- Essays··8 min read
The Permit You Can Now Block
Pennsylvania's Executive Order 2026-05 restructures permit sequencing: state environmental review now waits on local zoning approval, turning a township planning commission vote into a genuine gate rather than a formality. The shift arrives as utilities sought $18.6 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2026 alone and active opposition groups doubled to 833 across 49 states. This piece examines what the order actually changes — and why sequence is the mechanism that matters.
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The 10% Nobody Budgeted For
Germany's Energy Efficiency Act requires datacentres commissioned after July 2026 to redirect at least 10% of their waste heat, a rule public since 2023 that arrived before the offtaker ecosystem could support it. Operators now completing fit-out are engineering around the exemption clause rather than meeting the target, because the district heating networks the law assumes do not exist at the required density. The 20% mandate in 2028 will not permit the same approach.
data-centresenergy-efficiencywaste-heatdistrict-heatingRead - Essays··7 min read
Nvidia's Water Solution Ends at the Property Line
Nvidia's warm-water cooling eliminates water use inside the data centre and nothing beyond it. The bulk of AI's water footprint, roughly 54% by the IEA's accounting, sits behind the meter in fossil fuel plants supplying the grid when renewables fall short. Until disclosure extends to end-to-end water intensity per compute-hour inclusive of generation fuel source, the industry is optimising for a boundary it drew itself.
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Short of Space or Power
Microsoft is sitting on roughly $80 billion of Azure orders it cannot fill. It has the demand and it can buy the chips. What it cannot get is power. The binding constraint on AI has quietly moved from the fab to the substation, and the hyperscalers' answer, becoming their own utility, is rational for them and corrosive for everyone else standing in the same interconnection queue.
ai-infrastructuredata-centresenergyhyperscalersRead - Essays··7 min read
field notes: the data centre learns to flinch
The demos are real and the peer review is real. What's unproven is whether a utility planner will write a 500 MW flexible load into a resource-adequacy filing and sleep at night. The tariffs will decide this before the silicon does.
energy-aidata-centresgrid-flexibilitydemand-responseRead - Essays··7 min read
Brussels wants to triple data centre capacity and asked you to switch off the dishwasher, on the same afternoon
Brussels filed two plans on the same afternoon that quietly cancel each other out: triple the data centres, and please switch off the dishwasher. It's a demand-management answer to a supply problem, dressed as industrial strategy.
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