Companies that purchase large quantities of carbon credits typically follow one of two approaches: they either offset a fixed portion of their emissions (e.g. Delta Air Lines, easyJet, and Volkswagen Group) or offset residual emissions to meet specific emission targets (e.g. Shell, Eni, and Inpex). In contrast, companies that purchase fewer carbon credits typically only offer them to their customers during the checkout (e.g. Deutsche Lufthansa, Air France - KLM, Ryanair Holding, International Consolidated Airlines Group) or offset their business travel (e.g. Deutsche Lufthansa, International Consolidated Airlines Group).

“Whereas previously they had 100TWh contracted, we’re seeing nowhere near that kind of take-up under the new mechanism, and this is all happening in a climate where an increased amount of renewable sources are entering the system. So EDF is looking for replacement industrial off-takers for nuclear while this transition occurs.”

Mistral had already announced it was setting up its first dedicated AI training cluster in France. The company, which this week announced a fresh €1.7 billion ($1.99bn) funding round, had previously relied on infrastructure from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to train its models, but will now be working with Eclairion and French GPU cloud provider Scaleway to bring an initial 18,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs online later this year.

This figure is true, as is the fact that much of Texas is in drought, but the usage covers the entirety of 2023 and 2024, suggesting data centers averaged a little over 600,000 gallons a day of water use. By contrast, Texas homes use 2.3b gallons of water every single day. Even the data quoted by the Austin Chronicle suggests data centers could use a comparatively modest 0.13b gallons a day in 2025. They might use a lot of water, but data centers are a tiny contributor to overall water use.

In a strategic reserve, a select few resources – usually fossil fuel plants close to retirement – are kept open in case their capacity is needed to fill gaps. These plants are put in a stand-by reserve and are not allowed to participate in electricity markets, instead getting paid by a central authority to simply be available and ensure they can be activated quickly during critical periods. Germany, for example, currently has a strategic reserves mechanism

In California, where record-breaking wildfires earlier this year collectively accounted for $37.5 billion in insured losses—roughly 70 percent of global insured disaster costs—insurance providers are adapting their models

The US, with its expanding population, relatively consistent economic growth and extensive domestic coal reserves, sees a cap on carbon emissions as a threat to its competitiveness, and hence to its global hegemony

Europe, meanwhile, has been making encouraging though patchy progress towards its Kyoto targets, driven mainly by a one-off switch from coal to gas – leaving it cradled in Russia’s increasingly rough embraces

The authors therefore suggest the government introduce a special battery grid fee, which would set a variable price for withdrawing or feeding electricity every quarter-hour, depending on the regional capacity of grids to transport electricity.

A security of supply report that systematically ignores large-scale storage facilities does not provide a viable basis for political decisions on power plant expansion or capacity markets

In this system, the electricity sector cannot balance out shortcomings in transport and buildings.

The “nameplate” power rating of a chip, often based on its thermal design power (TDP), reflects the maximum theoretical power it could draw under extreme, fully saturated workloads. These ratings are used to inform the electrical system design, but in practice, chips rarely operate near those levels. Reaching 100% of nameplate power across an entire rack or cluster is not only unusual, it's extremely difficult to sustain, and often not desirable given reliability and thermal constraints.

Load factor is the ratio of average demand to realized peak demand

As a result, all the "gains" from "powerful new models" come from burning more and more tokens. The cost-per-million-token number is no longer an accurate measure of the actual costs of generative AI, because it's much, much harder to tell how many tokens a reasoning model may burn, and it varies (as Theo Browne noted) from model to model

The "early days" argument hinges on obscurity and limited resources, something that generative AI does not get to whine about. Companies that make effectively no revenue can raise $500 million to do the same AI coding bullshit that everybody else does.In simpler terms, these companies are flush with cash, have all the attention and investment they could possibly need, and are still unable to create a product with a defined, meaningful, mass-market use case.

In one sense, explaining what happened to the telecom sector is very simple: the growth in capacity has vastly outstripped the growth in demand. In the five years since the 1996 bill became law, telecommunications companies poured more than $500 billion into laying fiber optic cable, adding new switches, and building wireless networks. So much long-distance capacity was added in North America, for example, that no more than two percent is currently being used

I was probably 9 or 10 when my father took me to a Horn & Hardart automat. For those too young to remember — who I hope are a large fraction of my readers — these were establishments in which a variety of sandwiches and other foods were displayed behind glass doors. You would serve yourself by putting coins into a slot, which would unlock the door and let you extract your egg salad sandwich or whatever.At the time (and at my age) it seemed wonderfully futuristic: Food service without people! In reality, of course, automats weren’t automated; each required a substantial staff to operate the kitchen and keep refilling those glass-doored compartments. And because automats weren’t all they pretended to be, they were eventually driven out of business by the rise of fast food.

Our study also determines that the minimum wage has no effect on employment in competitive markets, but it has a positive and very large effect in monopsonistic markets. If the minimum wage increases 100 percent, employment increases 69.7 percent more in monopsony markets than in competitive markets, where it only sees a tiny increase

Instead of appearing the ring N times, each item appears once, and takes advantage of fault-tolerant nodes rather than spreading over multiple nodes

Another troubling point is that big tech doesn’t just buy data centers and then use them, but in many cases pays a construction company to build them, fills them with GPUs and then leases them from a company that runs them, meaning that they don’t have to personally staff up and maintain them

And no, Microsoft talking about its Azure revenue in its last quarterly earnings for the first time is not the same thing, as it stopped explicitly stating their AI revenue in January (when it was $13 billion annualized).

Cursor is allowed to die, it will be unable to pay a chunk of Anthropic’s revenue — and yes, the revenue of other providers too. It will also bring into question whether it’s possible to build — putting aside any questions of profitability — a business of any kind offering services built on top of generative AI, and in turn bring into doubt the veracity of investing in this sector.

ill stillcontribute to your annual CFE score

This is the CFE in the electricity utility/supplier mix that has not been voluntarily procured by corporate buyers but is delivered by default. It can only be claimed if the utility or supplier retires an equivalent amount of hourly or sub‑hourly EACs

Evaluating GPAI requires both broad and deep domain expertise – from bringing in cybersecurity experts to social scientists and disinformation experts. While major companies can hire that expertise in-house, smaller providers depend to a much greater extent on external expertise. Mandating third-party assessments incentivises a more mature ecosystem, driving down cost and expanding capacity, which disproportionately benefits smaller GPAI model providers.

By contrast, given Big Tech’s monopolistic dominance, they usually dictate the conditions for using their models to European startups and SMEs, often amounting to "take it or leave it". And while the cost of third-party assessments is minimal for the handful of big players spending millions—or even billions—on training, pushing the assurance onus onto smaller downstream providers is a true innovation killer. Instead, making third-party assessments for GPAI models mandatory, empowers smaller innovators, by providing independent, credible information on the robustness of the underlying model, and ultimately promoting European AI diffusion.

But won’t this stifle innovation, one might worry? Quite the opposite, we think. Europe's competitive advantage in AI is unlikely to arise from pouring hundreds of billions into building the largest foundational models. Instead, it will come from industrial adoption, effectively integrating GPAI into useful downstream applications–an approach that plays to Europe’s true strengths: rich data pools, world-class applied engineering capabilities and dynamic SMEs, which make up 99% of all businesses.

This won't trigger an error in Python, though. You have to use a type checker like mypy, pyright, or ty to get the warning. But it's a lightweight alternative, and even without tooling, it tells other programmers what parts of the program do what.

Similarly, 67% of the emissions from private jets escape the attention of the EU ETS. Removing existing exemptions would unlock significant funding for decarbonisation from this indulgent form of travel.

Recognising that it is expensive to maintain a pool of IP addresses in every potential user location, these companies have also proposed a new HTTP header to allow clients/browsers to directly convey geolocation information through any privacy relays that may be present.

While there (currently) is no singular definition of what privacy relays are, these are some examples of how they’ve been deployed: (1) Apple’s iCloud Private Relay is a subscription service that uses MASQUE proxies with oblivious routing to allow users to browse the internet while keeping their IP address private, (2) Apple’s Private Cloud Compute is experimenting with Oblivious HTTP to reduce the footprint of their user’s queries to AI models, (3) Google’s proposed IP Protection envisions MASQUE-based oblivious routing for a very limited set cases (third-party requests in incognito mode) in its Chrome browser, (4) Cloudflare’s Warp offers both free and paid versions of a VPN-like service that uses a MASQUE proxy for internet browsing, but without oblivious routing, and (5) Google’s Safe Browsing service uses Oblivious HTTP to enable users to privately query for unsafe URLs.

The US does supply more than 50% of EU imports of Liquefied Natural Gas, but LNG accounts for only 17% of total EU imports of energy products.

How the energy part of the deal will work is a particular mystery. Last year, the total imports of energy by the EU stood at EUR375bn so for the EU to buy USD250bn of US energy products per year for the next three years would require a massive re-allocation of European imports

Debt-financed housing

Alongside ever expanding flows of crude to the east and deepening investment ties with China, Saudi Arabia’s moves on the home front looked primed to tilt the axis of global capital accumulation

This means that if, for example, a government publishes an “inadequate” NDC, a “competent court or tribunal” could order it to supply one that is consistent with its obligations under the Paris Agreement.

Crucially, the court says that countries can, in principle, face liability for climate harms, opening the door to potential “reparations” for loss and damage.

customary international law

These nations had argued that the climate treaties formed a “lex specialis”, a specific area of law that precludes the application of broader general international law principles. On the contrary, the ICJ says countries do have legal obligations under general international law, including a duty to prevent “significant harm to the environment”, with further obligations arising under human rights law and from other treaties.

Rather than assuming a level playing field, this approach would acknowledge differentiated access to infrastructure, data, and energy, and could inform mechanisms such as equitable allocation of computational resources, financing for sovereign digital systems, or participatory standards-setting processes. Just as CBDR has shaped expectations around climate finance and capacity-building, it could offer a framework through which states with greater historical emissions and technological concentration contribute more substantively to the conditions under which AI systems are developed, governed, and distributed

Rebuilding this principle means aligning energy transitions with technological innovation under climate limits. Applying the CBDR principle to AI governance could involve reimagining the architecture of responsibility in light of technological asymmetries and historical ecological debt.

The human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is essential for the enjoyment of other human rights

To comply with the GHG Protocol Product Standard, future audits made in the industry may follow this study’s principles of using location-based approach for electricity emissions and including all significant upstream impacts

Long-term contracts, together with domestic gas production, typically accounted for 80-90% of the European Union’s natural gas consumption before the 2022 crisis. In the past two years, that share has dropped to around 50%. If no new contracts are signed and existing ones are not renewed, the share of spot gas and flexible LNG in total EU gas supply could increase to around two-thirds by 2030, which could increase exposure to short-term price volatility.

The social force at the heart of this initiative is European industry, which has been facing increasing competition from China and the United States and stands to gain substantially from such a program. However, the preferential treatment of purchasing European-produced weapons will mostly benefit the German, French, and Italian producers, who are already seeing their orders and share prices increasing

The technological spillovers and productivity gains suffusing current rhetoric will only be generated by domestic production. But even if policy succeeds in addressing this technological backwardness and dependency, shortening development times from their current Kiel-sponsored forecasts, there are reasons to question the efficiency of this growth strategy. Modern weapons production depends on advanced manufacturing techniques that require relatively little labour, resulting in lower economic multipliers compared to investments in sectors like health, education, or green energy. It generates fewer jobs per euro invested and has limited impact on enhancing the overall productive capacity of the economy

Member States must now implement a credit mechanism that counts renewable electricity used in EV charging towards sectoral renewable energy targets

It is important to note that HV transformers are generally custom-made as each transmission line has its own characteristics, and therefore tend to have long lead times (>12mo). To alleviate the bottleneck, datacenter operators can preorder them as part of their planning process.

all three transformers would share the load, but run at 2/3 of their rated capacity to detect any infant mortality (i.e. failure upon initial activation) and avoid deterioration that can occur on completely unused transformers

On average, Power Utilization rate is typically 50-60% for Cloud Computing workloads, and north of 80% for AI training. Enterprises are often even lower than 50%.

You can also use systemd-cat to pipe the output of any command directly into the journal. For example: ls -l / | systemd-cat -p info -t my-script will run the command and log its output with an "info" priority and the identifier "my-script".

Electrification is a foundational goal of energy transition, but its success places pressure on clean generation to cover marginal growth when that growth rate steps up to higher levels.

Power generation grew by a heady 4.3%, or 1,293 TWh from 29,963 to 31,256 TWh. Combined wind and solar generation grew by just half that total, 649 TWh. The gap between the two, 644 TWh, was filled with both good news and bad news. Nuclear and hydro generation grew by a combined 272 TWh. Yes, that’s encouraging; but neither nuclear power nor hydro is a reliable growth technology and cannot be forecasted with any ease, as they are volatile year to year. Meanwhile, coal in global power continued to grow, by a very unfortunate 152 TWh; and natural gas grew an even larger 192 TWh. The remainder, 28 TWh, was met by various minor sources, like geothermal and biomass.

Alternatively, ultracapacitors could be the long-term answer, Zanei says. “The ultracapacitor is a kind of energy storage solution, and it's very good at moving power in and out,” he explains. “It stores less energy [than a battery], but it is excellent in cycling very quickly and could provide the power needed just for those milliseconds, or whatever the brief peak is, and then recharge during the valleys.”

However, this switching operation would cause serious problems for the broader electric grid, because it takes hundreds of megawatts if not gigawatts of electric demand off the grid in an instant. This in turn causes voltage and frequency fluctuations from the sudden imbalance between electric supply and demand, which then may cause other generators or large loads to trip offline in a cascading grid failure.

The second point is best exemplified by DeepSeek’s very unique inference deployment

Inter-node communication stalls: high batching is crucial to profitably serve millions of users, and in the context of SOTA reasoning models, many nodes are often required. Inference workloads then resemble more training.

During training, tens of thousands of GPUs may increase or decrease power consumption at the same time, for example, due to all GPUs waiting for checkpointing or collective communications to finish, or the startup or shutdown of the entire training job. When this happens, it can result in instant fluctuations of power consumption across the datacenter on the order of tens of megawatts, stretching the limits of the power grid

It is quite apparent that if large amounts of waste serve as future feedstocks for the chemical industry, this waste can no longer be burned in waste-to-energy plants. Especially waste gasification could drastically change what can still legitimately be called unrecyclable waste.

Waste incinerators have traditionally seen favorable policy treatment within the European Union. The energy generated from their biogenic fuel share counts as renewable, allowing the creation of guarantees of origin, the EU's flawed green electricity certificates. Emissions from waste-to-energy plants are currently not included in the EU's emission trading system (ETS).

In 2014, BRICS—with South Africa now a member—launched institutions to mimic those created at Bretton Woods. The New Development Bank was to provide development finance a la World Bank, and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement was to give liquidity without onerous IMF-style conditionalities. These new institutions, however, remained limited in scope and scale, insofar as they were constrained by strategic differences between the BRICS members, and there was little for the West to feel threatened by. The New Development Bank’s loan book is small relative to its paid-in capital and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement relies on IMF decisions for much of the funding it offers.

The INI report addresses this challenge directly, calling for the creation of a foundational layer of digital public infrastructure. This foundational layer is essential for advancing technological sovereignty and enabling a more open and competitive digital market. It should be grounded in open standards, promote interoperability, and be designed with privacy, security, and public accountability by default.

Warns that there is significantgrowth in online traffic linked primarilyto the major non-EU content andapplication providers, resulting in highcosts for European telecoms operators,which already have to finance thedevelopment and modernisation of theirnetworks; calls therefore on theCommission to include, in its forthcominglegislative proposal for a digital networksact, provisions aimed at requiring themain content and application providers tomake a fair financial contribution totelecoms operators, and to put in place aframework for negotiations between theseoperators and content and applicationproviders

Therefore, for ease, we’ll use 40kWh/kg as the minimum input energy requirement to produce Hydrogen throughout this analysis. 

Public sector IT demand is estimated at €70bn a year, a portion of that (30%?) would be a major shot in the arm to European industry

It's similar to the discussion around flying. As an individual, me not choosing to take a flight doesn't change much. That flight is still going ahead. It's the same with data transfer and network energy use. Me sending a few less kilobytes over the network isn't going to signal to the network operator that capacity can be reduced. Like flying, though, we can collectively signal to airline operators that certain routes are less valuable if a sufficiently large number of people stop flying them. But that's a long game, with a lot of collective action required. We can get there, especially in places with suitable alternatives to flying, but we can't completely remove flying from our life. I'd say the same applies for the network. It's not a lost cause, but rather a long game that we can play alongside realising shorter term wins.

Khomeini’s prescription was that Iran and its Shia allies must lead the Palestinian cause — that was their ticket to acceptance in a Sunni Arab world that had long borne hostility to Persians and Shia. The 1982 invasion gave birth to Hizbollah, and the latter’s rise with Iran’s help put Tehran squarely in Israel’s crosshairs

We requested these air permits and applications from 50 states and Washington, DC, asking agencies to search permits using federal industry codes associated with data centers

According to Rystad, some 45% of total shipping demand is for transporting fossil fuels.[4] That means some $42 billion per year is spent on fossil shipping fuels to transport other fossil fuels to their point of use

But this comparison does not account for differences in the intensity of adoption (the number of hours of use) or the high cost of buying a PC compared to accessing generative AI.

The proposals in the paper meaningfully advance the conversation about leveraging public spending to reshape the digital economy and addressing public institutions’ dependence on foreign, proprietary technologies. Public authorities in the EU spend approximately €2 trillion (around 13.6% of GDP) annually on procurement.

2) Why do they only use 1 GPU, no servers, and a short training time in the embodied carbon estimates

This was then scaled by the ratio of the training time to the GPU lifespan (1082 hours/1.5 years = 0.08238). This gave an embodied carbon of 12.439 kg CO2e, which was then amortized over the 300000000 monthly queries to give an embodied carbon-per-query of 4.1465 g/query.

The embodied carbon was then accounted for by summing the embodied carbon of an A100 GPU (150 kg, from the aforementioned BLOOM study)

Natural hydrogen explorer Hyterra reported a 96.1% hydrogen concentration in mud gas samples from its first US well, Sue Duroche-3, in Kansas, one of the highest recorded levels of natural hydrogen. The find confirms historic readings nearby, ahead of a second well spud planned for mid-May. If validated, it could accelerate interest in geologic hydrogen as a scalable, low-emissions energy source, an alternative to electrolysis-based hydrogen production.

European lawmakers have granted automakers a reprieve until 2027 to meet 2025 CO2 targets, easing billions in potential fines for firms like Volkswagen, Stellantis, and Renault. The move responds to weak EV sales and industry pressure, but casts doubt on the bloc’s 2035 zero-emissions car mandate. It risks slowing momentum in transport electrification just as emissions cuts need to accelerate, and continues the EU’s retreat on climate policy implementation.

The sovereign cloud will be supported by a dedicated European Security Operations Center (SOC), led by an EU citizen residing in the EU, who will advise the managing director and assist customers and regulators on security matters. Regardless of Amazon's data sovereignty pledge, the parent company remains under American ownership, and may still be subject to the Cloud Act, which requires US companies to turn over data to law enforcement authorities with the proper warrants, no matter where that data is stored. As Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Germany-based Nextcloud, told us in March: "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else."

Benchmark estimates the “all-in” costs of oil brine DLE, including mining, processing, transporting and royalties, are currently around $10,000 per tonne. It puts Standard’s total costs at about $10,735 per tonne, significantly higher than the most competitive evaporation ponds and hybrid producers, where costs can be as low as $6,000 a tonne.

The first draft of eIDAS forced browsers to accept QWACs – lower-security standard website certificates and providers that issue them. This would lower the bar for protection and open up users to possible malicious attacks and online crime.

Georgia State University assistant professor and former House Oversight Committee staffer Todd Phillips laid this out in a Prospect piece earlier this month. Any 30 senators can force a CRA resolution onto the floor, with a required ten hours of debate time. These resolutions would need the president’s signature, and nearly all of them wouldn’t even get the Republican votes necessary to pass the Senate. But according to Senate procedure, they have to be dealt with if enough senators force them onto the floor. They must be debated and voted upon ahead of other Senate business if brought up for consideration. This means that Democrats can tie up the Senate floor for upwards of ten hours with any single CRA resolution.

So I think those would be the three things for me: the reducing the status competition by boosting the supply of housing, encouraging empathy with more personal interactions by getting kids off their phones, and also thinking about how do you change the algorithm so that people don’t see this distorted sense of humanity, which is just making them think that other people are crazy, when actually, most people are pretty moderate and towards the middle.

But, you know, one question I actually had for me, that’s part of this, is there’s this concept called group threat theory, where you think about some other group as being the cause of your misfortune. And identifying who that group is, though, is not just natural, right? That doesn’t happen out of the ether.

An IBM survey of 2,000 CEOs revealed that just 25% of AI projects deliver on their promised return on investment. The main driver of adoption, it seems, is corporate FOMO, with nearly two-thirds of CEOs agreeing that “the risk of falling behind drives them to invest in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization,” according to the study.

Humlum, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Emilie Vestergaard, an economics PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, looked at 25,000 workers across 7,000 workspaces, focusing on occupations believed to be susceptible to disruption by AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers.

There is live chatter about including these Paris-approved offsets in the European Union’s 2040 climate target.

Bell argued such a model could actually be attractive to gas plant owners as it would offer guaranteed returns for remaining in the strategic reserve, rather than an increasingly unpredictable income stream as more renewables are built. The government’s 2030 clean power plans require most of Britain’s gas plants to remain available for back-up power, but aims for them to account for no more than 5 per cent of generation.

Bell argues that severing the gas-electricity price link by removing gas plants from the wholesale power market would be “the single biggest move the government could make to cut bills in the short run”.

Merz’s far more generous approach to military spending will not boost domestic growth in the coming years as much as its advocates suggest. The defense sector is already operating near capacity, and in the short run, increasing government spending on weapons and tanks will have only a limited effect on production. Arms companies such as Rheinmetall have seen soaring profit margins, revealing their market power and the lack of competition they face even amid rising demand. Significant additional public spending may go into boosting their margins further. Rheinmetall’s 15-fold stock surge reflects expectations of continued windfall profits.

Merz is an advocate for free markets and espouses “trickle-down economics

The government’s refusal of industry pleas to raise the AR5 price ceiling was motivated in part by suspicion—exacerbated by glaring informational asymmetries—that their cost complaints were a bluff.

In “de-risking” one set of investment risks—reducing exposure to wholesale market volatility through the creation of regulated auctions and contracts—for for-profit developers, however, the program leaves these same private investment decisions vulnerable to another set of risks: cost.

The new policy removes price guarantees pegged to coal-power prices, with new wind and solar projects supposed to secure direct contracts with electricity buyers. This is likely to lead to lower prices being paid to new wind and solar projects. However, it offers more favourable pricing – via “contracts for difference” – to the amount of new capacity needed to meet central government energy targets.

Climeworks has kept a carbon accounting that the company publishes on its website. It states that it is growing rapidly and now employs 387 people. That is an increase of 45 percent between years. It also says that the company has been expanding systematically and in 2023 it entered new markets, such as the United States, Kenya, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom. Due to the company's rapid expansion, its carbon footprint has grown in parallel and is attributed to travel and the company's activities.

Central bank should purchase country’s debt if its borrowing costs rise because of excessive risk avoidance by investors

It offers an efficient way

The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.

Truman had authorized the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1946 so that the government could identify how nuclear energy might be used, and also reassert some degree of civilian control, now that the war was over. But the AEC would not be fully formed until 1947 and there were still no concrete plans to build a nuclear reactor

This change means many data centers built in central, western, and rural China—where electricity and land are cheaper—are losing their allure to AI companies. In Zhengzhou, a city in Li’s home province of Henan, a newly built data center is even distributing free computing vouchers to local tech firms but still struggles to attract clients.

It is the second biggest producer of electric cars in the world, surpassed only by China. In 2024, the nation built 1.35m electric cars, around a third of total production, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.

However, plans to auction 5GW of new gas plants in early 2025 fell apart when the coalition government collapsed. These plants were intended to be “hydrogen-ready”, with the idea they would run on green hydrogen in the future, rather than gas.

The greenhouse gas methane also seeps out of Germany’s lignite mines. Analysis by the thinktank Ember in 2024 concluded that these emissions could be up to 220 times higher than official government reporting suggests.

Lignite is cheap to produce and is used in some of Germany’s coal-power plants. However, it has a relatively low energy content and generates more CO2 when burned than hard coal

Finally, bioenergy – particularly biogas – plays a relatively large role in Germany’s energy system. It has been a key part of the Energiewende, with farmers taking advantage of feed-in tariffs from the 2000s onwards to set up small bioenergy plants.

Germany has also set up a national emissions trading system (ETS)

Around half of the measures relied on government funding, which had dried up following a supreme court ruling that the government’s transfer of €60bn in unused money from a Covid-19 fund to a major climate fund had been unlawful. Another amendment to the climate law came in 2024, pushed by the FDP in the coalition government. This effectively weakened the law by removing sectoral targets, spreading responsibility across the whole government and making it harder to scrutinise progress.

Germany’s target is net-zero for all greenhouse gases by 2045, with interim targets of a 65% emissions cut by 2030 and an 88% cut by 2040, compared to 1990 levels.

The German government announced that it had provided €9.9bn ($10.3bn) of climate finance in 2023. However, Germany has been criticised for relying heavily on loans to deliver climate finance, with the investigative NGO FragDenStaat reporting that €5.1bn ($5.3bn) of the 2023 total was provided in this way.

If there is a silver lining in all this, it’s the casting off of the illusion that private finance would ever prioritize climate goals over profit; in turn, this might mean wider opportunity to refocus on fundamental financial reforms

Over the last 15 years, these scaling laws have held steady, and the compute used to train the most compute-intensive models has reliably increased by roughly 5x each year: over a billion-fold increase.16

2) Globally, the power required by AI data centers could grow by more than 130 GW by 2030, whereas American power generation is forecasted to grow by only 30 GW, much of it unavailable or unusable for AI data centers

And those that will find cause for optimism and relativism, as double materiality is preserved and indeed if 80% of companies are descoped from the CSRD, but in GDP terms, those are 'only' expected to represent 10%.

The readings are always measured values SMETS electricity and gas meters occasionally produce high-values which are not actual recorded consumption. They are error codes used to report some kind of meter fault. You need to trap and handle these when processing the data. As the linked documents note: “Due to the nature of the national programme and the position taken by government and the regulator this is no obligation or requirement for manufacturers to publish these error codes so they can be captured and processed explicitly.“

As Fang Xinghai observed, EU countries “may examine the ESG information disclosed by Chinese firms in levying taxes.” The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) – an import tariff based on products’ carbon footprint – is an example of such a tax. Other heated policy debates around “climate clubs” and sustainable sourcing in critical minerals suggest that sustainability-linked trade instruments may become more widespread, at least in Western markets.Such trade-based tools will rely on granular product-level sustainability disclosures, not firm-wide disclosures, which are the subject of the Guidelines and Basic Standards.

I designed a Request for Information (RFI) while at DOE on energy supply chains that was the first to use “online portals” to collect responses in a systematic fashion that could be directly organized into a spreadsheet, rather using an email inbox to collect pdf responses from companies. The portals were really just Microsoft Forms™, but we had to take care not to call them that because saying “form” triggers PRA review. Having our lawyers ensure we did not trigger PRA review delayed the rollout of this by 9 months

the “paperwork reduction act” required any government office to check with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the White House every time they wanted to put out a form, to ensure the form was not duplicative of any other existing form. This measure aimed at “reducing paperwork” from the government, has indeed accomplished its goal, but by making it impossibly slow for any government office to put out any form or survey. This hurts everything from website user surveys to USGS surveys of opinions around public lands.

This might seem obvious now, but at the time it was a bold bet: instead of creating separate product lines optimized for different use-cases (laptops, desktops, IoT, datacenter, etc.), NVIDIA built a single contiguous GPU product line. This meant accepting trade-offs—such as power or cost inefficiencies—but in return, it created a unified ecosystem where every developer’s investment in CUDA could scale seamlessly from gaming GPUs to high-performance datacenter accelerators

On the side of academia France’s research ecosystem boasts notable achievements, such as the 2021 open-source BLOOM model, trained on the publicly funded Jean Zay supercomputer. The model has enabled numerous downstream commercial applications of AI in Europe, such as the Poro-series by the Finnish Silo AI, now owned by AMD.

would require a ramp-up of BECC from currently near-zero commercial capacity to covering almost all biomass conversion.

This flexible power capacity is seldom used, with capacity factors of 28% (Fig. 3), which renders the addition of costly carbon capture to these power plants prohibitively expensive. For carbon capture to be cost effective for a particular technology, high utilization rates are needed due to the high investment cost of the additional infrastructure.

Better Competition: Current competition in the cloud and digital infrastructure market is broken as Europe lacks the equivalent, vertically integrated, cash-generating digital product companies that the US has created by allowing them to fully integrate each part of the value creation chain. Building cloud infrastructure has displaced most other cash generation in these companies and therefore is where they gain their power. By establishing an open market, Europe creates a new, level playing field in which they and EU providers can compete on price and not market access or distribution, which are locked down.

If utilization scales to 65% (more customers are using the AI infrastructure), revenue swells to $795 million (€668 million) per year, while retaining the same staff costs to operate the facilities

Where European providers cannot compete are the following, which are addressed by the market:

Europe should create an open marketplace for buying and selling digital resources, specifically for AI infrastructure. This market should be an independent public, not-for-profit entity financed through transaction fees and with a clear statutory mandate, transparency, and limited leadership terms

In our example, if Siemens scales up its use of the AI provider to €100 million per year, that would mean €50 million worth of digital resources would have to be manufactured at a European facility. That facility pays property taxes on its size, not on the amount of digital resources it produces; therefore, property taxes do not scale with output (that is what profit and trade taxes are for).

These contracts usually fix the price over long periods (15-30 years), shielding them from fluctuations in the energy market at the expense of the power plant. The power plant receives long-term guaranteed income, though it might not benefit from increases in the power price over the next 15-30 years. The investors building the power plants reduce their risk but also forfeit potential value-creation opportunities. Many of them are financed by pension funds.

As far as we can tell from public financial records, even though the request is fulfilled by infrastructure in Europe, the €0.5 million does not travel back through internal transfer pricing between Microsoft's local entities in Europe from the US entity. That means it does not show up as revenue (or profit) in any European entity, although the infrastructure is using European land and power infrastructure.

Beyond this market structure, cloud infrastructure providers are further abusing their position

This is partly due to their ability to purchase large quantities of AI equipment (GPUs) using their vast cash reserves and de facto create a moat by controlling the supply chain for GPUs, hindering incumbents who want to compete.

41.17% of European businesses with more than 250 employees are reported to use AI services. This translates into EU businesses spending an estimated €39 billion a year on AI services

This creates a dependent relationship – in the case of Anthropic, 60-75% of its API revenue comes from the partnership with Amazon AWS.

Carbon dioxide injection companies can now insure against carbon dioxide loss and transfer liability for injection wells to the state after fifty years, which means that the risk of infrastructure failure largely falls on the public

The latter changed almost overnight with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which almost doubled the tax-credit (called 45Q) for sequestering carbon from $45 per cubic ton of carbon dioxide to $85 (the tax break for DAC is even steeper, at $180). This immediately made many carbon capture projects economically viable, unleashing a scramble for geological pore space suitable for carbon dioxide sequestration

It is no longer possible to claim that capitalists are uninterested; quite the contrary, we are in the midst of a massive speculative CCS boom. I spent the last year studying it wash over Louisiana, which, along with Texas, is at the boom’s epicenter. I attended meetings in communities slated for CCS infrastructure—whether carbon dioxide injection wells, carbon dioxide pipelines or new petrochemical plants that would produce “clean fuels” like blue ammonia and hydrogen using carbon capture.

At the Council on Foreign Relations, Brad Setser and Stephen Paduano have long called for the World Bank to set up an SDR-denominated bond facility, whereby countries like the United States could use their SDRs to help capitalize a massive long-term expansion of the World Bank’s lending headroom

EXIM could also encourage the use of joint venture partnerships to promote responsible technology transfer, both from the United States for technologies like geothermal energy―which is witnessing rapid innovations domestically―and to the United States for technologies like floating offshore wind from countries like Denmark

To that end, the United States has committed to mobilize $200 billion of PGI’s $600 billion goal, and senior White House, State Department, and Treasury officials are helping oversee the program alongside their counterparts across the G7

The Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Commerce, and the Secretary of Energy, shall undertake a programmatic environmental review, on a thematic basis, of the environmental effects — and opportunities to mitigate those effects — involved with the construction and operation of AI data centers, as well as of other components of AI infrastructure as the Secretary of Defense deems appropriate.  The review shall conclude, with all appropriate documents published, on the date of the close of the solicitations described in subsection 4(e) of this order, or as soon thereafter as possible

location within geographic areas that are not at risk of persistently failing to attain National Ambient Air Quality Standards, and where the total cancer risk from air pollution is at or below the national average according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) 2020 AirToxScreen;

possess the characteristics described in subsections (a)(i)-(x) of this section, in a manner that is consistent with the objective of fully permitting and approving work to construct utility-scale power facilities on a timeline that allows for the operation of those facilities by the end of 2027 or as soon as feasible thereafter; and

Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Energy shall release for public comment draft reporting requirements for AI data centers covering all phases of AI data centers’ development and operation — including material extraction, component fabrication, transportation, construction, operation, recycling, and retirement — regarding embodied greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and excess heat or energy expenditures, as distinct from operational intensity of greenhouse gas emissions.

require that, concurrent with operating a frontier AI data center on a Federal site, non-Federal parties constructing, owning, or operating AI infrastructure have procured sufficient new clean power generation resources with capacity value to meet the frontier AI data center’s planned electricity needs, including by providing power that matches the data center’s timing of electricity use on an hourly basis and is deliverable to the data center;

The Secretaries shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law and to the extent that the Secretaries assess that the requirement promotes national defense, national security, or the public interest, as appropriate, select at least one proposal developed and submitted jointly by a consortium of two or more small- or medium-sized organizations — as determined by those organizations’ market capitalization, revenues, or similar characteristics — provided that the Secretaries receive at least one such proposal that meets the appropriate qualifications

In a recent exploration of car bloat, The Economist found that the extra heft of the very heaviest US cars do make their occupants marginally safer, but every life saved corresponds with more than a dozen lost among those inside smaller vehicles that collide with the larger ones. People on foot are at even greater risk.

Browsers can’t just all the sudden make every aspect of a <select> and <option>s styleable, otherwise historical CSS that didn’t apply to them all the sudden does and it would wreak untold havoc on websites. The web doesn’t like to roll like that, and I applaud it for that backwards compatibility. So… there needed to be an opt-in to make it work. A new element can work for that, which for a hot minute seemed like it would be <selectmenu>. But the progressive enhancement story for that basically sucked. So the new opt-in looks like it will be CSS triggered

In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created

it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

Encourages shifting industrial focus to regenerative and circular models, where industries contribute to ecological restoration and local community resilience.

This view supports blended systems where public ownership, cooperative models, and market tools coexist, prioritising affordability and ecological regeneration over profit.

Taking into account central and subcentral taxes, Malta has the highest statutory corporate income tax rate, at 35 percent. Portugal, Germany, and Italy follow, at 31.5 percent, 29.9 percent, and 27.8 percent, respectively. Hungary (9 percent), Ireland (12.5 percent), and Lithuania (15 percent) have the lowest corporate income tax rates.

Membership in the Association of Issuing Bodies (AIB)Issuance of European Energy Certificate System (EECS) Guarantees of OriginGrid connection to another country meeting these criteria

Exhibit A is a new $527 million loan enabling Guyana to take hundreds of local, inefficient oil-fueled generators offline and replace them with an energy efficient combined-cycle gas power plant.

Oil and gas are next for consideration on the no-go list, as reported by our friends over at Grist. That will be much more difficult than cutting off coal, which had a much smaller share of financing to begin with. However, EXIM has already demonstrated its willingness to throw oil under the bus.

Among other projects, ESS is providing its iron-based flow battery to the Nigerian firm Sapele Power, for use at a power plant. The goal is to cut the widespread use of diesel backup generators in Nigeria, by improving efficiency at the power plant.

Growth in data centres and AI servers may diminish the rate of decline but the UK’s high electricity prices do not make the country a logical location for applications that require large amounts of power.

We got off easy here, because logging is a feature of our platform; we run very large ElasticSearch and VictoriaMetrics clusters, fed from Vector and Telegraf, and we’re generally a single ElasticSearch query away from any event happening anywhere in our infrastructure.

We asked peers who had done their own SOC2 and stole their answer: post-facto reviews. We do regular reviews on large components, like the Rust fly-proxy that powers our Anycast network and the Go flyd that drives Fly machines. But smaller projects like our private DNS server, and out-of-process changes like urgent bug fixes, can get merged unreviewed (by a subset of authorized developers). We run a Github bot that flags these PRs automatically and hold a weekly meeting where we review the PRs.

In contrast, regions like LATAM and APAC have tighter guidelines, treating each country as a separate market.

It also flags the potential for “transitional or legacy arrangements” that could protect existing investments from future changes:

The government will therefore aim to secure at least 12GW of new projects over the next two allocation rounds. To enable this, the action plan sets out further reform to the CfD process. 

It also means that the next two “contracts for difference” (CfD) auctions, due to be held in 2025 and 2026, will need to secure the bulk of the offshore wind capacity required for 2030.

Most interestingly, it unlocks ways to avoid coordination within distributed systems, offering better scalability and better performance

DSQL is serverless. Here, we mean that you create a cluster in the AWS console (or API or CLI), and that cluster will include an endpoint. You connect your PostgreSQL client to that endpoint. That’s all you have to do: management, scalability, patching, fault tolerance, durability, etc are all built right in. You never have to worry about infrastructure.

Unlike SQL designs that build on K/V stores, this allows to DSQL to do much of the heavy lifting of filtering and finding data right next to the data itself, on the storage replicas, without sacrificing scalability of storage or compute.

The blog does not detail how the cabinets are connected. Adrian said that, in future, the disaggregated power racks will allow AC inputs to be converted into 400Vdc. Current power solutions convert into 48Vdc, and Adrian argues 400V will be crucial for building more powerful and efficient AI systems. “With 400V we expect improvements and incremental evolution in improved efficiency, like what we have seen in the 48Vdc conversion space,” he said.

The BNetzA gave the example of a consumer using 600 megawatts of electricity per year, which is equal to that of a large and energy-intensive factory. Under the current grid fee scheme, this consumer would have to make a one-off payment of up to 60 million euros. If different levels of grid costs resulting from the connection are factored in, the one-off payment could drop to only twelve million euros if the grid operator assumes an operation cost of, for example, 20 percent of the current standard fee.

The financing strategy was widely used during the 1997-2010 Labour government, and finally ditched by the Conservatives in 2018 after several NHS trusts required bailouts stemming from the high cost of the PFI schemes. Existing contracts were untouched.A report by the National Audit Office, the spending watchdog, that year found taxpayers had incurred billions of pounds in extra costs for no clear benefit through PFIs, with yearly fees running at £10bn.PFI deals are on average 31 years long and generally involve the assets reverting back into public hands at the end. Nearly 71 PFI contracts worth about £4bn are coming to an end in the next four years. More than 300 PFI contracts will expire in the next decadeNumber of PFI contracts expiring, by financial year20502045204020352030202520200604020344 expirations344 expirationsSource: National Audit OfficeA common trigger for clashes when contracts near expiry is the condition of the assets, and the question of who should pay for any deficiencies.

The tech companies, which declined interview requests, said every watt of power they use for their data centers is matched with purchases of clean energy elsewhere on the regional power grid. But those contracts feed into a vast power grid, spanning 14 states from Louisiana to Montana. Many experts and activists say much of that clean power would probably get produced whether the tech companies were signing contracts or not.

In detail, this comprises a change in market dynamics from a “search engine market” to a “web data market”, where web data is used in manifold applications (like social media research, training of AI products, price monitoring, etc.).For this study, we remain aware of such disruptive forcesof altered search, but have not explicitly integrated this in our estimates –although, LLMs still need valid and scalable (web) information for training,which is present in our market model.

If such battery capacity had already been installed this summer, Germany could have displaced 36 GWh of expensive fossil power during evening peaks in June alone.

The role of gas in the evening peak in April 2024 has been roughly halved compared to April 2021.

An interesting heuristic I came up with is that we should install 1 kWh of batteries for every kilowattpeak (kWp) of solar panels. On average solar panels will output around 20% of their rated peak power worldwide (see table). A good rule of thumb is that you want a minimum of 5 hours of storage in the future renewable grid. Five times 20% is 100%, hence 1 kWh of batteries for 1 kWp of solar panels.

Assuming we get all that from renewable energy this would mean an average production of 10 TW (=terawatt). That’s roughly 1 kW per person by the way.

ECL launched its first modular hydrogen data center back in May, with a small deployment at its site in Mountain View, California. Each module supports 1MW, and can cool up to 75kW per rack.For the TerraSite, ECL said that it has three pipelines of hydrogen that will feed the facility, with an energy cost of 0.08-0.12/kWh.

But in 2021, millions of retired carbon credits were tokenized