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Data centers’ projected electricity demand has grown so much in the last seven months that BloombergNEF increased its forecast by nearly 40%. In a new analysis published Monday, the consultancy estimated that power demand from U.S. data centers will surge to 106 gigawatts by 2035. That’s 36% higher than BloombergNEF’s outlook published in April, “illustrating just how quickly the sector is expanding,” the consultancy wrote.
The finding illustrates the key challenge facing the grid as data centers complete construction far faster than new gas turbines, nuclear reactors, or even solar panels can be built and patched onto the grid. That reality has put new value on the ability of data centers to power down when the grid is overtaxed, a process Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin described as “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.” It also shows why data centers are becoming so politically contentious that the “backlash,” as our colleague Jael Holzman put it, “is swallowing American politics.”
Back in August, I told you about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency suspended staffers who signed onto a letter criticizing President Donald Trump’s plans to gut the agency. Now the Trump administration has reinstated 14 employees placed on administrative leave after their signatures on a letter addressed to Congress were considered “misconduct.” In notices sent to the workers last week, which The New York Times reviewed, FEMA said the “misconduct investigation has been closed, and as a result you are being removed from administrative leave.” The notices did not disclose the probe’s findings, and FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, didn’t respond to the newspaper’s questions.
The move comes as Illinois Governor JB Pritzker accuses Trump of politicizing disaster relief. The billionaire Democrat, who is widely discussed as a potential presidential candidate in 2028, said the White House rejected two separate requests for $130 million to help households affected by storms in late July and mid-August. E&E News called the denial “unusual” since “the damage documented by the administration was at such a high level that it would routinely lead to a presidential approval for disaster aid.”
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is dead. Long live the National Laboratory of the Rockies. The lab’s focus on clean energy wasn’t unique. Nuclear power, for example, benefits from receiving the primary focus at sites such as the Idaho, Argonne, and Oak Ridge national laboratories. But the Department of Energy said Monday that the rebranding was part of an effort to broaden NREL’s scope. “The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson, a key deputy of Secretary of Energy Chris Wright (whose unique professional history with Wright I wrote about last week), said in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”
In its press release, the Energy Department said NREL was formed amid the 1973 oil crisis and that the new name “reflects the Trump Administration’s broader vision for the lab’s applied energy research, which historically emphasized alternative and renewable sources of generation, and honors the natural splendor of the lab’s surroundings in Golden, Colorado.”
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Soldiers march in Mozambique. Ivan Bruno/Getty Images
In March, the Trump administration approved a $5 billion loan aimed to help restart the French oil giant TotalEnergies’ controversial liquified natural gas project in Mozambique. Though the project initially had international support, the southeast African nation has faced ongoing challenges from extreme weather and an Islamist insurgency, which mounted a deadly terrorist attack that caused work on the project to shut down in 2021. Troops from Rwanda have since come in to secure the area.
On Monday, however, the British government decided to pull its $1.15 billion loan, the Financial Times reported. Initially approved in 2020, the public financing faced fierce pushback from environmental and human rights groups. The Netherlands also announced Monday that it would stop backing the project.
Direct air capture is going big in Japan. On Tuesday morning, the U.S. carbon removal startup Heirloom announced investments from the Development Bank of Japan and Chiyoda Corporation, building on $150 million in Series B funding the company closed last year. That financing round also included investments from Japan Airlines, the industrial giant Mitsubishi Corporation, and the trading behemoth Mitsui & Co. The move comes as Japan’s greenhouse gas-trading system is poised to shift from voluntary participation to mandatory compliance next year, becoming Asia’s second-largest carbon market.
Heirloom had planned to build a giant DAC facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last year. But as our colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in October, the Trump administration looks poised to slash federal funding to support construction of DAC plants, making the fate of the Shreveport project unclear.
In the race to develop next-generation technology to harvest water straight out of the air, AirJoule Technologies has a promising lead. The GE Vernova-backed startup is already publicly traded and has deals with major industrial giants such as appliance maker Carrier. Now the company has inked a deal with a hyperscaler to sell water to cool data centers and use waste heat from the servers to power production of that same water. In a press release, the data center company, Nexus Data Centers, said AirJoule’s “waste-heat-to-water approach provides a superior solution by utilizing thermal energy we are already generating to produce high purity water for electricity production and cooling systems.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the relationship of the new investments in Heirloom to its previous funding round.
The push comes as residential electricity prices continue climbing. Rates for American households spiked by an average of 7.4% in September compared to the same month in 2024, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.Kevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency made some big news on Wednesday, just before much of the U.S. took off for Thanksgiving: It’s delaying a rule that would have required oil and gas companies to start reducing how much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is released from their operations into the atmosphere. The regulation would have required oil and gas companies to start reducing how much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is released from their operations into the atmosphere. Drillers were supposed to start tracking emissions this year. But the Trump administration is instead giving companies until January 2027 as it considers repealing the measure altogether.
The New York Power Authority, the nation’s second largest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, is staffing up in preparation for its push to build at least a gigawatt of new nuclear power generation. On Monday morning, NYPA named Todd Josifovski as its new senior vice president of nuclear energy development, tasking the veteran atomic power executive with charting the strategic direction and development of new reactor projects. Josifovski previously hailed from Ontario Power Generation, the state-owned utility in the eponymous Canadian province, which is building what is likely to be North America’s first small modular reactor project. (As Matthew wrote when NYPA first announced its plans for a new nuclear plant, the approach mirrors Ontario’s there.) NYPA is also adding Christopher Hanson, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission whom President Donald Trump abruptly fired from the federal agency this summer, as a senior consultant in charge of guiding federal financing and permitting.
The push comes as New York’s statewide grid reaches “an inflection point” as surging demand, an aging fleet, and a lack of dispatchable power puts the system at risk, according to the latest reliability report. “The margin for error is extremely narrow, and most plausible futures point to significant reliability shortfalls within the next ten years,” the report concluded. “Depending on demand growth and retirement patterns, the system may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation over that timeframe.”
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Zillow, the country’s largest real estate site, removed a feature from more than a million listings that showed the risks from extreme weather, The New York Times reported. The website had started including climate risk scores last year, using data from the risk-modeling company First Street. But real estate agents complained that the ratings hurt sales, and homeowners protested that there was no way to challenge the scores. Following a complaint from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which operates a private database of brokers and agents, Zillow stopped displaying the scores.
The European Commission unveiled a new plan to replace fossil fuels in Europe’s economy with trees. By adopting the so-called Bioeconomy Strategy, released Thursday, the continent aims to remove fossil fuels in products Politico listed as “plastics, building materials, chemicals, and fibers” with organic materials that regrow, such as trees and crops. Doing so, the bloc argued, will help to preserve Europe’s “strategic autonomy” by making the continent less dependent on imported fuels.
Canada, meanwhile, is plowing ahead with its plans to strengthen itself against the U.S. by turning into an energy superpower. Already, the Trans Mountain pipeline is earning the federal coffers nearly $1.3 billion, based on my back-of-the-napkin conversion of the Canadian loonies cited in this Globe and Mail story to U.S. dollars. Now Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is pitching a new pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast for export to Asia, as the Financial Times reported.
Swapping bunker fuel-burning engines for nuclear propulsion units in container ships could shave up to $68 million off annual shipping expenses, a new report found. If small modular reactors designed to power a cargo vessel are commercialized within four years as expected, the shipping companies could eliminate $50 million in fuel costs each year and about $18 million in carbon penalties. That’s according to data from Lloyd’s Register and LucidCatalyst report for the Singaporean maritime services company Seaspan Corporation.
