Data Centers Could Spike U.S. Power Emissions by 20%

Current conditions: Just a week after Tropical Storm Lala devastated the Big Island, a new tropical rainstorm is barreling toward Hawaii, threatening more flooding, strong winds, and choppy seas by this weekend • Forecasters reduced their estimates for the number of storms in this year’s Atlantic hurricane season as a particularly powerful El Niño’s effects ripple out from the Pacific and stir up winds that prevent hurricanes from forming • The air quality index in Kuching, Malaysia, hit 175, making the capital of Sarawak state the most polluted major city in the world this week as winds carry smoke from peatland and forests in neighboring Indonesian Borneo.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Data centers could spike U.S. power emissions by over 20%

Data centers’ appetite for gas-fired electricity could, after years of flatlining and even declining, send emissions from the United States’ power sector soaring by at least 20%. That’s according to a new analysis by Bloomberg. Developers have proposed building at least 99 bespoke gas plants across the country that would, if run to industry-standard rates, emit about 318 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Given that the whole U.S. electric power sector emitted about 1,485 million metric tons of carbon last year, this one sliver of the data center industry’s infrastructure could spike the electrical industry’s emissions by as much as a third. Not every plant is likely to be built. But the scale is growing. Just weeks after Amazon confirmed plans to back construction of the nation’s largest power plant, an off-grid gas-fired facility to power a major data center complex in Pennsylvania, OpenAI and Nvidia backed a proposal for an even bigger station in Ohio. As my colleague Robinson Meyer put it earlier this week, we have entered the “era of the gas mega-plant.”

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.

2. Trump looks to build out data centers and power infrastructure along federal transit corridors

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.”

3. The U.S. now has a third next-generation geothermal plant

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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4. North Dakota electric coop looks to revive CCS plans on a coal plant

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.

5. Orsted proposes a 2-gigawatt offshore wind farm in Taiwan

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.

THE KICKER

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.”