Energy News Beat

• President Donald Trump announced the $500 billion AI project, Stargate, earlier this week.
• Stargate’s first data center is under construction in Abilene, Texas, said Oracle CTO Larry Ellison.
• Public filings for an Abilene development matching Ellison’s description shed some light on costs.

Construction on what appears to be two buildings on Stargate’s first data center campus, now underway in Texas, is expected to be complete by the end of the year and cost an estimated $1.1 billion, according to public filings.

President Donald Trump announced the formation of Stargate, a joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank, at a White House press conference on Tuesday. He pledged to spend $500 billion building AI data centers in the US.

Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison, who joined Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at the briefing, said the first Stargate data centers are currently being built in Abilene, Texas.

“We’ve been working with OpenAI for a while and Masa for a while. The data centers are actually under construction — the first of them are under construction in Texas,” said Ellison. “Each building is a half million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”

Little else has been revealed about Stargate. Registration forms filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a data center development in Abilene matching Ellison’s description of Stargate give some insight into the cost of building the data centers.

The development is registered with the TDLR under the name “Project Ludicrous,” located at an address attached to the Lancium Clean Campus — a 1,000-acre site in Abilene owned by energy tech company Lancium. The owner of Project Ludicrous is listed as Abilene DC 1 LLC, an affiliate of data center development startup Crusoe. According to the Texas state comptroller’s records, Oracle is the occupant of the data center owned by Abilene DC 1, LLC, located at the Lancium Clean Campus in Abilene. A Texas-based Oracle employee is also listed as the tenant contact for Project Ludicrous in the TDLR filings.

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Energy News Beat

ENB Pub Note: The New York legislators and Gov Hochul are not looking at things in a “what is best for my constituents” type of model. This article points out that this will trigger a mass exodus, or in my opinion, speed up the exodus of businesses and tax-paying consumers leaving New York. We just have to watch what is happening in real-time in the EU, UK, Germany, and California to see that New York will be failing with the same green policies. 

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Albany’s rainmakers have found a new way to shower cash into the state’s dwindling coffers.

The day after Christmas, Gov. Hochul signed Bill S2129A into law, deputizing the Department of Environmental Conservation to fine fossil fuel companies billions of dollars for past greenhouse gas emissions.

The money will go into a Climate Change Slush — er, “superfund” that will be used, ostensibly, to prepare for and manage adverse weather events, like floods.

Sponsored by five Senate Democrats — Liz Krueger (28th Senate District) Joe Addabbo (15th), Neil Breslin (46th), Jabari Brisport (25th), and Samra Brouk (55th) — and following on the heels of a law Vermont passed last year, the Climate Change Superfund will retroactively levy a fee on firms that “engaged in the trade or business of extracting fossil fuel or refining crude oil” during a “covered period” from Jan. 1, 2000 to Dec. 31, 2018; that exceeded 1 billion metric tons of emissions; and that sold their products into the Empire State — big foreign producers like China National Petroleum Company and Rosneft needn’t worry.

The scheme sets a target of $75 billion to be collected from such firms over a 25-year period. From that (arbitrary) dollar starting point the scheme will portion a “cost recovery demand” to the big American energy players that constitute the “responsible parties” based on their historic emissions tallies. Where will the money go?

As Manhattan Institute legal fellow and cities director John Ketcham has pointed out, the fund will dole out cash to well-connected trade unions working on infrastructure projects, “disadvantaged” communities, and special interest groups under a system of “poorly defined preferentialism.”

The new scheme styles itself in the fashion of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s 1980 superfund law, but bears little resemblance to that law in reality.

The EPA superfund holds polluters liable for the direct environmental damage they have caused by releasing hazardous waste — harms that are specified, local, particular, and attributable.

4

The climate superfund idea simply slaps retroactive fees onto a group of companies that sold products the state no longer views favorably. While in aggregate global fossil fuel use has amplified the greenhouse effect, these companies have emitted just a sliver of the world’s total.

The state can’t credibly say Company X’s emissions caused damage Y, which is why it’s not troubling itself with this necessary specificity.

The scheme doesn’t even hold the decision-makers from the “covered period” accountable; it is today’s company shareholders who are on the hook.

In the end, these companies’ customers, the everyday users of fossil fuel products, will bear the cost of the superfund in the form of higher prices on heating bills, at the gas pump, and on all the myriad goods to which oil and natural gas contribute.

The Climate Change Superfund is a carbon tax shorn of economic logic. At least a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system levied fair and square across an economy would give emitters an incentive to abate emissions.

That the state’s time-machine taxation targets only firms with a legal tie to New York sets an obvious and different incentive: to flee.

Fossil fuel companies, the alcoholic beverage industry, Big Tech, and anyone else in a line of business that might find itself afoul of the public mood now have reason to consider leaving the state.

The retroactive nature of the law will sow deep concern about the state’s commitment to the rule of law itself.

The practices in which so-called responsible parties engaged were entirely above board and they have not been found liable for any particular harm. In a very real sense, “cost recovery demand” is a euphemism for the expropriation of justly earned profit.

4

Though signed into law, what happens now with the superfund remains uncertain. On paper, Gov. Hochul is required to publish a report providing compliance guidance for companies before the end of April and companies are required to begin paying their bills next year. In practice, challenges in federal court are sure to draw out the process.

At issue is whether states like New York, Vermont, and Hawaii can impose liability on interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions or are preempted by the US Clean Air Act.

Regardless of what the courts say, though, New York has made it clear to businesses that the state isn’t worthy of trust. Meant to mitigate flood damage, the Climate Change Superfund will prompt an exodus.

Jordan McGillis (@jordanmcgillis) is the economics editor of City Journal.

SourceA: NYPost

Is Oil and Gas An Investment for You?

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Energy News Beat

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New Delhi’s role as a counterweight to China solidifies its status as Washington’s’ key partner in South Asia, outweighing short-term concerns over Russian oil revenues

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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The entrepreneur has reaffirmed his support for the right-wing Alternative for Germany party ahead of the February vote

 

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For CRE, the motto in 2024 was “Survive till 2025” via extend-and-pretend. Now it’s 2025, and here comes the government’s office space.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The DOGE people in the Trump administration are considering shedding a big portion of the massive office space that the government owns or leases nationwide, managed by the General Services Administration (GSA), including selling two-thirds of the office space the government owns and terminating three-quarters of the leased office space, according to the WSJ.

Much of this office space is vacant or underused and poorly maintained due to lack of funding, according to GSA testimony before Congress in 2023, cited by the WSJ, which further noted:

“A recent report from Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa who chairs the Senate DOGE caucus, found that not one of the headquarters for any major agency or department in Washington is more than half full. GSA-owned buildings in Washington, D.C., average about a 12% occupancy rate. The government owns more than 7,500 vacant buildings across the country, and more than 2,200 that are partially empty.”

The office sector is already in a depression, with default rates that exceed those during the worst moments of the Financial Crisis. Putting this inventory on the market for sale is going to weigh on the already collapsed prices of older office buildings – prices of 50-70% below the last sale before the pandemic are now common.

And terminating leases is going to stress office buildings, their landlords, and their lenders even more, likely entailing more defaults and foreclosure sales. This is a much needed but very bitter medicine to alleviate government waste.

What office landlords and their lenders are facing.

Here we look at the leased office space, where those buildings are, and what portion of the leased space the GSA has the right to terminate in 2025, and also through 2028 (Trump 2.0), based on an analysis from Trepp, which tracks commercial real estate debt and CMBS.

• GSA leases 149 million square feet (msf) of office space around the US.
• GSA pays $5.2 billion in annual rent to private-sector landlords.
• Through 2028, GSA has the right to terminate 53.1 msf of leases, or 35.5% of its leased space, spread over 2,532 properties.
• In 2025, GSA has termination rights on 21.2 msf spread over more than 1,000 properties,
• If GSA terminates all possible leases during Trump 2.0, it would save the government $1.87 billion in annual rent after 2028.
• In the vast Washington DC metro, GSA leases nearly 10% of the entire office market, 35.8 msf in 446 buildings, and can terminate 9.6 msf of that in 2025.
• In the Washington D.C. metro, GSA currently pays $1.47 billion in annual rent.
• GSA leases nearly 6% of the office space in the Kansas City metro (DoD, USPS, Treasury, VA, and USDA), 4.3 msf, of which it can terminate 1.0 msf in 2025.

Here are the top 10 metros in terms of government office space. GSA leases 66.3 msf of office space in them and has termination rights in 2025 on 18.9 msf (28.5%):

Metropolitan area	Number of buildings	Office space msf	% of total market	Annual Rent, Million $	Space with termination rights in 2025, msf
Washington DC	446	35.8	9.7%	$1,470	9.59
New York City	223	5.0	0.7%	$249	1.53
Hagerstown-Martinsburg	60	4.8	N/A	$210	1.58
Kansas City	78	4.3	5.8%	$99	1.03
Philadelphia	124	3.0	2.9%	$97	0.71
Atlanta	90	3.0	1.9%	$68	1.35
Los Angeles	168	3.0	1.0%	$134	1.04
Dallas-Fort Worth	86	2.8	1.4%	$82	0.57
Chicago	113	2.4	1.0%	$92	0.93
Denver	74	2.3	2.3%	$77	0.58
Total	1,462	66.3	$2,576	18.9

Office CRE would be stressed enough without this.

The office sector of commercial real estate is in a depression, and office debt just keeps getting worse: The delinquency rate of office mortgages across the US that have been securitized into commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) spiked to a record 11% at the end of 2024, blowing by the Financial Crisis peak, having exploded over the past 24 months from an everything-is-just-fine 1.6% at the end of 2022, to a disastrous 11.0% at the end of 2024.

The motto in 2024 was “survive till 2025” via extend-and-pretend. But now it’s 2025, and here comes the government’s vacant office space.

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The post DOGE Seeks to Shed Vast Amounts of Government Office Space. Here’s How Much the Government Leases, and Where, and What Leases it Can Shed During Trump’s Term appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

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The Russian leader believes the Ukraine conflict might have been avoided if Donald Trump had become US president in 2020

 

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The incident looks like a “textbook example” of a scheme used to punish dissenting governments in the West, Slovakia’s Robert Fico has claimed

 

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The Bank of England said government climate requirements issued by the UK govt. are hindering efforts to boost economic growth.

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The Bank of England should be freed from burdensome net zero rules to help grow the economy, Rachel Reeves has been told. [emphasis, links added]

Sam Woods, the head of the Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), said the thicket of climate requirements imposed by Westminster was impeding efforts to boost growth.

In a letter to the Chancellor and Sir Keir Starmer, Mr. Woods said the requirement for the Bank to “have regard” for dozens of different “climate and the environment” issues made it harder to encourage risk-taking in the City and take a more light-touch approach to regulation.

Mr. Woods raised the issue in response to a call from Ms. Reeves for ideas on how to improve Britain’s flatlining growth rate.

The Bank of England’s main instructions from the Government are to keep inflation at 2pc and maintain a stable financial system.

However, the Government can also advise the central bank to “have regard” for other issues when making decisions. This means the issues covered by the notices have to be factored into decision-making.

Net zero requirements

The PRA, which sits within the Bank and is responsible for making sure individual lenders and financial institutions are operating soundly and safely, has more than two dozen of its own individual “have regard” instructions.

Mr. Woods wrote to ministers:

“The number of principles that the PRA is required to ‘have regard’ to has substantially increased in recent years, increasing the complexity of the analysis required when making or amending regulation. Depending on how they are counted, the PRA currently has around 25 such ‘have regards’.

“There is scope to rationalize some of these ‘have regards’ where they form a cluster, for instance in the set of ‘have regards’ which relate to climate and the environment.”

For example, the Prudential Regulation Committee, which effectively governs the PRA and on which Mr. Woods serves, must “have regard to … leading the world in sustainable finance, including by unlocking the full potential of the financial services sector to fund the green transition.”

Slashing back net zero requirements could help speed up the process of regulating companies and potentially make it cheaper to be certified. …snip…

Requirements to focus on climate change ramped up under the Conservatives in the era of Governor Mark Carney before being cut back under Jeremy Hunt, the last Tory chancellor.

They have since been reprioritized under Labour.

Read rest at Yahoo Finance

 

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Automakers are facing setbacks in reaching EV goals as consumer interest wanes and Trump ends the Biden-era EV subsidies and mandate.

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Automakers have been backtracking on their EV goals over the past year as consumer interest failed to keep up with the vision automakers had.

That vision appears to have been born from the idea that if the federal government mandated people to drive electric cars, then people would buy them. [emphasis, links added]

Not only did consumers rebel against this EV future, but they also voted for a candidate who had vowed throughout his campaign to end the Biden-Harris administration’s EV mandate.

On Monday, President Donald Trump made good on the promise, signing the “Unleashing American Energy” executive order. Among other things, it eliminates the EV mandate to “promote true consumer choice.”

Now, the automakers who were already losing billions on EVs could be in more trouble, depending on how much EV sales were buoyed by the mandates the automakers were counting on.

“I think the EV mistake has basically crippled the U.S. automotive industry, and unless there are bailouts, I can’t see these guys surviving,” Jack Lifton, executive chairman of the Critical Minerals Institutetold Just the News.

Scaling back

Trump’s order revokes a non-binding goal Biden had set in 2021 to make half of all new cars sold to be electric by 2030.

To block the EPA’s tailpipe emissions standards, which by some estimates would require 66% of all new cars sold in the U.S. to be electric by 2032,

Trump would have to work with the EPA to rewrite its rules. Either that or Congress could legislate the rule away.

While most consumers still want gas-powered cars, EV adoption rates continued to climb last year.

According to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book, EV sales jumped 15.2% year over year in the last quarter of 2024, and full-year EV sales reached 1.3 million, an increase of 7.3% in 2023.

Automakers, however, had expected sales volumes to be much higher, and when they weren’t keeping pace, they began realigning their EV targets with what consumers appear to want.

Ford had planned to invest 40% of its capital budget in electric vehicle lines, but in August, that was brought down to 30%. The company also scrapped plans for a three-row electric SUV.

General Motors had planned to sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035. Last July, the company said it was pushing back the opening of an EV manufacturing plant in Michigan to mid-2026, and pausing plans for an electric line in its Buick brand.

Stellantis also scaled back its EV targets last fall and temporarily suspended production of an EV Fiat 500 due to sluggish demand.

Meanwhile, the automakers have also been losing billions on their EV bet.

Ford, which separates its EV business from other parts of the company, lost $3.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2024. General Motors expects to narrow its losses on EVs this year by $2 billion to $4 billion.

All-electric Rivian lost $75,563 on every EV it sold in the third quarter, rivaling the $58,391 that Ford lost for each EV it sold, according to energy expert Robert Bryce.

Despite these losses, Bryce reports, the Department of Energy Loans Program Office gave the carmaker a $6.57 billion loan guarantee.

All electric Tesla saw its net income rise in the third quarter of 2024 to nearly $2.17 billion, or 62 cents a share, up from $1.85 billion, or 53 cents a share, a year ago.

However, Politico reports that the automaker earned $10.7 billion over 10 years selling credits from government climate programs designed to encourage automakers to switch to EVs.

This funding stream accounted for 33% of the company’s profits. If Congress repeals the program, that could impact Tesla’s profits considerably.

Read rest at Just The News

 

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The Danish PM had a “horrendous” conversation with the US president about acquiring the island, officials have told the paper

 

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