/ Energy News

Canada is looking at boosting energy exports to India in a bid to diversify its customer base and cut dependence on supply to the United States, its Energy Minister Tim Hodgson said on Tuesday.

Hodgson told the Indian Energy Week conference that exporting 98 per cent of its energy to the United States was a “strategic blunder,” and saw an opportunity to work with India.

“The fastest growing demand for energy in the world will be in India,” Hodgson said, adding Canada could supply crude oil, liquefied natural gas and uranium to India.

Donald Trump is threatening to impose a 100 per cent tariff on Canada if it makes a trade deal with China, registering opposition to closer ties between Ottawa and Beijing under Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Since taking office in January, 2025, Mr. Trump has hit Canada with a slew of tariffs. The President has imposed a 50 per cent levy on steel and aluminum, 25 per cent on autos and 35 per cent on any goods traded outside the USMCA, with the exception of oil, gas and potash, at 10 per cent. His administration has also significantly hiked duties on Canadian softwood.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Thursday upheld its decisions approving temporary fast-track generator interconnection processes for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and the Southwest Power Pool.

MISO’s Expedited Resource Addition Study and SPP’s Expedited Resource Adequacy Study framework are designed to address growing resource needs in the grid operators’ footprints.

Natural-gas prices have jumped 63% this week in response to forecasts calling for some of the coldest, snowiest weather in years to freeze the country from the West Texas desert to the Great Lakes.

The forecasts have stoked fears of a repeat of the deadly winter storm that froze Texas in 2021 and left millions of people without electricity for days. Energy producers and utilities are preparing for the worst. The Energy Department late Thursday ordered grid operators to be prepared to take extraordinary steps to tap in to backup power generation.

Quebec is postponing its 2030 emission-cuts deadline by five years, citing threats to jobs and the economy.

The time to reach the goal has been extended to buffer the province in a time of uncertainty, the government said when it made the announcement on Thursday. It’s a “pragmatic approach” that does not sacrifice Quebec’s commitment to fighting climate change, Environment Minister Bernard Drainville said.

The Pennsylvania consumer advocate concluded that electric utility customers in that state are paying higher energy prices largely because of increased costs for bulk power grid services “driven by data center and artificial intelligence demand that is outstripping existing and forecasted supply, resulting in higher wholesale supply costs and expensive transmission grid expansion.”

The OCA’s concern centers on a 765-kV project proposed by NextEra and Exelon that would run about 221 miles in central Pennsylvania.

On her first day in office Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed executive orders seeking to freeze electricity cost increases, issue ratepayer relief in the form of bill credits, and increase distributed energy resources, including utility-scale solar and battery storage.

Jetson Home Inc., a Vancouver startup aiming to disrupt the home heating sector with its own digitally enhanced heat pump systems, has raised US$50-million to fund its blistering growth.

The two-year-old company is already generating $4-million-plus in monthly revenue just over a year after launching a vertically integrated service, initially in Vancouver and Denver. Jetson makes, sells and installs digitally enhanced electric heating units featuring WiFi-connected electronics and sensors so their performance can be monitored on a mobile app.

The White House on Friday urged the largest U.S. electric grid to conduct an emergency power auction to protect against rolling blackouts as energy demand from data centersgrows faster than the country can build new generation plants.

The Trump administration initiative calls on PJM Interconnection, which serves 67 million customers in 13 states and Washington, D.C., to conduct an emergency procurement auction to address escalating electricity prices and growing reliability risks across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

A federal judge on Thursday cleared Norwegian offshore wind developer Equinor to resume work on its New York Empire Wind project, which President Donald Trump's administration halted along with four other projects last month.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington is the second legal setback for Trump's offshore wind pause this week, after a judge in the same court on Monday ruled Danish energy company Orsted could restart work on a project off the coast of Rhode Island.

Canadian energy infrastructure company AltaGas Ltd. says it’s been able to seize a meaningful foothold in the Chinese propane market in less than a year and it sees more opportunity ahead.

AltaGasopened Canada’s first propane export terminal in Prince Rupert, B.C., in 2019, but virtually all cargoes went to Japan and South Korea until April of last year, when it was able to tap into the Chinese market.

The Calgary-based company has rapidly grown its market share in China since then, now supplying 6 per cent of China’s propane imports.

Proposed transmission service agreements, or TSAs, between Commonwealth Edison and data centerdevelopers fail to adequately insulate ratepayers from the potential costs of serving those planned facilities, the Illinois attorney general’s office said in recent filings at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The agreements are based on payment models in which the offtakerpromises to pay a minimum and post security if its usage does not match its revenue commitment, according to ComEd.

However, there is no guarantee this revenue will cover the cost incurred to provide the required transmission facilities, the state argued.

Xcel Energy on Friday told Minnesota regulators that it would make modifications to its Capacity*Connect distributed battery proposal in response to stakeholder feedback, but it stood by company ownership of storage assets to “benefit and protect customers.”

Xcel filed the “first-of-its-kind proposal” in October with the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. The utility is asking for authorization to work with deployment services company Sparkfund to position front-of-meter batteries ranging from 1 MW-3 MW at “strategic locations” on its grid by 2028.

Dominion Energy on Friday proposed raising residential customer bills in South Carolina by about 12.7% to help pay for system upgrades and meet growing demand for electricity.

Dominion is also asking regulators for a higher rate of return on equity.

Regulators allowed the utility a 9.94% ROE in 2024. Dominion’s proposed rates and changes could allow the company to earn 10.5%.

The software giant’s president, Brad Smith, is meeting with federal lawmakers Tuesday to push forward an approach that calls for the industry, not taxpayers, to pay the full costs of the vast network of computing warehouses needed to power AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s own Copilot.

“Local communities naturally want to see new jobs but not at the expense of higher electricity prices or the diversion of their water,” Smith said in an interview with The Associated Press.