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Former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger will become Virginia’s new governor after a decisive win this week — and after a campaign that centered around rising power prices in the data-center capital of the world.
With Spanberger’s win, Democrats now control all branches of the state government. Virginia Democrats added more than a dozen seats to their majority in the House of Delegates on Tuesday; the Democrat-controlled Senate didn’t face an election.
That outcome may be a game-changer when it comes to preserving and enforcing the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Passed in 2020, the law requires top utilities Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to achieve 100% renewable power production in the coming decades. Virginia’s Republican delegates and current Gov. Glenn Youngkin have blamed the legislation for rising power prices and pushed to repeal it, while state regulators have approved Dominion’s plans to build a raft of new gas plants in spite of the law.
The Clean Economy Act remains divisive even among Virginia Democrats. Spanberger has said that she’s committed to its long-term goals and to scaling up clean energy generation. But Democratic House Speaker Don Scott was reluctant to get into details about its future in a press conference this week, and didn’t deny the possibility of weakening its fossil-fuel restrictions, Inside Climate News reports.
The trifecta could also pave the way for Virginia to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a collaborative of East Coast states that requires power generators to meet a set cap on carbon emissions or buy allowances to exceed it. States reinvest those proceeds into emissions-reducing projects and clean energy. Youngkin pulled Virginia out of the partnership two years ago, but Spanberger has promised to rejoin.
But there’s one piece of the clean-energy landscape where Spanberger’s win could be more problem than solution. Dominion is currently building what will be the country’s largest offshore wind farm, with support from Youngkin. That Republican backing could be why the Trump administration hasn’t targeted the Dominion array, while at the same time dealing blow after blow to offshore wind projects in blue states.
Climate action wins in elections big and small
It wasn’t just Virginia: Democrats swept statewide races across the country this week. In New Jersey, U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill campaigned on a promise to rein in rising power prices, and, in contrast to her Republican opponent, showed support for offshore wind. Still, the state has no operational or under-construction offshore wind projects, and Sherrill will have limited power to counteract the Trump administration’s anti-wind policies, Canary Media’s Clare Fieseler reports.
In Georgia, Democrats beat Republican incumbents in two elections widely seen as referendums on rising utility bills. Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson will now take seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, which oversees for-profit utilities and their requests to raise rates. And in New York City, Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani — who tied climate action into his affordability-focused campaign — won the mayoral race.
Several other smaller races also have energy implications. Here are the results of a few:
Clean energy carries on
As the world prepares to meet in Brazil next week for the COP30 climate conference (sans the Trump administration), new reports show that clean-energy progress is still happening in defiance of White House opposition.
BloombergNEF took a look at the impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rolled back federal incentives for clean energy. The legislation will slow solar, wind, and storage deployment over the next few years, BloombergNEF predicts, but growing power demand will ultimately lead renewables to rebound after 2028.
And while the world remains far off track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it’s still making progress. A United Nations report projects the impact of many countries’ new, bolstered emissions-reduction commitments, and finds they’ll limit warming to around 2.5°C this century if fully implemented. It’s not ideal, but it’s still a win from previous reports that forecast as much as 5°C of warming through 2100.
The coast is (somewhat) clear: The U.S. Interior Department removes the Atlantic coast and a portion of the Gulf Coast around Florida from Trump’s plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling, after opposition from local Republicans. (Politico)
Take another look: A federal court ruling is forcing FEMA to fully study whether installing distributed solar and batteries makes more sense than hardening Puerto Rico’s existing grid and repairing fossil-fuel plants in the wake of recent hurricanes. (Canary Media)
Fixer-uppers: The Trump administration announces a $100 million program for operators to refurbish aging coal plants and retrofit facilities to run on natural gas. (E&E News)
Diving deep for clean heat: A 75-year-old gas-powered steam-heating network in Boston and Cambridge is transitioning to electric boilers and heat pumps that draw thermal energy from the Charles River, even in winter. (Canary Media)
Lingering shutdown impacts: The U.S. Senate will vote today on a framework to reopen the government, but funds that help low-income families pay for heating will likely still be delayed for several weeks even if the shutdown ends. (E&E News, E&E News)
Energy Star saved? EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is quietly reconsidering plans to end the Energy Star program, and the agency has renewed contracts with the firm that administers it. (New York Times)
Coal-country dilemma: Navajo Nation citizens and officials debate the future of the coal industry in the Southwest, weighing the economic benefits against the environmental and human health impacts. (New York Times)
Hyundai Motor Group says its plan to invest $6 billion in a low-carbon steel plant in Louisiana “remains unchanged,” despite the Trump administration’s cuts to tax credits for the green hydrogen needed to produce clean iron and a recent immigration raid on a factory the automaker is building in Georgia.
In a statement last week to NPR’s Gulf States Newsroom, Hyundai said the company’s investment “is centered on creating thousands of high-quality American jobs.” The South Korean car manufacturer did not respond to Canary Media’s request for comment.
The Louisiana facility, set to come online in 2029, has emerged as the United States’ leading green-steel initiative.
“This is going to be the flagship project when it comes to green steel,” said Matthew Groch, senior director of decarbonization at the environmental group Mighty Earth.
Days before President Donald Trump returned to office in January, Swedish steel company SSAB quietly pulled out of talks with the Department of Energy for a $500 million grant to support a green-steel project in Mississippi. In June, Cleveland-Cliffs backed away from its plans to replace the blast furnaces at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology, also with $500 million in financing from the federal government.
Between those two decisions, however, Hyundai bucked the trend, announcing plans in March for its Louisiana steel plant.
Designed to use direct reduced iron, a cleaner method of making iron that relies on natural gas or hydrogen instead of the coal that fuels a blast furnace, the Hyundai facility is slated to produce 2.7 million metric tons of steel each year, including“low-carbon steel sheets using the abundant supply of steel scrap in the U.S.”
Hyundai’s initial press release did not explicitly mention direct reduced iron or hydrogen. But a Korean newspaper article noted at the time that the project would include direct reduced iron, and the 3.6 million tons of iron ore the Louisiana government said the plant would import each year will require some kind of processing. Since then, the company has clarified its plans at state regulatory hearings, Groch said.
At a Louisiana Clean Hydrogen Task Force meeting in June, Hyundai laid out its vision for bringing the plant online in about four years using what’s called blue hydrogen, a version of the fuel made with natural gas and equipped with carbon-capture technology to prevent the emissions from entering the atmosphere. But by 2034, Groch said, Hyundai intends to start producing green hydrogen — made with renewable energy — at the facility to power the process.
A clean industrial plant would likely be welcomed in Ascension Parish, roughly an hour west of New Orleans in the heart of the Bayou State’s so-called Cancer Alley. A new survey, shared with Canary Media, shows 60% of residents in the area favor investment in green hydrogen for steelmaking. The poll, commissioned by the Sierra Club’s Delta Chapter and conducted by JMC Analytics, “makes clear that steel manufacturing at this scale presents a unique set of opportunities for Louisianans,” said Angelle Bradford Rosenberg, the chair of the Sierra Club affiliate’s board.
“Residents are aware that the technology exists to make steel that is clean and has low impact on communities — they want Hyundai to make good on their promises,” Bradford Rosenberg said in a statement. “This poll shows that communities want industry to prioritize clean energy, and provide steel using renewable energy.”
For much of the past decade, Hyundai has focused on growing its presence in the U.S. market, particularly as competition from cheap Chinese electric vehicles mounts in Asia and Europe. The steel plant is part of a broader $26 billion investment that includes the EV-battery plant in Georgia where Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and shackled hundreds of South Korean workers in a high-profile raid in September.
Signs are emerging of Hyundai’s broader ambitions. First, there’s the location of the plant in Ascension Parish. That industrial corridor hosts the Louisiana stretch of an ammonia pipeline system that extends from the Gulf state all the way north to Indiana. Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to ship because the world’s smallest molecule is prone to dangerous leaking. Transformed into ammonia, however, hydrogen becomes a liquid that can be easily transported via a pipeline.
“They could eventually be selling green hydrogen as far as Indiana,” Groch said of Hyundai. “That’s why they’re building it there.”
Then, there’s the potential to supply rivals.
Last September, General Motors inked a partnership with Hyundai to work together on new car models and establish a shared supply chain that circumvents China. In June, news broke that GM abandoned the Chinese steel company supplying its Korean factories in favor of a new deal with Hyundai.
In August, however, GM signed an unusual three-year deal to buy steel for its American plants from Cleveland-Cliffs. Typically, such deals are structured to last a year. But the expiration date of this one coincides with when Hyundai expects to start selling steel made in Louisiana in the U.S.
“Hyundai has played this incredibly well,” Groch said.
This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for its newsletter here.
New York is violating its climate law — and doesn’t get a pass because implementing the law is “complicated,” a judge found Friday.
The 2019 law, which remains one of the most ambitious in the country, gave the state Department of Environmental Conservation until the start of 2024 to issue regulations that would “ensure” New York meets its binding greenhouse gas emissions targets. More than a year and half later, it has not — a fact that Ulster County Supreme Court Judge Julian Schreibman said was “undisputed” in the case.
Schreibman gave the DEC until Feb. 6 to issue regulations that comply with the law, called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
“While DEC notes that it has taken other, commendable regulatory steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it candidly concedes that the impact of those regulations would fall far short” of the targets set out in the law, which requires the state cut emissions 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and 85% by 2050, Schreibman wrote.
Climate groups brought the case in March after Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) slammed the brakes on what was expected to be her signature policy to implement the climate law: an emissions-pricing program known as cap-and-invest. Internal emails reported by Politico show that the DEC and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority had completed draft cap-and-invest rules at the beginning of this year, before Hochul’s abrupt about-face.
The DEC argued in court that issuing the regulations was “infeasible” because it “would require imposing extraordinary and damaging costs upon New Yorkers.” (Hochul in August said much the same about her own reasons for shelving cap-and-invest.)
The judge dismissed that argument.
“It is undoubtedly true that the task placed before the DEC is very complicated indeed,” he wrote. “But as a legal argument, this is unavailing.”
Schreibman said there were two possible paths forward: Either the legislature can step in and change the law, or the DEC must act on it. He set his deadline in February, a month into the next legislative session, to give state lawmakers a chance to weigh in. If the legislature leaves the climate law intact, he said, he is “highly unlikely” to grant the DEC an extension.
The ruling does not explicitly require the state to move ahead with cap-and-invest; the policy is not named in the climate law, and Schreibman said the content of the DEC’s regulations is not up to him. But the law does require the regulations to reflect the findings of its 2022 scoping plan, which envisioned cap-and-invest as its core measure to achieve the emissions targets. State agencies spent two years working on the rules to establish that program before Hochul put them on ice. It’s not yet clear whether the DEC could find a substitute by February.
Hochul said Monday that her administration plans to appeal the decision, which could lead the case to drag on for months longer, if not more.
Reacting to the ruling on Friday evening, she said she would do what was necessary to keep New York’s energy supply reliable and affordable and keep the state attractive to business.
“New York has been, and will continue to be, a leader in climate action, but the judge’s decision fails to factor in the realities of today that include a federal government hostile to clean energy projects, the continuing impacts of post-COVID high inflation, and potential energy shortages expected downstate as soon as next year,” Hochul said in an emailed statement. “We plan to review all our options, including working with the Legislature to modify the CLCPA and appeal, in order to protect New Yorkers from higher costs.”
Facing a cash crunch of more than $1 billion, Europe’s flagship green-steel project began publicly seeking a financial lifeline earlier this month. This week, the French hydrogen investor Hy24 swooped in to help fund Stegra, the Swedish firm behind the effort.
Construction is 60% complete on the facility, which is located in northern Sweden just below the Arctic Circle. If finished, the plant would be the world’s first large-scale steel mill fueled by clean hydrogen, giving Europe a leg up on both the United States and China in an emerging low-carbon technology.
“There is no reason to question the project, whose fundamentals are very good,” Pierre-Etienne Franc, co-founder and CEO of Hy24, told Bloomberg. “If anything, demand for green steel has risen since its launch.”
Franc did not disclose how much money Hy24 invested in Stegra (formerly known as H2 Green Steel), and the company did not respond to Canary Media’s multiple emails requesting comment.
In a press release announcing the start of the new fundraising round on October 13, Stegra CEO Henrik Henriksson said that the investments the company was seeking would represent “approximately 15%” of overall project funding, “comprising a mix of new equity, debt, outsourcing, and selected strategic partnerships.”
“Stegra has a unique position in the green steel landscape with a strong order book, a competitive cost position, and proven execution capabilities,” Henriksson said.
A previous investor from Stegra’s 2023 financing round had also stepped up before Hy24 made its announcement. Just Climate, the British low-carbon venture fund linked to former Vice President Al Gore’s investment company, told the Swedish broadcaster SVT earlier this month that it planned to increase its stake in Stegra. In a statement, Stegra told Canary Media that “several investors have conveyed their commitment to this round,” including the venture funds Altor, FAM, and Kallskär.
But Hy24 is the first new investor to come forward since the latest fundraising began. The investment firm represents “one of the most advanced funding bases for hydrogen in the world,” said Rinaldo Brutoco, the founder of the World Business Academy think tank and a hydrogen investor who has advised European governments on the hydrogen industry.
“They’re the best thing in the hydrogen space in France,” he said. “They invest at the level of ‘let’s build a full-scale plant’ and they operate at the level of ‘let’s build entire industries.’”
That Hy24 is funding Stegra, he said, is a sign the firm is “confident it’s a safe investment.”
“Will Stegra be successful? Absolutely,” Brutoco said. “Have they run into cost overruns? Sure, what new technology hasn’t? But it’s a minor hiccup.”
Still, some big investors are growing skittish. Unnamed sources told the Financial Times this month that Citigroup, one of the project’s core funders, has indicated it wants to stop lending to Stegra because of concerns about the company’s future.
Haunting the project is the ghost of its former sister company, the European battery manufacturer Northvolt, which declared bankruptcy last fall. Both firms were founded with money from Vargas Holding, a Swedish private equity investor focused on climate impacts.
“They’ve got their work cut out,” one lender said of Stegra, according to the FT. “But there is a solid case there, a basis to conduct fundraising, that there wasn’t for Northvolt.”
Amid multiple emergency board meetings, Harald Mix, chair and co-founder of Stegra, agreed to step aside.
Stegra isn’t alone in its troubles. In the U.S., the Trump administration has hampered the nascent green-steel industry by slashing funding to the two regional hubs meant to ramp up production of green hydrogen and changing the terms of grants through the Department of Energy to encourage steelmakers such as Cleveland-Cliffs to double down on coal. In Europe, meanwhile, the Luxembourg-based steel giant ArcelorMittal abandoned plans in June to produce clean steel with green hydrogen and direct reduced iron at two German sites in Bremen and Eisenhüttenstadt.
“[T]here has been slower than expected progress on all aspects of the energy transition, including green hydrogen not yet being a viable fuel source and natural gas-based DRI production not being competitive as an interim solution,” ArcelorMittal said in a statement.
That makes the latest investments in Stegra a cause for optimism, said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a hydrogen analyst at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“Some European steel producers have been going backward recently, like Arcelor, so it’s good to see this project moving forward,” she said.
America has some green shoots, too. Hyundai this month confirmed its plans to build a clean steel facility in Louisiana by the end of the decade, with plans to generate green hydrogen by 2034.
“In a time of strong headwinds for industrial decarbonization, continued investor confidence in projects like this is encouraging,” said Ariana Criste, a spokesperson at Industrious Labs, a research group that tracks steel industry decarbonization. “It shows that despite near-term challenges, the fundamentals for clean steel are solid, and each new project or demand signal helps build the technical foundation and market momentum needed to accelerate the transition.”
An update was made on November 2, 2025 to add a statement from Stegra
Thermal energy storage systems, which turn electricity into heat that can be tapped for hours or days at a time, could help decarbonize the production of everything from cement to beer.
But in the U.S., where the economics of replacing fossil fuels with electricity remain challenging, thermal-battery startup Rondo Energy has found its first industrial-scale opportunity in a more controversial place: the oil fields of California.
Last week, the San Francisco Bay Area-based firm announced the start of commercial operations for its first 100-megawatt-hour “heat battery,” located at a Holmes Western Oil Corp. facility in Kern County, the heart of the Central California oil patch.
The installation is housed in what looks like a four-story prefabricated office building. Inside sits a massive stack of refractory bricks, which are heated to temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) by an adjoining 20-megawatt solar array. That heat is tapped to generate steam that is injected into oil wells to increase production — a job previously done by a fossil-gas-fired boiler.
The project is something of a Faustian bargain. It will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 13,000 metric tons per year, said John O’Donnell, Rondo’s cofounder and chief innovation officer. But, of course, those reductions are in service of bringing more planet-warming fossil fuels to market.
Rondo’s argument for pursuing this application is twofold. For one, fossil fuels will be in use for decades to come, and so we might as well reduce emissions from the sector where we can. Second, thermal-storage startups need paying customers in order to scale up their technology, which could prove necessary to minimize pollution from a host of hard-to-decarbonize sectors.
“We’ve got to decarbonize the world the way it is right now,” O’Donnell told Canary Media in a Thursday call from the Washington, D.C., hotel hosting the annual summit of the Renewable Thermal Collaborative, a coalition of organizations working to cut emissions from heating and cooling. “And because California is kind of an island unto itself, we see this opportunity to make a very big impact in the state.”
Finding cost-effective projects in the U.S. has become even more important after the Trump administration canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for industrial decarbonization efforts across the country. The defunded projects included ones that planned to use Rondo heat batteries: International spirits maker Diageo wanted to install the tech at its production sites in Illinois and Kentucky, while chemicals giant Eastman had agreed to add it to a plastics-recycling facility being built in Texas.
Those companies haven’t said if they plan to continue work on those projects absent federal funding, and O’Donnell declined to comment on their prospects. “We are ready to work with them when they’re ready to go,” he said.
But industry experts have pointed out that building first-of-a-kind thermal batteries is challenging without government funding to absorb some of the risk. The recent rollbacks jeopardize the U.S.’s ability to develop a technology that could play a major role in cleaning up industrial heating, which is responsible for roughly 13% of U.S. energy-related carbon emissions.
“Transitioning the world’s industrial economy to clean is going to take a minute — and by a minute, I mean multiple decades,” said Blaine Collison, executive director of the Renewable Thermal Collaborative. “This is a big shift that has to happen at a lot of discrete points. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of facilities that have to be addressed.”
Rondo’s first 2-megawatt-hour pilot-scale heat battery started operating two years ago at a California ethanol-production facility. But that served more as a “constructability test” for the company’s technology than as a full-scale proof point for commercial viability, O’Donnell said.
Rondo’s Kern County battery, meanwhile, is its first major installation, though it has several others in the works across Europe. It’s building similar heat batteries at a chemicals plant in Germany, a green industrial park in Denmark, and an undisclosed food-and-beverage processing facility in Spain or Portugal.
The market for Rondo’s tech is stronger in Europe, where companies pay much higher prices for fossil gas and face sizeable fees and taxes on their greenhouse gas emissions, O’Donnell said. In the U.S., by contrast, fossil gas is cheap, and only a handful of states impose costs on industrial carbon emissions.
California is one of those states. Under its cap-and-trade program, industrial polluters must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions below certain thresholds — otherwise they have to pay fines or purchase offsets to make up the difference. And under the state’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, companies that produce and sell fossil fuels with lower embodied emissions can earn credits they can use to reduce compliance costs.
Still, even in more competitive markets like Europe and California, Rondo has additional work to do to hit its long-range cost goals. O’Donnell said the company is targeting $30 per megawatt-hour for the energy storage services its heat batteries provide, which would put it well within the range of lithium-ion batteries, albeit for a system that stores heat rather than electrical energy.
But the Holmes Western project is “not close” to that price point, he said. Rather, it’s “owned by the customer at a price point that was economical to them.”
The holy grail for thermal storage — the thing that will make it broadly cost-competitive with fossil-fueled heating — is tapping into cheap, clean power.
That’s because the cost of electricity is ultimately what dictates whether a thermal battery makes financial sense. But unlike fossil fuels, electricity prices vary not just from week to week, but from hour to hour. That makes it tricky for would-be customers to evaluate whether to stick with a gas boiler or to make a bet on an electricity-powered system like Rondo’s.
Solar and wind, however, reliably generate power at a very low cost. In some parts of the U.S. and the world, the amount of renewable energy available exceeds electricity demand for hours at a time, driving wholesale power prices to zero or even negative.
Storing this excess carbon-free electricity as heat can significantly cut costs for owners of thermal storage systems, O’Donnell said. The challenge for providers of the tech is to get utilities, regulators, and energy-market operators to allow industrial customers to access those low or negative energy prices, O’Donnell said. Today, most industrial sites buy their electricity from utilities at retail rates that don’t pass through these wide wholesale fluctuations.
This is especially true in California, where thermal batteries are “in many ways the perfect solution,” said Teresa Cheng, California director at Industrious Labs, an advocacy group focused on cutting emissions from heavy industry.
Solar power is close to overtaking fossil gas as the state’s predominant source of electricity. Much of it is generated at times when there isn’t enough demand for electricity to use it or enough battery capacity to save it for later, forcing the state’s grid operator to curtail increasing magnitudes of solar.
Thermal batteries could soak up that cheap renewable energy while helping industries decarbonize, Cheng said. But “to make this work, we need state leaders to fix industrial electricity rates so they actually reward companies for using cheap, clean power instead of letting it go to waste.”
Holmes Western Oil Corp. is in an unusual position of owning enough land surrounding its facility to build its own 20-MW solar array without connecting to the grid. That “islanded” system allows the company to self-supply solar power at a cost that justifies the project, O’Donnell said.
But that’s a rare occurrence. Most industrial customers will need to source power from the grid — and opportunities for them to access electricity at wholesale prices are few and far between.
Doron Brenmiller, cofounder and chief business officer of Israel-based thermal energy storage provider Brenmiller Energy, said Europe is moving more quickly than the U.S. to support heat batteries, including a number of projects his company is building. He cited the European Commission’s upcoming $1.2 billion pilot auction to fund efforts to decarbonize industrial process heat.
“The utilities in Europe are also very engaged in this space,” he said. Brenmiller has partnered with German energy-trading firm Entelios to integrate its growing roster of industrial thermal storage projects into a variety of “short-term flexibility markets” for specialty grid services like frequency regulation and demand response.
But getting the first large-scale projects up and running remains the most important next step for the industry, he said. Brenmiller expects its first industrial-scale project, a 32-megawatt-hour thermal storage unit at a beverage-processing plant in Israel, to start operations before the end of 2025. A second 30-megawatt-hour system at a pet-food factory in Hungary is scheduled to begin running in 2026.
“All the eyes of clients and investors are on these first few big projects,” he said. “We’ve done pilots, even at scale. But these are the real thing.”
Tech firms and automakers both need lots of steel to build their data centers and vehicles. The metal is sturdy, ubiquitous — and highly carbon-intensive when it’s produced using traditional coal-fired furnaces.
The startup Electra says it’s working to scale a dramatically cleaner method for making the key material. On Tuesday, the company unveiled the site of its new demonstration plant in Jefferson County, Colorado. Electra also announced purchase agreements with the tech giant Meta and with Nucor and Toyota Tsusho America, both of which supply steel to car manufacturers.
Instead of using a scorching furnace, Electra produces iron — the main ingredient in steel — with electrochemical devices, which are powered by renewables and can run at the same temperature as a fresh cup of coffee. The method, known as “electrowinning,” is time-tested for removing impurities from metals like copper, nickel, and zinc. Now Electra is using it to make high-purity iron.
“We’re reinventing how iron has been made for centuries through an electrified process,” Sandeep Nijhawan, the startup’s cofounder and CEO, told Canary Media ahead of this week’s announcement.
Steelmaking is responsible for up to 9% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, and most of that pollution comes from the coal-fueled blast furnaces that convert iron ore into iron.
Electra will soon begin installing equipment inside an existing 130,000-square-foot building south of the company’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. The demonstration project is backed by a new $50 million grant from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, adding to the $186 million Electra raised from investors earlier this year and its $8 million tax credit from the Colorado Energy Office.
The plant is set to start operations in mid-2026 and will deliver up to 500 metric tons of iron per year — a minuscule amount compared to the roughly 1.4 billion metric tons of iron produced globally in 2023. But it’s an important step toward commercializing the emerging technology, the company and its partners say.
Nucor, the largest U.S. steel producer and an early investor in Electra, has committed to purchasing iron from the demonstration facility, which it will then add to electric arc furnaces to make steel. Toyota Tsusho America said it plans to sell Electra’s clean iron to steelmakers, then distribute the resulting steel to automakers. A third partner, Germany’s Interfer Edelstahl Group, will use the iron in its specialty steel applications.
“We’re excited to see Electra’s demonstration facility become a reality,” Al Behr, Nucor’s executive vice president of raw materials, said in an Oct. 21 press release. He added that the project “lays the groundwork for a new era of low-carbon materials.”
Meta, for its part, struck a different type of deal to buy environmental attribute certificates from Electra. This relatively new concept allows the data-center developer to count the emissions reductions associated with a ton of Electra’s iron toward Meta’s own sustainability targets. The certificates won’t apply to the iron that other partners buy, but rather to a separate batch, Electra said.
Through its offtake agreement, Meta aims to “demonstrate a pathway for these innovative materials to scale,” John DeAngelis, the firm’s head of clean technology innovation, said in the press release.
Electra and its partners didn’t provide more details about the financial value or volumes of iron associated with the new deals.
Electra launched in 2020 with a vision to “use renewable electricity, along with electrochemistry, to produce iron without using fossil fuels,” said Nijhawan, who cofounded the company with Quoc Pham. The startup now operates two pilot plants at its research lab in Boulder, though it didn’t disclose how much clean iron it’s produced to date.
Across the steel industry, another alternative to the blast-furnace process is already gaining traction: “direct reduced iron” production, which can use fossil gas or hydrogen. About 9% of global iron was made this way in 2023.
A handful of commercial-scale direct-reduction projects are underway in Europe and China that will specifically use green hydrogen made with renewable power, which could curb the overall CO2 emissions from steelmaking by up to 90%. Among the most prominent efforts is Stegra’s green-steel plant in northern Sweden that’s set to be completed in late 2026 or early 2027.
Green-steel developers have recently faced soaring production costs, uncertain market demand, and a shifting policy landscape, leading some companies to cancel or postpone projects. Last week, Stegra said it plans to raise another $1.1 billion in funding to build its first-of-a-kind facility, for which the steelmaker has already raised $7.6 billion. In the United States, meanwhile, the Trump administration is gutting federal funding for producing low-carbon hydrogen meant to benefit industries like steelmaking.
“We are seeing a slowdown in the market among our peers, which is also exacerbated by the policy uncertainty” in the U.S., Nijhawan said. “But our long-term and even near-term strategies remain unchanged.”
Electra’s technology is still in the early stages of development, while direct-reduction plants have operated for decades, albeit using fossil fuels. But if electrowinning can scale, it would offer a few key advantages.
The method involves dissolving iron ore into a water-based acid solution to separate iron ions from impurities in the ore. The company then electrifies the solution to deposit pure iron onto sheets the size of a basketball backboard. This process doesn’t require fossil fuels or hydrogen. It can also incorporate iron ores with more impurities — such as those from older mines — than direct-reduction plants typically use, giving Electra access to cheaper materials.
Plus, electrowinning doesn’t need constant, extreme heat, so Electra can tune its operations to the fluctuations of wind and solar power plants, ramping up when clean electricity is most available and affordable. The company said it purchases 100% renewable energy for its Boulder pilot operations through an Xcel Energy utility program, which Electra will also leverage for its Jefferson County demonstration facility.
As the five-year-old firm prepares to open its new plant, Electra is already looking for places to build a commercial-scale manufacturing site, which could be operational in 2029.
The steel industry is “definitely in this phase where the [green steel] transition and meeting climate goals looks a lot more difficult today,” Nijhawan said. But, he added, “I believe the solutions are in hand, and it’s a matter of scaling to drive those economics as fast as we can.”
The United Nations agency that governs global shipping has voted to delay the adoption of its landmark decarbonization strategy by one year, following intense opposition from the Trump administration.
The Friday decision by the International Maritime Organization in London casts uncertainty over the future of the Net-Zero Framework, which would have been the world’s first binding emissions target for an entire industry.
“Today’s delay in adopting the [framework] is a missed opportunity,” Natacha Stamatiou, who leads the Environmental Defense Fund’s global shipping work, said in a statement to Canary Media. “Every delay means that innovation will struggle to scale, inequities will deepen, and the transition to clean shipping will become harder and more costly.”
International shipping is responsible for about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Climate pollution from diesel-guzzling vessels — which haul virtually everything we buy and use — is projected to soar in the coming decades if nothing changes.
The Net-Zero Framework would require large ships to progressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible by 2050. The strategy, which leans on a carbon tax, would force ships to swap out dirty fuels with cleaner alternatives, such as e-methanol or green ammonia, and adopt other energy-saving technologies like wind-assisted propulsion.
The delayed vote puts that progress on ice — and represents a stunning reversal from where negotiations sat just a few weeks ago.
In April, over 60 countries in the IMO, including Brazil, China, and India, agreed to put the framework to a vote in October. In the months leading up to this week, diplomats, environmental groups, and even industry organizations said they expected relatively smooth sailing toward approval.
However, on Oct. 10, ahead of the negotiations, the Trump administration issued a statement forcefully opposing an international environmental agreement, claiming it “unduly or unfairly burdens the United States.” U.S. officials also began calling and writing to countries that supported the measure, threatening to impose tariffs, withdraw visa rights, and take other retaliatory measures, The Guardian reported on Wednesday.
On Friday, the final day of talks, the U.S., Singapore, Liberia, and Saudi Arabia all called on IMO to postpone adoption of the climate rules. The motion to delay was ultimately put forward by Singapore and called to a vote by Saudi Arabia. While 49 countries voted against the delay, 57 were in favor. Twenty-one nations abstained.
Without a clear framework in place, progress toward decarbonizing shipping will remain slow going. Efforts to kickstart alternative, lower-carbon fuels have emerged in recent years, but shipping companies and fuel producers have been hesitant to invest at a meaningful scale without a clear directive from the IMO.
Shipping companies, for their part, had said they welcomed the certainty that a global, finalized net-zero standard would provide — particularly as the European Union presses ahead with its own ship-emission rules. A coalition of major shipping industry groups said in an Oct. 9 statement that without an international strategy, a patchwork of separate regulations could bog down the industry in costs without advancing decarbonization.
“This delay unfortunately continues the business uncertainty that hampers investment for private sector actors that are ready and eager for this energy transition to accelerate,” said Ingrid Irigoyen, president and CEO of the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance.
The Net-Zero Framework is the product of the IMO’s now decade-long attempt to institute a climate strategy.
While the details are still being sorted out, the basic idea behind the regulation is as follows: Every year, shipping companies must calculate their “GHG fuel intensity” — the emissions per unit of energy used, on a lifecycle basis — the results of which determine their next steps. Ships that don’t meet IMO’s fuel-intensity standards must buy “remedial units” to cover their compliance gap; the dirtiest ships must pay an additional penalty to IMO for every metric ton of CO2 above the established threshold.
Had the strategy passed, the global fuel standard and carbon-pricing mechanism would have taken effect in 2027, and ships would have needed to start reporting their GHG fuel intensity in 2028. That timeline will now be revised.
There’s no clear deadline yet for when the group will reconvene and conduct a final vote to officially adopt the framework. The IMO will hold a technical meeting to discuss the design of the framework next week.
But experts and advocates warned that there is no more time to delay.
“This is catastrophic for confidence, and therefore also for the equitable and ambitious decarbonisation we need,” Tristan Smith, professor of energy and transport at University College London, said in a statement. “We will now have to double-down on other means to drive shipping GHG reduction and energy transition. Climate science tells us that the challenge of decarbonisation does not go away, it gets harder.”
One of the largest ports in the Midwest is officially starting to decarbonize, thanks to a Biden-era grant program that has so far survived the Trump administration’s assault on all things clean energy.
Late last month, the Port of Cleveland began renovating its main warehouse on the shore of Lake Erie. When the work is complete, Warehouse A will have roughly 2 megawatts’ worth of rooftop solar panels, plus battery storage and numerous charging ports for cargo-handling equipment.
Cleveland, which received a $94 million award from the Clean Ports Program announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last fall, is one of three Great Lakes port groups benefitting from the funding. Although the agency has reneged on many other funding commitments under President Donald Trump, work and payments for the $2.9 billion ports program are still moving ahead.
The country’s more than 300 ports, which ship and receive the materials, food, and other products that Americans rely on, are mostly powered by fossil fuels. Their cranes, forklifts, and other freight-handling equipment burn diesel fuel, and so do the ships and boats docked at those ports, sending not only planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere but toxic pollution that can harm the people who work and live nearby.
To address both problems, the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority has set a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. “We want to have a lower impact on surrounding communities. We also want to stay ahead of regulations,” said Bryan Celik, a contract engineer for the Port of Cleveland. The goal covers the port’s direct Scope 1 emissions, as well as its Scope 2 emissions for energy use.
Global shipping companies face increasing pressure to decarbonize boats and ships, and technology for wind-powered and battery-powered vessels has improved in recent years.
The U.S. has previously taken steps toward decarbonizing shipping, including by partnering with Norway on the Green Shipping Challenge, but the Trump administration has scuttled progress this year. Trump also opposes a proposed global fee on greenhouse gas emissions that the International Maritime Organization will consider formally adopting this month.
The nearly $3 billion in Clean Ports Program funding nationwide “has transformative potential for U.S. ports,” said Jerold Brito, a program associate with the Electrification Coalition, a nonprofit that helped coordinate a Sept. 25 event on regional port electrification hosted by the Port of Cleveland.
Indeed, Cleveland is not alone in its efforts to clean up its port. The Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority, for example, has an even more ambitious goal of reaching net-zero for its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2040, said its sustainability manager, Taylor Mitchell.
Because so much is shipped through ports, Mitchell says, electrifying these hubs of commerce is a “cool opportunity to have a really huge impact on the planet.”
During the late September event organized by the Electrification Coalition, representatives from Cleveland, Detroit, and Hamilton, Ontario, met with contractors and others in industry and nonprofit organizations to share plans and address challenges.
For Brito, this sort of collaboration is key to the success of port electrification.
“Realizing that potential will require buy-in from — and coordination with — the regional networks of industry, nonprofit, and government actors affected by ports’ electrification,” he said.
For example, work at Cleveland’s Warehouse A necessitates collaborating with Cleveland Public Power, the city’s municipal utility. While solar panels and battery storage at the warehouse will eventually provide much of the port’s electricity needs, it still requires more grid power in order to fully electrify.
Other phases of the work will add cabling and connections for vessels to operate with electric power while they’re in port. That “shore power,” or cold ironing, could let boats and ships shut off their diesel engines until it’s time to get underway again.
Additionally, Logistec USA, the port operator, will acquire an electric crane and electric forklifts. And the Great Lakes Towing Co. will build two electric tugboats.
Coordination with other stakeholders also presents challenges for the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority. “We really don’t have much of a footprint ourselves,” except for a cruise dock, noted Mark Schrupp, executive director for the port authority.
Instead, most cargo carried by boats and ships moves through private docks in industrial port areas around the city. “We’ve definitely got to think of ways to get the private sector on board.”
But companies may not want to take some steps on an individual basis, such as constructing and installing power lines and charging equipment at privately owned docks that would only be used part-time.
So the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority is exploring alternatives, such as how hydrogen could produce clean electricity aboard a boat that could then act as a mobile plug-in port for docked vessels’ shore power.
Developing shore power calls for even more groups working together on a broader scale. “We really need a standard as much for a port as for a ship, because if there is a mismatch, you would have invested all of that for nothing,” said Hugo Daniel, a doctoral candidate at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec who researches engineering challenges in shore power. Ideally, Canada and the United States will join forces on a strategy for the Great Lakes that aligns with practices from California, the European Union, and China, he said.
Without standards set at the regional and national level, states and cities that try to compel changes on their own could see shippers simply move to other ports with more lax rules, Schrupp said. While some firms looking to slash their supply-chain emissions might prefer to work with a port that is decarbonizing operations, others might avoid areas that could restrict their diesel use.
Great Lakes ports are big economic drivers. More than 23,000 jobs and about $7 billion in annual economic activity are tied to Cleveland’s port alone, Celik said. Yet it and other inland ports handle a smaller volume of business than most of their counterparts on the East and West coasts, making it that much harder to spread costs and recoup major investments like electrification.
“Like all previous transitions, the electrification transition will present novel challenges and opportunities,” Brito said. “So Great Lakes ports must remain nimble.”
Even as the federal government attempts to prop up the waning coal industry, New England’s last coal-fired power plant has ceased operations three years ahead of its planned retirement date. The closure of the New Hampshire facility paves the way for its owner to press ahead with an initiative to transform the site into a clean energy complex including solar panels and battery storage systems.
“The end of coal is real, and it is here,” said Catherine Corkery, chapter director for Sierra Club New Hampshire. “We’re really excited about the next chapter.”
News of the closure came on the same day the Trump administration announced plans to resuscitate the coal sector by opening millions of acres of federal land to mining operations and investing $625 million in life-extending upgrades for coal plants. The administration had already released a blueprint for rolling back coal-related environmental regulations.
The announcement was the latest offensive in the administration’s pro-coal agenda. The federal government has twice extended the scheduled closure date of the coal-burning J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan, and U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has declared it a mission of the administration to keep coal plants open, saying the facilities are needed to ensure grid reliability and lower prices.
However, the closure in New Hampshire — so far undisputed by the federal government — demonstrates that prolonging operations at some facilities just doesn’t make economic sense for their owners.
“Coal has been incredibly challenged in the New England market for over a decade,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association.
Merrimack Station, a 438-megawatt power plant, came online in the 1960s and provided baseload power to the New England region for decades. Gradually, though, natural gas — which is cheaper and more efficient — took over the regional market. In 2000, gas-fired plants generated less than 15% of the region’s electricity; last year, they produced more than half.
Additionally, solar power production accelerated from 2010 on, lowering demand on the grid during the day and creating more evening peaks. Coal plants take longer to ramp up production than other sources, and are therefore less economical for these shorter bursts of demand, Dolan said.
In recent years, Merrimack operated only a few weeks annually. In 2024, the plant generated just 0.22% of the region’s electricity. It wasn’t making enough money to justify continued operations, observers said.
The closure “is emblematic of the transition that has been occurring in the generation fleet in New England for many years,” Dolan said. “The combination of all those factors has meant that coal facilities are no longer economic in this market.”
Granite Shore Power, the plant’s owner, first announced its intention to shutter Merrimack in March 2024, following years of protests and legal wrangling by environmental advocates. The company pledged to cease coal-fired operations by 2028 to settle a lawsuit claiming that the facility was in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. The agreement included another commitment to shut down the company’s Schiller plant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by the end of 2025; this smaller plant can burn coal but hasn’t done so since 2020.
At the time, the company outlined a proposal to repurpose the 400-acre Merrimack site, just outside Concord, for clean energy projects, taking advantage of existing electric infrastructure to connect a 120-megawatt combined solar and battery storage system to the grid.
It is not yet clear whether changes in federal renewable energy policies will affect this vision. In a statement announcing the Merrimack closure, Granite Shore Power was less specific about its plans than it had been, saying, “We continue to consider all opportunities for redevelopment” of the site, but declining to follow up with more detail.
Still, advocates are looking ahead with optimism.
“This is progress — there’s no doubt the math is there,” Corkery said. “It is never over until it is over, but I am very hopeful.”
Americans toss out roughly a billion dollars’ worth of aluminum drink cans a year — a valuable heap that the U.S. aluminum industry has long been working to keep from landfills. Recycling old metal into new products requires dramatically less energy than producing aluminum from scratch, giving companies a cheaper and lower-carbon way to make the versatile material.
Now, U.S. trade policy is lending new urgency to the effort to rescue discarded metal from junkyards and garbage bins across the country.
In June, the Trump administration raised tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel from 25% to 50% to bolster domestic production of both metals. About half of all aluminum used in the United States comes from other countries, primarily Canada, putting pressure on U.S. manufacturers to start churning out more aluminum and aluminum products at home.
Scrap metal, as a result, is an increasingly hot commodity. American companies are both importing more of it — the tariffs don’t apply to scrap — and scouring the country for domestic reserves of crumpled beverage cans, spare car parts, and bent-up building beams.
Demand for recycled aluminum was already rising before the tariff hike. Everyone from electric-vehicle makers and construction firms to solar-panel companies and packaging producers has been sourcing more of the relatively clean material as they work to reduce carbon emissions from their own supply chains.
“Recycling is the fastest-growing segment of the industry today, and it’s the cheapest, most effective way to make the United States more self-sufficient for its aluminum needs and less reliant on imports” of new metal, said Kelly Thomas, president and CEO of Vista Metals, which makes specialty aluminum products for vehicles, buildings, and industrial facilities.
Underlying all these trends is the fact that the U.S. makes far less primary, or nonrecycled, aluminum than it used to, with only four of the nation’s smelters still operating today. Each of the facilities can gobble enough electricity annually to power a mid-sized U.S. city, whereas recycling operations use only about 5% of the energy needed to run smelters.
Thomas, who is vice chair of the Aluminum Association, was speaking on a Sept. 18 call with reporters. The trade group had just released a report on the U.S. aluminum market for the first six months of 2025, which found that inventories of aluminum scrap rose 14.7% compared to the same period last year in response to tariffs. (More recent data show that levels continue to spike, with inventories up 35% in July compared to the same month last year.)
Still, it’s unclear how President Donald Trump’s trade policies will affect low-carbon aluminum production in the long run. While some recyclers stand to immediately benefit from the increased reliance on scrap, the results across the industry have been murkier.
Total aluminum shipments from U.S. and Canadian facilities fell 4.5% year-over-year through June as wider economic uncertainty and rising commodity prices weakened overall demand for the metal, according to the Aluminum Association. At least one downstream supplier, Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, has reportedly laid off more than a hundred workers as a result of unfavorable market conditions.
“It’s too early to say if it’s a blip or something more systemic,” Murray Rudisill, vice president of operations at Reynolds Consumer Products and chair of the Aluminum Association, said on the press call. “As tariff impacts start to make their way into the market, we will be carefully monitoring demand numbers to see if this softening continues or accelerates,” he said, adding that the report “is a reminder that we are not immune to broader economic headwinds.”
The reactions from America’s two remaining primary producers have been similarly mixed.
Pittsburgh-based Alcoa has criticized the 50% tariff, warning that — far from revitalizing the U.S. industry — the higher prices on imported aluminum will lead to “some type of demand destruction” as consumer appetite slows, Bill Oplinger, the company’s CEO, recently told Bloomberg. Alcoa also produces aluminum in Canada and imports it to the U.S., and the tariffs have reportedly increased the company’s annual expenses by $850 million.
Century Aluminum, by contrast, has applauded the trade policy. In August, the Chicago-based manufacturer said it is ramping up production in response to tariffs. Century will invest about $50 million to restart over 50,000 metric tons of idled production at its Mt. Holly smelter in South Carolina by June 2026. The company will purchase additional electricity for the restart from the utility Santee Cooper, which gets most of its energy supply from coal, fossil gas, and nuclear power plants.
Century and another company, Emirates Global Aluminium, are both planning to build entirely new smelters in the U.S., which together would nearly triple the nation’s primary-aluminum capacity. However, the smelters likely won’t come online for several years or more, meaning they won’t help reduce the supply crunch or price pain facing the industry right now.
In the meantime, the U.S. aluminum industry is accelerating its hunt for scrap. The startup Amp, for instance, said it has deployed around 400 robotic sorting systems, mainly in the U.S., that pluck aluminum from waste-handling facilities; the firm raised $91 million last year to expand its fleet. And a can-collection company called Clynk was just acquired by Norway’s Tomra as it works to deploy more of its automated bag-drop stations across the country.
The Aluminum Association, meanwhile, is continuing to lobby for measures that would boost the nation’s recycling rate — which, when it comes to drink cans, is at its lowest point in decades. State “bottle bills,” for example, provide a small financial incentive for returning cans to official redemption centers. Only 10 states have adopted them to date.
“When we look at the Midwest, or areas like Texas, that don’t have any sort of policies around recycling … we’re reframing this as an economic matter,” Henry Gordinier, president and CEO of Tri-Arrows Aluminum, said of the policy push. He noted that aluminum is one of the top three industries in Kentucky, where Tri-Arrows is based.
“It’s bringing awareness to say, ‘Hey, recycling metal is actually vital to the economy of the state,’” he said.
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