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Europe could teach America a thing or two about interconnection.
As the invasion of Ukraine raged last year, all eyes were on Europe’s power grid. Gas prices skyrocketed, Scandinavia’s water levels fell, and France’s trusty nuclear power plants went offline. It was a test of whether the world’s most interconnected energy grid could keep the lights on under extreme stress — and Europe passed. Today, as increasingly volatile weather patterns wreak havoc on infrastructure, the grid is proving to be more important than ever.
“Climate change is going to make us rely on the grid more,” Michael Pollitt, a professor of economics at Cambridge and an expert in energy economics, told me. “It’s not just gas price effects across Europe, it’s low water years and low wind years that will have impacts everywhere.”
This summer’s extreme heat could have been the next greatest threat to the power grid following the invasion of Ukraine. But instead, the stresses posed by recent weather have shown the strength of Europe’s power grid, proving the importance of interconnection in an era of global warming.
Europe’s power grid is made up of a series of interconnected localized grids. The primary one is the continental grid, where about 15% of the continent’s energy is traded across borders every year. This grid serves 400 million consumers across 24 countries, including most of the European Union countries, plus the Balkans and Turkey. These 24 countries are also connected to several other grids: the Nordic grid, the British grid, the Irish grid, and, as of August this year, the Baltic grid. Those additions bring electricity to more than 600 million consumers. In addition, there are discussions about connecting North Africa’s power grid, and especially Morocco, which would provide a rich source of solar energy.
Each country invests in what they do best: Norway champions hydropower, France has nuclear power plants, the U.K. invests in wind turbines, Spain does solar, etc. And each one can sell the excess energy to the grid to assist other countries. When water levels are low in the summer months, Norway relies on countries like Spain, who have ample power from their solar fields. In the cloudier winter months, Norway returns the favor. There is a call for faster progress on interconnection and transmission to make this into an even more reliable “Super Grid.”
This tool provides an interactive map of the grid today, and the expected changes up until 2040.
This single market allows for an energy security not seen in the United States, which has several disconnected state or regional grids with much more limited interconnection. This not only restricts the distribution of renewable energy in the U.S., but it can lead to blackouts, most famously in Texas in 2021.
One reason that Europe’s grid has proved remarkably resilient is that mutual reliance also means mutually assured destruction.
“If a country were to reduce exports, it would reduce costs in their country,” said Pollitt, referring to fears last year that European countries would unplug from the interconnected grid to safeguard their own energy supplies. “But you barely think about that for too long before you realize it’s a nuclear option to keep prices down.”
EU countries came together to agree on a gas price cap to contain the energy crisis in December 2022. But the rise in gas prices was a powerful incentive for countries to increase their reliance on renewables. Wind and solar generated 10% more energy compared with the same period in 2021-2022, saving the region 12 billion euros in gas imports (about the same in dollars), according to Ember, an energy think tank.
“I’m very happy to see European solidarity manifest itself and be resilient even though there was some temptation to go it alone,” Kristian Ruby, the secretary general for Eurelectric, the association for the electricity sector in Europe, told me. “By standing together and doubling down on solutions, we’ve seen them keep the lights on during an extremely difficult time.”
Extreme weather is the next big hurdle for the grid to overcome. “There’s no doubt that extreme weather events are becoming a strain on electricity operators,” said Ruby. A recent report from Eurelectric says that all power systems are exposed to the effects of extreme weather, including generation, transmission, and distribution. For hydropower, low water levels are detrimental and extreme cold can cause ice and blockages. Geothermal and nuclear energy become less efficient during heat waves because they require water and cold air for cooling. Many of these plants are also vulnerable to coastal and inland flooding.
This summer in particular, the grid was put to the test. Extreme heat in Spain and Italy pushed the grid to its upper limit. Using power from places like Britain, Norway and Switzerland, Spain was able to provide the power needed. It also benefited from investments in solar panels, which supplied 20 percent more solar power than in the summer of 2022.
The grid’s strength is in its variability. “Different types of weather phenomena call for different coping strategies. Resilience is about diversity. It’s about having a mix of different things. One technology will not solve it alone,” said Ruby.
Renewable energy sources differ based on the conditions in which they are built, which can make the electricity supply more adaptable. If there’s enough interconnection to bring power from, say, where it’s sunny or windy to where it’s needed, countries are much less likely to experience blackouts during severe weather. Whereas with fossil fuel based energy like coal plants, the energy supply is concentrated and more susceptible to shocks.
Despite the success, some experts are concerned that transmission isn’t growing fast enough to handle electrification. People are buying more heat pumps and using electric vehicles, but NGO WindEurope says that the grid itself is not expanding at the same pace. Experts also say that as loads increase, electricity flows will become more complex. Ruby advocates more digitalization in order to handle these complex flows.
The EU Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson wrote an op-ed piece in the Financial Times this month saying that Europe must sustain a fast pace in rolling out renewables and electrifying the economy. She references the need to integrate intermittent renewable power and adapt more decentralized electricity systems. She says the emphasis needs to be on transmission and distribution grids.
The EU reduced the length of time needed for permitting electricity transmission. It also introduced new emergency legislation last year to accelerate the authorization of renewable projects.
Despite concerns about pace, experts seem generally optimistic about the EU's grid. “EU energy and climate policy are really a success story in European coordination and interdependence,” said Pollitt.
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Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.
On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant
Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through June” • Canadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so far• Rescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce on Wednesday the rollback of two major Biden-era power plant regulations, administration insiders told Bloomberg and Politico. The EPA will reportedly argue that the prior administration’s rules curbing carbon dioxide emissions at coal and gas plants were misplaced because the emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution,” per The Guardian, despite research showing that the U.S. power sector has contributed 5% of all planet-warming pollution since 1990. The government will also reportedly argue that the carbon capture technology proposed by the prior administration to curb CO2 emissions at power plants is unproven and costly.
Similarly, the administration plans to soften limits on mercury emissions, which are released by burning coal, arguing that the Biden administration “improperly targeted coal-fire power plants” when it strengthened existing regulations in 2024. Per a document reviewed by The New York Times, the EPA’s proposal will “loosen emissions limits for toxic substances such as lead, nickel, and arsenic by 67%,” and for mercury at some coal power plants by as much as 70%. “Reversing these protections will take lives, drive up costs, and worsen the climate crisis,” Climate Action Campaign Director Margie Alt said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families, [President] Trump and [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin are turning their backs on science and the public to side with big polluters.”
Fervo Energy announced Wednesday morning that it has secured $206 million in financing for its 400-megawatt Cape Station geothermal project in southwest Utah. The bulk of the new funding, $100 million, comes from the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program.
Fervo’s announcement follows on the heels of the company’s Tuesday announcement that it had drilled its hottest and deepest well yet — at 15,000 feet and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — in just 16 days. As my colleague Katie Brigham reports, Fervo’s progress represents “an all too rare phenomenon: A first-of-a-kind clean energy project that has remained on track to hit its deadlines while securing the trust of institutional investors, who are often wary of betting on novel infrastructure projects.” Read her full report on the clean energy startup’s news here.
The United Kingdom said Tuesday that it will move forward with plans to construct a $19 billion nuclear power station in southwest England. Sizewell C, planned for coastal Suffolk, is expected to create 10,000 jobs and power 6 million homes, The New York Times reports. Sizewell would be only the second nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in over two decades; the country generates approximately 14% of its total electricity supply through nuclear energy. Critics, however, have pointed unfavorably to the other nuclear plant under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C, which has experienced multiple delays and escalating costs throughout its development. “For those who have followed Sizewell’s progress over the years, there was a glaring omission in the announcement,” one columnist wrote for The Guardian. “What will consumers pay for Sizewell’s electricity? Will it still be substantially cheaper in real terms than the juice that will be generated at Hinkley Point C in Somerset?” The UK additionally announced this week that it has chosen Rolls-Royce as the “preferred bidder” to build the country’s first three small modular nuclear reactors.
The European Union on Tuesday proposed a ban on transactions with Nord Stream 1 and 2 as part of a new package of sanctions aimed at Russia, Bloomberg reports. “We want peace for Ukraine,” the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said at a news conference in Brussels. “Therefore, we are ramping up pressure on Russia, because strength is the only language that Russia will understand.” The package would also lower the price cap on Russian oil to $45 a barrel, down from $60 a barrel, von der Leyen said, as well as crack down on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels used to transport sanctioned products like crude oil. The EU’s 27 member states need to unanimously agree to the package for it to be adopted; their next meeting is on June 23.
The world’s oceans hit their second-highest temperature ever in May, according to the European Union’s Earth observation program Copernicus. The average sea surface temperature for the month was 20.79 degrees Celsius, just 0.14 degrees below May 2024’s record. Last year’s marine heat had been partly driven by El Niño in the Pacific, so the fact that the oceans remain warm in 2025 is alarming, Copernicus senior scientist Julien Nicolas told the Financial Times. “As sea surface temperatures rise, the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon diminishes, potentially accelerating the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and intensifying future climate warming,” he said. In some areas around the UK and Ireland, the sea surface temperature is as high as 4 degrees Celsius above average.
Image: Todd Cravens/Unsplash
The Pacific Island nation of Tonga is poised to become the first country to recognize whales as legal persons — including by appointing them (human) representatives in court. “The time has come to recognize whales not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights,” Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho said in comments delivered ahead of the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France.