Amid the ongoing upheavals of the Trump administration, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy released its 2025 Sustainable Energy for America Factbook, providing a comprehensive view of the nation’s energy landscape as it existed at the end of former President Joe Biden’s administration, D.C. correspondent K Kaufmann writes.

Also on the demand growth beat, Kaufmann dug into a new report from the nonprofit think tank Energy Innovation, laying out a cogent argument for a new approach to electric system reliability. The report argues that no one power source can provide reliability; rather, it should be looked at as the product of a system with a range of different resources, each with its own reliability attributes. 

The search for 24/7, carbon-free power is stoking a resurgence of interest in nuclear energy — and controversy —as Holtec seeks to restart the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, our Amanda Durish Cook reports. A coalition of anti-nuclear groups claim that regulations do not exist for restarting a decommissioned plant like Palisades, and Holtec and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are cherry-picking existing rules to circumvent the issue. 

Under new Administrator Lee Zeldin, EPA is moving forward to get more carbon capture and sequestration projects online by granting states the authority to permit the injections wells used to store CO2 underground. Kaufmann has the story on the latest approval allowing West Virginia that permitting authority. 

Permitting is also a hot topic in our curated content, where E&E News looks at how Kathleen Sgamma, Trump’s pick to head the Bureau of Land Management, will treat permitting of solar and wind projects on public land. 

E&E also reports on Trump’s plan to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, with a single interim rule that would roll back close to 50 years of regulations developed to implement the law and the environmental reviews it requires for energy projects on public lands. 

The Guardian covers outrage over the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announcement of a new “emergency” designation that could result in fast-track permitting for hundreds of pipelines, fossil fuel plants and other infrastructure projects. The designation could allow the Corps to circumvent environmental reviews and cut short public comment periods for these projects. 

Meanwhile, the funding pause continues to spawn uncertainty and pushback. Zeldin has said he will claw back $20 billion in Inflation Reduction Act dollars awarded to nonprofit community development financial institutions — green banks — to be distributed as loans for clean energy projects in disadvantaged communities, according to Grist. 

Trump is also spearheading an information freeze, with a range of climate- and environment-related government webpages and datasets either taken offline completely or hard to find for the public, according to an article on The Conversation. A coalition of researchers, nonprofits and others are working to archive the information and ensure it remains available. 

Here’s more from this week’s Intelligence Report: