This week in buildings, land and industry decarbonization news, NetZero Insider’s John Cropley covered Constellation Energy’s third-quarter earnings, which came just after FERC rejected a proposal from fellow nuclear plant owner Talen Energy to expand a co-located data center. FERC did so without precedent, and Constellation CEO Joseph Dominguez told investors that he expects more co-location deals will go into effect as data centers are an economic priority. Constellation owns the largest fleet of nuclear plants in the country.

The FERC ruling came up during PSEG’s earnings call as well, NetZero Insider’s Hugh Morley reported. The New Jersey-based firm has excess power at its nuclear plants, and CEO Ralph LaRossa expects some of that will eventually be used in co-location deals. PSEG is the sole owner of the Hope Creek nuclear plant, while it co-owns the Salem nuclear plant with Constellation. 

A recent CNBC story focuses on data centers’ growing energy demands and the sector’s desire to adopt nuclear power to meet that. The article includes a discussion of tech firms’ pursuit of nuclear power and efforts to use new techniques to lower that demand. One is liquid cooling of the servers and other equipment. Another emerging technology is quantum computing, which uses quantum physics to make more powerful microchips. 

Meta recently failed to secure nuclear power for a data center it proposed because its proposed site is a habitat for a rare species of bees, CEO Mark Zukerberg reportedly told a recent all-hands meeting, and Popular Science has the details, which were first reported by the Financial Times. The difficulty in getting nuclear power in the U.S. is frustrating to the world’s richest millennial. 

In other building decarbonization news, Yahoo has a story on a recent report from WalletHub ranking states by their energy efficiency policies. Washington took the top spot because of its focus on minimizing home energy use even with cold winters; New York took second because of the New York City metro area’s public transportation infrastructure; and California rounded out the top three as its policies have led to the lowest per capita residential energy use in the country. 

In other news out the Golden State, Bloomberg reported on the failure of a ballot measure in Berkeley that would have taxed large buildings’ natural gas use. The measure was meant to further the Bay Area city’s building decarbonization efforts, which suffered a setback in recent years after a federal court found it could not ban hookups for natural gas in newly constructed buildings. 

Here are other stories from this week’s Intelligence Report: