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The media can’t seem to explain the collapse in China’s domestic solar installations.

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  June 14, 2026   CORTLANDT — A massive nuclear power plant sitting idle on the eastern bank of the Hudson River could be repowered, helping alleviate New York’s high energy costs and air pollution levels, both worsened by surging fossil fuel use.    But the stigma of reopening a controversial power source that environmentalists and other advocacy organizations fought for years to shut down has left the plant out of the ongoing discussions about reducing New York’s carbon emissions.   Gov. Kathy Hochul does not support reviving the plant, which closed four months before she ascended to the governor’s office, although she has said it was shuttered “without having a plan B in place .” Instead, the governor wants to build new reactors in the far reaches of upstate New York, far from New York City, where the power is needed most.   The two reactors at Indian Point are surrounded by more than four feet of reinforced concrete . Indian Point provided New York Cit...
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New York sues over the Trump administration’s deal to end offshore wind project

  June 2, 2026    New York’s attorney general sued the Trump administration Tuesday over one of its deals to end an offshore wind project . Under a deal made public in March, French company TotalEnergies is getting $1 billion — essentially a refund of its leases for offshore wind projects off New York and North Carolina — if it invests the money in fossil fuel projects instead. State attorneys general from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont joined New York in challenging the cancellation of the lease off New York, the larger of the two projects and the bulk of the payout. They say it will harm their states’ economies, energy grids and climate goals. “This administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement ...
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Federal court tosses out Trump’s strict limits on solar and wind tax credits

  Last August, the Internal Revenue Service issued strict new rules for solar and wind developers hoping to tap the federal tax credits known as 45Y, for the production of carbon-free electricity, and 48E, for investment in green generating assets. For years, the U.S. government had required companies to invest 5% of the total cost of the project by a certain deadline to qualify for the rebates. But last summer, the Trump administration eliminated the 5% threshold and instead mandated that projects over 1.5 megawatts in capacity show evidence that physical construction has begun to be eligible for the writeoffs. In all, the new rules “could have been so much worse,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote at the time. But requiring construction to start narrowed the scope of how many turbines and panels could be built before the two tax credits are phased out this July 4. With less than a month to go before the credits go away, a federal court has intervened to restore the original 5% ru...
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The Iron Law Of Power Density, Revisited

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  Note: You can’t understand energy and power systems if you don’t understand power density. As I explained in the article below, published on August 20, 2023, here on Substack , power density is the most important and least understood metric in physics. I’m reposting it because it is just as relevant today as it was in 2023. It’s also heartening to see that the Trump Administration has adopted power density as a key metric for determining its approach to energy policy. Last summer, Interior Secretary Doug Burghum issued an order that underscored the importance of density and noted that an offshore wind project requires 5,500 times more area to produce the same amount of electricity as a modern nuclear plant . Before going further, I must give credit where credit is due. Jesse Ausubel’s landmark 2007 essay, “ Renewable and Nuclear Heresies ,” changed the course of my career. In the very first sentence of the abstract, Ausubel boldly declares, “Renewables are not green.” His essay...
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Global Warming or Just Getting Old?

  A hot day in Rome.     The World Health Organization is at it again. A top commission—stacked with a former European Union climate commissioner, a former prime minister of Iceland, other former ministers and environmental campaigners—has recommended that the health body declare climate change a global health emergency. The commission’s headline evidence is a Lancet study showing heat deaths in Europe are rapidly rising, reaching 63,000 a year. This study shows that European heat-death risk has risen 82% since 1990. But the study and the commission report both ignore a crucial factor : Heat mortality risk rises sharply with age, and Europe has aged dramatically. Since 1990, the share of Europeans over 70 has increased by 78%. Aging alone explains virtually all the observed increase in heat deaths. Any honest analysis of mortality in a rapidly aging society uses age-standardized death rates, which are comparable over time because they control for demographic change. Th...
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The Insane Climate Bureaucracy That Never Was

  The SEC’s Atkins deserves praise for strangling the climate disclosure rule in its cradle.   On Friday, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins made one of the most important announcements in the history of modern financial regulation. His news was not a new regulation or a billion-dollar fine for some white-collar miscreant. In a refreshing move that will hopefully inspire future policymaking , Atkins announced the elimination of a huge bureaucratic burden: the agency’s climate disclosure rule . Critics of the rule cheered . The rule would have imposed an annual reporting mandate on every public company in the U.S. related to their energy use and climate-change-related policies . This would have been a departure from the SEC’s traditional “ principles-based ” approach to disclosure, which allows companies to prioritize the information they think will be most useful to investors. This emphasis on one specific topic — especially coming during the Bid...
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