Hello,

Hope you all had a lovely Mother’s day yesterday, especially if you’re a mom!! One quick heads up: I’ll be in Hawaii this week for a friend’s wedding, so it’s unlikely I’ll publish a roundup this time next week. I’ll get back to post a few more articles and regular roundups for the rest of May after this week.

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• New research from S&P Global offers a retort to the prevailing theory that data center development is the biggest driver of increasing electricity prices in the U.S. (“we observe no clear correlation between the change in state-level electricity prices over the last five years and the change in state-level data center capacity over the same period"). Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• In a landmark shift that has gone almost entirely unnoticed in English-language media, the scientific body that sets official scenarios for IPCC climate research has retired its most extreme warming pathways (RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0) formally labeling them "implausible." The new top-end scenario projects roughly 3°C of warming by 2100, versus the 4.4°C figure that dominated headlines and policy for two decades. There hasn’t been a ton of media coverage of this story, including in outlets, like the New York Times (most prominently) that used those scenarios to inform past reporting. Link.

• Airborne microplastics are a previously underappreciated climate forcer. According to new research in Nature Climate Change, colored plastic particles lofted into the atmosphere absorb sunlight and trap heat, with a global warming impact equal to about 16.2% of black carbon's. The finding challenges prior assumptions that atmospheric plastics were climatically negligible because lighter particles reflect sunlight. Link.

• A strengthening El Niño has pushed near-term temperature forecasts higher. Updated modeling now puts 2026 at roughly 1.46°C above the pre-industrial baseline, with 2027 projected at approximately 1.61°C. Forecasts for 2027 also now carry an 85% probability of making it the warmest year ever recorded, with an 88% chance of breaching the 1.5°C threshold. Both estimates have risen from projections made at the start of the year. Link.

Energy market x Iran war updates

• Oil futures are up again at the time of this writing after they fell somewhat over the course of the week on hopes that there’d be more progress soon towards peace in the Middle East. Now, that prospect looks remote again as hostilities flair up again. Link.

• The pump price pain keeps intensifying in the U.S., where gasoline prices hit a new wartime high of $4.54 per gallon, up roughly 51% since the conflict began. Link.

• U.S. airlines also burned through just over $5 billion in jet fuel in March, a 56% increase over February, as the Iran war-driven oil shock has also rippled into aviation costs. Link.

Elsewhere in energy and electrification

• The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) escalated a Level 3 grid alert, only the third such warning in the watchdog's 58-year history, after data centers in Virginia and Texas suddenly dropped off the grid, creating conditions that experts warned could trigger widespread blackouts. The alert comes with seven mandatory actions for grid operators and transmission planners. Link.

• U.S. electricity prices in April rose 6.7% above April of last year, with the 12-month trailing average also up 6.5%. These gains are consistent with the growth trend of the past five years, per Heatmap and MIT's Electricity Price Hub. The national picture, high in and of itself, also masks some ugly local dynamics: New Jersey and Washington D.C. saw trailing 12-month averages climb 21% and 25%, respectively, as power demand outstrips supply in the PJM market. Link.

• China's solar manufacturing sector is undergoing a pullback. The country's 22 biggest panel makers collectively lost 10.5 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in Q1 as raw material prices cratered and demand remained relatively soft. New installations tell a similar story, as capacity additions dropped 31% year-on-year to 41.4 GW in Q1. Link.

• Geothermal developer Fervo Energy has filed to go public at a $6.5 billion valuation. It aims to raise over $1.3 billion in an IPO. Recently reviewed leases owned by Fervo represent more than 40 GW of potential capacity (equal to~15% of total installed U.S solar). Link.

• As we’ve began to point to in recent weeks, local communities are pushing back on data center development more and more; Q1 2026 saw roughly 100 new local fights logged, a record for a single quarter, and cumulative project cancellations have now topped $85 billion over the past three years, per Heatmap Pro. Link.

• Microsoft appears to be quietly retreating from what was once corporate America's most ambitious clean energy commitment, namely a 2030 pledge to match every kilowatt it consumes with carbon-free power on an hour-by-hour basis. The company has already paused its carbon removal purchasing program and stopped mentioning the hourly target in press releases; Bloomberg now reports it may formally delay or drop the goal entirely. Overall, the AI buildout has already torched much of Big Tech's climate commitments; since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Meta's reported carbon emissions have surged 64%, Google's 51%, Amazon's 33%, and Microsoft's 23%. Link. Link.

• Construction is underway in northern Switzerland on what will be the world's largest redox flow battery, a 2.1 GWh system being built by FlexBase that can push or pull 1.2 GWh of power in milliseconds. The $1 billion-plus project targets a 2029 launch and will anchor a broader technology complex that includes a co-located data center. Link.

Fission and fusion

• Brookfield Asset Management and The Nuclear Company are teaming up to restart construction of two AP1000 reactors at South Carolina's V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, a project that was abandoned nearly a decade ago following massive cost overruns. Link.

• Ontario Power Generation has set the foundation for what could become the Western world's first operating small modular reactor, completing the below-grade concrete base of its BWRX-300 unit at the Darlington station east of Toronto, roughly 35 meters underground. If the project stays on schedule, it enters service in 2029. Link.

• Chicago-based Clean Core Thorium Energy cleared a meaningful technical hurdle for its patented thorium-uranium fuel blend by finishing a high-burnup irradiation test at Idaho National Laboratory's Advanced Test Reactor. In the test, it delivered more than eight times the output of conventional uranium fuel used in pressurized heavy water reactors. The fuel is designed to work in existing reactors without modifications. Link.

Policy

• Every new onshore wind project in the U.S. is now effectively on ice as the Pentagon has stopped signing off on routine FAA airspace clearances. This immediately impacts up to 165 wind farms, including many that historically wouldn't have needed military sign-off at all. The tactic mirrors the offshore wind halt the administration attempted earlier this year, which courts blocked within weeks after developers sued. The same legal playbook is expected to follow in this case. Link.

• New York's landmark climate law got materially weakened in budget negotiations this week. A tentative deal would push enforcement of greenhouse gas regulations back to 2028 and replace aggressive near-term cuts with an interim target of 60% below 1990 levels by 2040. Governor Hochul had initially sought to delay action until 2030; now, the final compromise landed somewhere in between. Link.

• The EU also looks set to weaken a landmark methane rule before it even took effect. Draft guidelines seen by Politico would let national governments grant open-ended exemptions to fossil fuel companies on energy security grounds, with no explicit Brussels oversight. The rules kick in January 2027 and carry fines of up to 20%, but have faced intense lobbying pressure from both the US and the fossil fuel industry. Link.

• The SEC took two significant swings at corporate reporting this week by advancing advanced a proposal to kill Biden-era climate disclosure requirements for public companies and separately floating the idea of halving financial reporting frequency from quarterly to twice-yearly. Whereas the disclosure rollback has been widely expected, the quarterly reporting change is the bigger potential structural shift of the two, and has drawn some positive interest from decarbonization advocates who've long argued that short-termism discourages long-horizon climate investment. Link. Link.

• The DOJ sued Minnesota to shut down the state's climate liability case against Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute, arguing a state cannot effectively set national greenhouse gas policy through litigation. Minnesota's suit, one of dozens filed by states and municipalities seeking to hold oil companies financially accountable for climate damages, has wound its way through courts since 2020 and survived a dismissal attempt by the defendants just this January. Link.

• Germany is putting up to €5 billion on the table this year to keep more heavy industry, such as steel, cement, chemicals, domestic and on a decarbonization path, using 15-year carbon contracts to cover cost gaps between more clean and conventional production methods. The round is the first to extend eligibility to carbon capture and storage technologies alongside novel production and decarbonization pathways. Link.

Honorable financing mentions

• Panthalassa, based out of Portland, Oregon, raised $140 million in a Series B led by Peter Thiel to build wave-powered offshore platforms that generate clean electricity and use it to run AI inference computing at sea. John Doerr, TIME Ventures, SciFi Ventures, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Hanwha Group, Fortescue Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Founders Fund, Gigascale Capital, and others participated. Link.

• Nyobolt, based out of Impington, U.K., raised $60 million in a Series C round at a $1 billion valuation to make high-power-density batteries. Symbotic led. Link.

• Moment Energy, based out of Coquitlam, British Columbia, raised $40 million in a Series B led by Evok Innovations to turn used EV battery packs into grid-scale energy storage systems. W23, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, and In-Q-Tel also participated. Link.

• Blackhorn Ventures, based out of Denver, Colorado, raised $40 million in a first close toward a targeted $150 million climate tech early-stage fund. Link.

• Terraform Industries, based out of Burbank, California, raised $37.75 million to produce synthetic natural gas from air and electricity. Link.

• Skeleton Technologies, based out of Tallinn, Estonia, raised €33 million (~$38.9 million) from Axon Partners Group, SmartCap, and Taiwania Capital to make ultracapacitors and energy storage systems for grid, automotive, and transportation markets. Link.

• Lithosquare, based out of Paris, France, raised $25 million in a seed round for its AI-driven critical metals discovery startup. It also announced a partnership with mining company Aterian to apply its platform to eight exploration projects across Morocco and Botswana. Link.

• Magrathea, based out of San Francisco, raised $24 million in a Series A co-led by Resource Technology Capital and Balerion Space Ventures to use electrochemical processes to pull magnesium metal from seawater and industrial brines. Oxcart, WovenEarth, Audacity, Avila, VoLo Earth, Capricorn Investment Group, and Ora Global also invested. Link.

• Barocal, based out of Cambridge, U.K., raised $10 million in a seed round from World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and IP Group to develop a solid-state cooling technology that replaces conventional refrigerant gases with materials that produce no direct emissions. Link.

Bye,

— Nick

Hello hello,

May, already. Plenty to catch up on from the past week in energy, climate tech, and sustainability news, so let’s hop right into it today.

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• Chinese domination of clean and climate tech supply chains is accelerating amidst the ongoing war in Iran and the pressure it has put on international oil and gas prices; exports of solar, batteries, and EVs reached a record 68 GW in March, according to Ember. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• CATL signed the world's largest-ever sodium-ion battery order to the tune of 60 GWh over three years with energy storage integrator HyperStrong. The company says it has solved the full sodium-ion mass production chain, while industry analysts are calling it a potential "DeepSeek moment" for energy storage, given sodium-ion's promise as a cheaper, more abundant alternative to lithium. CATL also raised $5 billion in a Hong Kong listing, with its stock up nearly 25% since late February on surging fossil fuel prices and data center storage demand. Link. Link.

• Rainmaker, a category-leading cloud seeding company, claims to have produced 142 million gallons of water in the form of snow; this is the first example of a commercial cloud seeding operation claiming verifiable precipitation results. Utah and Idaho are already paying the company “millions” of dollars annually while Utah's cloud seeding budget has grown from $350,000 five years ago to $7 million today. Results have not yet been published as a peer-reviewed study; I look forward to that data being made available. Link.

• A new paper using two decades of satellite data finds that Amazon deforestation causes top-of-atmosphere cooling that scales with the fraction of forest lost — and that cloud-driven albedo increases double the effect relative to surface brightening alone. The findings underscore the importance of accounting for cloud responses in climate models and land management policy. Link.

Energy market x Iran war updates

• Brent crude surged past $126/barrel this week, levels not seen since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While prices have again eased some heading into next week, Goldman Sachs forecasts Brent still averaging $90 in Q4, even if exports normalize by end of June. The U.S. dismissed Iran's latest ceasefire proposal; the near-term path to export normalization remains opaque. Link. Link.

• The U.S. national average gasoline price hit $4.39 per gallon, a new high since the start of the Iran war, per AAA. Link.

• The U.S. has also became a net exporter of crude oil for the first time since World War Two, and LNG exports are, rather predictably, posed to reach all-time highs. Link.

• The EU announced emergency state-aid measures to help offset the fuel and fertilizer cost spike from the Iran war. Individual companies can claim up to €50,000 each through year-end with minimal paperwork; energy-intensive industries can recover up to 70% of eligible excess electricity costs. Agriculture, fisheries, road, rail, and short-sea shipping are all covered. Airlines were notably excluded, though the EU left the door open for future intervention. Link.

• Japan Airlines announced it will double its jet fuel surcharge to $350 per ticket on flights to North America and Europe; South Korean carriers are implementing the same increase, citing elevated oil prices from the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Link. Link.

Elsewhere in energy and industry

• India set a record electricity demand of 256.1 GW last weekend, driven by extreme heat pushing air conditioning usage to new levels. Coal and gas-fired generation both increased to meet demand, though solar accounted for one-fifth of total generation during peak periods. Link.

• The UAE announced it will withdraw from OPEC, effective May 1, shrinking the cartel to 11 members. The UAE accounts for roughly 4% of global oil production, and officials claimed the decision aligns with its long-term energy strategy and national interest. OPEC+ is expected to agree a modest output quota increase at its weekend meeting, though if more members leave the group in coming weeks, months, or even years, it will erode its overall lobbying power and ability to influence global oil market prices. Link.

• ERCOT set a new solar generation record this week, producing 33,975 MW produced for a brief interval on Saturday. That level of production is enough to meet ~65% average instantaneous power grid demand in ERCOT / Texas. Link.

• Vineyard Wind became the third U.S. offshore wind project to enter full commercial operation, with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey activating the project's electricity contracts at a fixed price of $69.50/MWh for 20 years. Link.

• The Trump administration also confirmed it has brokered two more “pay-to-go-away” offshore wind buyout deals: Bluepoint Wind (50% owned by BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners) will receive up to $765 million reimbursed after committing an equal amount to a U.S. LNG facility, and Golden State Wind will recover ~$120 million after investing the same in oil, gas, or LNG projects along the Gulf Coast. Both developers agreed to exit U.S. offshore wind entirely. My joke of the week is that a new, hot business to pursue is larping like you’re going to develop an offshore wind farm just to get paid to cancel it. Might give it a go and see what happens. Link.

• Compass Datacenters, backed by Brookfield Asset Management, abandoned its bid to develop more than 800 acres of a planned 2,100-acre data center corridor in Prince William County, Virginia, after political resistance to tax incentives and mounting community opposition made the project untenable, despite already investing tens of millions on the development effort. Link.

• The Bureau of Land Management issued its third categorical exclusion for geothermal projects in two years; this time the exclusion covers pre-leasing drilling activities up to 10 acres. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) also introduced bipartisan legislation to boost federal funding for next-generation geothermal R&D. Link. Link.

• Meta placed an order for up to 1 GW of space-based solar capacity from Overview Energy to power its data centers. That’s a sizable bet on a technology that has yet to be proven at commercial scale; I’m all for the catalytic commitment, though. Link.

• The DOE announced it will soon unfreeze $430 million in negotiations to support upgrades at 212 hydropower facilities across the country. Link.

Fission and fusion

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems became the first fusion energy company to apply to connect to a major U.S. power grid, filing with PJM, the largest grid operator in the U.S., as it advances plans to open the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant in Virginia in the early 2030s (TBD, maybe another fusion developer will claim that “first.” What’s most likely in my opinion is that we’re still a bit further from commercial fusion than all this indicates, but I’d love to be wrong. Link.

• Belgium is reversing course on the decommissioning of its final two nuclear reactors and moving to nationalize its entire nuclear fleet. Prime Minister Bart De Wever confirmed an agreement with French utility Engie, which owns all seven of Belgium's nuclear plants, to begin studies for a full government takeover of its plants, following a years-long political battle that saw five of the seven reactors shut down. France nationalized its own nuclear utility EDF in 2023. Link.

• Canada also announced a new national nuclear strategy this week centered on its domestically-designed CANDU technology. Link.

• Duke Energy's Robinson nuclear plant in South Carolina received NRC approval to operate for 80 years. This was the agency's fastest-ever license renewal review, which is probably the bigger story here (it still took/takes 12 months). The plant's Unit 2 had previously received a 20-year renewal in 2004, making this its second subsequent renewal, in line with an executive order Trump issued last year to accelerate the process. Link.

• China's San'ao nuclear station Unit 1 (1116 MWe), the first of six planned reactors at the site, entered commercial operation this week. China has far more reactors under development than any other country and may well surpass the U.S. for largest nuclear power plant feet (whether measured in total capacity or by reactors) in coming years. Link.

Industry

• U.S. Steel announced a $1.9 billion investment to build the first direct reduced iron (DRI) facility in the United States at Big River Steel Works in Osceola, Arkansas, vertically integrating operations from iron ore mining in Minnesota through to electric arc furnace steelmaking on-site. The company said its partnership with Nippon Steel helped accelerate the timeline. Link.

• Atome, a British-listed green fertilizer company, took a final investment decision on a $665 million green ammonia plant in Villeta, Paraguay, which will use low-cost hydropower to produce ammonia via green hydrogen rather than natural gas. The company described it as the first time an industrial-scale green fertilizer facility has been closed and financed. Link.

Transportation 

• Tesla has begun mass-manufacturing its Class 8 electric semi at its Reno, Nevada production facility. Link.

• Rivian raised its Georgia factory production capacity estimate by 50% to 300,000 vehicles and renegotiated its DOE loan down to $4.5 billion from the original $6.6 billion award, in an effort to allow it access the funds sooner (if at all). Link. Link.

• Ford's EV division reported an $800 million operating loss in Q1 2026, flat year-over-year, on $1.2 billion in revenue (also flat), with a negative EBIT margin of -63%. The company says it is preparing a more affordable EV lineup on a new UEV platform, but, on the whole, I feel like all I’ve reported from legacy U.S. auto manufacturers EV divisions over the years in these newsletters are losses. Link.

• The U.K. now has just over 2 million licensed zero-emission vehicles on its roads, representing 4.8% of all registered vehicles. More than 500,000 ZEVs were licensed in 2025 alone, a 24% increase year-over-year. Link.

• BYD posted its lowest quarterly profit in three years, weighed down by softening demand in its home market. It seems the main story here is that among Chinese EV companies, there’s significantly more competition now than there was a few years ago; certainly, BYD isn’t enjoying the same market share it had even as recently as 2024. Link.

Honorable financing mentions

• Living Carbon, based out of San Francisco, raised $500 million investment, plus an additional ~$13 million direct equity investment, from Octopus Energy Generation to accelerate its U.S. afforestation and reforestation projects. Link.

• CMBlu Energy, based out of Alzenau, Germany, raised a $58.6 million Series C at a valuation exceeding $1 billion for its non-lithium multi-hour battery systems for data centers and industrial applications. Samsung Ventures led. Link.

• DISA Technologies, based out of Casper, WY, raised $33 million in an equity funding round led by Galvanize to use high-pressure fluid technology to extract minerals from ore and recover uranium from contaminated mine sites. BHP Ventures, Evok Innovations, Constellation Energy, Halliburton Labs, Valor Equity Partners, and Veriten also participated. Total funding raised stands at $83 million. Link.

• BMW i Ventures launched a new $300 million fund focused on early-stage through Series B startups working on agentic AI, physical AI (including robotics and AVs), industrial software, advanced materials, and manufacturing and supply chain technologies. This new raise brings the firm's total capital under management to $1.1 billion. Link.

• Kompas VC, based out of Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Tel Aviv, closed its second fund at €160 million (~$187.5 million). The firm writes early-stage checks of €3–5 million into companies focused on decarbonization, manufacturing, supply chains, and critical infrastructure. Link.

• Arcadia, an AI-powered energy intelligence platform, entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ENGIE Impact, the utility expense management, energy procurement, and sustainability advisory arm of ENGIE. The combined business will serve over 1,500 enterprise customers, including roughly 25% of the Fortune 500, manage 4.5 million meters globally, and process over $30 billion in annual utility payments. Link.

Ciao,

— Nick

Hurricane Helene, which wreaked unprecedented damage (both in scope and location) in regions more than four hundred miles inland in North Carolina, makes landfall on September 26, 2024. Credit: CSU/CIRA & NOAA

The U.S. has spent decades getting better at weathering hurricanes. Building codes have been strengthened, evacuation systems refined, forecasting windows extended and made more precise. After Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida in 1992, Miami-Dade County adopted some of the strongest building codes in the country. Yet, twenty-five years later, Hurricane Irma still caused nearly twice as much economic damage to Florida. When Hurricane Michael tore through Florida's Tyndall Air Force Base in 2018, meanwhile, it destroyed hundreds of buildings and caused nearly $5 billion in damage to a single military installation. The base is now being rebuilt to withstand future Category 5 storms. It’s a worthwhile response. And an emblematic one, insofar as it’s solely focused on adaptation and resilience. 

The pattern is consistent across the Atlantic basin. Despite sustained investment in adaptation and preparedness, hurricane-related damages keep climbing as economic development in vulnerable coastal areas grows, concentrating more and more at-risk infrastructure and people in the path of a perennial series of storms. Almost all investment goes toward downstream preparedness, i.e., efforts to prepare for, absorb, and recover from the damage hurricanes cause. There's another approach, however, one that asks a fundamentally different question: what if we could weaken hurricanes before they make landfall? 

It's not a new idea. For decades in the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. government, as well as the Japanese government, funded ambitious, multi-agency programs to investigate scientific questions surrounding hurricane formation, trajectories, and the feasibility of upstream interventions to weaken or redirect them. Then, for several reasons, all reasonably founded, the vast majority of that work ground to a halt. The science was inconclusive, the costs were escalating out of hand, and social and geopolitical questions were and remain valid, complicating factors. For half a century, this field has lain fallow.

This is not to say there isn’t ongoing, credible, rigorous research into intervention in hurricanes; there is significant, ongoing research at many institutions worldwide on several different potential pathways to viable intervention. But the fundamental conditions that historically stifled interest in storm modification have changed considerably, making it worth revitalizing, accelerating, and creating coordinating infrastructure to advance intervention efforts.

The history of hurricane modification

The first federally funded program to investigate the viability of hurricane modification was Project Cirrus, a collaboration between the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and General Electric to cover "research study of cloud particles and cloud modifications." In 1947, researchers with the project dropped roughly 86 kilograms of dry ice near the center of Hurricane King. The storm appeared to weaken briefly, though it then intensified the following day before making landfall in Georgia and South Carolina. It’s unlikely, and was impossible to conclude at the time, that Project Cirrus’ intervention altered the trajectory or power of the storm. Still, the general public blamed the seeding efforts and a lawsuit followed, establishing a pattern in which social license and geopolitical questions, as well as the need for more sophisticated methodological and meteorological capacity, came to the fore after any period during which intervention research gained a modicum of traction.

While Project Cirrus was discontinued in 1952, it sparked interest and appetite for federal storm modification research efforts. Between 1954 and 1955, six hurricanes (namely Carol, Edna, Hazel, Connie, Diane, and Ione) caused extensive damage across the eastern seaboard of the U.S., reinvigorating political and scientific appetite to, well, “do something.” In 1955, Congress authorized the U.S. Weather Bureau to create the National Hurricane Research Project. Within a few years, it had its own aircraft and was studying hurricanes for exploitable weaknesses.

Perhaps the most famous of past research efforts into hurricane modification was Project STORMFURY, an experiment conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy from 1962 to 1983. The project aimed to weaken hurricanes by seeding their clouds with silver iodide, a substance known to induce cloud formation by causing supercooled water droplets to freeze. The same technique is still used today in cloud seeding operations that attempt to induce rain from supercooled clouds worldwide.

VQ-1 Whale in 1974; similar planes were used in STORMFURY operations (Credit: U.S. Navy)

Researchers discovered large amounts of supercooled liquid water inside hurricanes, which led to a hypothesis that seeding the eyewall of a storm with silver iodide and freezing the supercooled water in it might force the eyewall to reform at a larger radius. That, by virtue of conservation of angular momentum, might help reduce peak wind speeds. In 1961, the National Hurricane Research Project tested this hypothesis on Hurricane Esther. Silver iodide seeding in the wall cloud appeared to reduce maximum wind speeds by about 10% over two hours. The result was promising enough to formalize the effort: In 1962, the U.S. Navy and the Department of Commerce launched Project STORMFURY.

STORMFURY’s ambitions were high, but its ultimate success was limited. Given stringent (understandable) safety conditions governing how far from land storms had to be to qualify for potential intervention, Project STORMFURY only attempted to intervene in three storms: Beulah in 1963, Debbie in 1969, and Ginger in 1971. Debbie was the high-water mark. Over two days of seeding, the storm’s wind speeds dropped measurably from 57 m/s to 43 m/s. Researchers were cautiously optimistic. But Ginger, a weak and disorganized storm, showed no objective response to seeding. 

As storm science matured, STORMFURY’s hypothesis also began to disintegrate. In the 1980s, improved observations revealed that most hurricanes simply don't contain enough supercooled water for silver iodide seeding to work as theorized. Secondly, and perhaps more consequentially, researchers observed that hurricanes naturally undergo eyewall replacement cycles, forming new eyewalls at larger radii absent any human intervention. The Japanese government had also been conducting typhoon and hurricane modification research, but its efforts petered out toward the end of the 1970s, roughly in parallel to those in the U.S.

STORMFURY’s failure to produce conclusive results, coupled with the scale of the testing that would have been required to make additional progress (hundreds of controlled hurricane experiments), weakened appetite for additional resource allocation. Moreover, geopolitical considerations cropped up, as countries downwind of proposed experiments (mainly China and Japan) objected to being in the way of “modified” storms. By the early 1980s, U.S. agencies redirected funding for weather‑modification programs toward forecasting and atmospheric science, where the returns were clearer, would come faster and with higher likelihoods of success, and weren’t politically fraught. After STORMFURY’s cancellation in 1983, no federal hurricane‑modification program with comparable funding or size replaced it.

The stigma that stuck

STORMFURY's cancellation didn't mark the end of all federal interest in storm modification, but what followed illustrates why the field continues to struggle to regain its footing. The back-to-back hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, which together caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, prompted the Department of Homeland Security to investigate whether the government could, once again, resume efforts to reduce storm intensity directly, in addition to investing in damage mitigation. In 2008, DHS's Science and Technology Directorate partnered with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory to scope viable paths forward. The resulting plan was modest and methodical; the coalition would develop models focused on the most promising potential intervention pathways, iteratively narrow the list for further testing, and eventually, ideally, identify one worth advancing to small-scale outdoor experiments.

DHS launched Project HURRMIT to model hurricane mitigation ideas, such as cloud seeding and wave-driven upwelling pumps, and later established a Hurricane Aerosol Microphysics Program (HAMP) that enlisted scientists including Joseph Golden, a retired NOAA researcher who worked on STORMFURY decades earlier. But the initiative ran into a wall that had less to do with science than with institutional culture. As William Laska, a program manager at DHS's Science and Technology Directorate, described it: 

The terms "geoengineering" and "weather modification" were still heavily charged in scientific and government circles. There was, as Laska also noted, "still a sour taste from STORMFURY." DHS ultimately retreated to aerosol and cloud microphysics research. That work is essential, too, but DHS explicitly reframed it as hurricane prediction support, rather than intervention. 

The lessons from the early aughts mirror those from the 20th century: Even well-resourced federal agencies, motivated by devastating hurricane seasons and armed with cautious, stage-gated plans, couldn't overcome lingering stigma and institutional risk aversion that persisted in the field over decades and still does to this day. 

What makes this decade different? 

Investment in tropical storm modification has stalled in the U.S., and abroad, multiple times for three main reasons:

1. The science: Experiments failed to conclusively showcase the capacity to modify storms or to bear out initial hypotheses, in part due to technological constraints, some of which have since been solved or are now solvable. 

2. The capital: The scale of capital required to iterate on these experiments again, as well as to expand them to prove intervention capacity, was monumental. 

3. The stigma: Stigma in academic and scientific circles, as well as social license and geopolitical concerns, coupled with the other factors, undercut appetite to keep investing in research, programs, and supporting infrastructure. 

So why is now, more than fifty years after the largest ever experiments, the right time to resuscitate storm modification and intervention efforts? For one, much of the core science, weather forecasting, and modeling capacity needed for research has advanced considerably. Computational models have grown in power by many orders of magnitude and continue to scale annually, if not monthly. Satellite and airborne observation systems can reach resolutions that Stormfury-era researchers would have salivated over. But as the frequency and severity of tropical storms accelerate as a result of cascading climate impacts, scientists are revisiting the idea of intervening in them, this time with the tools of modern science.

Three broad categories of intervention are attracting the most scientific attention. The first focuses on cooling sea surface temperatures along likely hurricane tracks before storms arrive, using methods including engineered upwelling or deep-water mixing to deprive storms of the warm water that fuels them. The relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity is one of the most robust in tropical meteorology, and autonomous ocean sensing now makes it possible to map subsurface thermal structure in real time. The second category investigates suppressing evaporation at the ocean surface using thin, temporary films that cut off the heat transfer powering intensification, an approach validated in lab settings decades ago but abandoned because the films couldn't survive realistic ocean conditions. That’s a materials science challenge that modern capabilities are much better equipped to solve, though concerns regarding potential environmental contamination persist. The third category updates the STORMFURY playbook: modify hurricane inner-core dynamics via cloud seeding, but with better observation, targeting, and attribution capabilities, more rugged deployment architectures, and potentially more effective and environmentally safer seeding agents.

The University of Miami SUSTAIN Laboratory’s wind-wave tank is capable of simulating Category 5 hurricane conditions and provides a necessary testbed for modern experiments.

Still, the landscape of science, research, and development remains a far cry from what it was in the 1960s and 1970s, and many bottlenecks persist that render step-change-type progress in the field unlikely near-term. For any modification and intervention efforts, regardless of the intervention pathway in question, to achieve greater viability, researchers will need more sophisticated sensor and data technology, which in turn will support more sophisticated modeling and attribution. Current lab work consists of large indoor tanks, static water tests, film layers, all of which, even together, can only loosely represent real hurricane conditions. Progressively larger and higher-fidelity simulations and testing infrastructure, ones that better represent ‘real’ conditions, alongside better parameterization in models, are essential before outdoor experiments can even be considered and anyone can credibly claim meaningful hurricane-weakening effects from any given intervention pathway.

The highest-leverage areas for this intervention research span several interconnected fronts. On the computational side, the field needs higher-resolution, AI-assisted hurricane models capable of simulating candidate interventions at operationally relevant speeds, as well as better integration of aerosol-cloud microphysics into numerical weather prediction. On the observational side, researchers need rugged, low-cost atmospheric sensing equipment that can be deployed in and around hurricanes, alongside real-time subsurface ocean thermal profiling across hurricane basins. Better materials are also essential, particularly turbulence-resilient, environmentally benign surface films and cost-effective ocean cooling delivery systems that can function at meaningful scales.

Perhaps most critically, the field needs experimental and statistical frameworks capable of detecting and attributing the effects of future interventions against natural variability — the problem that ultimately undermined STORMFURY and other past projects' credibility. Lower-stakes proxy testbeds, such as marine stratocumulus or non-hurricane tropical convection, offer a path toward validating intervention physics before scaling toward tropical storm environments. And all of this research will need to proceed alongside co-developed governance and policy frameworks involving local, state, federal, and international stakeholders, infrastructure that could take as long to formalize as the science itself.

Moreover, recent years have seen renewed interest and investment flow towards weather modification efforts more broadly, particularly cloud seeding, a sector in which private-sector companies are raising venture capital and inking deals with customers ranging from farmers to ski resorts to augment rain and snowfall. The World Meteorological Organization reports that cloud seeding operations have taken place in more than 50 countries. China alone has purportedly conducted ~27,000 documented operations since 2014, a figure that is likely significantly higher, given it is based on a limited data set. While markedly different in many ways from hurricane intervention efforts, advances in cloud seeding could be useful to several potential hurricane intervention pathways, and the broader signal that attitudes toward weather modification are shifting is a helpful tailwind. 

The optimal path forward to revitalize the field

Private companies, academic labs, and government agencies are all doing valuable work on hurricane intervention. Venture-backed startups are exploring ocean cooling technologies. Academic researchers are refining models and testing hypotheses across intervention pathways. Government agencies continue to fund foundational atmospheric science. But each operates within constraints that limit how far any one actor alone can advance the field. Venture capital drives companies to commercialize on a fund-lifecycle timeline, which can pressure companies to pursue commercialization before the science is ready, creating tension and inhibiting collaboration with other players in the field. Hurricane intervention efforts, especially at the scale of storms, are highly unlikely on medium-term timelines, regardless of how well near-term revitalization efforts proceed. What a revenue model for future interventions looks like is also opaque; even if meaningful intervention is achieved someday, precise attribution of what potential damages it averted and to what extent, may remain more challenging than meaningful intervention efforts themselves. 

Government agencies, as the DHS’s experience illustrates, face institutional stigma and are subject to political cycles that make sustained commitments, let alone scaling additional capital allocation, difficult. Academic labs produce essential science but often lack mandates to coordinate across disciplines or a clear, viable path to progress toward applied, field-ready research programs. Alongside scientific, R&D, and governance components, what’s missing from this field at present is a coordinating layer: an entity to convene otherwise disparate actors around a shared research agenda, to fund the foundational work that doesn't fit VC’s timeline or any single lab's mandate, and to build key coordination infrastructure for the field.

The economic stakes reinforce the case. Financial returns, including those potentially realized by averting economic losses driven by hurricanes, could be significant. Hurricanes scale approximately with the cube of their landfall wind speed, meaning even 10–15% reductions in maximum sustained winds at landfall can reduce total damages by ~50%. Who pays for interventions, however, remains an open question. That’s not to say that the benefits of intervention couldn’t be structured into financial instruments in creative ways; in the market for financial derivatives, which is massive, there is basically no limit to creativity. But the scientific and R&D advances most needed for the field today and in the medium-term require a “first mover” funder that isn’t motivated primarily by medium- or even long-term financial gain, given hurricane intervention is likely to produce more public than private goods. Even if real-world hurricane intervention never reaches operational scale, advancing the underlying R&D — such as weather and atmospheric data collection, modeling capacity, materials science — could find application across other fields, offering valuable co-benefits regardless.

Philanthropy is best positioned to fill this void. Philanthropic capital combines the catalytic characteristics of venture capital (relatively small investments with high potential upside) with the patience and public-interest orientation of non-private sector funding. A philanthropically-funded coordinating entity could de-risk private sector investment by advancing foundational science to the point where commercial applications become more viable. It could also bridge academic silos by creating shared benchmarks and sequencing research so that early results inform later decisions, and kickstart more of the essential work of building governance frameworks and stakeholder coalitions, including with governments, multilateral institutions, and affected communities, in parallel with the science. 

A government-funded entity could do more of this work, too. But it seems unlikely governments will invest more at this point in time, given how many cycles of prioritization and deprioritization they’ve already gone through with respect to hurricane intervention. Philanthropy, specifically, the creation of a new, philanthropically-funded entity, is the best option to create vital coordination infrastructure for the hurricane intervention field at this time.

The eyewall in the room

Now, it’s time to return to the eyewall in the room. The operational realization of hurricane intervention efforts and strategies will always have to navigate social and geopolitical controversy. They always have and always will. The planetary atmosphere is a global commons. Modifying a hurricane to spare one specific region could inadvertently redirect the storm to another, potentially yielding geopolitical blowback and exacerbating already scientifically and financially challenging questions around attribution and liability.

While that scale of intervention is a long way off, it’s another reason that an uncoordinated field of actors isn’t the ideal state of play to advance this discipline. No single actor is in the position to take on the level of risk larger-scale interventions will entail, nor to build and sustain global coordination, whether on research or governance efforts. Coordination on those fronts will need to proceed in parallel with accelerated R&D; as they could take as long, if not longer, to formalize than the science, technology, and attribution systems. The urgency and opportunity grow every year as more people, more infrastructure, and more overall economic value sit in the path of intensifying storms. As such, it's essential that all workstreams accelerate today, with coordination anchored by a new, philanthropically-funded entity.

Other opportunities

The Capital Valleys Forum is coming up on May 8, as part of the inaugural Sacramento Climate Week. It features a growing, curated selection of speakers ranging from Mayor McCarty (of Sacramento), Utilities, Cisco, CalSTRS, CARB, SMUD, CalEPIC, Infinium, California Forward, HSBC and more TBA; covering water, energy, jobs, agriculture and AI, bridging discussions of tech & policy for the prosperity of California. → RSVP here.

Catch you back here on Monday

— Nick

Hey,

It was a great SF climate week. Paul Gambill’s roundup of the Stabilize Earth event does it better justice than I could do in brief here, and we launched the Arctic Stabilization Initiative on Tuesday. Thanks for all the kind words; if you missed the launch, read more here.

For those of you I caught in SF, ‘twas great to see you. For those of you I didn’t, well, hope to see you soon. Also, ICYMI, I have a new podcast with Silas Mähner, which offers insight into the current climate tech landscape, especially re: recruiting and storytelling.

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ONE STORY IN (TWO) SENTENCE(S) AND A CHART

• The Western U.S. has been and remains in an atrocious drought; March 2026 was the third-worst month for drought in observed history for the United States. Here’s to hoping there are some more spring showers before we head into an El Niño-fueled H2 2026. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• A stretch of anomalously warm Pacific water spanning roughly 5,000 miles is drawing concern from climate scientists, who warn it could push western U.S. temperatures and humidity significantly higher this summer while increasing the likelihood of both hurricane formation and wildfire conditions. Link.

• 2025 was a record year for climate fund closes, according to reporting from Sightline and CTVC. $92 billion was raised across 179 funds. That said, the landscape is increasingly bifurcated. Infrastructure mega-funds dominate, with 75% of all capital concentrated in just 58 funds and Brookfield alone accounting for $51 billion in closes. Meanwhile, climate VC at earlier stages is struggling. Close rates fell to 39% (the lowest for any fund type), the average VC fund shrank from $174M to $160M, and the U.S. saw just $37 billion raised versus Europe's $61 billion, a striking reversal from 2022. Link.

Energy market x Iran war updates

• Oil futures are still hovering close to $100 a barrel as of this writing, given ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts remain largely unresolved. Link.

• Reposting some numbers here from recent weeks → EV sales surged globally in March amid rising fuel prices from the Hormuz conflict: India posted 87% year-over-year growth, the U.K. recorded its highest monthly EV sales ever, and U.S. used-EV sales rose 17% year-over-year in Q1, 2026. Link.

• Nitrogen-based fertilizer prices have more than doubled following the Strait of Hormuz closure, which has choked off roughly one-third of global urea exports. The CEO of fertilizer giant Fertiglobe warning it could take "months and months" to normalize even after the strait reopens, and that many farmers are likely to forgo fertilizer this planting season, which raises the prospect of food shortages and inflation ahead. Link.

Elsewhere in energy and industry

• For the first time in over a century, clean power surpassed coal's share of global electricity generation in 2025; renewables hit 34% vs. coal's 33%, according to Ember. Solar alone met three-quarters of last year's demand growth. Link.

• The global wind industry installed a record 165 GW of new capacity in 2025, a 40% increase from 2024; China and India accounted for four fifths of the additions. Link.

• CATL unveiled a series of battery breakthroughs at an event in Beijing. Its third-generation Shenxing LFP battery charges from 10% to 80% in just 3 minutes and 44 seconds, even at temperatures as low as -30°C, while a separate battery claims a world-record 932-mile range. The company also confirmed that sales of passenger EVs featuring sodium-ion cells rather than lithium-ion will begin sales by Q3 and full scale sodium-ion battery production will start in Q4. Link. Link.

• GE Vernova shares jumped 14% after the company reported its order backlog surged 32% to a record $163.28 billion, driven by soaring demand for gas turbines and nuclear reactors to power the AI data center buildout. Analysts expect the company to be sold out of heavy-duty turbine production capacity through 2029 and potentially into 2030. Link.

• A federal judge halted the Trump administration's freeze on new wind and solar projects, which clean energy advocates said had placed 57 GW of capacity at risk of cancellation or delay beyond 2029. Link.

• For a brief period this week, fossil fuel fired-electricity fell to just 2% of the U.K.'s electricity supply, the lowest level on record since 2009, underscoring the country's reasonable success adding renewables. In 2025, U.K. gas use fell to a 34-year low and coal use dropped to levels last seen in 1600. Link.

• Perovskite solar startup Tandem PV officially opened its new factory in Fremont, California, aiming to produce panels that increase solar conversion efficiency by up to 40% over conventional silicon cells. Link.

• The White House declared grid infrastructure, including transformers, transmission lines, substations, and high-voltage circuit breakers, essential to national defense, perhaps a helpful policy tailwind for companies working to electrify America. TBD how much follow through we get on this executive order, which mostly amounts to words right now. Link.

• Battery recycling startup Redwood Materials, based in Carson City, NV, laid off approximately 135 employees (~10% of its workforce) as it restructures to focus on energy storage. The company raised $425 million just earlier this year at a $6+ billion post-money valuation. Link.

Fission and fusion

• Nuclear developer X-energy raised $1 billion in an upsized IPO priced above its expected range, with surging electricity demand from AI data centers driving investor interest in small modular reactors. I’d be cautious on the investor side here, personally; we’re seeing big valuations for companies that have never sold a single kWh. Link.

• Bill Gates-backed TerraPower broke ground on its 345-MW Natrium advanced nuclear plant in western Wyoming. Link.

• Kairos Power broke ground on its first commercial-scale advanced reactor, which will supply power to Google data centers. Link.

• GE Vernova's BWRX-300 boiling water reactor at Ontario Power Generation's Darlington plant is 38% complete and purportedly on track to deliver electricity by 2030, per recent updates; it’s in the running to be North America's first operational small modular reactor. Link.

Policy

• Monterey Park, California became the first city in the state to permanently ban data centers, with the city council voting unanimously to declare them a public nuisance. Link.

• Maine Governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would have imposed a statewide moratorium on new data centers through November 2027, though she signed legislation barring data centers from state tax incentive programs. Lots of whiplash in this story so far, which is par for the course energy and sustainability news wise this year. Link.

• BP shareholders handed the oil major a "heavy defeat" at its annual meeting, rejecting two resolutions that would have reduced the company's climate reporting requirements and replaced in-person shareholder meetings with online-only events. Nearly 18% of shareholders also voted against the reelection of BP's chair. Link.

• A group of institutional investors including Sarasin & Partners, NEST, Merseyside Pension Fund, Lombard Odier Investment Management, and EdenTree Investment Management asked the U.K.'s Financial Reporting Council to audit HSBC's 2025 accounts as to whether the bank is properly accounting for climate-related financial risks. Link.

• The 2026 midterms are shaping into a competitive referendum on the Trump administration: Democrats need a net gain of just ~3 House seats to reclaim the majority, with some projections approaching 50/50 odds of a Democratic House flip. The Senate map structurally favors Republicans, but Georgia, Michigan, Maine, and Texas are all in play, and mid-decade redistricting, particularly amid Virginia map redistricting. Virginian outcomes alone could flip four Republican seats, which could shift control of the House. Link.

Transportation 

• Waymo's safety record is now approaching 200 million driverless miles with zero at-fault fatalities, only five serious incidents plausibly linked to its vehicles, and crash reviews that indicate most incidents involved human drivers striking stationary or slow-moving Waymos. Human drivers, in contrast, average a fatal crash every ~90 million miles. Link.

• General Motors has indefinitely suspended its next-generation full-size electric truck program at its Factory Zero plant in Detroit, shifting back toward internal combustion and hybrid vehicles amid weaker-than-expected demand for large electric pickups. Link.

• Swedish electric truck startup Einride secured a deal to deploy 75 heavy-duty EVs within Amazon's Relay freight network. Link.

Honorable financing mentions

• USA Rare Earth announced plans to acquire Brazilian rare earth miner Serra Verde in a deal valued at $2.8 billion in cash and shares, pitching the move as a direct challenge to China's dominance in rare earth processing and supply chains. Link.

• The U.K.'s development finance institution, British International Investment, launched British Climate Partners, a £1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) initiative to mobilize private capital for the energy transition across Asian developing economies including India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia. The estimated investment scale needed to help transition away from coal (and not necessarily solely to renewables, either) runs ~$210 billion annually for Southeast Asia and $160 billion for India through 2030. Link.

• As noted earlier on in this email, X-energy, a nuclear small modular reactor developer, raised $1 billion in an upsized IPO priced above its marketed range. Link.

• Blue Energy, a three-year-old startup based in Chevy Chase, MD, raised $380 million in financing split between equity and debt to make nuclear power plants by manufacturing reactors in shipyards and then transporting them to deployment sites. VXI Capital led; At One Ventures, Engine Ventures, and Tamarack Global also invested. Link.

• Nova Fusion, based out of Shanghai, raised $103 million in a pre-seed / seed round (!) from Alibaba Group to make nuclear fusion reactors. Link.

• Rivan, a three-year-old startup based in London, raised $34 million in a Series A round led by IQ Capital to make synthetic fuels. Plural, Fundomo, and various angels also invested. Link.

• Decade Energy, a seven-year-old startup based in Paris, France, raised $25.8 million in a round co-led by Eiffel Investment Group and SET Ventures to design, finance, and operate integrated energy systems including battery storage and EV charging for fleets. Ananda Impact Ventures and Contrarian Ventures also participated. Link.

• Humble, a recently founded startup based in San Francisco, CA, raised $24 million in a seed round led by Eclipse to build fully autonomous, cabless Class 8 electric haulers for freight. Energy Impact Partners also participating. Link.

• Exergy3, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, raised ~$13.3 million in seed funding for its ultra-high temperature thermal energy storage designed to help decarbonize industrial processes. Axeleo Capital led, with Bayern Kapital, Kibo Invest, Scottish Enterprise, Zero Carbon Capital, and Old College Capital participating. Link.

• Fasal Bio, an eight-year-old startup based in Zagreb, Croatia, that develops renewable composite materials replacing fossil-based plastics while working with existing manufacturing processes, raised ~$8.2 million in a round led by BlackPeak Capital. Link.

• TheStorage, a three-year-old startup based out of Tampere, Finland, raised ~$4.2 million in a seed round led by Voima Ventures to store renewable energy as heat using sand-based systems for on-demand delivery to industrial processes. Momentum and previous investors Superhero Capital and 2C Ventures also participated. Link.

Fun (and fast) diversions

I once ran a 3:07 marathon, well short of breaking the 3 hour mark which I hoped to achieve that day (almost a dozen years ago). Now, for the first time ever, people are breaking the 2 hour mark in the marathon, which nets out to running 26.2 miles, each at a <4:35 average mile pace. I never even ran a single mile that fast; as a solid high school track guy, the best I managed was 4:40 or so.

Here’s a nice visualization of the evolution of marathon times over the past century plus. Interesting to see some big drops followed by plateus. Recent advancements owe as much to shoe technology as anything else (not to take anything away from the record breakers). Link.

Have a nice week ahead,

— Nick

Climate systems in the Arctic are approaching critical tipping points and there is no coordinated, system-level plan to prepare for and respond to these risks.

The Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI), a new stage-gated research program, has raised $6.5 million to advance the research needed to assess the safety, efficacy, and feasibility of Arctic-targeted climate interventions.

Image credit: Hector John Periquin

Every country that sits on a major earthquake fault line maintains a disaster risk management and response plan. They do this despite not knowing when the next earthquake will strike or how severe it will be. Forecasting earthquakes is notoriously challenging despite decades of intensive research into precursors and fault mechanics. The same reasoning extends to many other domains. Stakeholders across disciplines and jurisdictions invest readily to study risks and develop preparedness for pandemics, floods, hurricanes, and many other types of disasters. The higher the potential damages and consequences, the higher the benefit of robust preparedness.

Many of the most advanced disaster early warning systems only offer minutes of advanced notice. Other systems designed to monitor catastrophic risks and inform preparedness - whether tsunami DART buoys, hurricane satellite tracking, flood gauge networks, or volcanic seismic/GPS monitoring - offer valuable, even if short, warning windows. Such efforts require significant resources, including scientific and technical infrastructure, as well as dedicated human and financial capital. Given the prevalence of such systems, the absence of comparable infrastructure for one area of concentrated disaster risks is striking.

Introducing ASI: Advancing science and assessing how to reduce dramatically underserved risks

Preparing for, responding to, and reducing disaster risk requires two components. The first is establishing preparedness measures: the evacuation routes, the flood barriers, stockpiling relief items. The second is the coordination protocol, the agreements between governments, institutions, and communities that determine who acts, how, to what extent, under which circumstances, and on what authority. Despite the scope, scale, and the urgent need to prepare for and respond to these risks, neither core component of risk management exists for the Arctic.

The Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI), incubated within the Advanced Research for Climate Emergencies (ARC), a program of Renaissance Philanthropy, has raised $6.5 million in philanthropic funding to launch a systems-level research program to advance the research required to assess and address some of the most severe and near-term risks in the Arctic (and on the planet). ASI will evaluate the feasibility, efficacy, risks, and benefits of a portfolio of potential Arctic-targeted climate interventions via a stage-gated research program, focusing on how and under what conditions response options could work, drive the most impact, how they might interact with cryosphere systems, and whether a portfolio of approaches could help stabilize core components of the Arctic’s climate system. This news was also covered in Heatmap News this morning.

ASI’s goal is to deliver the formal scientific benchmark and predictive tools needed to assess the safety and efficacy of Arctic-targeted interventions to a coalition of governments, Indigenous Peoples, and multilateral institutions positioned to use them. ASI will work to convene this coalition of parties.

The initiative is led by Charlotte DeWald, PhD, a climate scientist whose research on cloud ice formation pathways and the biological, chemical, and physical systems that link the ocean to the atmosphere informs ASI’s mission. Ryan O’Donnell also serves as Senior Strategic Advisor to ASI. A former U.S. diplomat and disaster response leader, O’Donnell has spent a decade working in disaster-preparedness and response operations, and co-designing climate resilience initiatives with Indigenous Peoples. O’Donnell will lead ASI’s engagement with Indigenous Peoples, whose lands are directly affected by Arctic climate risks, and the governments and multilateral institutions whose partnership is needed for successful initiatives.

Why the Arctic is mission critical

The world is dramatically underprepared for a confluence of potentially catastrophic risks concentrated in the Arctic. Arctic stability regulates food production, water availability, and livable conditions worldwide. It loses more heat to space than it absorbs, in contrast to lower latitudes, which receive more heat from the sun than they lose to space. But the Arctic is warming at roughly four times the global average, and up to seven times faster in some subregions. It’s also home to two of the most imminently at-risk climate systems on Earth, namely the Greenland Ice Sheet and thawing permafrost. A third feature of the Arctic is also under acute pressure: the Arctic sea ice extent has declined ~12% per decade since 1979.

These Arctic climate systems are at severe, imminent risk of destabilization, especially considering the higher Arctic warming rates. They are also tightly coupled and influence each other in complex, potentially compounding and cascading ways. The threshold which, if crossed, risks “tipping” these Arctic systems (as well as many others globally) into states of irreversible destabilization, is between 1.5 and 2°C of global mean warming. That’s a temperature range the world could enter within the next decade, possibly even before 2030. Given how closely interconnected these systems are to each other and the rest of the Earth’s climate, a triggered tipping point in one or more exacerbates destabilization risk across the Arctic and the globe.

The potential near-term consequences of destabilization in these Arctic climate systems include:

1. The Greenland Ice Sheet: Loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet could drive up to 0.25 meters of sea level rise by 2100. The freshwater it’s already releasing is measurably slowing Atlantic Ocean circulation, with downstream consequences for weather across Europe, monsoon systems in South Asia and the Sahel, and coastal sea-level rise.

2. Permafrost thaw: Permafrost across Arctic regions has already shifted from acting as net a carbon dioxide and methane sink to a net source. The greenhouse gasses it previously stored are being released at accelerated rates, as warming drives more rapid thaw. By 2100, cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost could rival the total historic emissions of the United States, and these additional releases could drive a feedback loop whereby warming begets more warming.

3. Arctic summer sea ice extent: Arctic summer sea ice functions like an air conditioner for the planet. Its loss has already contributed to global warming roughly equivalent to a quarter of what global carbon dioxide emissions over the past thirty years have driven. As reflective ice gives way to dark open water, the Arctic absorbs more solar heat, accelerating every other feedback in the system. Multiple models project the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in summer by the mid-2030s.

The Arctic is best understood as a complex and critical component of Earth’s climate system that serves a societally necessary climate regulating role. It also constitutes an increasingly acute, near-term, and potentially cascading risk profile. Multiple Arctic systems are destabilizing on an accelerated timeline, with consequences that reach far beyond the region itself. The long-term consequences of a destabilizing Arctic are staggering. High end estimates place the economic toll of severe and sustained Arctic destabilization at $70 trillion over coming centuries.

Why this program doesn’t exist yet

Even under the most optimistic decarbonization scenarios, the world will likely breach the 1.5°C threshold within the decade, if not by 2030. We’re entering an “overshoot” period in which Arctic climate systems, as well as many other global climate systems, will be exposed to pressures that risk serious, systemic destabilization, regardless of how fast greenhouse gas emissions fall and carbon removal capacity scales. Decarbonization and carbon removal are absolutely necessary. But they are no longer sufficient on their own to manage near-term risks considering the processes such as ice loss and permafrost thaw already underway. Some climate systems, like coral reefs, may already be in irreversible decline.

Researchers have proposed several categories of approaches to stabilizing the Arctic alongside ongoing decarbonization and carbon removal efforts, from methods that increase atmospheric reflectivity, to those that thin heat-trapping cloud layers, to approaches that reinforce Arctic ice structurally. Some efforts have examined interventions individually, but no systematic effort has evaluated whether, under which conditions, and in which combinations a portfolio of interventions could help stabilize core Arctic climate systems.

There are structural reasons for this gap in research. Intervention approaches are often too applied for most academic research mandates, too uncertain for governments to fund unilaterally, and too complex and potentially consequential for any single institution to pursue without broad scientific and stakeholder engagement and a coordinated governance and coalition-building strategy. As a result, the field lacks a well-resourced research program to work on parallel fronts to create shared benchmarks and agreed-upon criteria governments would need before making decisions, and the mechanisms to sequence work and disseminate findings so that early results make findings actionable for scientists, governments and multilateral institutions.

As Dr. Christina McCluskey of the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a member of ASI’s Scientific Advisory Board, describes:

ASI is that program.

What’s the plan?

The first intervention ASI will advance through its stage-gated framework and evaluation process is Mixed-Phase Cloud Thinning (MCT). About 60% of Arctic clouds are mixed-phase, meaning they contain both ice crystals and supercooled liquid water. For most of the year, these clouds trap more heat than they reflect. MCT aims to enhance ice formation in these clouds to reduce their heat-trapping effect, allowing more surface heat to radiate into space. Early models suggest the approach could cool the Arctic by roughly 1°C. It is also operationally analogous to existing cloud‑seeding practices in the U.S. and Canada, which offers technical and regulatory precedent that could lower political and social‑license barriers.

Phase I of ASI will leverage existing data and observations, to evaluate whether and to what extent specific interventions, such as Mixed-Phase Cloud Thinning (MCT), could help stabilize Arctic systems like sea ice and permafrost. Dust emissions and biological ice-nucleating particles from the ocean surface support ‘natural experiment’ approaches, or naturally occurring perturbations to Arctic clouds that are detectable from satellite and ground-based sensors. Analyzing how these events alter cloud phase and outgoing heat across different seasons and regions could support an estimate of MCT’s minimum potential efficacy and help identify where and when MCT could help slow sea ice loss and support stabilization. Phase I findings determine what follows. The program advances if three conditions hold: MCT remains plausibly effective in at least some target regimes, decision-critical uncertainties can be identified and addressed with additional evidence, and early screening has not revealed disqualifying large-scale concerns.

Dr. Matthew Shupe, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado and NOAA, and also a member of ASI’s Scientific Advisory Board, notes:

Alongside Dr. Matthew Shupe and Dr. Christina McCluskey, ASI’s Scientific Advisory Board also includes Dr. Graham Feingold of the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory.

The defining decade for the Arctic, and the planet

ASI was established on the premise that we have under 10 years to build a tipping point risk management approach, and was designed to produce findings within that period that governments, multilateral institutions, and Indigenous rights-holders can evaluate and act on. Some findings may establish that specific approaches carry risks that outweigh their potential benefits, or that certain interventions are not feasible at the scales that matter. That too constitutes the evidence base responsible governance requires. ASI will produce that evidence base while the findings can still shape what comes next.

Thanks for reading. I’ve been thrilled and humbled to support ASI over recent weeks and months, and look forward to continuing to do so, as they advance their research and technical intervention and governance development efforts.

For any inquiries, whether press or science-related and otherwise, you can respond directly to this email or email me at nicholas.vanosdol@renphil.org.

— Nick

Hi there,

Happy SF climate week to all making the trip and attending events over the course of the coming week. I’ll be up in the city Tuesday through Thursday bopping around; drop me a line by responding to this email and maybe we can link up or hop to events together. I’ll also report out in a future edition on some of the main themes and what I heard.

Also, tune back in here Tuesday for some major program news from a new, bold initiative I’ve been supporting closely, and increasingly so in coming weeks. It’s awesome and we’re excited to launch it to the world more publicly and share the vision with people like you.

Finally, I have a new podcast up with the inmitable Silas Mahner after a long podcasting hiatus. You can listen to that here. Lots of insight into the current climate tech landscape, especially with respect to recruiting and storytelling, which are two of Silas’ specialties.

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• It’s worth resisting the idea that the general public has lost interest and patience to remain concerned about climate change, let alone committed to combatting it; a recent Gallup poll reveals that U.S. adults are more concerned about it than ever (albeit margianlly). Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• Two Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) studies published this month have substantially narrowed the range of scientific uncertainty, in a direction that should unsettle anyone paying attention. The first used direct ocean mooring data from four independent North Atlantic arrays to document an actual, instrument-measured decline in the Atlantic overturning circulation over the past two decades, rather than a signal inferred through proxies or fingerprint methods. The second filtered a large ensemble of climate models against observed South Atlantic salinity data and found that the models aligning most closely with reality are the ones projecting the steepest future weakening, a constrained estimate of 51 ± 8% decline by 2100 under a moderate emissions scenario, roughly 60% worse than the previous multi-model average. One researcher who has studied this system for 35 years now says the probability of passing the AMOC shutdown tipping point by mid-century is above 50%. Link.

Energy market x Iran war updates

• The U.S. military put a naval blockade on Iranian ports on Monday, shutting down Tehran's oil export routes and adding another layer of pressure to energy markets already struggling since the conflict began. No Iran-flagged vessel made it past the U.S. blockade in the first 24 hours of enforcement. Later in the week, oil prices cratered as the Trump administration crowed about having reached a deal to reopen the straight. Over the weekend, prices are rising again, however, as the ceasfire in the straight didn’t last the weekend. Reckon it’s reasonable to expect more of the same whiplash for some time. Link. Link. Link.

• According to the IEA, global oil consumption dropped 3.4% in March, the most severe quarterly contraction since the financial crisis, COVID aside, with demand expected to fall further to approximately 100.4 million barrels per day in April, a low point stretching back over three years. OPEC's own production figures tell a similar story: a record 27% output drop in March concentrated across Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Link. Link.

• Japan committed $10 billion in financial assistance to Southeast Asian nations dealing with the energy supply crunch from the Hormuz conflict, a move that serves multiple strategic purposes: countering Chinese regional influence, securing supply chains Japan depends on, and building goodwill in a part of the world whose energy resilience matters to Tokyo. Link.

• The European Commission is preparing a set of non-binding recommendations for member states aimed at cutting fossil fuel demand during the Middle East energy crisis, covering things like mandatory remote working days, public transport subsidies, and reduced VAT on heat pumps and solar panels. Two binding legislative proposals are also being developed: one to reform electricity grid pricing, another to enshrine that electricity is taxed below fossil fuels. Link.

• Germany put together $1.9 billion in energy price relief for households and businesses as global markets remain under pressure from the conflict. Link.

Elsewhere in energy and industry

• March marked the first time renewables overtook natural gas as the single largest source of U.S. electricity, with wind, solar, hydro, and bioenergy collectively, alongside nuclear, accounting for more than half of total generation, per Ember data. The milestone carries a seasonal asterisk, but the structural capacity growth is real. Link.

• Fervo Energy, the enhanced geothermal systems company, filed an S-1 with the SEC for its planned Nasdaq IPO under the ticker "FRVO," with J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, RBC Capital Markets, and Barclays as lead bookrunners. Link.

• The SunZia Wind project in New Mexico, 3.5 GW of capacity connected to California via 550 miles of new transmission line, the largest renewable energy project ever built in the U.S., has started testing its 916 turbines ahead of full commercial operations later this quarter. The early impact is already detectable: California has reset its all-time wind generation record eight separate times over the past month. A genuinely remarkable thing to have pulled off in the current political environment. Link.

• Georgia-based Suniva is planning a $350 million, 4.5 GW solar cell factory in Laurens, South Carolina. Link.

• Rivian and Redwood Materials announced a partnership to deploy more than 100 second-life Rivian battery packs as a 10 MWh storage system at Rivian's Normal, Illinois manufacturing plant, cutting peak demand costs while demonstrating what a circular battery lifecycle can look like in practice. Link.

• New England's grid-scale battery buildout is moving at a pace that's hard to keep up with. A 250 MW facility in Medway, Massachusetts, operated by VC Renewables, a Vitol subsidiary, is now the region's largest after coming fully online in late February, a title it took from the 175 MW Cross Town battery in Gorham, Maine which had only been running since late November. Jupiter Power is already developing a 700 MW facility at a former oil storage site in Everett, Massachusetts, targeting completion in 2028–29. Link.

• Here’s one I’d misssed last month: Battery technology startup 24M shut down after 15 years and laid off its staff, after raised $500 million across 13 rounds. The company once held a unicorn valuation and had licensing relationships with companies including Norway's former battery giant Freyr. A post-mortem from Battery Burn Book pointed to two structural failures: targeting the wrong end markets, and running R&D reactively rather than anticipating where the technology needed to go. Link.

• Caterpillar acquired Monarch Tractor, the autonomous electric tractor startup, in what represents a big step by the equipment giant into electrified precision agriculture. Link.

• Vermont's first neighborhood-scale geothermal project is on track to break ground this summer at an affordable housing development in Hinesburg, using a shared borehole loop to heat and cool 36 units. Vermont Gas Systems will bear the approximately $275,000 in upfront infrastructure costs, recovering the investment through a monthly per-unit access fee of $25–$35, a utility-ownership model that removes the capital barrier for nonprofit housing developers and could serve as a template for the Northeast. Link.

• Fermi America, the data center company that raised $746 million in its October IPO on the promise of building the world's largest data center, may be in trouble. No tenant has been secured, no meaningful vertical construction has started despite an original April 2026 target, and CEO Toby Neugebauer exited abruptly on April 17, with shares dropping up to 31% in extended trading. Even on an optimistic construction timeline from here, the first buildings wouldn't open until May 2027, a full year behind original projections. Link.

Fission and fusion

• Amazon-backed X-energy launched its IPO roadshow targeting $16–$19 per share and up to ~$814 million in proceeds for its high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. Link.

• The U.K.'s national wealth fund committed up to £599 million to Rolls-Royce to support development of the country's first small modular reactors. Link.

• South Carolina's state-owned utility Santee Cooper gave itself a two-year window to decide whether to proceed with a $2.7 billion plan to restart two partially built AP1000 reactors at the V.C. Summer plant, with next steps due in June. Link.

Policy

• The Trump administration announced a full reorganization of the US Forest Service: headquarters out of DC and into Salt Lake City, all nine regional offices dissolved in favor of 15 state-aligned offices, and 50-plus research facilities consolidated to a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. The institutional expertise being removed is precisely what has historically served as a check on extraction industry pressure on public lands. Link.

• The full settlement terms governing the Trump administration's roughly $928 million buyout of TotalEnergies' offshore wind leases are now public, and they don't reflect well on the government's side of the deal. Total was permitted to satisfy its "new investment" obligation by documenting oil and gas expenditures it had already committed to independently, including its Rio Grande LNG terminal, for which a final investment decision came last September. The company collected nearly a billion dollars in public funds without making any genuinely incremental investments. Legal analysts have also flagged that the cancellation process appears to have bypassed a statutory requirement for a formal hearing. Link.

• The Senate voted 50-49 to open land adjoining Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to copper-nickel mining, handing a win to Chilean mining giant Antofagasta and its U.S. operation Twin Metals Minnesota. The mechanism, the Congressional Review Act, by which this move was conducted, makes this particularly troubling beyond the immediate outcome. Once applied to a federal land management plan, it bars any "substantially similar" rule in the future, potentially indefinitely. And the CRA's reach here could extend to hundreds of other resource management plans dating back to 1996. The Boundary Waters is the most-visited wilderness area in the U.S., anchoring an estimated $16 billion annual recreation economy in the surrounding region. Trump is expected to sign. Link.

• Microsoft has paused new carbon removal credit purchases, landing a serious blow on a sector where the company had previously been responsible for something like 80% of total industry procurement volume. Microsoft's appetite had already been tilting toward nature-based credits over engineered removal; this pause compounds the pressure on the CDR pipeline significantly. Paul Gambill and I saw this coming, to a degree. Link.

• In better news for carbon removal, the Department of Energy has confirmed it will keep up to $1.2 billion in Biden-era funding flowing to two direct air capture hubs—Occidental Petroleum's South Texas project and Climeworks and Heirloom's Project Cypress in Louisiana —both of which had previously turned up on a leaked internal list of grants being targeted for cancellation. Link.

• On May 5, Richland County, Ohio voters will decide whether to overturn a county-wide ban on utility-scale wind and solar projects. The case is being watched closely: more than 450 counties and municipalities across 44 states now carry similar restrictions, and Ohio's Senate Bill 52 has made the state a particular flashpoint. Notably, the campaign to overturn the ban is leading with a focus on property rights and job creation, rather than climate arguments. Link.

• Anti-data center sentiment continues to percolate and advance. Maine became the first state to officially enact a statewide ban on new large data centers (those drawing more than 20 GW), pending governor's signature, with a moratorium running through late 2027. In Missouri, a community responded to an approved local project by voting out every incumbent council member who supported it. At least 11 states now have moratorium legislation in motion. Link. Link.

• Delta Air Lines removed its 2030 target to source 10% of jet fuel from sustainable aviation fuel and downgraded its net-zero 2050 commitment from a "goal" to an "aspiration." IATA projects SAF will cover just 0.8% of global aviation fuel this year; Delta's own SAF use in 2025 was roughly 0.5% of consumption despite a six-fold volume increase over two years. Link.

Transportation 

• China's EV exports roughly doubled in Q1, rising 124%, with analysts suggesting the global energy price surge from the Hormuz conflict could accelerate that further as gasoline costs climb internationally. Chinese lithium battery exports also jumped 50% year-on-year in the same period, partly driven by front-loading before an export tax rebate reduction that kicked in April 1. Link. Link.

• Uber added $200 million to its Lucid Motors investment and raised its vehicle purchase commitment to at least 35,000 EVs for robotaxi deployment, up from the 20,000 previously announced. Link.

• Lyft, meanwhile, is building an 80,000-square-foot warehouse in Nashville to handle servicing, charging, and maintenance for Waymo's autonomous fleet. This is a deliberate pivot away from owning the vehicles toward running the operational layer behind them. It stands in contrast to Uber, which, as above, is investing directly into robotaxis. Link.

• Tesla received its first regulatory approval to operate Full Self-Driving software in Europe, a market milestone for the company which offers a brighspot in the face of two consecutive years of declining sales on that continent. Link.

• Hyundai's U.S. EV sales climbed 40% between February and March, driven by rising gasoline prices pulling consumers toward electric vehicles. CEO José Muñoz noted the company's sales mix has recovered to pre-tax-credit levels despite the $7,500 federal EV credit having been eliminated, and that dealers who were recently telling Hyundai to produce fewer EVs are now requesting more inventory. Link.

Honorable financing mentions

• Stegra, based out of Stockholm, (formerly H2 Green Steel), which aims to produce near-zero emissions steel using green hydrogen and renewable-powered electric arc furnaces, raised €1.4 billion (~$1.65 billion). The Wallenberg family led, joined by Temasek, IMAS, Altor, Hy24, and Just Climate. Link.

• Slate Auto, based out of Troy, MI, which develops low-cost electric pickup trucks, raised a $650 million Series C. TWG Global led. Link.

• Mazama Energy, based out of Frisco, TX, which develops next-generation geothermal systems engineered to reach ultra-high subsurface temperatures, raised $100 million. I couldn’t get my hands on investor details all that quickly, so I stopped trying. Link.

• Wayve, based out of the U.K., which trains end-to-end autonomous driving systems on sensor data rather than pre-built maps or proprietary hardware, raised a $60 million Series D extension. AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm participated. Link.

• Subra, based out of Denmark, which develops superconductor solutions for zero-loss power transmission and fusion energy applications, raised €40 million (~$47.2 million) in a Series A. Novo Holdings led. Maj Invest and SPRIND participated. Link.

• Zanskar, based out of Salt Lake City, which uses AI to locate previously undetected conventional geothermal resources underground, closed a $40 million development capital facility structured as a revolving line of credit for project development, among the first such instruments built specifically for early-stage geothermal. Just Capital and Spring Lane Capital led, with Tierra Adentro Growth Capital also participating. Link.

• Ulysses, based out of San Francisco, which builds networked fleets of autonomous surface and subsea vehicles for ocean exploration, monitoring, and infrastructure protection, raised a $38 million Series A. Andreessen Horowitz led, with Booz Allen Ventures, Harpoon Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, ReGen Ventures, and Superorganism also participating. Congrats, Will and team! Link.

• pH7 Technologies, based out of Vancouver, which uses an electrochemical process to recover metals from low-grade ores and waste streams, raised a $32 million Series B. Fine Structure Ventures led. Link.

• NanoTech Materials, based out of Houston, which develops coatings that reduce heat transfer and improve fire resistance in buildings and infrastructure, raised a $29.4 million Series A. HPI Real Estate & Investments led. Link.

• Critical Loop, based out of Los Angeles, CA, which combines battery storage, on-site generation, and its Cygnus software-defined power controller into a modular platform that can get industrial customers onto the grid in days or weeks rather than years, raised a $26 million Series A. Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover led, with Better Ventures, my team at Climate Capital, Adapt Nation Capital, and Cyrus Ventures also participating. I podcasted with the CEO previously, which you can listen to here. Link.

• Sepion Technologies, based out of Alameda, CA, which develops polymer coatings for battery separators to improve energy density, charging performance, and safety, raised a $10 million Series B led by Fine Structure Ventures (as with pH7 Technologies above). Link.

What else I’m reading, listening, and watching

• This interview with the CEO of Stardust, a stratospheric aerosol injection company. Link.

• This article exploring the socioeconomic nuances of the data center build out. Link.

• This article on the data center build out and AI generally as the new status symbol. Link.

• All these short stories and poems, including some of my own, and books. Link. Link.

• This Austrian crime series, which offers shades of True Detective (my fav). Link.

Hope to see some of y’all this week,

— Nick

Hello,

In non-energy, and sustainability news, for the lovers of the written word generally, I’ve got two new short stories and a poem out of late, with more poems coming in May. Read em’ here, here, and here—gold star if you send thoughts back my way, particularly thoughtful criticism.

Now, on to our regularly scheduled program. Today, we’ve got news of another major climate tech bankrupcty, as well as some developing threads surrounding blowback and public resistance to AI and data center development, which has big implications for energy and climate tech generally (among plenty of other sectors). All that and more in this roundup, not to mention some more positive stuff to offset the duldrums.

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• More than half the U.S. is now in drought, with near-record spring temperatures, a particularly pronounced drought across the Western U.S. and historically low snowpack, and Midwestern wildfires already underway. Link. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

Energy market x Iran war updates

• President Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, sending oil prices below $100 per barrel for the first time since the war began in earnest. The deal allows ships to transit the Strait of Hormuz under coordination with Iran's military, with both Iran and Oman able to collect tolls. Prices remain well above pre-war levels, and a full recovery in Gulf energy exports is expected to take months given widespread infrastructure damage and a global scattering of tanker fleets. Plus, the ceasfire already appears to be on shaky ground and WTI futures are back over $100 in the Sunday overnight trading session, at least as of this writing. We’re nowhere near out of the woods here yet, folks. Link. Link. Link.

• Average U.S. gas prices hit $4.14 per gallon this week. Diesel is up to $5.65, creeping toward the all-time record of $5.82 from 2022. Link.

• Brown University researchers estimate the Iran war has added roughly $17 billion in fuel costs to the U.S. economy so far, or about $129 per household. Link.

• The University of Michigan's preliminary April consumer sentiment index dropped to 47.6, the lowest level since records began in 1952. One-year inflation expectations jumped to 4.8% from 3.8%, while five-to-ten-year expectations rose to 3.4%. Link.

Elsewhere in energy and industry

• Battery recycling startup Ascend Elements filed for Chapter 11 despite having attracted over $1.1 billion in funding since launching in 2015. A $316 million federal grant was pulled by the Trump administration last October, compounding financial pressures. Link.

• Fervo Energy locked in a three-year deal with Turboden America for 1.75 GW of turbine capacity across its next-gen geothermal projects. Combined with the Cape Station development in Utah, which is set to begin generating power later this year, Fervo's pipeline now tops 2.2 GW, which would more than half-again the entire existing U.S. geothermal fleet. Reminder, this is one of the main companies from the past 5-7 year climate tech cohort that’s poised for and actively eyeing an an IPO. Link.

• Xcel Energy won regulatory approval in Minnesota for what would be the nation's first utility-owned virtual power plant. The $430 million Capacity*Connect program would deploy up to 200 MW of batteries in small increments across customer sites over two years, giving Xcel both an economic incentive and a framework to measure what distributed energy is actually worth to the grid, how to monetize it, and how to work with a variety of stakeholders to actually make it happen. Link.

Fission and fusion

• India's Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor achieved first fission after more than two decades of construction, joining Russia as only the second country to operate a commercial fast breeder reactor. The design converts India's abundant thorium reserves into usable fuel, long-sought step toward actual operation, though that itself remains many steps away. Link.

• China poured first concrete on a new Hualong One reactor in Zhejiang province, moving from license to construction start in just six months. Link.

• ARPA-E is committing $135 million over 18 months to fusion energy development, a record bet for the agency in this area. The move comes as Trump's 2027 budget proposes trimming the DOE's broader fusion sciences program from $805 million to $755 million. Link.

Pushback

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home was attacked twice this week, which, taken together with mounting resistance to AI in regulatory circles as well as as evidenced by another shooting incident referenced below, shows how quickly the AI and data center development narrative is spiraling out of control and sparking significant resistance (to put it mildly). Specifically, one suspect was arrested for hurling a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's residence and threatening violence outside OpenAI's San Francisco offices earlier this week. Two days later, surveillance footage captured a second apparent attack on the property: a Honda sedan stopped in front of the home early Sunday morning and a passenger appeared to fire a round at the building before fleeing. Link. Link.

• A gunman fired more than a dozen shots into an Indianapolis city councilmember's home, leaving a note on the doormat reading "no data centers." Councilmember Ron Gibson voted the previous week to approve construction of a 75 MW data center. Link.

• OpenAI also shelved its Stargate UK data center expansion over concerns about British energy costs and the regulatory environment. Other Stargate builds in the U.S., Norway, and the UAE are moving ahead, raising questions about the U.K.'s competitiveness for large-scale AI investment. Link.

• A Wisconsin city is holding what's believed to be the first-ever municipal vote on banning data center construction. Last week, we wrote about continously advancing efforts to put a moratorium on data center development in the state of Maine. Data center bans entirely are also under consideration in some jurisdictions. Link. Link.

• A community north of San Diego killed a proposed 320 MW battery installation after residents pushed back on siting large-scale energy storage near homes and within 1,600 feet of a major hospital. Developer AES withdrew its application for the project, which would have ranked among the largest standalone storage facilities in the U.S. Link.

Policy

• The EU is easing methane rules on imported gas as European governments scramble to secure alternative supply during the Iran conflict. Link.

• The EPA rolled out revisions to the Biden-era methane rules under the Clean Air Act for oil and gas producers. Administrator Lee Zeldin framed the changes as correcting regulatory overreach; others called the loosened flaring restrictions a major step backward for public health and the climate. Nothing too new to see here, folks. Link.

• New Jersey lifted its decades-old ban on new nuclear construction, becoming the sixth state in ten years, and the second in 2026, to scrap such restrictions. Governor Sherrill signed the bill at Hope Creek generating station, which together with the neighboring Salem plant delivers 40% of the state's power and the vast majority of its zero-carbon electricity. Link.

Transportation

• China's EV and hybrid exports surged 140% year over year in March to a record 349,000 units, as spiking fuel costs from the Iran conflict boosted global demand for EVs. BYD shipped roughly a third of the total, followed by Geely and Chery. Link.

• U.K. EV sales hit their highest level ever in March at 86,120 registrations, with plug-in hybrids also up 47%. Analysts attributed the surge to consumers looking to insulate themselves from volatile global fuel prices amidst the ongoing Iran war. Link.

• Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in Q1, short of analyst estimates but up from Q1 2025. Link.

• U.S. EV charging deployment hit new highs in 2025: DC fast charger installations jumped 46% to 23,000 ports and Level 2 networks added over 113,000. That said, the momentum is cooling; project activity in early 2026 is tracking 15% below last year through February, even as total port counts are higher, pointing to fewer but larger deployments. The demand picture has also softened: U.S. EV sales dropped 38% in Q4 2025 after the federal tax credit expired, and Q1 2026 came in at 216,399 units, down 27% year over year. Link.

• Volkswagen is pulling the plug on EV production at its Tennessee plant, pivoting the facility to gasoline models that move in higher volumes. Link.

Honorable financing mentions

• Xoople, based out of Madrid, raised €112.6 million (~$131.7 million) in a Series B to build geospatial data infrastructure that lets AI systems model and forecast physical-world changes. Nazca Capital, MCH, CDTI, Buenavista Equity Partners, and Endeavor invested. Link.

• Portal Space Systems, based out of Seattle, closed a $50 million Series A at a $250 million post-money valuation, co-led by Geodesic Capital and Mach33, to make solar thermal propulsion systems for spacecraft. Link.

• Satellites on Fire, based out of Buenos Aires, raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Dalus Capital to use satellite imagery and AI to spot wildfires in real time and model their spread. Link.

Hasta la vista,

— Nick

Hi,

Spring is assuredly sprung in the Northern Hemisphere, a fact I can divine not just from calendars but from my allergies to pollen and from continued and sustained high temperatures in the Western U.S. Here’s where else signs of spring are cropping up (or aren’t) across climate, energy, and sustainability circles:

ONE STORY IN (TWO) SENTENCE(S) AND A CHART

• Here’s one that’s further off the beaten path: Owing to the splendor and spiritual significance of cherry blossoms, when cherry blossoms bloom in Kyoto, Japan, is the subject of the most meticulously kept, longest-standing climate data. Bloom’s in recent years have been coming earlier and earlier. Link. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

Climate science

• JPMorgan's institutional clients are increasingly focused on climate tipping points, particularly the weakening of Atlantic ocean currents (AMOC) and what that could mean for European winters and migration. The bank's climate advisory head said it's "quite possible" the world is shifting from a linear to an accelerated nonlinear phase of climate change. More on that second point coming in a longer form article soon. Link.

• NOAA's March termination of an atmospheric dataset has alarmed researchers who rely on it to model long-term Arctic sea ice thickness trends, creating a gap in one of the world's key ice-monitoring systems. Link.

Energy market x Iran war updates

• Oil prices are now over $110 a barrel after President Trump failed to assuage concerns regarding the timeline of the conflict in Iran last week, even equivocating with respect to whether reopening the Strait of Hormuz is a key U.S. military objective. Trump has since taken to social media to harp on promises of continued strikes against Iran, including on its energy infrastructure, provided no deal is reached. I wrote more about the longer term implications of prolonged conflict in this piece. Link.

• Oil price moves in March represented the largest-ever monthly gain, while aluminum also approached a four-year high following Iranian strikes on major smelters in the UAE and Bahrain. The Gulf accounts for roughly 9% of global aluminum output. Link.

• The IMF has cautioned that a prolonged Middle East conflict would drive up prices and slow growth globally, warning that highly indebted nations would have little fiscal room to cushion the blow. Link.

• U.S. consumer sentiment dropped to a three-month low in March as rising gas prices and war-related market volatility weighed on households, according to the University of Michigan survey. Link.

• Slovenia became the first EU nation to ration fuel amid the Iran-driven energy shock. The European Commission followed by encouraging remote work and reduced travel across the bloc while pushing member states to accelerate renewables deployment. Link.

• U.S. LNG exports hit a record high in March, with shipments to Asia more than doubling month-over-month as buyers scrambled for alternatives after the Middle East conflict knocked nearly 20% of global LNG supply offline. Link.

Elsewhere in energy and industry

• Gas turbine manufacturers are backordered through the end of the decade as data center and power plant demand outstrips supply. Wood Mackenzie data shows turbine prices heading toward $600/kW by late next year, up 195% since 2019, with 110 GW of global orders against only ~65 GW of manufacturing capacity. Link.

• U.S. solar installations totaled 26.5 GW last year, a 22% decline year-over-year, though solar remained the most-added generation source in 2025. Link.

• Italy's parliament is debating legislation to extend the life of its coal plants to 2038, 13 years past the original shutdown deadline, as the country imports nearly all of the natural gas that supplies 40% of its electricity and heating. Sign of the times. Link.

• The European Commission approved a ~$6.9 billion aid package under an Italian-government led scheme to accelerate green hydrogen production, a space that has suffered considerably of late. Link.

Policy

• The Trump administration's Endangered Species Committee voted unanimously to exempt Gulf of America oil and gas operations from Endangered Species Act protections, citing national security. Conservationists warn the move threatens the Rice's whale, the Gulf's only year-round resident large whale, and the Center for Biological Diversity has amended its lawsuit to challenge the decision. Link.

• Maine is moving to freeze construction of data centers above 20 MW until November 2027 to study the AI boom's impact on its grid. Electricity costs in the state jumped nearly 60% between 2021 and 2026. There will likely be more such moritoriums in states to come; often, one state setting the precedent unleashes a wave of copycats. Link.

• Indonesia's forest loss jumped 66% in 2025 to an eight-year high, driven by loosened environmental protections and a push for national food and energy self-sufficiency. Link.

Transportation

• Waymo now completes over 500,000 paid robotaxi rides weekly across 10 US cities, a tenfold increase from May 2024. Its fleet exceeds 3,000 vehicles, and CEO Tekedra Mawakana is targeting one million weekly rides this year. J.P. Morgan analysts project the company could capture 7% of the U.S. rideshare market by 2030. Link.

• General Motors idled its Factory Zero EV plant in Detroit again, sending 1,300 workers home as EV demand weakens in the U.S. The pause comes less than three months after a prior round of layoffs and shift reductions at the $2.2 billion facility. Link.

Fission and fusion

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission renewed Diablo Canyon's license, allowing California's last operating nuclear reactors to continue running through at least 2030. Link.

• Holtec completed a key restoration milestone at the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, bringing the reactor to operating temperature and pressure for the first time since its 2022 shutdown. The system will now undergo further testing and preparation for fuel loading. Link.

• Japan's Kyushu Electric Power is restarting the 890 MW Sendai No. 2 reactor, which would bring all four of its nuclear units online and cut LNG consumption by an estimated 390,000 tonnes per month. Link.

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Realta Fusion are partnering to design and manufacture high-temperature superconducting magnets to accelerate Realta's path to commercial fusion power plants, which is presently targeted for the mid-2030s. Link.

Honorable financing mentions

• Eclipse, based out of Palo Alto, raised $1.31 billion across two funds targeting physical sectors including manufacturing, energy, and transportation. Link.

• Valar Atomics, based out of El Segundo, raised $450 million ($340M equity, $110M debt) at a $2 billion valuation to build clusters of small reactors for energy-intensive sites like AI data centers. Link.

• Also, a Palo Alto-based Rivian spinout that makes small EVs for consumers and commercial delivery, raised $200 million at a $1 billion valuation led by Greenoaks Capital, with Prysm and DoorDash also participating. The company announced a DoorDash partnership focused on autonomous deliveries. Link.

• Starcloud, based out of Redmond, Washington, raised a $170 million Series A at a $1.1 billion valuation to build solar-powered data centers in space. Benchmark and EQT Ventures co-led. Link.

• Voltify, based out of Philadelphia and Israel, raised a $30 million seed round to retrofit diesel locomotives with battery-electric powertrains that recharge while in motion. Aleph and Fortescue co-led. Link.

• TerraSpark, based out of Luxembourg, raised $5 million in pre-seed funding to work on space-based solar energy transmission to Earth. Daphni, Sake Bosch, better ventures, the Hans(wo)men Group, and Karaoke Club invested. Link.

Til’ next time,

— Nick

Hey there,

Last week, we featured some news about America’s blossoming battery manufacturing capacity. This week’s featured chart zooms out to appreciate how much continued progress the world is making in terms of battery energy storage system deployment, and that’s just on the utility-scale side, not residential or in vehicles themselves. Read on →

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• Since 2012, when the first lithium-ion batteries were connected to power grids, more than 267 GW of battery energy storage system capacity has been deployed; future projections are even rosier, and past projections have universally been conservative. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

Climate science

• A new study published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Letters found that a decline in low-level cloud cover over the past two decades has driven half of the increase in Earth's energy imbalance over that time period. The research attributes about 74% of the cloud decrease to human-driven factors, including cloud feedback from ocean warming (40%), greenhouse gas emissions (21%), and reduced aerosol emissions (14%), while natural climate variability accounts for just 3%. The researchers note that, on average, climate models accurately simulate recent low-cloud cover trends, meaning these effects are already accounted for in existing warming projections. But it was certainly news to me. Link.

• Arctic wintertime sea ice has tied last year's record for its lowest-ever winter peak extent according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Sea ice reached its high point on March 14 at roughly 14.29 million square kilometers, a statistical tie with last year's all-time low of 14.31 million km². Only 5% of the oldest, thickest sea ice recorded in the 1980s has survived to the present day, and summertime sea ice cover has been halved, shrinking by roughly 12% per decade. Link.

• Seventeen states broke records for their hottest March temperatures as a massive heat wave has swept the western U.S. Some places saw temperatures 30 to 40° F above historical averages. Climate attribution models suggest this latest heat wave would likely not have been possible without human-caused climate change. Link.

Energy market x Iran war updates

• Oil prices soared again this week after falling sharply at the beginning of last week as Tehran dismissed the 15-point US proposal to pause the war and issued its own counterproposal; JPMorgan analysis found that the month of March has been one of the largest drawdowns on global oil inventories on record. The last cargo ships that left the Gulf before the war have nearly all reached Asia, which is likely to face the first visible demand losses in April, followed by Africa, then Europe. Link. Link.

• Repair costs from damage and shutdowns hitting fossil fuel infrastructure in the Middle East could amount to at least $25 billion, according to Rystad Energy. The costliest attack hit Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City, where destruction of LNG trains has reduced capacity by 17%, and full recovery will likely take five years due to high demand for gas turbines needed for data center electrification and coal plant retirements. Link.

• Reuters estimates that at least 40% of Russia's oil export capacity is also halted following Ukrainian attacks on energy infrastructure and the seizure of tankers. Link.

• In general, as oil and natural gas prices surge, Asian countries including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand are turning back to coal. South Korea has lifted limits on coal fleet utilization, Thailand has restarted decommissioned coal units, and Japan is planning to lift limits on coal output. Indonesia, the world's largest coal exporter, reversed plans to cut production from 790 million to 600 million tons and is now allowing miners to increase output. The Newcastle coal benchmark is up ~20% since the war. In Europe, Italy's energy minister is flagging the possibility of reactivating reserve plants, and Germany's energy mix has already seen a 2% coal spike. I flagged this dynamic as likely more than two ago in this piece in these pages. Link.

• The Philippines declared a national energy emergency to deal with continuing energy market disruptions from the Iran war. The government now has new authority to plan for rationing and prevent fuel hoarding, and may spur Manila's plans to bring a nuclear power plant online decades after a nearly complete facility was abandoned. Link.

• Taiwan and Japan, two of East Asia's biggest economies that have become increasingly dependent on LNG over the past decade, are scrambling for alternatives after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz cut off LNG shipments from Qatar. Specifically, Japan is temporarily lifting restrictions on coal-fired power plants and will begin releasing 53 million barrels of oil (roughly one month of consumption) from its national reserve. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also asked the IEA for another coordinated release of global oil stockpiles to hedge against prolonged disruptions. Link. Link. Link.

• In the U.K., home rooftop solar sales are up 54% month-over-month and heat pump sales are up 50%, as consumers look to respond to rising energy costs. Similar trends are emerging globally in response to the Iran war's impact on oil prices. Link.

Elsewhere in energy and electrification

• The U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Commerce announced a public-private partnership with SoftBank Group and SB Energy to build 10 GW of new power generation, including at least 9.2 GW of natural gas, to power new data center development. The project will be located at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, Ohio, with SB Energy and AEP Ohio also partnering to build $4.2 billion in new electrical transmission infrastructure. SB Energy committed to paying for the transmission buildout and a $40 million Community Benefits Agreement. Link.

• BYD outlined plans for at least 20 new dealerships in Canada. At least three Chinese automakers are on track to start selling cars in Canada by the year’s-end. Link.

• The largest offshore wind farm being developed in the U.S., Dominion Energy's 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, began delivering power to the grid this week. The project started sending electricity to Virginia's wires days after Ørsted's Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island also began producing power for New England’s grid last week. The Coastal Virginia project is expected to be complete in early 2027, barring additional assaults from the Trump administration. Link.

• Previously, Constellation Energy hoped that the nuclear reactor at the former Three Mile Island power plant could be ready to generate electricity by 2027; now, the company has updated its timelines given that it may not be able to connect the plant to the power grid until 2031, even if the plant itself is ready prior. Link.

Policy

• India submitted its new national climate plan, aiming to cut emissions intensity by 47% from 2005 levels by 2035 and lift the share of installed clean power capacity to 60% from 52.6%, where it stands currently. Reactions from analysts are generally positive, though some noted the targets should be relatively easy to meet and could, as is typical, be more ambitious. Separately, new analysis found that India's carbon emissions grew at their slowest pace in over two decades in 2025, with power sector emissions falling 3.8% due to record renewable energy expansion and slowing power demand growth. Link. Link.

• TotalEnergies dropped its net zero target, announcing a 2050 vision in which oil and gas will still represent about 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day of production. The company says roughly 50% of its energy would come from low-carbon electricity (~500 TWh/year from ~400 GW of renewable capacity), about 25% from low-carbon energy molecules (biogas, hydrogen, e-fuels), and the remaining quarter from oil and gas. Link.

• Senators Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled legislation to place a moratorium on the construction of AI data centers. The bill aims to give the government time to create federal safeguards as towns and counties across the country, including in Missouri, Indiana, Georgia, and North Carolina, have passed temporary bans on datacenter buildout, and at least 11 states are considering similar policies. Link.

Honorable financing mentions

• Scalvy, based out of Austin, Texas, raised a $13.9 million Series A co-led by Silicon Badia to provide modular power distribution units that deliver and manage electricity across data center racks. Climate Capital, where I work part-time, also invested. I interviewed the CEO of Scalvy, Mohamed Badawy, on Climate Capital’s podcast last year. Link.

• Helix Earth, based out of Houston, Texas, raised $12 million in an oversubscribed Seed 2 round led by Veriten for its proprietary liquid-gas chemistry designed for the commercial HVAC market. Link.

Fin,

— Nick

Hey folks,

We’ve got a Tuesday evening send this week because yesterday was my birthday and I didn’t feel like working too much. Has been a busy period for news and updates, though, so we’re back on the horse today. Hope your week is off to a good start.

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• Crude oil shipments through the Straight of Hormuz remain close to zero-bound (as do LNG and fertilizer shipments) since the beginning of the month. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• The 11-year span between 2015 and 2025 was the hottest 11 year-span on record since 1850, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The agency also warned the problem may worsen in 2026, with meteorologists predicting an El Niño event later this year that will push already-warm temperatures even higher. Link.

Energy market x Iran war updates

• U.S. President Trump announced a five-day halt to strikes on Iran following what he described as productive conversations with Iranian authorities, roughly one day after threatening to obliterate the country's power plants, including the Bushehr nuclear plant, if Iran didn't fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That said, after oil prices fell by ~10% yesterday, they’re back on the rise today, as much remains unclear about the near- and medium-term trajectory of conflicts in the region and the ensuing energy market disruptions. Link.

• Iranian attacks have knocked out 17% of Qatar's LNG export capacity, sidelining 12.8 million tons per year of LNG for three to five years and causing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue. European gas prices are roughly double their pre-war levels. Link.

• The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has removed roughly a fifth of the global LNG supply from the market, posing perhaps the largest threat to energy networks across Asia, where countries like Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh generate a third or more of their electricity from natural gas. Asian utilities across the region have scrambled to buy remaining cargoes at record spot market prices, with many turning back to coal-fired power plants. South Korea, for one, is lifting its cap on coal-fired power generation to offset LNG losses. Link. Link.

• Sri Lanka declared every Wednesday a holiday for public institutions to conserve fuel, the latest in a series of belt-tightening measures by Asian countries; ~90% of all oil and gas flowing through the Hormuz last year was bound for Asia. This week, Slovenia also became the first EU country to start rationing fuel. Link. Link.

• Brazil could face fertilizer supply problems if the Middle East conflict does not ease soon, the nation's farm minister said, noting that urea prices spiked within days of the war starting, with some sellers suspending sales despite holding pre-conflict inventories. Link.

• Scandinavian airline SAS said it would cancel 1,000 flights in April because of high oil and jet fuel prices. Link.

Transportation

• Chinese EV startups Nio, Li Auto, and XPeng are all now profitable in stark contrast to many legacy automakers globally. Link.

• Rivian announced an over $1.2 billion investment from Uber through 2031, along with a deal for Uber to purchase between 10,000 and 50,000 autonomous R2 robotaxis. The fleet is slated to come online in San Francisco and Miami in 2028 and scale to 25 cities by 2031. Link.

• KKR-backed Zenobe Energy acquired San Francisco-based Revolv, which operates 13 fleet-charging facilities in California, as it looks to build a national electric-truck charging network. Link.

• Honda said it would cancel plans for three electric models it had planned to produce in the U.S. and that it would record its first annual loss, joining Stellantis, Ford, and GM in taking major hits to their profits, due in part to EV underperformance. Link.

• Global EV adoption helped avoid 2.3 million barrels of oil consumption per day last year, according to BloombergNEF. That figure is projected to more than double to 5.25 million barrels per day by 2030. EV sales as a share of total new car sales are still increasing globally, most rapidly in developing countries. Link.

Batteries and renewables

• The U.S. has achieved self-sufficiency in grid battery manufacturing for the first time, according to the US Energy Storage Coalition. By the end of this year, US factories are expected to produce 145 gigawatt-hours of finished grid storage systems annually, which is more than double the ~60 GWh of projected domestic installations. The country is also on pace to hit 96 GWh of dedicated battery cell manufacturing capacity by year-end, up from effectively zero at the close of 2024. Link.

• Tesla inked a $4.3 billion deal to buy lithium iron phosphate batteries from LG Energy Solution. The three-year agreement will see LG produce LFP prismatic cells at its Lansing, Michigan, factory starting in 2027, feeding into Tesla's next-generation Megapack 3 energy storage systems assembled at its Houston Megafactory. Link.

• Tesla is also looking to buy $2.9 billion of solar manufacturing equipment from Chinese suppliers, including Suzhou Maxwell Technologies; Musk recently promised to deploy 100 gigawatts of solar manufacturing on American soil by 2028. As of the start of this year, the U.S. had about 65.5 GW of solar manufacturing capacity. Link.

• The market capitalization of China's top battery manufacturers (BYD, CATL, and Sungrow) has soared by $70 billion since the start of the Iran war and resultant oil market instability. BYD recently upgraded its fastest chargers to provide 600 miles of range in nine minutes, four times the speed of a typical US charger, with thousands already installed in China and Europe. Link.

• China also announced that in January and February, production of wind turbines and lithium batteries for energy storage rose 28.7% and 84%, respectively. Link.

• Form Energy agreed to sell 12 gigawatt-hours of its iron-air (rust-based) long-duration batteries to data center developer Crusoe, with deliveries starting next year. Link.

• The Trump administration signed a $1 billion agreement with TotalEnergies for the French energy giant to abandon two offshore wind projects and redirect those funds toward fossil fuel infrastructure. Link.

Policy

• An alliance of 24 states and dozens of cities and counties filed a lawsuit against the EPA's repeal of the Endangerment Finding, the legal doctrine underpinning most federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The case may well reach the Supreme Court. Link.

• New York Governor Kathy Hochul proposed rewriting the state's climate law, requesting new emissions targets and more time to meet them. If successful, New York would be the first state to renege on its climate goals. More than half the state Senate has rebuked her plan, with 29 Democrats penning a letter saying they categorically oppose rolling back the law. Link.

• Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island announced an investigation into methane emissions from oil and gas facilities in the Permian Basin after satellite data revealed actual emissions were four times higher than EPA estimates. Link.

• Australia's second-biggest coal-producing state will ban new mine applications and impose rules to reduce methane emissions from existing projects. Link.

Fission

• X-Energy, a 17-year-old small modular nuclear reactor developer based out of Rockville, Maryland, filed for an IPO to capitalize on the positive tailwinds for SMRs given AI-related energy demand. The company has raised over $1.8 billion from investors, including Jane Street, Ares Management, Amazon, ARK Invest, and Emerson Collective. Link.

• The Natural Resources Defense Council came out in support of nuclear power for the first time in its history, filing comments supporting the restart of Iowa's defunct Duane Arnold nuclear plant. Link.

Other fundraising and financing activity

• Partech Impact Fund, based out of Paris, held a final close of $346 million (€300 million) for its inaugural Article 9 impact fund. It will invest in European B2B technology companies focused on decarbonization and cleaner mobility, among other objectives. Link.

• 360 Capital, based out of Paris and Milan, completed a first close of €85 million (~$99 million) out of a planned €100 million fund to invest in early-stage deeptech companies and climate tech companies. Link.

• UVC Partners, based out of Munich, held a first close of ~$89 million toward a $173 million growth extension fund to invest in European deeptech and climate tech companies. Link.

• GVC Gaesco Resilient Infratech Ventures Fund, based out of Barcelona, launched an $81 million fund targeting capital-intensive technology companies across energy storage, industrial electrification, automation, and data infrastructure in Europe. Link.

• Montis VC, based out of Warsaw, Poland, held a €50 million (~$58 million) first close for a new fund to invest in early-stage startups focused on energy and industrial systems. Link.

• Halcyon, based out of San Francisco, raised $21 million in Series A funding for its AI-powered energy information platform addressing the US electricity sector. Energize Ventures led. Link.

• Cocoon Carbon, based out of London, raised ~$15 million in Series A funding to convert steel mill byproducts into a low-carbon cement substitute. 2150 and Brick & Mortar Ventures co-led. Link.

• Ormat Technologies, based out of Nevada, raised a total of $1 billion in convertible debt to expand its geothermal business; the round was originally announced as a $750 million transaction. Link.

• Fervo Energy, based out of Houston, closed $421 million in non-recourse debt financing for the first phase of its Cape Station geothermal power plant in Utah, marking another successful step towards the company’s upcoming IPO. Link.

• Frore Systems, based out of San Jose, raised a $143 million Series D round at a $1.64 billion post-money valuation for its liquid-cooling systems for data centers. MVP Ventures led the round. Link.

• Utility Global, based out of Houston, raised $100 million in Series D funding for its industrial decarbonization platform. Ara Partners and APG Asset Management invested. Link.

• Solugen, based out of Houston, raised $50 million for its low-carbon nitrogen fertilizers derived from organic waste for agriculture. Idealist Capital and Canada Growth Fund invested. Link.

• Maersk Growth, the logistics giant's corporate venture capital arm, announced it will wind down operations and stop making new investments as Maersk refocuses on its core business. Link.

Adios,

— Nick

Hey there,

Yes, the title is a play on “Infinite Jest,” the encyclopedic novel by David Foster Wallace that operates as a nigh-perfect schism: you either love it or you hate it. Clocking in at ~900 pages with 388 footnotes, many of which have to do with the storyline itself as opposed to citing references or offering additional but not entirely necessary details, reading the book, as I did a few years back and likely will again soon, simulates what I imagine the experience of trying to digest the entirety of an IPCC report or other similar climate science synthesis reports would be like. All that’s to say that keeping up with the latest in climate science, especially if endeavored across all climate science, would be a Sisyphean affair. Still, the headlines of recent climate science are relatively clear: Global warming may well be accelerating. Let’s discuss what that means and what it requires of us.

The above is a quote from Andy Jankowiak, a NASCAR driver who quipped it casually over his headset to his crew towards the end of a race. He proceeded to make good on that commitment, pushing his car to the max with complete disregard for other drivers and any semblance of control. At max velocity, he careened into other cars and scraped against and along the wall while pieces of his car flew off—all without taking his foot off the pedal—until he did, indeed, see the checkered flag and crossed the finish line (the checkered flag denotes the final lap of the race). While he didn’t win, the “strategy” vaulted him and his team from tenth place into fifth. You can watch a replay here.

Reckless abandon may have a place in NASCAR racing; indeed, a modicum of it is likely a prerequisite for participation. It shouldn’t, however, characterize technological development or the way we manage our relationship to the foundational systems on which society depends.

Last month, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters reported that since 2015, the planet has warmed faster than ever previously recorded. Specifically, the rate of change of global warming, that is, not the warming itself, but the rate at which warming is accelerating, has nearly doubled since 2015. At the risk of pedantry, to spell that out a bit more, we’re dealing not just with a question or consideration of velocity, i.e., the direction and rate of warming, but of acceleration, i.e., the rate of change of that velocity.

Sitting here in Silicon Valley as I write this (where it is also currently ~90°F in Winter), there’s more “acceleration” conversation outside of climate circles than within them. If you spend much time online or in the tech and venture capital-adjacent spaces where I sometimes swim, you’ll quickly hear a cacophonous rabble of technologists, investors, and their hangers-on who spend a lot of breath talking about acceleration in the computational capacity and abilities of each new and improved AI model. The vision of those who celebrate “accelerationism” is perhaps best characterized by the belief that AI and advances in other technologies will solve more problems than they will cause. Sure, there may be a thin, albeit super fat, tail in the distribution where an artificial superintelligence leads to doom, deciding, for instance, that humans are superfluous if not detrimental to its designs.

For many, that seems to be a risk worth taking. But I’m not here to opine on the probabilities of that one way or another. Still, it’s not lost on me that we’re entering an accelerationist paradigm, one in which we’re either explicitly or implicitly taking the “until I see God or the checkered flag” attitude, across several seminal domains.

While the jury is out on the real risk distribution of more advanced AI, there’s far less uncertainty regarding the evolving nature of climate risk. I am also confident that most people aren’t cool with espousing the “God or checkered flag” attitude with respect to Earth’s climate and how we prepare for, mitigate, and manage climate change. But even as there is growing recognition of the risks of acceleration in climate change (just read the raft of comments on this recent New York Times article if you need some encouragement around whether climate risks are entering the common knowledge), as of yet, the lion’s share of investment and work in climate continues to focus on mitigation and adaptation. Those are very necessary pillars of climate work. And we urgently need to build another pillar focused on near-term climate stabilization, i.e., a confluence of strategies to arrest climate change acceleration.

Disambiguating climate destabilization

More important than AI accelerationism and everything that “movement” subsumes is the physical reality of what accelerating climate change portends. There is notable pushback against the results of the paper referenced above, which found that warming rates over the decade since 2015 have nearly doubled. As much debate as there is on this topic—about whether and to what extent climate change is accelerating and how much of the observations surrounding acceleration are driven by El Niño periods vs. not—we need look no further than the drivers of warming and climate change to appreciate why rates of change are increasing:

Greenhouse gas emissions: Emissions of most major greenhouse gasses globally remain at or close to all-time highs. Annual carbon dioxide emissions have increased more than 50% in my lifetime (since 1995 or so). And rates of increase for emissions of other, more powerful greenhouse gasses, like methane, are even higher: in terms of relative increase, atmospheric methane concentrations have increased much more than carbon dioxide concentrations have since 1800 (methane concentrations are up more than two-fold compared to a roughly carbon dioxide’s 50% increase.) The relationship between higher rates of emissions and faster rates of warming and climate change shouldn’t be particularly opaque.

Loss of natural reflectivity: As the planet warms, we also see losses of reflectivity that exacerbate warming; as reflective surfaces and particles are lost, more energy is retained in Earth’s net energy balance. The Arctic summer sea ice extent is a well-documented example, and a similar pattern holds across many Arctic and Antarctic regions. Reductions in the summer Arctic sea ice extent already account for ~25% of observed global warming.

Sourced from the Introduction to Modern Climate Change, 3rd Edition by Andrew E. Dessler

Loss of human-induced reflectivity: Another factor driving additional warming is the reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions. When sulfur dioxide emissions, whether from coal power plants, ships, or otherwise, enter the troposphere (the lower atmosphere), they oxidize to form sulfate aerosols, tiny particles that scatter incoming solar radiation back into space. Sulfur dioxide pollution is decreasing globally as ongoing efforts to reduce it continue, given that it is an air pollutant that’s deleterious to human and animal health. Still, the loss of the artificial shield that atmospheric sulfate aerosols previously provided is estimated to have “masked” ~0.4°C of the ~1.5°C of warming that’s already latent in Earth’s climate system. Put differently, the world is already much hotter in terms of retained energy than it seems or feels. We’ve just engineered a substantial atmospheric cooling effect to offset some of that warmth. Now, we’re consistently diminishing that cooling. 

Diminishing buffers: Alongside the loss of artificial or additional cooling from sulfate aerosols, many other ecosystems and climate systems that have historically acted as buffers against greenhouse gasses and the warming they drive may be approaching or at their “carrying capacity.” The world’s oceans are a good example: so far, the ocean has absorbed 90%+ of the excess heat introduced into Earth’s climate system by anthropogenic global warming. Other ecosystems, ranging from rainforests to peat bogs, are also exhibiting signs of stress and of being at capacity, as it were, to continue acting as buffers. There are limits to the extent to which any of these systems can offset climate change; beyond those limits, the impact of additional warming will accrue and compound elsewhere across Earth’s climate system.

Additional reinforcing feedback loops: Many elements of Earth’s climate system are complexly interconnected and coupled. Changes in one invariably impact many others. As global warming proceeds or even accelerates, climate change not only becomes more pronounced. It also risks “tipping” many stabilizing systems out of equilibrium. Some of what we’ve discussed above, such as the loss of sea ice or the shift in ecosystems’ ability to function as buffers against additional warming, is emblematic of this risk. And there are many other such systems, changes in which could accelerate warming and climate change even further. Another good example is thawing permafrost; at present, Arctic permafrost stores 1,460-1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon. If even a fraction of that carbon is released as warmer temperatures thaw permafrost, it will set back greenhouse gas reduction efforts and could hasten other tipping points, forming a vicious cycle.  

There are dozens of other such reinforcing feedback loops I could introduce, but I don’t imagine it will necessarily help my overarching project, which is to create a desire to do something more than it is to engender despair. Further, it is worth noting that truly “runaway” warming is unlikely, as explored in much more scientific detail than I can muster here. That said, with respect to tipping points and their feedback loops, the risks of significant change to Earth’s climate, well beyond what we’ve seen from global warming and climate change thus far, aren’t particularly remote, either. As described in an excellent report, “Parasol Lost”, from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries:

While the best estimate for when the 1.5°C warming threshold will be reached points to 2035, recent analysis suggests it could happen on or even before 2030. Further, some tipping points, such as large-scale die-off of coral reefs, may have already been breached. Taken together, all of the above threaten to drive step changes in climate change and its impacts. It’s possible we’re already on a path to cross thresholds that tip the Earth into an irreversible, fast slide into a permanently altered state. The graphic below, taken from the same report mentioned above, visualizes this risk well:

Ultimately, the changes to Earth’s climate that this version of climate change could reap are too chaotic to predict perfectly. But they will almost certainly render the Earth far less supportive of human and non-human flourishing than it is in its current state, to say nothing of what it was like circa 1800. As such, the paradigm of action we need to shift into is one of stabilization, of arresting acceleration and destabilization. This requires responses beyond mitigation, adaptation, and carbon removal, all of which, even taken together, and even if deployed at much larger scales, won’t suffice to meaningfully reduce the risk of accelerating and cascading climate change we’ve outlined thus far. 

There are quick wins within mitigation and adaptation that should be prioritized, given that they deliver benefits faster than reductions in long-lived atmospheric carbon dioxide do. Examples include reducing methane emissions and halting deforestation; we should emphasize these as much as in the near term, if not more than, scaling cleaner energy and electrification (not that these things should be in competition, anyway). Further, we will need to take even more proactive steps to evaluate how to intervene directly in regions such as the Arctic to stall the loss of reflective sea ice and ice sheets (as one example among many). Fortunately, that work—whether we call it climate interventions or stabilization—is coalescing and gaining traction as we speak, and I’m excited to tell you more about programs I’m helping develop soon as they have concrete news to share. 

Whereas acceleration is the first derivative of velocity, the second derivative of it is “jerk.” Acceleration is more familiar to us because it is associated with reasonably quotidian experiences, like hitting the gas in a car (especially in an EV!). While we don’t think of “jerk,” i.e., the acceleration of acceleration, as much, it’s probably time to start, as there’s a chance it becomes an apt analogy for the changing shape and scope of climate risk. Climate change is already such a complex, global, and often abstract concept that it’s tough for people to wrap their minds around it, let alone to remain enduringly concerned about it, or, even more ambitiously, dedicated to doing something about it. We will need to build the muscles to conceive and communicate about it as such, though, as that’s a foundational capacity to being able to then elevate a step further to respond—whether with technology, policy, investment, or otherwise—to the even more complex epoch of climate change that we’re stepping into. On that front, if not on many others, I’ll gladly commit to not lifting pen from pedal until I see God or checkered flag.

Hi there,

Hope all my Northern Hemisphere-based folk are excited to welcome in spring later this week. Hopefully, the vibes improve for the better in the Middle East soon, too, where continued hostilities between the U.S. and Israel and Iran are pushing oil futures towards $100 again in Sunday night trading as I write this. More on that and lots more across energy and sustainability follows below:

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• Fertilizers are another core commodity group that features global supply chains with significant Middle Eastern export concentrations, portending disruptions given the ongoing conflict in and around Iran. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• Multiple forecasting groups have released updated models and results from them that suggest a strong El Niño may develop in late 2026. The current median forecast is for an El Niño that’s stronger than the 2023/2024 one and potentially on par with the 2015/2016 one. El Niño can temporarily boost global mean temperatures by as much as 0.2°C, though the peak warming effect typically lags 3-4 months after the event peaks, meaning this will likely impact 2027 temperatures more than this year’s. Link.

• The war in Iran is unleashing severe pollution across the Tehran metro area, home to ~18.5 million people. The UK-based Conflict and Environment Observatory identified over 300 incidents posing environmental risks from the hostilities, with the Israeli strike on oil depots outside Tehran representing the largest pollution incident so far. Link.

• As oil prices globally remain elevated, the International Energy Agency's member states unanimously agreed to release 400 million barrels from emergency oil reserves (its largest-ever release) to cushion the supply disruption from the Middle East war. The U.S. will contribute 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Link.

• Early evidence of oil market-related demand destruction is cropping up in Asia: last week, the Thai government asked state agency employees to work from home to save gas. Link.

Power

• Global long-duration energy storage deployment surged 49% from 2024 to 2025; China dominated most of that build-out, according to a new Wood Mackenzie report. Link.

• China's CATL reported $10.4 billion in profit for 2025, up 42% from 2024, beating expectations and driving a 10% share price bump. The battery giant’s results were buoyed by rising grid-scale battery demand and insulated from mineral price swings by its upstream lithium investments. Link.

• The U.S. Department of Energy (“the DOE”) made $1.9 billion in funding available for grid upgrades focused on reconductoring, i.e., swapping old cables for higher-capacity lines on existing rights of way. The announcement came the same day PJM Interconnection's market monitor released data showing data center load growth as the primary driver of rising electricity costs in America's largest power market. Link. Link.

• The U.S. solar industry installed just over 43 GW of panels in 2025, a 14% decrease from 2024, with the utility-scale sector shrinking nearly 40% quarter-over-quarter in Q4. Link.

• France produced a record 521.1 TWh of low-carbon electricity in 2025, representing 95% of total power production, as nuclear reactor upgrades allowed the fleet to generate more power. Link.

• Revolution Wind, a 65-turbine, 705 MW offshore wind farm off the East Coast, has begun generating power for Rhode Island and Connecticut. The project survived attempts by the Trump administration to shut it down; its completion offers a timely counterpoint to the supply insecurity of fossil fuels amidst ongoing geopolitical conflict. Link.

• Base Power, the Texas-based home battery startup that raised $1 billion last October, will install 100 MW of home battery capacity for cooperative utility CoServ outside Dallas–Fort Worth over the next two years. Homeowners can access a whole-home backup battery system for a $695 installation fee and $19/month subscription. Link.

Transportation

• Honda is taking roughly $15.7 billion in write-offs and losses as it recalibrates its EV strategy, becoming the latest auto giant to bleed money as EV uptake slows. Link.

• Global EV registrations fell 11% from January to February, largely due to lost buyer incentives. Link.

• BYD, the world’s largest EV manufacturer, reported combined January and February 2026 sales that were 36% below 2025 levels, signaling a more competitive landscape intraregionally in China even as Chinese companies overtake competitors in many international markets. Link.

• Volkswagen will cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 as post-tax profits fell 44% in 2025 to €6.9 billion (~$8 billion), the company's worst annual performance since the Dieselgate scandal. CEO Oliver Blume cited geopolitical tensions, U.S. tariffs, and intense competition from China; declining German industrial conditions and higher energy costs are likely also part of the picture here. Link.

• Zoox, the Amazon-owned robotaxi company, announced a multiyear partnership to deploy robotaxis on Uber's network in Las Vegas this summer and Los Angeles in 2027. NHTSA is also seeking public comment on Zoox's application to deploy 2,500 robotaxis without human controls. Link.

• Two U.S.-based companies, Invisible Urban Charging and ATX Smart Mobility, announced a $500 million commitment to deploy integrated EV charging infrastructure across central Mexico, starting with the Bajío industrial corridor. Link.

• Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s compensation package now features up to $260 million tied explicitly to Waymo's performance; this is the first time the autonomous vehicle unit has been linked to his pay. Link.

Industry

• Green cement startup Sublime Systems laid off two-thirds of its workforce after the DOE cancelled an $87 million grant. Link.

• Swedish company Stegra needs to raise $2.3 billion to complete its hydrogen-based clean steel plant, more than double its previous estimate. Link.

• Dajin Heavy Industry, a Chinese manufacturer of offshore wind foundations, has begun promoting plans to go public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Beijing-based company has recently self-funded most of its expansion, including a new assembly plant in Tangshan and direct investments in wind and solar projects across China. Link.

• The DOE is restarting HB-Line operations at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to recycle surplus plutonium and produce uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for advanced nuclear reactors. The facility, part of H-Canyon, the only chemical separations facility of its kind in the U.S., has been in a managed offline state since completing its last mission in 2018. Link.

Policy

• Meta and a small town in Alabama are fighting over a solar farm; the conflict has escalated into a legislative push to ban utility-scale solar across much of the state. State Senator Greg Albritton introduced SB 354, which would impose a one-year moratorium on new large-scale solar projects statewide, with an exception for the Tennessee Valley Authority. If enacted, it would be the first time a U.S. state issued a blanket ban on solar. Link.

• The Trump administration sued California, accusing it of abusing its Clean Air Act authority to enact EV rules that unlawfully force a national transition to electric vehicles. If successful, the case could impact 17 different states, representing more than a third of the US auto market, all of which follow California's standards. Link.

Other fundraising and financing activity

• Emerald Technology Ventures raised €100 million (~$115 million) for its Global Water Fund II, out of which it plans to invest in startups that are developing water treatment, reuse, monitoring, and infrastructure resilience technologies. Link.

• Breakout Ventures launched a $114 million Fund III, backed by Cortes Capital, S-Cubed Capital, The Kraft Group, Pinegrove Venture Partners, JIMCO, and Korea Omega Investment Corporation, to support early-stage startups commercializing scientific breakthroughs in areas like biology, chemistry, and advanced materials. Link.

• AIRMO, based out of Berlin and Luxembourg, raised a ~$5.8 million seed round to monitor methane and other greenhouse gases from space via shortwave infrared imager and micro-LiDAR systems. Ananda Impact Ventures led. Link.

Be good out there,

— Nick

Much has been and will continue to be made of what dramatically increased oil prices mean for the economy at large, as well as for the economy and industry of decarbonization efforts. The headline impacts of higher oil and gas prices are relatively clear. Oil prices are currently extremely volatile and have increased by more than 50% in short order, representing the most pronounced and rapid rise ever, both in dollar terms and as a percentage. Near-term, higher oil and gas prices portend inflation for almost everything (everything that doesn’t feature a close-to-entirely digital supply chain, that is). There is certainly regional variability with respect to who’s most exposed to those price increases; in the U.S., companies and consumers will feel the impact of higher prices, but are far more sheltered from the loss of Middle Eastern oil and gas exports because the U.S. itself produces more oil and gas than any other country. Most other regions globally aren’t as well endowed with an embarrassment of natural resources.

Still, globally, higher oil and gas prices will drive near-term and likely medium-term inflation regardless of how soon we see a cessation of hostilities in the Middle East, especially considering that the output of something like an oil refinery or liquefied natural gas processing plant can’t be brought back online as readily as a data center, even if constraining factors like the safety of key shipping straights are shored up overnight.

This leads us to a second point. Much will and is already being made of the idea that this inflation should act as a boon for what at present constitute the “meat and potatoes” of decarbonization, namely cleaner energy alternatives and electrification. It certainly should. EV drivers can and deserve to take a smug victory lap (or three) this week and in the coming weeks as long as oil prices remain elevated. Consumers, companies, and countries that have invested in renewables, fission, and other clean firm power generation resources can and should too. But the longer-term prognosis for the current shock to global energy dynamics may not be wholly, or even close to wholly, positive for energy transition and innovation efforts.

Whether and to what extent current dynamics accelerate decarbonization depends on the duration of this latest war in the Middle East and its ensuant disruptions to oil and gas markets as well as to the flows of countless other essential commodities and products, like fertilizer.

While the current oil price is astronomical compared to where it was two weeks ago, if you look at the curve of oil futures contracts with longer-dated expiry (see below), contracts dating out to the second half of this year still price in considerable normalization, as evidenced by markedly lower prices. This situation, where the longer end of a futures curve is below the front, is known as “backwardation,” the reverse of the typical “contango,” where nearer-term prices are lower than longer-term ones, given longer-term contracts account for the additional implied uncertainty of passing time.

Oil futures curve visualized as of earlier this week—the longer end of the curve has risen somewhat since, but overall, the curve remains in a relatively steep state of backwardation

And while the longer end of the curve above in oil futures is now rising as well, indicating a gradual market acceptance that oil prices may not normalize soon, the curve remains steeply inverted from its norm. I raise this for a few reasons. For one, if this current energy shock remains reasonably temporally constrained—i.e., it doesn’t end up lasting all that long—I’m not convinced that it will serve as a massive accelerant to decarbonization efforts, investment, policymaking, etc... To be sure, again, it should. But if current energy market constraints don’t last into, say, the summer, I worry that their acute nature may simply convince stakeholders globally to double and triple down on energy independence efforts, where “energy” means all available sources and includes an invigorated commitment to diversifying oil and gas supply.

European and Asian countries alike will want to expand their options for oil and gas imports from regions less subject to geopolitical pitfalls than the Middle East, paralleling Germany’s record-breaking speed in constructing an LNG import terminal in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Asian countries may be even slower to phase out coal stockpiles and power plants that, at present, provide the bulk of their power and heat production. Countries with oil and gas reserves that haven’t yet developed them and/or don’t currently export much to global markets have plenty of pretext to expand their capacity to do so.

To be sure, much of the above likely holds even if current energy market dynamics persist for a while. Russia’s war in Ukraine also should have been a dramatic accelerant to global decarbonization efforts, especially in Europe, which was extremely dependent on imports of Russian gas through 2022. While there’s certainly been more recognition of the geopolitical and physical energy flow-related problems with that dependence, that European countries and many others globally still important Russian oil and gas while simultaneously supporting and aiding the Ukrainian resistance effort—a reality that may now come into even starker relief again as the U.S. and others ease sanctions on Russia in the context of current energy market dislocations—is ample evidence that decarbonization progress remains far too ponderous.

Further, if the energy constraints we’re currently experiencing persist for a while, their impacts on global markets are far too multivariate (and painful) to necessarily benefit any economic sector, including even oil and gas outside the Middle East. If sky-high prices persist for too long, an inflationary regime could flip into a deflationary one; higher costs borne for too long often lead to demand destruction. Once again, the impact and scars of that scenario will and should underscore the benefits of accelerated decarbonization and energy transition efforts. But they also pose many near-term challenges. For instance, to the extent we see spillover from energy markets to financial markets at large, I worry about the IPO window. Even as some companies that are advancing towards an IPO, like Fervo and its geothermal business, offer a medium- and long-term antidote to present-day problems, an oil price-driven inflationary shock to markets tightens capital conditions and dims the mood for everyone.

Similarly, the enthusiasm that has spurred significant investment into a data center and energy buildout for AI is also threatened by even more constrained energy availability and tighter capital conditions across markets. That no small part of the CAPEX for the data center supply chain has been earmarked by investors in the Gulf states and the Middle East doesn’t help that matter. The less long that hostilities in the region and the ensuing price dislocations they give rise to go on, the better. But a lot of damage, both physical to infrastructure and psychic to trust in return prospects over the next 5-10 years and in the U.S. as an ally that can be expected to honor all or at least most parties’ vested interests, has already been done.

Which brings us to the penultimate point: that all the above risks holding true not just at specific stages of fundraising (IPOs) or for specific sectors (higher-risk infrastructure and technology bets). At a certain point, with enough follow-through, system-wide contagions yield capitulating demand at all stages of private and public-sector business building, investment, innovation, and whatever else your favorite catch-all phrase may be. That means everything from early-stage venture capital to grantmaking and debt in all shapes, sizes, and stages. At the end of the day, when risk is really “back on,” especially after long periods where it was probably underpriced, most everyone “sells” most everything.

If there’s any saving grace to all this, it lies in the fact that major repricing events in commodities force a reckoning. The word “commodities” itself is an abstraction for very physical things our world most depends on, ranging from oil and gas to the lumber and steel that comprise the building you’re sitting in, to the core inputs to all the food you will eat today, and the fertilizer that was used to grow it. Too often, wars overseas remain little more than abstractions without anything to ground us personally in a lived experience of their impact. When, however, impacts are felt day-to-day by people worldwide via increased prices, travel disruptions, or the many other such effects we may well soon experience, it all becomes somewhat more real. We exit the paradigm of abstraction and everything that abstractions absolve our conscience of by virtue of what they obscure.

While most of our experiences will assuredly not be as terrible as the death and destruction to which we subject people in the Middle East, ideally, they’ll still lead to sufficient resistance to finally arrest the cycle of endless ill-fated Middle Eastern wars (which, at this point, feels like a case study in the Freudian concept of repetition compulsion), to say nothing of countless other awful foreign and domestic policies.

Howdy,

We enter the second full week of outright conflict in the Middle East as hostilities between the U.S., Israel, and Iran metastasize across the region. While the duration of the war remains perhaps the key unknown, its impact on energy markets and markets at large is already coming into starker relief. All that and more below:

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters reports that the pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015. Link. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• Crude oil prices posted their biggest weekly gain in futures trading history, with WTI surging 35.63% to close at $90.90 per barrel last week, while Brent jumped ~28% to $92.69 per barrel. Nor is the action done and dusted; WTI opened at ~$110 as of this writing last night, adding another 20% over the weekend, during which futures trading is closed. Whether those levels hold as we head into the week, near-term inflation is assured; expect elevated gasoline prices both domestically and globally, and higher electricity prices abroad, as LNG exports from Qatar and elsewhere in the region are affected as well. The longer oil prices remain elevated, the more likely it becomes that the overall impact flips from inflationary to deflationary, as higher prices for everything that isn’t purely digital risk driving demand destruction. Link. Link.

• Israel targeted Iran's oil facilities for the first time over the weekend, with strikes hitting a civilian oil storage facility in Tehran, bathing the city in toxic pollution. Iran retaliated by striking a desalination plant in Bahrain with drones. Water desalination plants also came under attack in Iran, where the U.S. stands accused of targeting a plant on Qeshm Island, possibly disrupting water supply for 30 villages. U.S. Central Command denied the charges. These attacks on energy and water infrastructure mark a significant escalation in the conflict, as many Gulf nations depend on desalination to sustain tens of millions of people. Link. Link. Link.

• Amidst all the above, Kuwait Petroleum and others declared force majeure—i.e., contractual provision freeing parties from liability when extraordinary, unforeseeable events (such as wars)—on oil sales owing to attacks on regional energy infrastructure and disrupted shipping routes. The more that regional energy companies follow suit, the more imperiled global oil, gas, and chemical supply chains will be for weeks if not months. Link.

• As noted above, Qatar halted LNG production and export operations due to military attacks on QatarEnergy's operating facilities, including the Ras Laffan plant, which accounts for roughly 20% of global LNG supplies. All traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has effectively ceased (as of this writing) due to insurers withdrawing and reports of ships being attacked. Qatar is the second largest exporter of LNG globally, behind only the U.S. European gas prices were up about 40% in trading on Tuesday when Qatar first announced the halt. Restarting gas liquefaction can take weeks. Link.

• Amazon said drone strikes tied to the Middle East conflict damaged two AWS data centers in the UAE and disrupted a facility in Bahrain, knocking services offline and causing widespread outages. Link.

Elsewhere in energy

• China's BYD unveiled its Blade Battery 2.0 system, capable of charging an EV from 10% to 70% in about five minutes when paired with the company's new 1.5-MW Flash Charging stations. Link.

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted a construction permit for TerraPower's flagship project to convert an old coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming, into a next-generation nuclear station. This is the first commercial-scale, fourth-generation reactor to receive regulatory approval in the U.S. this century. TerraPower's design uses liquid sodium metal as a coolant instead of water. Link.

• Facing surging electricity demand and threats to energy imports from China and now the war in the Middle East as well, Taiwan announced proposals to restart at least two of its three shuttered nuclear stations, nearly a year after its last reactor shut down. The government report also said Taiwan may consider building SMRs or, even more speculatively, fusion plants. Link.

• China is making progress on the world's largest commercial compressed air energy storage project. The $520 million Huai'an Salt Cavern CAES demonstration plant is now fully operational and includes two 300-MW units, the first of which came online in December, with the second following in recent weeks. Link.

• The Trump administration's first Alaskan oil and gas lease sale ended without a single bidder for more than a million acres of federal waters in the Cook Inlet, echoing a failed 2022 auction that also drew minimal interest. Link.

• Geothermal startup Quaise Energy is developing a 50-MW "superhot" geothermal plant in central Oregon using novel rock-melting technology and is in the process of raising a $100 million Series B round. The company has already signed a PPA for the initial 50 MW and is working on deals for an additional 200 MW. Link.

• Ocean Winds signed a lease agreement for a 1.5-GW floating offshore wind project in the UK, which would be by far the largest floating wind farm ever built. Two-thirds of global offshore wind potential is in waters too deep for traditional platforms. Link.

Policy

• The EU proposed setting a quota for publicly funded projects to source 25% of their steel from low-carbon sources as part of its Industrial Acceleration Act. Hydrogen Europe warned that the rules don't account for limited direct subsidies for key technologies or similar quotas in other industries, like housing or automotive construction. Link.

• China set a cautious new five-year climate target, pledging to cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 17% by decade's end, compared to a previous 18% target through 2025 that was narrowly missed. The goal has frustrated some analysts’ and policymakers’ hopes for tighter policy ahead of President Xi's 2030 peak emissions deadline. Link.

Hydrogen

• Spanish refiner Moeve is moving forward with a scaled-back version of its 2-GW Andalusian Green Hydrogen Valley project, which features a total project value pegged at $1.2 billion. Link.

• The 220-MW ACES Delta green hydrogen project in Utah, the largest in the U.S., is ready to launch with all 40 electrolyzers installed and fully operational. The milestone comes as the sector faces headwinds, including the 45V tax credit slated for phase-out next year and Trump pulling funding for regional hydrogen hubs. Link.

Other fundraising and financing activity

• Amazon, Google, JPMorganChase, Salesforce, and others unveiled a $100 million initiative to reduce emissions of superpollutants, i.e., methane, black carbon, and other refrigerant gases, through 2030. To date, superpollutants are responsible for roughly half of all global warming. Link.

• Galvanize closed a $370 million real estate-focused clean tech fund to invest in renewable energy and efficiency projects in commercial buildings, capitalizing on rising electricity costs. Link.

• Oxa, a UK-based self-driving software startup, raised $103 million in Series D funding from Nvidia's venture capital arm and the UK's National Wealth Fund. Link.

• Rift, based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, which develops circular iron fuel technology to decarbonize industrial heat, raised €83.1 million (~$96.7 million) in Series B funding led by PGGM. The company also secured €30.7 million in grant funding from the EU Innovation Fund. Link.

Take care,

— Nick

Hi there,

This piece was contributed by Tommy Hughes, with editorial overlay from yours truly. Tommy works on strategic accounts at PowerFlex, where he focuses on scaling distributed energy solutions. More of his writing can be found on his Substack.

DEEP DIVE

I have spent the better part of the past year silently tracing a changing digital supply chain across developers, utility executives, county planners, environmental advocates, and a few random conversations with residents who attend zoning meetings to monitor industrial expansion because they’re bored. The prevailing sentiment is not one of shared progress, but of rapid, opaque transformation. We are arguably witnessing the fastest buildout of industrial infrastructure ever, arriving in the form of data centers: windowless fortresses of steel that consume staggering (slightly unfathomable) amounts of electricity, water, and land. This growth is fundamentally rewriting the assumptions that have governed the power sector for decades.

Industry once treated electricity as a dependable, invisible input, someone else’s problem. Today, it, and many of the essential components of producing it, like gas turbines, has and have become the central constraint. Interconnection queues stretch into the 2030s, substations are scarce, and transformer lead times are measured in years rather than months or weeks. Cleanview’s recent analysis of 46 behind-the-meter data center projects, representing 56 gigawatts of planned capacity, indicates that roughly 30% of all planned U.S. data center capacity is now moving toward self-supplied power. Notably, 90% of that capacity was announced in 2025 alone. A niche workaround has become a core strategy. Developers are bringing their own power, not as a temporary backup, but as one option to deliver the foundational reliability and power requirements for project viability. This is the "on-site power arms race," and it is an important frame, beyond all the buzz about AI itself, through which to view all attendant discussions concerning AI, data centers, and all they may or may not enable in coming years. 

“Data Center” Mentions in media, original report from INK Media

1. How time-to-power shapes data center development

In technical discussions, the focus vis-à-vis data center development has shifted almost entirely to a single data point: the energization date. For developers, this date is the primary bottleneck in their project timelines. The shift is driven by fundamental math related to running and iteratively advancing AI. Data centers accounted for around 4% of total U.S. electricity demand in 2023. That figure is projected to grow to 9% by 2030. Data centers are expected to account for 15–20% of all U.S. load growth over the next decade. Furthermore, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) used for generative AI are estimated to be 10 to 15 times more electricity-intensive than the CPUs used in traditional computing. Hence, in part, how Nvidia, the most prominent producer of GPUs, managed to reap $68 billion in revenues in its most recent quarter, with roughly $62 billion thereof attributable to its data center segment.

The current U.S. grid, which accommodated relatively consistent electricity production, transmission, and distribution for decades, isn’t up to the demands of the growth pattern, let alone on the desired schedule that developers require. Indeed, even before the current infrastructure and AI boom, the grid was already overburdened. Interconnection risk has become a permanent feature of the development landscape, whether for data centers or otherwise, and schedule certainty is increasingly rare. Grid Strategies estimates a 16% surge in power demand over just four years, reaching 90 GW by 2029, while Goldman Sachs estimates data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030.

Recent project‑level data shows how unreliable nominal commissioning dates have become. Sightline Climate’s Q1 2026 Outlook notes that of 110 data center projects slated to come online last year, 26% are delayed, and another 10% quietly shifted their commercial operation dates amid power, permitting, and construction constraints. Looking ahead, at least 16 GW of capacity is nominally scheduled to come online in 2026 across 140 projects, but only 5 GW is actually under construction. Sightline expects 30–50% of those 2026 projects to be delayed, with roughly 11 GW still stuck at the “announced” stage despite typical build times of 12-18 months. Time‑to‑power is now the central development constraint, not an afterthought that can be mortgaged for utilities to figure out later and on their own.

Cleanview’s aforementioned research details how developers are responding. They are procuring whatever generation equipment is available: refurbished industrial turbines, aeroderivative turbines designed for aircraft, reciprocating engines, and mobile gas generators mounted on semi-trucks (or at least, they are working on making these alternatives feasible and integratable). One developer recently placed a $1.25 billion order with Boom Supersonic, a company that has never previously sold a power generation product, simply to secure the turbines the company says it will be able to make. The quest for the perfect energy source has been replaced by a more desperate “anything that hums” policy. 

Of course, the stakes are high. Not just because of competition and the race to build ever more powerful models. Current estimates suggest that AI data centers can generate between $10 million and $12 million in revenue per megawatt of capacity annually. On a gigawatt scale, that represents $10 billion to $12 billion a year. Bringing a campus online even two years ahead of a grid connection can thus yield tens of billions in additional revenue. Consequently, developers are willing to overlook everything from high fuel costs to sophisticated, novel engineering challenges, lower efficiencies, and, lest we forget, little regard for the potential to spike greenhouse gas emissions, to secure power as fast as physically possible.

2. The anatomy of modern data centers

The following “stacks” represent the hardware currently being deployed to these ends. Traditionally, data centers rely on a 2N redundancy scheme (meaning the facility has two completely independent power systems so that if one fails entirely, the other is not only dispatchable, but already running and capable of handling the full load on its own). The “BYOP” era elevates what were once backup components of setups to primary use.

Stack 1: Diesel gensets

A diesel genset is a coupled package of a compression ignition engine and an alternator that produces AC power on demand. In a traditional data center architecture, these units sit downstream of the utility feed as the last resort source, synchronized via paralleling switchgear to share the load during a grid failure. In dense corridors like Northern Virginia, the expected operating envelope is changing, with approximately 4,000 generators now permitted to run up to 500 hours per year for testing and reliability events. During an outage, the critical IT load rides on uninterruptible power supply (UPS) batteries for several minutes while the generators start, reach rated speed, and stabilize voltage. Once stabilized, automatic transfer switches move the load to the generator-backed buswork to maintain continuous uptime. However, this concentration creates significant localized air quality issues, as diesel exhaust contains nitrogen oxides, benzene, and arsenic. A single 1.3 million-square-foot facility in Wisconsin, for example, is permitted to emit nearly 90,000 tons of CO2e, primarily from these testing and emergency cycles. Consequently, while diesel remains the industry standard for reliability, its cumulative environmental footprint is increasingly coming under regulatory scrutiny.

More traditional, “standby” diesel generators for data centers (Central States Diesel Generators)

Stack 2: Gas microgrids

A gas microgrid is a behind-the-meter power plant composed of multiple natural gas prime movers, such as reciprocating engines or aeroderivative turbines, orchestrated by a sophisticated microgrid controller. This controller acts as the system's brain, managing voltage and frequency locally to enable islanding, where the data center operates independently of the utility grid. Cleanview’s research indicates that roughly three-quarters of the identified behind-the-meter equipment, totaling 23 GW, is now natural-gas-powered. Developers favor this stack because gas infrastructure is often more readily available than high-voltage grid interconnections, offering a more predictable energization timeline. Mechanically, these systems use modular engine blocks that can be scaled in increments of capital expenditure as the data center's power demand grows. While these microgrids offer a plausible path to rapid deployment, they tether the digital economy to fossil-fuel infrastructure in the long term. The trade-off for schedule certainty is a complex web of air permitting and pipeline constraints that can become a secondary bottleneck.

Stack 3: Private gas plants

For the largest hyperscale campuses, developers are bypassing modular solutions in favor of utility-scale, on-site gas-fired power plants. These facilities often use heavy-duty gas turbines or combined-cycle configurations to deliver hundreds of megawatts of dedicated baseload power. By building their own behind-the-meter plants, developers reduce the financial risk associated with multi-year utility interconnection delays. These projects are most prevalent in regions with high natural gas production and regulatory environments that favor rapid industrial development. However, these plants are land-intensive and require significant infrastructure, including dedicated high-pressure gas pipelines and cooling water systems. They also require rigorous permitting for noise and air emissions, as they essentially function as private utilities. While they provide the ultimate level of power independence, they represent a massive, long-term commitment to carbon-intensive generation.

Stack 4: Fuel cells

Fuel cells generate electricity through an electrochemical reaction between a fuel, typically natural gas or hydrogen, and an oxidant, rather than through combustion. In current data center deployments, these systems usually utilize Solid Oxide Fuel Cell technology, which can run on the existing natural gas grid while being hydrogen-ready for the future. They offer a quieter profile and a cleaner local plume compared to reciprocating engines, making them easier to permit in noise-sensitive areas. However, their current economic viability depends almost entirely on natural gas, meaning they are not yet a truly carbon-free solution. The modular nature of fuel cell energy servers allows developers to add capacity in small increments, matching the phased build-out of server halls. Despite the forward-looking narrative of a hydrogen economy, the high capital costs and reliance on fossil fuels remain significant hurdles. For now, they serve as a premium, lower-emission bridge for developers facing intense community or regulatory pressure.

Stack 5: Grid interfacing batteries and UPS

The Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is the critical link in a data center’s electrical chain, traditionally providing about 5 minutes of ride-through time using lead-acid or lithium-ion batteries. In the “BYOP” model, these systems are evolving into larger grid-interfacing battery energy storage systems capable of handling more than just emergency transitions. They allow facilities to perform peak shaving, reducing the load on on-site generators or the grid during periods of high demand. They also provide essential frequency regulation and voltage support, smoothing out the volatility inherent in islanded microgrid operations. By maintaining complete uptime reliability, they ensure that sensitive IT equipment experiences no power loss for a single millisecond. As data centers move toward hybrid power, these batteries become a key tool to integrate intermittent renewables with firm on-site generation. They transform the data center from a passive consumer into a flexible, responsive node in larger systems.

Stack 6: Hybrid campuses

Hybrid campuses represent the most complex tier of on-site power, integrating solar arrays, battery storage, and firm fuel generation into a single microgrid. A flagship example is Switch’s Citadel Campus in Nevada, which utilizes 127 MW of solar and 240 MWh of storage to serve the data center directly. These projects are designed to maintain some level of responsiveness to corporate sustainability goals, which have largely taken a backseat to building data centers and powering them at all costs in general, while preserving the reliability required for AI workloads. The technical challenge lies in “firming” the intermittent renewables, which requires sophisticated software to balance solar output with dispatchable gas engines or fuel cells. While these steps can help assuage community skepticism and reduce carbon footprints, they are exceptionally land-intensive and require massive upfront capital.

The physics of 24/7 uptime means that even the most advanced hybrid sites cannot yet abandon firm, combustion-based generation entirely. They serve as a proof of concept for a less gas-dependent data center buildout. These hybrid architectures are also where the largest projects live. Sightline’s data shows that while on‑site and hybrid campuses make up less than 10% of projects by count, they account for nearly half(!) of total announced capacity. Flagship sites like a 7‑GW Lea County campus in New Mexico and a 1.8‑GW gas‑plus‑renewables project in Wyoming are far too large to wait for conventional grid build‑outs; they are effectively building their own power systems first and then hanging compute off the side. Perhaps as a consequence of their complexity, they aren’t all that common yet in the current build-out.

Stack 7: PPAs and direct asset acquisition

Another recent evolution in power strategy is the shift from Power Purchase Agreements to the direct acquisition of generation assets. Traditionally, tech companies signed long-term contracts to buy power from third-party wind or solar farms to offset their dirtier grid consumption. However, as grid capacity has tightened, hyperscalers like Amazon have begun buying shovel-ready projects outright, such as the 1.2 GW Sunstone solar-plus-storage facility in Oregon. This move toward direct ownership allows companies to control the development timeline and ensure that the power is physically available when the data center opens. It signals a fundamental lack of confidence in traditional utilities' ability to deliver promised capacity on a competitive schedule. By owning the fuel and the plant, tech giants are effectively vertically integrating their energy supply chains. This strategy secures long term price stability and carbon-free energy, but it also places the burden of infrastructure management directly on the technology firm.

Soon, but not yet: Small modular reactors

Small Modular Reactors are envisioned as the ultimate solution for carbon-free, high-density baseload power for data center campuses. These reactors are designed to be factory-built and shipped to a site, offering a smaller footprint and, in theory, lower costs than traditional large-scale nuclear plants. However, the technology remains aspirational in the context of the current AI build-out, as no commercial SMRs are yet operational in the U.S. That may well change in the coming years as many startups tout monthly, if not weekly, progress towards demoing their first reactors; a cadre of startups hopes to take reactors critical for the first time before or on July 4th this year.

The cautionary tales of Vogtle Units 3 and 4, which took 15 years and 36 billion dollars to complete (running well over budget, some of the costs of which were passed along to ratepayers), loom large over the industry's nuclear ambitions. This motivates work on SMRs, which ideally, once commercialized, can be produced, deployed, and energized more quickly and with more predictable CAPEX requirements. Still, any semblance of steady SMR deployment will only start in 2027 or 2028 at best, which is already at the longer end of when developers want to develop, finish, and run data centers.

While tech companies are signing early-stage agreements to signal interest and spur development, the regulatory and technical hurdles mean that a vision of many dozens of SMRs dotting the American landscape is only realistically envisioned to start in the 2030s. And that would constitute a remarkable success. For a developer who needs power in 24 months, SMRs can’t be counted on in a construction Gantt chart.

Also ran: Resurrecting nuclear giants

The current operating nuclear strategy for some hyperscalers has also shifted from awaiting future innovation to resuscitating the industry’s vintage giants. This asset reclamation play prioritizes certainty over novelty, as developers realize that the fastest way to secure a gigawatt of carbon-free baseload power can be to tether data centers directly to proven, existing assets. The most significant signal of this shift was AWS acquiring 1.9 GW of nuclear power for its campus from Talen Energy, which is connected (via some complicated metering techniques to avoid approval scrutiny) to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Pennsylvania. By plugging directly into this 1980s-era plant, AWS effectively bypasses the years-long queue for grid interconnection. Even more unprecedented is Microsoft’s 20-year PPA with Constellation Energy to restart Unit 1 at Three Mile Island, a 1974-vintage reactor that was retired in 2019. Ironically, for some tech titans, the path of least resistance to ever-more advanced AI runs through 50-year-old cooling towers.

3. Geographic constraints

The choice of power stack is also dictated by local constraints. Where diesel permitting is permissive, diesel is used. Where gas pipelines are accessible, gas microgrids are built. Cleanview’s data shows that 83% of proposed behind-the-meter capacity is concentrated in just five states. These regions typically offer a combination of available fuel and regulatory frameworks that speed rapid industrial development.

Virginia is a great example. Data centers already consume approximately 25% of Virginia’s electricity, the highest share of any state. The only place in the world with more data centers than Virginia is China at large (and mind you, that’s one state versus a country with 1.4 billion people). Dominion Energy’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan projects a quadrupling of demand in 15 years, driven largely by data centers. A Virginia legislative audit (JLARC) found that unconstrained power demand will double in the next 10 years, a trend that’s irreconciliable with existing clean energy and climate goals.

Texas has seen an enormous boom in both wind and solar, yet it remains a primary site for gas-heavy data center development due to its independent grid and proximity to gas production. Other fast-growing states include South Carolina, Arizona, and North Dakota, where commercial electricity demand is growing fastest due to large computing facilities.

4) The environmental and social cost

The rapid deployment of on-site power has direct consequences for the communities hosting this infrastructure. Data centers are material infrastructures; they don’t happen in a theoretical vacuum, and are part of extractive digital supply chains that depend on land, minerals, water, and energy.

Water consumption

Data centers are forecast to consume ~450 million gallons of water per day by 2030, up from 205 million in 2016. A typical facility uses between three and five million gallons per day, equivalent to the water needed for a city of 30,000 to 50,000 people. Despite this, a 2022 Uptime Institute survey found that only 39% of data center operators actually measure water usage.

The impact is often underestimated. In northern Holland, a Microsoft data center used 84 million liters of drinking water in 2021, four times higher than the initial projection of 12–20 million liters. Furthermore, roughly three-quarters of the water footprint occurs indirectly at electricity generation sites (cooling thermal power plants), meaning communities far from the data center are part of the water-impact geography. In Northern Virginia, the Occoquan Reservoir, which provides drinking water to 2 million residents, has seen alarming increases in sodium and other salt-related constituents linked to the expansion of impervious surfaces, such as data center roofs and parking lots.

It sounds like a lot, but in macroeconomic water terms, data centers also remain a relatively small slice of total consumption. U.S. agriculture withdraws on the order of 80–100 billion gallons of water per day. Even at 450 million gallons per day, projected data center usage would represent well under 1% of total U.S. freshwater withdrawals. This does not mean it doesn’t matter, particularly in water-stressed regions, but it certainly reframes the discussion: data center cooling is a concentrated, visible load, whereas agriculture is a diffuse and structurally embedded one. Growing alfalfa to feed cows with water from the Colorado River is a much bigger problem than any modal data center’s water consumption.

Land use and noise

Data centers are enormous buildings, often exceeding 100,000 square feet, that provide few long-term jobs relative to their footprint. They are a poor fit for walkable, transit-supportive mixed-use areas. In Chandler, Arizona, noise from cooling systems and backup generator testing led to revised ordinances in 2023 that imposed stricter standards. In Fairfax County, Virginia, new data centers are prohibited within one mile of metro stations to preserve transit-oriented development.

Legal battles are mounting across the country as data center proposals run into a familiar buzzsaw of local resistance, noise complaints, worries about property values and community character, and a growing willingness by counties and neighborhood groups to drag projects into hearings, permitting fights, and court. The politics are catching up to the physical reality: New York lawmakers have proposed a statewide moratorium on permitting for large (20+ MW) data centers while the state studies land use, pollution (explicitly including noise), and rate impacts, a sign that siting is becoming a front-end regulatory question rather than a back-end mitigation exercise. Public opinion is also more fragile than the industry may have originally assumed: a Heatmap Pro poll found only 44% of Americans would support a data center being built near where they live (42% oppose), with “local, tangible” downsides like water and electricity impacts proving especially persuasive, the classic ingredients for zoning boards, injunctions, and drawn-out permitting wars. 

Even when national sentiment is “mildly positive,” backlash intensifies when a project becomes literal, a neighborhood-level fight over who absorbs the costs of the AI buildout and who captures the tax base. Washington’s emerging “BYONCE” posture, effectively telling developers to bring not just their own power, but their own new clean energy, underlines the same land-use tension: if the data center arrives, the enabling infrastructure (generation, transmission, substations) tends to arrive with it, expanding the project’s spatial and political footprint well beyond the server halls themselves. Mind you, all the opposition percolating out there is really no joke, and it’s mounting: at least 25 data center developments were canceled due to local opposition last year! Communities across the country are making it clear in hearings and court filings alike: whatever arrives with the data center had better be clean, quiet, and out of sight to the extent possible. If it could drive up electricity bills, strain local water supplies, or disrupt daily life, well, you’d be surprised at how hard local residents will work to thwart development. Especially if little effort is made to educate and ensure local economic development is in order for local taxpayers.

Environmental justice

New fossil fuel infrastructure is frequently sited in already overburdened communities. In Chesterfield County, Virginia, residents have faced 80 years of coal-plant pollution, and cancer rates are in the 90th percentile nationally. Adding new gas-fired plants to support data center loads exacerbates existing inequities. Moreover, 29% of Virginians reported forgoing basic goods like food or medicine to afford energy bills in 2023; Dominion Energy projects that bills may triple to finance the infrastructure driven by data center loads. That’s an unconscionable added burden to Virginians, sans any direct assurances that the trillions reaped by a relative few as AI booms will somehow trickle back to them. 

5. Governance and corporate tactics

The data center industry is increasingly adopting tactics reminiscent of older extractive industries. This includes veiling corporate identity behind local subsidiaries and using Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) to withhold environmental information.

In The Dalles, Oregon, Google planned a data center on land formerly occupied by an aluminum smelter, co-opting associated industrial water rights. When a local newspaper requested water usage data, the city sued the paper to block disclosure, with Google paying the city’s legal costs. After a year of litigation, the city settled and released the data. This pattern of "proprietary" environmental data is a recurring theme in data center governance.

Environmental impact and permitting processes are almost universally project-by-project. There is no standard requirement to evaluate the regional cumulative impacts of clustered data centers on grid stability, air quality, or water quantity. Local governments are often drawn to data centers as "cash cows" because they generate significant property tax revenue while requiring few municipal services, but this often ignores the long-term public burden of infrastructure upgrades.

6. Utility response: lead, follow, or be routed around

Utilities are currently being "routed around" by the largest developers. When Amazon or other hyperscalers buy gigawatt-scale power projects outright, it is a clear indication that they are losing confidence in utilities as reliable partners for timely delivery, though some of it is also a recognition that it is not entirely fair to utilities either for them to finance assets the most immediate financial benefits of which flow to a relatively select few, as opposed to, say, the general public in any given jurisdiction. This creates a two-tier system. In some regions, utilities and developers coordinate to integrate behind-the-meter assets into regional planning. In others, the system is fragmented, with developers building private, islanded infrastructure that operates independently of the public grid. This fragmentation makes long-term decarbonization more difficult, as it locks in gas infrastructure that may operate for decades, and bifurcates regulatory efforts, capital investment, data, and collaboration / “shared context.”.

However, some grid operators are responding with a more nuanced "conditional access" model. Sightline’s Q1 2026 Outlook notes that regions like SPP and PJM are now offering faster interconnections to data centers that bring their own generation or demand flexibility. By embedding grid-upgrade charges into large-load tariffs and offering non-firm service contracts, operators are effectively allowing developers to connect sooner if they can use on-site capacity to ride through grid curtailments. This represents a negotiated detour where data centers become quasi-utilities, responsible for both their own security of supply and a share of the grid’s broader stability. This trade-off, flexibility in exchange for speed, is becoming a primary middle path for managing AI-scale demand.

The net-net

The shift toward behind-the-meter power is a pragmatic response to a systemic failure to revitalize and upgrade the nation’s electrical grid to both keep pace with growing demand, AI boom or not, and to decarbonize at the requisite scope and scale. That developers are opting for BTM solutions is not a transition driven by a preference for self-sufficiency, per se, as much as by sheer logistical and economic necessity. That this buildout is currently slated to depend on natural gas and diesel in many cases is also a product of logistic and economic necessity (solar and batteries only get you so far), but still augers an indictment of corporate sustainability pledges from tech giants and elsewhere, adding to the long list of “green larping” examples enumerated in Keep Cool previously.

The on-site power arms race will create a massive fleet of fossil fuel generators, decoupled from the grid, powering data centers—a landscape of windowless, private fortresses of power production and the incessant whirr of ever faster, more complex, and increasingly even recursive computation—that will drive additional greenhouse gas emissions for decades. Its decoupling allows for rapid growth, yes, but it also continues to externalize the environmental and social costs onto local communities and the world at large while bypassing the traditional regulatory oversight that governs public utilities. A lot of what’s been discussed here is novel, groundbreaking, revolutionary, even. It’s also a tale as old as time.

For those of you in the weeds of this topic yourselves, both Tommy and I would love additional input to flesh this out further. Let us know where there’s even more nuance and where we may mischaracterize how things are actually shaping up on the ground.

— Tommy & Nick

Sources / references

1. Data Center Microgrid Diesel Gensets Market - Strategic Revenue Insights

2. Data Center Generator Market - Precedence Research

3. Data Center Generator Market - Mordor Intelligence

4. Microgrid Market - MarketsandMarkets

5. Data Center Generator Market - Straits Research

6. Grid Connected Microgrid Market - Global Market Insights

7. Data Center Generator Market Report - Strategic Market Research

8. E3 White Paper 2024: Load Growth Is Here to Stay - E3

9. Onsite Generation Expected to Fully Power 27 Percent of Data Center Facilities by 2030 - Bloom Energy

10. Betting Big on Data Centers: U.S. Now Leads World for New Gas Power Development - Global Energy Monitor

11. Fuel Cells Could Help Meet the Power Demand from Data Centers - Goldman Sachs

12. Scaling bigger, faster, cheaper: Data centers with smarter designs - McKinsey & Company

13. The Rise of AI: A Reality Check on Energy and Economic Impacts - Energy Analytics

14. Navigating U.S. Data Center Energy Demand - S&P Global

15. Powering the Future of Data Centers - EPRI

16. 2026-2030 BESS Industry Outlook - Nextgpower

17. Market Snapshot: Energy storage in Canada may multiply by 2030 - Canada Energy Regulator

18. North America Battery Energy Storage System Market - MarketsandMarkets

19. Battery Energy Storage System Market - Research and Markets

20. Data Center Energy Storage Market - Market Research Future

21. Design for More Efficient Data Centers Whitepaper - Honeywell

22. Global data center sector to nearly double to 200GW amid AI infrastructure boom - JLL

23. LinkedIn Post by Stanislav Masevych on Data Centers and Renewable Energy - LinkedIn

24. Data centers drive surge in clean energy procurement in 2024 - S&P Global

25. Data centers lead global growth in corporate PPAs - pv magazine USA

26. Diversity of power - the biggest data center energy stories of 2024 - DataCenterDynamics

27. A Reality Check of Corporate Procurement Trends in 2025 - Pexapark

28. Direct Renewable PPAs for Data Centers Market - Dataintelo

29. Power and Energy Trends Shaping the Data Center Industry - Faegre Drinker

30. How Data Centers Are Reshaping Global Energy Procurement - NZero

31. Leading the charge: Surge in US data centre growth is powering renewable energy investment opportunities - AXA IM

32. Talen Energy Expands Nuclear Energy Relationship with Amazon - Talen Energy

33. Amazon to help power data centers with nuclear energy - Amazon

34. Amazon Unveils ‘Cascade’—Energy Northwest’s Xe-100 SMR Project, Targeting Construction by 2030 - POWER Magazine

35. New supply agreement expands Talen-Amazon partnership - World Nuclear News

36. Amazon buys nuclear-powered data center from Talen - American Nuclear Society

37. TerraPower in Mega Deal with Meta for Eight Natrium 345 MW Advanced Nuclear Plants - Neutron Bytes

38. Amazon nuclear energy deal to power data centres - Datacentre Magazine

39. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft Go Nuclear - Trellis

40. Cleanview, “Bypassing the Grid: How Data Centers Are Building Their Own Power Plants,” 2026.

41. Lifset, R., Raparla, P., Stein, A., Bridges, L., McElfish, J., & Cywinski, T. (2025). Local environmental impacts of data center proliferation. Environmental Law Reporter, 55(2), 10131–10145.

42. Frenzel, J., Jansen, F., Liu, J., Ruddock, J., Finnegan, S., & Radloff, J. (2023, October). Digital infrastructures and environmental justice: Policies, practices, and visions. Panel presented at AoIR2023: The 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

43. Mandal, R., Mondal, M. K., Banerjee, S., Chakraborty, C., & Biswas, U. (2021). A survey and critical analysis on energy generation from datacenter. In Data Deduplication Approaches (pp. 203–230). Elsevier.

44. Data Center Dynamics, “Amazon acquires shovel-ready 1.2GW solar and storage facility in Oregon,” 2026.

45. B2B Tech + Energy Communications Agency 

46. Sightline, “Data Center Outlook Report Q126, 2026. 

Hello folks,

Hope you’re keeping ok; that wasn’t a fun weekend to be online at all! Here’s to hoping the wheel’s perpetual turning revolves towards more peace and prosperity for all soon. Turmoil in the Middle East portends plenty for energy and sustainability, however, so I can’t go ostrich mode entirely, as nice as that sounds. That and lots more follows below.

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• The below outlines the importance of the Straight of Hormuz, which will likely be closed or, at a minimum, avoided as much as possible by shipping companies until the developing conflict between Iran and the U.S., Israel, and their proxies eases. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• Oil prices rose sharply as U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and retaliatory strikes sent disruptions through the global energy supply chain. WTI crude jumped ~8% to about $72/barrel, and Brent rose ~8% to about $79/barrel (as of this writing), with attacks on two vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz reported so far. As above, ~20% of the world's oil is shipped through said Strait. Link.

• Global greenhouse gas emissions hit 60.63 billion tons of CO2-equivalent last year, a 0.5% rise to a new record high, per Climate TRACE. Notably, for the first time since at least 2015, emissions from China's power sector decreased year-over-year, but that decline was offset by an equivalent increase in U.S. power emissions. Link.

Elsewhere in energy

• Form Energy inked a deal with Xcel Energy to install 300 megawatts of its iron-air batteries in Pine Island, Minnesota, to help power a new Google data center. When built and fully charged, the system could hold up to 30 gigawatt-hours of energy and dispatch for up to 100 hours straight; if it comes to fruition, it will be one of, if not the largest and longest-duration battery projects in the world. Google will pay Xcel to build 1,400 MW of wind, 200 MW of solar, and Form’s long-duration storage, offering one of the cleaner stacks powering data centers we’ve seen yet. TBD on if and how this all comes together. Link.

• Proxima Fusion, based out of Munich, Germany, signed a €2 billion (~$2.36 billion) agreement with Bavaria, RWE, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics to develop the world's first commercial fusion power plant in Europe. Proxima will contribute 20% of the program cost, with the remainder backed through non-dilutive state and federal government funding. Link.

• SHINE Technologies, based out of Janesville, WI, raised $240 million in equity funding led by NantWorks for its fusion energy and nuclear waste recycling business. Link.

• The initial grid synchronization and connection of the first phase of the M Terra solar project in the Philippines has been completed. The project includes a 3.5 GW solar and 4.5 GWh BESS system on the island of Luzon, and will become the world's largest integrated solar and battery storage facility once complete. By the end of January, 1,288 MW of solar had been installed, and the project had stated aims to add another 250 MW of solar and 112.5 MWh of battery storage operational by the end of February, all delivered in less than 15 months since groundbreaking. Link.

• The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Dominance Financing closed its largest-ever $26 billion loan to Southern Company subsidiaries to fund 5 GW of new natural gas generation, 6 GW of nuclear power through uprates at the Vogtle, Hatch, and Farley plants, hydropower modernization, battery storage, and over 1,300 miles of new transmission lines in Georgia and Alabama. The loan is projected to deliver more than $7 billion in ratepayer savings and supports adding 16 GW of firm power to the grid. Link.

• The Trump administration isn’t just focused on SMRs for nuclear fission advancement. It’s also begun taking meetings with utilities and developers to build 10 new large-scale reactors by 2030, which would almost certainly be Westinghouse AP1000s capable of producing up to 1.1 GW of electricity per unit. The most recent AP1000 projects at Vogtle in Georgia were notoriously over budget and behind schedule. Link.

• Poland's Supreme Administrative Court also rejected an environmental complaint aimed at halting construction of AP1000 reactors at a Baltic Sea site, clearing a major hurdle for the country's first nuclear plant using American technology. Link.

• Public opposition to data centers is growing quickly. A new Heatmap poll found just 28% of Americans would support a data center near their home, down from 44% last fall. The biggest partisan gap was between rural and urban Republicans. Link.

• Amazon announced plans to invest $12 billion in new data center campuses in Louisiana, creating 540 full-time jobs and pledging up to $400 million in local water infrastructure. Meanwhile, at least 25 data centers were abandoned last year following local opposition (see above). Link. Link.

• Russia's nuclear regulator Rostekhnadzor issued a 10-year operating license for Unit 2 of the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine, which is Europe's largest nuclear fission power plant. It has been offline for four years amidst the ongoing Russian and Ukrainian war. Rosatom has applied for a license for Unit 6 and aims to do the same for Units 3, 4, and 5 by year-end; Moscow's intent to consolidate control over the facility is clear. Link.

• Ohio jurors are deciding whether two former FirstEnergy executives are guilty in the HB 6 utility bribery scheme, which could become the largest corruption scandal in state history. The utility admitted to paying approximately $60 million to dark money groups that funneled funds to former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, plus $4.3 million to a company controlled by a former Public Utilities Commission chair. Ohio customers have paid more than $400 million in coal plant subsidies under HB 6, and the state's renewable energy and efficiency standards remain decimated. Link.

Transportation

• Wayve, based out of London, raised ~$1.5 billion in Series D funding from investors including Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Stellantis, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Uber. Uber committed an additional $300 million in milestone-based capital tied to deploying Wayve-powered robotaxis in 10 global cities, starting in London. The company, which develops end-to-end deep learning for autonomous driving, is now valued at $8.6 billion. Link.

• Alphabet's Waymo expanded its driverless ride service to four new cities, namely Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Orlando, bringing its total U.S. footprint to 10 cities. Waymo is on track to provide more than 1 million driverless rides per week by year-end and has ~3,000 robotaxis operating nationwide. Link. Link.

• Uber is investing more than $100 million to build dedicated fast-charging hubs for autonomous vehicles in the U.S., starting in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Dallas. The company aims to launch robotaxi services in at least 10 cities by the end of 2026, partnering with Lucid/Nuro, Volkswagen, and Avride. Link.

• AV developers are increasingly relying on "world models," AI systems that simulate physical reality, to train self-driving cars. Waymo says its model, built on Google DeepMind's Genie 3, can simulate rare scenarios from tornadoes to wandering elephants. Some experts warn that using simulated data to both build and validate these models creates safety risks that aren't fully understood. Link.

• Einride, based out of Stockholm, raised an oversubscribed $113 million PIPE (private investment in public equity) ahead of a SPAC listing on the New York Stock Exchange for its autonomous electric trucks. Link.

• Chinese EV maker Nio provided a million battery swaps in China in less than a week. Link.

Industry

• Phoenix Tailings, based out of Woburn, MA, raised a $30.2 million Series B round at a $360 million post-money valuation and $10 million in venture debt. Investors included Traxys North America, Olive Tree Capital, and Geodesic Alliance Fund. The company processes rare earth elements from mining waste into finished metals and alloys. Link.

• Equinor abandoned a gigawatt-scale blue hydrogen plant in the Netherlands, one of the EU's landmark projects to prove hydrogen can be produced at scale using natural gas with CCS, as demand for the fuel stalls. Link.

• Green-steel startup Boston Metal, also based out of Woburn, MA, suffered a major setback after an "unforeseen critical equipment failure" at its Brazil facility on January 30 thwarted a key funding deal. The company will lay off 71 US employees after losing access to committed capital. Boston Metal, which has raised over $400 million from investors including ArcelorMittal, Saudi Aramco Ventures, and Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund, is developing "molten oxide electrolysis" to make steel without coal or emissions. Link.

Climate science and interventions

• Scientists continue to debate whether and to what extent the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is weakening. Researchers from the University of Miami and NOAA, who have been studying the Florida Current for 43 years, found it had remained stable over the past four decades after correcting cable data for geomagnetic field changes. But the key monitoring cable malfunctioned in 2023, and scientists say they need another 20 years of observations to determine if any decline is a robust feature. Other scientists are far more confident that AMOC is already weakening. Link.

• The NRDC launched a new Solar Geoengineering Research Governance Platform to collate research on solar radiation management, the controversial suite of technologies including but not limited to stratospheric aerosol injection to reflect the sun's energy back into space. The project will provide governance tools for research institutions. Link.

Other odds and ends

• The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative relaunched with 250 signatories and $3.7 trillion under management after suspending operations in early 2025. The revised commitment statement drops its founding 2050 target date but maintains support for Paris Agreement goals while recognizing "diverse jurisdictional realities." Link.

• China plans to tighten its national air quality standards (mostly focused on mitigating smog) for the first time since 2012. New limits on pollutants will be phased in from March and strengthened further through 2031. That said, China's new limits are still weaker than WHO 2021 guidance. Link.

• Syndicate One, based out of Brussels, Belgium, raised €22 million (~$26 million) in a first close for its second fund, backed by Sofina, Finhouse, COI, PMV, SFPIM, Finance&Invest Brussels, and Wallonie Entreprendre. The fund will invest in early-stage technology startups founded by Belgian entrepreneurs. Link.

Go with grace,

— Nick

Hey,

This piece was contributed by Stu Nissenbaum, with editorial overlay from Nick. Stu is a climate policy leader and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) insider who helped ensure that the strongest available science underpinned major federal emissions rulemakings during the Biden Administration; the U.S. greenhouse gas endangerment finding served as the scientific foundation for the majority of the standards he worked on. 

At the EPA, he operated at the intersection of science and policy, guiding technical analyses and advising senior leadership on landmark emissions standards, including federal vehicle emissions standards, power plant rules, and oil and gas methane regulations. He also served as Head of Delegation to the Arctic Council’s Arctic Contaminants Action Program, representing the United States in advancing international cooperation on pollution reduction. In addition, he is a member of the Science Alliance at Protect Our Winters and teaches as an adjunct professor. 

Stu is actively seeking senior leadership roles and welcomes conversations with organizations looking for experienced, science-grounded climate leadership.

Much of the climate field is reeling following the Trump Administration's repeal of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Endangerment Finding. My LinkedIn is flooded with statements from various organizations and personal posts with thoughts and feelings about the repeal. Generally, they are pretty dire. I get it…it’s bad. I would know–I worked on emissions rulemaking at the EPA for close to five years, predominantly under the Biden Administration. Unfortunately, my office barely exists there anymore, and I remain unemployed (shameless plug for anyone hiring). The Endangerment Finding underpinned everything I worked on, including the Power Plant Rules, the Oil and Gas Methane Rules, and the Vehicle Emissions Standards for Light-, Medium-, and Heavy-Duty Vehicles. It’s an incredibly important rule. So let’s talk about it.

What is the GHG Endangerment Finding?

In 2007, Massachusetts v. EPA was brought before the Supreme Court. This case contended that because the Clean Air Act covered “ [any] air pollutant” that “could endanger public health or welfare,” carbon dioxide and other GHGs should be regulated. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court found in favor of Massachusetts and eleven other states that GHGs can and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Shadows loom over the Supreme Court of the U.S., which, in 2007, found that Massachusetts (and other petitioners) had standing by showing concrete injury from climate change, especially loss of coastal land from sea‑level rise, which implicated its quasi‑sovereign interests.

The initial court case was brought on the basis of vehicle emissions, but the decision established the law, creating jurisdictional and regulatory implications for other industries as well. The GHG Endangerment Finding was established in 2009 under the first Obama Administration. It was lauded as a major climate victory, as it concluded that six major GHGs (CO2, methane [CH4], NOx, HFCs, PFCs, and SF6) threatened public health and welfare and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act (some short-lived greenhouse gasses that would be more impractical to regulate, like water vapor, were excluded). For seventeen years, the Endangerment Finding underpinned most of the EPA's climate regulations. 

The Endangerment Finding’s legacy

Specifically, the Endangerment Finding served as the legal foundation for federal climate regulation since 2009, and its effects now extend across a wide range of regulatory programs and economic sectors. Most directly, the finding enabled the EPA to regulate GHG emissions from motor vehicles under the Clean Air Act. This authority has shaped vehicle emissions standards for passenger cars and heavy-duty trucks for more than a decade and played a central role in driving automaker investment in electrification, battery manufacturing, and low-emissions vehicle technologies. These standards have also supported compliance credit markets and long-term product planning across the automotive sector.

The finding also triggered EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources such as power plants, refineries, and industrial facilities. Once GHGs became regulated pollutants under the Clean Air Act, major new and modified facilities became subject to permitting requirements that require the use of best available control technology to limit emissions. The finding also underpins EPA’s authority to establish performance standards for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which have been a central component of federal climate policy over the past decade. These regulatory authorities have influenced infrastructure investment, accelerated coal plant retirements, and shaped the design and economics of new energy and industrial projects.

The decline of coal power use in the U.S., while perhaps driven most prominently by economic factors and the proliferation of natural gas, is also attributable to more stringent regulation.

Beyond direct regulation, the Endangerment Finding enabled the development of federal greenhouse gas reporting systems, emissions inventories, and analytical tools that are now embedded in regulatory decision-making and private sector planning. Programs such as EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program provide essential data used by regulators, investors, and companies to track emissions and assess risk. The finding has also supported the use of climate damages in federal cost-benefit analysis, which affects a wide range of regulatory actions beyond traditional environmental rules, including appliance efficiency standards, infrastructure planning, and energy policy.

Further, the finding had important implications for state climate policy and broader market behavior. States have relied on the federal regulatory framework to implement their own vehicle standards, industrial regulations, and decarbonization policies. At the same time, the existence of durable federal authority to regulate greenhouse gases has shaped long-term capital allocation decisions across the energy, transportation, and industrial sectors. Investors and companies have made strategic decisions based on the expectation that greenhouse gas emissions would remain subject to regulatory constraint. After seventeen years, the Endangerment Finding should thus be seen not as an isolated regulatory determination but a central legal pillar supporting the structure of federal climate regulation and the economic systems that developed around it.

The repeal

To be sure, the most recent announcements aren’t new news. The EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, announced that the EPA was working to repeal the finding back in August of last year. Many organizations wrote letters and testified during the comment period, including one of my favorite organizations, Protect Our Winters, which sent a petition to The Outdoor State for support and whose CEO, Erin Sprague, testified. However, knowing the priorities and having followed the actual decision-making and behavior of the current administration, I do not believe anyone is truly shocked.

The Trump Administration says it repealed this finding because it creates excessive regulation and harms business. They also want to tout it as the largest deregulation action in history, with a stated purpose of “reigniting the American Dream.” More broadly, this action reflects a shift toward a purported “energy dominance” framework that prioritizes maximizing domestic fossil fuel production and limiting federal regulatory constraints on GHGs to unlock greater energy production capacity in general, across all generation sources, including coal, and except for wind, which the President hates particularly for peculiar and perhaps past pecuniary reasons. 

Insofar as the Endangerment Finding has served as the legal predicate for regulating GHGs under multiple Clean Air Act provisions, including mobile-source standards under Section 202 and stationary-source standards under Section 111, removing this predicate weakens the EPA’s ability to impose emissions performance standards that would otherwise continue to drive fuel switching and accelerated electrification. A robust decarbonization framework and the energy transition rely on these regulatory authorities, alongside statutory incentives such as those in the Inflation Reduction Act, to internalize the external costs of GHG emissions and shift investment toward lower-carbon technologies. Hence, this action represents both a discrete regulatory change and a structural shift in the federal government’s role in (or, really, its abdication of a large part of its role in) shaping long-term emissions trajectories.

Correlation isn’t causation, but U.S. GHGs peaked in line with the Endangerment Finding

The administration also relied on its own DOE report titled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, which suggested that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could have a “greening effect.” This “greening effect” implies that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will boost vegetation growth. This premise is largely rejected by the scientific community and relies on a report that a judge ruled violated transparency laws in the development and operation of the working group. Even if we accept (as we should) that higher atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations can yield more plant growth locally or in some parts of the world, focusing on that spatially limited dynamic misses the forest for the trees vis-à-vis the extent to which climate change at large risks destabilizing ecosystems and dramatically dysregulating Earth’s climate system in general.

Where do we go from here?

State and federal policies

Not all federal GHG regulations depend on the Endangerment Finding. For example, the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act of 2020 explicitly directs EPA to phase down hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), according to a statutory schedule. This authority is independent of any endangerment determination, and EPA’s obligations under the AIM Act will remain in force regardless of future litigation over broader GHG regulatory authority.

In addition, Congress anticipated potential legal challenges to EPA’s GHG regulatory authority when it enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Title VI of the IRA amended the Clean Air Act (CAA) to explicitly define six greenhouse gases as “air pollutants.” This statutory clarification may provide an alternative legal basis for the EPA to regulate GHG emissions under the CAA without relying on the finding, although this theory has not been fully tested in the courts.

States also retain broad and durable authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and can continue to play a central role in climate policy, particularly if federal regulatory efforts remain constrained. State governments have clear authority over many major sources of emissions, including transportation fuels, electricity generation, industrial sources, buildings, and natural gas systems. When federal regulation weakens or stalls, states have historically stepped in to advance decarbonization through regulation, infrastructure investments, and market-based policies. Opportunities for state leadership are perhaps more pronounced now than ever.

Litigation

I do not believe that the repeal of the Endangerment Finding will officially take hold anytime soon. There will be months and maybe even years of litigation surrounding this repeal. The repeal flies in the face of Massachusetts v. EPA, i.e., it’s in conflict with the established law of the land. The AGs from several states have already said they will litigate the decision, and I am sure several climate-focused organizations will follow suit. Indeed, many are preparing to or have already filed suit. The litigation may even carry into the next administration, at which point this could all be moot depending on which way the political pendulum swings. Additionally, judicial stay orders and injunctions on this repeal will likely prevent the EPA from using it to justify its deregulation agenda. That said, even if the Endangerment Finding survives, the whiplash from all this back-and-forth is deleterious to business, policymaking, and public confidence both domestically and abroad, to say nothing of climate change and efforts to address it in general. 

The private sector and consumers

Despite the last year of deregulation and attacks on climate policy, the climate field is still burgeoning. In the last few years, there has been increased discussion of superpollutants (i.e., most other greenhouse gasses beyond carbon dioxide), a topic Nick has written about several times and himself beat the drumbeat for. Companies and organizations are finding ways to continue to reduce these emissions. Just look at companies like Tradewater, which caps orphaned wells to cut methane and dispose of old HFC and HCFC refrigerants. The work is already being done, and it advances by the day.

A graphic we have often shared from the Clean Air Coalition detailing what super pollutants are

Climate also remains front-of-mind for consumers. Here in Colorado, we are facing one of our worst (read as warmest) winters ever. The mountains have minimal snowpack, and in Denver, roughly half of our winter days have featured temperatures above 60° F. The whole country has experienced unusual weather patterns, reinforcing the idea that climate change is not just about global warming but about climate system dysregulation. In parallel, battles over data centers are becoming commonplace in townships, cities, and counties across the country, as consternation over rising electricity prices, water usage, and more comes to the fore. 

Arguably, the whims of the Trump Administration are a drop in the bucket compared to the totality of the diverse, global set of climate change drivers. China alone accounts for roughly three times as many carbon dioxide emissions annually as the U.S. does at this point, a gap that is likely to widen even further into the rest of this decade and next. Still, this is not to make light of the potential loss of the Endangerment Finding. To quote from “The Long Heat,” a recently released book by Wim Carton and Andreas Mann, in many ways:

Pursuant to that final question, diverging even more flagrantly from an even close to adequate mitigation and adaptation path is certainly not the answer. There is already too little ground of concrete action on which to stand to cede any further. As such, especially with respect to important statutes like the Endangerment Finding, there can really be no acceptance or acquiescence. Prescribing action, while essential, is difficult, especially when addressing individuals like you. You can support any of the many organizations, including but not limited to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which mobilize to both litigate and navigate other policy avenues to mitigate the harms of this and other repeals and steps backward on climate action to which we’ve been routinely subjected. Really, the answers come back to staying in the game, a concept that is necessarily amorphous to who you are and your experience, but that boils down to finding your own best individual and organizational wedges to influence things, including and beyond yourself. You’re always welcome to reply to the email if you need more inspiration.

Take a deep breath

Finally, as this header says, take a deep breath. I am by no means trying to minimize the impact that this repeal could have, but the best we can do is to keep on keeping on. Part of the Trump Administration’s strategy is to demoralize and to divide; resisting that isn’t easy, but resisting those dynamics is an essential element of the resistance itself. It is easy to get caught up in sensationalizing bad news.  As someone who has worked in government for years, despite how fast things seem to move, they are actually way slower, nuanced, and little is ever entirely lost.

Hope this offers some deeper insight into what’s been going on with the Endangerment Finding. To connect with Stu and offer thoughts, feel free to respond directly to this email.

— Nick

The Labadie Power Plant is a 2,389.4-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Missouri. In 2023, it was the largest single point source of sulfur dioxide pollution in the U.S., emitting roughly 44,000 tons of SO₂. It likely remains one of, if not the largest, sources of sulfur dioxide pollution in the U.S. in 2026. Coal burning generally is a predominant source of sulfur dioxide pollution globally, particularly when plants haven't been retrofitted with sulfur scrubbing technology (the Labadie Power Plant hasn’t). Yet, despite the degree to which sulfur dioxide readily changes the Earth’s radiative forcing dynamics, no one is decrying the power plant’s continued operation (and lack of scrubbers) as a geoengineering experiment.

The Labadie coal-fired power plant in Labadie, Missouri (Image source here)

When nascent fields get mired in semantic controversies, it can be beneficial to set aside linguistic abstractions, opting instead for the time-honored tradition of getting precise about exactly what we’re talking about. With respect to the field of what I’ll refer to as “climate interventions”—i.e., direct interventions in climate systems to protect them against destabilization, shift climate system dynamics, and otherwise moderate climate change or its impacts to buy time for mitigation and removals—we should abandon the “geoengineering” term and agree on other terms and taxonomies. As interest and investment in interventions grow, geoengineering, as an umbrella term, is, most charitably, an imprecise and impractical catch-all for a diverse, varied set of potential intervention strategies. Less charitably, it lends itself to strawman arguments about “playing god” that artificially constrain reasonable efforts to advance the field.

Where “geoengineering” started and stands today

The prefix geo- is derived from the Greek word gē or gaia. In the context of the word “geoengineering,” we can understand it as meaning “earth.” One of the earlier, seminal uses of the term was in Cesare Marchetti’s 1977 paper, “On Geoengineering and the CO2 Problem,” published in the journal Climatic Change. Marchetti wrote (bold emphasis added):

What Marchetti describes at the end as an example of geoengineering is an early vision for ocean‑based carbon storage. Despite its role in originating the term, carbon removal and storage aren’t typically considered geoengineering today. So what is it?

Looking towards definitions from climate organizations and bodies with sway, we find geoengineering variously defined as:

• “...a broad set of methods and technologies that aim to deliberately alter the climate system in order to alleviate the impacts of climate change…” (the IPCC)

• “...a deliberate intervention in the planetary environment of a nature and scale intended to counteract anthropogenic climate change and its impacts.” (An expert group under the Convention on Biological Diversity, working with UNEP)

• “...the deliberate large‑scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.” (a now classic 2009 report from the Royal Society)

The throughlines here are found in emphasis on intent and deliberateness, as well as in at least two of the above and perhaps implicitly in all three, planetary-scale impacts. This agrees with Marchetti’s original definition, particularly his focus on “solutions to global problems…attempted from a global view.”

But there are many challenges with these conditions. Yes, umbrella terms are allowed to be coarse; after all, the point is that they are broad enough to “catch” a lot of subsidiary elements. But, even if geoengineering were used consistently (and, as we will soon see, it isn’t), surely defining it simply as deliberate interventions with the potential to deliver planetary-scale climate impacts is too broad. When used at that level of generality, deciding what counts as geoengineering versus what doesn’t becomes quite nebulous quite quickly, creating confusion and muddying important conversations that deserve specificity (as we will also show).

Perhaps the most discussed (and likely most fraught) intervention that the term geoengineering calls to mind is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). SAI proposes spraying aerosol-inducing chemicals into the upper atmosphere, where the aerosols would have a net cooling effect by reflecting solar radiation. A similar dynamic is at play in Earth’s climate today; the IPCC’s sixth assessment identified that sulfate pollution from power plants and cars, as well as several other sources, has produced a global cooling effect estimated somewhere between 0.2°C and 0.9°C to date (with 0.5°C as the anchoring midpoint, designated with “medium confidence”).¹

The chart above stems from the same IPCC report referenced in footnote #1

While there are meaningful differences between the two (sulfate pollution and SAI) in terms of where in the atmosphere they induce aerosols, cooling, and for how long—as a consequence of atmospheric elevation—that effect lasts, there is no doubt that adding additional aerosols to the atmosphere generally produces a global impact on Earth’s energy balance.

As such, SAI is certainly in scope across all prominent geoengineering definitions. But if we focus on things that can alter Earth’s energy balance, strategies like cloud seeding would not be geoengineering. Sure, it involves spraying things into the air. But it does not physically alter Earth’s energy balance: It deals in making rain. So perhaps it’s best understood as weather modification, not geoengineering. Yet, in present-day usage, cloud seeding is often proffered as a prime geoengineering example (and target).

In Tennessee, recently proposed legislation defines geoengineering as the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.” Here we still have the “intentional” element but have shifted from planetary scale to local, and away from radiative and energetic balances to also include weather alongside temperature. In stretching to include cloud seeding, this varies considerably from the other established definitions.

Moreover, the “spraying” and “into the atmosphere” conditions would also exclude many radiation management techniques and other proposed climate interventions also normally identified as geoengineering. Is deploying nanobubbles to enhance the reflectivity of the ocean’s surface to protect coral reefs geoengineering? Would glacial restabilization efforts, which similarly don’t deal in shifting Earth’s energy balance, at least not exclusively, count? I imagine groups like the IPCC might say so, but apparently Tennessee’s legislature wouldn’t. Granted, Tennessee is landlocked and glaciar-less, so perhaps the legislators are to be forgiven.

Elsewhere, in Missouri, HB 2656, the “Clean Skies Act,” prohibits any entity from engaging in “any form of geoengineering, weather modification, or cloud seeding.” Here, no definition of geoengineering or weather modification is really even offered, which begs the question of why those words were used at all. If the thrust of the legislation is focused on banning cloud seeding, why not just focus on that specifically? The answer probably lies in the pathos, not the logos.

We need not try to answer all these questions here; we have already illuminated sufficient tension in how the word geoengineering is applied (or weaponized). The overarching problems evident here are of inconsistent application, the degree to which stretch efforts are made to include the term “geoengineering” when it could simply be omitted in favor of specificity, and the extent to which its inclusion in certain settings conflicts with the general manner in which it is used in media, science, technological discussions, and other governance settings. We have different stakeholders discussing different things while referring to them using the same terms. Absent reconciliation, it seems like it would be better to drop references to geoengineering altogether.

The pernicious problem of scale

Even if we set aside the disagreements in application and return to definitions of geoengineering anchored in deliberateness and the possibility of inducing global impact on Earth’s energy balance, we continue to encounter problems. Homing in on the planetary-scale condition, the pernicious question of how to define scale comes to the fore. Many interventions that alter albedo dynamics or greenhouse gas flows technically impact Earth’s energy balance. This is where the term approaches a cliff of linguistic utility; if we fail to interrogate what’s in versus out for the scale condition, invariably, we’ll stumble into more conflicts in application.

Trying to decide where to set some nodal inflection point for where “planetary scale” begins and ends isn’t straightforward, however. Core definitions (IPCC, Royal Society, CBD, C2G, etc.) all emphasize “large‑scale” or “planetary‑scale” intervention but don’t specify a numeric cut‑off in area, fraction of radiative forcing, or share of global emissions affected.

To cut to a logical extreme, does planting a tree that otherwise would not have been, which will take up additional carbon dioxide and change the albedo of the land surface, count as geoengineering? Intuitively, it doesn’t “feel” like it should count. Clearly, some threshold of scope and scale matters. Some sort of de minimis argument. Should painting the roofs of buildings white count, insofar as it changes albedo, and could be applied at ever-increasing scales?

On this point, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm offer some useful ideas in their new book “The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late.” In defining geoengineering, one approach they apply focuses on defining it as based on the potential for an intervention to trigger cascading, negative, second-order impacts. They write:

Elsewhere in the book, to expand on this idea, they note:

Here and elsewhere, in enumerating and elaborating on these risks, Carton and Malm are really focused on large-scale SAI, deployed globally and continuously. So, while they offer concrete thoughts on a necessary threshold of scale and impact, this seems like another instance in which the use of the term “geoengineering” could be replaced by specifying the strategy or strategies, and at what scopes and scales of their deployment, produce the effects in question.

Further, another challenge arises in deciding whether carbon removal should be considered geoengineering. Applied at a large scale, by reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, it could similarly produce the asymmetric outcomes across geographies that Carton and Malm worry about and use to define geoengineering. What’s interesting in this line of inquiry is that before material carbon removal industries took shape over the past decade and before international climate scientists concretized around the idea that significant carbon removal capacity is essential to preserve the viability of temperature targets like 1.5°C, it was often lumped into the geoengineering category. Now, mostly it isn’t.

A helpful graphic from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity that visualizes the ambiguities of what qualifies as geoengineering, as well as where the delineations are less versus more clear.

Perhaps what the carbon removal example demonstrates is that, in practice, what’s considered geoengineering has more to do with how fringe or not a proposed solution or set thereof is. Perhaps the very acceptance of carbon removal into the climate mainstream is what ushered it out from under the geoengineering umbrella, rather than any shifts in technical or scientific definitions. Regardless, we have shown that geoengineering suffers not only from inconsistent application in general, but also from significant ambiguities regarding one of its two primary conditions, namely, where to set the defining boundaries of what “planetary impact” really is.

Addressing the second primary condition: intent

While we’re at it, we can also make progress undermining the other key condition of geoengineering, namely intent, as readily as we might seek to defend it. This returns us to the opening question of why no one lambasts the impact of coal power plants in geoengineering terms. Similar to scale, where does intentionality really begin and end? Perhaps I’ve already convinced you that geoengineering isn’t a particularly useful term for anything, given the pervasiveness of its inconsistent use and the questions surrounding scale. But if we were to continue using the term geoengineering in some capacity, as, perhaps, a category or categories of intentional interventions defined perhaps by what they are not (namely, mitigation or carbon removal), we would still need to create clear definitions for the intentionality component.

The word “engineering” does imply intentionality, as it originates from the Latin ingenium (meaning “cleverness”) and ingeniare (”to contrive, devise”). These are inherently active, purposeful, deliberate terms. On its surface, this seems to provide one helpful distinction. Without it, the geoengineering term would suffer from yet another problem, namely an inability to exclude the large-scale, ongoing drivers of climate change, such as greenhouse gas emissions, aerosol-inducing emissions (as discussed above), and large-scale land use change, which reshapes the topography of Earth directly while also producing emissions and albedo changes.

Absent the intentionality clause, legislation banning spraying chemicals in the air would suddenly ban internal combustion vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities, to the unbridled joy of ardent climate activists. Were geoengineering not inherently defined as dealing with advertent endeavors, perhaps we’d make two buckets for it, one for “ameliorative” interventions to assuage climate change’s impacts and another for the ongoing, “aggravative” geoengineering that causes them in the first place. But then we’d be at risk of categorizing most all human endeavors as geoengineering, the way “Eukarya” is a classification for all animals.

I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that fossil fuel burning isn’t “geoengineering,” given that the climate change it drives seems to be an inadvertent consequence of the advertent activity. But how inadvertent are the consequences really? The activity itself (burning fossil fuels) is extremely intentional, attracting trillions of dollars to advance it. And if an engineering activity is intentional, shouldn’t all its predominant impacts be considered to some degree in its linguistic and taxonomical classification? Stafford Beer, a famous leader in operations research from the United Kingdom, offered a famous heuristic, stating that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Sure, one could say the primary purpose of burning fossil fuels isn’t geoengineering. But geoengineering is what the system of fossil fuel burning does. It’s one of the things it does best.

Similarly, one could further question how inadvertent the climate change driven by fossil fuel development is, especially when cast in relief against how well documented the scientific evidence linking greenhouse gasses to climate change has been for decades. Companies, countries, financiers, and policymakers have known that part of the engineering that goes into building offshore oil rigs, doing enhanced oil recovery, or then burning the oil also yields geoengineering. Yes, it’s the sale and demand for the oil that finances the development. But the negative externalities of its burning, insofar as they aren’t priced, do too by keeping financing costs lower. Does wilfully ignoring a consequence make it an inadvertent one? Can we say that power plant developers and operators release greenhouse gasses and other pollutants, like sulfur dioxide, that can alter Earth’s energy balance into the atmosphere unintentionally when they have other options (carbon capture and sequestration)? The intent may not be to alter Earth’s energy balance. But it’s part of the program.

New terms for new paradigms

Clearly, there are many problems with the term geoengineering, so many and of such semantic and ponderous philosophical qualities, that there’s little use trying to definitively solve them here. This creates a vacuum in need of filling, ideally with new terms to categorize specific groups of climate interventions. “Weather modification” feels appropriate for time-bound, more localized interventions, like cloud seeding. Solar radiation management, or radiation/albedo management more generally, feels appropriate for interventions such as stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, mixed cloud thinning, and others, though additional distinctions based on scope and scale, as well as likely other factors, will be warranted. Some interventions, like glacial restabilization efforts, may be difficult to group with others, though some could fit within larger groupings such as “catastrophic impact prevention” measures and approaches.

Finding the right words will take time, iteration, and, to an extent, may happen naturally, especially once we free ourselves from the hangover of geoengineering’s past usage and present inadequacies. Where there is need for a new umbrella term, perhaps “climate interventions” can suffice as a catch-all for things defined based on what they are not, namely, concerned with greenhouse gas emissions management, whether in reduction or removal, or efforts to adapt to climate change that don’t alter climate system dynamics or albedo (think seawalls and such). All these linguistic quandaries also pale in comparison to the scientific challenges, as well as the need to build social license for, fund research, and advance global governance frameworks for “interventions,” or whatever else we might call them, anyway.

Still, the overarching point remains: “geoengineering” is used inconsistently, broadly ineffective at creating cohesion, and artificially constraining, as it carries baggage and lends itself to fearmongering. The science required, governance challenges, and important moral hazard considerations inherent to the field of climate interventions require and deserve better.

1. Forester, P et. al., “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis.” Figure 7.7. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021. doi:10.1017/9781009157896.009.

Hi there,

Hope all those in the path of the big nor’easter are staying safe. I’m sitting this one out in California but am with you in spirit. We’ll have some more original analysis and opinion this week from myself and others; for now, here’s a brisk run-down of news from the week past.

ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• While the data center buildout hogs headlines, it’s worth noting that many developers have as-of-yet not specified where they’re purchasing gas turbines from and the indicated totals likely far outstrip near and medium-term total supply. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

Geothermal

• Google signed a 150MW geothermal Power Purchase Agreement with Ormat Technologies in Nevada, its second geothermal deal made via NV Energy's Clean Transition Tariff. The portfolio PPA will support Google's data center operations, with projects expected to come online between 2028 and 2030. Link. Link.

• The EIA published an overview showing a double-digit number of next-generation enhanced geothermal projects are now underway in the U.S. Unlike traditional geothermal, which relies on naturally occurring underground hot water reservoirs, enhanced projects use modern drilling techniques to harness heat from dry rocks. Fervo’s upcoming IPO is another bellwether of tailwinds for the space. Link.

Nuclear fission

• X-energy received a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to begin commercial production of HALEU reactor fuel, making its facility the first Category II site in operation in the U.S. and the first new commercial fuel producer licensed by the NRC in more than half a century. Link.

• The U.S. government helped airlift a nuclear reactor for the first time, as the Department of Defense transported a Valar Atomics 5MW microreactor via a C-17 from California to Utah for testing. The company is among several startups hoping to take a small modular reactor critical before or on July 4th this year. Link.

• Lockheed Martin is joining microreactor startup Radiant's $350 million-plus Series D round, amid growing Pentagon and DOE interest in nuclear tech for both civilian and defense power uses. Radiant plans to begin testing its 1MW Kaleidos unit this summer at Idaho National Laboratory and is targeting 2028 for initial customer deployments. Link.

Elsewhere in power and grid things

• Battery storage prices dropped more than 25% last year to a record low, according to a new BloombergNEF report. BNEF also projects another 25% price decline for BESS between now and 2035, and many past projections have proven too conservative. Link.

• Heron Power, based out of Scotts Valley, CA, closed a $140 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism Fund and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The company has already lined up 50GW of orders and plans to build a factory capable of producing 40GW of power-conversion gear annually. Link.

• DG Matrix, based out of Raleigh, NC, raised a $60 million Series A for its solid-state transformer systems that route and manage power for data centers. Engine Ventures led the round, with participation from ABB, Cerberus Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Clean Energy Ventures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and others. Link.

• According to the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) February 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook, Trump's "drill, baby, drill" isn't moving American oil extractors, whose output is set to contract this year amid a global glut keeping prices low. However, natural gas production is still expected to hit another record high in 2026 at 120.8 billion cubic feet per day. Much of that gas is flowing to LNG exports, which won’t dampen domestic prices. Link.

• SB Energy, a subsidiary of Japan's SoftBank, announced plans for a 9.2GW gas-fired power plant in Ohio, which would make it among the largest in the world. Details remain sparse, and whether the project actually comes to fruition is an open question given the scramble among developers to procure turbines (see above for more on that in the ‘story in a sentence and a chart’ section). Link.

Policy

• A coalition of environmental and public health groups filed suit against the EPA over its repeal of the "endangerment finding," which undergirds much of U.S. climate regulation by designating greenhouse gasses as pollutants. More on that this week. Meanwhile, the EPA is also planning to scrap restrictions on mercury and other toxic air pollutant emissions from coal-fired power plants. Numerous Democrat-led states are accelerating plans to replace federal regulations with their own. Link. Link.

• Colorado River negotiations collapsed as seven states and the federal government disbanded without a plan to supply the 40 million people who depend on the river's waters. Upper-basin and lower-basin states remain at an impasse over water usage cuts. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said his agency would step in to provide guidelines by October. Link.

Other fundraising 

• Utility Global, based out of Houston, TX, announced a $100 million first close for its Series D round. The company produces hydrogen and concentrated CO₂ streams from industrial off-gases to help industrial facilities reduce their overall environmental footprint. Ara Partners and APG Asset Management co-led. Link.

• LanzaJet, based out of Deerfield, IL, announced a first close of $47 million for a $135 million round with a $650 million pre-money valuation for its alcohol-to-jet fuel technology that converts waste-based ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel. IAG and Shell co-led, with participation from Groupe ADP and LanzaTech. Link.

• Rosy, a biochar-based, peat-free soil brand based out of New York, NY, closed a $5 million Series A led by London-based climate fund AP Ventures. The company's soil uses approximately 30% biochar, a carbon-negative material, and is available in Target stores nationwide. We had the founder and CEO on the podcast many moons ago. Congrats, Chad! Keep goin’. Link.

Last but not least

• Scientists found microplastics in the guts of Antarctic midges, the only insects found exclusively in Antarctica. Seems you could go to the ends of the Earth and not avoid the plastic problem. While only two plastic fragments were detected across 40 larvae studied, the finding is striking given how scarce plastic pollution is on the continent. Lab tests showed larvae exposed to high levels of plastic had smaller fat reserves, which could have consequences on their overall health and resilience. Link.

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Hey,

Hope you had a great weekend. Quick note: I’m curious what topics and questions on climate, energy, and sustainability are front of mind for you at present. As I plan programming in the coming weeks and months, feel free to respond to this email with ideas or direct questions, and I’ll do my best to get to them. Cheers!

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ONE STORY IN A SENTENCE AND A CHART

• In 2025, the average battery energy storage system (BESS) in ERCOT earned 84% less than in 2023 (a high-water mark year for BESS revenues in ERCOT), signaling that saturation of BESS on grids can hamper profitability. Link.

NEWS, DATA, AND HEADLINES

• China's carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1% in the last three months of 2025, amounting to a 0.3% drop for the full year, according to new analysis from Carbon Brief. Emissions in China have now been flat or falling for close to two years, predominantly thanks to skyrocketing solar installations and EV penetration in the light-duty vehicle market. Per Wood Mackenzie, China's coal-fired power generation also decreased 1.9% last year, even as power demand surged 5% overall. Link. Link.

• Solar power, EVs, and other clean-energy technologies also drove more than a third of the growth in China's economy in 2025 and more than 90% of the rise in investment. Link.

Nuclear (fission and fusion)

• China made progress on multiple nuclear construction projects, with containment domes installed on both the Lianjiang NPP unit 1 and Xudabao NPP unit 1 (coincidentally, the projects are independent of one another), while the bottom containment part of Bailong NPP unit 1 was put in place. Lianjiang-1 is in the 29th month of construction, Xudabao-1 is in the 28th month, and Bailong-1 is in the 2nd month. Mind you, these are large reactors, not the SMRs that investors are pouring so much faith and capital into domestically. Link.

• Unit 1 of the Taipingling nuclear power station in China's Guangdong also reached criticality this week, seven years after construction began on the gigawatt-sized Hualong One reactor. The debut atom-splitting means the newest reactor is months, if not weeks, from entering commercial operation. Link.

• Helion, based out of Washington, announced that its Polaris prototype has set new fusion industry benchmarks, becoming the first privately developed fusion energy machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium fusion and to achieve plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius. Link.

• Inertia, based out of California, announced a $450 million fundraising round to commercialize its inertial-confinement-based fusion approach for utility-scale power production (most competitors focus on magnetic confinement). Bessemer Ventures led. Link.

• Japanese utility Tokyo Electric Power Co. restarted the No. 6 reactor at its Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, the world's biggest nuclear power plant, for the second time, after an issue last month delayed the process. The unit's power output will be gradually increased, with a goal of entering commercial operations on March 18. Link.

• Alva Energy, based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched from stealth with $33 million in funding and a proposal to squeeze more capacity out of the existing nuclear fleet by retrofitting pressurized-water reactors. The round was led by Playground Global. The startup plans to boost capacity by building new steam turbines and electricity generators adjacent to existing facilities and upgrading steam generators during scheduled maintenance to help make existing plants produce 20-30% more steam. Link.

• Valar Atomics loaded the core of its Ward 250 small modular reactor onto a U.S. Air Force plane at March Air Reserve Base, completing an airlift to Utah's San Rafael Energy Research Center for testing. Backed by the Departments of Energy and Defense, the company’s proof-of-concept reactor aims to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026. Link.

EVs

• FAW Group, one of China's largest automakers with joint ventures with Volkswagen and Toyota, has integrated a new lithium-manganese semi-solid-state battery in a production vehicle. The 142-kilowatt-hour semi-solid-state battery has an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram at the cell level, double that of today's lithium-ion batteries, resulting in a manufacturer-estimated range of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). Link.

• BYD has achieved technical progress on its sulfide solid-state battery, reporting improvements in cycle life and fast-charging performance, with small-batch production expected in 2027. In addition to sulfide solid-state batteries, BYD is advancing its third-generation sodium-ion platform that reportedly supports up to 10,000 charge cycles. Link.

• 10 EV battery factories in North America are being retooled to produce batteries for grid storage instead. As US EV sales slow, in part due to the elimination of federal tax credits, demand for residential and utility-scale batteries is booming. Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors are among the manufacturers making the change. Link.

• The Federal Highway Administration unveiled a controversial proposal raising the domestic content requirement for federally funded EV chargers from 55% to as high as 100%. Under the proposal, all components of EV chargers purchased or installed with FHWA-administered funds would need to be manufactured and assembled in the U.S. to meet the new Buy America standards. Critics argue that no current EV charger manufacturers can meet a 100% domestic content threshold today, warning that these overly strict requirements will derail the expansion of EV charging infrastructure. Link.

• BYD sued the United States government over the 100% tariff on Chinese EVs that serves as an effective ban on Beijing's booming auto exports. Four U.S.-based subsidiaries of the world's largest EV manufacturer also filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade challenging the legality of the Trump administration's trade levies. Link. Link.

• California's clean-truck incentive programme has reserved around $165 million for the Tesla Semi, even though the electric truck has yet to enter production. The next-largest grant recipient is New Flyer, a Canadian bus manufacturer, which is in line to receive ~$68 million. Link.

• Carmakers have registered around $55 billion in write-downs over the past year after the industry overestimated the pace of the energy transition, faced a reluctant US administration, and saw some companies struggle to keep up with new entrants from China. Link.

Policy

• President Trump announced that he is repealing the Environmental Protection Agency's scientific determination that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health and the natural world, which will hamper the EPA's ability to legislate and limit greenhouse gas and other pollution from cars, trucks, power plants, and other industrial facilities. The move sets up a Supreme Court battle over the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA. Link.

• The newly introduced Hawley-Blumenthal bill would ban new grid-connected data centers, requiring that any new data center "derives all of its energy from a captive power plant, on-site power generation, or some other source separate from, and not deriving power from, the electric grid." Unlikely it passes, but it’s a sign of the times. Link.

• Chile's environmental regulator formally cancelled the proposed $10 billion, 3,000-hectare INNA green hydrogen and ammonia production facility after astronomers warned that its proximity to some of the world's most powerful telescopes would have made observation in the area nearly impossible. The area is home to the “Very Large Telescope” and will be the future home of the “Extremely Large Telescope,” which is under construction (yes, those are their real names and I love them). Link.

Power grids

• Base Power announced a new partnership with El Paso Electric, launching a pilot program to use home battery systems to strengthen the grid during periods of high demand. This program aims to create a more scalable model for utilities to add 24/7 dispatchable, demand-side capacity to the grid on significantly shorter timelines than traditional utility-scale infrastructure buildout. Link.

• Anthropic announced that it will cover consumer electricity price increases tied to its expanding data centers, fund 100% of required grid upgrades, and invest in new power generation. How they’ll disambiguate what price increases they’re responsible for versus which are driven by other factors, well, good luck to em’. Link.

• Fervo has drilled its highest-temperature well yet, tapping into a resource with temperatures above 555 degrees Fahrenheit at an approximate depth of 11,200 feet. An independent assessment found that the Project Blanford site in Millard County, Utah, has multiple gigawatts of heat that could be harnessed. Link.

• Danish energy giant Ørsted reported $500 million in profits for 2025, despite a loss of $10 million because of the work stoppage on Revolution Wind ordered by the Trump administration in December, a welcome reprieve from a slew of dismal prior years. Link.

• Battery and solar construction contractor SOLV Energy, based out of California, fetched a nearly $6 billion valuation as it debuted on the stock market. Link.

• NineDot Energy, based out of Brooklyn, raised $431 million in debt financing to build batteries in New York City. It plans to develop 28 battery projects totaling 494 megawatt-hours of energy storage capacity over the next two years. Link.

• Neara, based out of Sydney, a 10-year-old startup that provides digital models of power networks for utilities to plan and manage electricity grids, reportedly raised a $63.8 million Series D round at a $780 million valuation. The deal was led by TCV, with Partners Group, EQT, Square Peg Capital, and Skip Capital also participating. Link.

Other

• Chinese scientists discovered natural hydrogen sealed in microscopic inclusions near Tibet. This is the first such discovery in China (or in Tibet, depending on your political persuasions). Link.

• Thyssenkrupp Nucera's sales of electrolyzers for green hydrogen projects halved in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period last year. China's rise as the world's preeminent manufacturer of electrolyzers poses significant competitive pressure. Link.

• Hades, based out of Munich, raised €17.8 million (~$21.2 million) in a round co-led by HV Capital and Headline to develop ultra-deep drilling technology to extract critical minerals and geothermal energy from deep rock formations. Link.

• The nonprofit research group CarbonPlan launched a free app called Open Climate Risk that assesses wildfire risk for every building in the United States. You can enter an address to view a wildfire risk score, on a scale of zero to 10, along with an explanation of how it was calculated. The underlying methodology, data, and code are all public. Connecticut's Department of Insurance also launched a website that displays extensive information on the climate risk of every property in the state, where flood insurance in particular can be prominent. The details include each property's history of flood damage and other events predicted to worsen as the planet warms. Link. Link.

• Here’s a fun and optimistic one to end on (not that there wasn’t some positive stuff above): Kazakhstan's Tiger Reintroduction Program achieved record forest restoration results in 2025, planting over 37,000 seedlings and cuttings across nearly 10 hectares in the Ili River Delta and Southern Balkhash region. The tugai forest restoration, led by Kazakhstan's Committee of Forestry and Wildlife, with support from WWF and UNDP, aims to rebuild ecosystems capable of sustaining wildlife and prepare the land for the eventual return of tigers. Link.

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Go with grace,

— Nick