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Everything has a cooler name when you’re on a boat. A kitchen becomes a galley. You’re not parked, you’re at berth. There is even a fun, old-timey name for cutting emissions when you’re at port by plugging into the local power grid: cold ironing.
Right now, lots of smart people are working to lower ship emissions, and for good reason: Container ships cart between 80% and 90% of global trade, yet more than 95% of them run on petroleum products (mainly an extremely dirty sludge called bunker fuel). By one estimate, a single large ship can emit as much CO2 as 70,000 cars, as much nitrogen oxide as 2 million cars, and as much fine dust and carcinogenic particles as 2.5 million cars. By another estimate, shipping pollution is responsible for 60,000 premature deaths per year. Though fully electrifying container ships remains distant and challenging for a number of reasons (albeit not for lack of trying), alternate fuel sources ranging from liquid natural gas to ammonia to hydrogen to nuclear propulsion to that oldie but goodie, wind, are all on the table.
Until that gets sorted out, though, container ships need to keep doing what they’re doing, which is moving stuff (we can all remember what happens when they don’t!). And that means the ships need to berth at ports to transfer their cargo, idling all the while with their auxiliary engines so the crew onboard has basic power for things like emergency equipment, lights, plumbing, temperature controls, and refrigeration. This is bad for all the same reasons a car idling for days on end would be bad if that car used the energy of a small town. It’s also bad for another reason that usually only gets mentioned in passing: Idling container ships are really, really loud.
The ‘Rio de Janeiro’ ship auxiliary generator noise at 30mwww.youtube.com
When you hear about container ships being loud, it’s usually in the context of distressing whales. That’s because container ships are also noisy when they’re at sea, and most marine life depends on sound and sonar that gets drowned out by human activity. But much of the sound a ship at sea makes comes from its propellors, a design issue that will require solutions regardless of what kind of energy source is powering the ship.
At berth, though, container ships continue to make a racket. “During port stay, [the diesel generator] will often be the most predominant source of noise radiating from the ship to the surroundings,” a 2010 paper on noise pollution by the Danish Ministry of the Environment found. According to a report by Signol, a U.K.-based software company that markets its product as a potential solution for inefficient idling, “in close proximity to auxiliary engines, noise levels can reach 80-120 decibels — in comparison, a chainsaw averages 110 decibels!”
It’s a given that ports are loud: Idling ship engines join a cacophony of cranes, trucks, heavy machinery, trains, horns, and the like. Historically, this was fine, since ports were usually built away from residential areas, on land zoned for industry. But as cities grow more crowded, former industrial areas are becoming residential; some 39 million Americans lived near ports according to a 2016 EPA estimate, many of them people of color. “Complaints about noise from seagoing ships at berth are increasingly becoming an environmental issue ... mainly due to the rising population in residential areas around ports, the increase in the number of residential areas being built closer to the port itself, and changing expectations from people living in these residential areas,” explained the Noise Exploration Program To Understand Noise Emitted by Seagoing ships (NEPTUNES), a now-defunct collaboration between 11 ports in Europe, Australia, and Canada.
And whales aren’t the only mammals that hate ship noise. “Research on the effects of low-frequency noise has … shown that this is a stressor that can lead to headaches, dizziness, insomnia, depression, loss of concentration, and distortion of heart rhythm” in humans, the NEPTUNES report added.
Beyond health concerns, the noise is also just ... really annoying. In 2019, residents of Port Otago, New Zealand, were terrorized by what sounded like “a V8 running in your driveway” but were in fact 10-year-old container ships idling out in the harbor.
In Vancouver, in 2022, residents offered a similar simile for their acoustic tormentors: “It’s like having a garbage truck revving at the bottom of your driveway all day long,” one local told Vancouver Is Awesome.
When a supply-chain-related backlog forced container ships to idle off Seattle in 2021, an afflicted islander complained, “We’re getting the noise, the throbbing noise at night.”
Even in the best of circumstances, container ship noise is a persistent nuisance; some have even attributed a worldwide phenomenon called “the hum” to the racket made by container ship generators.
Everyone hates how container ships sound.www.youtube.com
Addressing the problem of ship noise, though, is tricky. There isn’t an international standard for how loud ships can be, and the most NEPTUNES was ultimately able to do was produce a list of unenforceable “best practices.” Many of the recommendations would also be tricky to implement on pre-existing vessels. While boats can be built to be quieter from the get-go, container ships are in circulation for decades; it might be 20 years or more before quiet fleets take over.
Ports also don’t want to rock the boat: “A strict noise policy is ... seen as a competitive disadvantage,” noted a 2013 study by Sweden’s Transport Research Institute (TRI), noting that shipowners must obey a long list of mandatory environmental regulations that they’re loathe to follow voluntary ones.
Thankfully for anyone who’s ever had to listen to the monotonous chuckling of a ship generator, two birds can be killed with one stone. Remember cold ironing? The term harkens back to the age of coal-fired ship engines: At port, the fires didn’t need to be fed, and the ship’s iron engines were allowed to go cold. Today, cold ironing refers to when a ship turns off all its engines at berth — including the smaller auxiliary ones belching sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide, and CO2 over port cities — and instead plugs into onshore power (or “OSP,” in the industry lingo). “The overall emitted sound ... of a ship at berth could be reduced by up to 5 to 10 decibels by replacing the use of auxiliary engine(s) with external power suppliers,” NEPTUNES found.
In the EPA’s sexily titled “Shore Power Technology Assessment at U.S. Ports — 2022 Update,” the agency reported that there are currently 10 American ports that offer OSP for container and cruise ships, including the ports of Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Brooklyn (future upgrades are planned for Miami and Galveston). By all accounts, it’s working on both the environmental and the noise pollution fronts. “Port representatives report that neighbors notice when the shore power system is non-operational and vessels are emitting at-berth, compared to times when vessels are plugged in with no emissions coming from the vessel stacks and engine noise is reduced,” the EPA wrote. Unsurprisingly, “The community is strongly in support of the shore power system at the port.”
Cold ironing doesn’t reduce all port noise, of course; you can still expect the clanging of dropped containers, the vibration of ships, and the rumble of trucks and trains. There are other considerations, too: On-shore power generation needs to be low-emission, otherwise you’re just transferring pollution from the ship to the power plant. Still, the EPA is optimistic, noting that almost anything is better than ship engine emissions and that the situation will only improve as renewables roll out in force.
The possibilities only get more exciting from there. Stillstrom, a subsidiary of the Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk, is working on creating “charging buoys” that can power idling ships before they dock via underwater cables connected to offshore wind farms or onshore renewable power sources. OSP availability is rapidly expanding in the meantime. The Port of Seattle aims to install shore power at all of its major cruise and container berths by 2030. Starting this year, California will require 90% of vessels berthing at state-regulated ports to either use shore power or an approved emissions-reducing alternative. Abroad, the Port of Rotterdam is also working toward 90% shore power usage by 2030, and other European ports are pursuing OSP, too.
The impacts will be huge. The California Air Resources Board, for example, boasts its regulations will result in a 90% reduction in pollution from ships at port — and a 55% reduction in potential cancer risk.
That is, of course, great and worthy of pursuing in and of itself. “People will live longer, healthier lives” is a pretty unbeatable top line. But let’s not forget there are other laudable upsides to plugging in container ships — like living those longer lives in blessed peace and quiet.
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On a new plan for an old site, tariffs on Canada, and the Grain Belt Express
Current conditions: Phoenix will “cool” to 108 degrees Fahrenheit today after hitting 118 degrees on Thursday, its hottest day of the year so far • An extreme wildfire warning is in place through the weekend in Scotland • University of Colorado forecasters decreased their outlook for the 2025 hurricane season to 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, and three major hurricanes after a quiet June and July.
President Trump threatened a 35% tariff on Canadian imports on Thursday, giving Prime Minister Mark Carney a deadline of August 1 before the levies would go into effect. The move follows months of on-again, off-again threats against Canada, with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau having successfully staved off the tariffs during talks in February. Despite those earlier negotiations, Trump held firm on his 50% tariff on steel and aluminum, which will have significant implications for green manufacturing.
As my colleagues Matthew Zeitlin and Robinson Meyer have written, tariffs on Canadian imports will affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. It was unclear as of Thursday, however, whether Trump’s tariffs “would affect all Canadian goods, or if he would follow through,” The New York Times reports. The move follows Trump’s announcement this week of tariffs on several other significant trade partners like Japan and South Korea, as well as a 50% tariff on copper.
The long beleaguered Lava Ridge Wind Project, formally halted earlier this year by an executive order from President Trump, might have a second life as the site for small modular reactors, Idaho News 6 reports. Sawtooth Energy Development Corporation has proposed installing six small nuclear power generators on the former Lava Ridge grounds in Jerome County, Idaho, drawn to the site by the power transmission infrastructure that could connect the region to the Midpoint Substation and onto the rest of the Western U.S. The proposed SMR project would be significantly smaller in scale than Lava Ridge, which would have produced 1,000 megawatts of electricity on a 200,000-acre footprint, sitting instead on 40 acres and generating 462 megawatts, enough to power 400,000 homes.
Sawtooth Energy plans to hold four public meetings on the proposal beginning July 21. The Lava Ridge Wind Project had faced strong local opposition — we named it the No. 1 most at-risk project of the energy transition last fall — due in part to concerns about the visibility of the turbines from the Minidoka National Historic Site, the site of a Japanese internment camp.
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Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said on social media Thursday that Energy Secretary Chris Wright had assured him that he will be “putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam.” The Grain Belt Express is an 804-mile-long, $11 billion planned transmission line that would connect wind farms in Kansas to energy consumers in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, which has been nearing construction after “more than a decade of delays,” The New York Times reports. But earlier this month, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, put in a request for the local public service commission to reconsider its approval, claiming that the project had overstated the number of jobs it would create and the cost savings for customers. Hawley has also been a vocal critic of the project and had asked the Energy Department to cancel its conditional loan guarantee for the transmission project.
New electric vehicles sold in Europe are significantly more environmentally friendly than gas cars, even when battery production is taken into consideration, according to a new study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. Per the report, EVs produce 73% less life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than combustion engine cars, even considering production — a 24% improvement over 2021 estimates. The gains are also owed to the large share of renewable energy sources in Europe, and factor in that “cars sold today typically remain on the road for about 20 years, [and] continued improvement of the electricity mix will only widen the climate benefits of battery electric cars.” The gains are exclusive to battery electric cars, however; “other powertrains, including hybrids and plug-in hybrids, show only marginal or no progress in reducing their climate impacts,” the report found.
Aryna Sabalenka attempts to cool down during her Ladies' Singles semi-final at Wimbledon on Thursday.Julian Finney/Getty Images
With the United Kingdom staring down its third heatwave in a month this week, a new study warns of dire consequences if homes and cities do not adapt to the new climate reality. According to researchers at the University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, heat-related deaths in England and Wales could rise 50-fold by the 2070s, jumping from a baseline of 634 deaths to 34,027 in a worst-case scenario of 4.3 degrees Celsius warming, a high-emissions pathway.
The report specifically cited the aging populations of England and Wales, as older people become more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat. Low adoption of air conditioning is also a factor: only 2% to 5% of English households use air conditioning, although that number may grow to 32% by 2050. “We can mitigate [the] severity” of the health impacts of heat “by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and with carefully planned adaptations, but we have to start now,” UCL researcher Clare Heaviside told Sky News.
This week, Centerville, Ohio, rolled out high-tech recycling trucks that will use AI to scan the contents of residents’ bins and flag when items have been improperly sorted. “Reducing contamination in our recycling system lowers processing costs and improves the overall efficiency of our collection,” City Manager Wayne Davis said in a statement about the AI pilot program, per the Dayton Daily News.
Or at least the team at Emerald AI is going to try.
Everyone’s worried about the ravenous energy needs of AI data centers, which the International Energy Agency projects will help catalyze nearly 4% growth in global electricity demand this year and next, hitting the U.S. power sector particularly hard. On Monday, the Department of Energy released a report adding fuel to that fire, warning that blackouts in the U.S. could become 100 times more common by 2030 in large part due to data centers for AI.
The report stirred controversy among clean energy advocates, who cast doubt on that topline number and thus the paper’s justification for a significant fossil fuel buildout. But no matter how the AI revolution is powered, there’s widespread agreement that it’s going to require major infrastructure development of some form or another.
Not so fast, says Emerald AI, which emerged from stealth last week with $24.5 million in seed funding led by Radical Ventures along with a slew of other big name backers, including Nvidia’s venture arm as well as former Secretary of State John Kerry, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, and Kleiner Perkins chair John Doerr. The startup, founded and led by Orsted’s former chief strategy and innovation officer Varun Sivaram, was built to turn data centers from “grid liabilities into flexible assets” by slowing, pausing, or redirecting AI workloads during times of peak energy demand.
Research shows this type of data center load flexibility could unleash nearly 100 gigawatts of grid capacity — the equivalent of four or five Project Stargates and enough to power about 83 million U.S. homes for a year. Such adjustments, Sivaram told me, would be necessary for only about 0.5% of a data center’s total operating time, a fragment so tiny that it renders any resulting training or operating performance dips for AI models essentially negligible.
As impressive as that hypothetical potential is, whether a software product can actually reduce the pressures facing the grid is a high stakes question. The U.S. urgently needs enough energy to serve that data center growth, both to ensure its economic competitiveness and to keep electricity bills affordable for Americans. If an algorithm could help alleviate even some of the urgency of an unprecedented buildout of power plants and transmission infrastructure, well, that’d be a big deal.
While Emerald AI will by no means negate the need to expand and upgrade our energy system, Sivaram told me, the software alone “materially changes the build out needs to meet massive demand expansion,” he said. “It unleashes energy abundance using our existing system.”
Grand as that sounds, the fundamental idea is nothing new. It’s the same concept as a virtual power plant, which coordinates distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar panels, smart thermostats, and electric vehicles to ramp energy supply either up or down in accordance with the grid’s needs.
Adoption of VPPs has lagged far behind their technical potential, however. That’s due to a whole host of policy, regulatory, and market barriers such as a lack of state and utility-level rules around payment structures, insufficient participation incentives for customers and utilities, and limited access to wholesale electricity markets. These programs also depend on widespread customer opt-in to make a real impact on the grid.
“It’s really hard to aggregate enough Nest thermostats to make any kind of dent,”” Sivaram told me. Data centers are different, he said, simply because “they’re enormous, they’re a small city.” They’re also, by nature, virtually controllable and often already interconnected if they’re owned by the same company. Sivaram thinks the potential of flexible data center loads is so promising and the assets themselves so valuable that governments and utilities will opt to organize “bespoke arrangements for data centers to provide their services.”
Sivaram told me he’s also optimistic that utilities will offer data center operators with flexible loads the option to skip the ever-growing interconnection queue, helping hyperscalers get online and turn a profit more quickly.
The potential to jump the queue is not something that utilities have formally advertised as an option, however, although there appears to be growing interest in the idea. An incentive like this will be core to making Emerald AI’s business case work, transmission advocate and president of Grid Strategies Rob Gramlich told me.
Data center developers are spending billions every year on the semiconductor chips powering their AI models, so the typical demand response value proposition — earn a small sum by turning off appliances when the grid is strained — doesn’t apply here. “There’s just not anywhere near enough money in that for a hyperscaler to say, Oh yeah, I’m gonna not run my Nvidia chips for a while to make $200 a megawatt hour. That’s peanuts compared to the bazillions [they] just spent,” Gramlich explained.
For Emerald AI to make a real dent in energy supply and blunt the need for an immediate and enormous grid buildout, a significant number of data center operators will have to adopt the platform. That’s where the partnership with Nvidia comes in handy, Sivaram told me, as the startup is “working with them on the reference architecture” for future AI data centers. “The goal is for all [data centers] to be potentially flexible in the future because there will be a standard reference design,” Sivaram said.
Whether or not data centers will go all in on Nvidia’s design remains to be seen, of course. Hyperscalers have not typically thought of data centers as a flexible asset. Right now, Gramlich said, most are still in the mindset that they need to be operating all 8,760 hours of the year to reach their performance targets.
“Two or three years ago, when we first noticed the surge in AI-driven demand, I talked to every hyperscaler about how flexible they thought they could be, because it seemed intuitive that machine learning might be more flexible than search and streaming,” Gramlich told me. By and large, the response was that while these companies might be interested in exploring flexibility “potentially, maybe, someday,” they were mostly focused on their mandate to get huge amounts of gigawatts online, with little time to explore new data center models.
“Even the ones that are talking about flexibility now, in terms of what they’re actually doing in the market today, they all are demanding 8,760 [hours of operation per year],” Gramlich told me.
Emerald AI is well aware that its business depends on proving to hyperscalers that a degree of flexibility won’t materially impact their operations. Last week, the startup released the results of a pilot demonstration that it ran at an Oracle data center in Phoenix, which proved it was able to reduce power consumption by 25% for three hours during a period of grid stress while still “assuring acceptable customer performance for AI workloads.”
It achieved this by categorizing specific AI tasks — think everything from model training and fine tuning to conversations with chatbots — from high to low priority, indicating the degree to which operations could be slowed while still meeting Oracle’s performance targets. Now, Emerald AI is planning additional, larger-scale demonstrations to showcase its capacity to handle more complex scenarios, such as responding to unexpected grid emergencies.
As transmission planners and hyperscalers alike wait to see more proof validating Emerald AI’s vision of the future, Sivaram is careful to note that his company is not advocating for a halt to energy system expansion. In an increasingly electrified economy, expanding and upgrading the grid will be essential — even if every data center in the world has a flexible load profile.
’We should be building a nationwide transmission system. We should be building out generation. We should be doing grid modernization with grid enhancing technologies,” Sivaram told me. “We just don’t need to overdo it. We don’t need the particularly massive projections that you’re seeing that are going to cause your grandmother’s electricity rates to spike. We can avoid that.”
The saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund takes another turn.
On July 3, just after the House voted to send the reconciliation bill to Trump’s desk, a lawyer for the Department of Justice swiftly sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Once Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the letter said, the group of nonprofits suing the government for canceling the biggest clean energy program in the country’s history would no longer have a case.
It was the latest salvo in the saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, former President Joe Biden’s green bank program, which current Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has made the target of his “gold bar” scandal. At stake is nearly $20 billion to fight climate change.
Congress created the program as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award that $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer low-cost loans to individuals and organizations for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other efforts to reduce emissions. The agency announced the recipients last summer, before its September deadline to get the funds out.
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs.
In early March, buoyed by a covert video of a former EPA employee making an unfortunate and widely misunderstood comparison of the effort to award the funding to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic, Zeldin notified the recipients that he was terminating their grant agreements. He cited “substantial concerns” regarding “program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with agency’s priorities.”
In court proceedings over the decision, the government has yet to cite any specific acts of fraud, waste, or abuse that justified the termination — a fact that the initial judge overseeing the case pointed out in mid-April when she ordered a preliminary injunction blocking the EPA from canceling the grants. But the EPA quickly appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, which stayed the lower court’s injunction. The money remains frozen at Citibank, which had been overseeing its disbursement, as the parties await the appeals court’s decision.
As all of this was playing out, Congress wrote and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The new law rescinds the “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from nearly 50 Inflation Reduction Act programs, including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million.
The Trump administration, however, is arguing in court that the OBBBA doesn’t just recoup that $19 million, but also the billions in awards at issue in the lawsuit. Congress has rescinded “the appropriated funds that plaintiffs sought to reinstate through this action,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth wrote in his July 3 letter, implying that the awards were no longer officially “obligated” and that all of the money would have to be returned. Therefore, “it is more clear than ever that the district court’s preliminary injunction must be reversed,” he wrote.
Roth cited a statement that Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, made on the floor of the Senate in June. She said she agreed with Zeldin’s decision to cancel the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, and that it was Congress’ intent to rescind the funds that “had been obligated but were subsequently de-obligated” — about $17 billion in total. She did not acknowledge that Zeldin’s decision was being actively litigated in court.
On Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs fired back with a message to the court that the reconciliation bill does not, in fact, change anything about the case. They argued that the EPA broke the law by canceling the grants, and that the OBBBA can’t retroactively absolve the agency. They also served up a conflicting statement that Capito made about the fund to Politico in November. “We’re not gonna go claw back money,” she said. “That’s a ridiculous thought.”
Capito’s colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, offered additional evidence on the floor of the Senate Wednesday. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the repeal of the program of $19 million, noting that it was the amount “EPA had remaining to oversee the program” and that “at no point in our discussions with the majority, directly or in our several conversations with the Parliamentarian, was this score disputed.” Whitehouse also called up a previous statement made by Republican Representative Morgan Griffith, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, during a markup of the bill. “I just want to point out that these provisions that we are talking about only apply as far, as this bill is concerned, to the unobligated balances,” Griffith said.
Regardless, it will be up to the D.C. Circuit Court as to whether the lower court’s injunction was warranted. If it agrees, the nonprofit awardees may still, in fact, be able to get the money flowing for clean energy projects.
“Wishful thinking on the part of DOJ does not moot the ongoing litigation,” Whitehouse said.