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The August Electricity Price Hub data is in.
Voltpost announced two new models today designed to mount on walls and ceilings.
A proposed change in how the agency implements an obscure Cold War-era law would impose onerous reporting requirements on renewables and pipelines.
Americans paid $217 on average for electricity last month, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub.
The energy developer is backing off after a Heatmap report.
The deal, shared exclusively with Heatmap, is the startup’s third in the oil-importing country.
Hydrogen fuel comes in myriad forms. There’s green hydrogen, which is extracted from water molecules using zero-carbon electricity. There’s blue hydrogen, derived from methane and scrubbed clean by carbon capture. And then there’s white hydrogen. Otherwise known as natural or geologic hydrogen, this type of hydrogen comes directly from naturally occurring deposits in the earth, can accumulate in considerable quantities and concentrations, and is highly energy-efficient to extract compared to manufacturing pathways such as electrolyzers and steam methane reforming.
It’s a seductive promise, but finding deposits with enough hydrogen to make the economics of exploration work is difficult. That’s where Koloma comes in. The startup uses a bespoke subsurface data set, which its founders developed over 20-plus years, to flag the areas most likely to hold sufficient hydrogen, after which they can extract it for power and derivative fuels.
On Thursday, the startup announced its latest exploration deal, its third in the Philippines, which will give it exclusive rights to a roughly 817-square-mile area in western Zambales Province on the island of Luzon. Altogether, the company now has rights to explore more than 1,600 square miles of the island.
The Philippines until recently imported 98% of its oil from the Middle East. Since the onset of the U.S. and Israel-led war in Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the country’s responses have included declaring an energy emergency, imposing a four-day workweek, tripling solar panel imports from China, and even planning to dust off the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, which has sat idle since 1986.
The country also sits between three active tectonic plates, which means it has a lot of young iron-rich rock formations exposed to water — exactly the conditions that continuously produce natural hydrogen.
“The Philippines is like the poster child of that,” Pete Johnson, Koloma’s CEO, told me. “The geology is very, very good.” Accordingly, the prospect of a plentiful, easy-to-tap domestic energy source has gotten Philippine policymakers excited. The government collects data on natural leaks of hydrogen from the ground to help companies like Koloma narrow their search.
In theory, once a viable deposit is discovered, extraction is straightforward. “If you drill a hole into that pressurized reservoir, the gas is going to flow by itself. It’s just like poking a hole in a balloon,” Johnson told me. Where electrolyzers need around 55 megawatt-hours of energy to produce a ton of hydrogen and gas-powered reformers need around 40 megawatt-hours, natural hydrogen extraction would take 3 megawatt-hours maximum, according to the CEO. And unlike some methods to artificially stimulate the formation of hydrogen deposits, which my colleague Katie Brigham wrote about last week, tapping into natural wells doesn’t require injecting high-pressure fluids, which keeps the structural integrity of the subsurface intact.
Koloma has no hard agreement with the Philippine government to earmark any of the hydrogen it may produce there for domestic consumption, Johnson told me. But given the difficulty of transporting the lightweight gas and the projected growth of the Philippine economy, he expects the country would be the overwhelming beneficiary of Koloma’s activities there.
Once it’s extracted, Koloma could sell the hydrogen as a primary resource (major population and industrial centers like Manila are close to exploration sites) or as a feedstock for products like ammonia and sustainable aviation fuel, which local manufacturers could then export. There may also be opportunities to sequester captured CO2, which easily bonds with the types of rock often found in natural hydrogen deposits and can in turn make the rock more reactive for hydrogen generation.
Hydrogen has figured heavily in the decarbonization and energy security plans of import-dependent East and Southeast Asian economies for a long time. As Katie explained earlier this year, it’s also a centerpiece of China’s latest five-year plan. Japan, meanwhile, has been a leader since the industry’s inception, rolling out the world’s first hydrogen strategy in 2017. The Philippines’ partnership with Koloma is a bet that there are enough hydrogen balloons under its land to put its energy plans on the same trajectory.
The latest forecast from BloombergNEF raises its estimate for AI electricity demand by 83%.
Energy analysts at BloombergNEF predicted last year that U.S. data center electricity demand would reach 106 gigawatts within the next decade. In its latest outlook, released Tuesday, the group increased its forecast by 83%, to 194 gigawatts — enough to light up 150 million homes, or roughly every single household in the country today.
Even that may be a conservative estimate. If data center developers were to max out the total number of the high-powered chips used to train and operate AI models forecast to be delivered by 2035, electricity demand would reach 229 gigawatts.
Over 100 gigawatts of that demand has entered the development pipeline since the beginning of this year, the result of both rising demand for artificial intelligence and shortened construction timelines for data centers. Some developers have oriented their site selection around energy availability, redeveloping brownfield energy generation sites for quick access to electricity and developing relationships with utilities. Others have eschewed grid interconnection entirely and instead relied behind-the-meter power generation.
As Mark Daly, head of technology and innovation at BNEF and a co-author of the report, pointed out to me, a growing share of the project pipeline comes from first-time developers. He and his colleagues project that non-hyperscaler data center capacity will nearly quintuple over the next decade, as hyperscaler capacity almost triples. That could ultimately create pipeline risks, however, as small-scale developers lack the capabilities of more experienced developers to optimize around pre-construction bottlenecks and navigate rapidly growing local opposition. Although local opposition to data centers has become prevalent, historic trends and predictions on how quickly developers are able to navigate hostile environments are built on the proficiency of experienced developers. Because first-time developers may face more challenges, Daly told me that data center projects overall “would see an increase in the number of delays.”
All of this, of course, comes with a big asterisk. The data center sector is rapidly evolving, and therefore highly uncertain. Among leading market research firms, BNEF said, there is a 100-gigawatt spread between the lowest and highest predicted electricity demand from data centers in 2030. Driving this spread are differences in assumptions about the average development timeline for a data center project. Daly told me that BNEF’s “project-based estimate is middle-of-the-road to bearish compared to other outlooks,” but also acknowledged that the fickle nature of local opposition on development timelines may place more constraints on future data center development than currently modeled.
No matter which prediction turns out to be most accurate, hourly U.S. electricity demand will come under intensifying pressure. BNEF predicts that average hourly U.S. electricity demand from AI workloads will grow five-fold over next nine years, reaching 120 gigawatts by 2035. That will put data centers at 12% of total electricity consumption on average by 2030, and 20% in 2035, up from 5% in 2025, according to figures from the International Energy Agency. This will put particular strain on electricity prices in markets like the Mid-Atlantic’s PJM, where data centers already comprise nearly a third of electricity consumption, and Texas’ ERCOT, where data centers currently consume a fifth of the market’s electricity.
Even the most conservative bet on future data center electricity demand is a scenario we’re not prepared for. If the Electric Power Research Institute’s prediction that just 56 gigawatts of new data center capacity will be up and running by 2030 — the lowest estimate BNEF cited — that would still consume the equivalent of Sweden’s total energy supply. Absent investments from utilities into grid resilience and intensive permitting reform to speed up renewable energy siting and development, PJM and ERCOT customers will not be the only ones feeling a serious squeeze in their wallets when their monthly utility bills arrive.
