A warning for the AI era: Why America's energy infrastructure isn't ready for what's coming

Rob Jordan

Source Link

As tech giants race to power AI data centers and extreme weather becomes more frequent, America's electrical grid is straining under conditions it was not built to handle. Alice Hill, senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, has a message for business leaders and policymakers: prepare now.

“We need to stop treating rapid grid expansion and resilience needs as competing priorities, Hill said. “Resilience is growth policy.”

Why World Powers Have A Major Interest In Keeping Strait Of Hormuz Open

Jonathan Gornall

Source Link

As the conflict between Israel and Iran intensifies, attention is turning once again to the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow, 33-km-wide stretch of water separating Oman and Iran, through which a fifth of the world’s daily oil supply flows.

During the 12-day war in June last year, when Israel and the US attacked Iranian military and nuclear facilities, the mere suggestion that Iran might try to close the waterway sent oil prices soaring.

And, on Sunday morning, fears that shipping through the globally vital but vulnerable bottleneck was once again in peril were realized when the Oman Maritime Security Centre reported that the Skylight, a Palau-flagged tanker, had been hit some 5 nautical miles north of Musandam’s Khasab port.

It was not immediately clear what had struck the vessel, injuring four crew members. Oman said the 20 crew members, including 15 Indians and five Iranians, had been evacuated safely

Iran attack on giant Saudi refinery pushes up oil prices

Ben Geman

Source Link

A Saudi oil refinery — one of the world's largest — suffered "limited" damage overnight from an Iranian attack, per the kingdom's press agency and multiple news reports.

Why it matters: "The attack on Saudi Arabia's Ras Tanura refinery marks a significant escalation, with Gulf energy infrastructure now squarely in Iran's sights," Torbjorn Soltvedt, a top analyst with risk intelligence firm Verisk Maplecroft, said in a note.

The overall conflict — which included new strikes in Qatar — will push up U.S. gasoline prices, though the amount and duration depends on how high oil prices climb and for how long.

Why is the Strait of Hormuz off Iran so crucial?

Srinivas Mazumdaru, Nik Martin

Source Link

Iran on Tuesday announced it would partially close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, a critical waterway for the world's oil trade.

Iranian state television framed the closure as a "security" measure due to military drills by the country's Revolutionary Guards, which began a day earlier.

It was unclear how long the partial closure would last. The Associated Press reported that the curbs would last several hours.

Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the strait, signalling that it can disrupt the key maritime artery that carries a fifth of the world’s oil.

The curbs come as Iranian and US negotiators on Tuesday hold their second round of talks about Iran’s nuclear program in Geneva.

The US has ramped up its military presence in the Middle East in recent weeks to pressure the Islamic Republic over its nuclear ambitions and the bloody crackdown on anti-government protests.

Why Chevron Is Betting Big on Venezuela’s Heavy Crude

Robert Rapier

Source Link

The headlines in early 2026 have been dominated by political upheaval in Caracas. Following the dramatic events of early January and the overhaul of Venezuela’s Hydrocarbons Law on January 29, analysts have rushed to debate the morality of renewed American involvement in the Orinoco Belt.

But while the world focuses on the politics, the real story is unfolding thousands of miles away, inside the distillation towers along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

To understand why Chevron is moving aggressively to ramp Venezuelan production, you have to look past diplomacy and into refinery chemistry.

China’s Green Energy Advantage Unravels

J.T. Young

Source Link

China’s two-fold climate advantage over the West is unraveling. The Trump administration’s revocation of the 2009 climate endangerment finding, the UN’s COP30 failure in Brazil, the reappraisals of Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, and the frank admissions by some in Europe all point to an overdue shift in the West’s position. Beijing must be devastated because China has benefited absolutely from selling the West green energy technology and benefitted relatively as this technology has reduced the competitiveness of Western nations.

On February 12, the Trump administration revoked the EPA’s 2009 climate “endangerment finding” that classified CO-2 and five other greenhouse gases as public health threats. In contrast to his second-term’s first-day withdrawal (for the second time) from the 2015 Paris Agreement, this action had real teeth. The 2009 finding underpins a host of administration regulations (on vehicles, power facilities, and oil and gas operations). With the finding revoked, the regulations that relied on it could come down as well. Lawsuits are certain to follow from blue states and environmental groups.

Cuba’s Energy Crisis Deepens Amid U.S. Tariffs

Charles Kennedy

Source Link

Cubans are struggling with blackouts and fuel rationing amid President Trump’s campaign to provoke regime change by choking off the energy supply of the island nation, which is heavily dependent on fuel imports.

Trump last month threatened to impose tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba, labelling the island “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. He noted the Cuban government’s relations with Russia, China, and Iran as evidence of that threat, which, Trump suggested, would present as “migration and violence.”

The island’s biggest oil supplier was out of the picture already, since that was Venezuela, and the United States effectively took control of the country’s oil industry following the ousting of President Nicolas Maduro.

When the Gulf Heats Up, India Is the First to Pay

Fatemeh Aman

Source Link

A new US-Iran crisis in the Persian Gulf need not escalate into a full-scale war to harm India. The fear that the region is sliding into an escalatory cycle in which markets, shipping companies, and insurers begin pricing in the worst-case scenario is enough to create problems for New Delhi, whether in the form of inflationary pressures, higher shipping costs and insurance premiums, and diaspora anxiety.

India’s exposure to Gulf instability is structural. New Delhi may be a rising power in the Indo-Pacific, but the Gulf remains one of its most sensitive economic lifelines. That is why even limited military action involving Iran, Israel, or the United States tends to force India into caution, narrowing its options before it forces anyone else’s.

The Strait of Hormuz is the clearest reminder of how the region exports shock. The International Energy Agency estimates that from January to May 2025, approximately 14.5 million barrels per day of crude oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz, and that China and India’s imports together accounted for 46 percent of those volumes. Even without a blockade, escalation can trigger large pricing reactions because markets price risk, not certainty.

Bangladesh And Sri Lanka Foil Indian Tycoon Adani’s Bid To Foist Unequal Deals – Analysis

Shiamak Ali

Source Link

Bangladesh is home to the world’s 8th largest population– composing around 175 million people pressed into one of South Asia’s most dynamic developmental arcs. Meeting the power needs of such scale is not a peripheral challenge; it is resoundingly structural. Presently, Bangladesh ranks 32nd globally in total electricity consumption, yet that ranking obscures more than it reveals: since 2000, total electricity use in the country has expanded by roughly 550%, an almost unparalleled jump in demand and industrialization.

This surge is not a historical footnote. Rather, it reflects a nation still early in its economic ascent, with a rapidly growing population and abundant room to climb within the global developmental hierarchy. Far from plateauing, Bangladesh’s electricity demand appears set to accelerate, driven not by excess but by sheer necessity– as households urbanize, factories proliferate, and the power grid struggles to keep pace with ambitions that outstrip capacity.

China’s Cheap Oil Strategy Is Becoming a Geopolitical Liability

Nik Foster

Source Link

The U.S government’s removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last month is upending broader geopolitics as we know it. Informed by the second Trump administration’s focus on the Western Hemisphere, and codified in the November 2025 National Security Strategy, which calls for direct action against regimes Washington deems destabilizing or hostile to U.S. interests, the action signals that Venezuela’s future will likely be tied closely to the whims of Washington, D.C.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves, as well as an abundance of gold, diamonds, and other natural resources. As Western sanctions on Venezuela have dramatically curtailed its oil exports to the United States and Europe, the country has found a reliable buyer for its crude oil in China, which has purchased up to 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports in recent years at discount rates.

Sodium Supply Chain Emerges to Support Lithium Alternatives

Lea Thome

Source Link

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as the world’s largest producers of electric vehicles (EVs). In becoming the dominant global player, it has had to grapple with the high cost and low supply of raw lithium materials—critical inputs for the batteries that fuel most new energy vehicles. A lack of lithium deposits at home have led Chinese investors and mining companies to set up shop in countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Australia, and Zimbabwe, to extract and process the silvery metal. But as supply chains have become increasingly volatile due to tariffs, export bans, and host country legislation, Chinese policymakers and companies have started exploring alternatives to support the growth of the new energy storage industry.

One solution is sodium. In recent years, Chinese engineers have been testing sodium-based new-type energy storage technologies. In 2025, they deployed them for the first time. Chinese firms have also begun to focus their attention on the country’s salt lake industry, which is rich in sodium products but also offers opportunities to extract lithium and other materials.

‘Energy Truce’ Could be Preamble to Ukraine Peace Deal

Pavel K. Baev

Source Link

The Arctic vortex covering Moscow and Kyiv has given new momentum to talks on the final parameters of a peace deal. It was not difficult for Russian President Vladimir Putin to consent to U.S. President Donald Trump’s request for a pause on Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure because the Russian bombing campaign had already inflicted catastrophic damage on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure (Radio Svoboda, January 30). In the middle of this “energy truce,” Ukraine suffered a major blackout caused by the breakdown of its severely degraded electricity grid (Novaya Gazeta, January 31). The so-called “energy truce” fits the pattern of Russian strikes, in which a massive combined missile and drone attack is followed by five to six days of lower intensity drone assaults (RIA Novosti, January 30). Putin’s readiness to continue the pause into the first week of February, when temperatures are predicted to hit new lows, will reveal his true intentions.

This small episode in Russia’s protracted war of attrition against Ukraine appears to be a possible step forward in the peace-making process, as it was negotiated under a new diplomatic format. This format brings together the top teams of negotiators from the United States and Ukraine with a new, and apparently lower-level, Russian delegation led by Admiral Igor Kostyikov, the Director of the Main Intelligence Directorate and deputy to Army General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff (Vedomosti, January 29; Novaya Gazeta Europe, February 1). Mainstream Russian media were cautiously optimistic about the proceedings in Abu Dhabi and skeptical about the prospect of an “energy truce” until Putin granted it his approval (Izvestiya; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 26). The talks are set to continue later this week, albeit without the U.S. team, which returned to Miami for a meeting with Putin’s special envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, who is keen to discuss possible joint economic projects with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for peace missions (RBC, January 31).

Risks to Gulf Energy Assets From an Iran Strike Will Be Much Higher

Greg Priddy

Source Link

The risks of an Iranian strike on Gulf energy assets have frequently been dismissed as “crying wolf.” Is the wolf finally at the door? With President Donald Trump apparently again facing a near-term decision point on whether to launch military strikes on Iran, the world oil market has taken notice, with global benchmark Brent crude oil settling at over $70 per barrel, the highest since July. This came amid a rather bearish consensus expectation of excess supply and building inventories this year. That reaction, which is still up only about 10 percent on concerns about Iran, seems justified, as there are plenty of reasons to see the risk of an actual supply disruption taking place as being significantly higher than in June, when Israel and Iran traded strikes for 12 days. The United States joined in on the last night of the campaign to hit hardened nuclear sites, which required bombs larger than what Israel could deliver.

The History of Supply Risk and Oil Prices. The relationship between perceptions of security-driven supply risk and oil prices has changed a bit since the shale boom began in the United States in the late 2000s. During the long price run-up on perceived scarcity in the mid-2000s, concerns related to Iran, pipeline bombings in Iraq, and outages in the Niger Delta in Nigeria frequently made substantial waves in the market. There were long periods when crude markets clearly carried a “risk premium” relative to where they would have been without those perceived risks, even if they had not yet materialized.

China's Renewable Energy Transformation in Tibet Autonomous Region

Dr Y Nithiyanandam

Source Link

While the previous edition of the Geospatial Bulletin examined solar energy harvesting in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in depth, this edition turns to the other pillars of electricity generation on the plateau: geothermal, wind, and hydropower. The focus is not simply on where these projects exist, but on what they are designed to achieve: the scale of deployment, the stated purpose of these sites, the technological shifts enabling high-altitude operations, and the way infrastructure is being arranged and connected across TAR.

This assessment sits within a broader national context in which China’s renewable build-out has crossed a historic threshold. Total installed renewable capacity has reached 1,889 GW, accounting for 56% of the nation’s power capacity: wind and solar alone amount to 1,482 GW, overtaking thermal power at 1,451 GW. China also met its 2024 target of 1,200 GW of wind and solar six years ahead of the 2030 deadline announced by President Xi in 2020. By current estimates, China accounts for 44% of global renewable capacity and hosts approximately 64–74% of the world’s utility-scale renewable projects under construction. Against that scale, the TAR’s contribution is surprisingly modest: it holds less than 0.5% of China’s renewable capacity, about 7.176 GW out of 1,889 GW, roughly comparable to Austria’s solar photovoltaic capacity. Yet this small base masks a turning point: the region is now entering an acceleration phase, with substantial additions anticipated during 2026–2030.

Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy System

Umair Irfan

Source Link

The tricky thing about generating electricity is that for the most part, you pretty much have to use it or lose it.

This fundamental fact has governed and constrained the development of the world’s largest machine: the $2 trillion US power grid. Massive generators send electrons along a continent-wide network of conductors, transformers, cables, and wires into millions of homes and businesses, delicately balancing supply and demand so that every light switch, computer, television, stove, and charging cable will turn on 99.95 percent of the time.

Making sure there are always enough generators spooled up to send electricity to every single power outlet in the country requires precise coordination. And while the amount of electricity actually used can swing drastically throughout the day and year, the grid is built to meet the brief periods of peak demand, like the hot summer days when air conditioning use can double average electricity consumption. Imagine building a 30-lane highway to make sure no driver ever has to tap their brakes. That’s effectively what those who design and run the grid have had to do.

But what if you could just hold onto electricity for a bit and save it for later? You wouldn’t have to overbuild the grid or spend so much effort keeping power generation in equilibrium with users. You could smooth over the drawbacks of intermittent power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, like wind and solar. You could have easy local backup power in emergencies when transmission lines are damaged. You may not even need a giant, centralized power grid at all.

Trump’s Tariffs Are Killing His Plans for Energy Dominance - Analysis

Keith Johnson

Source Link

U.S. President Donald Trump promised to bring down energy prices, and on that front at least, he has delivered.

Thanks to his trade war, crude oil prices have plunged. Benchmark prices in New York and London are down about 15 percent in the last few days, a drop that is matched only by the declines on Wall Street, in Asian stock markets, and in Tesla’s appeal. Crude oil went from the mid $70s a barrel when Trump was elected the second time to the upper $50s (briefly) on Monday.

Russian Energy Shortages Require Bans, Tariffs, and Purchasing Electricity From China

John C. K. Daly

Source Link

Russia’s energy industry is experiencing difficulties caused by rising sanctions, declining exports, and Ukrainian drone and missile assaults on infrastructure, in turn creating challenges for domestic electricity generation (see EDM, April 18, October 16, November 13, 2024, February 27). Two months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded an update of the “Energy Strategy of the Russian Federation until 2035” that was approved in 2020 to address these problems. He also demanded that the “horizon” of planning be updated and extended to 2050 (TASS, April 14, 2022). Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilev stated in February that this update would be delivered by the end of March (Russian Energy Ministry, June 9, 2020; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, February 16). The document defined the strategic goals of the country’s fuel and energy complex to promote Russia’s socio-economic development and strengthen and preserve Russia’s presence in the global energy sector. The issues the Russian energy sector has been facing have made fulfilling these goals more and more problematic.

The energy shortages resulting from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine are most deeply affecting Russia’s eastern regions, so much so that it is considering importing electricity from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a reversal of previous years during which it exported electricity there, most recently in 2023 (E²nergy, February 19). Last year Russia reduced its electricity exports to the PRC by three times its previous export rate. The volume of electricity exports from Russia to the PRC in 2024 amounted to less than one billion kilowatt hours (kWh), down from 3.1 billion kWh in 2023 (TASS, December 18, 2024). This decrease is attributed to a deficit in Russia’s Far East energy system (TASS, December 18, 2024; Interfax, February 6).

The World’s Biggest Polluter, China, Is Ramping Up Renewables

Simmone Shah

Source Link

On Wednesday, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced that the country would be investing in major renewable energy projects—developing new offshore wind farms and large scale clean energy bases that combine solar and wind farms.

It’s the latest move by the country, both a leader in renewable energy and the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, to make inroads in the green energy transition.

China’s renewable energy dominance has been a long time coming, experts say. “Several of the clean energy industries were identified by the government several decades ago as strategic industries, where they really wanted to invest and position themselves as the global leader,” says Joanna Lewis, director of the science, technology, and international affairs program at Georgetown University. “This has really been a long-term strategic effort on behalf of the government to both put in place policies that would promote the deployment of renewables domestically within China, but also build up the industrial capacity to allow them to actually manufacture the technologies as well.”

What is China's climate target?

In 2020, China announced that the country would reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. Since then, the country has been making strides towards adopting clean energy. That same year, the Chinese government pledged to double its renewable energy capacity by 2030—only to reach that goal six years ahead of schedule. And in 2024, the country led the world in energy transition investment, accounting for two-thirds of the $2.1 trillion spent globally last year on everything from power grids to electric transport, according to BloombergNEF.

Energy and AI Coordination in the ‘Eastern Data Western Computing’ Plan

Andrew Stokols

Source Link

The training and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) models is predicated on an enormous energy supply. This has ushered in a new rush for resource security—both for power generation and water use, as the data centers on which these technologies rely consume large amounts of water to keep them from overheating (Semianalysis, February 13). Currently, the United States leads the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in number of data centers by a wide margin (Statista, October 11, 2024). However, given the energy needs of cloud computing and AI, which continue to expand, there is a growing imperative for coordinating energy and cloud investment.

In the PRC, the “Eastern Data Western Computing” (东数西算) plan is a multiagency national initiative to do just that. While the United States lacks a national strategy to coordinate cloud computing and energy use, instead relying on disconnected regional initiatives and private-sector led investment, the PRC’s plan serves as an illustration of the potential benefits such coordination offers at national and local scales (NDRC, February 22, 2022; NCSTI, accessed February 26).

Energy Literacy-Understanding Crude Oil’s Vital Role – OpEd

Ronald Stein

Source Link

Over the last 200 years, and the world has populated from 1 to 8 billion because of the more than 6,000 products and different fuels for planes, ships, trucks, cars, military, and the space programs that did not exist before the 1800’s. Today, the world is a materialistic society.

We have more than 50,000 merchant ships, more than 20,000 commercial aircraft and more than 50,000 military aircraft that use the fuels manufactured from crude oil. The fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of jets moving people and products, and the merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space programs, are also dependent on what can be manufactured from crude oil.

Today, American policymakers setting “green” policies are oblivious to the reality that electricity came AFTER the discovery of crude oil, and everything that NEEDS Electricity, are made with the products made from oil derivatives.

• ALL electrical generation methods from hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar are ALL built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil,
• All EV’s, solar panels, and wind turbines are also built with the products, components, and equipment that are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
• Getting rid of crude oil would eliminate electricity, and all the products that need electricity to operate!

We’ve had more than 200 years to “clone” oil to support the supply chain of products demanded by our materialistic society and have been unsuccessful.