana. “We have no reserves.” On Thursday, the Financial Times reported, Cuba’s national grid operator UNE said that much of the island’s eastern provinces were still without power after the latest blackouts. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January threatening tariffs on any country shipping fuel to Cuba. “The only thing we have is gas from our own wells, whose production has increased, and domestic crude oil, whose production is also rising,” de la O Levy said. “The situation is very tense.” In the country’s state-controlled newspaper Gramna, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused the U.S. of implementing a “genocidal energy blockade.” Still, he said, the U.S. has “had to acknowledge that, despite the brutal measures of economic and energy strangulation decreed by the U.S., Cuba remains standing; it is not a failed state.” As a result, the communist leader continued, Washington is “thereby admitting that the crisis gripping us is the result of the severe economic war they are waging against us and the energy persecution.”
Under the leftist regime of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela once served as Cuba’s main supplier of oil. Mexico’s left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum has faced heavy U.S. pressure against sending shipments to the island. Just one large oil tanker, the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, has brought crude oil to Cuba since December, The Guardian reported. “We are back in the stone age,” independent journalist Yoani Sanchez said in a broadcast Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Texas Republican John Cornyn and Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman introduced a Senate bill Thursday to block future presidential administrations from halting approvals of new liquified natural gas projects. Politico described the LNG Export Security Act as “a bipartisan rebuke of former President Joe Biden’s move in 2024 to free new export permits for natural gas” while the economic and environmental effects of selling more fuel overseas were being studied. A federal judge later halted the pause, but the pause nevertheless enraged Republicans, who later moved to crush the solar and wind sectors.
The clean energy project finance startup Crux has received a $500 million debt facility from Nuveen Energy Infrastructure Credit as part of the company’s expansion. While New York-based Crux was initially built to facilitate the transfer of lucrative green tax credits, the financing from insurer TIAA’s investment manager will “help expand its role as a general partner for clean energy and manufacturing investments,” Bloomberg reported.
In the midst of congressional negotiations last year in the fate of the clean energy tax credits, Crux CEO Alfred Johnson described the company’s expansive vision to Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “All parts of the capital stack are opaque, illiquid, bespoke and manual. These are private transactions that require a ton of documentation, models, advisory lawyers. But it doesn't have to be as bad as it is.”
Once stagnant, the nuclear industry in North America is seeing a real revival. The region now has 90 projects under development across the continent, with eight already breaking ground, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute’s latest state of the industry report.
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.
