Thursday, 3 September 2026

Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the pause on the federal excise tax on gasoline and diesel will be extended until at least next year, according to a statement from the Canadian Energy Marketers Association (CEMA).

The measure had been due to lapse on September 7. In April, the Carney government temporarily removed the 10-cent federal excise tax on a litre of gasoline and four cents per litre on diesel, per CEMA.

The government presented the extension as an affordability measure for Canadians, citing international turmoil in the Middle East and geopolitical pressures with the United States.

CEMA is asking for a transition mechanism, such as a rebate or credit, covering federally taxed fuel inventory held as of the effective date of the suspension. Fuel marketers that bought stock with the excise tax already embedded in the purchase price carry that cost into a market where the tax is no longer collected at the pump.

The association's request ties the extension of the pause to the same inventory question raised by the original April suspension, when the levy was lifted mid-stream on gasoline and diesel already in the distribution chain.

Powering Skills Organisation estimates the energy transition workforce needs 42,000 new qualified workers, according to pv magazine. The same research points to hiring gaps that employers have been unable to close for months at a time.

Among employers surveyed by PSO, 55% carried vacancies over the past 12 months, pv magazine reported. A further 52% said positions had stayed unfilled for longer than six months.

The pipeline meant to supply those roles leaks early. PSO research cited by pv magazine found 59% of electrotechnology apprenticeship cancellations happen in the first year of study. Another 26% of cancellations occur in the second year. Completion rates for those apprenticeships stand at 70%, according to PSO.

PSO's report names workplace culture as a constraint on recruitment, identifying women, First Nations peoples and culturally and linguistically diverse communities as underutilised talent pools. That framing puts retention and workplace conditions, rather than training volume alone, at the centre of the shortfall PSO describes.

The combination of the two datasets sets the scale of the task. Employers report vacancies they cannot fill, while roughly three in ten apprentices do not finish, with most departures clustered in the first two years of study.

Brazil's Federal Senate passed Bill 278/2026, which sets up a special tax regime for data center services known as Redata, pv magazine reported.

Two domestic conditions attach to the benefit. Operators drawing on the regime have to keep a minimum of 10% of the data processing, storage and handling capacity they install available to the Brazilian market. Alongside that, they owe domestic investment worth 2% of what they spend on products bought under the incentive.

Senators loosened how eligible power is defined. Where the earlier proposal spoke of "clean or renewable sources," the approved wording reads "renewable or low-emission sources," with the detailed criteria pushed to later regulation, according to pv magazine. The approved text treats solar and wind as renewable, and hydropower, biomass and biogas as low-emission, pv magazine reported.

Clean Energy Latin America (CELA) counted 11 long-term supply contracts signed between renewable generators and Brazilian data centers from 2021 to 2024, covering 330 MW and worth roughly BRL 7.7 billion (USD 1.4 billion), according to pv magazine.

Seven of those 11 used a self-generation structure and four were power purchase agreements, the CELA survey found as cited by pv magazine.

Municipal utility Homestead Public Services was owed more than USD 8 million in unpaid bills from customers still receiving service, according to a city analysis from 2025 cited by Inside Climate News, with more than 9,000 delinquent residential accounts on its books.

The arrears are concentrated in small balances. As of April, the average delinquent energy bill in Homestead stood at USD 617, Inside Climate News reported, while the largest single past-due account had reached USD 9,981.

The billing pressure has coincided with a hotter summer. Thirty-seven heat advisories were issued for Miami-Dade County this summer, against 12 the previous summer, according to Inside Climate News. The National Weather Service issued one extreme heat warning, its most severe alert for dangerous heat conditions, on Aug. 19, prompted by a forecast heat index of 112 degrees. That day was the hottest August day on record in Homestead.

Municipal utilities cut off customers at twice the rate of their investor-owned counterparts. In 2024, the only year for which comprehensive federal data is available, municipal utilities disconnected 12 out of every 100 customers, compared with six out of every 100 at investor-owned utilities, Inside Climate News reported.

Asian refiners will pay USD 2 a barrel under the Oman/Dubai benchmark for Saudi Aramco's flagship Arab Light in September, the deepest such discount since June 2020, Semafor Net Zero reported.

That price list lands after a change in OPEC's membership. On April 28 the United Arab Emirates said it would quit both OPEC and the wider OPEC+ coalition, closing out a seat it had held since 1967, according to Semafor Net Zero.

Without Emirati barrels, OPEC's share of world crude output slips to roughly 31%, down from about 35% when the UAE was counted in. For OPEC+, the comparable figures are about 46% and 42%, per Semafor Net Zero.

Iraq wants a bigger allocation. Over the summer Baghdad pushed for a higher quota, with an output ambition of 8 million to 10 million barrels a day inside six years. Its September quota stood at 4.431 million barrels a day, Semafor Net Zero reported.

American refineries are taking upward of 500,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan crude, about half of that country's output, according to US officials cited by Semafor Net Zero.

OPEC+ has now finished rolling back the 1.65 million-barrel-a-day tranche of voluntary curbs that members agreed in 2023. The final step was an increase of 188,000 barrels a day for September, Semafor Net Zero reported.

Ministers convene on September 6 to set output for the following month, with the next price list due around that meeting, according to Semafor Net Zero.

The US District Court for the District of Columbia has issued a preliminary injunction against the EPA, according to Electrek, ruling that the waivers at issue qualify as adjudicatory orders under the APA and the CRA.

The court held that the waivers are "properly considered adjudicatory orders" under those statutes "for both procedural and substantive reasons," Electrek reported.

In the same preliminary injunction, the court wrote that California is likely to prevail on the merits of the case after a full trial, according to Electrek.

The reach of the dispute extends well beyond a single state. Electrek reported that 16 states have adopted some portion of California's clean air rules.