Donald Trump’s administration is teaming up with a British company to help it build a fleet of nuclear-powered merchant vessels to challenge China’s growing dominance of commercial shipbuilding, a top US official has said.
Stephen Carmel, administrator of the US Maritime Administration at the transport department, told the FT that Washington would sign a public-private partnership agreement on Monday with Core Power, which would help accelerate development of nuclear propulsion for shipping.
California and Texas have led the charge on America’s grid battery revolution. Now, a third state is racing to catch up: Arizona. The Grand Canyon State installed more battery capacity than every state besides Texas over the first half of 2026, per a Canary Media analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
It’s the continuation of a trend from last year, when Arizona also edged out California in both storage and utility-scale solar additions. In recent months, Arizona welcomed three new battery projects with 250 megawatts/1 gigawatt-hour of storage each — Beehive, Catclaw, and Pediment — plus several smaller ones.
This piece was initially published in the National Interest.
The Trump administration recently extended its Jones Act waiver for another 90 days, allowing goods shipped between US ports to travel on foreign vessels. The Jones Act requires domestic cargo to move on ships that are built, owned, and crewed by Americans.
>>>READ: Time to Waive the Jones Act Goodbye Forever
The new waiver applies only to specific commodities, including gasoline, diesel, crude oil, petrochemicals, natural gas, and fertilizer, and government agencies must first confirm that no Jones Act-compliant vessel is available before turning to a foreign-flagged one. Even with these restrictions, the waiver has delivered measurable benefits to American consumers and businesses, underscoring why this outdated law should be repealed altogether.
The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, but energy abundance means little if that energy cannot reach the people who need it. In the waiver’s first 50 days, foreign-flagged tankers moved 1.59 million barrels of diesel products from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast—roughly four times the volume shipped by water on that route during all of 2025. In the waiver’s first 76 days, more gasoline and jet fuel moved from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast than in the previous 11 years combined. According to the Cato Institute’s Jones Act Waiver Tracker, as of July 10, 162 voyages had moved 40 million barrels of energy products, roughly half of it gasoline and crude oil.
This surge is not evidence of foreign ships taking work from idle American vessels. A separate tracker of the 56 Jones Act-compliant tankers found the entire domestic fleet fully employed. The waiver simply added capacity where none existed, getting more fuel to market rather than displacing American shippers.
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The waiver has also linked American producers directly with American customers, especially in non-contiguous states and territories. The United States is the world’s largest propane producer, yet the Jones Act fleet includes zero oceangoing liquid propane gas (LPG) tankers. Without a waiver, Puerto Rico has no economical way to buy bulk propane from the mainland using the global LPG fleet. Once the restriction was relaxed, US propane began flowing to the island in bulk—and by July, Puerto Rico had purchased more American propane in four months than in the previous 22 years combined.
The waiver also allowed crude oil from Texas to reach East Coast refiners. New England, which has no refineries of its own and limited pipeline access, received nearly one million barrels of mostly gasoline and diesel in the waiver’s first 115 days.
Just as important, the waiver opened access to specialized vessels that simply do not exist in the Jones Act fleet. The same LPG tankers, for example, also carried anhydrous ammonia, a key fertilizer input, helping deliver cost-competitive supplies to American farmers.
Jones Act waivers are routinely issued whenever ordinary transportation networks fail, demonstrating that the law itself is an obstacle to quicker, more efficient recoveries. After the 2021 Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, the federal government approved two targeted waivers to ease East Coast fuel shortages. After Hurricane Fiona in 2022, waivers helped keep diesel flowing to backup generators across Puerto Rico. Waivers have also supported Strategic Petroleum Reserve drawdowns, disaster response, and oil-spill cleanup, and the Defense Department has leased or used foreign vessels to carry out its own missions.
>>>READ: Harnessing Rail for Resilient Supply Chains
These episodes expose a basic contradiction at the heart of the law: whenever energy supplies tighten, infrastructure fails, or disaster strikes, both Democratic and Republican administrations recognize that restricting shippers to a small pool of qualifying vessels only makes the crisis worse.
And the benefits of flexibility do not disappear once the emergency ends. Supply chains do not become more efficient just because Washington declares the crisis over. Repealing the Jones Act would give shippers permanent flexibility, diversifying and strengthening American supply chains for good.
The Jones Act draws criticism from across the political spectrum, from Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Mike Lee (R-UT) to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has long highlighted the law’s disproportionate toll on Puerto Ricans. That rare bipartisan agreement is exactly the momentum needed to finally drive a stake through the heart of the Jones Act.
After an earlier reform effort proved ineffective, the PJM Interconnection is taking a second swing at creating a pathway for bringing generation online by using surplus interconnection capacity at existing power facilities.
Surplus interconnection service, called SIS, allows a new generator or energy storage system to connect to the grid at a power facility’s existing interconnection point, using that asset’s excess capacity interconnection rights.
India is counting on increasing investments in battery storage to help abate the mounting curtailments of solar power that the grid is currently unable to absorb.
Projects that are not equipped with battery storage are unlikely to find buyers, with almost 42 gigawatts of planned capacity yet to sign offtake contracts, Renewables Secretary Santosh Kumar Sarangi said on Friday.
The sci-fi-worthy machine soaring 120 feet tall in the hills outside Lynchburg had been all but left for dead — a $400 million experiment that collapsed as the energy economy shifted and the financial prospects for next-generation nuclear technology soured.
The faux eight-story reactor in Lynchburg, built to mimic a nuclear plant but run on electricity so engineers can safely monitor and tinker with it, languished a decade unused on a Liberty University engineering campus.
Now, with the AI build out exploding across the country, a pair of engineering wizards with a nuclear start-up and SpaceX pedigree see in it a lucrative solution to one of the country’s most vexing challenges: powering the proliferation of data centers.
America’s power grid is heading towards a breaking point. Data-center growth and resurgent industrial demand are putting strain on the transmission system, while outdated utility planning continues to lock out mature and cost-effective wire solutions. This is a regulatory bottleneck born from utilities’ monopoly status, not an innovation problem. To unlock affordable capacity, policymakers should require utilities to consider the best-available technologies by default, while utilities themselves modernize planning to reinforce their affordability commitment to customers.
>>>READ: The Wire Inside the Wire: Energy Capacity Hiding in Plain Sight
For decades, utilities strung transmission towers with the same conductors. These lines are built from materials that determine how much electricity can flow without exceeding safe operating temperatures. Advanced conductors, available today, can deliver between 25 and 100 percent more power than the decades-old, sometimes century-old, materials utilities still rely on.
Restringing existing towers with higher-capacity conductors, called reconductoring, is one particular high-value opportunity for this technology. It enables more energy on the same physical footprint at lower long-term cost to consumers, especially when it can defer new construction. So why do utilities reconduct less than 1 percent of transmission lines each year and under-deploy this technology in new construction too?
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A new study by ClearPath and Evolved Energy Research, which I had the chance to review, answers that question directly. The analysis looks at what happens to costs and grid capacity when planning properly accommodates advanced conductors. Today’s grid models select conductors late in the planning process, often after the path of a line is already fixed, blocking opportunities for reconductoring. The study’s distinct innovation is its modelling approach. Instead of evaluating long-term capacity needs and power reliability separately, as conventional planning processes do, it evaluates both questions together. This allows the model to evaluate reconductoring and new construction side-by-side and identify the least-cost way to meet transmission needs on Texas’s ERCOT grid across several growth scenarios.
The study demonstrates the value of reconductoring, especially given large growth in AI and datacenters. In its high-demand scenario, reconductoring accounts for nearly 75 percent of the new transmission capacity added by 2030. But it is not a perfect substitute for new lines. New transmission routes remain a necessary complement, though affordability and reliability both suffer when new construction is the only option considered.
This complementary relationship between upgrades and greenfield lines holds in the long run too. By 2040, a reconductoring-inclusive approach avoids roughly 6,500 miles of new construction—of a total possible 14,479 miles—and saves ERCOT customers approximately $20 billion. Additionally, including reconductoring under the high-demand scenario reduces total transmission costs by 30 percent compared to meeting the same demand with greenfield development only.
Unlocking these savings in practice requires fixing how utilities plan, which directly determines what they build. The researchers’ model confronts planning’s current pitfalls: by iterating between the often-siloed capacity and reliability models, it can test reconductoring, greenfield lines, and different conductor types together, so the least-cost mix emerges early in the planning process. Utilities need to modernize their planning tools with these same principles in mind.
>>>READ: A Growing Grid Needs Market Discipline: Five Principles for Transmission Policy
Legislative direction can spur greater discipline from transmission planners too. Representative Julie Fedorchak’s (R-N.D.) High-Capacity Grid Act would instruct FERC to set a best-available transmission conductor standard for new interstate lines and major rebuilds. Today, utilities earn a profit from customers only on new infrastructure. Because installing or upgrading lines with advanced conductors can defer the need for new construction, utilities have a perverse incentive to keep using old technology. Under this legislation, a utility that installs anything less than the best-available conductor must justify that choice to regulators, ensuring customers are served at the lowest cost instead of subsidizing utility rent-seeking. The bill cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee this summer, with complete bipartisan consensus.
Demand is now growing just as retail electricity prices climb faster than inflation, and that combination should make cost-competitive innovation a priority for utilities, regulators, and legislators alike. Advanced conductors are a clear place to start. Enacting policies and practices that catalyze their deployment at scale could save households and small businesses money, while unlocking the near-term energy capacity America’s economy needs to grow.
Kenya has tripled its long-term target for expanding its renewable energy capacity to meet surging demand and support its industrialization, but that might not result in more affordable power for consumers.
The plan calls for renewable power generating capacity of 5,500 megawatts, up from about 1,500 MW now. That would include 2,000 MW of nuclear power alongside 700 MW of hydropower and new geothermal projects.
That will strengthen the country’s position as a global leader in renewable energy. Kenya already produces 93% of its electricity using renewable sources. But experts say that reforms for utility contracts, electricity grids, financing and pricing are needed to translate clean energy growth into lower cost power for consumers.
Urenco plans to expand uranium enrichment capacity at its U.S. facility in New Mexico by nearly 50 percent, adding 2.1 million separative work units (SWU) to support rising domestic demand for nuclear fuel.
The multi-billion-dollar project will install 24 cascades of gas centrifuges at the National Enrichment Facility in Eunice. The first cascades are scheduled to enter production in 2032, with the remaining units installed through 2036.
Solar energy and batteries are making it easier for utilities to meet surging electricity demand during extreme heat, but prolonged high temperatures are exposing other vulnerabilities in the grid.
Electricity demand rises as air conditioners work harder in extreme heat, while high temperatures can make parts of the system less efficient and put additional stress on equipment. Climate change is extending periods of extreme heat just as electrification and data centers add new loads, leaving parts of the grid working harder for longer.
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