Energy

The US is trying to kick-start a “nuclear energy renaissance”

climate change, Energy, nuclear energy, reactors, Science, syndication / Mike M. / September 13, 2025

Push to revive nuclear energy relies on deregulation; experts say strategy is misplaced.

In May, President Donald Trump signed four executive orders to facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors and the development of nuclear energy technology; the orders aim to cut red tape, ease approval processes, and reshape the role of the main regulatory agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. These moves, the administration said, were part of an effort to achieve American independence from foreign power providers by way of a “nuclear energy renaissance.”

Self-reliance isn’t the only factor motivating nuclear power proponents outside of the administration: Following a decades-long trend away from nuclear energy, in part due to safety concerns and high costs, the technology has emerged as a potential option to try to mitigate climate change. Through nuclear fission, in which atoms are split to release energy, reactors don’t emit any greenhouse gases.

The Trump administration wants to quadruple the nuclear sector’s domestic energy production, with the goal of producing 400 gigawatts by 2050. To help achieve that goal, scientific institutions like the Idaho National Laboratory, a leading research institute in nuclear energy, are pushing forward innovations such as more efficient types of fuel. Companies are also investing millions of dollars to develop their own nuclear reactor designs, a move from industry that was previously unheard of in the nuclear sector. For example, Westinghouse, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear power company, plans to build 10 new large reactors to help achieve the 2050 goal.

However, the road to renaissance is filled with familiar obstacles. Nuclear energy infrastructure is “too expensive to build, and it takes too long to build,” said Allison Macfarlane, a science and technology policy expert at the University of British Columbia who used to chair the NRC from 2012 to 2014.

And experts are divided on whether new nuclear technologies, such as small versions of reactors, are ready for primetime. The nuclear energy field is now “in a hype bubble that is driving unrealistic expectations,” said Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization that has long acted as a nuclear safety watchdog.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to advance nuclear energy by weakening the NRC, Lyman said. “The message is that it’s regulation that has been the obstacle to deploying nuclear power, and if we just get rid of all this red tape, then the industry is going to thrive,” he added. “I think that’s really misplaced.”

Although streamlining the approval process might accelerate development, the true problem lies in the high costs of nuclear, which would need to be significantly cheaper to compete with other sources of energy such as natural gas, said Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear science researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even the license-ready reactors are still not economical,” he said. If the newer reactor technologies do pan out, without government support and subsidies, Shirvan said, it is difficult to imagine them “coming online before 2035.”

It’s déjá vu all over again

Rumblings of a nuclear renaissance give experts a sense of déjà vu. The first resurgence in interest was around 2005, when many thought that nuclear energy could mitigate climate change and be an energy alternative to dwindling supply and rising prices of fossil fuels. But that enthusiasm slowed mainly after the Fukushima accident in 2011, in which a tsunami-triggered power outage—along with multiple safety failures—led to a nuclear meltdown at a facility in Japan. “So, the first nuclear renaissance fizzled out,” said Lyman.

Globally, the proportion of electricity provided by nuclear energy has been dwindling. Although there has been an increase in generation, nuclear energy has contributed less to the share of global electricity demand, dropping to 9 percent in 2024 from a peak of about 17 percent in 2001. In the US, 94 reactors generate about a fifth of the nation’s electricity, a proportion that has held steady since 1990s. But only two of those reactors have come online in the last nearly 30 years.

This renewed push is “a second bite at the apple, and we’ll have to see but it does seem to have a lot more of a headwind now,” said Lyman.

Much of that movement comes from the private sector, said Todd Allen, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. In the last couple of decades, dozens of nuclear energy companies have emerged, including TerraPower, co-founded by Bill Gates. “It feels more like normal capitalism than we ever had in nuclear,” Allen said. Those companies are working on developing the large reactors that have been the backbone of nuclear energy for decades, as well as newer technologies that can bolster the field.

Proponents say small modular reactors, or SMRs, and microreactors, which generate less than 300 megawatts and 20 megawatts, respectively, could offer safer, cheaper, and more flexible energy compared to their more traditional counterparts. (Large reactors have, on average, 900 megawatts of capacity.) One 2022 study found that modularization can reduce construction time by up to 60 percent.

These designs have taken the spotlight: In 2024, a report estimated that the SMR market would reach $295 billion by 2043. In June, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Congress that DOE will have at least three SMRs running by July of next year. And in July of this year, the Nuclear Energy Agency launched a dashboard to track SMR technologies around the world, which identified 74 SMR designs at different stages around the world. The first commercial SMR in North America is currently being constructed in Canada, with plans to be operational by 2030.

But whether SMRs and microreactors are actually safer and more cost-effective remains to be determined. A 2022 study found that SMRs would likely produce more leakage and nuclear waste than conventional reactors. Studying them, though, is difficult since so few are currently operational.

In part, that may be because of cost. Multiple analyses have concluded that, because of rising construction and operating costs, SMRs might not be financially viable enough to compete for the world’s energy markets, including in developing countries that lack affordable access to electricity.

And recent ventures have hit road bumps: For example, NuScale, the only SMR developer with a design approved by the NRC, had to shut down its operations in November 2023 due to increasingly high costs (though another uprated SMR design was approved earlier this year).

“Nothing is really commercialized yet,” said Macfarlane. Most of the tech companies haven’t figured out expenses, supply chains, the kind of waste they are going to produce or security at their reactors, she added.

Fuel supply is also a barrier since most plants use uranium enriched at low rates, but SMRs and microreactors use uranium enriched at higher levels, which is typically sourced from Russia and not commercially available in the US. So scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory are working to recover enriched uranium from existing reactors and developed new, more cost-effective fuels, said Jess Gehin, the associate laboratory director for the Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate at the INL. They are also using artificial intelligence and modeling simulation tools and capabilities to optimize nuclear energy systems, he added: “We got to reach 400 gigawatts, we need to accelerate all of this.”

Companies are determined to face and surpass these barriers. Some have begun pouring concrete, such as one nuclear company called Kairos Power that began building a demo of their SMR design in Tennessee; the plant is projected to be fully operational by 2027. “I would make the case that we’re moving faster than many in the field, if not the fastest,” Mike Laufer, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told Reuters last year.

Some experts think achieving nuclear expansion can be done—and revel in the progress so far: “I would have never thought we’d be in this position where we’re working so hard to expand nuclear, because for most of my career, it wasn’t that way,” said Gehin. “And I would say each month that goes by exceeds my expectations on the next bigger things that are coming.”

Doing more with less?

Although the Trump administration aims to accelerate nuclear energy through executive orders, in practice, it has not allocated new funding yet, said Matt Bowen, an expert on nuclear energy, waste, and nonproliferation at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. In fact, the initial White House budget proposed cutting $4.7 billion from the Department of Energy, including $408 million from the Office of Nuclear Energy allocated for nuclear research in the 2026 fiscal year.

“The administration was proposing cuts to Office of Nuclear Energy and DOE more broadly, and DOGE is pushing staff out,” said Bowen. “How do you do more with less? Less staff, less money.”

The Trump administration places the blame for the nuclear sector’s stagnation on the NRC, which oversees licensing and recertification processes that cost the industry millions of dollars each year in compliance. In his executive orders, Trump called for a major reorganization of the NRC. Some of the proposed changes, like streamlining the approval process (which can take years for new plants), may be welcomed because “for a long time, they were very, very, very slow,” said Charles Forsberg, a nuclear chemical engineer at MIT. But there are worries that the executive orders could do more than cut red tape.

“Every word in those orders is of concern, because the thrust of those orders is to essentially strip the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its independence from the executive branch, essentially nullifying the original purpose,” said Lyman.

Some experts fear that with these new constraints, NRC staff will have less time and fewer resources to do their jobs, which could impact power plant safety in the future. Bowen said: “This notion that the problem for nuclear energy is regulation, and so all we need to do is deregulate, is both wrong and also really problematic.”

The next few decades will tell whether nuclear, especially SMRs, can overcome economic and technical challenges to safely contribute to decarbonization efforts. Some, like Gehin, are optimistic. “I think we’re going to accelerate,” he said. “We certainly can achieve a dramatic deployment if we put our mindset to it.”

But making nuclear financially competitive will take serious commitment from the government and the dozens of companies, with many still skeptical, Shirvan said. “I am quite, I would say, on the pessimistic scale when it comes to the future of nuclear energy in the US.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Feds try to dodge lawsuit against their bogus climate report

climate change, doe, Energy, EPA, greenhouse gasses, lawsuit, Policy, Science / Mike M. / September 13, 2025

Meanwhile, Congress is trying to keep serious scientists from weighing in.

While the Trump administration has continued to refer to efforts to avoid the worst impacts of climate change as a scam, it has done almost nothing to counter the copious scientific evidence that demonstrates that climate change is real and doing real damage to the citizens of the US. The lone exception has been a draft Department of Energy report prepared by a handful of carefully chosen fringe figures that questioned the mainstream understanding of climate change. The shoddy work and questionable conclusions of that report were so extensive that an analysis of it required over 450 pages to detail all of its shortcomings.

But its shortcomings may not have been limited to the science, as a lawsuit alleges that its preparation violated a law that regulates the activities of federal advisory panels. Now, in an attempt to avoid dealing with that lawsuit, the Department of Energy is claiming that it dissolved the committee that prepared the report, making the lawsuit moot.

Meanwhile, Congress is also attempting to muddy the waters. In response to the DOE report, the National Academies of Science announced that it would prepare a report describing the current state of climate science. Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight have responded by announcing an investigation of the National Academies “for undermining the EPA.”

The vanishing committee

As we noted in our original coverage, the members of the advisory group that prepared the DOE report were carefully chosen for having views that are well outside the mainstream of climate science. Based on their past public statements, they could be counted on to produce a report that would question the severity of climate change and raise doubts about whether we had any evidence it was happening. The report they produced went beyond that by suggesting that the net effect of our carbon emissions was likely to be a positive for humanity.

Not only was that shoddy science, but a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists suggested that it was likely illegal. Groups like the one that wrote the report, the suit alleges, fall under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which (among other things) dictates that these groups must be “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented,” rather than be selected in order to reinforce a single point of view.

The “among other things” that the law dictates is that the advisory groups have public meetings that are announced in advance, be chartered with a well-defined mission, and all of their records be made available to the public. In contrast, nobody within the Department of Energy, including the contrarians who wrote the report, acknowledged the work they were doing publicly until the day the draft report was released.

The suit alleges that the work of this group fell under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and the group violated the act in all of the above ways and more. The act asks the courts to force the DOE to disclose all the relevant records involved with the preparation of the report, and to cease relying on it for any regulatory actions. That’s significant because the Environmental Protection Agency cited it in its attempts to roll back its prior finding that greenhouse gases posed a danger to the US public.

This week, the DOE responded in court by claiming the panel that produced the report had been dissolved, making the suit moot. That does not address the fact that the EPA is continuing to rely on the report in its attempts to argue there’s no point in regulating greenhouse gases. It also leaves the report itself in a weird limbo. Its release marked the start of a period of public comment, and said comments were supposed to be considered during the revisions that would take place before the draft was finalized.

Failure to complete the revision process would leave the EPA vulnerable to claims that it’s relying on an incomplete draft report for its scientific justifications. So, while the DOE’s tactics may protect some of its internal documents, it may ultimately cause larger problems for the Trump administration’s agenda.

Attacking the academies

Earlier this year, we were critical of the US’s National Academies of Science for seemingly refusing to respond to the Trump administration’s attacks on science. That reticence appeared to end in August with the release of the DOE climate report and the announcement that the EPA was using that report as the latest word on climate science, which it argued had changed considerably since the initial EPA decisions on this issue in 2009.

In response, the National Academies announced that it would fast-track a new analysis of the risks posed by greenhouse gases, this one done by mainstream scientists instead of a handful of fringe figures. The goal was to get it done before the EPA closed its public comment period on its proposal to ignore greenhouse gases.

Obviously, this poses a threat to the EPA’s planned actions, which apparently prompted Republicans in Congress to step in. Earlier this month, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), announced he was investigating the National Academies for preparing this report, calling it “a blatant partisan act to undermine the Trump Administration.”

Comer has also sent a letter to the National Academies, outlining his concerns and demanding a variety of documents. Some of these are pretty convoluted: “The study is led by a National Academies member who serves as an external advisor to the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which has ties to the left-wing group Arabella Advisors through the New Venture Fund, an organization that promotes a variety of progressive causes and funds major climate litigation,” Comer says, suggesting … it’s not entirely clear what. Another member of the study panel had the audacity to endorse former President Biden for his climate policies. Separately, Comer says he’s concerned about the source of the funds that will pay for this study.

Some of Comer’s demands are consistent with this, focusing on funding for this review. But he goes well beyond that, demanding a list of all the National Academies’ sources of funding, as well as any internal communications about this study. He’s also going on a bit of a witch hunt within the federal government, demanding any communications the NAS has had with government employees regarding the DOE’s report or the EPA’s greenhouse gas decisions.

It’s pretty clear that Comer recognizes that any unbiased presentation of climate science is going to undercut the EPA’s rationale for reversing course on greenhouse gas regulations. So, he’s preparing in advance to undercut that presentation by claiming it’s rife with conflicts of interest—and he’s willing to include “supporting politicians who want to act on climate change” as a conflict.

All of this maneuvering is taking place before the EPA has even finalized its planned U-turn on greenhouse gases, a step that will undoubtedly trigger additional investigations and lawsuits. In many ways, this is likely to reflect many of these parties laying the groundwork for the legal fight to come. And, while some of this is ostensibly about the state of the science that has supported the EPA’s past policy decisions, it’s clear that the administration and its supporters are doing their best to minimize science’s impact on their preferred course of action.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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Trump admin issues stop-work order for offshore wind project

Energy, Science, Trump, Wind / Mike M. / August 26, 2025

In a statement to Politico’s E&E News days after the order was lifted in May, the White House claimed that Hochul “caved” and struck an agreement to allow “two natural gas pipelines to advance” through New York.

Hochul denied that any such deal was made.

Trump has made no effort to conceal his disdain for wind power and other renewable energies, and his administration has actively sought to stymie growth in the industry while providing what critics have described as “giveaways” to fossil fuels.

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump called wind and solar energy the “SCAM OF THE CENTURY,” criticizing states that have built and rely on them for power.

“We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” Trump wrote. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”

On Trump’s first day in office, the president issued a memorandum halting approvals, permits, leases, and loans for both offshore and onshore wind projects.

The GOP also targeted wind energy in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, accelerating the phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar projects while mandating lease sales for fossil fuels and making millions of acres of federal land available for mining.

The administration’s subsequent consideration of rules to further restrict access to tax credits for wind and solar projects alarmed even some Republicans, prompting Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Utah Sen. John Curtis to place holds on Treasury nominees as they awaited the department’s formal guidance.

Those moves have rattled the wind industry and created uncertainty about the viability of ongoing and future projects.

“The unfortunate message to investors is clear: the US is no longer a reliable place for long-term energy investments,” said the American Clean Power Association, a trade association, in a statement on Friday.

To Kathleen Meil, local clean energy deployment director at the League of Conservation Voters, that represents a loss not only for the environment but also for the US economy.

“It’s really easy to think about the visible—the 4,200 jobs across all phases of development that you see… They’ve hit more than 2 million union work hours on Revolution Wind,” Meil said.

“But what’s also really transformational is that it’s already triggered $1.3 billion in investment through the supply chain. So it’s not just coastal communities that are benefiting from these jobs,” she said.

“This hurts so many people. And why? There’s just no justification.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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AI in Wyoming may soon use more electricity than state’s human residents

AI, ai data center, AI development tools, AI infrastructure, AI policy, Biz & IT, Cheyenne, Chris Lehane, Crusoe, datacenters, Energy, machine learning, Mark Gordon, Meta, microsoft, natural gas, openai, oracle, Patrick Collins, Policy, renewable energy, Tallgrass, wyoming / 9u50fv / July 30, 2025

Wyoming’s data center boom

Cheyenne is no stranger to data centers, having attracted facilities from Microsoft and Meta since 2012 due to its cool climate and energy access. However, the new project pushes the state into uncharted territory. While Wyoming is the nation’s third-biggest net energy supplier, producing 12 times more total energy than it consumes (dominated by fossil fuels), its electricity supply is finite.

While Tallgrass and Crusoe have announced the partnership, they haven’t revealed who will ultimately use all this computing power—leading to speculation about potential tenants.

A potential connection to OpenAI’s Stargate AI infrastructure project, announced in January, remains a subject of speculation. When asked by The Associated Press if the Cheyenne project was part of this effort, Crusoe spokesperson Andrew Schmitt was noncommittal. “We are not at a stage that we are ready to announce our tenant there,” Schmitt said. “I can’t confirm or deny that it’s going to be one of the Stargate.”

OpenAI recently activated the first phase of a Crusoe-built data center complex in Abilene, Texas, in partnership with Oracle. Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, told The Associated Press last week that the Texas facility generates “roughly and depending how you count, about a gigawatt of energy” and represents “the largest data center—we think of it as a campus—in the world.”

OpenAI has committed to developing an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity through an agreement with Oracle. “We’re now in a position where we have, in a really concrete way, identified over five gigawatts of energy that we’re going to be able to build around,” Lehane told the AP. The company has not disclosed locations for these expansions, and Wyoming was not among the 16 states where OpenAI said it was searching for data center sites earlier this year.

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Trump promised a drilling boom, but US energy industry hasn’t been interested

Energy, fossil fuels, Science, syndication / Beth Washington / July 29, 2025

Exec: “Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry.”

“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.

Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.

The White House is discovering, perhaps the hard way, that energy markets aren’t easily managed from the Oval Office—even as it moves to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, offers up more public lands for drilling at reduced royalty rates, and axes Biden-era incentives for wind and solar.

“The industry is going to do what the industry is going to do,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, director for public lands at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank.

That’s because the price of oil, the world’s most-traded commodity, is more responsive to global demand and supply dynamics than to domestic policy and posturing.

The market is flush with supplies at the moment, as the Saudi Arabia-led cartel of oil-producing nations known as OPEC+ allows more barrels to flow while China, the world’s top oil consumer, curbs its consumption. Within the US, a boom in energy demand driven by rapid electrification and AI-serving data centers is boosting power costs for homes and businesses, yet fossil fuel producers are not rushing to ramp up drilling.

There is one key indicator of drilling levels that the industry has watched closely for more than 80 years: a weekly census of active oil and gas rigs published by Baker Hughes. When Trump came into office January 20, the US rig count was 580. Last week, the most recent figure, it was down to 542—hovering just above a four-year low reached earlier in the month.

The most glaring factor behind this stagnant rig count is the current level of crude oil prices. Take the US benchmark grade: West Texas Intermediate crude. Its prices were near $66 a barrel on July 28, after hitting a four-year low of $62 in May. The break-even level for drilling new wells is somewhere close to $60 per barrel, according to oil and gas experts.

That’s before you account for the fallout of elevated tariffs on steel and other imports for the many companies that get their pipes and drilling equipment from overseas, said Robert Rapier, editor-in-chief of Shale Magazine, who has two decades of experience as a chemical engineer.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ quarterly survey of over 130 oil and gas producers based in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, conducted in June, suggests the industry’s outlook is pessimistic. Nearly half of the 38 firms that responded to this question saw their firms drilling fewer wells this year than they had earlier expected.

Survey participants could also submit comments. One executive from an exploration and production (E&P) company said, “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and DC rhetoric could have been for US E&P companies.” Another executive said, “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”

Roughly one in three survey respondents chalked up the expectations for fewer wells to higher tariffs on steel imports. And three in four said tariffs raised the cost of drilling and completing new wells.

“They’re getting more places to drill and they’re getting some lower royalties, but they’re also getting these tariffs that they don’t want,” Rapier said. “And the bottom line is their profits are going to suffer.”

Earlier this month, ExxonMobil estimated that its profit in the April-June quarter will be roughly $1.5 billion lower than in the previous three months because of weaker oil and gas prices. And over in Europe, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies issued similar warnings to investors about hits to their respective profits.

These warnings come even as Trump has installed friendly faces to regulate the oil and gas sector, including at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior, the latter of which manages federal lands and is gearing up to auction more oil and gas leases on those lands.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for a window of opportunity to make investments. But there’s also a lot of caution about wanting to make sure that if there’s regulatory reforms, they’re going to stick,” said Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, which produces analyses for energy companies and investors.

The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains provisions requiring four onshore and two offshore lease sales every year, lowering the minimum royalty rate to 12.5 percent from 16.67 percent, and bringing back speculative leasing—when lands that don’t invite enough bids are leased for less money—that was stopped in 2022.

“Pro-energy policies play a critical role in strengthening domestic production,” said a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil and gas industry group. “The new tax legislation unlocks opportunities for safe, responsible development in critical resource basins to deliver the affordable, reliable fuel Americans rely on.”

Because about half of the federal royalties end up with the states and localities where the drilling occurs, “budgets in these oil and gas communities are going to be hit hard,” Rowland-Shea of American Progress said. Meanwhile, she said, drilling on public lands can pollute the air, raise noise levels, cause spills or leaks, and restrict movement for both people and wildlife.

Earlier this year, Congress killed an EPA rule finalized in November that would have charged oil and gas companies for flaring excess methane from their operations.

“Folks in the Trump camp have long said that the Biden administration was killing drilling by enforcing these regulations on speculative leasing and reining in methane pollution,” said Rowland-Shea. “And yet under Biden, we saw the highest production of oil and gas in history.”

In fact, the top three fossil fuel producers collectively earned less during Trump’s first term than they did in either of President Barack Obama’s terms or under President Joe Biden. “It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry,” said Rapier.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Trump administration’s actions won’t have long-lasting climate implications. Even though six months may be a significant amount of time in political accounting, investment decisions in the energy sector are made over longer horizons, ClearView’s Book said. As long as the planned lease sales take place, oil companies can snap up and sit on public lands until they see more favorable conditions for drilling.

It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry.

What could pad the demand for oil and gas is how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will withdraw or dilute the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives and subsidies for renewable energy sources. “With the kneecapping of wind and solar, that’s going to put a lot more pressure on fossil fuels to fill that gap,” Rowland-Shea said.

However, the economics of solar and wind are increasingly too attractive to ignore. With electricity demand exceeding expectations, Book said, “any president looking ahead at end-user prices and power supply might revisit or take a flexible position if they find themselves facing shortage.”

A recent United Nations report found that “solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive—and the fastest—option for new electricity generation.” That is why Texas, deemed the oil capital of the world, produces more wind power than any other state and also led the nation in new solar capacity in the last two years.

Renewables like wind and solar, said Rowland-Shea, are “a truly abundant and American source of energy.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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White House unveils sweeping plan to “win” global AI race through deregulation

AI, AI and work, AI development tools, AI ethics, AI infrastructure, AI law, AI regulation, AI research, AI security, biosecurity, Biz & IT, china, Chips Act, data centers, David Sacks, Deepfakes, Department of Commerce, Donald Trump, Energy, Export controls, machine learning, Michael Kratsios, national security, NIST, Open Source, Policy, semiconductors, White House / 9u50fv / July 24, 2025

Trump’s plan was not welcomed by everyone. J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate for Public Citizen, in a statement provided to Ars, criticized Trump as giving “sweetheart deals” to tech companies that would cause “electricity bills to rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI data centers.”

Infrastructure demands and energy requirements

Trump’s new AI plan tackles infrastructure head-on, stating that “AI is the first digital service in modern life that challenges America to build vastly greater energy generation than we have today.” To meet this demand, it proposes streamlining environmental permitting for data centers through new National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) exemptions, making federal lands available for construction and modernizing the power grid—all while explicitly rejecting “radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape.”

The document embraces what it calls a “Build, Baby, Build!” approach—echoing a Trump campaign slogan—and promises to restore semiconductor manufacturing through the CHIPS Program Office, though stripped of “extraneous policy requirements.”

On the technology front, the plan directs Commerce to revise NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework to “eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” Federal procurement would favor AI developers whose systems are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” The document strongly backs open source AI models and calls for exporting American AI technology to allies while blocking administration-labeled adversaries like China.

Security proposals include high-security military data centers and warnings that advanced AI systems “may pose novel national security risks” in cyberattacks and weapons development.

Critics respond with “People’s AI Action Plan”

Before the White House unveiled its plan, more than 90 organizations launched a competing “People’s AI Action Plan” on Tuesday, characterizing the Trump administration’s approach as “a massive handout to the tech industry” that prioritizes corporate interests over public welfare. The coalition includes labor unions, environmental justice groups, and consumer protection nonprofits.

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Spanish blackout report: Power plants meant to stabilize voltage didn’t

electricity, Energy, grid stability, Portugal, Science, spain / Mike M. / June 19, 2025

The blackout that took down the Iberian grid serving Spain and Portugal in April was the result of a number of smaller interacting problems, according to an investigation by the Spanish government. The report concludes that several steps meant to address a small instability made matters worse, eventually leading to a self-reinforcing cascade where high voltages caused power plants to drop off the grid, thereby increasing the voltage further. Critically, the report suggests that the Spanish grid operator had an unusually low number of plants on call to stabilize matters, and some of the ones it did have responded poorly.

The full report will be available later today; however, the government released a summary ahead of its release. The document includes a timeline of the events that triggered the blackout, as well as an analysis of why grid management failed to keep it in check. It also notes that a parallel investigation checked for indications of a cyberattack and found none.

Oscillations and a cascade

The document notes that for several days prior to the blackout, the Iberian grid had been experiencing voltage fluctuations—products of a mismatch between supply and demand—that had been managed without incident. These continued through the morning of April 28 until shortly after noon, when an unusual frequency oscillation occurred. This oscillation has been traced back to a single facility on the grid, but the report doesn’t identify it or even indicate its type, simply referring to it as an “instalación.”

The grid operators responded in a way that suppressed the oscillations but increased the voltages on the grid. About 15 minutes later, a weakened version of this oscillation occurred again, followed shortly thereafter by oscillations at a different frequency, this one with properties that are commonly seen on European grids. That prompted the grid operators to take corrective steps again, which increased the voltages on the grid.

The Iberian grid is capable of handling this sort of thing. But the grid operator only scheduled 10 power plants to handle voltage regulation on the 28th, which the report notes is the lowest total it had committed to in all of 2025 up to that point. The report found that a number of those plants failed to respond properly to the grid operators, and a few even responded in a way that contributed to the surging voltages.

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Could floating solar panels on a reservoir help the Colorado River?

Energy, Science, solar panels, syndication, water conservation / DJ Henderson / June 2, 2025

Floating solar panels appear to conserve water while generating green electricity.

The Gila River Indian Community in Arizona has lined 3,000 feet of their canals with solar panels. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News

GILA RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz.—About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farm’s shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert.

The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh tribes—known together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC—on their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the US. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the desert’s unflinching sun and wind.

In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely watched water users in the West in the process.

The community’s investments come at a critical time for the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people across seven Western states, Mexico and 30 tribes, including GRIC. Annual consumption from the river regularly exceeds its supply, and a decadeslong drought, fueled in part by climate change, continues to leave water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead dangerously low.

Covering water with solar panels is not a new idea. But for some it represents an elegant mitigation of water shortages in the West. Doing so could reduce evaporation, generate more carbon-free electricity and require dams to run less frequently to produce power.

But, so far, the technology has not been included in the ongoing Colorado River negotiations between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, tribes and Mexico. All are expected to eventually agree on cuts to the system’s water allocations to maintain the river’s ability to provide water and electricity for residents and farms, and keep its ecosystem alive.

“People in the US don’t know about [floating solar] yet,” said Scott Young, a former policy analyst in the Nevada state legislature’s counsel bureau. “They’re not willing to look at it and try and factor it” into the negotiations.

Several Western water managers Inside Climate News contacted for this story said they were open to learning more about floating solar—Colorado has even studied the technology through pilot projects. But, outside of GRIC’s project, none knew of any plans to deploy floating solar anywhere in the basin. Some listed costly and unusual construction methods and potentially modest water savings as the primary obstacles to floating solar maturing in the US.

A tantalizing technology with tradeoffs

A winery in Napa County, California, deployed the first floating solar panels in the US on an irrigation pond in 2007. The country was still years away from passing federal legislation to combat the climate crisis, and the technology matured here haltingly. As recently as 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis, most of the world’s 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity had been built in Asia.

Unlike many Asian countries, the US has an abundance of undeveloped land where solar could be constructed, said Prateek Joshi, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has studied floating solar, among other forms of energy. “Even though [floating solar] may play a smaller role, I think it’s a critical role in just diversifying our energy mix and also reducing the burden of land use,” he said.

This February, NREL published a study that found floating solar on the reservoirs behind federally owned dams could provide enough electricity to power 100 million US homes annually, but only if all the developable space on each reservoir were used.

Lake Powell could host almost 15 gigawatts of floating solar using about 23 percent of its surface area, and Lake Mead could generate over 17 gigawatts of power on 28 percent of its surface. Such large-scale development is “probably not going to be the case,” Joshi said, but even if a project used only a fraction of the developable area, “there’s a lot of power you could get from a relatively small percentage of these Colorado Basin reservoirs.”

The study did not measure how much water evaporation floating solar would prevent, but previous NREL research has shown that photovoltaic panels—sometimes called “floatovoltaics” when they are deployed on reservoirs—could also save water by changing the way hydropower is deployed.

Some of a dam’s energy could come from solar panels floating on its reservoir to prevent water from being released solely to generate electricity. As late as December, when a typical Western dam would be running low, lakes with floating solar could still have enough water to produce hydropower, reducing reliance on more expensive backup energy from gas-fired power plants.

Joshi has spoken with developers and water managers about floating solar before, and said there is “an eagerness to get this [technology] going.” The technology, however, is not flawless.

Solar arrays can be around 20 percent more expensive to install on water than land, largely because of the added cost of buoys that keep the panels afloat, according to a 2021 NREL report. The water’s cooling effect can boost panel efficiency, but floating solar panels may produce slightly less energy than a similarly sized array on land because they can’t be tilted as directly toward the sun as land-based panels.

And while the panels likely reduce water loss from reservoirs, they may also increase a water body’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the climate and increase evaporation. This January, researchers at Cornell University found that floating solar covering more than 70 percent of a pond’s surface area increased the water’s CO2 and methane emissions. These kinds of impacts “should be considered not only for the waterbody in which [floating solar] is deployed but also in the broader context of trade-offs of shifting energy production from land to water,” the study’s authors wrote.

“Any energy technology has its tradeoffs,” Joshi said, and in the case of floating solar, some of its benefits—reduced evaporation and land use—may not be easy to express in dollars and cents.

Silver buckshot

There is perhaps no bigger champion for floating solar in the West than Scott Young. Before he retired in 2016, he spent much of his 18 years working for the Nevada Legislature researching the effects of proposed legislation, especially in the energy sector.

On an overcast, blustery May day in southwest Wyoming near his home, Young said that in the past two years he has promoted the technology to Colorado River negotiators, members of Congress, environmental groups and other water managers from the seven basin states, all of whom he has implored to consider the virtues of floating solar arrays on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Young grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, about 40 miles, he estimated, from the pioneering floating solar panels in Napa. He stressed that he does not have any ties to industry; he is just a concerned Westerner who wants to diversify the region’s energy mix and save as much water as possible.

But so far, when he has been able to get someone’s attention, Young said his pitch has been met with tepid interest. “Usually the response is: ‘Eh, that’s kind of interesting,’” said Young, dressed in a black jacket, a maroon button-down shirt and a matching ball cap that framed his round, open face. “But there’s no follow-up.”

The Bureau of Reclamation “has not received any formal proposals for floating solar on its reservoirs,” said an agency spokesperson, who added that the bureau has been monitoring the technology.

In a 2021 paper published with NREL, Reclamation estimated that floating solar on its reservoirs could generate approximately 1.5 terawatts of electricity, enough to power about 100 million homes. But, in addition to potentially interfering with recreation, aquatic life, and water safety, floating solar’s effect on evaporation proved difficult to model broadly.

So many environmental factors determine how water is lost or consumed in a reservoir—solar intensity, wind, humidity, lake circulation, water depth, and temperature—that the study’s authors concluded Reclamation “should be wary of contractors’ claims of evaporation savings” without site-specific studies. Those same factors affect the panels’ efficiency, and in turn, how much hydropower would need to be generated from the reservoir they cover.

The report also showed the Colorado River was ripe with floating solar potential—more than any other basin in the West. That’s particularly true in the Upper Basin, where Young has been heartened by Colorado’s approach to the technology.

In 2023, the state passed a law requiring several agencies to study the use of floating solar. Last December, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published its findings, and estimated that the state could save up to 407,000 acre feet of water by deploying floating solar on certain reservoirs. An acre foot covers one acre with a foot of water, or 325,851 gallons, just about three year’s worth of water for a family of four.

When Young saw the Colorado study quantifying savings from floating solar, he felt hopeful. “407,000 acre feet from one state,” he said. “I was hoping that would catch people’s attention.”

Saving that much water would require using over 100,000 acres of surface water, said Cole Bedford, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s chief operating officer, in an email. “On some of these reservoirs a [floating solar] system would diminish the recreational value such that it would not be appropriate,” he said. “On others, recreation, power generation, and water savings could be balanced.”

Colorado is not planning to develop another project in the wake of this study, and Bedford said that the technology is not a silver bullet solution for Colorado River negotiations.

“While floating solar is one tool in the toolkit for water conservation, the only true solution to the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin is a shift to supply-driven, sustainable uses and operations,” he said.

Some of the West’s largest and driest cities, like Phoenix and Denver, ferry Colorado River water to residents hundreds of miles away from the basin using a web of infrastructure that must reliably operate in unforgiving terrain. Like their counterparts at the state level, water managers in these cities have heard floatovoltaics floated before, but they say the technology is currently too immature and costly to be deployed in the US.

In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) delivers much of the Colorado River water used by Phoenix, Tucson, tribes, and other southern Arizona communities with a 336-mile canal running through the desert, and Lake Pleasant, the company’s 811,784-acre-foot reservoir.

Though CAP is following GRIC’s deployment of solar over canals, it has no immediate plans to build solar over its canal, or Lake Pleasant, according to Darrin Francom, CAP’s assistant general manager for operations, power, engineering, and maintenance, in part because the city of Peoria technically owns the surface water.

Covering the whole canal with solar to save the 4,000 acre feet that evaporates from it could be prohibitively expensive for CAP. “The dollar cost per that acre foot [saved] is going to be in the tens of, you know, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Francom said, mainly due to working with novel equipment and construction methods. “Ultimately,” he continued, “those costs are going to be borne by our ratepayers,” which gives CAP reason to pursue other lower-cost ways to save water, like conservation programs, or to seek new sources.

An intake tower moves water into and out of the dam at Lake Pleasant. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News

The increased costs associated with building solar panels on water instead of on land has made such projects unpalatable to Denver Water, Colorado’s largest water utility, which moves water out of the Colorado River Basin and through the Rocky Mountains to customers on the Front Range. “Floating solar doesn’t pencil out for us for many reasons,” said Todd Hartman, a company spokesperson. “Were we to add more solar resources—which we are considering—we have abundant land-based options.”

GRIC spent about $5.6 million, financed with Inflation Reduction Act grants, to construct 3,000 feet of solar over a canal, according to David DeJong, project director for the community’s irrigation district.

Young is aware there is no single solution to the problems plaguing the Colorado River Basin, and he knows floating solar is not a perfect technology. Instead, he thinks of it as a “silver buckshot,” he said, borrowing a term from John Entsminger, general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority—a technology that can be deployed alongside a constellation of behavioral changes to help keep the Colorado River alive.

Given the duration and intensity of the drought in the West and the growing demand for water and clean energy, Young believes the US needs to act now to embed this technology into the fabric of Western water management going forward.

As drought in the West intensifies, “I think more lawmakers are going to look at this,” he said. “If you can save water in two ways—why not?”

“We’re not going to know until we try”

If all goes according to plan, GRIC’s West Side Reservoir will be finished and ready to store Colorado River water by the end of July. The community wants to cover just under 60 percent of the lake’s surface area with floating solar.

“Do we know for a fact that this is going to be 100 percent effective and foolproof? No,” said DeJong, GRIC’s project director for its irrigation district. “But we’re not going to know until we try.”

Solar panels over the canal — The Gila River Indian Community spent about $5.6 million, with the help of Inflation Reduction Act grants, to cover a canal with solar. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News

GRIC’s panels will have a few things going for them that projects on lakes Mead or Powell probably wouldn’t. West Side Reservoir will not be open to recreation, limiting the panels’ impacts on people. And the community already has the funds—Inflation Reduction Act grants and some of its own money—to pay for the project.

But GRIC’s solar ambitions may be threatened by the hostile posture toward solar and wind energy from the White House and congressional Republicans, and the project is vulnerable to an increasingly volatile economy. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump, aided by billionaire Elon Musk, has made deep cuts in renewable energy grants at the Environmental Protection Agency. It is unclear whether or to what extent the Bureau of Reclamation has slashed its grant programs.

“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, the Department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently,” said a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees Reclamation. “This includes ensuring Bureau of Reclamation projects that use funds from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act align with administration priorities. Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality, and other criteria. Projects have been approved for obligation under this process so that critical work can continue.”

And Trump’s tariffs could cause costs to balloon beyond the community’s budget, which could either reduce the size of the array or cause delays in soliciting proposals, DeJong said.

While the community will study the panels over canals to understand the water’s effects on solar panel efficiency, it won’t do similar research on the panels on West Side Reservoir, though DeJong said they have been in touch with NREL about studying them. The enterprise will be part of the system that may one day offset all the electrical demand and carbon footprint of GRIC’s irrigation system.

“The community, they love these types of innovative projects. I love these innovative projects,” said GRIC Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, standing in front of the canals in April. Lewis had his dark hair pulled back in a long ponytail and wore a blue button down that matched the color of the sky.

“I know for a fact this is inspiring a whole new generation of water protectors—those that want to come back and they want to go into this cutting-edge technology,” he said. “I couldn’t be more proud of our team for getting this done.”

DeJong feels plenty of other water managers across the West could learn from what is happening at GRIC. In fact, the West Side Reservoir was intentionally constructed near Interstate 10 so that people driving by on the highway could one day see the floating solar the community intends to build there, DeJong said.

“It could be a paradigm shift in the Western United States,” he said. “We recognize all of the projects we’re doing are pilot projects. None of them are large scale. But it’s the beginning.”

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