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If you’re selling clean firm power, data centers are “the best news ever.”
There’s a simple and well-supported story to tell about the projected growth in electricity demand coming from data centers, population growth, and new factories, i.e. that it will boost the fossil fuel industry. When faced with the need for more electricity generation, utilities will simply build more natural gas power plants, and market overseers will act to ensure that aging gas and coal plants don’t get shut down. Some version of this story is already playing out in Arizona, the Southeast, and the Mid-Atlantic.
Many green activists are understandably wary of the data center boom, seeing it as a “unique opportunity for fossil fuel interests to get in while the getting is still good and turn a digital and industrial boom into yet another gas boom,” as the Natural Resources Defense Council said of Georgia, where a 15-times increase in projected electricity demand has Georgia Power scrambling for more fossil fuels.
However this is not the story I’ve been hearing this week in New York City, where thousands of government officials, climate activists, celebrities, investors, and executives have descended for the annual meeting-and-panel extravaganza that is Climate Week. For the Biden Administration officials, clean energy executives, and technological visionaries flitting between sponsored events, data center load growth is,as John F. Kennedy might have put it in one of his frequent flights of amateur Chinese linguistics, a danger and opportunity mixed into one.
“This can be a good-news story. The sky doesn’t necessarily need to be falling,” Kelly Sanders, assistant director for energy systems innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said during a panel discussion hosted by the think tank Third Way, referring to load growth from manufacturing and data centers. “This could actually be good for clean energy.”
And very good for anyone who can promise to deliver said clean energy, even if it’s years in the future. During a “fireside chat” at Geothermal House, a day-long summit on geothermal energy sponsored by Project InnerSpace, a geothermal nonprofit, Mike Schroepfer, the former CTO of Meta who is now a climate venture investor, said the demand for power from AI was “the best news ever.” He argued that having companies with big power needs and deep pockets was much better for clean energy development than having a stagnant grid that’s just trying to replace dirty power plants.
Among those in the same rah-rah camp, the general idea is that energy-hungry data centers can help get new clean energy sources like advanced geothermal through the project finance "valley of death" so they can eventually deliver affordable, clean power to the rest of us. “For the first time in history, demand for clean energy outstrips supply,” said Ally Yost, a senior vice president at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, during a panel discussion in New York City. “Those that have access to that clean power will be in a very profitable situation.”
“AI is a gift for fusion,” added Clay Dumas, a partner at Lowercarbon Capital, a Commonwealth investor. He even conceded that the skyrocketing demand was a “gift for fission,” from which fusion advocates are typically at pains to distinguish themselves. “There’s an intense interest and demand for clean electrons,” he said, referencing the recent deal to bring back a shuttered reactor at Three Mile Island, alongside a power purchase agreement with Microsoft.
That investors and executives at fusion companies were talking about meeting projected load growth is a good sign of how heady the financial and technology prospects have gotten for anyone who has a good story to tell (and some capital). Fusion’s claim to be the holy grail of energy has passed over time from aspiration to irony and back again, thanks to billions piled into the industry in the past few years.
This combination of dreaminess and realism prevailed at Commonwealth’s event, where Dumas said that when he first invested in the company, “there was an exciting story of how fusion or a company like CFS could provide 5, 10, 20% of the world’s primary energy and could become the biggest company in the history of capitalism,” Dumas said. (Perhaps not surprisingly, several former SpaceX employees work at Commonwealth.) Now the focus is on getting a power plant developed with technology that the industry insists will be ready to go online on a reasonable timeframe — something more like a decade than the standard 20 or 30 years.
But whether you’re splitting atoms or fusing them, the demand for clean power from data centers is coming in months and years, not decades. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman reportedlytold the White House he wants to build 5-gigawatt data centers, which would take the equivalent of five large nuclear reactors to power. Even restarting an existing fission plant takes at least three years, while building a new one using existing typically takes around … well no one knows because there are no plans currently to do so.
“People are not going to be patient” if new clean power can’t be developed quickly, Juliann Edwards, the chief development officer of The Nuclear Company, told me this week. “They're going to go build more gas plants.”
Kathleen Barrón, the chief strategy officer at Constellation, the country’s leading nuclear energy providers, said during the panel hosted by Third Way that conversations about new nuclear are “starting to happen,” and that the most important part of that process is coming up with a reasonable cost estimate. “Once you know what it costs, you can figure out what contributions will be,” she said, referring to the nasty problem of how to split up the expense among various stakeholders, including the government. Barrón pointed out that the second reactor at Vogtle was almost a third cheaper than the first — meaning that maybe the nuclear industry has a chance of getting a handle on costs. In the meantime, owners of existing plants will be happy to reopen and expand what they can, picking up generous incentives all along the way.
Edwards told me she’s been speaking with potential offtakers like Amazon and Meta, utilities, independent power producers, and investors in pursuit of having “binding contracts” for new plants by late 2026. But the hyperscalers committed to using clean power will need more than that.
Lucia Tian, a former official at the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office who now heads of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google, estimated that Google’s clean energy needs would be largely served from existing renewable technologies “that we can deploy at scale,” which, paired with storage, would get the company to around 80% of its needs. “But in order to get that last 20%, we need a suite of technologies including nuclear, long-duration energy storage, fossil generation with carbon capture and storage.”
Behind each of these promising technologies is a unique deployment issue. Geothermal might work in the western United States only, for instance, and even then not before the late 2020s. As for nuclear, outside of reopening shuttered plants and uprating existing ones, Tian said, “the reality that everyone recognizes” is that if “I sign a deal today” for a small modular reactor or the existing AP1000 design, “it’s not going to come online before 2030.” This leaves “a strong role for CCS,” she added, referring to using natural gas with carbon capture and storage, an approach strongly encouraged by new Environmental Protection Agency rules for gas plants, but one that is by no means widespread today.
Making progress on a technology that’s been in development for decades and still involves extracting and burning a fossil fuel doesn’t quite meet the futuristic moment the data center and artificial intelligence boom has created in the present.
“Every day someone asks, can’t you foot the billion dollar risk of a nuclear reactor?” Tian said. The future will have to wait a bit longer, but the data centers are coming now.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Juliann Edwards is not a founder of The Nuclear Company.
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Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.
At least in the short term, developers looking to build quickly have just a few sites to choose from.
Donald Trump aims to spur the biggest nuclear development boom this side of the 21st century. The big question: Will it work?
Trump signed a fleet of executive orders on Friday seeking to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity, expanding generation from 100 gigawatts today to 400 gigawatts by 2050. To that end, he also set a near-term goal to start construction on 10 new conventional reactors by 2030 — that is, within the next five years.
The interim goal on its own is, on its face, extremely ambitious. There have only been three reactors completed this century: Watts Bar Unit 2, which had a complicated, multi-decade development timeline and finally entered operation in 2016; and Vogtle Units 3 and 4, which started construction in 2009 and came online in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Part of the reason those three facilities took so long is the convoluted permitting process nuclear hopefuls must navigate. (Chris Gadomski, lead nuclear analyst at BloombergNEF, called it a “gauntlet.”) It can take almost a decade for a new nuclear project to receive what’s called a “combined operating license” from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal body charged with overseeing civilian nuclear technology and power plant operations. The orders seek to simplify and accelerate the NRC’s licensing procedure, giving the body 18 months to issue new rules and guidance designed to shorten the timeline for new applications to 18 months at the longest, and for continuing operations to just a year.
In the even nearer term, however, “If you want to build nuclear fast in this country, you would go to sites that are already licensed or already have infrastructure,” Brett Rampal, senior director of nuclear and power strategy at Veriten, told Heatmap. Many of these sites received NRC approval in the 2000 and 2010s but languished due to poor market conditions (the rise of cheap natural gas), the nuclear industry’s own instability (Westinghouse, a major contractor, went bankrupt in 2017), or some combination of both.
But even then the process is complicated, as Adam Stein, director of the nuclear energy innovation program of the Breakthrough Institute, told Heatmap. “Several of the sites with licenses for AP1000 [reactors] theoretically could start construction fairly quickly without major license changes,” he said. “However, that’s not likely to happen.”
The AP1000 is a 1-gigawatt pressurized water reactor made by Westinghouse, and it’s currently pumping out electrons at the Vogtle site in Georgia. There are hopes that it can become a standard design that is built over and over again at scale.
But even on an already-licensed site, any new project would be starting from scratch with its supply chain and workforce. And just because the site has a license now doesn’t mean its developers are done with the licensing process. “The licenses for those sites were issued for a design that was essentially what Vogtle started out as,” Stein explained. Vogtle subsequently underwent almost 200 license amendments, and it’s probable that a new build would want to incorporate many of these design changes into their license, as well. “That takes time,” Stein said.
Duke Energy, which serves over 8 million customers largely in the Southeast, has active combined operating licenses for AP1000s at sites in Florida and in South Carolina. The company told South Carolina utilities regulators in April that its W.S. Lee site in the state “offers the best opportunity to deploy large light-water reactors in the Carolinas” — but that, at least at the time, “the conceptual deployment timeline from when a definitive “go forward” decision is made is about 13 to 14 years.” (Emphasis mine.)
The spokesperson noted that the combined operating license at the site “gives us optionality in the future to construct and operate two Westinghouse AP1000 units at the site,” and that “we will have an opportunity to update state Commissions in the Carolinas on our progress regarding the potential for future new nuclear investments later this year.” The spokesperson gave no specific indication that the company’s timeline for building a new plant had changed due to the executive orders.
As for the Florida site, the spokesperson said, “We currently have no nuclear planned for Duke Energy Florida per our 10-year site plan, although advanced nuclear overall is still a longer-term option.”
What about “advanced nuclear”? Several advanced nuclear projects have either applied for or gotten construction permits. Kairos Power received construction permits for demonstration reactors, while X-Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and TerraPower have applied for construction permits for advanced reactors. These companies are pursuing a different pathway than the combined operating license application process and will need to apply for operation licenses as well. Two advanced reactor designs by NuScale have received approval from the NRC to date, including one that’s fresh as of Thursday, but there are no current plans to deploy either anywhere.
That hasn’t dampened excitement about advanced nuclear, including on sites with licenses for larger reactors. Virginia utility Dominion Energy is looking at new nuclear development at its North Anna site, which is licensed for a GE-Hitachi Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, a large reactor which has received an NRC design certification but has not yet been deployed. But instead of conventional reactors, Dominion has a memorandum of understanding with Amazon to explore small modular reactor development.
Duke Energy, meanwhile, told Heatmap that the company “strongly supports the advancement and deployment of new nuclear technologies, including large reactors and small modular reactors, to meet the growing energy needs of our customers.”
There is one nuclear company that greeted the executive orders with fulsome excitement: The Nuclear Company. Unlike other newer entrants in the space, The Nuclear Company — which raised a $51 million Series A in April — aims to build six conventional reactors with “proven, licensed technology.”
“I feel like I’m Jack and Rose from the Titanic and my arms are out. I feel like we're flying finally,” Juliann Edwards, chief development officer at The Nuclear Company, told Heatmap. “I feel like we’ve been unleashed through these executive orders.”
As difficult and costly as it was to bring the new Vogtle reactors online, the process jumpstarted the previously dormant domestic nuclear industry. And The Nuclear Company thinks it would be a shame for this emergent expertise to go to waste.
The Nuclear Company has identified the first site where it plans to build, but it’s not yet public, Edwards told Heatmap, though she pointed to states such as Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama as places where the company could “hit the ground running,” given that they already have the necessary licenses in place.
And yet The Nuclear Company does not, itself, intend to design or operate these reactors. Instead it would run licensing, permitting, and construction, while also potentially serving as the facility’s long-term owner, depending on the regulatory structure of the local utilities and grid operators.
That still leaves the question of whether the market will end up valuing the power produced from all these new reactors at a level that will keep an operator in business. That’s not a given. In the 2010s, nuclear capacity fell in part because the market preferred natural gas to nuclear, since it was cheaper and could respond quickly to varying demand. “Why would you build a nuclear reactor when you got very cheap natural gas?” BNEF’s Gadomski, told Heatmap.
But the prospects of an artificial-intelligence-fueled data center boom, as well as the broader electrification of the economy, has begun to change this calculus, as utilities look to catch up to quickly rising electricity demand for the first time this century.
"I’m hoping that this environment doesn’t create too much uncertainty for folks, and I’m hoping it sends signals to get things going and that things will hopefully work out,” Rampal said. “I love my utilities, but they are 14 times bitten, 97 times shy.”
On a state legislative session, German Courts, and U.S. permitting personnel
Current conditions: The first named tropical storm of the year appears to be forming in the Pacific Ocean as Tropical Storm Alvin • Northern California braces for temperatures as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It’s cloudy and cool in Manhattan, where Wednesday night the Court of International Trade threw out much of Trump’s tariff regime.
1. Texas anti-renewables bills won’t get crucial vote
A suite of bills in the Texas legislature that targeted the state’s booming renewable energy sector will not make it to the governor’s desk after the state’s House of Representatives declined to schedule votes on them before the Texas legislature’s biennial session ends on Monday, The Hill reported.
The Texas Senate had passed S.B. 819 in April, which would have mandated extra regulatory approval for large solar and wind projects, over and above what fossil fuels are required to seek. The Senate also passed S.B. 388, which would have essentially mandated that more than half of new generation in the state would be gas, and S.B. 715, which would have required existing wind and solar generation to have gas backup. Trade groups were “in freak-out mode,” my colleague Jael Holzman reported at the time, and the head of one renewables group testified that S.B. 819 alone would “kill” the industry.
2. D.C. energy veteran gets permitting gig
Emily Domenech, a former staffer for House Speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, will head the federal government’s Permitting Council, Politico reported Wednesday.
The Permitting Council was established as part of the Highway Bill in 2015 as the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, and helps coordinate permitting for infrastructure projects that require multiple layers and stages of federal regulatory and environmental review.
Domenech also helped negotiate permitting reform provisions in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act. More recently, she has been a senior vice president at the energy and environment public affairs firm Boundary Stone.
I spoke with Domenech last year after the presidential election for a story about how the clean energy industry could “learn to speak Republican.” In the past, she told me, “clean energy hasn’t focused on getting to know those representatives. When they’ve had ideas for bills or policies, they went to Democrats. They haven’t built a lot of personal relationships with members of Congress on the other side of the aisle.”
3. Climate lawsuit rejected, principle behind it affirmed
A Peruvian farmer’s lawsuit against the utility RWE for its contribution to the risk of glacial flooding was rejected by a German court, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, had sued in Hamm Higher Regional Court, arguing that emissions from RWE increased glacial melting and threatened the inundation of his town of Huaraz.
RWE does not operate in Peru, but the suit argued that it was responsible for 0.5% of global emissions, and thus should be responsible for that portion of the cost of protecting the town from flooding, about $19,000. The judge dismissed the suit but “affirmed that German civil law could be used to hold companies accountable for the worldwide effects of their emissions,” the Times reported.
Lliuya’s lawyer hailed the decision, saying in a statement, “For the first time in history, a higher court in Europe has ruled that large emitters can be held responsible for the consequences of their greenhouse gas emissions.”
RWE warned that the decision could “have unforeseeable consequences for Germany as an industrial location, because ultimately claims could be asserted against any German company for damage caused by climate change anywhere in the world.”
4. Constitution revived
A fracking site in the Marcellus Shale. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The Williams Companies is planning to start the process of permitting formerly dormant pipeline projects in New York state, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The two pipelines, the Constitution and Northeast Supply Enhancement, were canceled in 2020 and 2024, respectively, following intense environmental and local opposition.
The Northeast is adjacent to productive natural gas fields in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, but does not have fully built out infrastructure for shipping gas from Pennsylvania to New York and beyond. The Constitution pipeline would have run from Northeast Pennsylvania to Schoharie, New York, outside Albany. The Northeast Supply Enhancement would have augmented existing infrastructure that runs from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania through New Jersey, and would have included new pipelines under New York Bay to supply gas to New York City and Long Island.
The move to restart the projects comes after President Trump allowed work to restart on the Empire Wind 1 offshore wind project off the south coast of Long Island. While New York Governor Kathy Hochul never directly said there was quid pro quo for the pipeline, she did say in a statement at the time that she would “work with the Administration and private entities on new energy projects that meet the legal requirements under New York law.”
5. Fed scraps climate groups
The Federal Reserve has gotten rid of a number of working groups and internal organizations dedicated to climate change, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. These include the Supervision Climate Committee, founded in 2021, which the Fed said then would “further build the Federal Reserve’s capacity to understand the potential implications of climate change for financial institutions, infrastructure, and markets.” The other groups eliminated are the Financial Stability Climate Committee, the Climate Committee on Economic Activity, and the Climate Data Committee.
The central bank’s actions are part of a government wide push to de-emphasize climate change in policymaking and official communications. Days before President Trump’s second inauguration, the Fed said that it had withdrawn from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System. In a statement, the Fed said that the group had “increasingly broadened in scope, covering a wider range of issues that are outside of the Board's statutory mandate.”
The central bank will continue to “assess climate risk as part of its business-as-usual activities,” Bloomberg reported.
“Abruptly ending the energy tax credits would threaten America’s energy independence and the reliability of our grid - we urge the senate to enact legislation with a sensible wind down of 25D and 48e,” Tesla Energy’s Twitter account posted Wednesday night, in reference to tax credits for home purchases of solar and storage energy systems and investments in clean energy systems respectively. The post came hours after news broke that Tesla CEO Elon Musk would be leaving the Trump administration.