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.
SLB agreed to acquire thermal management company Kelvion from private-equity funds for $4.1 billion.
The oil drilling and production company said Monday that the acquisition is meant to strengthen its growing data center business.
“This transaction accelerates our ambition to become an industrial technology partner to the data center industry and help customers address the growing infrastructure complexity required to scale AI,” SLB Chief Executive Olivier Le Peuch said.
A Houston-based company has received funding that can help make world’s first superhot geothermal power plant.
Quaise Energy, a leading developer of utility-scale superhot geothermal energy, today announced the final close of its Series B, raising a total of $180 million in equity financing, including a $35 million investment from Nabors Industries (NYSE: NBR), one of the world’s largest land drilling contractors and a long-standing partner to Quaise.
Nabors has also entered into a strategic framework agreement that supports Quaise’s mission to make superhot geothermal a commercial reality, beginning with the development of Project Obsidian, the world’s first superhot geothermal power plant. The Series B brings Quaise’s total funding to date to $280 million.
A four-month test of enhanced geothermal systems performance, aimed at derisking the technology to ensure its commercial viability, began in Utah earlier this month, according to the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy.
The test is an “extended circulation” which will allow the FORGE team to “evaluate reservoir performance under continuous flow” over the course of 90 days, potentially extended to 120 days, FORGE said in an Aug. 12 release. FORGE is managed by the University of Utah and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order preparing to block utilities from connecting some foreign-made equipment to the bulk power system, including transformers, batteries, inverters and associated software and digital products.
The order also contemplates the replacement of already-installed equipment, allowing the Secretary of Energy to “impose conditions on the continued use, operation, maintenance, servicing, or updating of foreign manufactured or operated bulk-power system electric equipment acquired or installed before the date of this order.”
Europe’s increasingly hot summers come with a worrying trend. The air conditioning that the continent long eschewed as an American indulgence is becoming a necessity, and some of the nuclear reactors needed to run those cooling units are tapping out right as thermometers spike. This summer was especially bad: The series of extreme heat waves that roasted Europe, killing thousands and fueling historic wildfires, also severely impacted the rivers that provide water to cool thermal power plants such as nuclear stations.
In France and Switzerland, nuclear plants went offline as river temperatures rose, to prevent the discharge of warm water into sensitive aquatic ecosystems. In Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, nuclear plants built along the Danube River either shut down or reduced output as drought dropped the water levels below intake pumps.
Nevada utility regulators cleared the way earlier this month for NV Energy to develop two performance-based credit programs for distributed energy resources that provide energy or capacity services during load flexibility events.
Under the Energy Grid Services and Capacity Grid Services riders, customer-sited resources would be eligible to receive payments for dispatched energy based on hourly market pricing in NV Energy territory and for load reduction based on an avoided cost of generation and transmission calculation, the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada said in an Aug. 11 order.
But by limiting participation of third-party resource aggregators, the commission “misses an opportunity to establish a broader market that could have expanded customer choice, encouraged innovation, and helped lower energy costs,” one of the intervenors in the proceeding said earlier this month.
Californians could soon put solar panel kits on balconies and in backyards to lower their electric bills — without utility approval.
On Wednesday, state lawmakers passed the Plug and Play Solar Act (Senate Bill 868) to legalize balcony solar, a form of DIY clean energy that’s taken off in Germany. The bill, which garnered bipartisan support, now heads to the desk of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. His office declined to say if he’ll sign or veto it within the 30-day deadline; if he does neither, it would still become law and take effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Researchers in the US have developed a new electric plasma heating method that could significantly speed up the production of cement and at the same time slash its reliance on fossil fuels.
The technique was developed by Qi Zheng, PhD, and Yi Cui, PhD, from Stanford University, along with Paulo Monteiro, PhD, a civil engineering researcher at UC Berkeley. It uses plasma heated above 4,352 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius) to directly heat the raw materials used to make cement.
Across major farming regions, crop conditions are shifting quickly as rainfall and temperature patterns become more uneven. Too much rain is creating problems in some places, while others are dealing with persistent dryness.
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One factor shaping that volatility is the strengthening El Niño, a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that can alter weather patterns around the world. The World Meteorological Organization expects the current event to intensify through August-October, overlapping with important stages of crop development in several major producing regions.
The crop picture is already diverging sharply. Southern Brazil is dealing with excessive rainfall, while parts of India remain unusually dry.
Knowing El Niño is present still leaves the agricultural question unanswered: what does it mean for a wheat crop in Paraná or a maize field in northeast India at this point in the season? Answering that requires following the crop as conditions change.
July showed how quickly that picture can move. Canadian crops held up through hotter, drier weather, rain improved Argentina’s wheat outlook, and European corn deteriorated during flowering, all within a few weeks.
Weather and crop forecasting have always been closely linked. As weather patterns become more volatile, that relationship is getting tighter and faster. Increasingly, the challenge is knowing which indicator matters at a particular point in the season and what it is actually saying about the crop.
Rainfall is an obvious place to start. It is also easy to misread in isolation. Which signal matters shifts as a crop moves through its own calendar, and the Canadian Prairies show why.
The region dried out in July and soil moisture fell, yet crop conditions remained strong, helped by heavy rain in May and June that had already built moisture reserves. By late July, Reuters reported that Prairie crops were in their best mid-season condition in about a decade, based on EarthDaily’s analysis of satellite and agronomic data. A rainfall deficit in July carried a very different implication than it would have after a dry spring.
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As crops move through flowering and grain filling, when kernels are developing and gaining weight, temperature and short periods of moisture stress become more important. Later, excessive rainfall can raise disease pressure, delay fieldwork or affect grain quality even when vegetation still looks healthy.
Southern Brazil illustrates that last point. The region remained wet through July, with moisture increasing further in Paraná. For wheat, the question now is how long that pattern persists as the crop develops.
A national map showing where rainfall is above or below normal may tell us where to pay attention. Soil moisture, vegetation condition and crop stage help tell us whether the weather is beginning to matter.
In Western Australia, rainfall is beginning to resemble 2023, when yields were poor, although vegetation remains considerably stronger than it was at the same stage that year.
Crop forecasting already draws on weather forecasts, field observations, crop models and official reporting. Satellite observations, automated analysis and increasingly capable AI systems are making it easier to update that picture between formal assessments, tracking rainfall, soil moisture and vegetation performance as conditions change.
Australia also showed how quickly the picture can reverse. In June, the country’s last remaining weak spot, northern New South Wales, was recovering quickly, with satellite measurements of vegetation greenness, commonly known as NDVI, pointing to a strong turnaround. By July, that favorable read had given way to a drier, more uncertain national outlook.
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U.S. spring wheat followed a similar back-and-forth: weaker satellite vegetation readings concentrated in eastern North Dakota in June gave way to a brief improvement, before weakening again in the same area by July. A seasonal outlook may remain valid through those changes. The crop picture underneath it keeps moving.
Scale is part of the challenge. During an event such as El Niño, several major producing regions can change at once. Automation can narrow the search to places where rainfall, moisture or vegetation signals have moved materially, leaving analysts to determine what those changes mean for the crop.
Agriculture already has enormous volumes of weather, satellite and crop data. The opportunity now is to connect the pieces that matter at the point when they matter most. Consider India. By early August, national monsoon rainfall was below its historical average, but regional conditions varied sharply. Central India was slightly above average while deficits were much deeper elsewhere.
For maize and soybeans in those drier regions, the national number only goes so far. What matters is whether the shortfall overlaps with the crop areas and development stages where another dry spell could begin to affect performance.
The task is to connect those signals quickly enough to keep pace with the crop. That has implications well beyond yield forecasting. Grain quality, harvest timing and regional availability can change before final production numbers do. Commodity buyers, feed markets, insurers and food-security planners are making decisions while the season is still unfolding. Earlier visibility gives them more room to respond.
That calls for a different approach to agricultural monitoring. Seasonal outlooks are the starting point. Farmers and agribusinesses need crop-condition information that can be updated as the season changes, while policymakers need monitoring systems that bring weather, satellite and field observations together quickly enough to support crop assessments, drought response and food-security planning. For agricultural technology, the priority should be making those signals consistent and usable across large areas, rather than simply adding more data.
El Niño can significantly reshape weather across major agricultural regions, but it rarely acts alone. The Indian Ocean Dipole, another ocean pattern that can shift rainfall across countries around the Indian Ocean, can reinforce or offset El Niño, as can shorter-term weather systems. That is why crop impacts have to be assessed through the conditions developing in each region rather than attributed to El Niño alone.
The next two months will make that especially important. WMO expects El Niño to strengthen through August-October, favoring drier conditions over the Indian subcontinent and southern and eastern Australia, with wetter conditions across parts of southeastern South America.
The global warning is already there. The job now is to see where those weather shifts begin to change crop performance, while there is still time to act.
Felippe Reis is a Crop Analyst at EarthDaily, where he supports crop condition monitoring, yield analysis, and market-relevant agricultural insights.
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