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This week in buildings, land and industry news, James Downing covered remarks from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who discussed how his firm’s products went from improving video game graphics to potentially transforming the world by enabling artificial intelligence. The firm’s innovation was to use a separate chip for intensive processes like graphics, or AI, which made such processes much more efficient and, in an example of Jevons paradox, has led to huge growth in demand for both.
In related news, the folks at the Energy Information Administration ran down the details of the Susquehanna and Three Mile Island nuclear plants’ agreements to serve data centers. A deal with Microsoft is leading the reopening of the retired unit at TMI, while Susquehanna’s deal with Amazon Web Services is an early example of what promises to be a growing trend of co-locating data centers at existing nuclear plants. The Hill reports that Google is among the firms considering nuclear to help serve their energy-hungry data centers.
Switching fuels and coasts, Inside Climate News has a story on how cities in California are responding to litigation that ended Berkeley’s ban on new natural gas hook-ups. Rather than outright bans, cities are passing new building codes that are easier for all-electric buildings to meet but do not outright ban gas appliances.
The California legislature’s effort to include health warnings on natural gas stoves sold in the state died with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s veto pen, as Bloomberg reported. Similar bills failed to pass in Illinois and New York this year. Newsom called the legislatively mandated language for the warning labels too prescriptive, meaning it can only be updated by another law, which would not allow for timely updates as the science around stoves’ health impacts changes.
Oregon became the latest state to get funding for home energy retrofits from the Inflation Reduction Act, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. The state is getting $113 million targeted at low- and moderate-income households to help increase their energy efficiency, which could include the installation of heat pumps, smart thermostats or new water heaters.
Over in Europe, the sale of heat pumps this year fell by nearly half from 2023 as natural gas prices came back to earth, according to The Telegraph. Prices for the heating fuel surged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused most of the continent to cut back on imports from Russia, which scrambled supplies and led to spiking prices. The move to heat pumps has also become political, with right-wing governments in some countries promising to push back on the effort.
There are plenty of additional stories in this week’s Intelligence Report:
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