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Pacific Gas & Electric is one of the oldest and largest utilities in the United States. It’s also one of the most notorious.
The company serving Northern California was driven into bankruptcy after being found liable for the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, California. After restructuring and emerging in 2020, it was again found liable for the 2021 Dixie Fire. Needless to say, PG&E has since gotten the message that it needs to better fortify its equipment and surrounding environment. So while utilities aren’t generally renowned for their enthusiastic adoption of novel technologies, PG&E has been going all in on startups that can help prevent future disasters.
“More than half of our northern and central California service areas are within high fire threat areas, and a third of our assets are located in those areas,” PG&E spokesperson Paul Doherty told me. While PG&E’s service area doesn’t overlap with the L.A. fires, the growing list of gridtech and climate tech companies that it’s partnered with could serve as an example for other utilities in the state and country as a whole. In PG&E’s catalogue are vegetation management robots, power pole sensors, advanced fire detection cameras, and autonomous drones, with much of this enhanced by an artificial intelligence-powered analytics platforms.
In some ways, the 120-year-old utility is starting to act like a tech incubator. It hosted its first-ever innovation summit in 2023, where Doherty said it held a Shark Tank-style pitch fest to source ideas for a variety of grid challenges, including wildfire-related ones like system monitoring and vegetation management, ultimately receiving over 600 applications. Out of that, PG&E chose 24 concepts to move forward with in some form.
“My experience has been that they’re very focused on reducing risk,” Dave Winnacker, co-founder of the AI-powered risk visualization and mitigation platform XyloPlan, told me. “That attention is probably focused by the fact that they were held accountable and they had significant monetary losses, reputational losses.”
Last year, XyloPlan partnered with PG&E to pilot its software in the wildfire-prone Lake County, California. The platform provides insight into the areas most at risk from fast-moving fires, which Winnacker told me are much more damaging to communities and critical infrastructure than hot fires, known to be more destructive in forests. “So in our model and our future state, you can still have plenty of fire on the landscape, and you can even have plenty of fast-moving fire, but we have prioritized treatments that would disrupt those fast-moving fires that have the greatest consequences,” Winnacker, the former fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, told me. XyloPlan’s algorithm makes recommendations on where various resiliency efforts such as vegetation management would have the greatest impact.
Winnacker acknowledges though that for utilities, “it’s really difficult and risky to take something new on.” Not only could money be wasted if it doesn’t work out, but as Winnacker told me, “It can be perceived as an admission of your doing things wrong before. The tendency to assign blame makes it harder to adopt new and innovative things.”
“I think the toughest thing for a utility is to trust a technology,” Christina Park, senior director of energy strategy at the autonomous drone company Skydio, told me. A former veteran of the utility industry herself, Park spent 15 years at the New York Power Authority and understands why utilities would be reluctant to tweak at least formerly reliable services and infrastructure that millions of households depend upon. But as climate change brings drought and more extreme weather, and as utility infrastructure ages, evolution seems like the only option. “Based on all the confluence of factors that are kind of putting their backs against the wall, they are more open to change,” Park told me. “It’s just not possible to keep doing things the old way.”
Skydio, which was last valued at $2.2 billion after its 2023 Series E funding round, operates in three main markets — defense, public safety, and utilities. PG&E has been a customer of the company since 2022, and became the first California utility to conduct fully remote drone inspections of its assets in 2023. This was made possible after the utility secured a much-coveted waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that allows it to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight.
“An operator could fly a drone to a location that’s up over a mountain, right up over super steep, rugged terrain that would normally be really hard to access via helicopter, via foot, via vehicle, and now we have the capability to go inspect that,” Doherty told me. Six navigation cameras as well as onboard artificial intelligence and advanced computing allow Skydio drones to operate autonomously, docked and deployed at PG&E substations.
Park told me that PG&E, which has had a drone program since 2019, has used its aviation expertise to help Skydio develop key capabilities. “They have the knowledge in the drone space to really ask for more advanced features — being able to pick out when there is a zoom quality that they would really like to see or a certain lens.” After Skydio’s drones gather reams of visual data, algorithms can pinpoint the location and severity of any infrastructural defects. PG&E has developed its own A.I. model in house to do this.
PG&E is far from alone in its excitement over Skydio’s capabilities. The dronemaker has over 200 utility partnerships to date, and Park told me that across all of them she’s seeing more and more integration of new tech into the standard workflow. “Their business as usual, it just looks different than it did five years ago,” she told me. But while there might be an increased appetite in the industry for novel solutions, Winnacker warns that there are numerous logistical and financial barriers that can get in the way of promising tech moving from pilot to full-scale implementation.
“The challenge on these things always is that the benefit is very widespread, but there has to be someone who is the lead, and ultimately someone has to make the investment,” Winnacker told me. “That’s challenging, because there is a federal component, there’s a state component, there’s a local government component, there’s a non-government, land-owning agency component, and then there’s a small private property component. We have to mesh all of these.”
Sometimes, good companies with good ideas can languish as these various stakeholders with different perspectives and priorities wait for someone else to step up and foot the bill. As of now, Winnacker said he doesn’t know if PG&E is going to make a more significant investment in XyloPlan, although he said last year’s partnership proved fruitful.
But if PG&E does move forward with XyloPlan, or any other gridtech or wildfire mitigation tech for that matter, the success of that program will depend not just on the utility, but also on all the other governmental and non-governmental players that Winnacker mentioned. “There’s a need for really tight alignment, so that the work of one group compliments the other, and we don’t end up in this disjointed manner, where a lot of effort is occurring, but because it’s not coordinated, it’s not aligned, you don’t get that the reinforcing benefit of the network,” Winnacker told me.
Not to mention the fact that in rural and urban areas alike, there’s always competing demands and only so much money to go around. Especially in a state like California, which is facing a severe housing crisis, the perpetual question of prioritization looms over every budget decision. And while tech companies often promise to save utilities money in the long term — via both efficiency gains and avoided disaster costs — implementing new programs often means big upfront expenses, which typically leads to higher customer rates. And, well, everybody hates that.
Suffice it to say, there’s no perfect solution here, but inaction is the worst option of all. As Winnacker put it, “you eat an elephant one bite at a time.” So as Los Angeles recovers from some of the most destructive fires in the state’s history and utilities across the state open themselves up to new ways of doing business, “we need to start with these small bites to get moving so that we can get past the either nothing can be done, this is an act of nature discussion or this pie in the sky, oh, you know, a single tech silver bullet will just make this problem go away,” Winnacker told me.
“This is an all of the above approach, and the time is probably now, with regard to having everyone’s undivided attention on this for a very brief period of time.”
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On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.
On China’s Paris pact with Europe, Trump’s mineral geopolitics, and Google’s CO2 battery bet
Current conditions: The record-setting heat roasting more than 100 million Americans in the central U.S. is now headed for the densely populated Northeast • The American Samoan capital of Pago Pago faces “imminent” flash flooding on Friday amid days of rain • China just set a record for the highest number of hot days since March in its history.
The Palisades nuclear plant on the shore of Lake Michigan.Holtec International
Three years after the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan became the country’s last atomic power station to permanently close, the facility is set to become the first in U.S. history to reopen after a final shutdown. On Thursday afternoon, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its formal approval for the plant’s operating license, putting the single-reactor station on track to restart later this year, the plant’s owner, Holtec International, told me. With just 11 days to go before its license expired, Palisades’ previous owner opted to close down May 2022 rather than make necessary upgrades to continue operations. The Biden-era Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy put up more than $1.5 to fund the effort. Despite freezing funding for other projects, the Trump administration shelled out the money to Holtec.
The project still faces obstacles. Holtec still needs to finalize repairs at the plant, which are subject to another NRC review. Anti-nuclear activists, meanwhile, vowed to appeal the NRC license. Still, Holtec’s President Kelly Trice said the NRC approval “represents an unprecedented milestone in U.S. nuclear energy.”
As the U.S. seeks to dismantle its climate regulations, China and the European Union signed a pledge Thursday to work together on cutting emissions. The document, dubbed “the way forward” following the 10-year anniversary of the Paris climate accords, called the 2015 pact brokered in the French capital “the cornerstone of international climate cooperation” that “all parties” should implement “in a comprehensive, good-faith and effective manner.” The two global powers also reached a deal for the emergency export of rare earth metals from China, which dominates their global trade, to European factories facing shortages of the materials, according to The New York Times.
The diplomatic communique comes as the U.S. goes through the process to quit the Paris Agreement for the second time. In 2017, Trump waited weeks to initiate the exit, and the protocol completed around the time of the 2020 election. That allowed then-President-elect Joe Biden to signal his plans to rejoin immediately, rendering the American withdrawal a brief hiccup. This time, however, the rules allow the U.S. to leave in about a year, and Trump started the process on his first day in office.
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Just over a week after the Pentagon made a landmark investment in the United States’ only rare earths mine, President Donald Trump elevated his minerals adviser to the Nation Security Council. While the Trump administration did not confirm what Copley’s new position would entail, an industry source told E&E News the job change was a promotion for the military veteran and former mining executive, who would now serve as “both the White House mineral and supply chain czar.”
The move comes as China has sought to leverage its grip over global supplies of minerals such as rare earth metals and graphite by tightening export restrictions. While Trump’s military investment into California rare earth producer MP Materials may mirror China’s strategy of government funding for critical materials, Beijing has another thing going for it: Strong demand from electric vehicles. Therein lies what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin recently called the “paradox” of Trump’s mineral policy: He’s making it easier to mine but eliminating the demand pull of electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Google has invested in small modular reactors, nuclear fusion, and even old-fashioned hydropower to shore up a steady supply of electricity for its reactors. This morning, the tech giant announced a strategic investment into carbon dioxide batteries, as I reported earlier today over at Latitude Media. The startup Energy Dome houses its technology in white, inflatable shelters similar to what you see over the courts at professional tennis tournaments. But inside is equipment that compresses and liquefies CO2, stores it in carbon steel tanks, then turns the liquid back into pressurized gas when energy is needed. Once reheated, the carbon dioxide is pumped through turbines to generate electricity for up to 24 hours at a time.
Headquartered in Milan, Energy Dome already had a deal for pilot plants in Wisconsin, Sardinia, and India, about eight hours west of Hyderabad. But Google said it plans to deploy the technology across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Maine is speeding up approvals for nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy to make sure projects can tap into federal tax credits before the Trump administration cracks down, Canary Media's Sarah Shemkus reported. State regulators gave developers a July 25 deadline to take part in the fast-tracking program. The state is seeking enough bids to meet about 13% of its annual electricity demand. The program will give preference to projects sited on property where water or soil is contaminated by toxic PFAS, the cancer-causing substances known as “forever chemicals.”
Not all states are as welcoming of renewables. In Ohio, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported yesterday, 26 out of 88 counties have “established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited.” The key to getting around local opposition is early community outreach and building a base of support for a project.
Consider the lobster, but listen to the shrimp. A new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that listening to the high-frequency sounds snapping shrimp produce “can be used as a real indicator of coral resilience,” Xavier Raick, postdoctoral fellow in bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said in a press release. “Snapping shrimp’s abundance is a mirror of coral cover. So if you have more corals, especially very big colonies, you have more snapping shrimps, and then you can use their sound as a proxy for the reef, structure, and health.”