Tag: infrastructure

Trump Calls On Data Center Developers To Pay Communities A Dividend

President Donald Trump has suggested that companies building data centers in the United States should offer local communities a dividend to make them more popular.

“If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend,’” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday.

New data centers, which are required to fuel the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), have become politically controversial in some areas because of the amount of electricity and water they consume.

Local resistance blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects, worth $130 billion, in the first quarter of 2026, according to Data Center Watch.

The Trump administration has supported AI, and the president said last month that U.S. government documents would start referring to it as “super intelligence.”

On Oct. 4, Trump announced the creation of the Super Intelligence Force to coordinate federal efforts to maintain the United States’ lead over China in AI technology.

“As the President of the United States, I have been watching Data Centers very closely, and have come to a very strong conclusion,” Trump wrote on Wednesday.

“New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data Centers are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid, and therefore there is [an] electric price increase. In fact, there could be a substantial decrease.”

Keep reading

LA family slapped with shocking $10K water bill after nearby fire hydrant repairs

A Los Angeles homeowner is demanding answers after getting hit with a jaw-dropping water bill — and he suspects a nearby fire hydrant may be to blame.

Joshua Ward, whose family has lived for two generations at their home near Sunland Boulevard and Wornom Avenue, said he’s never seen anything close to the $10,000 charge.

Even during last year’s summer heat, Ward’s water bill averaged about $1,400. In April, it was $765, and by June, it had dropped to roughly $640.

He believes a nearby fire hydrant repair may have sent his latest bill through the roof.

Neighbors confirmed the water had been shut off several times during the work as the hydrant was moved farther up the street.

Keep reading

Bolivia’s Energy Crisis Deepens As Natural Gas Reserves Run Dry

Years of underinvestment in Bolivia’s gas industry have left the South American country facing a severe fuel shortage, as energy prices rise ever higher owing to the ongoing war in Iran. The energy shortages and economic crisis follow years of poor decision-making by the government.

In 2006, then-president Evo Morales took control of Bolivia’s fossil fuel industry, renegotiating contracts with international oil and gas companies and benefiting from the revenue. Much of the country’s newfound wealth was invested in public spending programs, expensive fuel subsidies, and the maintenance of a fixed currency exchange rate pegged to the U.S. dollar. Fossil fuel revenues contributed heavily to Bolivia’s economy for several years, supporting GDP expansion and the development of social programs that helped halve poverty rates.

For many years, Bolivian’s were led to believe that they had more extensive gas supplies than they actually did. However, in recent years, Bolivia’s fossil fuel sector has suffered as reserves have dwindled and no successful gas discoveries have occurred. As of April, Bolivia has an estimated 3.7 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves. The fall in gas production led exports to fall by almost 60 percent over the last decade. Bolivia continues to rely heavily on natural gas, which accounts for around 70 percent of its electricity mix.

Meanwhile, little progress has been made in developing the country’s green energy sector, leaving it facing severe energy shortages. The fall in gas revenues has left the economy suffering terribly, as inflation soars and the price of imported goods becomes ever more unaffordable. Luis Fernando Romero, the former head of an association of economists in southern Bolivia, stated, “We failed to take advantage of a historic opportunity that brought in immense revenue.”

This situation is not uncommon, with many other oil-rich states having had similar experiences. Several Middle Eastern states have long depended on oil and gas revenues for economic growth, and most have only recently announced plans to diversify their economies to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Several countries across the MENA region announced new economic strategies following greater talk of a global green transition, which could leave them missing out on vital oil revenues if they don’t take moves to diversify and invest in value-added sectors.

The lack of investment in Bolivia’s other domestic sectors has left it struggling to stay afloat as it runs out of fuel and is forced to pay high fuel import costs. President Rodrigo Paz warned that “International prices are forcing us to make complex choices.”

In September, Bolivia’s Congress approved a $1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), even though the terms of the deal require the government to impose strict austerity measures that could fuel social unrest. The loan received approval from the IMF’s Executive Board on October 2, and the government will now be required to cut its fuel subsidies and significantly reduce public spending. It has already increased fuel prices and is expected to scrap further gasoline subsidies from the beginning of next year. The loan is expected to unlock up to $4 billion more in financing from the World Bank and other lenders.

However, there are major concerns that the new financial plan will significantly increase the cost of living for households already struggling. Last December, the government reduced fuel subsidies, leaving little support for the most vulnerable Bolivians. This led to widespread protests as people called for President Paz’s resignation. In February, there was further social unrest after the distribution of poor-quality gasoline ruined thousands of vehicles. Then, in June and July, several weeks of road blockades by protesters occurred.

Meanwhile, to tackle the ongoing fuel shortages, Bolivia’s government announced plans in September to triple the fund financing refined fuel purchases, following similar announcements by Peru and Ecuador. This is expected to help mitigate diesel shortages and rising prices. Both Peru and Ecuador have increased fuel subsidies in recent months and are focusing on increasing production at state oil refineries to alleviate the price pressure of expensive fuel imports.

In July, Bolivia’s Energy Minister Marcelo Blanco announced that the government had authorized the private sector to import and sell refined fuels to mitigate severe shortages. Then, in September, the government said that the state hydrocarbons firm plans to focus on exploration, extraction, and refining to continue developing Bolivia’s gas resources. However, experts warn that Bolivia could become a net fossil gas importer by around 2030.

As Bolivia continues to battle fuel shortages and seeks to support economic recovery by borrowing from international organizations, the government must focus on diversifying the economy by developing other value-added sectors to sustain long-term growth. In addition, the government must also develop Bolivia’s renewable energy sources to reduce dependence on expensive fuel imports and ensure the country’s energy security.

Keep reading

Useless Without Transmission: DOE Backs $581 Million TVA Grid Expansion

On Tuesday, DOE said it plans to help the Tennessee Valley Authority fund 84 transmission and distribution projects across eight states to add about 2.5 gigawatts of grid capacity. The award totals roughly $581 million, with $250 million in federal money and $331 million from TVA.

“America’s electric grid cannot become a roadblock to economic growth,” said Katie Jereza, who heads DOE’s Office of Electricity.

Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly went further, blaming “years of misguided energy policies under the previous administration” for leaving the bulk power system “less robust than it should be.”

From $250 Million To $10.5 Billion

The announcement for TVA support from the DOE is alongside the ongoing SPARK program under the GRIP program… If the acronyms are starting to blur together, here is the simple version:

  • Tuesday’s award is for $250 million, written to TVA and its local power companies.
  • SPARK, DOE’s acronym for “Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades,” is the bigger, nationwide program. It puts $1.9 billion of federal money, plus $3.35 billion in cost share, into 31 projects in 26 states that will reconductor or rebuild more than 1,500 miles of existing lines and free up over 23 GW of capacity. TVA’s slice is about $80 million to upgrade roughly 125 miles of lines in Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina with advanced conductors, adding about 1,900 MW.
  • GRIP, the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program, is the even bigger $10.5 billion pot created by the 2021 infrastructure law, and it pays for both SPARK and the new award announced Tuesday afternoon.

Add TVA’s two awards together and it has nearly $741 million in planned grid investment for more than 4,300 MW of added grid capacity.

The Real Bottleneck

As we just covered, the hyperscalers are fighting over how much of the grid’s bill is theirs, with one telling Senate staff that shared upgrades provide a “system benefit which should be shared among all ratepayers.”

Tuesday’s award is that argument in practice, with taxpayers and utility customers splitting the cost of wires everyone uses, on a national grid where, by the senators’ own count, about a third of transmission and half of distribution infrastructure is “near or beyond its useful life.”

You can build all the combined-cycle gas plants, reactors and geothermal wells you want, and line up every data center and electrified factory in the country to buy their output. If the grid can’t carry the power from one to the other, none of it matters.

Keep reading

The Sheer Ignorance Of What’s At Stake Globally

This is a textbook case of how someone can reach the top of one field and still be utterly clueless about everything else. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg served as National Security Advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence and later as Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia. He is Co-Chair at the Center for American Security, America First Policy Institute, USA, which is a Neocon think tank. The man’s ignorance is staggering. He has made no effort to examine the facts—or, more likely, he knows them and deliberately refuses to discuss how Victoria Nuland helped select the interim government that started this civil war and attacked the Donbas on Neocon orders.

He advocates that Zelensky should tell President Trump to go to hell and destroy every refinery in Russia. To illustrate his sheer stupidity: forget the food crisis he would cause in Russia, knowing that would lead to nuclear war—he completely ignores that Africa and the Middle East account for over 80% of Russia’s wheat exports, making those regions the most directly tied to Russian grain. Iran is 100% dependent on Russian grain. That would be a surefire way to make the Middle East explode into a full-blown war, which would then merge with the Russia-versus-EU war, and China and North Korea would join.

It is these Neocons, who simply hate the Russian people, who are cascading the world into World War III over a war they instigated using Ukraine. He would fulfill our model by pushing diesel to the extreme, projecting $8, which would hit the U.S. economy, reduce trucking, and result in a U.S. food shortage. This is what I mean. Expertise in one field does not qualify you to argue about things that will impact the rest of the entire world with zero comprehension of where that leads.

A full-scale war with Russia would very likely cause a severe global diesel crisis, and in many regions, a collapse in supply is a real possibility. The system is already under extreme strain, and a broader conflict would push it past its breaking point. Our computer projects $10+ a gallon by 2032.

Keep reading

Big Tech Pushes Back On Paying For A Grid That Was Crumbling Long Before AI

When Big Tech signed President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, promising to pay for all the new grid infrastructure upgrades required to service their data centers, we cautioned that “voluntary pledges from trillion-dollar tech giants have a habit of evolving.“

Seven months later, the hyperscalers are pushing back on how much of the grid’s bill is theirs to pay.

The past week brought a Democratic Senate report and a North Carolina utility settlement, and FERC is expected to rule on whether new data centers must bring their own power.

But before anyone grabs a pitchfork, ask the question none of them answers: how much of this bill is really AI’s, and how much is the cost of decades of grid neglect?

On Friday, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Richard Blumenthal released Power and Profits, the result of a nearly yearlong investigation into seven data center operators including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft. The headline finding is as you would expect: the companies’ promises to cover their full costs apply to infrastructure serving only their own facilities, not the full cost of shared grid upgrades their arrival triggers.

The companies broadly opposed the “but-for” standard consumer advocates are pushing, under which a data center pays for any shared upgrade that “would not have been built but for the data center.” One hyperscaler told Senate staff that such upgrades often provide a “system benefit which should be shared among all ratepayers.”

They also balked at minimum bills, which advocates want set at 80% to 90% of contracted demand whether the power gets used or not. One Big Tech firm called a 90% floor “insanely high.” Another called 85% to 90% “unreasonably high,” since facilities often don’t use all of their projected demand.

Two days earlier, Duke Energy announced a settlement, signed by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and North Carolina’s utility consumer advocate, that it says ensures data centers “will pay upfront for all costs to connect to the grid.“

The settlement itself is more nuanced. Data centers prepay the full cost of equipment that serves only them, such as a dedicated substation. For shared transmission upgrades, they post a letter of credit covering the estimated cost, collateral that starts shrinking once the facility consistently draws 75% of its contracted demand.

Whether data centers get directly charged for any slice of those shared costs is punted to a Duke study due a year after approval, and would apply only to future contracts.

Keep reading

SKIES SET ABLAZE After Ukraine Bombs Massive Oil Depot in Valuyki, Russia – Two Days After Zelensky Agreed to Trump’s Energy Ceasefire

It is pretty clear at this point that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can not be trusted.

How many times has he turned on President Trump and America? It is too numerous to count.

Zelenskyy agreed to an energy ceasefire with Trump but his globalist masters had other plans.

On Tuesday — two days after President Zelensky agreed to Trump’s energy ceasefire – Ukraine bombed the massive oil depot in Valuyki, Oblast, Russia.

As Cristina Laila reported earlier, President Trump on Sunday announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

Keep reading

Kallas & Zelensky Cannot Sleep as Long As One Russian is Still Breathing

For whatever it’s worth, it seems diesel fuel and heating oil are set to climb, with a final peak next March. A cold winter could speed that up, but Ukraine has already inflicted massive damage on Russia’s refineries. Diesel has a dramatic impact on food. In Asia, ships need diesel to transport food back, and farmers can’t harvest their crops without it. Trump is right that Zelensky is affecting the entire world, and Zelensky has openly said he doesn’t give a damn. Even worse, all the critics pushing for World War III insist Trump shouldn’t lift any sanctions on Russia. They won’t be satisfied until there’s a nuclear war.

In the case of wheat, we had a Directional Change in 2025 and that has been correct. A close at year end simply above 645 when we are currently at the 670 area is projecting a serious risk of a rally into 2030. Between Zelensky and Netanyahu, this dynamic-duo is really screwing the entire world and then we have ruthless Neocons, include Kaja Kallas in Europe, who cannot sleep at night as long as one Russian is still alive.

Even the Ukrainian government-controlled press states that they will NOT honor any ceasefire on energy. What if the EU were supplying Carney in Canada to wage war against the United States with 80,000 drones—who is the enemy? Canada, which launches the drones, or the country providing them? In law, if you hire someone to kill your spouse, you cannot claim innocence on the grounds that you didn’t pull the trigger. The UK has supplied over 80,000 drones to Zelensky, orchestrated by Boris Johnson, who has intervened to ensure Zelensky does not agree to peace.

Keep reading

Utilities Struggle to Confront Issue of ‘Phantom’ AI Data Centers

Electric utilities across the country are tightening their rules on new AI data center customers, requiring binding financial commitments, collateral and steep engineering fees to separate genuine projects from speculative ones, known as “phantom” data centers in the industry.

The Wall Street Journal reports that AI’s electricity appetite has buried utilities in requests for grid connections, and many of those requests are never going to turn into actual buildings. Wood Mackenzie, a research firm, puts only 23 percent of disclosed data-center requests in the “high confidence” category. The rest is speculation.

Jeanne Jones, executive vice president of finance and strategy at Exelon, a utility operating across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, said inquiries began ballooning in 2024, and the individual asks got bigger too. A typical request used to be around 50 megawatts, about enough to power 50 Walmart stores. Now companies ask for 1,000 megawatts or more, the kind of output you’d expect from a large nuclear reactor.

Exelon used to study each project on its own. But once service requests from large customers tripled to 18,000 megawatts, the company switched to studying them in clusters instead. Jones described the challenge as separating “real growth that’s going to happen versus speculative growth.”

“We would get these questions internally but also externally: ‘How do you know what’s real?’” Jones said.

Exelon’s fix was to require binding financial commitments and collateral before granting a connection. That dropped the company’s high-probability project list from 18,000 megawatts to 11,000, with the remaining projects posting roughly $1 billion in collateral.

Keep reading

The $64 Million Harrisburg Question

A few weeks before Gov. Josh Shapiro arrived in Harrisburg to make a splashy announcement of $64 million toward a revitalization plan for the capital city, local officials faced a far less photogenic task: finding $2.3 million to return to the state. The city had failed to finish a playground project at Reservoir Park before its grant deadline expired, despite multiple extensions. Indeed, in Pennsylvania’s capital, even free money apparently requires more administrative competence than we can reliably supply.

That’s why the mood in Harrisburg is flickering somewhere between cautiously optimistic and carefully pessimistic after Shapiro’s September 28 announcement of $64 million in public and private investment — including $22.7 million of state money —under the banner“Harrisburg Works for All of Us.” Given the city’s current moribund state, that slogan almost feels ironic — it barely works. It’s too bad the plan’s long-term success relies heavily on the two parties least equipped to deliver it: a corrupt, incompetent mayor in Wanda Williams and a do-nothing City Hall often at war with her.

First, the good news. On paper, there is plenty to like: a new downtown hotel, improvements to the criminally underutilized Susquehanna Riverfront, and funding to develop a master plan to revitalize City Island. There’s also vague talk of improving public safety technology and parking woes. But for nearly every nice bullet point in Shapiro’s Harrisburg agenda, there’s a caveat or an incomplete grade.

What no one will say is that this plan is a compensation package for the partial withdrawal of the state government. This is a company town, and that company is the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It’s by far the biggest landlord here, and it pays no property taxes. Harrisburg became a ghost town during Covid, and six years later, it still hasn’t fully returned to its pre-2020 self. Why? Despite a return-to-office mandate, many Commonwealth employees have stayed fully remote or work hybrid, and the old five-day lunch crowd is a thing of the past. Shapiro’s Space Optimization & Utilization Project (SOUP), released in 2025, reflects this new reality; it shrank the government’s office footprint in Harrisburg and beyond to cut costs. In the end, there was no reason to keep up the facade of big office spaces with fewer people.

The savings make sense on the state’s balance sheet. But what’s good for Pennsylvania taxpayers is bad for Harrisburg on the ground, and the scarcity of state workers has helped fuel the doom-loop effect. Walk downtown on a Monday or Tuesday morning, and you’ll find nearly as many homeless people shuffling through the streets near the green-domed Capitol building as state workers. Over the last three years, restaurants, pharmacies, and other needed retail have closed, and a stretch of Second Street resembles a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with trash in the streets and people sleeping in doorways of abandoned buildings. When pasta joint Pastorante closed in mid-2025, the owner cited declining business, neighborhood bar fights, the odor of marijuana everywhere, and a shop window shattered by gunfire. They moved to nearby Steelton, which isn’t exactly fleeing to a crime-free paradise.

Keep reading