** A federal judge rules the Trump administration acted illegally when it canceled $7.6 billion in federal grants for clean energy projects in 16 Democratic-leaning states, including Colorado, California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii.
** Rival carrier T-Mobile piled on as Verizon struggled through a massive nationwide outage on Wednesday, telling customers its own network was operating normally while pointing the finger at its battered competitor. “T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected. However due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time,” the company posted on X as Verizon’s network melted down.
** On Monday, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul called for adding 5 GW of nuclear capacity to the state’s 3.4-GW fleet. The state’s new energy plan cast nuclear as key to its reliability and decarbonization goals.
** Data center firm Switch signs on to purchase 13 MW of power from Ormat’s Salt Wells geothermal facility near Fallon, Nevada.
** NV Energy refuses to fully pay back $65 million it overcharged Nevada customers since 2002, saying it will only provide refunds back to June 2017, the last month for which it has records.
World
** The U.S. is officially in the Venezuelan oil business. The U.S. government sold its first tranche of Venezuelan crude on Wednesday, which was valued at $500 million, according to the Trump administration. It came less than two weeks after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to face drug trafficking charges in the U.S.
** The United States seized another tanker in the Caribbean Thursday morning, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced — saying in a social media post that the vessel was “operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean.”
** One of the largest offshore wind farms in the world is set to be built off the coast of East Lothian after being awarded a key UK government contract. SSE will construct the Berwick Bank wind farm in the outer Firth of Forth with up to 307 turbines generating enough electricity to power up to six million homes.
** Russian drones struck infrastructure in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Wednesday, forcing emergency power blackouts for more than 45,000 customers and disrupting heat supplies, military administration head Oleksandr Vilkul said.