As the data center boom pressures counties, cities, and towns into fights over noise, the trickiest tone local officials are starting to hear complaints about is one they can’t even hear – a low-frequency rumble known as infrasound.Infrasound is a phenomenon best described as sou … | Continue reading
1. King County, Washington – The Moss Landing battery backlash is alive and well more than a year after the fiery disaster, fomenting an opposition stampede that threatens to delay a massive energy storage project two dozen miles east of Seattle. Moss Landing looms large in Snoqu … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Holly Jean Buck, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo and former official in the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. Buck got into the thicket of the data center siting debate this past week after auth … | Continue reading
Current conditions: The storms soaking the American South with as much as 10 inches of rain are tamping down the region’s wildfire risk • Cavite, the Philippine port city on a peninsula at the southern lip of Manila Bay, is facing its eighth straight day of temperatures nearing 1 … | Continue reading
Here’s some good news: Clean power met all electricity demand growth last year for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s according to a new report on global electricity trends from Ember, a U.K. think tank that tracks energy data from around the world. The new review … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer:[1:53] Hello, it’s F … | Continue reading
America’s largest electricity market is looking at hooking up new power generation again, and a lot of it is natural gas.PJM stopped evaluating new generation in 2022, when the backlog of projects awaiting interconnection studies stood at 2,664, of which 1,972 — representing 107 … | Continue reading
Current conditions: The Gulf Coast states are bracing for a series of midweek thunderstorms • Temperatures are rocketing up near 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Lahore, Pakistan • San Juan, Puerto Rico, is facing days of severe thunderstorms. THE TOP FIVE1. Brookfield abandons data cen … | Continue reading
Two House Democrats are going after TotalEnergies after the company ignored an earlier request to defend its $1 billion settlement with the Trump administration to walk away from offshore wind.Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee from Califor … | Continue reading
On March 6, Pennsylvania real estate mogul Brian O’Neill shot a panicked email to Benjamin Kirshner, a top state official, with a plea to the governor. Amazon, wrote the property developer, had just told him “in writing, and I have sent you the e-mail, that they will not be doing … | Continue reading
Current conditions: More than 200 damaging wind reports from Missouri to Indiana came in so far this week as a series of storms wraps up over the Central United States • South Sudan’s capital of Juba is roasting in temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as heavy storms threa … | Continue reading
The Trump administration inked two more agreements to cancel offshore wind leases and reimburse the former leaseholders nearly $1 billion on Monday, demonstrating that its previous deals with TotalEnergies was not a one-off legal settlement but rather a new, repeatable strategy t … | Continue reading
President Trump has announced a dizzying array of executive branch led critical mineral policies since taking office again last year. While bombastically branded as new achievements, many elements from critical mineral tariffs to strategic stockpiling to Defense Production Act fi … | Continue reading
Current conditions: After a springy warm up, temperatures in Northeast cities such as Boston and Atlantic City are plunging back into the low 50 degrees Fahrenheit range for the rest of the week • In India, meanwhile, a northern heatwave is sending temperatures in Gujarat as high … | Continue reading
Here in Los Angeles, the hot new thing in parenting is Waymo. One recent article argued that driverless electric vehicles have become the go-to solution for overscheduled parents who can’t be everywhere at once. No time to drive the kid to school dropoff or to practice? Hire a ri … | Continue reading
Everyone’s mad about high oil prices, but are they doing anything about it? With around 11 million barrels per day (about a tenth of global production) shut in, and thus missing from the global oil market, someone has to be using less of it. Maybe it’s petrochemical plants that r … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Nearly two dozen states from Texas to Minnesota are bracing for days of thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, and winds up to 70 miles per hour • Japan is deploying 1,400 firefighters to battle a wildfire in Iwate prefecture that has forced at least 3,000 people to … | Continue reading
Now in its fourth year, San Francisco Climate Week is noticeably bigger and buzzier each time I go. When I first attended in 2024, everyone was trying to shoehorn generative artificial intelligence into climate solutions. Last year, founders and funders were struggling to figure … | Continue reading
Three climate investors walked onto a boat.That’s not the start of a joke — it’s a description of a panel at Heatmap House, a day of conversations and roundtables with leading policymakers, executives, and investors at San Francisco Climate Week (at the Klamath, a venue made out … | Continue reading
Three climate investors walked onto a boat.That’s not the start of a joke — it’s a description of a panel at Heatmap House, a day of conversations and roundtables with leading policymakers, executives, and investors at San Francisco Climate Week (at the Klamath, a venue made out … | Continue reading
What did you do for Earth Day this year? I spent mine visiting a notoriously loud artificial intelligence campus in Virginia’s Data Center Alley. The experience brought home to me just how big a problem noise can be for the communities adjacent to these tech campuses – and how mu … | Continue reading
New Jersey – Crucial transmission for future offshore wind energy in New Jersey is scrapped for now.The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities on Wednesday canceled the agreement it reached with PJM Interconnection in 2021 to develop wires and a substation necessary to send electri … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Evan Vaughan, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition. The trade group is at the center of things right now, representing many of the 13 states in the PJM Interconnection region, including power-hungry Virginia. MAREC rea … | Continue reading
This week’s conversation is with Evan Vaughn, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Renewable Energy Coalition. The trade group is at the center of things right now, representing many of the 13 states in the PJM Interconnection region, including power-hungry Virginia. MAREC reac … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are pummeling the Mississippi Valley, particularly in Arkansas • Heavy rain has deluged much of the Somali capital of Mogadishu • Temperatures in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit. THE TOP FIVE1 … | Continue reading
Well before the introduction of ChatGPT and Claude, Ireland underwent a data center construction boom similar to the one the U.S. is experiencing today.That makes it a fitting location for Form Energy’s first project outside the U.S. Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO of the long-duration … | Continue reading
Well before the introduction of ChatGPT and Claude, Ireland underwent a data center construction boom similar to the one the U.S. is experiencing today.That makes it a fitting location for Form Energy’s first project outside the U.S. Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO of the long-duration … | Continue reading
Blessed with ample sun and wind for renewables but bedeviled by high electricity prices and natural disasters, California encapsulates the promise and peril of the United States’ energy transition.So it was fitting that Heatmap House, a day of conversations and roundtables with l … | Continue reading
Crucial transmission for future offshore wind energy in New Jersey is scrapped for now. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities on Wednesday canceled the agreement it reached with PJM Interconnection in 2021 to develop wires and substations necessary to send electricity generate … | Continue reading
You may have heard that we could be in for a “super” or even a “super duper” El Niño this year. The difference is non-technical, a matter of how warm the sea surface temperature in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation region of the central-eastern Pacific Ocean gets. An El Niño forms … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Wildfires are raging across the Southeast, with more than 27,000 acres alight in southern Georgia alone • At least two separate blazes have also broken out in Japan’s northeastern Iwate prefecture • A late blizzard is dumping as much as 20 inches of snow on no … | Continue reading
Fervo Energy has become a darling of the clean energy industry by using workers and technology from the oil and gas sector to unlock zero-carbon, all-day geothermal electricity. Last week, Fervo filed to go public, giving us the first deep look at its finances and long-term expan … | Continue reading
This transcript has been automatically generated.Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.Robinson Meyer:[1:06] Hello, it is … | Continue reading
Americans may not agree on much, but it seems fair to say that most are pretty happy that the bald eagle isn’t extinct. When the Senate passed the Endangered Species Act on a 92-0 vote in 1973, bald eagles were among the first on the protected list, their population having crater … | Continue reading
Customers get a whole lot of choice in Texas’ deregulated electricity market — which provider to go with, fixed-rate or variable-rate plan, and contract length are all variables to consider. If a customer wants a home battery as well, that’s yet another exercise in complexity, in … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Illinois far outpaces every other state for tornadoes so far this year, clocking 80, with Mississippi in a distant second with 43 • Western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains face high wildfire risk during the day and frost at night • A magnitude 7.4 earthq … | Continue reading
It is something of a miracle that tens of thousands of companies around the world voluntarily report their greenhouse gas emissions each year. In 2025, more than 22,100 businesses, together worth more than half the global stock market, disclosed this data. Unfortunately, it’s an … | Continue reading
The energy impacts of the continued crisis in the Persian Gulf are obvious. Countries that rely on the natural gas and oil from the region are dealing with higher prices, and in some cases are trying to tamp down their demand for fuel and electricity to keep prices under control, … | Continue reading
A federal court seems to have struck down a swath of Trump administration moves to paralyze solar and wind permits. U.S. District Judge Denise Casper on Tuesday enjoined a raft of actions by the Trump administration that delayed federal renewable energy permits, granting a reques … | Continue reading
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Fernand is heading northward toward Bermuda • In the Pacific, Tropic Storm Juliette is active about 520 miles southwest of Baja California, with winds of up to 65 miles per hour • Temperatures are surging past 100 degrees Fahren … | Continue reading
Local data center conflicts in the U.S. now outnumber clashes over wind farms.More than 270 data centers have faced opposition across the country compared to 258 onshore and offshore wind projects, according to a review of data collected by Heatmap Pro. Data center battles only r … | Continue reading
Fervo, the enhanced geothermal company that uses hydraulic fracturing techniques to drill thousands of feet into the Earth to find pockets of heat to tap for geothermal power, is going public.The Houston-based company was founded in 2017 and has been a longtime favorite of invest … | Continue reading
Six years ago this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began advising that even healthy individuals to wear face coverings to protect themselves against the spread of what we were then still calling the “novel coronavirus.” Mask debates, mandates, bans, and conf … | Continue reading
Current conditions: Temperatures in the Northeast are swinging from last week’s record 90 degrees Fahrenheit to a cold snap with the risk of freezing • After a sunny weekend, the United States’ southernmost capital — Pago Pago, American Samoa — is facing a week of roaring thunder … | Continue reading
John Doerr thinks it’s time to refresh his grand plan for decarbonization. The Kleiner Perkins chairman and climate-focused philanthropist published his book Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now five years ago; then a year later, he introduced an onlin … | Continue reading
When the Trump administration announced it was paying TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to cancel the company’s offshore wind leases, it painted the deal as a mutually beneficial trade: The government would reimburse the company for every penny it spent to acquire the leases, and i … | Continue reading
The Strait of Hormuz appears to maybe be opening up eventually — and the price of oil is collapsing.Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday morning that the waterway was “completely open,” shortly before President Trump declared on Truth Social that the strait was “CO … | Continue reading
It’s been a busy week for funding, with several of the most high-profile deals featured in our daily AM newsletter, including Slate Auto’s $650 million fundraise for its stripped-down electric truck and Rivian’s partnership with Redwood Materials to repurpose the electric automak … | Continue reading