North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Utilities Commission has drawn a rare line in the sand.

September 18, 2026, the North Carolina Utilities Commission denied Duke Energy Progress a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for a new natural-gas simple-cycle combustion turbine at the Sherwood H. Smith Jr. Energy Complex in Richmond County. The denial is without prejudice, meaning Duke can refile. The message, however, is clear: data-center load forecasts and […]

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Oracle’s huge data center project declares force majeure. Is this the first warning sign in the data center space?

On Thursday, September 24, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Oracle sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter — the 1,400-acre AI campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico — in an effort to defer payments if the facility misses its planned 2028 in-service date. Shares of Oracle fell about 4–5%. Blue Owl […]

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Diesel, AI, and Energy Dominance: Charlie Garcia on the Crisis Nobody Sees Coming

Charlie Garcia stops by the Energy News Beat Channel, and he is a RockStar! Welcome back to Energy News Beat Podcast. Today we’re diving deep into a perfect storm that’s reshaping global markets, and most people have no idea it’s coming. We’re talking about the diesel crisis that’s quietly becoming the inflationary tax on everything—from […]

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Secretary Bessent on CNBC: China Talks, Energy Exports, an AI Incident Line, and Why Americans Have Lost Trust in Legacy Media

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used a Monday appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box to lay out the working-level results of weekend talks with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng — talks he described as a direct extension of the personal relationship between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping. Those discussions, held in New York the day […]

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Loudoun County, the heart of Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, advanced a 12-month pause on new legislative data center and substation applications on September 16, 2026.

The 7-1-1 Board of Supervisors vote directs staff to draft a resolution for a later October vote, with a proposed retroactive effective date of September 15. Officials emphasized it is not a legal moratorium under Virginia’s Dillon Rule, but a temporary pause on board-level reviews while Phase 2 data-center standards are completed. Board Chair Phyllis […]

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South Korea’s Hyosung Heavy Industries has locked in ₩386.5 billion (about $277–$287 million) in ultra-high-voltage transformer contracts with two unnamed U.S. Big Tech companies for new AI data centers—one in the South and one in the North.

The award is smaller than some of Hyosung’s earlier 2026 utility mega-deals, but it is strategically important: hyperscalers are now buying grid hardware directly, and Hyosung is one of the few firms that can deliver 765 kV equipment from a U.S. factory. The split is ₩220 billion of 765 kV transformers for the southern site […]

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