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The coal surge isn’t unique to the U.S., as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last year. Worldwide, rising demand for electricity and shrinking supply of natural gas coming through the Strait of Hormuz made for a good year for coal.
Watershed, the software platform focused on corporate sustainability, just published what it called its first comprehensive open framework for estimating the greenhouse gas emissions from companies’ use of AI programs. The framework has three elements: A comprehensive system that includes all phases of a data center’s use, from model training to inference to hardware production; a function unit of kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per million tokens; and a three-tier calculation approach “that aligns with companies’ data quality.”
In a statement to my colleague Emily Pontecorvo, Watershed’s science chief John Bistline said he had “heard from companies that they’re already being asked about AI emissions from investors, from auditors, from regulators, and right now most of them are guessing. We wanted to give them something that was more defensible.”
Oil prices spiked again Tuesday after President Donald Trump publicly weighed taking “a nice big fat shot” at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, where Israeli intelligence suggests the Islamic Republic moved its uranium-enriching centrifuges last fall. Brent crude, the main European benchmark for the price per barrel of oil, rose nearly 3% to over $91. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. price signal, saw a 3% hike to just nearly $85. Murban crude — out of the United Arab Emirates, therefore the most sensitive to Persian Gulf disruptions — soared nearly 5% to just under $86 per barrel.
Shakeups among smaller producers, meanwhile, appeared to cancel out each other’s effects on the market. The shot: Kazakhstan, which falls just outside the top 10 oil-producing nations, is halting crude shipments to the Russia ports it relied on to get its hydrocarbons to market now that Ukraine is consistently attacking the Kremlin’s energy infrastructure, according to the Financial Times. The chaser: Norway’s oil output just beat forecasts, per Oil Price.
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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
Unlike the last man Trump put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency during his first term in office, Lee Zeldin hadn’t formally worked for the coal industry before serving in government. But the EPA administrator sure made it sound like the industry’s executives are high-priority constituents. At a National Coal Council event in Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel that E&E News covered, Zeldin said “many of the items that were on your wish list are now done.” In the coming months, he added, the agency would get to “the remainder of those items,” but said he wouldn’t “prejudge” any rulemaking outcomes. “Between now and your next meeting, I’m excited to be able to share with great optimism, hope, and enthusiasm that you all, again, not prejudging the outcome of any rulemaking, we’ll have a lot to celebrate the next time you all get together again in January,” Zeldin said. One thing the EPA can’t do: Keep the coal plants the Trump administration wants open actually running. As Matthew wrote last year, the big problem with aging coal stations is that they keep breaking down.
Mergers and acquisitions within the global nuclear industry totaled more than $7 billion in value in the first half of 2026, doubling that same figure from a year earlier. That’s according to new data the law firm White & Case LLP shared Tuesday with World Nuclear News. The number of individual deals increased 10%, from 40 to 44. “At the current pace of dealmaking activity, 2026 is set to surpass all years aside from 2024 when a record $29 billion of M&A activity was registered,” the law firm said. More proof that the nuclear dealmaking boom, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, “is real.”
It’s not just automobiles going hybrid-electric. The startup Electra, which has promised to build a nine-passenger hybrid-electric plane that can take off in as little as 150 feet, is now pumping $850 million into its first aircraft factory in Ohio. The plant, announced Tuesday, will build up to 800 aircraft per year at full capacity. But as Electrek put it, “that’s a big commitment for a plane that hasn’t flown yet.”
In its announcement, the Trump administration said the new tariffs would “apply to all covered goods regardless of whether a good originates under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement,” referring to the Trump-negotiated North American free trade agreement, which the U.S. opted this month not to renew. This struck my colleague Robinson Meyer as ominous. “If the White House now thinks it can levy taxes despite that pact,” he wrote in yesterday’s Heatmap Daily newsletter, “then the risks for Ford, General Motors, and their suppliers have increased.”
Perhaps the only thing growing faster than voters’ antipathy toward data centers is the market’s desire for more of them. Demand for data centers is ballooning at such a rapid clip that BloombergNEF just raised its total forecast for 2035 by a jaw-dropping 83%. The latest data outlining the best-case scenario from the energy consultancy, released Tuesday morning, shows the total installed capacity of U.S. data centers reaching 194 gigawatts in the next nine years. The surge reflects how quickly new server farms are flowing into the project pipeline. In a bid to hedge against the continued expansion, BNEF created a new scenario based on the implied power demand of forecast shipments of microchips for AI computers up to 2033. This scenario implies an even greater need for power: 229 gigawatts of demand from data centers in just the next seven years. And that doesn’t count the continued growth of demand from data centers carrying out non-AI functions, such as traditional cloud computing workloads. This comes as the latest Heatmap Pro polling shows that seven in 10 Americans now oppose data centers in their backyard, a marked shift from last September, when the same survey showed voters evenly split in support and opposition.
That ballooning demand is already showing up in power markets. Of the $16.4 billion in charges from PJM Interconnection’s most recent capacity auction, $6.3 billion — some 38% — stems from data centers. That’s what Joseph Bowring, president of PJM’s independent market monitor Monitoring Analytics, told Utility Dive last week. In the last four base capacity auctions the nation’s largest grid operator held, 46% of capacity charges were driven by data centers. “PJM is continuing to act like it’s business as usual,” Bowring told the trade publication Friday. “You have to open your eyes and recognize that it is really a paradigm shift, and failing to do that imposes costs on other customers.”
A solar farm in Utah. Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
On a logical level, it’s a simple supply and demand problem. The supply of electricity is not growing as quickly as demand, all while the Trump administration eliminates subsidies that once buoyed investments in new supply. As a result, corporate electricity deals look poised to increase in price. But not for every generating source. New estimates from LevelTen, a marketplace for power purchase agreements, found that solar PPAs were 5% cheaper in the second quarter of this year compared to the first quarter. In a piece by my colleague Matthew Zeitlin, LevelTen attributed the decline to an especially steep drop in prices in California’s electricity market. Excluding CAISO, solar PPA prices nationwide dropped slightly less than 2%. While hyperscalers are still buying solar, LevelTen found that commercial and industrial buyers are pulling back, creating a “continued softening in the market’s buy-side.” “We saw a lot less corporate energy buyers in the space in 2025 — 40% less — and that is just due to the increase of hyperscalers and data centers getting projects and snapping them up quickly,” Sarah Wolf, LevelTen’s director of North American transactions, told Matthew.
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Ah, Germany. The land of the Autobahn. Diesel-powered industry. The purring engines of BMWs, Porsches, and Mercedes-Benzes. The nation’s automotive might makes its latest milestone particularly important: Electric vehicles just outsold gas and diesel cars for the first time. New data from the Federal Motor Transport Authority shows that Germans registered 84,057 new electric vehicles in June, a more than 78% year-over-year increase. Traditional hybrids, meanwhile, saw 83,315 registrations, followed by gasoline-powered cars with 60,796, diesel with 33,862, and plug-in hybrids with 32,212. “The automotive history books will need a new page sooner rather than later, after electric cars outsold every other fuel type in Germany for the first time,” InsideEVs reporter Iulian Dnistran wrote. “It’s a huge shift in Europe’s biggest car market, which has traditionally been associated with diesel-powered cars that could travel hundreds of miles at highway speeds without breaking a sweat.” The Tesla Model Y was by far the best-selling EV in Germany, with nearly twice as many registrations as the No. 2 vehicle, the Volkswagen ID.3.
Putting on my Mesopotamian metal merchant hat again: Copper prices are back up. The price of the metal needed for virtually all electrical infrastructure rose 1.3% to just under $14,000 per metric ton, according to Mining.com. The price ultimately hovered at the red metal’s record set in early June. The spike stems from data showing rising tightness in the Chinese market, namely a hike in the premium buyers will pay in Shanghai for shipments of the metal. The price hiked further after a series of storms halted production in Chile for a few days.
While the West dithers on hydrogen, China is making huge strides. It already may be too late to catch up to Beijing on manufacturing the key machinery needed to produce the zero-carbon fuel. The latest data point, via Hydrogen Insight: China just shipped its largest electrolyzer order yet to Europe, via Romania.
