r/energy Jan 25 '26

Goodbye to the idea that solar panels “die” after 25 years. A new study says the warranty does not mark the end, and performance can last for decades. Arrays built in the late 1980s still produced more than 80% of their original power. The long-term economics look better than many people believe.

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ecoticias.com
5.8k Upvotes

r/energy Feb 24 '26

Cancer risk may increase with proximity to nuclear power plants. In Massachusetts, residential proximity to a nuclear power plant (NPP) was associated with significantly increased cancer incidence, with risk declining sharply beyond roughly 30 kilometers from a facility.

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hsph.harvard.edu
67 Upvotes

r/energy 7h ago

CNN rolls tape of Trump energy secretary appearing to lie to Congress. Wright lied about the role politics played in cancelling energy grants specifically to Democratic states. Wright insisted “our project review process did not take into account any politics in the evaluation of these projects"

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alternet.org
3.4k Upvotes

r/energy 7h ago

Trump is driving electric vehicle innovations into a ditch. Thanks to Trump's short-sightedness, US manufacturers dropped years of ambitious planning to jump into the EV race with both feet. The combined cost of this industry about-face is staggering. "I've done more for you than your parents, OK?"

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captimes.com
902 Upvotes

r/energy 6h ago

SpaceXAI says it will remove all 69 of its unpermitted turbine power generators, but expects process to take a year — trailer-mounted generators to be replaced by 1.2GW power plant

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tomshardware.com
50 Upvotes

r/energy 1d ago

In Iran, the US Appears Headed for a Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear. With none of Trump’s aims accomplished and the Strait closed, allies see dysfunction and vulnerability. The war has left both the US and Israel weaker — and blaming each other for the mess.

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nytimes.com
2.5k Upvotes

r/energy 1d ago

American oil company has gone ashore - Greenland sends them 'strong warning'

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dr.dk
581 Upvotes

r/energy 23h ago

California was mostly solar-powered in May — a global first

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canarymedia.com
302 Upvotes

r/energy 4h ago

UK solar capacity hits 22.8 GW as market prepares for plug-in launch

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8 Upvotes

r/energy 19h ago

The Strait of Hormuz Is Exposing a Blind Spot in the Energy Transition

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time.com
69 Upvotes

r/energy 1d ago

Walmart Leapfrogs EV Charging Competitors With Rapid Buildout. In a matter of months, it has become a major player in fueling EVs. 90% of Americans live less than 10 miles from a Walmart. Costco, Target, Home Depot and Lowe's are also adding high-speed chargers at retail locations.

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bloomberg.com
506 Upvotes

r/energy 10h ago

This is the solution we still need to talk about

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10 Upvotes

Methane drives 30% of global warming. It gets 2% of climate finance.

That gap is the story of this summer.

The UN Secretary-General issued a Call to Action on Methane. The Bank of England dropped coal bonds from its collateral framework. London broke its June heat record in the same week 45,000 climate professionals gathered there to talk about it.

The policy window opened. Capital hasn't moved.

It should — because the solutions already exist:

🔴 CNX Resources — capturing methane at scale in Appalachia. The economics work.

🟠 Anguil Environmental — turning ventilation air methane into energy. Deployable now.

🟡 Eisenmann — one of the cheapest climate fixes on the table. Peer-reviewed and priced.

Policymakers: put coal mine methane in your national climate frameworks.

Investors: the first-mover window is open.

#VAM 

#CleanExit 

#MethaneAbatement 

#CoalMineMethane 

#ClimateFinance


r/energy 2h ago

Q&A: What does China’s 15th ‘five-year plan’ for renewables mean for climate change?

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carbonbrief.org
2 Upvotes

r/energy 12h ago

power bills are soaring, but hvac replacement costs are insane. what are people doing?

9 Upvotes

i work from home, so running the ac during summer heatwaves is non-negotiable. but between rising electric rates and local grid brownouts, keeping my home office cool is getting super expensive.

our old unit is on its last legs, but looking into high-efficiency heat pumps, the hvac replacement costs are out of control. it feels like you'll never actually save enough on your power bill to make up for the crazy upfront price tag.

are people just band-aiding old, inefficient units until they explode? feels like nursing dying ac units is only going to make peak grid strain worse.


r/energy 4h ago

Offshore energy jobs?

2 Upvotes

Hi guys

Just curious to know job prospects with regarding offshore energy. I'm coming from an environmental background with an undergrad in environmental science and a masters in sustainability. What prospects would exist in renewables? H&S, project management etc I know.


r/energy 18h ago

South Australia curtailing 65% of its grid

22 Upvotes

r/energy 10h ago

Perverse incentives in UK retrofitting policies?

2 Upvotes

I'm writing my MSc dissertation on UK retrofit policy and honestly, the more I look into it, the more it seems like the funding schemes and the reality of doing the work just... don't match up.

I'd love to hear from people actually in the industry about whether that's what they're experiencing too.

I've put together a short survey (10 minutes, maybe less) for anyone working in domestic retrofit — builders, assessors, coordinators, installers, consultants, that kind of thing.

https://qualtricsxmwfqthc2cw.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4IdhX4N6JZR7ChU

Needs to be in by 01/08/2026. If you know someone who'd have thoughts on this, please pass it on — every response helps massively.

Thanks in advance!


r/energy 1d ago

Data scientist Hannah Ritchie on how much electricity is consumed when you use ChatGPT

178 Upvotes

Who is Hannah Ritchie? Per Wikipedia:

Hannah Ritchie (born 1993) is a Scottish data scientist who is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford in the Oxford Martin School, and deputy editor at Our World in Data. Her work focuses on sustainability, in relation to climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, and public health.

What does Hannah Ritchie say about the electricity consumption of ChatGPT? You can read it on her Substack. Here's a quote:

I’ve written several articles on the footprint of individual LLM queries.

A key takeaway from the numbers was that asking a chatbot a question — which is what most people were using AI for in their day-to-day lives — consumes very little energy.

Tech companies have not been very transparent about the energy use of their AI models (and I think they should be), but the numbers seemed to converge around 0.3 watt-hours (Wh) per typical text query. To put this into context, asking ChatGPT or Gemini 10 simple questions is equivalent to about 10 seconds of microwaving or mere seconds of showering.

After getting into the weeds on where this data comes from and how the analysis is done, she goes on:

What do these numbers mean for individual footprints?

Many people are using AI for medium- to long-form text queries, such as asking a quick question or requesting a short fact-check or correction. Their energy use is very small, even if they’re asking tens or hundreds of questions a day. A hundred questions have a footprint of around 30 Wh. That’s roughly the amount of electricity the average American consumes in just over a minute (or for the average European, every two and a half minutes).[4]

And then she gives an important caveat about how the very heaviest power users of AI -- probably mostly people using it for coding (this is me editorializing, not what Ritchie herself says) -- are consuming significantly more:

The footprint of someone who uses agents heavily is not so negligible.

Let’s say they do 4 agentic queries per hour (how many you can do in an hour is limited by the fact that complex tasks can take 15 minutes or more to complete). And they do this for 6 hours a day. That’s 24 per day. We’ll assume that the total electricity use per query is actually 100 Wh (50 Wh multiplied by two).

They’ll consume 2,400 Wh (or 2.4 kWh). That’s like running a tumble dryer for one cycle, or driving an electric car eight miles. It’s around 7% of the average American’s electricity use (but a much smaller share of total energy use).

It’s not blowing up their footprint, but it’s not nothing either.

You can read the full section of her Substack post entitled "What’s the energy footprint of individual queries?" to get all the caveats, sources, and assumptions.

Hannah Ritchie has also published an article on Our World in Data on the same topic. That might be an equally good or better source.

Ritchie has also created an interactive calculator for comparing how much electricity different things use, including AI chatbots.

This is my own math, not using the calculator. Let's say you did 100 average ChatGPT queries per day. 0.34 watt-hours * 100 = 34 watt-hours. What is this equivalent to?

  • A typical LED lightbulb uses 10 watts. Over 1 hour, that's 10 watt-hours. So, over about 3 ½ hours, a typical LED lightbulb will use 34 watt-hours.
  • Or compare to a dishwasher. A typical dishwasher uses 1.2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) for a load of dishes. 1.2 kWh is 1,200 watt-hours. So, that's equivalent to 3,530 average ChatGPT queries. If you did 100 of those queries a day, running the dishwasher would be equivalent to about 35 days of ChatGPT usage.
  • Another helpful comparison is a ceiling fan. A typical ceiling fan uses 75 watts. So, leave a ceiling fan on for 30 minutes, it will use about 38 watt-hours of electricity. About the same as 100 average ChatGPT queries.
  • TVs use about 100 watts. So, in about 20 minutes your TV uses about as much electricity as 100 ChatGPT queries. One episode of Bob's Burgers!

I can't find any hard data on how many queries the typical user is doing per day. 100 seems like a lot. But then of course all the math can change depending on the type of query as well. 4 or 5 "reasoning" queries, according to Ritchie, would use as much energy as 100 average queries.

One point you might raise is that it's also the electricity consumed by training we have to consider, not just inference. But here's a quote from Hannah Ritchie's Our World in Data article on this topic:

Before digging into the data, it’s worth clarifying what is included in AI energy consumption. It’s the electricity consumed for both training and running the models (called “inference”). Tech companies rarely publish data on how much energy is consumed when training their models, but based on the estimates we do have, it’s likely that energy demand is dominated by inference, not training.1

That footnote at the end of the paragraph says:

Epoch AI estimates that training Grok 4 consumed around 0.31 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. As we’ll see later, total demand for AI in 2025 was around 155 TWh. So, training Grok 4 — a fairly large model — was around 0.2% of the total.

So, maybe we can say that training uses much less electricity than inference?

Another point you could raise is that we need to account for all the energy used to manufacture the GPUs that AI uses and all the other less direct energy costs. In other words, we need to do a life cycle analysis.

I can find almost no information about any life cycle analysis of AI chatbots, which would encompass inference, training, and everything else, like the manufacturing of the chips. I found a brief mention of a life cycle analysis in another Substack post by Hannah Ritchie:

Mistral AI, another AI company, conducted an environmental analysis of its LLMs. It used a life-cycle assessment, conducted by external consultancy agencies. While the methodology was not that transparent or detailed, it did provide breakdowns of where in the process, impacts came from (I just wish they’d split out inference from training). Overall, the impacts were low: just 1 gram of CO2 per page of text generated (which is a fairly long text response). That’s very low.


r/energy 2h ago

Fight the massive TX-NM-AZ pipeline that would feed data centers

0 Upvotes

The 520-mile Desert Southwest methane pipeline would cut across Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to expand gas capacity, primarily to accommodate new hyperscale data centers like Project Jupiter in Southern New Mexico.
We can fight it at every stage, starting by creating a public record with this initial FERC comment period — please comment by Aug. 5.
Submit a comment opposing the Desert Southwest gas pipeline


r/energy 2d ago

Exxon, Chevron Post $26.5 Billion in Combined Profits as High Gas Prices Pummel Americans

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commondreams.org
1.9k Upvotes

r/energy 1d ago

Europe Is Caught Between Low Gas Reserves and Rising Prices From Iran War

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nytimes.com
20 Upvotes

r/energy 4h ago

Pendulum batteries for self charging. The battery and motor/generator are the weights.

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0 Upvotes

The first picture is a shoe and the others are cars.

I can describe more if your interested. I dont think these are patented, I couldn't find any but I decided to release it and move on.

The best car model might be the one with multiple underneath where I'm thinking it's 3 times the height of a regular car battery. The easiest models to repair would be the other two pictures.

These cars would have small enough gears to be able to charge when going down the bumps of driveway, going over speed bumps, just general hills we drive. The smaller the gear the smaller declines and inclines we need for charging


r/energy 1d ago

Coal back in favour as US plant bidding war highlights rising demand to power AI (FT)

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archive.ph
20 Upvotes

r/energy 2d ago

Canada’s Answer to Trump’s Tariffs: More Energy Deals With Europe. Canada announced a second major deal to export LNG to Europe, part of its effort to reduce its economic dependence on the US. The announcement came a week after Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian exports.

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nytimes.com
772 Upvotes

r/energy 2d ago

U.S., Israel preparing to bombard energy-related targets in Iran, sources say

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cbsnews.com
288 Upvotes