Current Climate brings you the latest sustainability business news every Monday. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
WCome back to Current Climate. The US’s 250th birthday is an opportunity to reflect on the influence of the nation’s founding fathers, among whom statesman, publisher, inventor and jovial scholar Benjamin Franklin ranks high. Among his many famous admonitions Poor Richard’s Almanacthe focus on avoiding waste still resonates. He did not say, “Waste not, want not,” but thought, “A penny saved is a penny gained,” and also, “The art of getting rich consists in great economy.”
As countless entrepreneurs, farmers, or Warren Buffett-style investors have learned in the centuries since Franklin’s death, efficient use of money, energy, and other resources is the cornerstone of success: The less you waste, the more you have. It is conservatism in the truest sense.
The Trump administration is described as politically conservative, but its policies, particularly on energy, are anything but. Eliminating tough fuel economy rules for cars and trucks ensures that American drivers will pay more for gas. Killing much-needed offshore wind farms or solar farms on federal land that promise cheap, clean electricity only ensures that utility bills will continue to rise.
So it’s no wonder that Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced a review aimed at ending federal rules that require manufacturers to produce increasingly efficient home appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, stoves and air conditioners. He justified the move as a cost savings for consumers by adding clothes dryers to the low-flow toilets and showerheads that Trump despises.
“For too long, the American people have paid the price for mandates that limited consumer choice and raised costs,” Wright said, framing the move as part of the president’s war on “green new fraud.”
It’s an odd move, as an earlier failed attempt by Trump’s EPA to end the Energy Star program turned into a blunder that drew bipartisan political and public opposition. The reason was simple: Energy-efficient appliances may cost a little more than older models, but consumers know that using far less electricity or water creates savings on utility bills.
Or as Franklin put it: “The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”
The big read
Nuclear startups meet Trump’s July 4 deadline to go ‘critical’ with new reactors
All 200 employees from nuclear startup Aalo Atomics’ headquarters in Austin, Texas, have flown to Idaho Falls this week to gather at the two-acre construction site just outside the Idaho Department of Energy’s National Laboratory, where their new Aalo-X reactor is now being tested. Aalo brought an Airstream trailer to the event, which CEO Matt Loszak describes as a “nuclear Burning Man,” after the counterculture festival in the Nevada desert.
“We’re going to give some emotional speeches,” Loszak says of himself and co-founder Yasir Arafat, and will share a live video feed of the team loading bundles of uranium fuel into the reactor core and then removing the control rods to speed up the fission chain reactions.
Aalo broke ground on the DOE site in August 2025 with the ambitious plan to achieve “criticality” — the state in which a nuclear reactor maintains a stable chain reaction — by July 4, 2026. Early on July 2, Aalo’s Arafat, the chief technology officer, admitted in a post on X that they were quite critical of X. “Atoms decay and the nucleus multiplies the neutrons, but we’re not critical yet … criticality is a slow and deliberate process. And we’re very close to the July 4 deadline.”
America’s 250th birthday is the deadline set by President Donald Trump in a May 2025 executive order directing the DOE to launch the Pilot Reactor Program, with the goal of at least three reactor launches to achieve criticality. Aalo is just the latest small reactor startup to close the “criticality,” thanks to help from the DOE. Incredibly, three others recently hit the milestone, meeting Trump’s deadline — Valar Atomics, Antares Energy and Deployable Energy.
Read more here
Hot topic
Ben Brown, CEO of Renew Home, on how AI-enabled energy management technology can help the grid
Does Renew Home’s technology come from Google Nest smart thermostats?
A huge component of it was the development of the Google Nest energy team. We have been the foundation of many smart thermostat programs over the past 14 years, from 2012 to now. About 150 smart thermostat utilities nationwide [demand response] with peak hour rewards with the Nest Alert thermostat. This was in the early days of the housing demand response.
Then, about five years ago, Nest Renew came out, and that was the first kind of recognition that, hey, this is going to scale to something much more dynamic, much more integrated, recognizing that EVs, batteries, and water heaters are going to be a big part of driving large-scale virtual power plant capacity into the grid over the next decade.
As part of that, we also started working on deeper personalization and enrollment of a wide range of devices, but also specifically on smart thermostats, trying to push this direction where, with this concept of comfortable flexibility through personalization and artificial intelligence, you could really find a way to engage 80% of the population in small ways to save energy. Save money in ways that still maintain comfort. This is compared to a more traditional demand response, which required a bit more of a compromise between convenience and financial reward. That’s where Renew came from.
We are the largest residential aggregator platform in the country. We have over eight million devices on our platform, six million households, six gigawatts of load under control from a flexibility advantage. This is marketable flexible capacity.
We work with 150 utilities across the country on these DR programs, as well as in wholesale markets like California and Texas, to name a few.
Can this also help utilities reduce power spikes when demand is high?
Yes. The perfect example that in most markets, consumers are not exposed to real-time electricity prices. In [Texas]which is the most liberalized market, you can see that the cost of delivering electrons in real time can range from negative in the middle of the night on a windy night to very, very expensive and hitting its cap in the middle of a hot summer day or a really cold winter night. So being able to help flatten those peaks really has a huge financial benefit to the system that should flow back into the customers’ pockets.
What else are we reading?
After a bold promiseEPA shelves testing of microplastics in US drinking water (Los Angeles Times)
Spain built too much solar. Investors want out (Bloomberg)
The US is working on banning it are targeting Chinese solar power converters, sources say (Reuters)
Chinese breakthrough could create desalinated seawater cheaper than bottled water (The Independent)
