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Welcome back to Current Climate. The USA’s 250th birthday is an opportunity to reflect on the influence of the nation’s founders, among whom statesman, publisher, inventor and jovial polymath Benjamin Franklin ranks high. Among many famous admonitions in his Poor Richard’s Almanac, the focus on avoiding waste still resonates. He didn’t say “Waste not, want not,” but did coin: “A penny saved is a penny earned,” as well as “The art of getting riches consists very much in thrift.”
As countless entrepreneurs, farmers or Warren Buffett-style investors have learned in the centuries since Franklin’s passing, the efficient use of money, energy and other resources is a cornerstone of success: The less you waste, the more you have. It’s conservatism in the truest sense.
The Trump administration is described as politically conservative, but its policies, particularly when it comes to energy, are anything but. Its elimination of tough fuel-economy rules for cars and trucks ensures American drivers will pay more for fuel. Killing much-needed offshore wind projects or solar farms on federal land that promise cheap, clean electricity only ensures utility bills will keep rising.
So it’s not surprising that Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced a review aimed at ending federal rules requiring manufacturers to produce evermore efficient home appliances, such as refrigerators, washers, stoves and air conditioners. He justified the move as a cost-saver for consumers, adding wimpy clothes dryers to the low-flow toilets and showerheads that Trump despises.
“For too long, the American people paid the price for mandates that restricted consumer choice and drove up costs,” Wright said, framing the move as part of the president’s war on the “green new scam.”
It’s a curious move since an earlier failed effort 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 much less electricity or water generates utility bill savings.
Or as Franklin put it: “The bitterness of poor quality remains 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’ Austin, Texas headquarters have been flying into Idaho Falls this week to gather at the two-acre construction site, just outside of the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where their new Aalo-X reactor is now being put to the test. Aalo brought in Airstream trailers for the event, which CEO Matt Loszak describes as “a nuclear Burning Man,” after the counter culture festival in the Nevada desert.
“We’ll give some emotional speeches,” says Loszak of himself and his co-founder Yasir Arafat, and share a live video feed of the team loading uranium fuel bundles into the reactor core, then removing control rods to allow fission chain reactions to speed up.
Aalo broke ground on the DOE site in August 2025 with the ambitious plan to achieve “criticality” — the state in which a nuclear reactor sustains a stable chain reaction — by July 4, 2026. Early on July 2, Aalo’s Arafat, the chief technology officer, conceded in a post on X that they weren’t quite to critical yet. “Atoms are splitting, and the core is multiplying neutrons, but we’re not critical yet….criticality is a slow and deliberate process. And we are super close to the July 4th deadline.”
America’s 250th birthday is the deadline President Donald Trump set in a May 2025 executive order directing the DOE to launch the Reactor Pilot Program, with the goal of jumpstarting at least three reactor startups to achieve criticality. Aalo is just the latest small-sized reactor startup to close in on “criticality,” thanks to help from the DOE. Incredibly, three others recently achieved the milestone, satisfying Trump’s deadline — Valar Atomics, Antares Energy and Deployable Energy.
Hot Topic
Ben Brown, CEO of Renew Home, on how its AI-enabled energy management tech can aid the grid
Is Renew Home’s technology derived from Google Nest’s smart thermostats?
A huge component of it was spinning out the Google Nest energy team. We had been the foundation of a lot of the smart thermostat programs over the last 14 years, from 2012 until now. About 150 utility programs across the country for smart thermostat [demand response] with rush-hour rewards with the Nest Alert thermostat. That was in the early days of residential demand response.
Then about five years ago, we launched Nest Renew, and that was the first kind of recognition that, hey, this is going to scale into something that’s much more dynamic, much more whole-home, recognizing that EVs, batteries, and hot water heaters are going to be a significant component of bringing forward large-scale virtual power plant capacity to the grid over the coming decade.
As part of that, we also really started to work on deeper personalization and enrollment of a broad swath of devices, but also specifically for smart thermostats, trying to push this direction in which, with this notion of comfortable flexibility through personalization and AI, you could actually find a way to engage 80% of the population in small ways to save energy. Save money in ways that still preserve comfort. That’s versus a more traditional demand response, which required a bit more of a trade-off between comfort and financial reward. That’s where Renew came from.
We’re the largest platform for residential aggregation in the country. We have over eight million devices on our platform, six million households, six gigawatts of load under control from a flexibility vantage point. That’s flexible capacity that can be put into the market.
We work with 150 utilities across the country, across these DR programs, as well as in wholesale markets like California and Texas, to name a few.
Can this also help utilities shave energy peaks when demand is high?
Yes. The perfect example of looking at 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 real-time cost of delivering electrons can fluctuate from being negative in the middle of the night on a windy night to being very, very expensive and hitting its cap in the middle of a hot summer day or a really cold winter evening. So being able to help flatten those peaks actually has a huge economic benefit to the system that should flow back into customers’ pockets.
What Else We’re Reading
After bold pledge, EPA shelves microplastics testing in U.S. drinking water (Los Angeles Times)
Spain built too much solar. Investors want out (Bloomberg)
The U.S. is working on a ban targeting Chinese solar energy inverters, sources say (Reuters)
Chinese breakthrough could make desalinated seawater cheaper than bottled water (The Independent)