A tropical storm brewing in the Caribbean is likely to strengthen into a named storm in the coming days, bringing deadly flooding and powerful winds| Tropical storm Fengshen has killed at least eight in the Philippines as it barrels toward Vietnam and Laos | In Australia, record heat in the eastern Outback hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Energy Department kills $700 million in battery factory funding
Late last month, the Department of Energy clawed back $7.5 billion from 321 separate grants to clean energy projects. A week later, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo extensively reported, a list that included three times as many grants, including those that had already been canceled, began circulating. When the agency declined to confirm that the second list as real, speculation mounted that it was either an old document that the Trump administration was using as a threat for political leverage in ongoing negotiations over the government shutdown, or that the White House was staying mum to avoid conflicts over cuts in red districts. Recent events, however, seem to confirm that the longer kill list is precisely what it appears to be. On Monday, the Energy Department told E&E News that it had canceled $700 million in battery manufacturing projects, the first grants off the second list the agency confirmed were on the chopping block. The awards had gone to companies including Ascend Elements, American Battery Technology Co., Anovion, and ICL Specialty Products, as well as the glass manufacturer LuxWall.
Just because the U.S. is pulling back support for the production of batteries doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of purchasers. On Monday, BloombergNEF estimated that global energy storage additions are set to reach 92 gigawatts this year, up 23% from last year, according to the consultancy’s market forecast for the second half of 2025. Utility-scale projects made up 84% of the annual growth, and the U.S. market kept expanding despite federal funding cuts. BloombergNEF also said U.S. buyers were looking for more domestic manufacturers to weather rising tariffs, which might be tricky given recent trends in the space.
2. Interior Department slashes staff in charge of energy permitting
Despite the Trump administration’s promises to speed up permitting for energy projects, the Department of the Interior plans to fire more than 200 workers in state offices that manage federal licensing in key regions for fossil fuel, geothermal, and mining development. In a court filing Monday, the agency said it would cut as much as 12% of the staff at its Bureau of Land Management office in Utah, 9% in the California outpost, and 6% in Colorado. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s regional office for the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, was set to lose 5% of its employees. And those are just the local offices I found in the 35-page document that explicitly handled energy permitting. The cuts are part of a plan to “imminently” axe at least 2,000 jobs from the Interior Department overall, including — as NOTUS first reported — hundreds of National Park Service employees.
The administration’s tightened grip over the BLM office in Utah has already caused some headaches for next-generation geothermal companies, according to industry sources I spoke to earlier this year, as local officials who once had the autonomy to greenlight incremental permits for drilling exploration suddenly needed to report back to political officials in Washington. The Interior Department ultimately eased the issue, but the example illustrates what’s at stake when a state office that’s tasked with doing more as new projects proliferate has fewer people and resources.
3. Despite chaotic immigration raid, Hyundai is still betting on the U.S.
A month after federal officers raided Hyundai Motor Group’s $26 billion factory in Ellabell, Georgia, shackling more than 300 South Korean workers the Trump administration accused of violating visa rules, the carmaker remains focused on expanding its U.S. production. Facing growing competition from Chinese cars in other markets, the Korean auto giant still sees the U.S. as its best market for growth, The New York Times reported Monday. “My top three priorities are U-S-A,” José Muñoz, chief executive of Hyundai Motor Company, the car-making subsidiary, said at the company’s annual investor gathering, reportedly pausing for effect after each letter. “If we do well here, it’s very good for Korea. It’s very good for the company.”
The chance to reap the fruits of what Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman called Hyundai’s “incredible timing” may be too tempting to pass up, even as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid sparked a diplomatic crisis involving South Korea’s foreign minister. The company spent three years working on the 2,900-acre campus near Savannah, and sought to make a public statement about its support for President Donald Trump’s re-industrialization plans by naming the facility Metaplant America. With tariffs now coming into force, Andrew argued, Hyundai is better positioned than most to supply the domestic market.
4. Palisades nuclear plant takes another big step toward restarting
The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan received fresh nuclear fuel on Monday in what the facility’s owner called “a major milestone on the path to restarting” a permanently shuttered atomic station for the first time in the U.S. As I reported in this newsletter at the time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Holtec International the green light to restart the facility in July, setting a new precedent for reauthorizing operations at a plant that was already slated for decommissioning. The project faced some local opposition from not-in-my-backyard types backed by the anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear. But the Trump administration stood behind the project. The $1.5 billion loan granted by the Biden-era Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office to Holtec to fund the reopening was the only financing deal the agency maintained without any interruption through the change in leadership.
Aside from the 68 fuel assemblies arriving, Holtec said “major equipment restoration work is progressing,” including the reassembly of the main turbine generator and the chemical cleaning of the steam generators. Once complete, the work will remake Holtec — until now primarily a manufacturer of casks to store nuclear waste and a decommissioning company — into an operator of an active power plant. In a press release, Holtec CEO Kris Singh called the “esprit de corps of our tirelessly toiling worker force” a “testament to the national consensus and our collective will to harness nuclear energy to meet the galloping demand for power in our country.”
5. World’s top private carbon registry expands into superpollutants
Isometric bills itself as the world’s leading carbon registry, providing what it calls “scientifically rigorous carbon removal credits so companies can reliably meet their climate commitments.” Now the British company is expanding its operations to cover two climate superpollutants: landfill methane and hydrofluorocarbons. The startup plans to develop protocols for eliminating emissions of both superheating gases with its in-house science team and network of more than 300 outside researchers. Among its partners will be Recoolit, a company that collects and destroys refrigerants and previously partnered with Google to destroy the carbon dioxide equivalent of 250,000 metric tons of superpollutants. Another is Cool Effect, a California-based nonprofit that helps collect landfill gas and also worked with Google earlier this year to install methane destruction equipment at a landfill in Cuiabá, Brazil. “Superpollutants are responsible for nearly half of global warming,” Eamon Jubbawy, Isometric’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Isometric is entering this market to bring the scientific rigour needed to help this crucial climate solution scale, using the same transparent approach that is building the trust needed to scale the carbon removal market.”
THE KICKER
Call the paradox of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Overall, it’s a disaster. But the mass melting is fueling the engine of Arctic food chains: algae. A new study led by the University of Copenhagen suggests there will be more food for future marine life than previously thought. That will also improve the ocean’s carbon dioxide uptake, which the researchers said was “likely good news” for the climate. “But biological systems are very complex, so it is hard to make firm predictions, because other mechanisms may pull in the opposite direction,” Lasse Riemann, professor at the Department of Biology and senior author of the study, said in a press release. “We do not yet know whether the net effect will be beneficial for the climate.”
