On 16 July 2026 FERC voted 5-0 to direct NERC to write mandatory Reliability Standards for data centres and to revise its registry criteria. Both are due 31 December 2026. What it means for owners with US compute.
On 15 July 2026 the Commission sent letters of formal notice to all 27 Member States over the recast EPBD. The 2030 and 2033 building deadlines are unchanged.
The Commission cleared a 300 million euro Irish scheme cutting electricity bills for energy-intensive firms. Half of every euro must be reinvested, and the relief expires after three years.
PJM's 2028/2029 capacity auction cleared at 325 dollars per megawatt-day on 14 July 2026, exactly at the FERC-approved cap. PJM says it would have cleared near 555 without the collar, and it still finished 6,831 megawatts short.
New York paused permits for new hyperscale data centres for up to a year. Dublin and Amsterdam did it first, and the terms they reopened on tell you what your next capacity contract will cost.
Williams sold 49% of five dedicated power projects to Blackstone, Apollo and KKR for $5.34 billion. Insurance money now underwrites the electricity behind AI - and that puts a floor under the price of compute that cheaper chips cannot cut through.
Nscale's Loughton data centre cannot get a UK grid connection until 2027 and is turning to Bloom Energy gas fuel cells. Over 100 British projects are choosing gas over the queue.
Quaise raised a 134 million dollar first close, backed by Japan's JERA and Idemitsu, to build the first commercial superhot geothermal plant. Here is what it means for operators.
TeraWulf, a former bitcoin miner, has signed a 20-year, $19 billion lease to supply Anthropic with about 401 megawatts of AI capacity in Kentucky. The scarce asset in the AI build-out is powered land, and the capacity operators will rent in 2028 is being locked up now.
National Grid is paying 1.75 billion dollars for a 35 percent stake in Joulent to build Project Kilby, a 2.67 gigawatt gas plant in West Texas dedicated to one Microsoft data center. The plant sits behind the meter because the public grid is too slow, and it says a lot about how the next five years of AI power get built.
On 1 July 2026 Finland moved data centres from its lowest electricity tax band to the standard one, from 0.05 to 2.24 cents per kilowatt-hour. Google has already paused a billion-euro Kajaani build, and the Nordic siting map for AI compute has quietly redrawn around a single tax line.
Munich fusion startup Proxima Fusion raised 411 million euros at a 2.4 billion valuation, with Google and the utility RWE as strategic backers. When a data-centre power buyer and a grid operator co-fund a plant a decade out, they are pre-buying firm power before it exists, and a retired Bavarian reactor site is where it will be built.
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One considered note on infrastructure, governance, and measurement, most mornings. No theory.