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Sparks

Wow, It’s Hot in D.C.

And last week we had snow. What a world.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The temperature rose to 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C. today. That is weird because it’s currently January 26, and because about four inches of snow fell last week. (Literally, D.C. public schools had a snow day a week ago.) Now the snow has melted and people are walking around in shorts and t-shirts.

 

While it can be hard to attribute individual weather events to climate change, “freakishly warm winter days” are an exception. Washington’s winters have gotten significantly warmer lately because of climate change. Across the country, climate change is making winters warmer and less snowy.

As a Washingtonian, I’ll add that these warmer days are especially odd because the sun is still at a slanty January angle. At 2 p.m. the sun was less than 30 degrees above the horizon; that’s the same height it would be at, say, 5 or 6 p.m. in June or July. So it looks and feels like a cool summer evening here — but it’s actually a bright winter early afternoon. Global weirding is right.

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Sparks

The Fed Has No Relief for Renewables Developers (or Trump)

The U.S. central bank left its interest rate target unchanged for the fifth time in a row.

Donald Trump and Jerome Powell.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Interest rate relief isn’t coming anytime soon for renewables. As widely expected, the Federal Reserve chose to keep rates unchanged on Wednesday, despite intense pressure from President Trump and two Republican Fed governors to lower rates.

The Fed maintained the benchmark short term rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. During the press conference that followed the rate announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave no indication that the board will lower rates at the Fed’s next meeting in September, either. That’s contrary to Trump’s claims to reporters after the meeting. “We have made no decisions about September,” Powell said. “We don’t do that in advance. We’ll be taking that information into consideration and all the other information we get as we make our decision.”

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Sparks

After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

A cut wire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.

“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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