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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.”
The new push comes a day after Customs and Border Protection paused work on a border barrier in Big Bend National Park after a flurry of videos showing bulldozers marring the protected landscape drove what the public lands-focused news site Public Domain called “a furious backlash.”
You know those thin white lines that trail behind airplanes? If you’re among the hordes of internet-poisoned conspiracy theorists, you may be certain these are called chemtrails, deliberately sprayed aerosols containing some secret mind control substance. In reality, these are condensation trails, or “contrails,” clouds of vapor that condense around soot particles from jet engine exhaust. Though they are not spreading any nefarious biochemical agents, contrails do take a climate toll, trapping outgoing infrared radiation like a blanket and adding to the greenhouse gas effect. Now Google is stepping in with a new program called Operation Blue Skies, in which the tech giant will partner with the British government and airlines to deploy its artificial intelligence technology to help create a zone in the North Atlantic free of any contrails. “While they may seem harmless, these warming contrails account for roughly one third of aviation’s total climate impact,” the two program managers in charge of effort, Paul Hodgson and Chaim Langermann, wrote in a blog post. “Our AI-powered forecasts have enabled flight crews and air traffic controllers to make targeted adjustments that avoid contrail-sensitive regions while remaining within normal flight operations. Now, we’re taking the next major step: expanding beyond individual airline trials to coordinated contrail mitigation across an entire flight corridor.”
The technology could, in theory, lay the groundwork for solar radiation management. Some conspiracists, without real evidence, suggest that contrails are, in fact, already a furtive government experiment to modify the atmosphere with aerosols that reflect the sun’s light back into space, a leading concept for how to artificially cool the planet and buy more time to tackle the causes of climate change. Those efforts are inching closer to reality — just read my colleague Robinson Meyer’s reporting on the world’s first major private geoengineering company’s fundraising or my reporting on when the startup revealed its proprietary reflective particle. Technology that could help coordinate flights to spray aerosols in the atmosphere, or can deliberately keep planes out of certain airspace, may prove central to deploying geoengineering at any real scale. Perhaps a public effort to explain contrails and deal with their actual downsides will earn more trust to experiment with things like solar radiation management. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Solid-state technology could revolutionize batteries by making them charge faster, last longer, and pack more energy into less space. But the electrolytes needed for the ceramic or polymer interior that store and deliver the battery’s charge are not widely produced in the U.S. On Tuesday, the startup Anthro Energy broke ground on a new factory in Louisville, Kentucky, that is designed to produce enough battery materials for more than 300,000 electric vehicles. The facility is scheduled to start production in 2028, and will provide a definitive domestic source of materials that are otherwise largely sold by Chinese companies, David Mackanic, co-founder and CEO of Anthro Energy, told TechCrunch. The plant itself is a testament to the success of the Biden administration’s two landmark laws. It received $24.9 million from the Department of Energy under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and another $18.4 million in investment tax credits under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
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Back in February, I told you about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s middleground approach on data centers. Instead of advocating a full-on moratorium on building the facilities, as progressives Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a month later, the centrist Democrat laid out “selective” new conditions for large data centers seeking Harrisburg’s approval, including recycling of cooling water, as the state became a hotbed for projects. Now Shapiro is making an about face. In what The Philadelphia Inquirer called “a major shift from his initial embrace of the increasingly unpopular projects,” the governor signed a sweeping executive order Tuesday requiring local approval for data centers to receive state permits. The move is not a moratorium. But the extent of the backlash — seven in 10 Americans now oppose data centers in their backyards, per Heatmap Pro’s polling — may mean the need for a local green light serves as an effective ban. The order also removes Amazon’s controversial $20 billion data center complex between Luzerne and Bucks counties from the state’s fast-track permitting program, which is now unavailable to any such projects. “I have no other choice than but to take this executive action to protect the good people of Pennsylvania from these predatory developers and from these projects that would negatively impact our communities,” Shapiro said after signing the order.
Seeking Canadian energy dominance.ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced plans Monday to invest roughly $50.2 billion into upgrading the nation’s hydroelectric fleet and building new wind turbines, part of the Liberal government’s effort to build “a stronger, more independent, and more sustainable country.” Under the pact with provincial governments, Ottawa will upgrade and expand the behemoth hydroelectric Churchill Falls Generating Station, develop another hydroelectric project on Gull Island in Labrador, build onshore wind turbines, and construct new transmission lines. “Canada is extending its unique advantage in clean, reliable, and affordable power. Because when we master energy, we master our destiny,” Carney said in a statement. The investment comes as Canada is refurbishing and expanding its fleet of CANDUs, a natively-designed type of pressurized heavy water reactor that can run on raw uranium, as I previously reported here.
Romania, one of only seven countries with a pressurized heavy water reactor as part of its fleet, is struggling to generate electricity from its nuclear plants as the rivers Europe depends on for cooling water run low amid the latest heat wave. On Monday, the country’s Ministry of Energy brought a giant coal plant back online to meet surging demand as the nuclear stations idle, according to the Romanian news site Economedia.
Octopus Energy is, by its own press release’s pun, “stretching its tentacles beyond the home and onto the open road.” The U.S. subsidiary of the British renewable energy giant is making Octopus Charge, Europe’s largest electric vehicle charging platform, a public network in the U.S. The company’s app will allow drivers to chargers on the go. “Driving electric should be simple, wherever the journey leads,” Nick Chaset, chief executive of Octopus Energy U.S., said in a statement. “Drivers shouldn’t have to juggle multiple apps and accounts just to charge their cars.”
