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The weekend brought a grave new energy concern over the conflict’s kinetic warfare. On Sunday, the United Arab Emirates condemned a drone strike it referred to as a “treacherous terrorist attack” that caused a fire near Abu Dhabi’s Barakah nuclear station. The UAE’s top English-language newspaper, The National, noted that the government’s official statement did not blame Iran explicitly. The attack came just a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency raised the alarm over drone strikes near nuclear plants after a swarm of more than 160 drones hovered near key stations in Ukraine last week.
We are apparently now entering the megamerger phase of the new electricity supercycle. On Friday, the Financial Times broke news that NextEra Energy is in talks with rival Dominion Energy for a tie-up that would create a more than $400 billion utility behemoth in one of the biggest deals of all time. The merger talks, which The Wall Street Journal confirmed, could be announced as early as this week. The combined company would reach from Dominion’s homebase of Virginia, where the northern half of the state is serving as what the FT called “the heartland of U.S. digital infrastructure serving the AI boom,” down to NextEra’s home-state of Florida, where the subsidiary Florida Power & Light serves roughly 6 million customers. While Dominion dominates data centers in Northern Virginia, NextEra last year partnered with Google to build more power plants and even reopen the Duane Arnold nuclear station in Iowa.
Pre-construction Thacker Pass.Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Trump digs lithium. In fact, he’s such a fan of Lithium Americas’ plan to build North America’s largest lithium mine on federal land in Nevada that he renegotiated a Biden-era deal to finance construction of the Thacker Pass project to secure a 5% equity stake in the publicly-traded developer. Yet the White House’s macroeconomic policies are pinching the nation’s lithium champion. During its first-quarter earnings call with investors last week, Lithium Americas cautioned that the Trump administration’s steel tariffs, coupled with inflation from disrupted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, could add between $80 million and $120 million to construction costs at Thacker Pass. Most of the impact, Mining.com noted, is expected this year. Once mining begins, the project could spur new discussion of a strategic lithium reserve, the case for which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin articulated here.
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The Department of Energy has selected Travis Kavulla, an energy industry veteran, as the 17th chief executive and administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration, NewsData reported. Founded under then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, the federal agency is a holdover from the New Deal era before utilities had built out electrical networks in rural parts of the U.S. Unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority — which functions as a standalone utility that owns and sells power, though it’s wholly owned by the federal government and its board of directors is appointed by the White House — the BPA, as it’s known, is a power marketing agency that sells electricity from hydroelectric dams owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. Kavulla currently serves as the head of policy for Base Power, the startup building a network of distributed batteries to back up the grid. He previously worked as the regulatory chief at the utility NRG Energy, and as a state utility commissioner in his home state of Montana. NewsData, a trade publication focused on Western energy markets, cautioned that the Energy Department may hold off on announcing the appointment for “the next few days or weeks” as sources warned that “it might be delayed while the department conducts a background check, or to allow the new undersecretary of energy, Kyle Haustveit, to be confirmed.”
Reached Sunday night via LinkedIn message, Kavulla politely declined to comment on whether he was appointed to lead the BPA.
Offshore wind may be spinning in reverse in the U.S. as the Trump administration attempts to, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman put it, “murder” an industry through death by a thousand cuts. But elsewhere in the world, offshore wind is booming. Just look at Azerbaijan. Despite its vast reserves of natural gas, the nation on the Caspian Sea is looking into building its first offshore turbines. On Friday, offshoreWIND.biz reported that the Azerbaijan Green Energy Company, owned by the Baku-based industrial giant Nobel Energy, had commissioned a Spanish company to design a floating LiDAR-equipped buoy for the country’s first turbines in the Caspian. The debut project, backed by the Azeri government, would start with 200 megawatts of offshore wind and eventually triple in size.
Before the wealthy software entrepreneur Greg Gianforte ran to be governor of Montana, he donated millions of dollars to a Christian-themed museum that claims humans walked alongside dinosaurs and the Earth is just 6,000 years old. After winning the state’s top job, the Republican set about revoking virtually all policies related to climate change, including banning the projected effects of warming from state agencies’ risk forecasts. With drought withering the state, however, Gianforte has turned to perhaps the most ancient policy approach humanities leaders have called upon to fix devastating weather patterns: Pray. On Sunday, Gianforte declared an official day of prayer for rain. “Prayer is the most powerful tool we have,” he wrote in a post on X. “I ask all who are faithful to come to God with thanks and pray.”
Last month, Stardust put out the first ethical guidelines to which it plans to hold itself. Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer broke the news in October that the company was emerging from stealth with $60 million in funding to support its commercialization. “The idea that certain interventions could reduce the chance of really bad climate outcomes, like collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, isn’t new. The Stardust patents show that these ideas are now moving from the realm of the theoretical to the realm of the possible,” Hannah Safford, a climate expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said in a statement Thursday. “It’s time to take climate intervention strategies more seriously, and rigorously evaluate the risks of these strategies against the risks of failing to intervene.”
Cleveland, Ohio’s second-largest city, has rejected a permit application for a $1.6 data center on a 35-acre lot in the Slavic Village neighborhood. The city, the Cleveland Signal reported, “offered no details about why it was rejecting it.” In a statement, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said he held “serious concerns about hyperscale, standalone data centers being placed in residential neighborhoods.” The Democrat said he was echoing voters’ concerns about the computer farms.
Roughly 25 data centers were canceled in the first quarter of this year due to mounting local opposition, Rob reported in an exclusive earlier this month. Polling from Heatmap Pro, meanwhile, shows that public support for data centers has nosedived from even its paltry position last fall.
A man cooks with firewood during a blackout in Havana this week.Yamil LAGE / AFP via Getty Images
The Cuban government announced that it has run out of diesel and fuel oil as the Caribbean nation enters its fifth month without a large shipment of crude oil. “We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy said Wednesday in remarks carried on state-run broadcasters as protests gathered in Havana. “We have no reserves.” On Thursday, the Financial Times reported, Cuba’s national grid operator UNE said that much of the island’s eastern provinces were still without power after the latest blackouts. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January threatening tariffs on any country shipping fuel to Cuba. “The only thing we have is gas from our own wells, whose production has increased, and domestic crude oil, whose production is also rising,” de la O Levy said. “The situation is very tense.” In the country’s state-controlled newspaper Gramna, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused the U.S. of implementing a “genocidal energy blockade.” Still, he said, the U.S. has “had to acknowledge that, despite the brutal measures of economic and energy strangulation decreed by the U.S., Cuba remains standing; it is not a failed state.” As a result, the communist leader continued, Washington is “thereby admitting that the crisis gripping us is the result of the severe economic war they are waging against us and the energy persecution.”
Under the leftist regime of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela once served as Cuba’s main supplier of oil. Mexico’s left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum has faced heavy U.S. pressure against sending shipments to the island. Just one large oil tanker, the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, has brought crude oil to Cuba since December, The Guardian reported. “We are back in the stone age,” independent journalist Yoani Sanchez said in a broadcast Thursday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Texas Republican John Cornyn and Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman introduced a Senate bill Thursday to block future presidential administrations from halting approvals of new liquified natural gas projects. Politico described the LNG Export Security Act as “a bipartisan rebuke of former President Joe Biden’s move in 2024 to free new export permits for natural gas” while the economic and environmental effects of selling more fuel overseas were being studied. A federal judge later halted the pause, but the pause nevertheless enraged Republicans, who later moved to crush the solar and wind sectors.
The clean energy project finance startup Crux has received a $500 million debt facility from Nuveen Energy Infrastructure Credit as part of the company’s expansion. While New York-based Crux was initially built to facilitate the transfer of lucrative green tax credits, the financing from insurer TIAA’s investment manager will “help expand its role as a general partner for clean energy and manufacturing investments,” Bloomberg reported.
In the midst of congressional negotiations last year in the fate of the clean energy tax credits, Crux CEO Alfred Johnson described the company’s expansive vision to Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. “All parts of the capital stack are opaque, illiquid, bespoke and manual. These are private transactions that require a ton of documentation, models, advisory lawyers. But it doesn't have to be as bad as it is.”
Once stagnant, the nuclear industry in North America is seeing a real revival. The region now has 90 projects under development across the continent, with eight already breaking ground, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute’s latest state of the industry report.