Latest issue
Batteries Are Becoming the Data Center's Power Utility — and the IEA Just Confirmed Why
9/7/2026
The IEA published a commentary on lithium-ion batteries today — September 7, 2026, the exact date you're reading this — and the timing is almost too perfect. While Ireland's utility regulator is literally proposing to cut gas supply to data centers during winter peaks in exchange…
Recent posts
At 7:56 a.m. on July 22, a mechanical failure knocked a 230 kV transmission line offline in Northern Virginia. What happened next was unlike anything PJM had ever seen. Data center…
Chubu Electric Power just handed nuclear skeptics exactly what they wanted. The utility altered construction reports on the decommissioning of two Hamaoka reactors — falsifying dem…
The Texas grid has an all-time peak demand record of roughly 94 gigawatts. The ERCOT interconnection queue currently holds requests totaling approximately 474 gigawatts of new elec…
The Hormuz headlines have dominated energy coverage for months, but the more consequential price signal right now is happening in European natural gas markets. Bloomberg reports th…
The U.S. Army doesn't do speculative investments. When it awards up to $2.2 billion across five companies to own, construct, and operate nuclear microreactors at military bases fro…
Kimmeridge Energy Management dropped a number this week that deserves more attention than it's getting: up to 50% of proposed US data centers are at risk of delays or outright canc…
The assigned topic — grid frequency instability driven by AI data centers — is a real engineering concern. But the sources in front of me tell a more specific, more damning story:…
The Paks story isn't over. Hungary's Prime Minister announced the restart of the plant's Block 3 reactor after emergency measures — including an underwater barrier constructed in t…
China threw away enough clean electricity in the first half of 2026 to power Mexico for a year. Not because the sun stopped shining or the wind stopped blowing — because the wires…
Rosatom controls roughly 40–46 percent of global uranium enrichment capacity. Let that number sit for a moment. The same civilization that is racing to build AI-powered data center…
The old logic was simple: build data centers near cities, near users, near fiber. The new logic is blunter. Build near power. Reuters reports that the average distance of European…
The numbers landed last week and they're staggering. U.S. electricity consumption will climb from an all-time high of 4,195 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025 to 4,268 billion kWh in 2…
Ninety-nine proposed natural-gas power plants, built specifically to feed data centers, would add roughly 318 million metric tons of CO₂ annually if run at industry-standard utiliz…
A nearly $40-per-barrel price range in a single month. That's not volatility — that's a civilization running on a fuel it cannot control. According to the IEA's August 2026 Oil Mar…
- The 1,066 Gigawatt Mirage: Why AI's Power Demand Is Both Overstated and Understated at the Same Time
The number that's been circulating in grid planning circles is staggering: 1,066 gigawatts of electricity requested by data center projects from U.S. grid operators and utilities.…
France's Gravelines plant lost three reactors to a jellyfish swarm this week. Romania is literally detonating rocks in the Danube to keep its last working reactor cooled. Two separ…
The EIA's August 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook puts Henry Hub at roughly $2.87/mmBtu for Q3 2026 — down about $0.50 from the prior forecast — with prices expected to stay below $3…
Texas just blinked. Governor Greg Abbott ordered a pause on new data center approvals through the state's grid interconnection process, directing ERCOT and the Public Utility Commi…
The grid used to be simple. Utilities built power plants, regulators set rates, customers paid bills. The price of electricity was a negotiated average, spread across millions of r…
