/ Energy News

The Texas Public Utility Commission on Thursday unanimously approved rules that will require large computational loads, like data centers and crypto-mining facilities, within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas footprint to stay stable and connected to the grid through disruptions.

Modern computational loads, KenteelEngineering said in a June blog, are “engineered to protect extremely sensitive and expensive equipment,” and during a voltage dip are programmed to disconnect or enter momentary cessation.

Alberta, Ottawa and the five largest oil sands companies in the country have signed an agreement to push forward a massive carbon capture project in the province’s north, while setting the stage for a substantial increase in crude production.

The non-binding deal clears away another hurdle to the construction of a new West Coast oil pipeline, a major priority for both the federal and Alberta governments.

Sunrun Inc. is piloting a program to enable customers to earn money by using electricity from rooftop solar and battery installations to power home-computing systems for AI.

Customers could make money for hosting a computer the size of a small filing cabinet, with compensation potentially ranging from a couple hundred dollars to more than that in a month.

The Innu First Nation of Pessamit has rejected a landmark agreement their leaders negotiated with Quebec that aimed to settle a decades-long dispute over land use and deliver billions of dollars to the community while opening up new energy development in the province.

Members of the community of 4,300, located about 50 kilometres southwest of Baie-Comeau, Que., voted 63 per cent against the deal in a referendum whose ballots were counted Sunday evening during a live broadcast on Facebook.

Meta Platforms Inc. plans to spend more than $13-billion to build a massive artificial intelligence data centre in Sturgeon County, north of Edmonton, marking the technology company’s first such facility in Canada.

To meet the electricity needs of the data centre, Pembina Pipeline Corp., Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and KineticorAsset Management are building a $4.6-billion natural gas plant in Sturgeon County.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, D, signed legislation Tuesday that aims to make electricity more affordable, including a bill that requires state regulatory review of “supplemental” transmission projects.

Supplemental projects in New Jersey totaled$14.7 billion from 2008 to 2025, making up 79% of total ratepayer transmission expenses, according to Sherrill.

Ohio utility regulators voted Wednesday, July 8 to give Dayton-area electric utility consumers a refund of $11 million, far short of the more than $80 million consumer advocates wanted.

The decision followed an Ohio Supreme Court ruling last year that the PUCO acted unlawfully when it allowed AES to offset excessive earnings against future committed capital investments instead of refunding those excessive earnings to consumers.

That law, passed in 2025, creates a new rate class for these large energy users, requiring them to pay for their share of electricity usage.

The company’s residential customers will see a 1.3% decrease on their energy bills.

Alberta and Ontario are proposing a new 3,300-kilometre pipeline route to carry crude oil across the country, in a bid to reduce Canada’s reliance on foreign markets.

The proposed pipeline would travel across four provinces from Hardisty, Alta., to Sarnia, Ont., and would be able to move roughly 500,000 barrels of oil per day, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Ontario Premier Doug Ford said in Calgary on Monday.

The national average price of residential electricity increased by around 7.3% from April 2025 to April 2026, to 18.8 cents/kWh, exacerbating an affordability crisis that has ensnared a growing number of Americans despite efforts to address it, according to a report from the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.

As of last month, 46 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have taken 362 actions to address energy affordability, including utility business model reform efforts in New Jersey and performance-based ratemaking legislation in Indiana.

Arizona Public Service plans to convert two units at its retired Cholla Power Plant in Navajo County, Arizona, to natural gas generation, providing up to 380 GW of energy, the utility announced Thursday.

The plant’s coal units were retired over the last decade due to federal environmental mandates, with the final retirement occurring in March 2025, APS said.

FERC issued show cause orders to each of the six FERC-jurisdictional RTOs and ISOs to demonstrate that their transmission tariffs and related rules adequately address the interconnection of large loads — such as data centers — or to propose reforms.

Although FERC has not prescribed uniform tariff requirements, the issues identified in the orders — including study procedures, cost recovery mechanisms, co-located generation, flexible load service and generation-to-load transmission arrangements — are likely to shape transmission policy across organized markets.

The Nova Scotia government has granted environmental assessment approval for plans to build what it describes as the province’s largest wind energy project.

On Thursday, the Environment Department issued a statement saying the Ocean Lake Wind Project proposed for Guysborough County in eastern Nova Scotia calls for the construction of 158 turbines, each of them 221 metres tall.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday said it issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to “permanently end home appliance and equipment mandates,” continuing President Trump’s campaign against limits on how much energy is used by light bulbs, washing machines, furnaces and a host of other devices.

The changes will help “safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances,” according to the proposal, and will “promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries.”

PJM Interconnection stakeholders on Tuesday approved a two-part reliability backstop procurement plan to help supply data centers with electricity and meet an expected power supply shortfall in two years.

Under the plan, utilities and other load-serving entities, and potentially data centersthemselves, would ask PJM to buy a specific amount of capacity in a one-time auction.