Energy

The Utilities for Net Zero Alliance made the announcement Friday during the UN climate conference taking place in Brazil. Investment need to grow from $390 billion in 2024 to $670 billion annually between now and 2030 to update power grids, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Growing electricity demand for AI and the Trump administration’s love of natural gas have influenced the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, Heatmap reports.

“All these nuke bros who know nothing about operating a reactor, they just want a free pass,” Allison Macfarlane, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, tells Bloomberg. “They can have their free pass, but then they will have an accident.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency is considering keeping it alive, following news earlier this year that the Trump administration would shutter the money-saving program as part of its efforts to roll back energy and water efficiency standards.

Trump is opening it up to drilling. Whether oil and gas companies will want to bite, however, is still up in the air.

US power grids aren’t moving fast enough to keep up with the sudden rise in electricity demand from AI. Data center developers are forging ahead anyway, adding their own gas turbines and fuel cells.

It’s supporting new solar and wind farms across Greece, Italy, Latvia, Poland, and Romania that are supposed to add 650 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to local power grids.

That’s according to a recent Bloomberg analysis of wholesale electricity prices across the US, which has more data centers than any other country.

A federal judge lifted the stop-work order the Trump administration issued in August for the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. The project was already permitted and 80 percent complete, but Trump hates wind turbines and his administration claims it’s concerned about potential national security risks with the project.

Both Trump and Biden have sought to build up a domestic supply chain for uranium to lessen dependency on Russian imports and meet growing data center electricity demand with nuclear energy.

The Environmental Protection Agency wants to stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other polluting sites. The proposed rule change comes as the Trump administration attempts to get rid of the agency’s ability to regulate planet-heating pollution at all.

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated Jon Batiste’s hometown of New Orleans. We now know that climate change made warm ocean temperatures that fueled the storm more likely and increased its maximum sustained wind speed.

There’s plenty of disinformation trying to blame the nascent offshore wind industry for whale deaths without evidence. Not only is that misleading, it also takes the focus away from solutions that might actually address the leading causes of death — vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear.

Trump’s tariffs on solar panels — with 80-plus percent coming from China — are complicating the affordability equation in the US, but record low prices due to overproduction is good news for the rest of world bent on switching to clean energies.

So it’s no surprise Meta is supporting a new solar farm in South Carolina that’ll provide power for the first data center the tech company is building in the state. Developers also have to race to take advantage of Biden-era tax credits for renewables before they expire, a victim of Republicans’ big spending bill.

In local battles over who foots the bill for new energy infrastructure, it’s about “power in the literal sense — the electrons that keep the lights on and fuel modern technology — and power in the political sense,” Ivan Penn and Karen Weise write for the The New York Times.