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The new estimate comes as more candidates for statewide office build campaigns around opposing data centers. The latest is Aaron Ford, Nevada’s attorney general and a Democratic candidate for governor, who vowed Wednesday to “pause tax breaks” for data centers if elected.
The Trump administration has launched an effort to fast-track permitting of data centers and utility infrastructure along federal highway and railway corridors. This week, the Department of Transportation took the first step to establish what it dubbed America’s Great Corridors of Commerce, along which the agency “will build, in record time, a new backbone for the world’s strongest economy.” In a public notice posted to a federal website Tuesday, the Transportation Department said the potential policy changes would aim to “drastically accelerate the siting, permitting, and financing of linear utility infrastructure projects, including electrical transmission lines, water pipelines along highways, pipelines along railways, fiber optic, and rural broadband.” The zones will also “incentivize data centers, manufacturing facilities, and distribution hubs to locate close to” the corridors “to leverage a ‘plug and play’ model for easy connectivity to new utility corridors.” The proposal, which is currently only a request for information before a September 12 deadline, would also “reduce administrative burdens” for state transportation agencies and railroads “giving them the vital technology backbone — from Wi-Fi and safety systems to intelligent transportation systems — needed to build the connected, intelligent transportation networks of tomorrow.”
If you want proof things can in fact get built, look — perhaps counterintuitively — to clean energy. Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts to curtail development of renewables, new data from S&P Global Energy shows that clean power is booming in America. The U.S. is on track to add a record 45 gigawatts of clean power this year — equal to the average electricity demand of all of Turkey. “There was a campaign promise to go against renewables, but at the same time they’re realizing that you can’t do without it,” Izzet Bensusan, chief executive of the energy investment firm Captona, told the Financial Times. “I don’t see a world where power demand is flattening out.”
Next-generation geothermal technology first debuted in the U.S. in 2013, when Ormat — the company I once embarrassingly called the “unc” of geothermal — completed a 1.7-megawatt demonstration project at a site in western Nevada. A decade later, Fervo Energy — the hot rock sector’s hottest new stock — started up its 3.5-megawatt, Google-backed demonstration plant in northern Nevada. Now one of Fervo’s closest rivals, Sage Geosystems, has joined the list. On Wednesday, Canary Media reported that the company had begun producing power at its 3-megawatt Texas pilot plant in April. Like Fervo, Sage is using the same horizontal drilling and fracking technology that transformed America into the world’s top producer of both oil and gas. Cindy Taff, the chief executive, spent decades at the helm of Royal Dutch Shell’s fracking division. For a refresher on how the technology works, I recommend this 101 explainer my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last summer.
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The Trump administration is doing all it can to keep coal-fired stations from retiring, even funding construction of the first U.S. new coal plants in over a decade. But an electrical cooperative in North Dakota is thinking about how to keep a coal-fired plant open even if a future White House looks to crack down once again on emissions. On Wednesday, the North Dakota Monitor reported Minnkota Power Cooperative had inked a deal to work with a carbon capture and storage developer to revive a long-stalled project. The state’s Clean Sustainable Energy Authority recommended approving a combined $205 million in loans for the partnership between Minnkota and Reliant Carbon Capture & Storage. The state industrial commission — to which the sustainability agency, established in 2021, reports — will have final approval.
Canada’s largest oil producers, meanwhile, told Reuters they plan to make a final investment decision on a sweeping carbon capture project called Pathways in Alberta by the end of next year.
Tilting at windmills. Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
Taiwan’s long-stalled offshore wind buildout was supposed to justify the self-governing island’s shutdown of its nuclear power stations. Yet the Taiwanese successfully constructed less than 5 gigawatts of offshore turbines before powering down the last reactor. That put the country at a deficit since the atomic stations once provided more than 5 gigawatts of power, and left a place widely considered to be at risk of a Chinese invasion in the coming years more reliant on imported fossil fuels. But Orsted is now stepping up to build more turbines. On Wednesday, the Danish giant announced plans to develop a new 2-gigawatt project off Taiwan. The project is the larger, second phase of the Dadu plant the company is already developing, according to offshoreWIND.biz.
Deforestation and aquaculture across Southeast Asia’s fast-growing economies have destroyed mangroves at an alarming rate. But here’s some good news: Even more new mangroves are growing back in other parts of the world. Global mangrove cover has increased over the past 40 years, with a net gain of 47,720 hectares, or about 185 square miles between 1985 and 2025. That’s according to a new tally by Global Mangrove Watch, a project at Aberystwyth University in Wales. Indonesia has lost nearly 800 square miles of mangrove since 1985, and Myanmar, Malaysia, and Nigeria record significant declines. Australia, India, and the Philippines, by contrast, saw growth. “The overall increase in mangrove cover is encouraging, but it also shows that progress is uneven, with some regions continuing to experience significant losses,” Pete Bunting, a researcher at Aberystwyth University whose work was part of the study, said in a press release. “The findings also highlight the complexity of mangrove change, with gains in some areas linked to both restoration efforts and natural processes.”
