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voltsdaily

Thursday, 13 August 2026

55 briefs so farlast update 18:52 UTC

Key points

  • China Issues Five-Year Climate Plan Covering 2026-2030.
  • DOE Cancels Three Proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors.
  • Nuclearelectrica Halts Cernavoda Unit 2 as Danube Falls to 182 cm.
  • Iran Cleans Up Oil Spill Off Qeshm Island as Hormuz Ship Incidents Reach 65.
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AI & Energy

Chicago Mayor Orders Task Force on Data Center Rules, Seeks Council Pause on New Sites

Utility bill spikes, water and energy draw, and air and noise pollution from data centers all fall under a new task force created by executive order from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, which directs the group to draft tighter regulations, Inside Climate News reported.

Johnson wants a temporary halt on new and expanded data centers in the city while broader rules are written, and is pressing the Chicago City Council to pass it, according to Inside Climate News.

By the mayor's own account, the order sets the "strictest" safeguards on data centers of any city in the country, Johnson said in remarks reported by Inside Climate News.

City officials put the current count at 39 data centers, a total they expect to rise.

A University of Pennsylvania survey put opposition to new data center construction in respondents' own areas at 61 percent of adults surveyed nationally, Inside Climate News reported.

New York enacted a temporary moratorium on hyperscale data centers in July, the first state to do so, citing environmental and affordability concerns. The Chicago proposal would follow that step at the municipal level.

Source: insideclimatenews.org (opens in a new tab)1 sourcePermalink

Chart highlighting cited value: 61 percent. Data as cited.
Chart: voltsdaily, data as cited

AI & Energy

Nature Study Puts AI-Enabled Oil and Gas Emissions at Up to 1.8 Gigatonnes a Year

AI tools deployed by oil and gas companies add between 0.47 and 1.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide to global emissions annually, according to a study by former Microsoft employees published in Nature and reported by Inside Climate News. The study put that range at 1.2 to 4.8 percent of global energy-related emissions in 2024.

The upper end of that estimate is as much as 13 times the emissions the International Energy Agency attributed to data centers in 2025, according to Inside Climate News. The comparison reframes the climate debate around AI: the electricity drawn by the models is smaller than the fossil output the models help unlock.

The production mechanism is quantified. Consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates that oil and gas companies using AI tools could reach an additional 470 billion barrels of oil in fields already in production.

Speed is one route to those barrels. Boston Consulting Group said processing 3D seismic data once took a year, and that AI can compress it to roughly two weeks.

The corporate accounting sits awkwardly beside the study's authorship. Microsoft reported in 2025 that it matched all of its global electricity consumption with renewable energy. That matching covers the company's own power draw, not the downstream emissions from customers using its tools to lift more hydrocarbons, which is the category the Nature study measures.

The study's framing places AI-enabled upstream production, rather than model training and inference load, as the dominant climate exposure in the sector, on the figures Inside Climate News reported.

Source: insideclimatenews.org (opens in a new tab)1 sourcePermalink