Last mentioned: Mar 20, 2026
Assistant Secretary Audrey Robertson announces the 'leapfrog' innovation strategy at CFR.
Projected window for significant gains in domestic black mass recycling output.
End of the 24-month window set by industry experts to significantly reduce Chinese dependence.
Lawsuit Filings
Public notices of class-action lawsuits against PLUG and SMR are issued for investor losses.
Q4 Earnings Release
Reports narrowing losses and improved margins across fuel and equipment segments.
Cost-Cutting Initiative
Company announces $50 million in annual operational savings targets.
Office Formation
DOE establishes the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
DOE Loan Guarantee
Plug Power receives a $1.66 billion conditional loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.
DOE Loan Guarantee
Receives conditional commitment for $1.66 billion to expand hydrogen production.
Georgia Plant Launch
Plug Power begins operations at its first large-scale green hydrogen plant.
Plug Power Going Concern
Plug Power issues a 'going concern' warning in its Q3 earnings report, citing liquidity issues.
NuScale Project Cancelled
NuScale and UAMPS announce the termination of the Carbon Free Power Project due to rising costs.
Energy Vault (NRGV) achieved a return to positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4 2025, driven by its 'Asset Vault' ownership strategy and significant revenue growth. Meanwhile, advanced nuclear firm Oklo (OKLO) is transitioning from R&D to active project deployment at Department of Energy sites, signaling a broader shift toward commercialization.
The US Department of Energy is pivoting toward advanced e-waste recycling and multi-mineral processing to break China's decades-long monopoly on critical minerals. Assistant Secretary Audrey Robertson highlights 'black mass' recovery and flexible refining flow sheets as the primary catalysts for this strategic shift.
Plug Power and NuScale Power are facing intensifying legal pressure as class-action lawsuits allege the companies misled investors regarding operational viability and project timelines. These legal challenges highlight the growing regulatory and litigation risks for high-growth firms in the energy transition sector.
Plug Power reported a narrowing loss per share for the fourth quarter of 2025, signaling a critical turning point in its transition toward a vertically integrated green hydrogen ecosystem. The results reflect improved operational efficiencies at its Georgia production facility and the initial success of its global cost-containment program.
This page surfaces every story mentioning Department of Energy across our climate coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running climate beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where Department of Energy was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |