Democrats on Tuesday won control of both houses of Congress and a decisive mandate to put a check on Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency, a victory propelled by voter anger over high prices, corruption and the unchecked spread of data centers. Some of the same concerns helped to lift Democrats to victories in statehouses, where they gained a majority of the country’s governorships for the…
Source
Political action committees funded by technology companies, the state’s major utilities and other corporate interests have spent several million dollars more to pass a ballot measure that would greenlight major development projects with minimal environmental or public review than public interest and labor groups have spent opposing it. Developers and other corporate interests aim to…
Source
A ballot measure written by a conservative nonprofit could amend the Colorado Constitution to enshrine fossil fuel companies’ right to sell methane gas and possibly force communities that have tried to eliminate gas appliances from new construction to back away from those efforts. Advance Colorado, which wrote the measure and led the effort to gather enough signatures to add the measure to…
Source
Millions of people across the U.S. are angry at their utilities. Electricity costs are rising while CEOs and Wall Street investors salivate over the booming energy demand from data centers. Now, we could be entering a new and ominous stage of utility power: the rise of the corporate mega-utility. On May 18, Florida-based NextEra Energy, owner of the largest electric utility in the U.S.
Source
Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect. The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption…
Source
“The demand for power and for AI is like nothing I’ve ever seen.” These words were uttered during an October earnings call, not by a wide-eyed tech executive, but by Jeff Miller, the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s biggest oilfield services corporations. Like droves of other companies tied to the fracked gas industry, Halliburton is pivoting toward servicing the data center boom…
Source