Trends

The data center buildout underway across North America is charging ahead at full speed and may even surpass original forecasts. Facility owners are no longer planning incremental expansions. The demand for data, driven by the rapid adoption and maturation of artificial intelligence (AI), now has them planning in gigawatts. Demand has increased; expectations have changed, […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the power requirements of modern data centers. At this point in the timeline of AI’s continued evolution, this statement should not be controversial. The deployment of increasingly large GPU clusters for training and inference purposes, such as NVIDIA’s 72-GPU Vera Rubin model, is causing rack power densities to climb from […]

Severe weather conditions have become constant. Cyclones, storms, heatwaves, floods, and droughts continue to put critical infrastructure, homes, livelihoods, and lives at risk in the U.S. and around the world. Heat waves and droughts are the second-deadliest weather category, causing critical infrastructure instability, power line inefficiency, thermal sagging, and overloaded transformers that can lead to […]

  An Ecolab executive brief for fossil power plant operators, engineers, and specifiers focused on condensate polishing performance. The document argues that condensate polishing resin selection should be viewed as a turbine-life and asset-protection decision, not a commodity purchase. It identifies five critical resin characteristics that influence water quality, equipment protection, resin longevity, operating efficiency, […]

  Keep water chemistry under control when flexible operation, aging assets, and workforce turnover put fossil-plant reliability at risk. Download the infographic to see how high-performance resins coupled with leading expertise can help protect critical equipment, stabilize operations, and reduce the risk of costly excursions and outages. Explore practical approaches for improving condensate polishing, extending […]

American Electric Power (AEP), which said in July that it had secured about 13 GW of gas turbines for deployment through 2031, this week announced plans for a $4 billion, 702-MW Bloom Energy fuel cell plant in Wyoming to supply Google and purchased 190 MW of Mainspring Energy linear generators under an agreement for up […]

When the heads of three of the power sector’s biggest trade associations shared a stage at Experience POWER on Sept. 30, the most notable thing was how little they disagreed. Whether the question was data center backlash, grid security, or what to do about gas-plant emissions rules, the answer came back to the same point: […]

This year’s Data Center POWER eXchange (DPX), whose programming POWER’s editors curated, was structured to look beyond the scale of opportunity presented by large-load forecasts and delve into the questions they raise. A key focus: What will it take to deliver power infrastructure and data centers on timelines, terms, and operating conditions that both industries […]

Hyperscaler Google and Constellation Energy, the largest nuclear operator in the U.S., have signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) designed to support $4.3 billion of upgrades at 11 nuclear units across the PJM Interconnection, which is slated to add 890 MW of generating capacity from Constellation’s existing reactors by the end of 2032. The […]

Fit Energy, a developer of energy solutions for data center projects, has announced plans for a fuel cell power generation and data center project in Newport Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The project received township zoning approval for both uses in August of this year. Fit Energy on October 6 said engineering and the remaining permitting […]

Power plants generate a large amount of maintenance and inspection information every day. Operators complete rounds. Technicians document repairs. Contractors submit reports. Engineers review abnormal conditions. Reliability teams analyze failures. Asset managers track age, condition, criticality, and replacement plans. The challenge is not always that power generation facilities lack data. The challenge is that much […]

  This eBook explains how organizations in the Power & Utilities industry can evolve from scattered, uncontrolled engineering information to a governed, connected, and AI-ready digital foundation. It introduces Asset Information Lifecycle Management (AILM) as the extension of engineering document control across the full asset lifecycle—keeping engineering records aligned with the physical plant as assets […]

  This customer webinar brings together engineering and IT leaders from Eversource, Great River Energy, and Hoosier Energy to share how their utilities moved from fragmented drawing storage to centralized Engineering Document Management. Through firsthand experiences, the panel explores the risks of shared drives, paper drawings, conflicting revisions, and tribal knowledge—and how a single source […]

  This playbook explores how utilities can use Engineering Document Management (EDM) to improve access to critical engineering information, connect teams, automate workflows, and reduce operational risk. Drawing on real-world experiences from Con Edison, Eversource Energy, Great River Energy, and Hoosier Energy, it demonstrates how centralized document control supports everything from design and capital projects […]

Data centers are connecting to the transmission system faster than the reliability rules were built to handle and behaving nothing like the passive load those rules assumed. Here’s what the North American Electric Reliability Corp.’s (NERC’s) Large Loads Action Plan, a new class of registered entity, and a hard 2026 deadline mean for anyone planning, […]

North Carolina State University, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), and EPRI have demonstrated a megawatt-class solid-state transformer (SST) on a live 13.2-kV utility distribution feeder, marking what the partners describe as the first independent validation of a megawatt-class SST under real-world distribution conditions. The NC State-built prototype was connected at EPRI’s power delivery laboratory […]

America’s emerging electricity challenge is increasingly an infrastructure challenge. For much of the energy transition, attention concentrated on the cost of producing electricity. Solar developers focused on module prices, battery developers compared cell costs and round-trip efficiency (RTE), and utilities evaluated competing resources using measures such as levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). Those calculations remain […]

As data center developers confront tighter power supplies, longer interconnection timelines, and growing scrutiny over who should pay for the grid infrastructure required to serve large loads, those pressures are beginning to reshape another part of the development equation: talent. As states and utilities reconsider how the costs of serving large data center loads should […]

A widening gas turbine supply crunch has prompted Ansaldo Energia to explore a new path back into the U.S. generation market after more than 30 years. The Italian manufacturer will supply California-based

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being adopted across industries at an unprecedented pace, and the electric utility sector is no exception. Faced with rising energy demand, aging infrastructure, and an increasingly complex grid, utilities are turning to AI to innovate and modernize operations. However, adoption of this technology—as with various digital innovation waves preceding it—fundamentally looks […]

PJM Interconnection has proposed a new framework that would allow large data centers and other major electricity users to enter service without first securing enough new capacity to cover their demand—but would make the uncovered portion of that load available for reduction before PJM calls on existing pre-emergency demand-response resources if electricity supplies become dangerously […]

When federal emergency powers become routine operating procedure, the system is not holding up. It is operating at its ceiling. And the customers who kept their lights on paid triple for the privilege, which means the event that operations survived is one that affordability did not.

A growing group of data center operators—including Dallas-based Skybox Datacenters, Austin-headquartered bitcoin miner and hyperscale developer Mara, and global colocation giant Digital Realty—have publicly committed to comply with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s data center standards and the state’s active audit of projects in the Texas grid operator’s interconnection queue. They join QTS Data Centers, Blackstone’s […]

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption accelerates, the gap between electricity demand and grid capacity is widening rapidly. While this trend is often framed as a power generation and transmission challenge, it is equally a procurement challenge. The materials, equipment, and skilled labor required to build both data centers and grid infrastructure are in increasingly tight […]

Oklo’s Groves Isotope Test Reactor in Lockhart, Texas, has become the fifth reactor to achieve criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program (RPP), and the first under the program to do so on private land. The low-power test reactor reached criticality at 9:19 p.m. ET Aug. 5, achieving a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear […]

The transition to sustainable energy infrastructure has been experiencing steady progress in recent years across the globe, while simultaneously undergoing constant fluctuation. Actual progress is influenced by a wide variety of factors, such as the drivers behind participants’ motivations and the technologies enabling the transition, as well as the status of supply chains and geopolitical […]

For most of the last two decades, the anxiety in power planning was about demand: would consumption grow fast enough to justify new capacity, and how would an aging fleet keep pace? That question has inverted. Demand is no longer the uncertain variable—it is the one thing forecasters are confident about. The uncertainty now sits […]

As utility-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) scale from megawatts to gigawatts, the engineering complexity grows exponentially. Higher-voltage architectures and denser rack configurations are pushing the limits of conventional component design and exposing gaps that can compromise system performance and site safety. For the electrical engineers and systems integrators building these projects, the cells, fire […]

For Rayburn Electric Cooperative, ownership of the 758-MW combined cycle plant in Sherman, Texas, means stable rates, hardened reliability through heat waves and winter storms, and a hedge against the

Waste-to-energy technologies, long viewed mainly for waste management, are finding renewed relevance.