Tag: infrastructure

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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Sec. Burgum on Economy-Crushing Bureaucratic Creep: ‘80% of What People Were Being Held Accountable for’ Not Original Law

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued while speaking at a Breitbart News policy event that the vast majority of the legal hoops the American energy industry has to jump through are setting the U.S. back, while China skips over bureaucracy in the race for AI dominance.

Burgum, the chairman of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that the “Silicon Valley Titans” who do not necessarily see eye-to-eye with Trump understand the issue, which is why they largely supported his 2024 campaign. 

“In November ’24, who was standing on stage at the inauguration? Tim Cook, Elon Musk, [and] Mark Zuckerberg,” the secretary said. “I mean, you know, Silicon Valley Titans were all standing there within 20 feet of the president. Think, why?”

“Because,” Burgum said, “They all got behind electing a president that understood that we needed more energy, and that we could not win the AI arms race without more electricity, and that the policies that the competition was offering was going to end up with energy subtraction.”

In its own words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stated that their AI theories, technologies, and applications should “achieve world-leading levels” and make China “the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030. 

As Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall noted in his latest book, Code Red, “Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are Chinese,” and the country produces “nearly twice as many AI-relevant PhDs as the United States does.”

Burgum stated that Trump’s mission to beat China in the AI race is what caused a “giant shift” to occur, with major technology companies throwing their support behind the president in order to achieve this goal. 

“It was important that it was happening because if we were going down a path, which was continuing to do energy subtraction, we have no chance,” the Interior secretary argued. “Now, we have a chance.”

According to Burgum, the Chinese “are not spending years caught up in court, in litigation over a bunch of, say, bureaucratic rules — not even laws.”

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Russia Claims Frontline Progress in War With Ukraine, as Drone Strike Kills Two in Kherson

Two people were killed after a Russian drone attacked a minibus in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, local officials said Saturday, in the latest barrage of civilian areas, a hallmark of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.

Seven people were also wounded in the attack, regional head Oleksandr Prokudin said. Hours later Russia attacked another minibus in Kherson, wounding the driver, he said.

Meanwhile, along the northern border with Belarus, Ukraine recorded “rather unusual” activity on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on Telegram on Saturday. Without elaborating, he said activity was seen on the Belarusian side of the border and that Ukraine would act if matters escalated.

“We are closely documenting and keeping the situation under control. If necessary, we will react,” he said.

Belarus, a close ally of the Kremlin, has allowed Russia to use its territory as a staging ground to send troops into Ukraine and to host some of Moscow’s tactical nuclear weapons.

On Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, a Russian strike damaged port infrastructure in the city of Odesa. No casualties were reported.

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Kiev’s attacks on Russian refinery cutting global oil supply – Kremlin

Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure on the Black Sea coast are worsening the global oil crunch caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran and disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes have hit Tuapse, a key densely-populated port in Russia’s Krasnodar Region, have targeted its refinery and adjacent marine terminal. Regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev reported fires at the site, including a major blaze at the refinery, prompting evacuations of nearby residents and emergency response measures.

The attacks led to high-risk air pollution, with residents advised to use respirators, as an oil spill destroyed miles of the beach in the resort town. Kondratyev also released a video of the town filled with smoke, with a clean-up operation ongoing on the beach.

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Trump warns Iran oil infrastructure could ‘explode’ as blockade halts exports

During an appearance on Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing,” President Donald Trump asserted that Iran’s oil infrastructure is currently on the brink of a catastrophic failure that could materialize within the next three days.

He attributed this imminent collapse to a U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, which has effectively halted the nation’s ability to export its primary commodity.

Trump further explained that while Iranian facilities continue to produce oil, the lack of viable export routes has left the surplus with nowhere to go, creating immense physical and logistical pressure on the country’s internal storage and pipeline systems.

“When you have, you know, lines of vast amounts of oil pouring through your system, if for any reason that line is closed because you can’t continue to put it into containers or ships, which has happened to them — they have no ships because of the blockade — what happens is that line explodes from within, both mechanically and in the earth,” the president said.

Trump also warned that if these detrimental failures occur, the country will have to spend vast amounts of time and money rebuilding the impacted infrastructure, and other issues could still linger.

“It’s something that happens where it just explodes. And they say they only have about three days left before that happens. And when it explodes, you can never, regardless, you can never rebuild it the way it was,” Trump said.

Analysts believe that Iran could be forced to shut down its oil fields as early as April 29th due to the blockade, which could also impact the crude production long term.

“In other words, it will always be, if you rebuild it, it’s hard to rebuild it all, but it would only be about 50% of what it is right now,” Trump said, emphasizing that he believes Iran is ‘under pressure’ because of the situation.

Forced to divert its oil to onshore tanks, Tehran is quickly running out of storage, as the tanks are only able to hold so much, since its exports have been halted.

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The Sabotage of Global Energy Infrastructure is Intended to Starve Billions of Humans to Death

Introduction: This Is Not Random

I am watching the world unravel in real-time. From empty diesel pumps in Sydney to desperate lines for petrol in Manila, a chilling new reality is taking shape. This is not a temporary supply hiccup or a market fluctuation. We are witnessing the first, deliberate tremors of a global energy collapse — an engineered crisis designed to shatter the foundations of modern abundance and force humanity into a state of controlled scarcity. [1]

As I have documented for years, the patterns are unmistakable. The current wave of refinery explosions, fertilizer plant fires, and the confirmed destruction of critical liquefied natural gas infrastructure is not a series of unfortunate accidents. It is a coordinated, global effort employing sabotage tactics designed to mimic accidents and cripple the very systems that sustain human life. [2] This is a deliberate act of war, not against a nation, but against humanity itself.

The Pattern of Global Energy Sabotage

To understand the present, we must look at the recent past. The COVID-era was not just a bioweapon and psychological operation; it was a pilot run for today’s engineered chaos. During the pandemic, we saw the strategic shutdown of food processing facilities, testing the public’s tolerance for disruption. That same playbook is now being executed against the global energy grid with terrifying precision. [3]

The current sabotage is a global phenomenon. As reported, over 100 food and agricultural facilities have been burned down, damaged, or destroyed in recent years, a pattern that has now expanded to energy infrastructure. [4] From the Haifa refinery to the Ras Laffan LNG complex in Qatar, the targets are not random. They are the choke points of modern civilization. The book Shadow Grid: The Hidden War on Global Energy lays bare how energy, the lifeblood of our world, has been weaponized by geopolitical elites to control populations and amass power. [5] These are not acts of war in the traditional sense, but special forces-style sabotage, designed to look like accidents while achieving strategic devastation.

The Real Goal: Engineered Scarcity and Deliberate Depopulation

The simultaneous impact of open warfare and covert sabotage has one clear objective: to destroy the world’s hydrocarbon base. Why? Because energy is the foundation of everything. It is the prerequisite for modern agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and commerce. As the book Fragile Foundations: Securing the Pillars of Modern Civilization warns, our dependence on centralized, complex systems is our greatest vulnerability. [6] Destroy the energy foundation, and you directly engineer famine, poverty, and societal collapse.

This is not about exterminating everyone. The globalist strategy is one of a controlled ‘pinch.’ It aims to cull billions to ‘solve’ the economic and social burdens — specifically, the multi-trillion-dollar entitlement obligations that governments see as unsustainable liabilities. As I stated in a 2022 interview, global elites see these financial obligations and have a simple, genocidal solution: clear the balance sheets by eliminating the people owed the money. [7] The destruction of fertilizer production is a key vector in this plan. The Haber-Bosch process, which synthesizes ammonia for fertilizer, is directly responsible for feeding half the world’s population. Sabotaging the natural gas feedstock for this process is a direct attack on the global food supply. [8]

Follow the Incentives: Why Governments Want You Gone

We must follow the financial incentives to see the cold, calculated logic behind this war. Schemes like Universal Basic Income (UBI), often marketed as progressive policy, create a perverse incentive. A government that promises a basic income to every citizen has a direct financial motive to have fewer citizens. Every person removed from the UBI roster is a permanent reduction in state liability. [9]

Furthermore, the rise of AI and robotics is rendering human labor obsolete in the eyes of the ruling class. In an interview, I discussed how figures like Yuval Noah Harari argue that technology can replace human workers, making vast swaths of humanity ‘useless.’ [10] From this vantage point, human life is no longer an asset but a liability — a consumer of resources and a potential source of social unrest. Why feed, house, and care for billions when AI-driven machines can perform the labor? This mentality justifies the depopulation agenda.

This also explains why genuine breakthroughs in longevity and natural health are suppressed. Technologies and protocols that could allow the masses to live longer, healthier lives would only exacerbate the ‘problem’ of too many people. Such breakthroughs are therefore reserved for the elite, who see themselves as the worthy inheritors of a depopulated planet. The masses are deemed expendable.

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