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The biggest impediment, at least according to North America’s quasi-governmental grid watchdog, is power. “The only thing China is ahead of us in the AI race is power,” Jim Robb, the chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, told reporter Arianna Skibell on the Politico Energy podcast episode that went live Monday. “We have better models, we have better engineers, we have better scientists — but we’re challenged in our society to build the infrastructure that’s going to be required to support the growth.”
Europe’s hellish summer continues to shatter records. Just weeks after wildfires scorched Spain and France in what the French president called the country’s “hardest” challenge “since World War II,” Belgium is now battling its biggest blaze in recorded history. Hundreds fled as the flames approached the German border, though rainfall on Monday helped slow the spread. But the High Fens fire has already exposed political fissures in the country. On Monday, Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken blamed anti-American sentiment for preventing the government from purchasing Chinook helicopters that would have strengthened the country’s firefighting capacities, according to The Brussels Times, an English-language news website. In the Flemish-language Het Laatste Nieuws, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper, columnist Isolde Van den Eynde complained that the episode highlighted the gap between how much government infrastructure exists for climate policy and how little there is for actually dealing with warming-fueled disasters. “While quite a few citizens are wondering where our little army of climate ministers is,” she wrote, “soldiers are on the ground.”
Hawaii, meanwhile, was still reeling from the first hurricane to damage the Big Island in more than a century. Tropical Storm Lala, which strengthened into a Category 1 storm at its peak, knocked out power for nearly 200,000 homes and businesses across the state. As I told you yesterday, the utility that covers 95% of Hawaii has warned it could be months before power is restored. Today we got a clearer sense of the other damage. More than 100 homes were washed away in the storm, and the damage to roads and bridges, according to The New York Times, cut off access to a town with the only hospital in its region.
Rwandan peacekeepers in Cabo Delgado.CAMILLE LAFFONT/AFP via Getty Images
Exxon Mobil’s oil fields off the coast of Guyana are booming, generating nearly $5 billion in profit last year and only expanding. Chevron last summer spent $53 billion to buy Hess and gain a foothold in the once-poor nation on South America’s Caribbean shores. It’s no wonder The Economist declared South America “the world’s hottest oil patch” last summer.
Now America’s oil goliaths are looking across the Atlantic for their next windfall. On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Exxon had revived its plans to build a liquified natural gas plant in Mozambique’s restive Cabo Delgado, despite the threat of terrorism from an Islamist insurgency in the region. At the same time, Chevron confirmed to Reuters the discovery of new oil and gas deposits in one of its blocks off the coast of Angola, the second-largest producer in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Sunrun built America’s biggest business selling and leasing residential batteries and solar panels on the promise of going off-grid and helping homeowners produce enough power to pare down their utility bills. Now the company is doing the same for data centers. On Monday, the San Francisco-based giant announced a deal with the virtual power plant provider Voltus to provide access to its thousands of residential solar-plus-storage systems in the PJM Interconnection and Midcontinent Independent System Operator electrical grids, covering much of the eastern half of the lower 48 states. “We are providing critical capacity from home batteries supported by funding from hyperscalers,” Sunrun CEO Mary Powell said in a statement. “This is just the beginning of what distributed energy assets can achieve.”
Good news for some of my friends over at the farmer’s market in my neck of Brooklyn: New Jersey is preparing to allow farmers to harvest sunlight for crops and electricity. On Monday, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities voted to award 16 projects totaling more than 52 megawatts for the state’s first agrivoltaics program. Over the next three years, the program will scale up to more than 200 megawatts of projects. “This pilot can help agriculture and the solar energy industry learn if active agriculture use can be a renewable energy partner in shaping New Jersey’s future,” New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture Ed Wengryn said in a statement. “Getting these projects operating is the best real-life laboratory to learn the challenges the two industries face.”
Manila is a striking metropolis with ancient-looking Chinese and Spanish colonial architecture, gleaming new towers, and vast new neighborhoods forming out of landfilled parts of its eponymous bay. When I visited for a reporting trip in 2024, I learned that the name of the Philippines’ capital comes from the Tagalog phrase meaning “where there is nilad,” a type of flowering mangrove shrub that historically blossomed along the city’s riverbanks. Today those channels that line that city’s streets and wind through the world’s oldest Chinatown are filled with trash. Plastic bottles and garbage are common sights in a fast-growing economy held back by its limited supply of mostly dirty electricity. President Ferdinand Marco Jr. now says there’s “only” one solution to the pollution crisis: Burn it. Last week, his administration told The Philippine Star that new waste-to-energy plants could come online in as little as a year. Environmentalists who say incinerators will only add to air pollution are already pushing back. The government has put out a tender for up to 400 megawatts of capacity, Renewables Now reported. Meanwhile, in a sign of just how much the energy market is heating up in the country, the Philippines’ biggest renewables installer, First Gen Corporation, just turned down a bid from the American investment giant KKR, saying the offer didn’t match the installer’s surging value.
Europe, on the other hand, is seeing its hydrogen ambitions stall out. New analysis by Hydrogen Insight found that project timelines across the continent are now being pushed past two years, “with the number of projects expected to begin commissioning by the end of 2029 falling by almost two thirds.”
Something you don’t see every day: The Trump administration is defending a climate policy imposed by the Biden administration that environmental groups like against Republican states. Last week, E&E News reported that the Department of Justice had asked a federal judge in Louisiana to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 10 GOP state attorneys general in a challenge to a Biden-era policy that stopped subsidizing flood insurance for properties in places increasingly at risk due to new climate extremes.
“It doesn’t matter how many poles we fix in your neighborhood, they’re not going to be getting any power,” Jim Kelly, a spokesman for the utility, told Honolulu Civil Beat. “So we’ve got to focus on restoring those transmission lines first.”
Georgia has over the past decade emerged as a hotbed for cutting-edge industry in the United States. The state welcomed battery factories, solar manufacturers, and the nation’s only wholly new nuclear reactors in decades. But regulators are now cracking down on data centers. Last week, Georgia Power opted to delay the start date for a 25-year service contract to supply the ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s $20 billion data center near the state’s coast with electricity. The voluntary delay, E&E News reported, gives the utility 12 days to revise its proposal before the Public Service Commission, which had signaled its plans to reject the original pitch amid a groundswell of opposition to artificial intelligence infrastructure. The new deadline to review and approve the proposal is August 26.
The postponement comes about a week after West Virginia attempted to “clean slate” with a new set of proposals to regulate data centers aimed at undercutting the movement to block server projects across the country. Governor Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, issued a plan that calls for reducing and possibly eliminating state income taxes on the back of new revenue from AI companies. The move came after Mountain State Spotlight, a venerable investigative outlet based in West Virginia, published a report outlining how a data center developer was using the state’s patchwork of regulations to push a project with limited oversight. It’s no surprise. At least seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built near their homes now, according to the latest polling from Heatmap Pro.
Batteries are booming as lithium-ion units grow cheaper and more useful to back up the grid. The industry saw 70% annual growth last year, as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote last week. But powering the grid off of batteries requires actually hooking them up to the power system. Across the country, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equal to more than 700 nuclear reactors — are waiting in the queue for a grid connection, according to data the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shared with Bloomberg. Not all the projects will be built. But the median wait time for a grid connection was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015.
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Last I checked, it’s actually illegal to write about the geothermal industry’s looming boom without making a pun about heat. So you’ll have to forgive the headline. But things really are getting steamy between investors and developers. When the Bureau of Land Management held a geothermal lease sale in New Mexico in June, the agency netted more than $16.5 million, making it the second-highest-grossing sale in its history, according to Utility Dive. The record-setting bid was from Rock Canyon Resources, which paid $3.14 million for one 4,479-acre tract. Another auction is set to take place in Utah on Tuesday.
Canada can help America take the U out of Ru.EIA
The U.S. used to produce and enrich the uranium that fueled the world’s largest fleet of nuclear power stations. In the 1990s, however, then-President Bill Clinton brokered a deal to establish the famous “megatons to megawatts” with Russia, whereby American power plants promised to buy fuel made from disassembled Soviet warheads. As a nonproliferation exercise, it was a success. But the Russian fuel undercut the domestic market, putting many American miners and enrichers — already facing dimmer prospects as the U.S. stopped building new atomic power stations — out of business. By the time the 2022 invasion of Ukraine plunged Washington’s relations with Russia to their lowest point since the Cold War, the U.S. remained heavily dependent on imports from the Kremlin-owned nuclear company Rosatom. Congress banned Russian uranium imports in 2024, but allowed for waivers until the start of 2028. That cliff is fast approaching, right as one of the other largest suppliers — Kazakhstan — lowered production at its mines.
Luckily for the resurgent U.S. nuclear industry, Canada remains America’s largest supplier of uranium. And a lot of Canadian uranium is coming to the market. On Friday, NexGen Energy broke ground on the first phase of what’s expected to be one of the largest uranium mines on Earth. The project in northern Saskatchewan was first conceived more than a decade ago. The company had started drilling for samples in 2012, but failed after 13 attempts. In winter of 2014, the company tried again. “On the very first home, we hit mineralization,” NextGen CEO Leigh Curyer told CBC News. “We didn’t know it at the time, but we were on top of what has become the world’s most important energy fuel project.” Canada isn’t the only country planning for a nuclear future. Spain, the world’s last major country still pursuing a phaseout policy, seems to be inching toward saving its nuclear plants. Last week, regulators cleared the Almaraz nuclear station to operate through 2030. But NucNet cautioned that left-wing Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government still planned to shut down the reactors by 2035.
Peter Thiel has invested in Facebook, SpaceX, and Palantir, where he serves as chairman of the board and co-founder. Add Argentina’s oil and gas sector to his portfolio. In a Friday filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the billionaire disclosed a 1% stake in Vista, one of Argentina’s largest oil companies operating in the Vaca Muerta shale formation roughly the size of Belgium, where Argentine President Javier Milei wants to ramp up fracking. Reuters reported that Thiel also recently bought a new home in Buenos Aires.
