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The latest capacity auction in PJM Interconnection, where power generators in the nation’s largest electricity market bid to provide power when the grid is especially stressed, ended at the legally-mandated cap of $333.44 per megawatt. This adds up to some $16.4 billion, a record-setting figure following the past two auctions, which brought in $16.1 billion and $14.7 billion.
This auction covers 2027 through 2028, and is the last that will be subject to the price cap. Despite the dizzying spending, it failed to procure enough power to meet PJM’s preferred 20% reserve margin for a severe demand event. The auction procured 145,777 megawatts of capacity, 6,623 megawatts short of the target, giving the grid a 14.8% margin. Much of that projected demand will come from data centers, which, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote, have stressed the grid operator nearly to the breaking point.
A view of Puerto Rico's lone coal plant. Alexander C. Kaufman
Global coal use is set to start declining over the next five years as renewables and liquified natural gas gobble up its market share, the International Energy Agency projected in its latest annual forecast Wednesday. Demand is on track to inch upward 0.5% this year to a record 8,845 million tons before dropping 3% by 2030. Analysts warned Bloomberg that coal has remained “stubbornly strong” given high levels of consumption in China and India, and the Paris-based IEA cautioned that its five-year outlook “is subject to significant uncertainties that could impact it materially.”
Among the factors that look increasingly certain: That the Trump administration won’t allow any more U.S. coal plants to shut down. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy ordered the 730-megawatt TransAlta Centralia Generation in Washington to remain past its retirement at the end of this month, despite the state’s ban on coal operations. There’s just one big problem with that plan, as Matthew wrote last month. Old coal plants keep breaking down.
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Nuno Loureiro, a professor of nuclear science and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, died Tuesday after being shot multiple times in his home near Boston the night before. Police statements made no mention of a suspect or motives, but Loureiro’s coveted position as one of the United States’ leading fusion scientists stoked speculation that the killing was politically motivated. Prominent influencers including the Trump adviser Laura Loomer falsely claimed that Loureiro, who was from Portugal, was Jewish and a vocal activist for the Israeli government. But The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli intelligence officials are investigating potential links between the murder and the Iranian government, though the newspaper cautioned that the assessment “has not yet been verified.” As of now, there is no clear evidence of who killed Loureiro or why. His death shocked the field of research in which he was lauded as a leader. A former colleague in Portugal who started working at the same laboratory with Loureiro years ago in Lisbon and “knew him well” told me, “Everyone here is in shock.”
Back in June, Matthew wrote a good piece explaining why the commonly used metric known as levelized cost of energy was “wrong.” Essentially, LCOE represents the energy output of a given source in terms of its construction and operating expenses — the lower the LCOE, the more efficient it is operationally. But the metric fails to capture all the other things that make an energy source valuable, such as the frequency with which it operates, how long it lasts, or how much infrastructure is required to make use of it. When Ontario Power Generation assessed the cost of building new nuclear reactors at its Darlington station, the LCOE showed solar and batteries costing far less. But a full systems analysis found that nuclear reactors would last longer, require fewer transmission upgrades, and would not need back-up generation. A report published this morning by the consultancy FTI has proposed two new metrics instead: Levelized value of energy, or LVOE, “which reflects the total value a project can create for its owners, and Levelized Net Benefit (LNB), which quantifies the broader value a project can deliver to the overall system.” While the LCOE for solar is roughly 40% lower than nuclear power in both Texas’ ERCOT grid system and PJM, a chart from the report shows that nuclear has an LVOE roughly 10 times greater.
A chart comparing LVOE of nuclear and solar in two major grids. FTI
Record rainfall last month has revived an ancient lake in an unusual place. When ice covered the Sierra Nevada between 128,000 and 186,000 years ago, a lake 100 miles long and 600 feet deep sat in what is today the Mojave Desert in eastern California. That lake, called Lake Manly, has returned. As the science site Phys.org reported, “now Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth and the lowest point in North America, has a desert lake framed by snow-capped mountains.” But the “marvel” is likely to disappear soon.
Opposing data centers is emerging as a touchstone political test on the left. On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist independent from Vermont, posted a video on his X account in which he argued that “a moratorium” on building new data centers nationwide “will give democracy a chance to catch up, and ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1%.” Polling suggests the political issue has populist appeal. Just 44% of Americans said they would support a data center built nearby in a September survey from Heatmap Pro.
The House of Representatives voted 215-209 Tuesday to advance the bipartisan permitting reform bill known as the SPEED Act, despite mounting opposition from Republicans to provisions meant to protect already-licensed projects from the type of legal assault the Trump administration has unleashed on offshore wind. Republican critics of the bill, including Maryland Congressman Andy Harris and New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew, vowed to vote against any legislation that included measures that might defend offshore turbine developers from Trump’s “total war on wind.”
Yet, “while the bill is alive for now, the outcome casts a pall over the prospects for any permitting deal this Congress,” as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last night, because “there is little shot of a grand deal on NEPA reform without exactly the sort of executive power restrictions Republican objectors feared.”
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The nationwide transformer shortage is getting worse as extreme weather destroys the existing grid and data centers demand the buildout of power infrastructure at a rate not seen in decades. A new Wall Street Journal feature on the manufacturers racing to churn out the big transformers featured a fresh statistic from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie that illustrates just how bad the problem has become. Orders for large transformers exceeded supply by about 14,000 units so far this year. The Biden administration made the transformer crisis worse by proposing — then revoking — a regulation to increase the energy efficiency of the equipment at the cost of requiring manufacturers to decide between investing in compliant assembly lines by 2027 or additional output to match today’s demand. The Trump administration has made the problem worse still by imposing strict trade tariffs on the very material transformers need most, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote.
A rendering of one of Last Energy's power plants.Last Energy
In the race to build the nation’s first small modular reactor, there are startups that developed designs based on less-powerful models of existing light water reactors and startups that are pursuing next-generation technologies shrunken down to a tiny fraction of a normal atomic power plant’s size. Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy is doing both. The company, founded by the entrepreneur and nuclear podcaster Bret Kugelmass, started out by proposing to build 20-megawatt light water reactors in Europe, before embarking on a U.S. project after the Trump administration vowed to ease the way for new nuclear reactors. On Tuesday, in a sign of investors’ confidence in the new trans-Atlantic direction, Last Energy announced a $100 million fundraising round. “For the first half a decade that I was telling people I was doing nuclear, I had to convince them, ‘Hey, here’s why nuclear is important,’” Kugelmass told TechCrunch. “Now everyone just comes to us saying, ‘Oh yeah, of course nuclear is a key part of the solution.’ I’m like, okay, great, I’m glad everyone’s caught up now.” The company is among the 10 startups in the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program, meant to speed up deployments of new technologies by bringing at least three to the atom-splitting phase of development by next July 4.
The fundraising news came as the Trump administration took yet another stake in a private minerals company. On Tuesday, the military announced a deal to take a 40% share of the nearly $8 billion mineral processing plant the South Korean industrial company Korea Zinc promised to build in Tennessee.
BlackRock’s retreat from sustainable investing has cost the world’s largest asset manager the business of at least two European pension funds. On Tuesday, the PME group, which manages more than $69 billion in retirement savings for Dutch workers in the metal and technologies sectors, said it had “decided to end our relationship with BlackRock,” the Financial Times reported. The move comes after the Dutch healthcare workers pension group PFZW withdrew about more than $16 billion from the financial giant, though its money-market funds are still under BlackRock’s management. It’s not just BlackRock facing backlash for its softening position on emissions. In February, the United Kingdom-based People’s Pension yanked nearly $38 billion from State Street, saying it was prioritizing “sustainability, active stewardship, and long-term value creation.”
For penguins, bad weather is good news. In a new study in Nature Geoscience, researchers from the University of Gothenburg showed that storms in the Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica regulate the Earth’s climate by moving heat, carbon, and nutrients out in the world’s oceans. The effect amounts to what scientists called “a critical climate service” marked by “absorbing 75% of the excess heat generated by humans globally.”
