/ Energy News

Atlas Energy said ​on Tuesday it had signed a ‌deal with Caterpillar to secure about $840 million worth of power-generation equipment through 2029, a move aimed at ​locking in manufacturing capacity as ​U.S. electricity demand rises.

Atlas said the deal ​covers roughly 1.4 gigawatts (GW) of incremental natural gas power ‌generation ⁠assets scheduled for delivery between 2027 and 2029.

As he promised to do in his State of the Union address last week, President Trump on Wednesday secured commitments from leading technology companies to pay for their own power generation.

However, the industry has largely greeted the pledge with a shrug: a decent set of principles, but unlikely to substantially change the trajectory of what big tech companies were already doing. And Trump himself acknowledged that this deal is largely about public perception of data centers in light of affordability concerns. “They need some PR help because people think that if a data center goes in there, electricity prices are going to go up,” he said at the signing.

The three jurisdictions released a draft agreement Tuesday that seeks to add Washington to the shared carbon market jointly run by California and Québec, which connected their programs in 2014. This decade-old carbon market is already the largest carbon market in North America and the third-largest in the world.

Washington’s Department of Ecology published the draft agreement and said in an accompanying release that “a shared market would reduce greenhouse gases more efficiently by driving long-term, cost-effective investment in decarbonization.”

Colorado could soon see a new wave of home solar power — but not in the form of the large solar panels you may see on rooftops around your neighborhood. Instead: Imagine slim, portable panels that you can attach to a porch or balcony and then plug into your wall.

Small-scale solar units like these are already popular in Europe. But they’re almost unheard of in the U.S., partly because of regulatory restrictions by power utilities but also because there aren’t many of these plug-in solar products on the market.

A bill at the Colorado statehouse could clear the way for renters, condo owners and people who can’t afford a full rooftop system to buy these plug-in panels.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its first commercial nuclear reactor construction permit in nearly 10 years Wednesday to a subsidiary of Bill Gates’ TerraPower for a 345-MW plant planned near the site of a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

Kemmerer Power Station Unit 1 will be the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant in the U.S., TerraPower said in a release, and will supply power to PacifiCorp’s grid, with completion anticipated in 2030.

The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor on Wednesday urged federal regulators to reject an application from GenOn to sell a 216-MW power plant in Maryland to TeraWulf over concerns the data centerdeveloper would remove the resource from PJM’s market.

Taking the four oil-fired Morgantown generating units out of the PJM market would run counter to “principles” issued by the National Energy Dominance Council and the PJM governors that call for new data centers to provide new generation, Monitoring Analytics, the market monitor, said in a filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has hit pause on the planned $8.25-billion expansion of its Jackpine oil sands mine in northern Alberta, citing uncertainty over government policies and calling for the end of carbon pricing.

The Jackpine project would have included the construction of a new extraction and treatment processing plant.

CNRL president Scott Stauth told an investor call Thursday morning that it was being deferred “due to lack of finalization of government regulatory policies around carbon pricing and methane, which creates uncertainty and economic burden for our long-term growth.”

U.S. natural gas futures climbed about 3% on Thursday on a bigger-than-expected storage withdrawal, forecasts for higher demand this week than previously expected, and soaring global energy prices as the U.S.-Iran war escalated.

Front-month gas ​futures for April delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 8.6 cents, or 2.9%, to settle at $3.003 per million British thermal units (mmBtu).

The Trump administration is urging energy companies to beef up security at their drilling sites, pipelines and fuel manufacturing plants in case of retaliatory attacks stemming from the U.S. and Israeli military strikes against Iran.

There are no indications of an imminent strike, but as the war in the Middle East spreads, the administration is issuing an alert about possible attacks against U.S. energy infrastructure, officials warned industry executives.

Babcock & Wilcox said on Wednesday an Applied Digital-backed company has given a go-ahead to ​their $2.4 billion deal to deliver equipment that would power ‌the technology firm's artificial intelligence campuses.

Shares of Babcock surged nearly 31% in early trading after Base Electron gave the full notice for the 1.2-gigawatt power ​project. Applied Digital had formed Base Electron to produce power for the technology firm's AI campuses under separate agreements. The power producer in turn ​hired Babcock to design, procure and construct the facility.

Under their ​agreement, Babcock will supply four 300-megawatt natural gas-fired boilers and steam turbine ‌generator ⁠systems.

A British Columbia pulp mill that’s been in operation for more than 50 years will test a way to replace carbon-emitting natural gas with clean-burning ‘green’ hydrogen made from water.

To lower the mill’s carbon footprint, the 10-megawatt Kamloops Clean Energy Centre will be located alongside the mill’s existing lime kiln, an industrial unit used in the pulp-and-paper-making process.

Since 2020, at least 80 low-carbon-emitting hydrogen projects have been announced, representing over $100-billion in potential investment, according to Natural Resources

Canada.

The Indian nuclear market presents a major growth opportunity for Cameco Corp., said chief executive officer Tim Gitzel, after securing a $2.6-billion uranium supply deal with the country which is embarking on a generational expansion of nuclear power and opening the sector to private investment.

On Monday, Mr. Gitzel signed an agreement with the Indian government to supply 22 million pounds (9.9 million kilograms) of uranium to the country between 2027 and 2035. The deal was the centrepiece of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to India this week, and was signed in the palatial Hyderabad House in New Delhi with Mr. Carney and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi looking on.

The PJM Interconnection on Friday asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve two key elements of its emerging plan for ensuring it has enough power supplies to meet growing loads, driven mainly by data centers.

Under a proposed “expedited interconnection track” process, PJM would consider up to 10 interconnection requests a year on a fast-track basis for new or uprated capacity resources of at least 250 MW.

The proposals must be backed by a pledge from a state’s “primary siting authority” that it supports expediting the project so it can come online within three years, according to the filing.

A consortium led by BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and Swedish private-equity firm EQT AB has agreed to buy U.S. power company AES Corp for $33.4 billion, ​including debt, in one of the biggest acquisitions in the sector.

The deal, announced on ‌Monday, extends a wave of big transactions in the industry, such as Blackstone's $11.5 billion acquisition of TXNM Energy and Constellation Energy's $16.4 billion buy of Calpine, as the AI boom increases the demand for power, straining grids and pushing investors toward dependable power ​portfolios.

FirstEnergy said on Monday its transmission unit ​has been selected by grid operator ‌PJM to modernize equipment, rebuild older lines and upgrade substations in Ohio and Pennsylvania, ​and that it will invest $950 ​million in the effort.

Some parts of the ⁠project will be carried out ​through Grid Growth Ventures, a joint venture ​with TransourceEnergy, at a total cost of $1.2 billion, in which FET will invest about $490 ​million.