Tag: infrastructure

Ukraine Continues Assault on Russian Oil Infrastructure with More Drone Strikes

Ukrainian drone strikes caused fires at more Russian oil facilities overnight into Saturday, local Russian officials said, in what appeared to be the latest attack on Moscow’s vital oil industry.

Authorities in Russia’s Rostov region said falling drone debris sparked a fire that damaged an oil depot and tanker in the port of Taganrog, while officials in the neighboring Krasnodar region reported a fire breaking out at an oil depot in Armavir for the same reason.

“Another facility of Russia’s oil industry has been reached – Armavir,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X Saturday of the attack in the Krasnodar region, noting that Armavir is “500 kilometers from our state border.”

“We are rightfully bringing the war back to where it came from,” he wrote.

Ukraine has expanded its mid- and long-range strike capabilities, deploying drone and missile technology that it has developed domestically to battle Russia’s 4-year-old invasion. Attacks on Russian oil assets that play a key part in funding the invasion have become almost daily occurrences.

For its part, Russia has used its long-range ballistic missiles to damage Ukraine’s power grid and hammer cities. The Ukrainian capital is bracing for further heavy bombardments after what the Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier this week would be upcoming “systemic strikes” on Kyiv. Zelenskyy said Thursday that he’s being “very persistent” in pressing the United States to provide his country with more Patriot air defense missiles that can counter devastating Russian ballistic missile attacks.

The attacks on Russian oil infrastructure came a day after a Russian drone that was part of an attack on Ukraine went astray and struck an apartment building in eastern Romania, injuring two people in the NATO member country. The incursion added to concerns that the war could spread across the alliance´s borders, and drew strong condemnation across Europe.

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When The Grid Dies: How A Single Blackout Could Unravel A Modern World

For decades, infrastructure analysts, military planners, and emergency preparedness experts have warned that modern civilization is built upon a dangerously fragile foundation.

Electricity is no longer merely a convenience of industrial society; it is the bloodstream of every institution sustaining modern life. Water purification systems, food distribution chains, hospitals, communication networks, banking systems, fuel pipelines, transportation corridors, satellite infrastructure, and emergency services all depend upon uninterrupted electrical continuity.

What follows is a dramatized reconstruction of a prolonged nationwide blackout and the sequence of societal failures that unfolds afterward.

Though fictionalized for narrative intensity, the mechanisms behind the collapse are rooted in real vulnerabilities documented by energy experts, cybersecurity specialists, and federal emergency studies over the past several decades.

The First Day — The Extinguishing of the Great Machine

At 4:12 in the morning, long before sunrise reached the eastern seaboard, the first disturbances began spreading through the electrical arteries of the United States. Inside regional grid control centers, operators noticed unstable fluctuations racing through transmission frequencies connecting several major sectors of the national power network. Similar anomalies had appeared before during severe storms or regional overload incidents, and at first the event seemed manageable. Automated balancing protocols activated instantly while engineers attempted to isolate unstable sectors before the disturbance propagated farther outward. Yet within minutes the system began behaving in ways that experienced technicians later described as deeply unnatural.

Massive substations disconnected from the network one after another as transformers erupted under abnormal strain. Entire transmission corridors collapsed in rapid succession across multiple states while gas compressor stations abruptly failed after synchronization systems destabilized. Power plants automatically disengaged from the grid to protect turbines from catastrophic overload damage, but the protective measures only accelerated the wider collapse already spreading across the country. Before dawn had fully broken, immense regions of the United States disappeared into darkness.

The first reaction among the public was irritation rather than fear. Alarm clocks failed. Wireless networks vanished. Elevators froze between floors. Morning commuters discovered traffic lights dead at major intersections while gas stations sat powerless beside clogged roads. Millions initially assumed the outage would last only a few hours because modern populations had become psychologically conditioned to believe every disruption was temporary and every institution fundamentally stable. Yet beneath the surface of ordinary frustration, panic had already begun inside the agencies responsible for maintaining national order.

Cellular networks became overloaded almost immediately as millions attempted to contact relatives simultaneously. Emergency dispatch systems collapsed beneath an avalanche of calls reporting fires, traffic collisions, medical emergencies, and electrical accidents. Airports grounded flights across the country while financial institutions struggled to maintain even minimal continuity. Then, shortly before midmorning, another layer of modern civilization began deteriorating as large portions of the internet itself started disappearing region by region. Data centers exhausted backup reserves. Routing infrastructure failed. Communication nodes vanished from the network faster than technicians could stabilize them. Social media descended into chaos before becoming inaccessible entirely across many states.

Inside federal emergency facilities, the atmosphere shifted from concern into dread. Continuity-of-government protocols were activated before sunrise while intelligence analysts attempted to determine whether the catastrophe had been orchestrated deliberately. Preliminary evidence suggested coordinated intrusions may have accompanied the cascading failures, raising the terrifying possibility that the blackout was not an accident at all but the opening phase of a far larger attack against the nation’s infrastructure backbone.

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The Financial Decline Of Miami Beach: When Pride Becomes Debt

Every time Miami Beach wants residents to accept another tax increase, another utility hike, another bond, or another excuse for why basic infrastructure still has not been fixed, the same pattern begins. First comes the whisper campaign. Then comes the friendly media narrative. Then come the professional politicians telling you there is no other choice. They want you to believe that more borrowing on your back is the only responsible path forward and that if you question them, you are somehow against progress, resiliency, public safety, or the future.

That is dishonest.

Miami Beach is not broke because the people have failed to pay. Miami Beach is in trouble because the political establishment has failed to lead.

For years, residents have paid more in taxes, more in fees, more in utility bills, and more through debt. The city has approved luxury development, expanded its budget, increased administrative costs, hired more staff, funded consultants, celebrated ribbon cuttings, and marketed itself as a global success story. Yet now we are told the city faces more than one billion dollars in infrastructure needs.

How?

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Homeowners Face Eminent Domain Bulldozers As Data Centers Demand Ever More Power

Georgia Power isn’t negotiating anymore. The Southern Company subsidiary is seizing dozens of homes and hundreds of easements across Coweta and Fayette counties to ram through a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that will feed at least four massive AI data centers. Project Wansley is just the latest flashpoint in a backlash that has been building for months.

At least 20 to 30 homes face outright demolition. Another 300-plus properties will get permanent easements for towers planted in backyards and next to pools.

But residents like Ansley Brown are fighting back. Her mother bought their family home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. Now the utility wants the property for the corridor. Brown’s viral TikTok exposing the lowball offers (she says $70,000 to $100,000 below market) has racked up millions of views and drawn state lawmakers into the fight. 

Georgia Power says the line is essential.

The company is racing to add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with executives openly stating that  about 80% of that power will go to data centers. Meanwhile, transmission has become the bottleneck, and utilities are turning to eminent domain to clear the path.

This isn’t happening in isolation. We’ve been pounding the table on data center resistance, from Northern Virginia counties rejecting new substations to Texas communities suing over water drawdowns and power rate spikes. The pattern is the same: hyperscale demand collides with local infrastructure limits, and the costs get socialized while the profits stay private.

Electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied directly to data center load growth. Georgia Power’s own filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the bill for transmission and generation built primarily for big tech. 

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US Faces Electricity Shortages Heading Into Summer, as Grid Operators Warn of Limits of Green Energy

With more than 25 years of executive experience in the utility industry, people tend to listen when MISO CEO John Bear talks about energy.

And the message he’s sending about electricity shortages as Americans head into summer is clear.

“I am concerned about it,” Bear told The Wall Street Journal in an article exploring why power-grid operators are worried that electricity supplies may struggle to keep up with rising energy demands.

Bear is not some lone prophet foretelling doom.

From California to Texas to the Midwest, the Journal spoke to grid operators warning that conditions are ripe for outages, as plants pivot to new renewable energy sources.

These concerns are not unfounded. Evidence shows America’s power grid is increasingly unreliable and struggling to keep up with demand, and operators are bracing for rolling blackouts that could be arriving as soon as this year during heat waves and cold snaps.

‘Quitting’ Fossil Fuels?

Politicians and policy wonks often speak of “quitting” fossil fuels, as if they are a filthy habit or a narcotic like crack. But the reality is humans could not survive without coal, natural gas, and oil.

Despite their impressive growth, renewable energy sources—solar, wind, hydro and biomass combined—account for just 20 percent of US utility-scale electricity generation.

Fossil fuels, on the other hand, provide 61 percent of utility-scale electricity generation in the country. They heat and cool our homes, run our appliances, and feed the Teslas we drive.

While there is a great deal of excitement around the potential of renewable energy, one cannot simply replace a coal plant with a wind or solar farm and expect things will go just fine. These are intermittent energy sources, for one, but their construction and expansion has also been hit with delays for a variety of reasons, including inflation and supply chain bottlenecks.

“Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue,” Brad Jones, interim chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told the Journal. “We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability.”

The shift from filthy coal to clean energy has not always been smooth.

Last year, for example, Hawaiian officials were stunned to learn the coal plant they had killed had been replaced with a massive battery powered by oil, which one public official described as “going from cigarettes to crack.”

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Electric Bills Could Be 2026 Election Shocker

If all politics is local, as former House Speaker Tip O’Neill said in tying politicians’ fortunes to constituents’ pocketbooks, then a voter’s electricity bill is about as local as an issue can get, landing on kitchen tables every month.

With electricity costs spiking for many of the nation’s 133 million households, this local issue could determine whether Republicans retain control of Congress or Democrats seize one or both chambers in November’s midterm elections.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, average residential electricity rates increased nationwide nearly 13 percent from April 2020 to April 2025. Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, they’ve increased 6 percent.

Electricity prices are expected to increase, on average nationwide, by another 6 percent in 2026, the administration projects, and as much as 40 percent by 2030, warns economic development finance firm ICF.

The reason is simple: supply and demand. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. projected in its 2026 long-term reliability assessment report that electricity demand will increase in the coming decade by 70 percent more than what was estimated in 2024. Many analyses find that overall demand will increase 25 percent by 2030.

The surge is driven by the development of power-hungry data centers, artificial intelligence computing, advanced manufacturing, and “the electrification of everything,” with the average home featuring up to 21 digital devices – all eating electricity all the time.

The solution is also simple: The nation’s 2,896 utility companies must increase the electricity their power plants produce with the most abundant, least expensive energy sources. Meanwhile, the nation’s seven major grid operators must add up to 7,500 miles a year to their 240,000-mile network of high-voltage transmission lines while also upgrading up to 100,000 miles of those live wires, through 2035.

But determining what solutions work best and what long-term investments to make is a complex $1 trillion challenge mired in partisan politics and buried in century-old federal, state, and local regulations.

Not only are utilities and regional transmission operators amping up from a standing start after nearly two decades of inertia, but many are scrambling to keep pace with swelling demand while also building out generation and transmission capacities to meet projected need.

The cost of these capital improvements is showing up in customers’ electricity bills, leading to heightened scrutiny of investment decisions and generation choices, as well as spurring debate about how individual communities want to develop, all while meeting a Trump administration mandate to expand rapidly to win the “AI arms race” with China.

The focus and investment is long overdue, said Robert Bryce, a film producer and author of a widely read Substack on the grid and seven books on energy policies, including, “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.”

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Graham on Iran: I Want to “Hurt Them More” by Wrecking Oil Industry

Israel-First GOP Senator Lindsey Graham wants President Trump to order more bombing of Iran’s civilian infrastructure and to “hurt them more,” and apparently doesn’t care that Republicans might well lose the midterms because of Trump’s growing unpopularity, largely because of the war in Iran.

As well, Graham told Meet the Press hostess Kristin Welker that Trump is comparable to Winston Churchill because of the president’s telling a reporter he doesn’t much care about Americans’ financial woes, and instead only cares about Israel and Iran’s supposedly obtaining a nuclear device.

Graham said he’d happily “give up” both houses of Congress to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

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Ethanol: Not The Energy Transition We’re Looking For

With current events stirring up global energy prices, corn ethanol is again being dressed up as if it is a domestic energy source and agent of energy security. The truth is that corn ethanol is an energy sump, and that it takes more fossil fuel energy to make a gallon of corn ethanol than a gallon of gasoline. It is time to face this unpleasant truth and the other perverse outcomes achieved by twenty years of misguided policy.

In 2005 and 2007, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Energy Independence and Security Acts that together created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program. RFS had three stated objectives: to improve U.S. energy security, to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and to support rural economies and agricultural development. Instead, RFS has increased motor fuel prices, increased food prices, put millions of carbon-sequestering acres of land into intensive cultivation, increased GHG emissions and air pollution, and increased water consumption and pollution. As to energy security, the gallons of U.S. gasoline displaced by federal ethanol blending mandates are being exported to Mexico and other nations. The great success of RFS has been the hand of government transferring wealth from motorists to big ag corporations. It’s past time to stop the economic and chemical absurdity of forcing food to be fuel.

The government wanted biofuels bad, and it got them bad. Under Corn Belt lobbying pressure, Congress cynically waived the need for RFS to achieve actual GHG reductions for all existing corn ethanol biorefineries, plus all that could be built by the end of 2010. The bulk of the corn ethanol produced over the past 20 years and still today comes from these waivered plants. The EPA’s specious 2010 prediction that corn ethanol would achieve a 21% GHG reduction by 2022 was immediately challenged by the National Research Council for not properly counting land-use change and not realistically treating food competition and water use. This panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences even questioned the viability of the entire concept of reducing GHG with biofuels. The most rigorous and honest estimate by a third party in testimony before Congress used the EPA’s own methodology to show that adding corn ethanol to gasoline has increased GHG emissions by 28% over the pure gasoline baseline with no trajectory to ever recover.

As to energy security, the goal was noble, but the method was irrational. Corn ethanol is critically dependent upon fossil fuels at every stage of production—tractor and truck fuel, fertilizer and pesticides, biorefinery energy and chemicals. Biofuels in general are just a way to put a green fig leaf on petroleum by inefficiently re-routing it through a farm field. While corn ethanol production has plateaued at 15-16 billion gallons for the past 10 years—not coincidentally matching the federal subsidy limit—domestic crude oil production has skyrocketed due to technological innovations that have opened up vast new geological formations to economic production. Despite a raft of federal policies and actions as negative for petroleum as they have been favorable for biofuels, the USA is once again energy self-sufficient and the world’s largest producer of crude oil and natural gas. In 2024, the USA exported 100 billion gallons of refined petroleum. Other countries are burning U.S. gasoline in their cars and producing the same CO2 emissions as if Americans were allowed to use it. The energy security objective for RFS is moot, and it was never achievable with fossil-fuel dependent corn ethanol.

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Heated Protests in Cuba After Yet Another 30-Hour Blackout in Havana

Residents of Havana took to the streets of several neighborhoods in the capital city on Tuesday night for the second day in a row to protest against the communist Castro regime amid a new, over 30-hour-long blackout.

Over the past two days, Cubans living in Havana have been enduring yet another over 30-hour-long blackout as the ailing communist regime finds itself unable to consistently provide power to the Cuban capital city. Cuban-focused outlets reported that residents of the Havana neighborhoods of Bahía, Marianao, Diez de Octubre, Nuevo Vedado, Luyanó, and others banged pots, set up campfires, and burned piles of trash that the ailing ruling regime has failed to properly dispose of during Tuesday night’s protests.

Cuban dissidents with internet access successfully managed to publish footage of the protests on social media and share it with outlets. Cubanet published footage of a cacerolazo (“pot-banging”) protest in Diez de Octubre — a neighborhood described by the outlet as a location that has become a central spot for peaceful protests against the Castro regime in recent months. In another piece of footage, shared by Cuban dissident Eliécer Ávila and published by Cubanet, shows fires burning along the side of a road while dozens of people protest during the blackout.

Cuban activist Orlando Ramírez spoke with Martí Noticias on Tuesday and described the situation as “chaotic.” Ramírez resides in Santo Suárez, a neighborhood that lost power on Monday afternoon and only had power for a brief 14-minute period before it went out again. His area also lacks running water, as there is not enough pressure to pump water through the pipelines of his neighborhood and, without power, no one can operate any pumps to move water upwards into tanks. Having access to fuel-powered generators is no guarantee to overcome the blackout, Ramírez pointed out, as generators are not suited to provide power to the old refrigerators that are commonplace in Cuba — in addition to soaring fuel costs across the island, which make running generators an expensive endeavor.

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Secretary Doug Burgum Backs BYOP: Data Centers Must ‘Bring Your Own Power’ to Curtail Economic Impact

Data centers must “bring your own power” to curtail the economic impact, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during a Monday event with Breitbart News.

Addressing concerns about the economic impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of energy, Burgum acknowledged, “When you bring in AI, the rates go up because they use so much power.” However, he said he fully embraces BYOP – bring your own power.

Pointing to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, Burgum said it is a fairly simple concept.

“If you’re one of the hyperscalers, and if you want to build out a data center, then you have to, like, you know, say BYOP. You’ve got to bring your own power,” the Interior Secretary said.

And in the instances they do not want to bring their own power, they have to at least be willing to allow themselves to be “curtailed.”

“You have to be willing during those peak moments, hours, days of the year, to say, yeah, you can shut my center off. And you say, well, that’s not possible. It’s not possible in some forms of AI, but if you’re just doing a training model, then you could say, yeah, we’re, you know, we’re willing, over a course of 365 days to be shut down 24 hours,” he explained. “We can be curtailed.”

“If somebody says yes to that, there’s a lot of places you go in the country where we actually have excess power in the spring and the fall – we generate, you know, hundreds of gigawatts more power than what we use,” Burgum said.

“All the grid of operators are trying to, you know, trying to make sure that on those peak cold days and peak warm days that we can still keep everything running and not have the, you know, the cascading collapse on this giant machine called the grid,” he said. “So there’s that.”

But ultimately, Burgum said these data centers have the option to “build your own power.”

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