The Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) ordered Google's data center subsidiary, Tuike Finland, to suspend preparatory work at planned data center sites in…
Our take "We've fallen short" is the right thing to say, and it came after the trees were down. The order is the useful part: assess first, clear land second. Every country courting AI investment should hold builders to that order before the bulldozers arrive, not after.
A study published Oct. 14 in Nature ran a year-long, single-blind test of space-based methane detection: 481 metered methane releases in Arizona and 265…
Our take This is what honest evaluation looks like: blind, a year long, and willing to report where AI fails. Satellites can catch methane leaks that matter for the climate. An AI alarm that cries wolf costs regulators and operators trust, so AI methods should be held to this kind of test before anyone acts on their alerts.
Mayor Daniel Lurie on Friday, Oct. 16, signed a moratorium authored by Supervisor Shamann Walton that pauses data center development citywide for 45 days…
Our take A city that can't count its data centers can't govern them. Forty-five days is a pause, not a policy; the test is whether planners come back with rules that put water, power and residents' say ahead of the permit.
Data center operator Switch disclosed in an October filing with the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada that it is the intended off-taker and "ultimate…
Our take Behind-the-meter is the industry's name for skipping the line. The grid queue is slow, but a private gas plant trades the wait for turbines, emissions and a new water draw. Regulators should give it the full environmental review residents asked for.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have pledged to crack down on data centers that failed to file required state water-use surveys, but the…
Our take A $500 ceiling is a rounding error, not a deterrent. Texas is planning its water future without knowing what its data centers draw. Until lawmakers give the reporting rule teeth, the crackdown is a talking point, not a policy.
Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit renewable energy advocate and one of 23 intervenors in APS's pending rate case, told 12News that the Arizona…
Our take APS and regulators say growth pays for growth; WRA says the math doesn't. Its figure is an advocate's estimate and deserves scrutiny. So does a utility that calls the alternative too complex. The bill should follow the load, not the households.
A study published Oct. 2 by AlgorithmWatch, the Umweltinstitut München and the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research projects that…
Our take Efficiency rules are the cheapest power plant Germany has. Loosening them mid-boom trades a lighter compliance load for more gas burned and higher bills passed down the line. And per-site disclosure is the point: a sector can't be held to numbers it is allowed to hide.
A county judge ruled last month that developer Sebastian Rucci's proposed AI data center in unincorporated Imperial County, California, a nearly 1…
Our take A fast-track exemption is a promise to skip the questions. Neighbors and a city forced them back onto the table: water, power, air. Environmental review is not obstruction; it is how a community gets a say before the ground is broken.
University of Texas at Austin researchers modeled the cost and energy trade-offs of desalinating saline water, from brackish groundwater to oil and gas…
Our take Freshwater is the resource communities can't replace. If data centers can cool on water nobody drinks, the question for regulators shifts from whether they can to why they don't. A model is not a mandate, but it does remove an excuse.