Tag: infrastructure

Germany to funnel more cash into Ukraine’s corruption-plagued energy sector

Germany has pledged to provide Ukraine with an additional €40 million in an effort to prop up its power generation during the winter, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has said. The announcement comes as Ukraine’s energy industry finds itself mired in a corruption scandal allegedly linked to an ally of leader Vladimir Zelensky.

Speaking on Tuesday, Wadephul said Berlin was “helping Ukrainians survive another winter of war with an additional €40 million ($46 million).” The diplomat noted that this year alone Germany has already spent €9 billion on military aid for Kiev.

A day earlier, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced that it was investigating a “high-level criminal organization” which allegedly profited from contracts involving state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom.

According to the authorities, the ring forced Energoatom officials and contractors to pay kickbacks for state contracts. Formal charges have so far been brought against seven unnamed individuals. The Ukrainian media has claimed that one of the suspects is Timur Mindich, a close associate and former business partner of Zelensky. The businessman allegedly fled Ukraine just hours before his home was raided by NABU agents.

Mindich’s personal and business ties to the Ukrainian leader are understood to date back to when Zelensky was actively involved in the entertainment industry.

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“We May Have To Evacuate Tehran”: Iranian President’s Remarks Stun Amid Water Crisis

Coming off a very ‘hot’ geopolitical summer which saw Israel and the US attack Tehran and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy facilities, Iran is now facing yet another immensely threatening crisis amid historic drought: lack of water for the population of 90+ million.

Rainfall has been at record lows, causing reservoirs to be nearly empty, in an already arid Middle East climate. The situation has grown so acute that President Masoud Pezeshkian has warned that if the drought persists for another month, Tehran’s water would have to be rationed. But this appears to be happening currently, as no rain is expected for at least the next ten days.

Already Iranians are being urged to conserve water and only use what’s available for the most pressing needs. Pezeshkian has actually said something stunning and unprecedented on Monday, though some are describing it as obvious hyperbole: 

“If rationing doesn’t work,” Pezeshkian said, “we may have to evacuate Tehran.“

The alarming statement resulted in an avalanche of criticism in Iranian media, also with former Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi dismissing the idea as “a joke” and saying that “evacuating Tehran makes no sense at all”.

Some regional analysts and officials report an over 90% decrease in rainfall compared with last year. The NY Times summarizes of how dire the situation is:

Iran’s officials have begun rationing water in the capital, Tehran, amid a drought so severe that the president has warned the capital may need to be evacuated.

The country is facing the worst drought in six decades, and major dams are at critically low levels. Water authorities this week said the main dams feeding Tehran, on which more than 10 million people depend, were at 5 percent capacity.

On Sunday, the spokesman for Iran’s water industry, Isa Bozorgzadeh, told reporters that water pressure would be lowered from midnight until the morning “so that we can both reduce urban leakage and create an opportunity for city reservoirs to refill.”

People have in some cases taken to TikTok and other social media to show that faucets in their homes have stopped producing water for hours at a time.

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Endgame For Germany’s Industrial Power Prices: Green Deal Failure Sparks Subsidy Spiral

On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz hosted top executives from the German steel industry at a summit in the the Chancellery to discuss solutions to the deepening crisis. Since the peak year of 2018, German steel production has fallen by around 25 percent.

Germany’s economic crisis is accelerating. Sky-high energy costs, relentless competition from China and India, and the EU’s absurd push for “green steel”—a climate-neutral variant no one demands on the world market—are pushing companies either into insolvency or out of the country.

Thursday’s meeting will bring together industry representatives, unions, and policymakers to chart the next steps for a sector facing its most severe turbulence in decades.

This is just the latest in a string of crisis summits orchestrated by the federal government for media effect. Awareness is demonstrated—solutions? Not so much. For Germany’s economy, political “solutions” increasingly mean one standard instrument: more subsidies.

A One-Issue Summit

Aside from the expected push for protective tariffs, the summit can be reduced to a single dispute: the so-called industrial electricity price. While many energy-intensive companies already receive partial relief, it is far from enough to remain internationally competitive.

Industrial electricity prices have hovered around 16–17 ct/kWh for months. German industry still pays up to 70 percent more than U.S. or French competitors, who benefit from nuclear power as their energy base.

This is the cost of the green transition.

And with it come job losses, shrinking value creation, and, for the first time, sharply declining municipal tax revenues.

Unsurprisingly, the federal government is ready to approve this subsidy. We are deep in a spiral of interventionism.

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Trump Admin To Lend “Hundreds Of Billions” To Build Nuclear Power Plants

While the market is finally starting to grapple with the most unpleasant question of who will plug the funding gap needed to build out all the data centers required to make the AI dream a reality, a gap which Morgan Stanley recently calculated would be as large as $2.9 trillion in capex funding needs, of which at least $1 trillion will come in the form of debt (and mostly private debt)…

… there is another, just as critical question: who will fund the energy buildout that powers these data centers? 

Recall, last December Morgan Stanley calculated that the US would need at least 36GW in new power to be brought online by 2028 to energize all the (yet to be built) data centers, a number which one year later is surely far higher. 

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Ukraine’s state-owned energy company says all of its power plants are down after Russia’s ‘largest-ever attack’

All thermal power plants (TPP) operated by Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Centrenergo are down following “the largest Russian attack” which targeted all of them, the company announced on Nov. 8.

According to the company, the same thermal power plants that had been restored after attacks in 2024 were struck again, with multiple Russian drones targeting them “each minute” overnight on Nov. 8.

Ukrainian forces downed 406 out of the 458 drones, including Shahed-type attack drones, launched by Russia overnight, the Air Force reported. Russia also launched 45 cruise and ballistic missiles, nine of which were downed, the statement said.

Centrenergo operates three thermal power plants, which were essentially all the company’s assets: Trypillia in Kyiv Oblast, Zmiivska in Kharkiv Oblast, and Vuhlehirska in Donetsk Oblast.

Last spring, Centrenergo announced that the Zmiivska thermal power plant had beed completely destroyed. On July 25, 2022, Russian troops occupied the Vuhlehirska thermal power plant.

The recent attack destroyed all restored capacity, leaving the plants generating no power, the company said.

“For safety reasons, we remained silent, but we did everything possible to ensure that Ukrainians got through the last winter with electricity and heat, overcoming hellish challenges to successfully start the current heating season,” Centrenergo said.

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The largest project in the history of humanity is about to enter a key phase the final assembly of the reactor core led by an american giant

The world’s largest and most ambitious fusion energy project has reached a turning point as Westinghouse Electric Company begins assembling the heart of ITER’s fusion reactor in Cadarache, southern France. The international effort, designed to replicate the energy of the sun, could one day provide humanity with an endless supply of clean, sustainable power.

Westinghouse leads final assembly of ITER’s tokamak core

In August 2025, the ITER fusion project entered one of its most technically demanding phases — the final assembly of the reactor’s tokamak core. Westinghouse, a global leader in nuclear technology, secured a €168 million contract to oversee the installation and welding of nine giant steel sectors that will form the tokamak’s vacuum vessel, the central chamber where fusion will occur.

This donut-shaped vessel must be perfectly circular and hermetically sealed, as it will contain plasma heated to over 150 million degrees Celsius—hotter than the core of the sun. Each sector, weighing about 400 tons, requires millimeter-level precision to ensure the system’s stability and safety during operation.

Westinghouse’s experience spans over a decade of work with Ansaldo Nucleare and Walter Tosto through the AMW consortium, which produced five of the nine reactor sectors. Their expertise ensures precision in both construction and integration, as the vessel must endure enormous magnetic and thermal stresses.

As former ITER Director-General Bernard Bigot once said, “Assembling this is like putting together a three-dimensional puzzle on an industrial scale.” Every weld, joint, and component must perform flawlessly to contain a process capable of replicating stellar reactions on Earth.

Global collaboration of unprecedented scale

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) represents one of the greatest examples of scientific collaboration in history. Bringing together 35 nations—including the European Union, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India, and South Korea—the project unites over half the world’s population and 85% of global GDP toward a common goal: sustainable energy.

Each participating country contributes precision-built components manufactured across four continents, shipped to France for assembly. This global supply chain transforms ITER into a model for future international cooperation in large-scale science and technology projects.

The result is more than just a reactor—it’s a demonstration of how humanity can coordinate resources and knowledge to solve planetary challenges, setting a precedent for future global energy innovations.

Technical ambitions and timeline challenges

ITER’s goal is to produce 500 megawatts of fusion power from just 50 megawatts of input—a tenfold return that would confirm the commercial viability of nuclear fusion. Achieving this would redefine global energy systems and represent a technological breakthrough comparable to the invention of electricity itself.

However, progress hasn’t come without challenges. Since construction began in 2010, ITER’s timeline has been extended multiple times due to technical complexity, supply chain coordination, and the unprecedented scale of the project. Originally scheduled for first plasma by 2018, the target now stands at 2035 for the first deuterium-tritium fusion experiments.

This delay underscores fusion’s enduring difficulty: creating and maintaining the extreme conditions necessary for sustained reaction. As the saying goes in the industry, “Fusion is always 30 years away”—a reminder of both the ambition and patience required for such pioneering work.

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Europe’s Solar Surge Exposes Cracks In Aging Power Grid: Analysts

Europe’s solar power boom is putting huge pressure on electricity grids that were never built to handle this much renewable energy, say analysts.

As a record number of new solar panels are being installed every year, the old grid system is struggling to keep up.

Solar generation capacity in the European Union continues to increase and reached an estimated 338 GW by 2024, according to SolarPower Europe.

To curb its dependence on Russian energy and accelerate its green transition, the EU set a goal in 2022 to install at least 700 gigawatts of solar power by 2030, enough to supply electricity to hundreds of millions of homes.

But the rapid expansion has exposed cracks in Europe’s energy system, threatening to slow the transition unless grids catch up.

Europe’s power grids faced a surge in voltage problems last year, with 8,645 over-voltage incidents reported in 2024—nearly 10 times more than in 2023, according to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E).

Aging distribution infrastructure complicates the issue. Industry group Eurelectric estimates that nearly half of Europe’s distribution networks will be more than 40 years old by 2030.

Energy analyst and project lead at the Helmholtz Center Berlin, Susanne Nies, told The Epoch Times that Europe’s power system is under heavy strain because it was designed for a time when electricity made up only a small share of total energy use.

“When you go to the countryside and countries like France or even Germany, those grids have been built in the 50s. They are really nearly 70 years old,” she said.

Europe’s electricity system was initially designed for one-way flows—from large power plants to homes and businesses, Nies explained, adding that now it must handle power flowing in both directions, as millions of solar panels feed energy back into the grid.

She said today’s grid needs to combine large regional “super grids” with smaller, local systems that can operate independently during emergencies.

Harry Wilkinson, head of policy at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the challenge is not only that Europe’s grid is aging but that it must be vastly expanded to connect power sources that are far more scattered than in the past.

“Just the physical amount of additional cabling that you have to add to the grid, to connect, that is a big challenge, just in itself,” he said.

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America’s Power Bill Crisis Rages In Democrat-Run States

The epicenter of America’s power bill inflation crisis stretches across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where far-left state and city leaders have swallowed the globalist “climate crisis” pill, which even Bill Gates admitted last week that the climate crisis narrative was fake news.

The result of these leftist extremist “green” policies has been the systematic degradation of regional power grids in Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, as reliable fossil-fuel generation was prematurely retired in favor of unreliable, intermittent solar and wind. These nation-destroying green policies have gutted spare grid capacity (read here) just as demand surges from data centers, onshoring, and the broader electrification push (read here), culminating in today’s power bill crisis. 

A recent Goldman Sachs report by analyst Carly Davenport found that “higher power bill inflation has been the most pronounced in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and California in the past three years.”

It’s no secret that the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and California are governed primarily by Democratic leaders who have pushed at least a decade of climate crisis hoax narratives to justify massive “green” funding, some of which was funneled into NGOs, and to advance the progressive utopia narrative that solar and wind power would deliver clean skies and save, most importantly, planet Earth from immient climate catastrophe. Yet this fantasy was far from reality. There was never going to be a green utopia, only what millions of Americans across these states are now realizing: unaccountable Democrats have left them with a power bill crisis.

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‘Massive’ Overnight Drone Strikes Cause Widespread Power Outages in Ukraine

The latest in a sustained Russian campaign of massive drone and missile attacks on Ukraine´s energy infrastructure brought power outages and restrictions in all the country´s regions Thursday, officials said, with the Ukrainian prime minister describing Moscow´s tactic as “systematic energy terror.”

The strikes, which were the latest in Russia´s almost daily attacks on the Ukrainian power grid as bitter winter temperatures approach, killed at least three people, including a 7-year-old girl, according to authorities. Children between 2 and 16 years of age were among the 17 injured.

Russian launched more than 650 drones and more than 50 missiles of various types in the attack, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Ukrainian cities use centralized public infrastructure to run water, sewage and heating systems, and blackouts stop from them working. Months of attacks have aimed to erode Ukrainian morale as well as disrupt weapons manufacturing and other war-related activity almost four years after Russia´s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.

“Russia continues its systematic energy terror – striking at the lives, dignity, and warmth of Ukrainians on the eve of winter. Its goal is to plunge Ukraine into darkness; ours is to keep the light on,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said.

“To stop this terror, Ukraine needs more air defense systems, tougher sanctions, and maximum pressure on (Russia),” she added, referring to fruitless U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to make Russia enter negotiations for a peace settlement.

Strikes in the southern Zaporizhzhia region injured 17 people, including a 2-year-old girl, regional authorities said. Rescuers pulled a man from the rubble of a building, but he did not survive, according to Ivan Fedorov, head of the Zaporizhzhia regional administration. A second person was also killed in Zaporizhzhia.

A 7-year-old girl died in hospital from her injuries in Ukraine´s central-west Vinnytsia region, regional governor Nataliia Zobolotna said.

Two energy infrastructure facilities were damaged in the western Lviv region, near the border with Poland, local authorities said.

The Polish military said that it scrambled Polish and allied NATO aircraft as a preventive measure due to the Russian attack on Ukrainian territory. The Polish regional airports in Radom and Lublin were closed to ensure the military freedom of operation, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency said.

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Zelensky Declares Expansion Of Long-Range Attacks On Russian Oil Refineries 

Days after urging European allies in Britain that Ukraine urgently needs sufficient long-range weapons to change the course of the war, President Zelensky has declared Monday that he intends to expand strikes against Russian refineries.

After a meeting with his staff Zelensky indicated, “We reviewed the effectiveness of our long-range strikes over a defined period and the results achieved. Russian oil refining is already paying a tangible price for the war—and will pay even more. We set tasks to expand the geography for the use of our long-range capabilities.”

This makes clear it’s no secret how Kiev would use Tomahawks missiles if it received Washington’s approval to get them; however, President Trump has appeared to resist so far.

The past couple of months have seen Ukrainian long-range drone strikes on Russian energy sites and oil depots become an almost nightly phenomenon. Drones are very hard to defend against, given their small size, so the UAVs often hit their targets as they are often sent in large waves.

Recently, media sources have said the Trump White House has been actively giving intelligence assistance to Ukraine related to these long-range attacks on Russian energy. Still, there’s as yet no indication Trump has approved Tomahawks.

The Ukrainians of lately been striking defense sector and manufacturing sites as well, sometimes with devastating and deadly effect. One recent ‘mystery’ blast more than a dozen people:

The death toll from an explosion at a Russian plastics manufacturing plant has increased to 13 people, the Chelyabinsk regional administration said Monday.

The blast occurred last Wednesday night at the Plastmass plant in the town of Kopeysk. The facility, known for producing artillery ammunition for the Russian military, is subject to Western sanctions.

It is unclear whether sabotage or other deliberate action caused the explosion.

But Russia has been hitting back hard, with a Monday an aerial attack on an important energy facility in Chernihiv region, resulting in a number of towns and settlements in the border area being without electricity.

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