From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Will America’s electricity grid make it through the impending winter of 2025-26 without suffering major blackouts? It’s a legitimate question to ask given the dearth of adequate dispatchable baseload that now exists on a majority of the major regional grids according to a new report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).

In its report, NERC expresses particular concern for the Texas grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), where a rapid buildout of new, energy hogging AI datacenters and major industrial users is creating a rapid increase in electricity demand. “Strong load growth from new data centers and other large industrial end users is driving higher winter electricity demand forecasts and contributing to continued risk of supply shortfalls,” NERC notes.

Texas, remember, lost 300 souls in February 2021 when Winter Storm Uri put the state in a deep freeze for a week. The freezing temperatures combined with snowy and icy conditions first caused the state’s wind and solar fleets to fail. When ERCOT implemented rolling blackouts, they denied electricity to some of the state’s natural gas transmission infrastructure, causing it to freeze up, which in turn caused a significant percentage of natural gas power plants to fall offline. Because the state had already shut down so much of its once formidable fleet of coal-fired plants and hasn’t opened a new nuclear plant since the mid-1980s, a disastrous major blackout that lingered for days resulted.

This country’s power generation sector can either get serious about building out the needed new thermal capacity or disaster will inevitably result again, because demand isn’t going to stop rising anytime soon. In fact, the already rapid expansion of the AI datacenter industry is certain to accelerate in the wake of President Trump’s approval on Monday of the Genesis Mission, a plan to create another Manhattan Project-style partnership between the government and private industry focused on AI.

It’s an incredibly complex vision, but what the Genesis Mission boils down to is an effort to build an “integrated AI platform” consisting of all federal scientific datasets to which selected AI development projects will be provided access. The concept is to build what amounts to a national brain to help accelerate U.S. AI development and enable America to remain ahead of China in the global AI arm’s race.

So, every dataset that is currently siloed within DOE, NASA, NSF, Census Bureau, NIH, USDA, FDA, etc. will be melded into a single dataset to try to produce a sort of quantum leap in AI development. Put simply, most AI tools currently exist in a phase of their development in which they function as little more than accelerated, advanced search tools – basically, they’re in the fourth grade of their education path on the way to obtaining their doctorate’s degree. This is an effort to invoke a quantum leap among those selected tools, enabling them to figuratively skip eight grades and become college freshmen.

Here’s how the order signed Monday by President Trump puts it: “The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership.”

It’s an ambitious goal that attempts to exploit some of the same central planning techniques China is able to use to its own advantage.

But here’s the thing: Every element envisioned in the Genesis Mission will require more electricity: Much more, in fact. It’s a brave new world that will place a huge amount of added pressure on power generation companies and grid managers like ERCOT. Americans must hope and pray they’re up to the task. Their track records in this century do not inspire confidence.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Audrey Streb

The United Nations’ annual climate conference concluded Saturday, and some critics in attendance told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it was a chaotic affair.

After Thursday’s fire forced an evacuation and temporarily halted the talks, COP30 was prolonged by an extra day. Corporate media outlets and green groups critiqued the final agreement reached on Saturday, arguing that it did not do enough to restrict carbon emissions. The environmental groups claimed the resolution departed from COP28’s declaration which called for an end to fossil fuels.

Hosted in Belém, Brazil, COP30 provoked backlash after developers razed the Amazon rainforest ahead of the climate talks and China worked to seize the spotlight in America’s absence. Craig Rucker, co-founder and president of the conservative nonprofit known as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow,(CFACT) told the DCNF that this year’s UN climate talks were especially chaotic and disorganized.

“I’ve been to 27 of the 30 conferences. … What you see on the ground is just how chaotic it’s gotten. There was a certain chaos in the past, but this was particularly disorganized because they picked a venue that I think was unsuited for all the delegates that were coming in,” Rucker told the DCNF in an interview. “They wanted to emphasize the rainforest, yet hypocritically, they’re chopping them down to accommodate delegates flying in on private jets.”

The UN did not respond to the DCNF’S request for comment.

Rucker and Marc Morano, who publishes CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com, ventured into the Amazon rainforest to investigate the four-lane highway initially reported by BBC in March. Rucker told the DCNF that Brazil was “still cutting and burning. We heard the chainsaws ourselves, and this is something they [the Brazilian state] try to keep [quiet].”

The highway, known as Avenida Liberdade, was shelved multiple times in the past due to environmental concerns but revived as part of a broader push to modernize Belém ahead of COP30, according to the outlet. State officials say the development efforts will leave a lasting legacy, including an expanded airport, new hotels and an ungraded port to accommodate cruise ships.

The Brazilian state denied that the highway was built for the climate conference, noting that plans for the road were underway as early as 2020 — well before Brazil was selected to host COP30, Reuters reported in March.

President Donald Trump sharply criticized the conference for deforesting portions of the Amazon to ease travel for environmentalist attendees. The U.S. did not send an official delegation this year.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse attended the talks, where they denounced the Trump administration’s energy policies and absence.

A top United Nations official reportedly directed Brazilian authorities to address concerns including leaky light fixtures, sweltering heat and lackluster security at the conference, according to Bloomberg News. Days later, the fire broke out.

Morano also documented water pouring from vents, and Rucker told the DCNF that attendees were not allowed to flush toilet paper as the venue “didn’t have a septic system.”

Rucker also recalled what he described as elitism, noting that delegates were in the “blue zone” while other attendees and indigenous groups were relegated to the “green zone.”

“The blue zone is where the official delegates go, the people that are from Spain, Portugal, Brazil. … And these are the people that make the decisions,” Rucker said. “The indigenous people, they say, don’t have a voice allowed in there. That’s partially why they crashed it.”

Though COP30 did host several events featuring indigenous voices, some native groups stormed the COP30 venue the first week, demanding their voice be heard by the UN.

Rucker told the DCNF that China seemed to have become a “new leader” on the environmentalism and green energy front at the climate conference, though the oriental nation is “pumping out with two coal plants per week.”

Recent media reports have hailed China as a giant in building out “renewables,” though China is far from dependent on intermittent resources like solar and wind as it also churns out new coal plants and is the world’s top emitter.

“They genuinely looked at China as the world leader on climate change,” Rucker noted, branding it as “totally bizarre.”

Rucker recalled that upon the entrance of the “blue zone,” there was a “very impressive Chinese booth.”

Additionally, a statue demeaning Trump stood outside COP30, according to Reuters, as well as a horned jaguar-dragon hybrid statue with its hands gripping the globe. The fanged construction purportedly represented China and Brazil partnering to protect the rainforest.

“The statues are purely political statements: one symbolizes how communism is alive and well in Brazil and China, and the other is a misguided attempt to shame or critique Trump,” Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute Sterling Burnett told the DCNF. “Trump’s promotion of fossil-fuel development and broader use — especially encouraging developing countries to tap into affordable energy — will do more to help children in poor countries than all the climate agreements and green energy scams combined.”