Wildfires in Washington and Oregon have forced evacuations, caused power outages, and burned hundreds of thousands of acres as firefighters battle dozens of massive fires across the Pacific Northwest.
Why it matters: The blazes are among 99 active large fires burning across the U.S. as this year’s wildfire season exceeds the 10-year average for both the number of fires and the acres burned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
History keeps repeating itself in the smoldering forests of southwest France, now ash-covered and charred.
Devastated by previous blazes in 2022 and 1949, when 82 people died, the largest human-made woodland in Western Europe has again been ravaged by wildfires which burned an area four times the size of Paris.
The forests of Les Landes — covering 10,000 square kilometers (3,860 square miles) — were created in the 19th century for timber and resin production. They comprise endless rows of pines in neat, close lines, which works against them in a wildfire, with flames jumping easily from one tree to another.
The federal government is proposing potentially steep cuts to water used by California, Arizona and Nevada, a major step toward figuring out the management of the dwindling Colorado River.
The river provides water to states throughout the West, including drinking water and water for agricultural, industrial and municipal uses.
As the West becomes drier, figuring out how to manage the shrinking resource has been a challenge.
About 450,000 residents in the Corpus Christi (Texas) metropolitan area are primarily served by fresh water from two severely threatened reservoirs, but the city has become increasingly reliant on water sent via the Mary Rhodes Pipeline from Lake Texana and the Colorado River. The city remains under stage 3 water restrictions despite recent heavy rains. Lake Corpus Christi is only a third full, while the rains raised Choke Canyon Reservoir’s water level to 20% full.
The city has twice voted to delay a final vote to approve the billion-dollar, privately funded, state and federally permitted desalination Inner Harbor desalination plant that when operational would produce 30 million gallons per day of potable water – about a quarter of the city’s water need (including that of its burgeoning industrial sector).
A federal decision to allow a large data center project on public land in southern Nevada is facing a growing legal challenge, setting up what opponents say could become a national test case for the Trump administration’s push to accelerate data center development.
Investors know the Trump administration is worried about fuel prices — and they’re offering assistance.
The White House has had discussions with a wide range of potential suitors to reopen defunct petroleum refineries from the Virgin Islands to California amid rising anxieties over higher fuel prices, according to three industry executives familiar with the talks. National Energy Dominance Council officials confirmed they have fielded inquiries from potential investors, and the industry sources said the NEDC connected those investors to relevant agencies to discuss how the government could help facilitate investments.
Building more is no substitute for building smarter. At times, this has been a challenge for America’s energy infrastructure, particularly transmission. It is evident that the U.S. needs more transmission, but which transmission lines it builds matters for protecting ratepayers and keeping costs in check. An overwhelming number of House Members just reaffirmed this guiding principle for how America should approach the development of electric transmission.
Subscribe for ideas that support the environment and the people.
In a rare 49-0 showing of complete bipartisan consensus, the House Energy and Commerce Committee just cleared Representative Julie Fedorchak’s (R-ND) High-Capacity Grid Act, which would ensure the next era of grid development uses the best available power lines, known as advanced conductors, for both new construction and line rebuilds. As utilities race to expand their networks of poles and wires to meet surging electricity demand, the bill responds to the evasive challenge of getting utilities to deploy best-in-class grid materials.
Most of us will never think about the type of metal core that makes up a power line. Yet that core determines exactly how much electricity a line can carry to homes and businesses. Most of the country’s high-voltage lines still rely on a conductor design that is more than a century old. Continued use of this aged conductor technology for line replacements and new builds is often an inefficient decision for serving ratepayers at the lowest-possible cost.
Swapping that core for an advanced conductor, known as reconductoring, can roughly double the line’s carrying capacity when replacing an old core, and commonly costs a fraction of building a new line and can be deployed on a much shorter timescale. The underuse of this commercially mature technology thus has little to do with reliability or cost and instead relates to how utilities plan and are paid for what they build.
This dynamic centers on a mechanism called prudence review, through which state and federal regulators decide whether a utility’s spending is passed on to customers’ bills. Today, this review asks whether the utility followed a reasonable planning process when it made its decision, and it does not ask whether a better option was available. Because conventional conductors have long been the default choice for the prudence checkbox, opting for an advanced core can invite extra scrutiny simply for deviating from convention.
Two additional dynamics, planning and financial incentives, reinforce this bias toward familiar solutions. Reconductoring projects often fall outside the scope of utilities’ routine planning process, meaning they compete on an ad hoc basis rather than as a standard option planners can default to. Furthermore, monopoly transmission owners earn a regulator-set return based on new capital project spending, so choosing reconductoring, which is cheaper than building additional lower-current lines, is not in their financial interest either. These biases enforce process complacency over optimal outcomes for ratepayers.
>>>READ: Closing the Local Project Loophole: the Case for Competitive Transmission
And the risks historically cited by utility companies about these new conductors, predominantly higher upfront costs and technical unfamiliarity, are now outweighed by the opportunity. Advanced conductors have matured precisely as demand for grid capacity is climbing, creating a rare opportunity to innovate on these planning incentives.
The High-Capacity Grid Act answers this call directly. Under the legislation, using the best-available transmission conductor, defined by performance characteristics like capacity, electrical efficiency, and thermal sag mitigation, is presumed prudent, meaning the utility can recover those costs from customers by default. A utility that opts for a lesser conductor can still do so, but it has to show why that choice actually served customers better under its specific circumstances to recover that investment’s costs. This flips the norm that consumer advocates or regulators have to prove a better option went unused, instead requiring the utility to justify sticking with an inferior conductor. This shift would structurally nudge interstate transmission owners’ planning toward the frontier of affordable, innovative grid technologies.
Consumers could see savings in the near term, as smart planning standards bring capacity additions online with greater cost and schedule discipline than utilities observe today. The upside extends further out too. Efficiently added transmission catalyzes economic activity in the industrial and digital infrastructure sectors and stimulates local job growth.
Yet, other opportunities can be and are being pursued to create regulatory parity between advanced and traditional conductor offerings. For instance, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken steps to ensure that advanced transmission technologies, including advanced conductors, are evaluated fairly in federally regulated transmission regions through regional planning and interconnection processes for large power consumers. Separately, state-level legislation to exempt reconductoring from additional certificate requirements and environmental reviews could accelerate its cost-effective implementation in state grid planning.
>>>READ: DOE’s Transmission Needs Study Is Out. These Principles Should Guide the Policy
Deploying advanced conductors, especially for replacements on existing towers, can directly complement the much-needed greenfield transmission development set to take place over the next several years. For the vast mileage of existing lines running well below their potential across rights-of-way with secured permits, reconductoring is one of the fastest, cheapest ways to add grid capacity today. The full House floor should move to take up the High-Capacity Grid Act next. Securing this legislative victory would send a clear message: America’s grid doesn’t just need to grow; it needs to work harder with the network already in place.
As Americans crank up their air conditioning bills in the summer months, the importance of affordable, dependable power is critical but often taken for granted. Especially today, families are more acutely aware of how much they’re paying as electricity rates have risen at a pace more than double the rate of inflation over the past year.
Subscribe for ideas that support the environment and the people.
With demand surging, primarily driven by the data centers powering America’s AI boom, the Trump administration launched its Ratepayer Protection Pledge to shield Americans from the costs of new load growth. Since its signing in March, the pledge has grown to cover roughly 80 percent of all power delivered to U.S. homes and businesses, pulling in support from more than 200 additional utilities, developers, cooperatives, and states. The initiative has also been picked up as a Senate resolution urging federal agencies to help implement it. While the buy-in is real, the outcome will be more difficult to achieve without the regulatory reforms necessary to truly protect ratepayers.
The original premise of the Ratepayer Protection Pledge is sound in principle. Hyperscalers that need more energy should pay for the power plants and transmission lines their servers require, rather than spreading those costs across every ratepayer’s monthly bill. Original signatories, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, committed to building or buying their own generation, covering the infrastructure upgrades their projects require, and paying negotiated rates whether they use the power they request or not. Utilities already negotiate special contracts with large industrial customers and data centers, and the power they help bring online could be a flexible resource for the grid during high demand or if a weather event takes other power offline.
>>>READ: Energy Innovation Could Offer a Path to More Affordable Energy and Lower Emissions
In practice, insulating ratepayers from all the new builds will be challenging. Electricity rates are complex, and disentangling the costs AI developers should bear for generation, transmission, and distribution is an extremely difficult task that requires coordinated efforts across multiple jurisdictions. Special contracts between utilities and large customers that preemptively bind commercial and industrial players to pay for grid upgrades are rare in today’s buildout. This leaves ratepayers to foot the bill if a large customer’s demand is lower than expected or fails to materialize altogether. While federal regulators just directed regional markets to close this gap, the comprehensiveness and timeliness of regions’ responses are highly uncertain. In the near term, contracts could include real minimum-payment and exit-cost provisions, but it is likely that not all of them will.
Investor-owned utilities’ business model is also not conducive to building out energy infrastructure in an economically efficient manner. These monopolies earn a regulator-approved rate of return on new infrastructure investments they add to their rate base. They have a “spend money, make money” model. Since the beginning of 2026, utility rate increases have totaled $18.6 billion, evidence of this perverse incentive. As utilities plan $1.4 trillion in capital expenditures through 2030, there’s no utility bill relief in sight for U.S. households and businesses. When regulators approve large, rate-based investments, ratepayers foot the bill.
While spending is necessary to ensure grid reliability and meet rising demand, policy and regulation should ensure reliability at the lowest possible cost, which has been far from the case. The role, then, for federal and state policymakers is to create a system that structures the incentives to minimize those costs.
The hard work requires consumer-first reforms at the federal and state levels. Subjecting generation and transmission to more competition, expanding retail choice, improving permitting timelines, providing flexibility, integrating cost-competitive, advanced transmission technologies into grid planning, and creating entirely new infrastructure development models that operate outside of public utility commissions but are still subject to environmental and safety standards.
>>>READ: Blocking Data Centers Won’t Make Electricity Cheaper
These reforms share a common goal of reducing artificial barriers to competitive grid innovation. Meeting elevated, AI-driven electricity demand while fostering cost discipline requires policymakers to embrace a solution set that enables competition, supports the least-cost investments, and cuts unnecessary red tape that hinders energy growth.
None of this means the pledge is worthless. It’s a meaningful signal that industry recognizes the political and economic risk of shifting AI’s power needs onto ordinary families, particularly amid growing opposition to data centers. However, if lawmakers are serious about protecting ratepayers, it is incumbent on federal lawmakers, state legislatures, and public utility commissions to enact reforms that create a more dynamic, flexible system that rewards cost discipline rather than cost overruns. Doing so will reward technological innovation and drive economic competitiveness while protecting families from unnecessarily high utility bills.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced Monday that the U.S. Department of Energy selected Tennessee as a finalist to host a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.”
According to the governor’s office, the campus could bring billions of dollars in economic investment and create thousands of jobs. The DOE said the campus would support the development of domestic nuclear fuel cycle capabilities, accelerate the development of advanced nuclear technologies, and reinforce America’s energy security.
The White House is pushing Congress to break a decades-long impasse around the handling of nuclear waste and entice states to get on board, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.
The Trump administration is seeking changes to federal law to allow the Department of Energy to partner with states willing to store waste generated at the nation’s nuclear reactors, according to the document laying out “legislative principles.” It has been circulating on Capitol Hill and among nuclear industry leaders.
Thank you for signing up
Help us promote free market solutions for climate change.