President Donald Trump has rescinded a memorandum issued by his predecessor to safeguard salmon, steelhead and other native fish populations in the Columbia River Basin. The memo, signed by Joe Biden September 2023, “placed concerns about climate change above the Nation’s interests in reliable energy resources”, the White House said in an online statement. “The MOU required the Federal government to spend millions of dollars and comply with 36 pages of onerous commitments to dam operations on the Lower Snake River”, the presidential office said. “Dam breaching would have resulted in reduced water supply to farmers, eliminated several shipping channels, had devastating impacts to agriculture, increased energy costs, and eliminated recreational opportunities throughout the region.   “The dam breaches would have eliminated over 3,000 megawatts of secure and reliable hydroelectric generating capacity – which is enough generation to power 2.5 million American homes”. Biden’s memo, meant to honor U.S. “trust and treaty responsibilities” to tribal nations and enforce safeguards under the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act, directed all agencies with applicable authority to review their programs affecting native fish in the basin. The memo also called for the formation of an intergovernmental partnership involving tribal nations and the states of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. In December 2023 the Biden administration signed an agreement establishing a 10-year partnership with tribes, conservation groups, Oregon and Washington to restore wild fish populations, including a federal investment of over $1 billion. The agreement also enabled a 10-year break from decades-long litigation against the federal government’s operation of dams in the Pacific Northwest. Trump, through a presidential memorandum, has now directed the secretaries of energy, interior and commerce, as well as the assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, “to withdraw from agreements stemming from Biden’s misguided executive action, including the

Dive Brief: The Senate Finance Committee on Monday released its version of the budget bill the House passed in May, offering gentler cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act but still slashing tax incentives, especially those for wind and solar energy. The bill allows transferability for the full life of certain IRA energy tax credits, breaking with the House, which proposed ending transferability for 45Q, 45Z and 45X tax credits after 2027. The Senate proposal is particularly tough on residential solar and residential batteries, proposing that the 30% 25D tax credit for those items be phased out just 180 days after President Donald Trump signs the budget into law. Dive Insight: The Senate proposal removes the House’s tough requirement that projects must break ground within 60 days of the bill’s signing and then be placed in service by the end of 2028 to qualify for technology-neutral clean electricity production and investment tax credits. The Senate version stipulates that eligible technologies such as nuclear, geothermal and hydropower can claim the 45Y and 48E tax credits as long as they begin construction by 2033. However, it subjects wind and solar energy to different rules. Wind and solar projects would be able to qualify for 60% of these credits if they break ground by 2026, 20% if they break ground by 2027, and nothing after that. “For wind and solar, you have particularly large-scale projects that are very much in development,” said Harry Godfrey, who leads Advanced Energy United’s federal policy team. “They’re in interconnection. They are in permitting processes that have pilot agreements, but they are likely not to go to construction until ’27 or ’28, so this effectively kills those projects.” Godfrey said the legislation’s leasing prohibition on third-party wind and solar projects, along with the abrupt termination of 25D, hits the residential solar

Dive Brief: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission could approve construction of X-energy’s first commercial small modular reactor deployment by the end of 2026, the company said Monday. The 18-month review timeline would be significantly faster than the 36 months NRC says it takes to review a typical construction permit application and the 30 months X-energy advised in March. The accelerated timeline is due in part to the “completeness and quality of the application, and the effectiveness of pre-application engagements” since 2018, X-energy said. The four-reactor, 320-MWe plant would provide heat and power for Dow’s UCC Seadrift petrochemical plant on the Texas Gulf Coast, replacing a fossil-fuel cogeneration plant. Dow “does not expect to make a final investment decision on the project before 2028,” Dow Media Relations Director Sarah Young said in an email. Dive Insight: A final investment decision in or after 2028 would likely come as the NRC reviewed the project’s operating license application, the second of two steps in the Part 50 licensing process Dow is pursuing. In March, Dow and X-energy said construction could begin “once the permit is received and upon Dow confirming the ability to deliver the project while achieving its financial return targets,” which depend on the cost of energy produced at the plant being “competitive with other alternatives for firm, clean energy … net of all subsidies,” they said. A “clear, well-defined regulatory pathway” is helpful for X-energy as it continues work on its Xe-100 reactor design, fuel fabrication, supply chain and workforce development, all of which are “critical to the timely completion of the project,” CEO J. Clay Sell said in an email. X-energy subsidiary TRISO-X is building a fuel fabrication facility in Tennessee to supply the Seadrift plant and subsequent deployments, Sell said. In April, the U.S. Department of Energy said

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said his country won’t surrender to Israel after US President Donald Trump called for the Islamic Republic’s capitulation amid growing speculation that Washington could enter the conflict.  “The Americans should know that the Iranian nation is not one to surrender,” Khamenei said in a statement published on his official website, Khamenei.ir. He warned that if the US joined Israel’s military offensive, it would see “irreparable damage.” Khamenei also said he opposed an “imposed peace,” suggesting he would not engage in any US or Israel-led efforts to force Iran into accepting a ceasefire. Khamenei’s latest comments, which were originally scheduled to be televised, come a day after Trump said he knows where the supreme leader is “hiding” and also called for Iran’s surrender. On Tuesday, Trump and his national security team had a meeting that lasted more than hour, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu afterward, a White House official said. No further official comments were made. Israel started its military strikes on Iran last Friday and has hit scores of targets in residential and commercial areas of the capital Tehran as well as nuclear facilities, gas fields and oil refineries.  In response Iran has fired hundreds of missiles at Israel, most of them targeting Tel Aviv. So far, at least 224 Iranians have been killed by Israel’s attacks and 24 Israelis have been killed by Iran’s strikes, according to government figures from both countries. The White House has said Trump will meet Pakistan’s army chief on Wednesday. The South Asian country – a key ally of Iran – has expressed a willingness to play a role as a mediator between the US and Iran. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said Monday Iran is open to resuming talks

After finding a “data mismatch,” the North American Electric Reliability Corp. on Tuesday said the Midcontinent Independent System Operator’s reliability risk wasn’t as bad as reported by the grid watchdog in a December assessment. “When reanalyzed with the corrected data, the MISO footprint was reclassified as an ‘elevated risk’ over the next few years, shifting to ‘high risk’ in the 2028–2031 timeframe, depending on new resource additions/retirements,” the reliablity watchdog said in a statement. Elevated risk means an area meets resource adequacy criteria but under extreme weather conditions remains likely to experience a shortfall in reserves, NERC said. In December NERC published its Long-Term Reliability Assessment, concluding that more than half of North America faces a risk of energy shortfalls in the next five to 10 years. While many areas were classified at an “elevated” risk, the report warned MISO faced a “high risk” beginning this year, with energy shortfalls in some areas possible during normal peak conditions. But at a technical conference on resource adequacy challenges, held earlier this month by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, MISO’s market monitor cast doubt on those conclusions. “I’d love to work with NERC to figure out where they got their numbers from, because I don’t think they’re accurate,” David Patton, president of Potomac Economics, said at the June 5 conference. According to Patton, NERC understated MISO’s capacity for demand response, behind-the-meter generation and firm capacity imports by more than 8 GW. And it considered possible power plant retirements that have not occurred, he said. “Following an in-depth review, NERC found that MISO submitted mismatched data, which overstated the near-term energy shortfall risk,” the reliability organization said.  The grid operator is exploring the cause for the mismatched data, it said. “We are in close contact with NERC and will provide an update as we learn

Brandon N. Owens is the founder AIxEnergy, an independent thought leadership platform. I have spent the past two decades analyzing energy systems — across corridors, markets and control rooms. If there is one pattern that repeats, it’s this: technology moves faster than governance. Today, artificial intelligence is on the cusp of reshaping how we forecast demand, dispatch energy, manage outages and allocate investment across the grid. But while the technology races ahead, the frameworks to guide it have barely begun to form. What we’re witnessing is not just digital transformation. It is cognitive infrastructure — a system that anticipates, learns and optimizes. In some control centers, AI is already being used to balance distributed energy, identify faults and forecast system stress. In others, it is guiding major capital decisions based on probabilistic scenario modeling. And soon, these systems may be making ethical decisions — without ever being trained in ethics. The risk is not some science-fiction singularity. It is something far more practical: optimization without deliberation. Imagine an AI model designed to restore power after an outage. If it is trained solely to maximize economic productivity, it may prioritize large warehouses over nursing homes — not out of malice, but because that’s what the objective function rewards. Or consider forecasting algorithms that perpetuate underinvestment in low-income neighborhoods because historical usage was low — not because demand is low, but because access has been limited. These are not hypothetical edge cases. They are quietly becoming part of real-world grid operations — often buried deep within optimization engines, procurement models and DER orchestration platforms. The problem isn’t that AI is malfunctioning. The problem is that it’s working exactly as designed — and we haven’t designed it to align with public values. The industry has been here before. For much of the 20th