The House on Tuesday passed a bill aimed at shielding Americans from increased electricity costs associated with data centers. The bill requires states to consider taking up standards that would force tech companies to shoulder the electricity cost increases associated with large data centers but doesn’t actually require them to regulate. Read more in The...
The House and Senate are back in Washington, and with the November midterms approaching, Congress has a narrow window to get legislation across the finish line. There’s still a few national priorities that are on the to-do list, and at the top should be delivering a comprehensive bipartisan permitting reform bill to the president’s desk....
The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it is repealing rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas and announced it is taking a separate but related step to prevent future administrations from regulating climate pollution from power plants. The rule change, first proposed last year, represents a fundamental shift from efforts by...
The scale of power requested by data centers joining the grid is straining how utilities have historically connected large customers. When a customer needs vast, uninterrupted power, major system upgrades often follow and those upgrades should be paid for by data centers to the extent they cause them. That's the premise behind the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge: data center energy costs shouldn't slide onto household bills. But holding utilities and hyperscalers to that promise is proving harder than it sounds. A recently-filed data center transmission service agreement shows how, when sound ratemaking principles are overlooked, the true costs imposed by data centers become hard to identify and harder to properly bill.
A federal appeals court on Friday vacated the U.S. Department of Energy’s emergency order requiring the owners of a coal-fired power plant in Michigan to delay its planned retirement, saying the move usurped state authority over generating resources. “The federal government has, until now, issued stopgap generation orders in response only to transitory emergencies caused...
Earlier this month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from forcing hundreds of bison from BLM grazing allotments in Montana. The ruling came months after BLM finalized the decision to revoke the conservation group American Prairie’s grazing permits and clear its bison off federal land by the end of September.
The Protecting Domestic Mining Act (H.R. 1501) just passed the House by a 218–201 vote, with seven Democrats crossing the aisle. The bill, which now heads to the Senate, makes mining and mineral processing eligible for expedited permitting under Title 41 of the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (known as FAST-41) and blocks a Biden-era proposal that would have limited that eligibility to "critical" minerals.
The Environmental Protection Agency has opened another round of public comment on three key terms in a rule defining which bodies of water are subject to regulation, also known as the “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, rule, further lengthening the agency’s timeline for finalizing the rules. The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers announced...
Americans just lived through one chip shortage. They’re about to live through another, and this one could hit their wallets even harder. The culprit this time isn’t a pandemic disrupting factories; it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) boom devouring the world’s memory chip supply. If Washington isn’t careful, the policy response could make the problem worse, not better.
New details of the Trump administration’s agreement to provide Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program are spurring criticism that the landmark deal doesn’t do enough to head off the risk of nuclear proliferation. The text of the accord was shared with lawmakers last week along with a raft of related documents. It outlines a...
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