The goal is to speed scientific breakthroughs on key priorities including meeting soaring energy demand that’s raising electricity costs for Americans.
Energy


Negotiators are deadlocked in a tumultuous close to United Nations climate talks. A proposed roadmap for transitioning away from coal, oil, and gas has become a flashpoint. “We’re facing the reality of a no-deal scenario” EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said earlier today.
The company plants to start trading power, a move that could support the buildout of new power plants as grids try to keep up with rising electricity demand from data centers and generative AI, Bloomberg reports.
A blaze broke out in the conference venue Thursday, just ahead of negotiations scheduled to come to a close today in Brazil.
Is the promise of jobs worth all the water and chemicals it takes to manufacture chips in the Arizona desert?
More than 1,600 lobbyists for oil, coal, and gas have crowded into pivotal international climate negotiations going down in Brazil. They outnumber delegations from every country in attendance except for Brazil, according to an analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition.
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).
[The International Renewable Energy Agency ]
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.







New industry-backed research shows how waste from deep-sea mining could have far-reaching effects on fish and their food.
“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.
[The New York TImes]






Trump is opening it up to drilling. Whether oil and gas companies will want to bite, however, is still up in the air.
”The market has said no: Banks and insurers won’t back it, lease sales flopped, and taxpayers are left holding the bag,” said Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council.


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.
[The Wall Street Journal]




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.
The company also shared that its suppliers jointly launched a new $150 million investment fund to support renewable energy infrastructure in China.


That’s according to a recent Bloomberg analysis of wholesale electricity prices across the US, which has more data centers than any other country.
There are other factors aside from speculative electricity demand from data centers that are pushing up prices. Updating aging grids with new power lines and recovering from climate disasters is also costly.






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.
Along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Wright previously sat on the board of a company called Oklo that’s developing advanced nuclear reactors.
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.
[The New York Times]






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.
“The weather patterns are shifting. Nobody wants that. And we know what the solution is. There’s an overwhelming majority of people that believe in clean energy,” Batiste says in an interview about his new song Petrichor.
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.
Whales are dying, but it’s not because of wind farms
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