The solar industry is pivoting to survive Donald Trump’s attacks on clean energy.
The Trump administration has taken down content about the human causes of global warming — greenhouse gases from fossil fuels — from the Environmental Protection Agency website, part of a larger purge of science-backed information on federal websites.
“It’s clearly a deliberate effort to misinform,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain tells the Washington Post.
They used 30 times more electricity on average than other models according to research by the AI Energy Score project that included responses to 1,000 written prompts. “We should be smarter about the way that we use AI ... Choosing the right model for the right task is important,” Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni tells Bloomberg.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) completed its safety evaluation for the Kemmerer Power Station in Wyoming and determined that “there are no safety aspects that would preclude issuing the construction permit” for the plant. The NRC says it could take up to another 18 months to make a licensing decision on the advanced reactor.
The tech industry “needs to earn the social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers he says in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. Nadella also called for faster permitting for new power infrastructure and “innovation” in energy efficiency and generation.
Now, the independent market monitor for the northeast’s PJM Interconnection is asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to only allow large data centers to connect to the grid if there’s enough capacity available to serve them reliably. PJM is struggling to finalize a plan to cope with surging data center growth.
The goal is to speed scientific breakthroughs on key priorities including meeting soaring energy demand that’s raising electricity costs for Americans.
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.
