Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 22, 2024.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump will headline a campaign fundraiser in Nashville on the sidelines of the Bitcoin Conference, where the top ticket is going for $844,600 per person.
According to an invitation shared with CNBC, the July 27 event will coincide with Trump’s expected keynote speech at the conference, the country’s biggest gathering of cryptocurrency fans.
The top-tier tickets, which include a seat at a roundtable with Trump, are priced at the maximum donation amount permitted for individuals to give to Trump and the Republican party’s largest joint fundraising committee, known as the Trump 47 Committee.
A next level down includes a photo with the former president at $60,000 per person or $100,000 per couple, according to the invitation.
Trump signed on to headline the Music City Center gathering shortly before he survived an attempted assassination on July 13.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on his Nashville appearances.
In recent months, Trump has positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate for president, a reversal from his previous stance during his time in the White House.
In April, Trump launched his latest non-fungible token collection on the solana blockchain in April and has been making increasingly bullish comments on crypto since then.
The Trump campaign team is accepting digital currency donations, and he has personally pledged to defend the rights of those who choose to self-custody their coins, meaning that they don’t rely on a centralized entity like Coinbase to hold their tokens and instead, do it themselves in personal crypto wallets, which are sometimes outside the reach of the Internal Revenue Service.
Trump also vowed at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington in May to keep Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and “her goons” away from bitcoin holders.
Meanwhile, following a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with about a dozen bitcoin mining executives who pledged cash and votes to him, Trump declared that all future bitcoin will be minted in the U.S., should he return to the White House.
On Monday, the Republican presidential nominee named Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate — a move viewed by many as a net win for the crypto sector. Vance has advocated for looser regulation of crypto and disclosed in 2022 that he personally holds bitcoin.
It comes in stark contrast to the Biden White House, which has taken a consistently skeptical approach to crypto regulation. Under Biden, the Securities and Exchange Commission has dialed up actions on the sector.
In the absence of hard-and-fast rules from Congress, the U.S. has proven to be one of the most active enforcers of penalties and legal challenges against crypto companies.
Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro
This election cycle, the crypto contingent has become a key pipeline for cash — and votes.
One day after Trump named Vance to his ticket, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz told employees of Andreessen Horowitz that they plan to make significant donations to political action committees supporting Trump’s campaign.
“They’re losing almost all these lawsuits, but the problem is that when you’re a startup, you don’t have the money to fight the U.S. government. And so they’re kind of nuking the industry in that way,” he said.
Fairshake, a super PAC backed by crypto’s top companies is now one of the top-spending PACs in this election cycle. Of the $160 million in total contributions it has raised, 94% can be traced back to just four companies: Ripple, Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase and Jump Crypto.
Do you have a collection of old cell phones in a desk drawer somewhere because you don’t know what to do with them? A new US initiative aims to make it easier for people to recycle phones, computers, and other battery-powered electronics.
This month, the US Department of Energy announced a $14 million program that will fund more than 1,000 consumer battery collection sites across the country at Staples and Battery Plus stores. It’s part of a larger $62 million effort announced by the Biden administration in April to boost battery recycling.
Smartphones can’t be discarded in household garbage or recycling bins. They contain lithium-ion batteries that can leak toxic chemicals into the environment or spark dangerous fires if damaged, punctured, or exposed to excessive heat.
And disposing of batteries improperly isn’t just an environmental problem. The Department of Energy sees it as an economic problem as well. Many rechargeable batteries contain lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese—critical materials needed to make clean energy technologies, including wind turbines and electric vehicles. With EV sales growing in the US, more of these materials will be needed.
“Up to now, China has largely cornered the market on processing those, and in many cases on extracting them as well,” US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told WIRED in an interview. “We want to be able to create multiple ways for us to access those critical materials in the United States, and recycling is one component of that.” She added that US battery recycling capacity has been “very underutilized.”
When batteries are thrown away, those materials can’t be recovered. If they’re recycled, these resources can be used over and over again—and research has found that recycled battery materials can work as well as new ones.
“What we don’t want is to be losing critical minerals from the supply chain,” says Martin Bazant, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT who leads the Center for Battery Sustainability, a joint effort of MIT and Northeastern University. “We have to be able to recycle them.”
Bazant says it makes sense for the government to work with retail stores that sell consumer electronics and batteries to increase the recovery of these materials. “These companies are very visible,” he says. But he acknowledges that it could be a challenge to get people to recognize not only the importance of preserving these materials, but also the environmental damage they can do if not disposed of properly.
Even if the collection sites are successful, there’s still a question of who’s going to process the batteries, says Doug Kobold, executive director of the California Product Stewardship Council, which has sponsored legislation on battery recycling. The problem, he says, is that extracting critical materials from recycled batteries is complex and costly. In fact, processing these materials can be more expensive than mining them fresh. And lithium is especially dangerous to handle because of its reactive properties. Only about 5 percent of lithium-ion batteries are thought to be recycled, according to the American Chemical Society.
“Every facility that is processing those is taking them at a cost,” Kobold says. “We need to figure out how to fund the cost of processing.”
California tacks on a visible fee to certain electronic devices to help fund recycling them. It’s similar to how states charge a tire recycling fee up front when you purchase a new set of tires. “Propping up collection networks in other states may still be problematic, because once you collect it, who’s paying for it to be processed?” Kobold says.
Scientists are working on ways to recycle lithium-ion batteries more sustainably and cost-effectively, but those methods could take years to become profitable.
James Tour, a chemist at Rice University who studies methods to recycle batteries, says one way the US could improve its battery recycling ecosystem is to standardize battery designs with new regulations, which could help streamline processing. “These metals are infinitely recyclable,” he says. “We need better designs that make it easier to get into the batteries.”
Rechargeable batteries, cell phones, laptops, vacuums, and smartwatches are among the items that will be collected at the new sites. EV batteries will not be accepted.
When I first switched from Pilates to weightlifting, I booked a session with a personal trainer. I was told, verbatim, that cardio would prevent me from building the muscle I wanted. So, I stopped my weekly jogs and halted all incline walking on the treadmill out of caution.
Deep-belly yawns, midday naps, a thirst for caffeine: Some signs of sleepiness are obvious. But since sleep fuels so many processes in the body, tiredness can also be more subtle. Here are six lesser-known signals that you might want to start making deep sleep a higher priority:
As mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz has plenty of problems to reckon with. Her London borough is wrestling with entrenched poverty and the capital’s highest rate of residents stuck in temporary housing. But midway through her second term, Fiaz has a new plan to turn things around. She believes that AI could provide a multimillion-pound boost to economic growth, and she’s campaigning for Newham to get a share. “We want to be able to seize the opportunities of the data economy,” she says, “and data centers are a core part of that.”
Fiaz’s support for the server farms reflects the enthusiasm of a new generation of Labour politicians expecting to be voted into power in the UK election later this week. After 14 years of center-right Conservative rule, polls predict that voters will endorse the center-left Labour Party’s pledges to kick-start economic growth and grasp the potential of AI—in part by making it easier to build more data centers across the country.
Last month, Newham approved the nation’s latest data center, on a patch of industrial land overlooking the River Thames. The plan was welcomed by some residents, who had fiercely campaigned against a new lorry depot destined for the same site. “Everyone breathed a sigh of relief,” says Sam Parsons of the Royal Wharf Residents Association, which represents 1,600 people who live in a nearby housing development. Personally, however, Parsons is still worried—mostly about the noise the data center could make once building-work has finished. “There’s a place in America where residents had a terrible time with this humming sound,” he says, referring to reports out of Virginia last year. On a Thursday morning in Newham, the handful of people that spoke to WIRED as they were passing London City Hall near to the data center site said they did not know about the plans. Most local residents seemed disinterested in how the 210-megawatt infrastructure would impact the already hugely built-up area, but one resident, Paul, who refused to give a surname, summed up the general sentiment: “We have zero need for it,” he says.
If Labour does get elected to power this week, ministers will have to convince people across the UK, already Europe’s biggest market for data centers, why they need even more and decide where to put them.
Discontent is brewing across the country, with opposition particularly strong in areas known as the “green belt,” swaths of countryside designated to prevent urban sprawl. Labour is well-aware the party’s plan to make it easier to build data centers risks causing conflict between developers and locals, according to two people with knowledge of internal party discussions. Residents in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Dublin have clashed with data center developers, complaining of the buildings’ insatiable appetite for power and water. All three cities have since imposed restrictions on new developments.
“The question for national politicians, rather than poor little us, is: What does the country value most?” says Jane Griffin, spokesperson for the Colne Valley Regional Park, a stretch of farmland, woodland and lakes on the outskirts of London where there have been six applications to build new data centers. “Green spaces with trees and lakes? Or do we want a massive, great data center?”
Wind turbines, solar panels and a coal-fired power station in China.
Owngarden | Moment | Getty Images
The United States is producing less than 1% of the wind power it wants to generate by 2030. But an enormous boat promising to change that is about 89% built, and when it’s done next year, the real race to catch up begins.
The ship, named the Charybdis after a mythological Greek sea monster, won’t set sail until next year, potentially after one of the most pro-green energy administrations in history has left the White House. And as Eric Hines, the director of Tufts University’s offshore wind energy graduate program, puts it, “We’re going to need somewhere on the order of five of these installation vessels in just a few years.”
The Biden administration wants the U.S. to generate 30,000 megawatts from wind power within the next five and a half years. As of last year, that figure stood at just 42 megawatts, putting the nation far behind Europe — which added 18,300 megawatts of new wind energy capacity in 2023 alone, according to WindEurope.
In recent years, constructing massive offshore windmills has come with headwinds from supply chain snags to higher interest rates. But the U.S. faces an added logistical puzzle from a 100-year-old maritime law that, along with those other factors, has contributed to project delays and even cancellations.
The outcome of November’s election isn’t likely to affect the Charybdis, whose operator plans to take advantage of green energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. But the prospect of a new administration much less keen on renewables could hamper additional projects.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed at a New Jersey rally in May that offshore wind installations harm whales, saying, “We are going to make sure that ends on day one. I am going to write it out in an executive order.” (“There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said.)
The first major parts of the boat were laid down in 2020, kicking off a $625 million project between Dominion Energy and Seatrium AmFELS, which is building the massive vessel in its Brownsville, Texas, shipyard. At over 30,000 tons and with 58,000 square feet of deck space, the Charybdis will be able to transport 12 blades at a time, each measuring 357 feet and weighing 60 tons.
We’re going to need somewhere on the order of five of these installation vessels in just a few years.
Eric Hines
Tufts University Professor
Just as important as its technical specs, the boat will also be able to meet the requirements of the Jones Act, a 1920 merchant marine law that says cargo shipped from one point to another within the U.S. must be carried by an American vessel. And so far, there’s no American vessel capable of carrying wind turbine parts directly from shore to installation sites miles off the coast.
The Charybdis’ first project will be Dominion’s offshore wind farm under development 24 miles east of Virginia Beach. Once completed, its 176 turbines are expected to deliver 2,600 megawatts of energy, enough to power over 900,000 homes. But to install its first two pilot turbines, it had to stage the parts in Canada to comply with the Jones Act, adding long travel times and related costs.
“Obviously, you don’t want to install a large project like that,” said Mark Mitchell, the Dominion Energy senior vice president overseeing the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project — which, at $9.8 billion, is currently the largest and priciest in the country.
Instead, the Charybdis will be able to pick up components on the coast, sail out to the wind farm site, and plant itself into the ocean floor using four 30-story legs that will transform the ship into a construction platform. Then, using a crane with a boom longer than 20 full-sized vehicles lined up bumper to bumper, it will begin assembling the turbines.
After completing the Virginia project, the ship will be available for contract to other offshore wind projects along the nation’s coastline. Mitchell hopes the Charybdis can do more than complete wind farms already in the works, but inspire developers and planners to propose new ones too.
“It’s a little bit of the chicken or the egg. As we start committing the projects, others can commit to infrastructure like this,” Mitchell said, adding that state and federal incentives will “pass right down to our customers.”
But in other cases, federal subsidies have not been enough to overcome rising costs. One major reason: the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates 11 times between March 2022 and July 2023, the fastest pace it has raised rates since the early 1980s.
It’s a little bit of the chicken or the egg. As we start committing the projects, others can commit to infrastructure like this.
Mark Mitchell
Dominion Energy
Higher interest rates make it more expensive to finance large construction projects like wind farms.
“The cost of construction is very high,” Hines said. “If you imagine the time while one is constructing a project, you’re not making any money off the project. And so money that you borrow that time to construct the project, there’s a premium on that money, and the lower the interest rates, the better.”
Last year, Danish company Orsted canceled two projects off the coast of New Jersey, citing “challenging” conditions.
“Macroeconomic factors have changed dramatically over a short period of time, with high inflation, rising interest rates, and supply chain bottlenecks impacting our long-term capital investments,” Orsted said in October. The company paid the state $125 million to cease development.
The Biden administration acknowledges the pressure from higher interest rates and points to tax credits in the IRA as a way to offset them.
“We know that there are a number of different tools that will help us overcome some of those macroeconomic challenges,” said Jeff Marootian, principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
He acknowledged that the Biden administration’s goal of 30,000 megawatts of wind energy is “ambitious” but pointed to projects in the pipeline as a sign of things to come. The Energy Department has tallied nearly $6 billion of investments to develop offshore wind over the last few years, including in 17 manufacturing sites and at 15 ports.
“Those are the kinds of investments that we need to continue to see in order to reach the president’s goals,” Marootian said.
A changing climate, drier weather, and more frequent severe weather events mean growing wildfire risk. At Xcel Energy, the highest priority is and always will be public safety, and the company has been working hard to confront this threat.
Since 2020, Xcel has invested over $500 million in wildfire mitigation, and it has made considerable progress. We have a clear goal: that no catastrophic wildfire in Colorado is ever started by Xcel Energy assets. But the risk is ever-changing and there is no shortcut to resiliency.
This week, Xcel submitted a 2025-2027 Colorado Wildfire Mitigation Plan to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, building upon our efforts to date. The 2025-2027 plan integrates industry experience, incorporates evolving risk assessment methodologies, adds new technology, and expands the scope, pace, and scale of our work.
A state-owned power company is splashing out 80 billion yuan ($11 billion) on an energy base that will generate electricity from , and sources. China Three Gorges Renewables Group, a subsidiary of the country’s largest hydropower company, plans to build a plant with a 16-gigawatt capacity and a five-gigawatt storage facility, reports.
This is part of China’s aim to build 455 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects in the desert by 2030. This plant is being constructed in Inner Mongolia, which will get 135 gigawatts of the total planned output.
The China Three Gorges Corporation is looking to diversify its energy sources as building large hydro dams is becoming less feasible. According to Three Gorges, wind and solar generation from the plant will depend on grid accessibility. The coal plant is set to start operations in three years.
It’s somewhat disappointing that the new plant will have a coal power element, though it’s not fully surprising given the way China has bristled at renewable energy commitments during . As Bloomberg notes, China has been struggling to put all of its clean energy into the power grid. It often relies on coal when renewable sources like solar and wind aren’t available.
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Market moves : Stocks were mixed Monday as money continued to shift out of high price-to-earnings multiple technology stocks that have outperformed this year and moved into cyclical areas of the market like energy, the financials, and industrials. It’s no wonder why the Dow Jones Industrial Average was higher Monday and the S & P 500 and Nasdaq were lower. For example, Club name Nvidia , the company at the center of the rally in artificial intelligence-related stocks, has quickly lost about 12% since hitting a closing high of $135.58 last Tuesday. It is worth noting that Nvidia has historically been prone to volatility at times. Conversely, the energy and utilities sectors — two of the worst-performing groups in June — charged higher. The oil rally was certainly helping our lone energy stock, Coterra Energy, which was nearly 4% higher on Monday. Next for tech : These rotations, which saw the Nasdaq recently lead and the Dow lag, have a habit of lasting a handful of sessions, making it hard to predict when and where those beloved tech stocks will stabilize. But what could turn the tide is a positive data point on industry spending later this week when Micron reports earnings. “People are picking apart the part of tech that’s been working and the Mag7 members except Apple. I think that this move will be hard to stop until we hear from Micron on Wednesday, which could tell us about actual demand and supply. I think that demand will stay strong,” Jim Cramer said Monday. Don’t chase : Still, the quick pullbacks in some of these AI names that were monster gainers over the past month is another reminder of why investors should be hesitant about chasing parabolic moves. This discipline is part of the reason why we trimmed Broadcom last week after it shot up after earnings. We ended up putting about half of the cash from that sale into Dover , an industrial company that can benefit as a second-order AI stock. Dover makes things that go into data centers, which are being upgraded and constructed at a fast clip to handle AI workloads. Record runs : As money rotated into other areas of the market, non-tech stocks like consumer products giant Procter & Gamble and off-price retailer TJX Companies reached all-time highs Monday. Industrial conglomerate Honeywell reached its highest levels back to late 2022. “Procter & Gamble might have the best consumer packaged goods profile and is barely up versus the rest of the group. I think it still has room to run,” Cramer said. Up Next: No earnings are out after the bell Monday. Cruise line Carnival reports before the opening bell Tuesday — and later in the morning, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence survey is released. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street.
Barron counters that the life in the abyssal zone is less abundant than in an ecosystem like rainforests in Indonesia, where a great deal of nickel mines operate—although scientists discovered 5,000 new species in the CCZ in 2023 alone. He considers that the lesser of two evils.
“At the end of the day, it’s not that easy,” You can’t just say no to something. If you say no to this, you’re saying yes to something else.”
RRRRR
Barron and others make the case that this ecosystem disruption is the only way to access the minerals needed to fuel the clean-tech revolution, and is therefore worth the cost in the long run. But Proctor and the others behind the report aren’t convinced. They say that without fully investing in a circular economy that thinks more carefully about the resources we use, we will continue to burn through the minerals needed for renewable tech the same way we’ve burned through fossil fuels.
“I just had this initial reaction when I heard about deep sea mining,” Proctor says. “Like, ‘Oh, really? You want to strip mine the ocean floor to build electronic devices that manufacturers say we should all throw away?’”
While mining companies may wax poetic about using critical minerals for building clean tech, there’s no guarantee that’s where the minerals will actually wind up. They are also commonly used in much more consumer-facing devices, like phones, laptops, headphones, and those aforementioned disposable vape cartridges. Many of these devices are not designed to be long lasting, or repairable. In many cases, big companies like Apple and Microsoft have actively lobbied to make repairing their devices more difficult, all but guaranteeing more of them will end up in the landfill.
“I spend every day throwing my hands up in frustration by just how much disposable, unfixable, ridiculous electronics are being shoveled on people with active measures to prevent them from being able to reuse them,” Proctor says. “If these are really critical materials, why are they ending up in stuff that we’re told is instantly trash?”
The report aims to position critical minerals in products and e-waste as an “abundant domestic resource.” The way to tap into that is to recommit to the old mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle—with a couple of additions. The report adds the concept of repairing and reimagining products to the list, calling them the five Rs. It calls for making active efforts to extend product lifetimes and invest in “second life” opportunities for tech like solar panels and battery recycling that have reached the end of their useful lifespan. (EV batteries used to be difficult to recycle, but more cutting-edge battery materials can often work just as well as new ones, if you recycle them right.)
Treasures in the Trash
The problem is thinking of these deep sea rocks in the same framework of fossil fuels. What may seem like an abundant resource now is going to feel much more finite later.
“There is a little bit of the irony, right, that we think it’s easier to go out and mine and potentially destroy one of the most mysterious remote wildernesses left on this planet just to get more of the metals we’re throwing in the trash every day,” Lamp says.
Core Scientific’s 104 megawatt Bitcoin mining data center in Marble, North Carolina
Carey McKelvey
AUSTIN — For five years, bitcoin miner Core Scientific has quietly been diversifying out of mining and into artificial intelligence, a market that will require immense amounts of power to handle the training of AI models and the massive workloads that follow.
The move is no longer a secret.
On Monday, Core Scientific announced a 12-year deal with cloud provider CoreWeave to provide infrastructure for use cases like machine learning. Core Scientific said the agreement, which expands upon an existing partnership between the two companies, will add revenue of more than $3.5 billion over the course of the contract.
CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, rents out graphics processing units (GPUs), which are needed for training and running AI models. CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion in a funding round last month. Core Scientific will deliver about 200 megawatts of infrastructure to CoreWeave’s operations.
Core Scientific, which emerged from bankruptcy in January, has been mining a mix of digital assets since 2017. The company began to diversify into other services in 2019.
“The best way to think about bitcoin mining facilities is that we are essentially power shells to the data center industry,” Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan told CNBC.
Sullivan jumped into the role of CEO while the company was still in the throes of bankruptcy, which resulted from the collapse of bitcoin in 2022. Since then, the former investment banker has settled debts with angry lenders and further beefed up the company’s non-bitcoin business as it reentered the public market.
Though Core is up more than 40% since relisting earlier this year, its market capitalization of around $865 million is significantly lower than its valuation of $4.3 billion in July 2021.
Demand for AI compute and infrastructure surged after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT in Nov. 2022, setting off a rush of investment in AI models and startups. Meanwhile, Core Scientific and other miners like Bit Digital, Hive, Hut 8, and TeraWulf have been looking to bolster their revenue streams after the so-called bitcoin halving in April cut rewards paid out to bitcoin miners by 50%.
Many have been retrofitting their massive facilities to meet the needs of the market.
“Bitcoin miners, often stationed in energy-secure and energy-intensive data centers, find these facilities ideal for AI operations as well,” said James Butterfill, head of research at digital asset firm CoinShares.
Butterfill said the the overlap is leading to a competition for rack space between bitcoin mining and AI activities. While AI operations require up to 20 times the capital expenditure of bitcoin mining, they’re more profitable, according to a report from CoinShares.
“The introduction of AI activities leads to increased depreciation and amortization, which can enhance gross profit margins,” Butterfill said.
According to CoinShares, Bit Digital derives 27% of its revenue from AI. Hut 8 generates 6% of sales from AI, and Hive, which has data centers in Canada and Sweden, gets 4% of its revenue from these services.
Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro
Hut 8 said in its first-quarter earnings report that it had purchased its first batch of 1,000 Nvidia GPUs and secured a customer agreement with a venture-backed AI cloud platform as part of its expansion into new technologies offering higher returns.
“We finalized commercial agreements for our new AI vertical under a GPU-as-a-service model, including a customer agreement which provides for fixed infrastructure payments plus revenue sharing,” said Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot.
Genoot added that the company expects to begin generating revenue in the second half of the year at an annual rate of about $20 million.
Bit Digital had 251 servers actively generating revenue from its first AI contract as of the end of April, and the company said it earned about $4.1 million of revenue from the operation that month.
Iris Energy expects to generate between $14 million and $17 million in annual revenue from its AI cloud services. Core Scientific’s expanded arrangement with CoreWeave is expected to produce annual revenue of $290 million.
“While we intend to remain one of the largest and most productive bitcoin miners, we expect to have a diversified business model and more predictable cash flows,” Sullivan said.
Bitcoin’s volatility has made mining a challenging business.
Though bitcoin is currently up more than 150% in the past year to around $69,000, the bear market of 2022 sent many miners into bankruptcy or forced them to shutter altogether.
Pivoting to AI isn’t as simple as repurposing existing infrastructure and machines, because high-performance computing (HPC) data center requirements are different, as are the needs of the data network.
“Besides transformers, substations, and some switch gear nearly all infrastructure miners currently have would need to be bulldozed and built from the ground up to accommodate HPC,” Needham analysts wrote in a report on May 30.
The rigs used to mine bitcoin are called Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). They’re built specifically for crypto mining and can’t be used to do other things.
Needham estimates that HPC data centers run at $8 million to $10 million per megawatt in capex, excluding GPUs, whereas bitcoin mining sites typically operate at $300,000 to $800,000 per megawatt in capex, not including ASICs.
Core’s Sullivan says there’s a lot of synergy between the two businesses.
“One of the most exciting parts about the bitcoin mining business is we have access to large amounts of power across the United States with access to fiber lines,” he said.
Beyond its partnership with CoreWeave, Core Scientific has also announced that over the next three to four years, it’s working to convert 500 megawatts of its bitcoin mining infrastructure across the country to HPC data centers.
Sullivan said the retrofit is manageable because the company owns and controls all of its data center infrastructure.
“There are components that we have to purchase to retrofit for HPC, but it is things that we can easily acquire,” he said.
In the next one to two years, Needham analysts estimate that large publicly traded bitcoin miners are expected to more than double power capacity, including both their mining and HPC business expansion plans.
Clean energy is a popular choice because it’s the cheapest power source in many markets. Miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, so they’re incentivized to migrate to the world’s cheapest sources of power. An industry report estimates the bitcoin network is 54.5% powered by sustainable electricity.
The Electric Power Research Institute estimates that data centers could take up to 9% of the country’s total electricity consumption by 2030, up from around 4% in 2023. Tapping into nuclear energy is seen by many as the answer to meeting that demand.
TeraWulf powers its mining sites with nuclear energy, and is looking to get into machine learning. So far, the firm has two megawatts dedicated to HPC capacity, though it has plans to transition its energy infrastructure toward AI and HPC.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC last year that he’s a big believer in nuclear when it comes to serving the needs of AI workloads.
“I don’t see a way for us to get there without nuclear,” Altman said. “I mean, maybe we could get there just with solar and storage. But from my vantage point, I feel like this is the most likely and the best way to get there.”
Kathryn Burgum aplauds as her husband Republican Governor of North Dakota Doug Burgum shakes hands with former US President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump during a Caucus Night watch party in Las Vegas, Nevada, on February 8, 2024.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum – a potential pick to be former President Donald Trump‘s running mate – is denying claims that the former president had told oil executives he’d reduce regulations if elected in exchange for helping him raise money to return to the White House.
According to the Washington Post, Trump told a few of the country’s top oil executives in a meeting with them earlier this year at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, that he’d reverse dozens of environmental rules and policies that the Biden administration has put in place and prevent new ones from being implemented. That is, if they raised $1 billion to re-elect him.
That donation would make it a “deal” given that they’d avoid taxation and regulation because of him, he said. Trump also reportedly told the executives that he would auction off more oil drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I was at that meeting – that did not happen,” Burgum said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “He didn’t ask for a billion dollars in donations, and there was no quid pro quo.”
Burgum also denied that Trump was targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection, saying that “he’s not targeting anybody” and is “doing what candidates do” by going and listening to an industry that is “fundamental to the entire economy.”
In January, Burgum endorsed Trump for president. He ended his bid to become the Republican nominee a month earlier in December 2023 after launching his campaign in June of that year and has since become an advisor to Trump on energy policy.
Burgum’s family leases 200 acres of farmland in Williams County, North Dakota, to Continental Resources – the largest oil and gas leaseholder in that state – for oil and gas pumping.
While his financial disclosure reveals that he’s made up to $50,000 in royalties since late 2022 from the deal with Continental, experts told CNBC that he and his family business have likely made thousands more since they signed a contract with the company in 2009.
When asked whether his aligning with the energy industry is alienating young voters who say that climate and environmental policy is important to them, Burgum is “not concerned about it at all,” he said.
Burgum, who’s also a software entrepreneur, announced earlier this year that he won’t be seeking a third term as governor. His second term is set to end on December 14.
Schools in North of Boston and southern New Hampshire communities, including Newburyport, are among the largest recipients of grants in the latest round of Clean School Bus Program awards.
As part of its ongoing effort to replace diesel-fueled school buses, the Biden administration said this week it will provide about 530 school districts across nearly all states with an additional $1 billion to help them purchase clean school buses.
Massachusetts school districts are in line for more than $42 million to purchase electric buses as part of an effort to upgrade the state’s aging fleet and reduce emissions from diesel-powered vehicles.
Newburyport is receiving $3 million for 15 buses, according to the Biden administration.
The Derry Cooperative School District in New Hampshire is receiving one of the largest grants in the region – $8.6 million for 25 electric school buses, thanks to an application submitted by First Student Inc., the transportation contractor for the district.
Several North of Boston school districts are also sharing in the e-bus funding, according to a list provided by the White House. Andover is receiving $5 million for 25 e-buses, while Ipswich is getting $5 million for 15.
Salem is receiving $2.6 million for 13 e-buses, the Biden administration said. Other school districts, including Gloucester, Marblehead, Beverly and the Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School, are also getting funding to buy new e-buses.
In addition to Derry, eight other New Hampshire districts such as Concord and Nashua will receive some of the funding, according to the White House. The money comes from the latest disbursements of grants through the Clean School Bus Program administered by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection.
The rebates will help school districts purchase more than 3,400 clean school buses – 92% of them electric – to accelerate the nation’s transition to zero-emission vehicles and produce cleaner air in schools and communities, according to the Biden administration.
EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday that the funding will help “transform the nation’s school bus fleet to better protect our most precious cargo – our kids – saving school districts money, improving air quality, and bolstering American manufacturing all at the same time.”
The federal program has awarded nearly $3 billion for 8,500 electric and alternative fuel buses in more than 1,000 school districts, according to the Biden administration.
Low-income, rural and tribal communities – accounting for about 45% percent of the selected projects – are slated to receive roughly 67% of the total funding, per the administration.
Regan noted how “low-income communities and communities of color have long felt the disproportionate impacts of air pollution leading to severe health outcomes that continue to impact these populations.”
As for business and economic opportunities, Regan pointed to the development of well-paying manufacturing jobs and investment in local businesses stemming from the increasing demand for these clean school buses.
“As more and more schools make the switch to electric buses, there will be a need for American-made batteries, charging stations and service providers to maintain the buses supercharging and reinvigorating local economies,” he added.
The program was initially funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by Biden in November 2021, which includes $5 billion over five years to replace the country’s current school buses with “zero-emission and low-emission models.”
In January, the EPA announced more than $1 billion in funding for 2,700 clean school buses in 280 school districts in 37 states, including Massachusetts.
Federal health officials say exposure to diesel exhaust can lead to major health conditions such as asthma and respiratory illnesses, especially among children.
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts, e-buses still make up a tiny percentage of the buses on the roads nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The number of e-buses grew by 112% between 2018 and 2021. But with just 1,300 on the roadways in 2021, that represented just 2% of the transit buses in operation, according to DOT data. Of about 500,000 school buses nationwide, only 1,800 were electric in 2021, the federal agency said.
Material from States Newsroom reporter Shauneen Miranda was used in this report.
MILAN, May 31, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Today, under the leadership of Guido Bortoni, who has been confirmed as Chairman, the first meeting of the new Board of Directors of CESI S.p.A. took place. The Board was renewed on May 29 by the Ordinary Shareholders’ Meeting.
During the meeting, Nicola Melchiotti was appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Group for the 2024–2026 term. On June 1, Melchiotti will also assume the role of General Manager. He succeeds Domenico Villani, who will remain with the company as TIC Division and Group Sustainability Affairs Executive Vice President.
Nicola Melchiotti joins CESI after a long career at Enel, where he held various international positions, including Head of Global Customer Operations, Country Manager for Argentina, Head of European Public Affairs and Regulation in Brussels, and Area Manager for Mexico and Central America. His professional journey also includes strategic consulting at McKinsey & Company. Melchiotti holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, a Master’s in Engineering from CentraleSupélec in Paris, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
“I thank the shareholders for the trust they have placed in me. The energy transition represents a unique opportunity to leverage CESI’s skills, technologies, and innovation. We aim to fully realize this potential, becoming a key partner for companies and institutions navigating their transformation in the energy and infrastructure sectors”, stated the new CEO.
In addition to Bortoni and Melchiotti, the new Board of Directors includes:
Gianni Vittorio Armani – Enel
Chiara dalla Chiesa – Enel
Claudio Dicembrino – Enel
Luca Giorgio Maria De Rai – Prysmian
Maria Rosaria Guarniere – Terna
Francesco Salerni – Terna
Carmine Scoglio – Terna
Flavio Villa – Hitachi Energy
Chairman Bortoni commented on his confirmation: “With gratitude to CESI’s shareholders, my first thought goes to the colleagues working at CESI S.p.A. in Italy and across the CESI Group globally. The Group has a long history and a promising future, determined to continue growing through the quality of its solutions. I hope to serve well as Chairman of the new Board of Directors, ensuring my continued commitment to this new term. I promise my full support to the new CEO, who joins CESI’s management today, and I extend my best wishes for his success on behalf of myself and the entire Board”.
The new Board of Directors and all CESI employees express their gratitude to Domenico Villani for his dedication during his tenure as CEO. His contributions were fundamental to CESI’s success and growth. The company is pleased to continue benefiting from his valuable collaboration.
For nearly seventy years, CESI (Centro Elettrotecnico Sperimentale Italiano) has been offering clients in over 70 countries services in innovation, digitalization, consultancy, testing, and engineering for the electrical sector, as well as in civil and environmental engineering. Through its KEMA Labs Division, the Group is the world’s leading independent entity in testing, inspection, and certification of components and systems for the electrical and digital sectors. CESI is also one of the few companies worldwide to develop and produce advanced solar cells for space applications.
Its main clients include energy generation companies, transmission and distribution network operators, international manufacturers of electrical and digital components and systems, private investors, public institutions (governments, public administrations, local authorities), and regulatory authorities. Additionally, CESI works closely with international financial institutions such as the World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Inter-American Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Arab Fund.
The OPEC logo on the building of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Thomas Coex | Afp | Getty Images
The oil-producing Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies could extend existing output cuts this week, delegates and analysts told CNBC, even as focus shifts from Middle East tensions to summer demand.
The group, collectively known as OPEC+, was set to convene in person in Vienna on June 1, but last week moved the encounter virtually to June 2.
OPEC+ producers are currently implementing a combined 5.86 million barrels per day of supply cuts. Just 2 million barrels per day of these cuts represent unanimous commitments under OPEC group policy, and expire at the end of this year.
The remainder are reduced voluntarily by a subset of the alliance. A cut of 1.66 million per barrel is in place until the end of 2024, and 2.2 million barrels per day of supplies have been trimmed until the end of the second quarter. Market participants are watching whether this latter cut will be extended for another quarter, amid projected demand hikes.
“Come June, China would be largely out of refinery maintenance, U.S. consumption is improving as summer moves closer, so June should already see negative crude balances. And then August is the peak month for tightness,” Viktor Katona, lead crude analyst at Kpler, told CNBC.
The OPEC+ coalition is also eyeing individual members’ quota compliance, asking overproducers to implement additional cuts. Iraq and Kazakhstan have detailed compensation plans.
Three OPEC+ delegates, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of talks, told CNBC the 2.2 million-barrels-per-day supply reductions will likely be prolonged, with a fourth saying this is the scenario anticipated by the market. One delegate acknowledged the probable market tightness in the second half of the year, but noted that demand concerns persisted until only recently.
OPEC’s latest Monthly Oil Market Report of May projects a 2.25 million barrel-per-day increase in demand this year, while Paris-based International Energy Agency’s Oil Market Report of the same month points to just a 1.06 million-barrel-per-day demand hike.
“I think that the clever thing for OPEC+ would be to gradually unwind the voluntary cuts to limit the upside price pressure, to prevent refilling inflation,” Jorge Leon, senior vice president of Rystad Energy’s Oil Market Research, told CNBC. “However, I think that the market right now has priced in a full extension of the voluntary cuts. So I think that is what, probably, they will do.”
He added, “If they decide to fully extend the voluntary cuts, and there is perfect compliance, and they do the full compensation, and then, if, I think prices could reach closer to $100 per barrel this summer.”
Energy security concerns fueled global inflation in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and were further stoked after the conflict in Gaza threatened a broader spillover in the oil-rich Middle East, while frequent maritime attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militants disrupted trade transit in the Red Sea.
A high-inflation environment and tight monetary policy in turn reined in oil demand, but central banks have signaled readiness to lower interest rates in the second half of the year.
Tamas Varga, analyst at PVM Oil Associates, told CNBC that the OPEC+ supply restrictions will likely remain in place for the third quarter, adding, “I also believe that the producer group will emphasize that anyone who did not comply with the quota will have to make amends. And I believe that OPEC+ will only ease the supply constraints when they see obvious signs of global oil inventories depleting.”
Kpler’s Katona aligned with the views, but noted that heavyweights Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, who participate in the voluntary reductions, could seek to scrap the latter curbs toward the end of the year.
“Further down the line into 2025, unwinding cuts might be challenging for prices as incremental production from Guyana, Brazil, Canada will saturate the markets,” he said, flagging new Floating Production Storage and Offloading facilities due to come online. “This year there’s no new FPSO in Guyana, whilst next year it starts up a new one in [third-quarter] 2025. Brazil, likewise, has one FPSO starting up this year whilst next year it will be a bonanza of new capacity.”
Rising competing supplies have reduced the market prominence of OPEC+, one OPEC+ delegate acknowledged, while analysts signaled that the group’s ongoing output cuts allows unfettered producers to capture their market share.
Oil prices have largely languished range-bound in the first half of the year, under ongoing threat of spikes from developments in the Middle East. Regional escalations could top prices with a risk premium of up to $10 per barrel, Rystad’s Jorge Leon noted – while OPEC+ delegates told CNBC that the situation in the Gaza Strip is still adding a little pressure, but that the market has already absorbed the majority of its effect.
Katona likewise noted that the Gaza crisis “will seemingly persist for longer than everyone expected but it doesn’t really have an imprint on OPEC+ coherence and policy.”
One OPEC+ delegate meanwhile said that the unexpected death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi represented a tragic accident that could not be interpreted as a risk to the market, especially given that his successor will likely pursue similar politics.
“I think the geopolitical risk premium has subsided and I think that the tension between Israel and Hamas will only support prices if it will have an obvious impact on oil production or oil flows, which might come in the form of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, or attacks on oil infrastructure in the region, something which does not look plausible at the moment,” Varga said.
OPEC+ must also balance its relationship with the U.S., which has previously blasted the coalition’s supply cuts amid concerns over gasoline prices. The Biden administration last week said it will release 1 million barrels of gasoline from reserves in a bid to curb prices at the pump. The U.S. undertook similar crude releases from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve Stocks during the Covid-19 pandemic, but one OPEC+ delegate noted such measures are unlikely to have an impact beyond price relief during the summer. The U.S. typically seeks to replenish the emergency stockpile of its state reserves.
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Market pressure : The major stock benchmarks were moving lower Wednesday, with the Dow getting the worst of it again. Adding pressure on equities, bond yields moved higher following a poor auction of $44 billion worth of 7-year Treasury notes. Nvidia was bucking the overall market decline, but its modest gain was much cooler than the incredible march higher over the past three sessions after last week’s earnings. American Airlines shares sank roughly 15% after a company sales strategy backfired and the carrier cut growth guidance. Sector watch : All of the S & P 500 sectors were under pressure Wednesday, led by energy and utilities. Tech has been flirting with positive territory as Nvidia, which opened lower, reversed to the upside. Fellow Club names Apple and Microsoft were also in the green. Combined, the three account for nearly 49% of the tech sector index. Apple and Nvidia, our two “own, don’t trade” stocks were also the top performers among the entire 33 stock Club portfolio. Deal movers : ConocoPhillips has agreed to buy Marathon Oil in a $17 billion all-stock transaction. Marathon shares rose about 7.5%, while Conoco stock fell roughly 4%. Additionally, Hess shareholders approved the company’s pending merger with Chevron . And, Merck has reached a deal to acquire privately held Eyebiotech for $1.3 billion in cash. Banking news : Here’s a dispatch from our Investing Club reporter Morgan Chittum about what Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said Wednesday at Bernstein’s 40th annual Strategic Decisions Conference: Scharf said Wells Fargo has been focusing on investment banking in a “very, very targeted way.” There were several mentions of the bank’s quiet hiring spree to beef up its Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) division, which we reported on last week . Building out lucrative underwriting and advisory fee capabilities is “staring us in the face,” he added, as long-dormant IPO and M & A activity have started to perk up. Expanding Wells Fargo’s Wealth Management franchise, another fee-based revenue stream is “one of the bigger opportunities” ahead, Scharf said. The bank has around 12,000 advisors and is better positioned than in years past, the CEO added. We have been encouraged by Wells Fargo’s push to boost fees business lines. Scharf said Wells Fargo remains focused on efficiency. The bank has cut staff to 225,000 from 275,000. “The conversation around efficiency is less [about] saving money and it’s more about how do we run a better company,” he added. When the Federal Reserve at some point removes its asset cap on Wells Fargo, Scharf said corporate lending and trading will be areas of growth for the bank. He said he dialed back those areas to stay under the Fed’s $1.95 trillion limit. “When you turn a consumer away, they’ll remember that forever,” Scharf said. Businesses understand and can be won back, he added. The CEO believes it’s just a matter of time before the asset cap is lifted and so do we. Scharf said Wells Fargo was able to get a key regulatory penalty removed back in February by stripping away things like certain incentive plans at branches. The so-called consent order was tied to the bank’s 2016 fake accounts scandal that predated Scharf. There are still several other orders outstanding. Quick hits : The FDA granted accelerated approval for Club name Eli Lilly ‘s Retevmo, which is used to treat certain kinds of advanced or metastatic medullary thyroid cancer in children two and older. Twelve years and older was the prior age threshold. Elsewhere, shares of HubSpot were bucking the broader market decline on further speculation that Club name Alphabet is indeed considering an acquisition. CNBC’s David Faber believes that should a deal occur, it would be all-stock. Up next : Salesforce is set to report earnings after Wednesday’s closing bell. AI monetization commentary and what the team has been seeing in terms of cross-selling opportunities will be key watch items. Foot Locker and Best Buy report before the bell Thursday. Costco is out with results Thursday evening. That will do it for Club name earnings, except for Broadcom, which is set to report next month. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street.
Kenya is home to the world’s first-ever blue carbon initiative that sold carbon credits from mangrove conservation along its vast coastline. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, May 27 (IPS) – Carbon trading has gained growing popularity on the African continent and is considered by many governments as a viable way to achieve their climate targets while building communities. IPS takes a look at what’s behind the carbon market.
What is carbon trading and where did it come from?
During the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2015, 196 nations agreed to an internationally binding treaty on climate change known as the Paris Agreement. The agreement was a commitment to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of this century.
A significant rise in global temperatures is a significant threat as it increases the effects of climate change, such as prolonged and severe droughts and deadly floods, like those experienced in Kenya recently, killing people and animals and destroying crops and critical infrastructure.
One of the biggest contributors to global warming or a dangerous rise in temperatures are greenhouse gas emissions, which include carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Carbon emissions are particularly dangerous. These gases are emitted as human beings go about their day-to-day living and business activities, such as driving a vehicle or running factory machines using coal-generated electricity.
The Paris Agreement, therefore, requires that nations make significant efforts to reduce carbon emissions. One of the solutions laid out was carbon emissions trading—those who reduce emissions would receive a financial reward and those that emit would bear a financial responsibility.
Simply put, carbon emissions trading allows you—who is unable to reduce carbon emissions to the required limits—to pay someone who is not only successfully limiting their own carbon emissions but has also gone a step further to remove additional carbon from the atmosphere. A similar approach was deployed in the 1990s to successfully remove sulphur from the atmosphere.
How does carbon trading work?
One of the best ways of removing carbon from the atmosphere is by mangrove trees, as they capture 3–5 times more carbon from the atmosphere compared to other types of trees.
Kenya has various projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere and receive money for doing so through projects such as the Mikoko Pamoja (Swahili for Mangroves Together) and the Vanga Blue Forest. Mikoko Pamoja project was the first in the world to trade in carbon from planting mangroves.
The Mikoko community plants mangroves and successfully removes at least 3,000 metric tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. The project started in 2013 and it will continue to capture carbon for trading until 2033, generating an annual revenue of about USD 130,000 from selling all the carbon captured annually.
Internationally recognized scientific methods exist to calculate how much carbon a certain business, activity or project emits and how much carbon a project, like the Mikoko Pamoja, captures in a year.
One tonne of carbon dioxide emitted into the environment is equivalent to one carbon credit. A carbon credit is a permit to emit carbon dioxide. For example, in line with the Paris Agreement, when company X in Europe is unable to reduce their emissions by say 3,000 metric tons, they can ‘artificially’ reduce them by paying for carbon credits from a community in Kenya that is able to reduce emissions and go a step further and remove an additional 3,000 metric tonnes from the atmosphere.
The community is allowed to sell the excess amount of carbon captured, in this case, 3,000 metric tonnes. The principle of selling and buying carbon credits is that the Kenyan community is already living below their emissions, have no obligation to make additional carbon emission reductions, but have been incentivized to remove more carbon from the atmosphere for money.
Company X is therefore punished by having to pay for the carbon they are releasing but at the same time rewarded by having their own carbon emissions wiped off by the carbon removal activities conducted by the Kenyan community.
What is a carbon market?
There are many carbon markets around the world. The kind of exchange of carbon emitted for money described above is conducted through a carbon market called the Voluntary Carbon Market. The community in Kenya planting mangroves to capture carbon uses a middleman or broker to find a market for their carbon and negotiate the best price on their behalf.
The money is deposited into the community’s bank accounts for the community’s development projects. For example, Kenya’s Vanga Blue Forest spans over 460 hectares and is expected to avoid emissions of over 100,379tCO2-eq over a 20-year period.
In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 65 percent of carbon credits issued are in the Voluntary Carbon Market, concentrated in just five countries: Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The government of Kenya can enter into a carbon trading arrangement with another government and this bilateral approach is much more lucrative compared to the voluntary approach. The World Bank estimates that one ton of carbon dioxide or one carbon credit would cost between 40 and 80 USD, in line with the Paris Agreement.
Remember, if you—from anywhere in the world—pay for one carbon credit from the Mikoko Pamoja project, you are essentially buying a permit to emit one ton of carbon dioxide.
In 2020, the Vanga Blue Forest received USD 48,713 in exchange for the carbon captured that year.
The voluntary carbon trading sector has grown exponentially and was valued at USD 2 billion in 2022. The players in the voluntary market gathered in Kenya in June 2023 for the world’s largest carbon credit auction event where more than 2.2 million tonnes of carbon credits were sold.
This auction worked the same way as say a painting auction works only that carbon is an intangible commodity. Emitters haggle for the best prices to buy carbon credits or permits to help them wipe off their own emission—they pay for the permit to emit.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of carbon trading?
Heavy carbon emitters are in the global North. Africa for instance emits about 3.8 percent of global carbon emissions. Kenya’s alone accounts for less than 1 percent of the global carbon emissions.
Some say carbon trading systems are fraudulent—the global North buys the permission to continue polluting and the global South receives financial crumbs to wipe off the former’s harmful emissions. They also say carbon markets are a new form of colonialism and a distraction as heavy emitters continue to emit without making strides to reduce their own emissions. Human Rights Watch has also expressed a concern about the rights of an Indigenous community in Cambodia as carbon trading continues.
For others, carbon markets are increasing carbon removal projects while providing the money that developing countries need to accelerate growth and development.
Buyers curious about making the switch to electric vehicles have made it clear in survey after survey after survey: Charging kind of freaks them out.
In many ways, drivers report, owning an EV is the same if not better than owning a gas-powered car. But fueling an electric vehicle is different, and can be inconvenient depending on where you live, and is therefore sometimes scary to even those interested in buying electric.
The good news is that automakers, governments, and other policy players realize the US has a charging problem. They want more people in electric cars. Automakers are scaling up EV production and want people to buy them, and legislators realize that nixing gas-powered cars in favor of zero-emissions electrics will be an important part of staving off the worst effects of climate change.
As a result of the early efforts to make the switch to EVs, the US currently has 188,600 public and private charging ports, and 67,900 charging stations, according to data collected by the US Department of Energy—figures that have more than doubled since 2020. Another 240 stations are currently planned. Compare that to today’s gas infrastructure: The country has about 145,000 gas fueling stations, according to the American Petroleum Institute.
At WIRED, the whole situation got us interested in a thought experiment: If we could magically snap our fingers and turn every auto electric, how many charging stations would the US need to add?
Number-crunchers at Coltura, an alternative fuel research and advocacy group, crunched the numbers:
The upshot? The nation needs to build lots and lots more chargers before it gets to full electrification, a point experts suggest should come in the 2040s. But the task may not be as insurmountable as it looks.
The number of public chargers will have to grow by a factor of six, as estimated by Matthew Metz, Coltura’s executive director, and Ron Barzilay, its data and policy associate. “We’re not necessarily off-track,” says Metz.
America’s first large-scale offshore wind farms began sending power to the Northeast in early 2024, but a wave of wind farm project cancellations and rising costs have left many people with doubts about the industry’s future in the US.
Several big hitters, including Ørsted, Equinor, BP, and Avangrid, have canceled contracts or sought to renegotiate them in recent months. Pulling out meant the companies faced cancellation penalties ranging from $16 million to several hundred million dollars per project. It also resulted in Siemens Energy, the world’s largest maker of offshore wind turbines, anticipating financial losses in 2024 of around $2.2 billion.
Altogether, projects that had been canceled by the end of 2023 were expected to total more than 12 gigawatts of power, representing more than half of the capacity in the project pipeline.
So, what happened, and can the US offshore wind industry recover?
I lead the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Wind-Energy Science, Technology, and Research (WindSTAR) and Center for Energy Innovation, and follow the industry closely. The offshore wind industry’s troubles are complicated, but it’s far from dead in the US, and some policy changes may help it find firmer footing.
A Cascade of Approval Challenges
Getting offshore wind projects permitted and approved in the US takes years and is fraught with uncertainty for developers, more so than in Europe or Asia.
Before a company bids on a US project, the developer must plan the procurement of the entire wind farm, including making reservations to purchase components such as turbines and cables, construction equipment, and ships. The bid must also be cost-competitive, so companies have a tendency to bid low and not anticipate unexpected costs, which adds to financial uncertainty and risk.
Before starting to build, the developer must conduct site assessments to determine what kind of foundations are possible and identify the scale of the project. The developer must consummate an agreement to sell the power it produces, identify a point of interconnection to the power grid, and then prepare a construction and operation plan, which is subject to further environmental review. All of that takes about five years, and it’s only the beginning.
For a project to move forward, developers may need to secure dozens of permits from local, tribal, state, regional, and federal agencies. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which has jurisdiction over leasing and management of the seabed, must consult with agencies that have regulatory responsibilities over different aspects in the ocean, such as the armed forces, Environmental Protection Agency, and National Marine Fisheries Service, as well as groups including commercial and recreational fishing, Indigenous groups, shipping, harbor managers, and property owners.
