标签：#energy

Never mind the “heat death of the universe.” Entropy is just a bridge between two levels of reality.

On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE).…

In the face of backlash to concerns the AI boom will increase consumer electricity bills, the largest utility companies and data center developers in the US are now promising to do something about it. The Wall Street Journal reports that nearly 200 organizations have signed President Donald Trump's "rate payer protection pledge" that's meant to […]

Maritime nuclear energy startup Bluecore Energy has raised $10 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Slauson & Co.

How does AI make you feel? Are you excited to “vibe-code” your smart home? Or anxious about all the added pollution and billions of gallons of water used by data centers? Dig a little deeper and you’ll start to question the actual value of the GPUs that underpin all the leaps and promises of generative […]

Companies coming to market are raising money at fastest pace this century.

It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps. The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (For what it’s worth, many heat…

Applied Computing has raised a $20M Series A to build a foundation AI model for the oil, gas and petrochemical industry.

Google's biggest solar and battery project stands in sharp contrast with xAI's nearby unpermitted power plant.

“We have no choice but to address the challenges created by these massive facilities,” New York governor Kathy Hochul said. The executive order will pause construction for one year.

Solid-state batteries are safer and more capable—but harder to mass-produce. They also represent an opportunity for non-Chinese companies to get back in the game.

The AC culture wars may be solved by advances in environmentally friendly technology.

Thousands of new fossil-fuel power sources are quietly firing up across the state to power the AI boom, thanks to a regulatory loophole, leaving residents feeling blindsided.

As extreme heat becomes the norm on the continent, the AC culture wars may be solved by advances in environmentally friendly technology.

I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year the American holiday also marked a big symbolic deadline for US nuclear power. Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can…

Miners backed by Trump admin. sell to Japan, South Korea despite push to develop domestic supply chain.

Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland. He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms.…

In February, city officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming discovered something in their reclaimed water system that shouldn't have been there: Cupriavidus gilardii , a rare metal-resistant bacterium traced to wastewater discharges from Meta's $800 million data center campus. The contamination shut down Cheyenne's reuse water system for months , and on July 2, the city publicly named Meta's construction entity — a shell company called Goat Systems LLC — as the source. 📖 Read the full version with charts and embedded sources on ComputeLeap → "It's a very, very unpleasant surprise," said City Councilman Pete Laybourn. It shouldn't have been a surprise at all. Cheyenne is just the latest community learning what happens when AI's insatiable demand for compute meets the physical world: contaminated water, noise that residents describe as "living in hell," electricity bills that spike 267%, and — in the most surreal twist — a federal government that deleted its own energy conservation pages while a heatwave slammed the eastern seaboard. The AI industry talks endlessly about parameters, benchmarks, and scaling laws. But the story converging across Reddit, Hacker News, X, and YouTube this week isn't about models. It's about watts, gallons, and the communities living next to the machines. The water problem is worse than you think A Brookings Institution analysis puts the numbers in perspective: a typical data center consumes 300,000 gallons of water every day — equivalent to roughly 1,000 households. Large facilities gulp up to 5 million gallons daily, matching the needs of a town of 50,000. And water demand for data center cooling may rise by 870% as the current build-out continues. The scale is hard to overstate. According to a Consumer Reports investigation , Phoenix-area data centers currently use 385 million gallons annually — a figure projected to explode to 3.7 billion gallons once planned facilities come online. About two-thirds of data centers built since 2022 sit in water-st

The companies’ Fourth of July plans include celebrating new reactor designs coming online. But there’s still a long way to go before they deliver energy at a meaningful scale.

Google tries balancing AI data center emissions with clean energy efforts.