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A new report demonstrates how to power the computing boom with (mostly) clean energy.
After a year of concerted hand-wringing about the growing energy needs of data centers, a report that dropped just before the holidays proposed a solution that had been strangely absent from the discussion.
AI companies have seemingly grasped for every imaginable source of clean energy to quench their thirst for power, including pricey, left-field ideas like restarting shuttered nuclear plants. Some are foregoing climate concerns altogether and ordering up off-grid natural gas turbines. In a pithily named new analysis — “Fast, scalable, clean, and cheap enough” — the report’s authors make a compelling case for an alternative: off-grid solar microgrids.
An off-grid solar microgrid is a system with solar panels, batteries, and small gas generators that can work together to power a data center directly without connecting to the wider electricity system. It can have infinite possible configurations, such as greater or smaller numbers of solar panels, and more or less gas-generated capacity. The report models the full range of possibilities to illustrate the trade-offs in terms of emission reductions and cost.
An eclectic group of experts got together to do the research, including staffers from the payment company Stripe, a developer called Scale Microgrids, and Paces, which builds software to help renewable energy developers identify viable sites for projects. They found that an off-grid microgrid that supplied 44% of a data center’s demand from solar panels and used a natural gas generator the rest of the time would cost roughly $93 per megawatt-hour compared to about $86 for large, off-grid natural gas turbines — and it would emit nearly one million tons of CO2 less than the gas turbines. A cleaner system that produced 90% of its power from solar and batteries would cost closer to $109 per megawatt-hour, the authors found. While that’s more expensive than gas turbines, it’s significantly cheaper than repowering Three Mile Island, the fabled nuclear plant that Microsoft is bringing back online for an estimated $130 per megawatt-hour.
One challenge with solar microgrids is that they require a lot of land for solar panels. But a geospatial analysis showed that there’s more than enough available land in the U.S. southwest — primarily in West Texas — to cover estimated energy demand growth from data centers through 2030. This shouldn’t be taken as a recommendation, per se. The paper doesn’t interrogate the need for data centers or the trade-offs of building renewable power for AI training facilities versus to serve manufacturing or households. The report is just an exercise in asking whether, if these data centers are going to be developed, could they at least add as few emissions as possible? Not all hyperscalers care about climate, and those that do might still prioritize speed and scale over their net-zero commitments. But the authors argue that it’s possible to build these systems more quickly than it would be to install big gas turbines, which currently have at least three-year lead times to procure and fall under more complicated permitting regimes.
Before the New Year, I spoke with two of the authors — Zeke Hausfather from Stripe and Duncan Campbell from Scale Microgrids — about the report. Stripe doesn’t build data centers and has no plans to, but Hausfather works for a unit within the company called Stripe Climate, which has a “remit to work on impactful things,” he told me. He and his colleagues got interested in the climate dilemma of data centers, and enlisted Scale Microgrids and Paces to help investigate. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Why weren’t off-grid solar microgrids really being considered before?
Zeke Hausfather: As AI has grown dramatically, there’s been much more demand for data centers specifically focused on training. Those data centers have a lot more relaxed requirements. Instead of serving millions of customer requests in real time, they’re running these incredibly energy intensive training models. Those don’t need to necessarily be located near where people live, and that unlocks a lot more potential for solar, because you need about 50 times more land to build a data center with off-grid solar and storage than you would to build a data center that had a grid connection.
The other change is that we’re simply running out of good grid connections. And so a lot of the conversation among data center developers has been focused on, is there a way to do this with off-grid natural gas? We think that it makes a lot more sense, particularly given the relaxed constraints of where you can build these, to go with solar and storage, gas back-up, and substantially reduce the emissions impact.
Duncan Campbell: It was funny, when Nan [Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe] and Zeke first reached out to me, I feel like they convinced me that microgrids were a good idea, which was the first time this ever happened in my life. They were like, what do you think about off-grid solar and storage? Oh, the energy density is way off, you need a ton of land. They’re like, yeah, but you know, for training, you could put it out in the desert, it’s fine, and hyperscalers are doing crazy things right now to access this power. We just went through all these things, and by the end of the call, I was like, yeah, we should do this study. I wasn’t thinking about it this way until me, the microgrids guy, spoke to the payments company.
So it’s just kind of against conventional logic?
Campbell: Going off-grid at all is wild for a data center operator to consider, given the historical impulse was, let’s have 3x more backup generators than we need. Even the off-grid gas turbine proposals out there feel a little nuts. Then, to say solar, 1,000 acres of land, a million batteries — it’s just so unconventional, it’s almost heretical. But when you soberly assess the performance criteria and how the landscape has shifted, particularly access to the grid being problematic right now, but also different requirements for AI training and a very high willingness to pay — as we demonstrate in our reference case with the Three Mile Island restart — it makes sense.
Hausfather: We should be clear, when we talk about reliability, a data center with what we model, which is solar, batteries, and 125% capacity backup gas generators, is still probably going to achieve upwards of 99% reliability. It’s just not gonna be the 99.999% that’s traditionally been needed for serving customers with data centers. You can relax some of the requirements around that.
Can you explain how you went about investigating what it would mean for data centers to use off-grid solar microgrids?
Campbell: First we just built a pretty simple power flow model that says, if you’re in a given location, the solar panel is going to make this much power every hour of the year. And if you have a certain amount of demand and a certain amount of battery, the battery is going to charge and discharge these times to make the demand and supply match. And then when it can’t, your generators will kick on. So that model is just for a given solar-battery-generator combo in a given location. Then what we did is made a huge scenario suite in 50-megawatt increments. Now you can see, for any level of renewable-ness you want, here’s what the [levelized cost of energy] is.
Hausfather: As you approach 100%, the costs start increasing exponentially, which isn’t a new finding, but you’re essentially having to overbuild more and more solar and batteries in order to deal with those few hours of the year where you have extended periods of cloudiness. Which is why it makes a lot more sense, financially, to have a system with some gas generator use — unless you happen to be in a situation where you can actually only run your data center 90% of the time. I think that’s probably a little too heretical for anyone today, but we did include that as one of the cases.
Did you consider water use? Because when you zoom in on the Southwest, that seems like it could be a constraint.
Hausfather: We talked about water use a little bit, but it wasn’t a primary consideration. One of the reasons is that how data centers are designed has a big effect on net water use. There are a lot of designs now that are pretty low — close to zero — water use, because you’re cycling water through the system rather than using evaporative cooling as the primary approach.
What do you want the takeaway from this report to be? Should all data centers be doing this? To what extent do you think this can replace other options out there?
Hausfather: There is a land rush right now for building data centers quickly. While there’s a lot of exciting investment happening in clean, firm generation like the enhanced geothermal that Fervo is doing, none of those are going to be available at very large scales until after 2030. So if you’re building data centers right now and you don’t want to cause a ton of emissions and threaten your company’s net-zero targets or the social license for AI more broadly, this makes a lot of sense as an option. The cost premium above building a gas system is not that big.
Campbell: For me, it’s two things. I see one purpose of this white paper being to reset rules of thumb. There’s this vestigial knowledge we have that this is impossible, and no, this is totally possible. And it seems actually pretty reasonable.
The second part that I think is really radical is the gigantic scale implied by this solution. Every other solution being proposed is kind of like finding a needle in a haystack — if we find this old steel mill, we could use that interconnection to build a data center, or, you know, maybe we can get Exxon to make carbon capture work finally. If a hyperscaler just wanted to build 10 gigawatts of data centers, and wanted one plan to do it, I think this is the most compelling option. The scalability implied by this solution is a huge factor that should be considered.
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Thea Riofrancos, a professor of political science at Providence College, discusses her new book, Extraction, and the global consequences of our growing need for lithium.
We cannot hope to halt or even slow dangerous climate change without remaking our energy systems, and we cannot remake our energy systems without environmentally damaging projects like lithium mines.
This is the perplexing paradox at the heart of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, a new book by political scientist and climate activist Thea Riofrancos, coming out September 23, from Norton.
Riofrancos, a professor at Providence College, has spent much of her academic career studying mining and oil production in Latin America. In Extraction, she traces the lithium boom of the past five or so years, as the aims of the Global North and Global South began to resemble an inverted mirror. Countries in the latter group that have long been sites of mineral extraction — with little economic benefit — are now seeking to manufacture the more lucrative high tech products further down the supply chain. Meanwhile, after decades of offshoring, Europe and the U.S. suddenly want to bring mining back home in pursuit of “green dominance,” she writes. All of this is happening against the backdrop of China’s geopolitical rise, the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, and worsening effects of climate change.
The book also spends time with the indigenous communities and environmental defenders fighting the lithium industry in Chile, Spain, and the American West. Riofrancos doesn’t shy away from difficult questions, such as whether there is such a thing as a “right place” for a lithium mine. But she’s optimistic that there’s a better path than the one we’re on now. “The energy transition has presented a fork in the road for the entire economic and social order,” she writes. Down one road, we entrench existing power structures. Down the other, we capitalize on the energy transition to create a more just society.
Green capitalism, Riofrancos argues, is an oxymoron. While we can’t avoid extraction, we can reduce the need for it, for example through better public transit, smaller EV batteries, and minerals recycling, she concludes.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Are there notable differences between lithium and the extraction of other natural resources?
Yes and no. Whether it’s copper or lithium or gold or cobalt — and even I would include hydrocarbons in this, to a degree — whether we look at the economics, the way that they have boom and bust cycles, the fact that governments, even neoliberal governments, tend to take a pretty concerted interest in extractive sectors within their jurisdiction, environmental concerns and direct forms of violence that are meted out at environmental defenders — no, it’s not different. Which should raise alarm bells because a lot of those dynamics are not positive.
What’s different, though, is that precisely because mining companies and host governments claim that the extraction of lithium is urgent and essential for the energy transition, what ends up happening is that these big claims are made — like, “We are now a sustainable mining company because we’re extracting lithium,” or, “This is part of our green industrial policy.” This toxic and dirty extractive sector is now greenified because of its role in the energy transition. On the one hand, that’s greenwashing. On the other, it’s an opening. When companies make those claims, it’s something to hold them accountable to.
I was somewhat surprised by the issues you describe with the way lithium mining is regulated in Chile — the companies do their own environmental monitoring, there’s a lack of transparent data, the brine they mine in the Atacama is not considered water under Chilean law, etc. It seems like the state could change a lot of this. Why hasn’t it?
States in the Global South, although not exclusively there, lack geological and hydrological data about their own territory. In ways that we can trace to colonialism and neocolonialism in terms of who controls the territory and who has knowledge about it, the actors that have the basic data about deposits, how they interact with water sources, all of that, are the companies. And so to even regulate these companies better, you first need to set up independent and objective sources of data collection — and that’s something that any state might struggle with, but especially in the Global South, given the kind of legacy under which these companies operated, with little oversight of the state.
The [U.S. Geological Survey] doesn’t exist everywhere in the world. Not every state has a surveying agency with that level of expertise. And even in the U.S., the USGS actually has quite partial knowledge of what’s here. And there are many examples of companies in the U.S. hiding proprietary knowledge from the government.
What about after Gabriel Boric became president in Chile, in 2022, and created this new public-private partnership between the mining giant SQM and the government. Wouldn’t that have given the Chilean government more visibility and more control?
I think in some ways he’s made strides. He has set aside many salt flats for conservation. A right wing government wouldn’t have done that. He also is inserting the state, via the state-owned copper company Codelco, entering into public-private partnerships with companies, including SQM. If all goes according to plan, that will help the state learn more about lithium extraction, or maybe even set up their own lithium company, which was the initial goal of this government.
I’ll just point out two things to show how this is difficult. According to indigenous communities and environmental activists that have been organizing around this, they were excluded from the initial moment where that memorandum of understanding between SQM and Codelco was signed, and so they felt like it was a reenactment of historic injuries by a government that they had cautiously supported or thought would be different. Now they’re back at the negotiating table and indigenous communities are being consulted again. But there was a critical moment where the MOU was signed and indigenous communities were not present, and actually learned about it from the media. These historic patterns are really hard to change because companies hold a lot of power.
Even a progressive government is balancing indigenous rights and ecological protection with a desire to not lose market share. Argentina is starting to catch up with Chile — is Chile still going to remain the number two producer globally? Does it need to change its regulations to attract more companies? This is the kind of double bind that Global South societies find themselves in.
You write about this tension between expanding extraction and minimizing environmental and community impacts. Do you believe there are actually ways to minimize these impacts?
Absolutely. You can do anything better. I believe in human ingenuity and science and figuring out how to improve processes. There are ways to extract using less water, using a smaller land footprint, using fewer polluting energy sources. One of the reasons emissions from mining are not insignificant is a lot of it happens off-grid, and for now, that means diesel generators or gasoline-powered mining vehicles, let alone the cargo ships that are shipping the stuff around the world. So we could think about localizing or regionalizing supply chains.
The question is, how do we get companies to change their practices? They might do it if a regulator tells them they have to, if civil society puts so much pressure on them that it just becomes reputational harm if they don’t do it, if perhaps activist shareholders ask or tell the company to change its practices.
But the company, if it’s a shareholder-owned company, has one main obligation, which is to maximize the value of their shares. Changing your technological setup and your physical plant arrangement is costly, and it may not immediately produce more profits. And so you have to think about, what are the crude economic dynamics that keep companies on a particular technological path in terms of how they do their physical operations? And then think, using the power of policy, of economics, of consumer pressure, whatever it is, how to get them to make a decision that may not be in their immediate shareholder interest.
One theme in the book is that countries in the West are making a case for domestic mining by arguing that it will be greener than mining in the Global South. Is there any evidence for that? What’s the logic?
This was honestly one of the most surprising things in my research as someone that primarily has worked in Latin America. I heard some rumblings — and this was in 2019, before the pandemic — of EU officials wanting to onshore. It confused me because mining is toxic, it’s low value-added. And what I learned is that it had come to a point where Western policymakers saw the whole supply chain as a domain of geostrategic power.
And then, probably some people really feel this way, and other people are using it as nice rhetoric, but Western policymakers also started to come to the idea that it would be more “responsible” to mine in the West. This is in no small part due to the fact that the mining industry has deservedly gotten a lot of negative coverage for, in some cases, outright killing people. In other cases, you have an avalanche that destroys a village. You have water contamination. There are issues around forced labor, how the Uyghurs are treated in China. So there was a lot of bad press on the industry. I think they thought, We can solve a few problems at once. We can increase our geopolitical power by having domestic supply chains for the most important 21st century technologies, and we can also make the claim to consumers, regulators, and the media that this is better if you care about responsible, ethical, green mining.
The reality is, of course, more complex than that. Our mining law in the U.S. that governs hard rock mining on public lands is from 1872, which tells you everything you need to know. It’s extremely out of date with the modern mining industry and the scale of harm that mining poses, and it also literally was implemented during the westward expansion and dispossession of indigenous peoples to serve that end.
In fact, countries in Latin America tend to have better — on paper — governance of mining than the U.S., though they may not have the state capacity to always implement it. In Europe, there’s even more dependence on imports. A lot of the European countries have almost no regulations on the books for basic things like, how do you deal with mining waste? And so in the Global North, what we have to fight for is a mining governance regime and a set of legal codes and regulations that is up to date.
This book is pretty critical of the way communities have been treated in the lithium boom so far. What are some of the ways community engagement can be done better?
We see better outcomes when communities are organized, when they actually identify as a community, have some meetings, maybe set up a group to coordinate themselves. Like, who’s going to go to the public hearing? Who’s going to contact a lawyer? Who’s going to contact the water expert? Because communities need a lot of outside help. The companies have lawyers, they have experts, they probably have friends in government. A lot of lawyers and experts that companies hire used to work for the government, and they know these processes inside out, and so the community needs to be as or more organized. They’re already on the losing end of a power imbalance.
In a way, none of this is about what companies can do, because I presume that companies are responsive to pressure. Multinationals, insofar as they’re shareholder-owned, their main goal is to maximize value, and that’s it. It’s that simple. And so in order to get them to behave differently towards communities, outside forces need to take a role. The first outside force is the community itself. A second is, how involved is the government? And how objective and public-serving is the government? Where governments take a more objective role and help protect the baseline rights of communities, make sure that those rights are not being violated by companies, help distribute more culturally sensitive and appropriate information about the mine, we could get better outcomes that way.
You had activists tell you, “I support lithium mining, but this is the wrong place for it.” Do you think there is such a thing as a right or wrong place, or even a better or worse place for a lithium mine?
This was honestly the most vexing question that I had to contemplate in my own research. I often think about how these communities are called NIMBYs, and there’s two reasons that’s a really inappropriate term. First of all, the “my backyard” — not every person has private property, or that’s not their stake in the matter. It’s not about, this is going to decrease the value of my property, or this is going to disrupt my ocean view. It’s about the land that they have a deep relationship with.
The second thing is, I don’t think most of the people that call these communities NIMBYs would really want to live next to a large-scale mine, either. They are just enormous scars on the landscape. I understand that they are necessary, to some degree, to provide for the technologies that we enjoy, including life-saving and planet-saving technology. Even in my perfect world, where everyone is riding an electric bus or bike or walking around, some lithium is still needed in the near term. In the future, we could conceivably enter into a circular economy, but we don’t have the level of feedstock for that yet.
So the question remains, where are we going to mine? I don’t have an easy answer to that, but I will say that in the entire process of land use planning, the corporation is the protagonist. In the U.S., a place that I think most political scientists would say has more state capacity than a country in Africa or Latin America, we do not use that capacity to proactively plan land use. I think it would make sense to really rearrange the process such that governments plan with substantial community input, and then corporations, if we want to have private corporations doing this, get the ability to compete for contracts. I know that would be a big lift to change that policy dynamic, but I think we need to have the conversation.
You write a lot about this difficult dance between supply and demand in mining. What are you seeing right now in how the lithium industry is reacting to Trump’s dismantling of EV policy?
With Trump, it’s particularly interesting and bizarre because on the list of fast-tracked mines, you have several lithium mines and some lithium processing along with other “critical minerals.” He really wants to expand mining, to the point that the Pentagon is now the No. 1 investor in our only rare earth mine in the U.S. They bought 15% of MP Materials’ shares, the company that manages the Mountain Pass mine. And so Trump is fast-tracking mines, he’s sending huge amounts of public money to financially underwrite these mining companies. But yet, he’s destroying demand for rare earths. He loves to talk about AI and military tech — that’s a small slice of demand. It’s really about wind turbines and electric vehicle motors. That’s really where the demand is. With lithium, it’s even clearer.
That all seems like a recipe for prices to crash.
The thing is, they already had crashed because of a supply glut. But at the same time, the market will likely pick back up because we’re seeing so much action elsewhere in the world. It’s very easy to focus on the U.S., especially because the U.S. government is such a basket case right now. But if we zoom out, there’s been a bunch of recent reporting, including in Heatmap, on how rapidly the energy transition is going in other parts of the world, with China playing an enormous role not only on the trade side, but also in foreign direct investment, in setting up solar and EV manufacturing hubs in the Global South.
And so I think that Trump can dismantle EVs as much as he wants in the U.S., and that’s a shame given that transportation is our most polluting sector. I mean, that pains me as a climate activist. But the world is bigger than the U.S.
The last thing I’ll say — and this is another interesting contradiction — in the Big, Beautiful Bill, it’s not across the board against all green technologies. There’s this distinction that conservatives increasingly like to make called “clean, firm power.” So they put nuclear, geothermal, and battery storage in that. Now, battery storage, what is that made of? Lithium. So in a weird way, they like lithium mining, they like batteries for storage, they just don’t like electric vehicles. We’re still going to have lithium demand in the U.S., and lots of individual people will still buy electric cars, and blue states will still procure them for their public fleets. He’s not going to kill the market. He’s just going to slow its growth, primarily by making it less affordable for working and middle class people.
The CEO’s $1 billion share buy changes nothing — except in the eyes of his shareholders.
Elon Musk’s signature talent, the thing that made him the world’s richest man, has long been his ability to make Tesla’s stock price soar. It’s a superpower that manifests through a combination of financial lever-pulling and promises of world-changing innovations to come. For this reason, it leads to glaring disconnects such as Tesla having become the world’s most valuable automaker despite selling only a 10th as many vehicles as a true manufacturing superpower like Toyota.
By that yardstick, this week’s news might be his biggest achievement yet.
On Monday, headlines declared that Tesla has turned itself around. Its share price has rebounded after taking a nosedive early this year. In this case, the bullish stock market performance is divorced not only from the reality of the company’s electric car sales, but also from, well, everything else that’s happened lately.
Remember the protests? Remember the celebrities performatively selling their Teslas? The “I bought this before Elon went crazy” bumper stickers? With Musk having abandoned his dalliance with the Trump administration, other crises have taken over the spotlight. Even so, the echo of discontent is visible. Protests dogged the opening of the new Tesla Diner charging station here in Los Angeles, and plenty of Teslas in my neighborhood still have the apology stuck to their bumpers.
Most crucially for Tesla, the anger did real damage to its bottom line. The brand’s sales around the world fell dramatically as public disgust with Musk rose and EV shoppers ran toward a growing number of competitors, especially those from China. But even in the U.S., where cheap Chinese EVs are not an option, Tesla’s dominance has shrunk. In August 2025, the company’s share of the U.S. EV market fell to 38%. That was Tesla’s lowest figure since 2017, before the Model 3 or Model Y rolled off assembly lines. It was enough to inspire another round of speculation over whether the company might be better off freeing itself from the PR albatross that is Elon Musk.
Yet once again, the performance of Tesla’s stock would suggest that none of this had ever happened, or at least that it didn’t matter. Tesla offered Musk a trillion-dollar pay package — so absurd that even the pope felt compelled to condemn it. Musk then turned around and bought a billion dollars of Tesla stock to signal his self-confidence, which in turn propelled Tesla’s share price back up again and wiped out the losses from earlier this year.
The “why” of this financial madness is the same refrain that’s been playing for the past two years, ever since Musk rolled out the disastrous Cybertruck rather than building Tesla’s volume EV business. The man cares about robotics, AI, and autonomy — and decidedly not about building cars — and has convinced shareholders that his pivot in this direction will reap untold rewards. Once again, it’s possible that he’s right.
I am, admittedly, a cynic about Tesla and self-driving, for reasons personal and general. My Model 3 encounters the occasional worrisome blip with its relatively simpler Autopilot system, for instance on the part of Interstate 5 near Disneyland where it suddenly decides it’s on the 45 mile-per-hour access road rather than the freeway and hits the brakes.
This error alone is enough that I wouldn’t entrust my family’s safety to Tesla Full Self-Driving, to say nothing of Musk’s lifelong habit of overstating the abilities of his tech. But I know plenty of people who are already allowing versions of FSD to chauffeur them. Conversations with industry sources often settle on the inevitability of autonomy, if for no other reason than they worry about younger folks who can’t be bothered with learning to drive. Maybe Tesla will win the race to sell them self-driving electric cars. (Or, as a Bloomberg op-ed says, maybe the big buy is just window dressing, though a more apt metaphor might have been lipstick on a pig.)
Either way, it’s not great news for the here and now, the EV market of the present that Musk loves to neglect. South Korean competitors Hyundai and Kia — which are both building cool EVs for today that humans drive and trying to do much of their manufacturing in the United States — are nonetheless getting hammered by Trump tariffs and ICE raids. The federal tax credit set to expire at the end of this month is a particularly hard hit for forthcoming vehicles such as the new Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf, which could have reached compellingly cheap prices had the government not killed the incentive and slapped tariffs in its place.
Will Tesla, which has long teased an affordable EV, at least redouble its efforts to sell more cars? If anything can motivate Musk to refocus on Tesla rather than trolling on X, it’s money. To date, the company has sold a little more than 7 million vehicles; 20 million Tesla cars sold is one of the many strings attached to Musk actually earning the entire “trillion-dollar” deal.
Another condition is that he aid the company in its search for his successor, a sign that those who’ve always wanted to see a Tesla without Musk might get their wish sooner rather than later.
On Toyota’s recalls, America’s per-capita emissions, and Sierra Club drama
Current conditions: Drought is worsening in the U.S. Northeast, where cities such as Pittsburgh and Bangor, Maine have recorded 30% less rainfall than average • Temperatures in the Mississippi Valley are soaring into the triple digits, with cities such as Omaha, Nebraska and St. Louis breaking daily temperature records with highs of up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average • A heat wave in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, has sent temperatures as high as 114 degrees.
Orsted is offering investors a nearly 70% discount on the new shares issued to raise money to save its American offshore wind projects amid the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on the industry. The Danish energy giant won nearly unanimous approval from its shareholders earlier this month for a rights issue aimed at raising $9.4 billion. Shares in the company, which is half owned by the government in Copenhagen, closed around $32 each on Friday. But the offering of 901 million new shares came at a subscription rate of about $10.50 each. Orsted’s projects in the northeastern U.S. already “struggled” with what The Wall Street Journal listed as “supply-chain bottlenecks, higher interest rates, and trouble getting tax credits,” which culminated in the restructuring last year that saw the company “pull out of two high-profile wind projects off the coast of New Jersey.”
The offshore wind industry, as I noted in yesterday’s newsletter, is just starting to fight back. The owners of the Rhode Island offshore project Revolution Wind, which Trump halted unilaterally, filed a lawsuit claiming the administration illegally withdrew its already-finalized permits. After the administration filed a lawsuit to revoke the permits of US Wind’s big project off Maryland’s coast, the company said it intends “to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.” But the multi-agency assault on offshore turbine projects has only escalated in recent months, as the timeline Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo produced shows. And Orsted is facing other headwinds. The company just warned investors of lower profits this year after weaker-than-forecast wind speeds reduced the output of its turbines.
Toyota issued a voluntary recall for some 591,000 Toyota and Lexus cars over a slight glitch in the display screen. The 12.3-inch screen could fail to turn on after the car started, or go black while driving. Toyota said it will begin notifying owners if affected vehicles by mid-November. The move came just days after the Japanese auto giant — which owns both its eponymous passenger car brand and the associated luxury line, Lexus — recalled 62,000 electric vehicles, including the Toyota bZ4X SUV and the Lexus RZ300e sedan and its luxury SUV, the RZ450. Subaru, in which Toyota owns a minority stake, is also recalling its electric SUV, the Solterra. With all four EVs, the issue revolved around a faulty windshield defroster that “may not remove frost, ice and/or fog from the windshield glass due to a software issue in the electrical control unit,” the company said in a press release..
States such as Mississippi and Idaho had the lowest drop in energy-related per-capita emissions.EIA
Americans who complain that the U.S. should bear less responsibility for mitigating climate change like to point out that China produces far more planet-heating emissions per year, and that India is not far behind. The cumulative nature of carbon in the atmosphere makes for an easy rebuke, since the U.S. and Western Europe are overwhelmingly responsible for the emissions of the past two centuries. But a less historically abstract response could be that Americans still have by far the highest per capita emissions of any large country. That doesn’t mean the U.S. isn’t making progress on a per capita level, though. Between 2005 and 2023, per capita emissions from primary energy consumption decreased in every U.S. state, with an average drop of 30%, even as the American population grew by 14%, according to a new analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The dip is largely thanks to the electric power sector burning less coal. Increased electricity generation from natural gas, which releases about half as much carbon per unit of energy when burned as coal, and the growth of renewables such as wind and solar have reduced the need for the dirtier fuel. But the EIA forecasts that overall U.S. emissions are set to climb by 1% as electricity demand increases.
For those keen to shrink their individual carbon output at a much faster pace than American society at large, Heatmap’s award-winning Decarbonize Your Life series walks through the benefits and drawbacks to driving less, eating less steak, installing solar panels, and renovating homes to be more energy efficient.
Following rebellions from various state chapters, the Sierra Club terminated its executive director, Ben Jealous, last month, as I reported here in this newsletter at the time. Now the group has named its new leader: Loren Blackford. The Sierra Club veteran, who served in various senior roles before taking on the interim executive director job last month, won unanimous support from the group’s board of directors on Saturday.
Jealous had previously served as a chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the 2018 Democratic nominee for Maryland governor before becoming the first non-white leader of the 133-year-old Sierra Club. His appointment marked a symbolic turning of the page from the group’s early chapters under its founder, John Muir, who made numerous derogatory remarks about Black and Native Americans. Jealous was accused of sexual harassment earlier this year.
Thermal battery company Fourth Power just announced $20 million in follow-on funding, building on its $19 million Series A round from 2023. While other thermal storage companies such as Rondo and Antora are targeting the decarbonization of high-temperature industrial processes such as smelting or chemical manufacturing, Fourth Power aims to manufacture long-duration energy storage systems for utilities and power producers.
“In our view, electricity is the biggest problem that needs to be solved,” Fourth Power’s CEO Arvin Ganesan told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “There is certainly a future application for heat, but we don’t think that’s where to start.” The company’s tech works by taking in excess renewable electricity from the grid, which is used to heat up liquid tin to 2,400 degrees Celsius, nearly half the temperature of the sun’s surface. That heat is then stored in carbon blocks and later converted back into electricity using thermophotovoltaic cells. This latest funding will accelerate the deployment of the startup’s first one megawatt hour demonstration plant.
The tropical storm that later became Hurricane María formed exactly eight years ago today and went on to lay waste to Puerto Rico’s aging electrical system. The grid remains fragile and expensive, with frequent outages and some of the highest rates in the U.S. on the hours when the power is accessible. That has spurred a boom in rooftop solar panels. Now more than 10% of the island’s electricity consumption comes from rooftop solar power. Data released by the grid operator LUMA Energy showed approximately 1.2 gigawatts of residential and commercial rooftop solar had been installed under Puerto Rico’s net-metering regulations as of June 2025. New analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that is equal to about 10.3% of Puerto Rico’s total power consumption — and that’s not counting any off-grid systems.