Construction of the final segment of the Southwest Intertie Project, a 576-mile transmission corridor connecting an area from Idaho to just south of Las Vegas, Nevada, is underway. Officials celebrated the latest milestone for the installation during a groundbreaking ceremony in Ely, Nevada, on September 3.
Michael Skelly knows it’s hard to build a huge transmission line that connects different regions of the grid. He has spent a decade trying to get one up and running.
But Skelly, now CEO of Grid United, thinks his current attempt to build a first-of-its-kind transmission line is on the right track. And he’s gotten a consortium of utilities from Minnesota to Oregon, and officials in the U.S. Department of Energy through both the Biden and Trump administrations, to back it up.
Grid United’s North Plains Connector will be a 420-mile, 3-gigawatt high-voltage direct current (HVDC) link between Montana and North Dakota. It will require an estimated $6 billion in investment across both states, and won’t be completed until 2032 at the earliest.
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 road map for how uranium might be enriched in the kingdom’s territory after further consultations, including at a level of nearly 20%.
A set of 13 “high value” inter- and intraregional transmission projects in the Eastern Interconnection could produce up to $15.3 billion in net system value through 2050, according to a study released Tuesday.
Also, the transmission projects would lower retail electricity rates, enhance system reliability and improve resilience to extreme weather events, according to Powering Growth and Affordability: The Role of Transmission in Economic and National Security, which was prepared by S&P Global’s CERA Consulting for the Electricity Customer Alliance, National Grid and Converge Strategies.
Europe’s heat waves and record-breaking droughts are depleting freshwater resources while simultaneously driving up demand for water. This hazardous combination is putting a strain on the Old Continent’s water supply infrastructure, which is already aging and increasingly vulnerable to leaks, overflows, and other climate-related disruptions.
>>>READ: Policy Inaction Threatens the West’s Energy and Water Supplies
This is particularly problematic for European cities, which were built in an era where climate change was largely a non-issue and now must contend with its growing impacts alongside aging infrastructure.
The good thing is, that, for many cities facing these pressures, better does not always mean starting from scratch. Some communities are realizing their capacity to leverage technology to optimize the systems they already have.
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Washington, D.C.-based Xylem is helping communities do exactly that. The water technology provider operates in more than 150 countries, delivering water solutions to a variety of markets, from residential buildings and commercial facilities to the food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries. Its portfolio of offerings spans the entire water cycle, from water transport, treatment, and monitoring.
Its technologies include heavy-duty Flygt and Goulds Water Technology pumps for moving sewage and stormwater, as well as Wedeco disinfection systems and Sanitaire biological treatment technologies for purifying wastewater.
Through its Sensus brand, Xylem also ensures that water is being managed efficiently. To help utilities monitor their water usage, identify leaks, and detect water losses, Xylem leverages a wide array of “smart water” technologies connected to intelligent meters and real-time monitoring systems.
These capabilities translate into real-time savings for customers.
>>>READ: Can We Refill the Great Salt Lake?
Leveraging Xylem’s “smart sewer” technology, the community of South Bend, Indiana, was able to save around $400 million in planned infrastructure spending. This is because Xylem was able to retrofit its technology into the city’s existing sewer system, as opposed to building an entirely new system from scratch––the presumed solution at the time. Not only did the city avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure costs, but roughly one billion gallons of polluted water are now prevented from contaminating the St. Joseph River every year.
This is just one of many success stories enabled by the company.
As deadly heat waves and prolonged dry spells intensify water scarcity, water technology companies like Xylem will become indispensable for helping utilities and communities do more with less.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator on Friday proposed a set of requirements large loads must meet before they can connect to the grid, including ramping and ride-through specifications.
The “interconnection reliability requirements” framework aims to improve MISO’s visibility into large load “characteristics and behavior, support reliable planning and operational decision-making, and establish scalable and technically justified expectations proportional to demonstrated reliability risk,” the grid operator said in its filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
There’s never been a better time to build energy storage in the U.S. than right now.
Grid batteries — which sop up power when it’s abundant and discharge that energy when it’s needed — have been ascendant for a decade, as the price of the underlying lithium-ion cells fell precipitously. Bolstered by plummeting costs and increasing familiarity with the tech, developers started building bigger and in more parts of the country.
Now, the U.S. power sector has added more battery capacity in the second quarter of this year than any quarter ever, according to a report out today from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Even as the wind and solar industries face uncertain futures, the outlook for continued battery growth is so strong that Benchmark Minerals upped the prediction for cumulative installs through 2030 by 11.5% from its previous report, issued just three months ago.
America’s electricity demand increase is now a reality, not just a projection. After nearly 20 years of minimal annual growth of around 0.1 percent, demand surged to about 1.7 percent per year between 2020 and 2025. In 2025, U.S. electricity generation hit a record 4,430 terawatt-hours. Meanwhile, data-center electricity consumption increased from roughly 58 terawatt-hours in 2014 to 176 terawatt-hours in 2023, now accounting for approximately 4.4 percent of the country’s total power use.
>>>READ: Will the Ratepayer Protection Pledge Work?
The country clearly needs more reliable and affordable electricity. While artificial intelligence is increasing this demand, it is not the sole factor. Manufacturing, electrification, population shifts, reliability standards, and the decommissioning of old power plants all strain a power system largely designed and built in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, over 70 percent of the core electrical grid infrastructure, including major transmission lines and large transformers, is over 50 years old.
The rising demand, combined with aging, capital-heavy infrastructure, poses both engineering and capital-allocation challenges. Markets have faced similar situations before, such as with shale, where resource opportunities drew investment before the economics could be established. This leads to a key question: could power be the next shale?
The answer isn’t straightforward. Shale was a major technological and geopolitical achievement. U.S. crude production rose from about 5.5 million barrels per day in 2010 to more than 12.2 million in 2019. Advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing enhanced energy security, reshaped global trade dynamics, and lowered costs for American industries, yet many investors still lost money.
The issue was not the resource itself but the capital cycle associated with it. Companies amassed land, increased leverage, prioritized production growth, and often spent beyond their internal cash flow. Although technology advanced, it also exposed weaker acreage and outdated assumptions. Ultimately, commodity prices forced the sector to confront the gap between increasing production and achieving a satisfactory return.
Power could repeat the capital-allocation mistake without facing shale’s synchronized crash. Today’s acreage encompasses interconnection points, turbine slots, transformers, transmission access, natural gas transport, water supplies, permits, skilled labor, and long-term power contracts, assets that are genuinely scarce. This scarcity motivates developers and customers to act promptly, yet it also risks investing capital before details about the location, timing, usage, and economics of future loads are fully understood.
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Power lacks a straightforward clearing mechanism like shale. Instead, oil and gas benchmark prices and regional differentials often serve as quick indicators of deteriorating economic conditions. Losses in power can be absorbed, deferred, renegotiated, or passed on through regulated rate bases, long-term contracts, private-credit deals, utility tariffs, and company balance sheets. This creates a “non-consensus” risk, meaning that the absence of a crash doesn’t necessarily indicate wise capital allocation.
A physically advantageous power asset can remain financially unprofitable over many years. The system may appear stable, even as investors, ratepayers, lenders, suppliers, and customers silently absorb the costs of inaccurate forecasts. These errors can appear in various ways or lead to lower-than-expected utilization. This highlights the need to advance both permitting reform and market discipline simultaneously.
America needs faster, more predictable permitting for generation, transmission, pipelines, and other vital infrastructure. Delays raise financing costs, reduce competition, and raise the value of scarce opportunities. Energy abundance benefits the country only if projects are approved swiftly, costs are clear, and consumers are protected from unexpected obligations. Reforms should aim to accelerate financially sound projects, rather than bailing out poorly underwritten ones or assuming all announced megawatts will be built.
The primary policy and commercial issue is straightforward: who is responsible for the cost if the forecast is wrong? Markets are already developing solutions like minimum bills, customer deposits, take-or-pay clauses, exit obligations, parent guarantees, milestone criteria, and large-load tariffs to protect utilities and existing customers from stranded costs. These measures do not suggest that the boom is artificial. Instead, they demonstrate that informed parties understand the risks.
>>>READ: FERC to Grid Operators: Protect Your Customers Better
The strongest projects will not merely secure power. They will allocate uncertainty. They will inquire whether demand is real or merely announced. They will assess whether the asset can be used by another customer or for a different load class. They will set aside capital against clear milestones. They will maintain flexibility in fuel choice, location, design, and expansion options. Additionally, they will identify who assumes risks related to cancellation, underutilization, grid upgrades, and regulations before making a fixed commitment based on a forecast.
America must pragmatically increase its power capacity while keeping in mind the lessons from shale play, most importantly, knowing about the resource doesn’t mean all investments to develop it will succeed. Announced megawatts are like leased acres, but energized, used, and profitable megawatts are like productive wells. The boom is genuine, and success will depend on precision, discipline, and pragmatism.
A shortage of plutonium could hold back a new generation of nuclear projects, with start-ups battling to secure the radioactive material given the limited supplies available to civilian projects.
Plutonium, which cannot be mined, is a byproduct of spent uranium-based fuel used in reactors. Its huge explosive capacity makes it ideal for nuclear warheads, meaning its usage and extraction have been highly restricted for decades.
Some designs for a new crop of nuclear projects require the material to help power their systems, with companies trying to find an adequate supply to carry out testing as well as eventually running the reactors.
Geothermal company Fervo Energy has signed a major deal to sell power to Alphabet’s Google from a Utah project that it plans to turn into the world’s largest enhanced geothermal facility.
The agreement for nearly 400 megawatts of electricity is enough to power a midsize city and would be Fervo’s largest-ever power deal. Fervo plans to begin selling power to Google in 2028 from its Cape Station project in southwestern Utah.
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