News

A Connecticut-based developer of distributed energy resources said it has begun construction on solar power installations at four municipal landfill sites in that state.

A $350 million Department of Energy (DOE) coal-revival program has put $18.5 million toward the TerraSpark Energy Campus, a 1.6-GW greenfield project in West Virginia pairing Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) supercritical boilers with Mantel Capture’s molten borate carbon capture. In responses to POWER, developer TerraSpark laid out a 2030 startup target, a 95% to 98% […]

Elevate Infrastructure and ArcLight Capital Partners on June 11 announced the companies have begun operating the 150-MW/600-MWh Prospect Power battery energy storage project in Rockingham County, Virginia.

Technology giant Meta said it has expanded its partnership with major renewable energy developer RWE through a long-term corporate power purchase agreement (PPA) for the 298-MW Rabbit’s Foot Solar installation in North Texas.

Cypress Creek Energy has announced financial close on the first two phases of the three-phase Steel River Energy Center in Arkansas. The company on June 11 said it secured $3.5 billion in financing for the project. Phase 1 and Phase 2 combined will feature 1.63 GW of solar power along with 1.9 GWh of battery energy storage.

A Colorado-based fusion energy company said the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) has approved the company’s preconceptual technical design for its commercial fusion power plant.

A Texas-based power producer has broken ground on a new natural gas-fired power plant that is part of the state’s plan to increase its supply of dispatchable electricity.

System planners and grid operators are treating extreme heat as an assumed operating condition given new pressures, including drought, demand growth, and fuel concerns. Will it be enough? For decades, the U.S. power system treated extreme heat as a tail risk, managed through seasonal readiness—something for which to prepare. But hotter conditions are now arriving […]

Wildfires are no longer isolated disasters limited to the western United States—they are a growing threat to communities, infrastructure, and electric grid reliability nationwide. For the 42 million Americans served by electric cooperatives, the risk is especially acute. Co-ops power more than half the nation’s landmass, primarily in rural areas where wildfire danger is highest […]

The power generation sector, including electric utilities and grid operators, recognizes the value of moving equipment underground to mitigate outages, lessen risks to assets, and reduce the chances of that equipment causing a wildfire.

Companies are deploying a variety of strategies in efforts to strengthen the power grid against severe weather and other issues.

From EOP-012-3 to Order 587-AB, from Cold Weather Critical Component inventories to dual-fuel conversions, the bulk power system has spent five years rewiring how it prepares for extreme cold. Winter Storm Fern, the latest test, showed the system ran “very close to the edge.” The last five winters have given the North American power sector […]

Extreme weather is making one thing clear—hardening of the power grid alone is not enough to solve the problem of keeping the lights on.

The power sector recognizes the urgent need to harden the power grid, which involves upgrading and fortifying electrical infrastructure to withstand severe weather, cyberattacks, and surging demand for electricity. The U.S. Dept. of Energy is providing billions of dollars to groups involved with modernizing the grid, underscoring the importance of measures designed to support power […]

Antares Nuclear Inc.’s Mark-0—a sodium heat-pipe-cooled microreactor fueled by high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) fuel compacts—has achieved zero-power criticality at Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL’s) Reactor and Critical Experiment (RACE) facility, becoming the first advanced reactor to reach that milestone under the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Reactor Pilot Program. The development, announced on June […]

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced the company has published five peer-reviewed physics basis papers detailing its work on the group’s ARC fusion power plant.

Google and Intersect, a clean energy developer Google acquired in March 2026, have launched construction on the Meitner Energy Center, a co-located data center and generation complex in the Texas Panhandle that will integrate more than 1 GW of wind, solar, and battery storage with on-site gas-fired generation for reliability firming. The project is located […]

Fusion energy group Helion said the company has completed a $465-million Series G investment round, increasing the Everett, Washington-based group’s valuation to $15.5 billion. Helion is among dozens of U.S. and global companies working to commercialize fusion power.

In order to appreciate just how quickly risk solutions for data centers have evolved, consider the fact that three years ago, it was nearly impossible to appropriately insure a $20-billion campus. By 2026, it’s become a weekly conversation.

The Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on wind energy development in the U.S. stands in sharp contrast to its promotion of oil and gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG) production, and microreactor nuclear projects. Agencies have blocked 165 wind projects nationwide while simultaneously spending nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to convince energy companies to abandon offshore […]

Another U.S.-based energy company said its technology has achieved key performance metrics that advance its goal of commercial fusion by the mid 2030s. California-headquartered Pacific Fusion on June 2 said its core pulsed power technology is on track to achieve net facility gain by 2030. That’s the state where the “entire fusion machine produces more […]

Global clean energy group ContourGlobal announced the start of commercial operation of another utility-scale solar-plus-storage project in Chile, one the company said features Latin America’s longest-duration battery energy storage system.

POET, a South Dakota-headquartered company and the world’s largest producer of biofuels, has joined with Antora Energy to commission a 5-GWh, multi-day thermal energy storage system at POET’s bioprocessing facility in Big Stone City, South Dakota. Antora is supplying batteries from the company’s recently expanded San Jose, California gigafactory. The companies earlier in May said […]

Sweden’s nuclear reversal marked three major developments this past week, as advanced modular reactor developer Blykalla and long-established nuclear services firm Studsvik filed separate applications for up to 1.7 GW of new reactors at two sites, while the government formalized an unprecedented financial commitment to another flagship project. The filings, among the first in Sweden’s […]

Uptime has become the defining performance metric of the modern data center. As digital services underpin everything from financial markets to transport systems, tolerance for disruption has all but disappeared. For mission-critical environments, 99.999% availability and just five minutes of downtime per year aren’t the dream, but the baseline. Industry performance is improving. According to the Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis 2025, data center service availability has […]

New Jersey-based Thea Energy, one of several U.S. companies working to commercialize fusion energy, said the company has raised $100 million in Series B funding. Thea is advancing stellarator technology to provide baseload fusion power. The company, which has several investors, is moving toward beginning construction of its Helios power plant (Figure 1) by the […]

DigitalBridge Group said it has a definitive agreement to acquire ArcLight Capital Partners as part of a $1.05-billion deal.

Florida-headquartered Spearmint Energy said it has closed a financing package of $450 million to support a standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) installation in Texas.

Google will invest $15 billion in Missouri infrastructure, including a new data center in New Florence, Montgomery County, in a project that pairs its expanding data center footprint with new generation commitments, a large-load cost-allocation framework, and Ameren Missouri rate structures designed to protect existing customers from infrastructure costs tied to large energy users. “When […]

VoLo Earth and Equal Ventures co-lead Series A in grid technology firm building an “operating system” to help utilities consolidate data and maximize value across operations — from data center load to renewables growth to distributed energy resources. Texture, the grid software platform that provides utilities a single view of every device and data source […]