US Electric Grid Heading Toward ‘Crisis’ Thanks to AI Data Centers

Brad Reed | Common Dreams

The massive energy needs of artificial intelligence data centers became a major political controversy in 2025, and new reporting suggests that it will grow even further in 2026.

CNBC reported on Thursday that data center projects have become political lightning rods among politicians ranging from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the left to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the right.

However, objections to data centers aren’t just coming from politicians but from ordinary citizens who are worried about the impact such projects will have on their local environment and their utility bills.

CNBC noted that data centers’ energy needs are so great that PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator that serves over 65 million people across 13 states, projects that it will be a full six gigawatts short of its reliability requirements in 2027.

Joe Bowring, president of independent market monitor Monitoring Analytics, told CNBC that he’s never seen the grid under such projected strain.

“It’s at a crisis stage right now,” Bowring said. “PJM has never been this short.”

Read more

Bitcoin miners are using as much energy as Ireland - study

RT

The process of mining new bitcoin is now so intensive that computers carrying out the process are using nearly as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland. 

A new study by economist Alex de Vries estimates that bitcoin mining consumes at least 2.55 gigawatts of electricity and, by the end of the year, that will have risen to 7.67 gigawatts – as much as Austria consumes in the same period.

Mining the cryptocurrency involves computers solving complex mathematical problems. As the amount of bitcoin left to mine grows smaller and smaller, the problems become increasingly complex, meaning they require an even greater amount of computing power.

"Half a Million Play-stations"

Due to the secretive nature of mining, the research is based on speculative figures. The cryptocurrency’s network is estimated to have around 10,000 connected nodes, but a single node in the network can represent either one or many machines.

“A hashrate of 14 terahashes per second can either come from a single Antminer S9 running on just 1,372 watts, or more than half a million PlayStation 3 devices running on 40 megawatts,” the research says.

Read more

Ankara, Turkey Major Power Cut Hits Dozens of Turkish Cities, Shuts Down Subway

Spuntnik

The power outage was presumably caused by the collapse of Turkey’s power distribution system.

Several Turkish regions have been affected by major power cuts after the failure of the country’s electricity distribution system.

The power failed at about 10:40 a.m., hitting several Turkish cities and shutting down the subway in Ankara and Istanbul.

The power cut also affected most Internet and telephone connections across the country and left people completely cut off.

The country is facing the worst such incident over the last 15 years. Authorities are currently examining the possibility of a terrorist attack.

Revealed: How the world gets rich – from privatising British public services

The Independent

Foreign governments are making hundreds of millions of pounds a year running British public services, according to an Independent investigation highlighting how privatisation is benefiting overseas – rather than UK – taxpayers. 

Swathes of Britain’s energy, transport and utility networks are run by companies owned by other European governments – meaning foreign exchequers reap the dividends while UK customers struggle with increasing fares and bills. 

In the past two years alone, overseas taxpayers have taken dividends totalling nearly £1bn from companies which make their profits from UK households and passengers.

Read more

Big Banks Busted Massively Manipulating Foreign Exchange, Precious Metals … And Every Other Market

Washington's Blog

Currency Markets Are RiggedCurrency markets are massively rigged. And see this and this.

Reuters notes today:

Regulators fined six major banks including Citigroup (C.N) and UBS (UBSN.VX) a total of $4.3 billion for failing to stop traders from trying to manipulate the foreign exchange market, following a year-long global investigation.
HSBC (HSBA.L), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L), JP Morgan (JPM.N) and Bank of America (BAC.N) also face penalties resulting from the inquiry that has put the largely unregulated $5 trillion-a-day market on a tighter leash, accelerated the push to automate trading and ensnared the Bank of England.
In the latest scandal to hit the financial services industry, dealers shared confidential information about client orders and coordinated trades to make money from a foreign exchange benchmark used by asset managers and corporate treasurers to value their holdings. Dozens of traders have been fired or suspended.

***
Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined five lenders $1.77 billion, the biggest penalty in the history of the City of London, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) ordered them to pay a further $1.48 billion.

***
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates banks, also fined the U.S. lenders $950 million and was the only authority to penalise Bank of America.

 

Gold and Silver Are Manipulated

Today, Switzerland’s financial regulator (FINMA) found “serious misconduct” and a “clear attempt to manipulate precious metals benchmarks” by UBS employees in precious metals trading, particularly with silver.
Reuters reports:

Swiss regulator FINMA said on Wednesday that it found a “clear attempt” to manipulate precious metals benchmarks during its investigation into precious metals and foreign exchange trading at UBS …

Gold and silver prices have been “fixed” in daily conference calls by the powers-that-be.
Bloomberg reported last December:

It is the participating banks themselves that administer the gold and silver benchmarks.

So are prices being manipulated? Let’s take a look at the evidence. In his book “The Gold Cartel,” commodity analyst Dimitri Speck combines minute-by-minute data from most of 1993 through 2012 to show how gold prices move on an average day (see attached charts). He finds that the spot price of gold tends to drop sharply around the Londonevening fixing (10 a.m. New York time). A similar, if less pronounced, drop in price occurs around the London morning fixing. The same daily declines can be seen in silver prices from 1998 through 2012.

For both commodities there were, on average, no comparable price changes at any other time of the day. These patterns are consistent with manipulation in both markets.

 

Derivatives Are Manipulated

Runaway derivatives – especially credit default swaps (CDS) – were one of the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis. Congress never fixed the problem, and actually made it worse.

The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.
Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are being manipulated in the exact same same way that interest rates are fixed (see below) … through gamed self-reporting.
Reuters noted in September:

A Manhattan federal judge said on Thursday that investors may pursue a lawsuit accusing 12 major banks of violating antitrust law by fixing prices and restraining competition in the roughly $21 trillion market for credit default swaps.
***
“The complaint provides a chronology of behavior that would probably not result from chance, coincidence, independent responses to common stimuli, or mere interdependence,” [Judge] Cote said.
The defendants include Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, BNP Paribas SA, Citigroup Inc , Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG , Goldman Sachs Group Inc, HSBC Holdings Plc , JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and UBS AG.
Other defendants are the International Swaps and Derivatives Association and Markit Ltd, which provides credit derivative pricing services.
***
U.S. and European regulators have probed potential anticompetitive activity in CDS. In July 2013, the European Commission accused many of the defendants of colluding to block new CDS exchanges from entering the market.
***
“The financial crisis hardly explains the alleged secret meetings and coordinated actions,” the judge wrote. “Nor does it explain why ISDA and Markit simultaneously reversed course.”

In other words, the big banks are continuing to fix prices for CDS in secret meetings … and have torpedoed the more open and transparent CDS exchanges that Congress mandated.

 

Interest Rates Are Manipulated

Bloomberg reported in January:

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was ordered to pay $50 million by a federal judge in Connecticut over claims that it rigged the London interbank offered rate.
RBS Securities Japan Ltd. in April pleaded guilty to wire frauda s part of a settlement of more than $600 million with U.S and U.K. regulators over Libor manipulation, according to court filings. U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea in New Haventoday sentenced the Tokyo-based unit of RBS, Britain’s biggest publicly owned lender, to pay the agreed-upon fine, according to a Justice Department Justice Department.
Global investigations into banks’ attempts to manipulate the benchmarks for profit have led to fines and settlements for lenders including RBS, Barclays Plc, UBS AG and Rabobank Groep.
RBS was among six companies fined a record 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) by the European Union last month for rigging interest rates linked to Libor. The combined fines for manipulating yen Libor and Euribor, the benchmark money-market rate for the euro, are the largest-ever EU cartel penalties.
Global fines for rate-rigging have reached $6 billion since June 2012 as authorities around the world probe whether traders worked together to fix Libor, meant to reflect the interest rate at which banks lend to each other, to benefit their own trading positions.

To put the Libor interest rate scandal in perspective:

• The big banks have conspired for years to rig interest rates … upon which $800 trillion in assets are pegged

• This was the largest insider trading scandal ever … and the largest financial scam in world history

• Local governments got ripped off bigtime by the Libor manipulation

• Even though RBS and a handful of other banks have been fined for interest rate manipulation, Libor is still being manipulated. No wonder … the fines are pocket change – the cost of doing business – for the big banks

 

Energy Prices Manipulated

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.

Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston noted in May that Wall Street is trying to launch Enron 2.0.

 

Oil Prices Are Manipulated

Oil prices are manipulated as well.

 

Commodities Are Manipulated

The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to manipulate commodities prices for decades.
The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical economy, including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity.
And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each year. More from Matt Taibbi, FDL and Elizabeth Warren.

 

Everything Can Be Manipulated through High-Frequency Trading

Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocks, bonds, options, currencies and commodities. And see this.

 

Manipulating Numerous Markets In Myriad Ways

The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:

• Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See this, this and this

• Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here and here

• Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

• Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)

• Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See this, this, this, this and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car

• Cheating homeowners by gaming laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure

• Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets. See this, this, this, this, this and this

• Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See this, this and this

• Otherwise manipulating markets. And see this

• Participating in various Ponzi schemes

• Charging veterans unlawful mortgage fees

• Cooking their books (and see this)

• Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

 

The Big Picture

The experts say that big banks will keep manipulating markets unless and until their executives are thrown in jail for fraud.
Why? Because the system is rigged to allow the big banks to commit continuous and massive fraud, and then to pay small fines as the “cost of doing business”. As Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitznoted years ago:

“The system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.
The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.”

Indeed, Reuters points out today:

Switzerland’s regulator FINMA ordered UBS, the country’s biggest bank, to pay 134 million francs ($139 million) after it found serious misconduct in both foreign exchange and precious metals trading. It also capped bonuses for dealers in both units at twice their basic salary for two years.

Capping bonuses at twice base salary?  That’s not a punishment … it’s an incentive.
Experts say that we have to prosecute fraud or else the economy won’t ever really stabilize.
But the government is doing the exact opposite. Indeed, the Justice Department has announced it will go easy on big banks, and always settles prosecutions for pennies on the dollar (a form of stealth bailout. It is also arguably one of the main causes of the double dip in housing. And there is no change in the air.)
Indeed, the government doesn’t even force the banks to admit any guilt as part of their settlements.  In fact:

“The banks have been allowed to investigate themselves,” one source familiar with the investigation told Reuters. “The investigated decide what they want to investigate, what they admit to, and how much they will pay.

Wall Street has manipulated virtually every other market as well – both in the financial sector and thereal economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.
And they will keep on doing so until the Department of Justice grows a pair.
The criminality and blatant manipulation will grow and spread and metastasize – taking over and killing off more and more of the economy – until Wall Street executives are finally thrown in jail.

It’s that simple …

-------------------

See also:  Cartels R Us: Tab for Rigging Foreign Exchange $3.3 Billion and Rising

Vladimir Putin signs historic $20bn oil deal with Iran to bypass Western sanctions

The Telegraph

Vladimir Putin is eyeing a $20bn (£11.8bn) trade deal with Iran that would see Russia sidestep Western sanctions on its energy sector. 

Under the terms of a five-year accord, Russia would help Iran organise oil sales as well as “cooperate in the oil-gas industry, construction of power plants, grids, supply of machinery, consumer goods and agriculture products”, according to a statement by the Energy Ministry in Moscow.

However, the Russian government mysteriously withdrew that statement last night, saying it would issue a new one on Wednesday.

Despite the U-turn, news of a possible agreement hit US markets. The Dow fell 139 points, or 0.8pc, led by energy companies such as Chevron, down 2.5pc, and ExxonMobil, down 1.9pc. Brent Crude fell 1.5pc before recovering to trade down 0.7pc at $104.61.

Read more

As Iraq fighting rages, gas prices climb

CBS News

A rising tide of violence in Iraq is driving up prices at the pump.

The hike in gas costs follows the battlefield successes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al Qaeda breakaway group backed by Sunni fighters and other groups, in northern Iraq. The cost of crude rose Friday afternoon to nearly $107, a 10-month high, amid fears that the mounting insurgency there could lead to major disruptions of oil shipments. Brent crude futures, an international benchmark, climbed 54 cents to $112.96.

Iraq is the third-largest exporter of oil in the world and has the fifth-largest crude reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. 

Oil prices rose Friday afternoon to nearly $107 a barrel, a 10-month high, amid fears that the insurgency could affect crude supplies from Iraq. Brent crude futures, an international benchmark, climbed 54 cents to $112.96.

"It is guaranteed that consumers will pay higher gas prices in the coming days, due to the turmoil in Iraq," said Michael Green, a spokesman for AAA. "The price of oil has gone up in recent days due to the fact that the production in Iraq might be curtailed and there could be increased conflict in the Middle East. And whenever oil prices go up, that is going to affect you at the gas pump."

Read more

Energy War: Bulgaria halts Russia's South Stream gas pipeline project

RT

Bulgaria’s prime minister, Plamen Oresharski, has ordered a halt to work on Russia’s South Stream pipeline, on the recommendation of the EU. The decision was announced after his talks with US senators.

"At this time there is a request from the European Commission, after which we've suspended the current works, I ordered it," Oresharski told journalists after meeting with John McCain, Chris Murphy and Ron Johnson during their visit to Bulgaria on Sunday. "Further proceedings will be decided after additional consultations with Brussels."

McCain, commenting on the situation, said that "Bulgaria should solve the South Stream problems in collaboration with European colleagues," adding that in the current situation they would want "less Russian involvement" in the project.

"America has decided that it wants to put itself in a position where it excludes anybody it doesn't like from countries where it thinks it might have an interest, and there is no economic rationality in this at all. Europeans are very pragmatic, they are looking for cheap energy resources - clean energy resources, and Russia can supply that. But the thing with the South Stream is that it doesn't fit with the politics of the situation," Ben Aris, editor of Business New Europe told RT.

Read more
 

Sustainable nuclear fusion breakthrough raises hopes for ultimate green energy

The Guardian

US researchers have achieved a world first in an ambitious experiment that aims to recreate the conditions at the heart of the sun and pave the way for nuclear fusion reactors.

The scientists generated more energy from fusion reactions than they put into the nuclear fuel, in a small but crucial step along the road to harnessing fusion power. The ultimate goal – to produce more energy than the whole experiment consumes – remains a long way off, but the feat has nonetheless raised hopes that after decades of setbacks, firm progress is finally being made.

Fusion energy has the potential to become a radical alternative power source, with zero carbon emissions during operation and minimal waste, but the technical difficulties in demonstrating fusion in the lab have so far proved overwhelming. While existing nuclear reactors generate energy by splitting atoms into lighter particles, fusion reactors combine light atomic nuclei into heavier particles.

In their experiments, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California use a bank of 192 powerful lasers to crush a minuscule amount of fuel so hard and fast that it becomes hotter than the sun.

The process is not straightforward. The lasers are fired into a gold capsule that holds a 2mm-wide spherical pellet. The fuel is coated on the inside of this plastic pellet in a layer as thin as a human hair.
When the laser light enters the gold capsule, it makes the walls of the gold container emit x-rays, which heat the pellet and make it implode with extraordinary ferocity. The fuel, a mixture of hydrogen isotopes called tritium and deuterium, partially fuses under the intense conditions.

The scientists have not generated more energy than the experiment uses in total. The lasers unleash nearly two megajoules of energy on their target, the equivalent, roughly, of two standard sticks of dynamite. But only a tiny fraction of this reaches the fuel. Writing in Nature, the scientists say fusion reactions in the fuel released at best 17 kilojoules of energy.

Though slight, the advance is welcome news for the NIF scientists. In 2012, the project was restructured and given more modest goals after six years of failure to generate more energy than the experiment consumes, known as "ignition".

Results from the NIF facility will help scientists work out how to build a fusion reactor, but the centre is funded primarily to help the US understand how its stockpile of nuclear weapons is ageing. The experiments help to verify computer models that are used in place of nuclear tests, which are now banned.

Omar Hurricane, the lead author of the report, said the latest improvement came by controlling the implosion of the spherical pellet more carefully. In previous experiments, the pellet distorted as it was crushed, which seemed to reduce the efficiency of the process. By squashing the fuel more softly, helium nuclei that are produced in the fusion reactions dump their energy into the fuel, heating it up even further, and driving a cycle of ever more fusion.

"We are finally, by harnessing these reactions, getting more energy out of that reaction than we put into the DT fuel," Hurricane said. The report appears in the journal Nature.

The dream of controlled fusion remains a distant hope, and Hurricane said it was too early to say whether it was even possible with the NIF facility. The researchers need to get a hundred times more energy from the fusion reactions before the process can run itself, and more for it to deliver an overall surplus of energy.

Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Abingdon in the UK, said the study was "truly excellent" and began to address the core challenges of what is known as inertial fusion in the lab. He said the team may need a bigger laser, or a redesigned capsule that can be squashed more violently without becoming unstable. "Livermore should be given plenty of time to develop a better capsule. It strikes me that we have only just begun to understand the fusion regime," Cowley told the Guardian.

The Culham lab has taken a different approach, called magnetic confinement. As long ago as 1997, the facility generated 16MW of power with 24MW put into the device. "We have waited 60 years to get close to controlled fusion. We are now close in both magnetic and inertial. We must keep at it. The engineering milestone is when the whole plant produces more energy than it consumes," Cowley said.

The experimental fusion reactor Iter, which is being built in France, is expected to be the first plant to produce more energy than it consumes. The project has faced delays of more than two years and overrun budgets, but is still an international flagship for fusion research. "Iter is going slowly but progress is happening," said Cowley.

‘Waste Not Want Not’ – Why Energy Should Be Re-Nationalized

Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire

 With regards to the economics of energy debate, Europe, and the world, finds itself at a major crossroads now.


 This is a complex issue, not least of all because of the politically-loaded connotations associated with the term ‘nationalization’.

From a socioeconomic standpoint, the status quo of continual rising heating and electric bills – is not sustainable at all. Arguably, there are more people in ‘fuel poverty’ now, than at any other time in modern history. Those numbers are growing by the day and politicians and energy CEOs know it. Boycotts, protests and riots are right around the corner. It’s a ticking time bomb – and they must face it, even if financiers and major shareholders are still looking the other way.

Beyond the fuel poverty issue, there are other problems emerging… 

‘Oligarchic’ Nationalization 

Professor Colin Robinson, in a Dec 2013 study published by the UK Institute of Economic Affairs, says the energy sector in the UK has been effectively renationalized. He sees the return of centralized energy planning as the root cause of skyrocketing fuel and energy prices, fuel poverty, and accelerating de-industrialisation of the UK economy as industrialists flee the high cost of energy. He, however, does not signal the before-and-after differences of old style energy nationalization, what we can call the ‘postwar social democrat’, waste-not-want-not austerity model, and today’s 19th century-style crony corporate and crony government energy sector takeover.

To be sure, the crony monopoly-board model is profit-only, always corrupt and thrives on waste. It was well analyzed by Thorsten Veblen is his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, describing the emergence of early industrial capitalism’s super rich class he called “the lords of the manor” who employed themselves in the economically useless practice of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure – treating their permanent gambling party using financial betting chips as a prime leisure activity, for which the Money Lords created banks, brokers and trading houses.

Veblen specially identified the role of new or emerging technology and science, as a means for the Leisure Class to create and play new and more gambling chips.

Read more