EnviroPolitics Blog

Blazes grow in Europe, approaching Bordeaux

Smoke rises as a wildfire advances near Hoyo de Pinares, Madrid province, Spain, on Saturday.

By Mark Carlson, Emma Da Silva, and John Leicester (Associated Press)

LEGE-CAP FERRET, France — France sent a hulking military cargo plane to dump tons of flame retardants as it battled raging wildfires on Saturday and slashed the final stage of Tour de France to redeploy security personnel to the blazes that forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.

The giant A400M transporter swooped in low, its long plume of ochre-colored retardant trailing over drought-hit woodlands in the southwest as fire crews on the ground fought flames that authorities feared could spread toward the wine region city of Bordeaux.

Race organizers and the Paris police department announced a truncated 21st and final stage on Sunday for the three-week Tour, France’s most famous annual sporting event, reflecting the immense strain that two large fires in the southwest are causing for emergency services.

Tour riders will race Sunday inside Paris, rather than starting from Thoiry, west of the capital, on a circuit of 55 miles — down by a third from the 82.5-mile route that had been planned. Part of the race’s security detail will instead “reinforce the response efforts in the areas affected by the wildfires,” according to the statement announcing the ”exceptional measures made necessary by the situation.”

Including some 70,000 people evacuated in central Spain, wildfires in southern Europe this week have displaced more than 250,000 people.

Shifting winds raise concerns for Bordeaux

With winds expected to shift in a west-to-east direction on Saturday afternoon, potentially driving flames closer to Bordeaux, fire crews and authorities were digging trenches, using retardants, and taking other blaze-blocking steps, French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said, predicting a “long and very difficult” battle.

He said the fire was about 20 miles west of the city and lost some of its intensity overnight. The prefect of the Gironde region that includes Bordeaux said the blaze grew into “a firestorm” on Friday after igniting earlier this week and cautioned that it “remains dangerous” even though firefighters were making progress.

Read the full story here

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Pa proposing standards for PFOA and PFOS in biosolids for land applications

By Jacob Wallace, Senior Reporter, Waste Dive

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is soliciting feedback on its draft general permits for land application of biosolids. The permits seek to address a variety of contaminants, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

Proposed language would set monitoring requirements for PFOA and PFOS in biosolids that wastewater treatment plants must follow. It would also allow the codigestion of food waste at those facilities’ digesters.

States have taken a variety of approaches to monitoring and lowering levels of PFAS in biosolids, which the U.S. EPA defines as sewage sludge treated for use as a fertilizer. Pennsylvania’s approach could leave critical decisions about upstream pollution up to local municipalities.

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Imagine your Ford pickup powering your home appliances

Workers assemble a Ford F-150 Lightning at the company's Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan.

Workers assemble a Ford F-150 Lightning at the automaker’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan. Ford discontinued the all-electric, full-size F-150 in December 2025. Courtesy of Ford Motor Co.

By Brian Martucci, Utility Drive

The Ford Vehicle Connector links Ford F-150 Lightning and PowerBoost Hybrid trucks’ 240-volt outlets with GPP’s GenerLink transfer switch. It can deliver power to home outlets and hardwired appliances like well and sump pumps, security systems, gas furnaces and lighting that can’t be powered with generator extension cords, Ford and GPP say.

Nic Saeger, CEO of Global Power Products, told Utility Dive that the product greatly simplifies and reduces the cost of home backup for rural utility customers, who typically face longer outages and have more critical hardwired appliances, like well and sump pumps. Rural customers in most of the U.S. experience longer and more frequent power outages, according to an analysis of Poweroutage.us data.

Read the full story here

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PJM’s management comes under attack at FERC conference. Where’s Gov. Sherrill?

By Laila Kearney, Reuters, July 23, 2026

NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters) – U.S. energy officials questioned PJM Interconnection’s power structure on Thursday as regulators weigh reforms to the country’s largest power grid, which faces the growing risk of blackouts as data center demand soars and little new electricity supply is added.

PJM, which covers 67 million Americans across the Mid-Atlantic and ‌Midwest that include the world’s biggest concentration of data centers, has struggled with power shortfalls and surging electricity prices since demand in the region began to accelerate roughly two years ago.

Officials with the White House, state governments and power industry executives convened at a technical conference held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to discuss potential solutions to PJM’s supplies and pricing woes.

Some of those proposals included giving the grid operator’s board of managers more independence from its stakeholders, which include voting members like utilities and independent power producers, and more control to enact changes in the market that covers 13 states and the District of Columbia.

OPINION: If NJ governor’s #1 priority is energy affordability, why was she a no-show at FERC hearing?

PJM’s hundreds of members, including transmission owners and power ⁠plant operators, vote on market rules through a multi-layered process, with the board ultimately deciding whether to approve proposed changes.

Under proposals floated at the conference, those members would potentially serve in a type of advisory role instead of voting directly on PJM rules – a change that would shift more decision-making onto the board of managers.

“I don’t know how to get around it without breaking the system up to where the board is empowered to get a backbone,” said FERC Commissioner David LaCerte.

LaCerte said the board should take bolder action instead of caving to the demands of its stakeholders, whose conflicting interests can ultimately slow PJM’s primary work of ensuring the grid operates reliably and affordably.

Read the full story here

PJM’s management comes under attack at FERC conference. Where’s Gov. Sherrill? Read More »

PJM’s electric grid structure comes under attack at FERC conference. Where’s Sherrill?

By Laila Kearney, Reuters, July 23, 2026

NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters) – U.S. energy officials questioned PJM Interconnection’s power structure on Thursday as regulators weigh reforms to the country’s largest power grid, which faces the growing risk of blackouts as data center demand soars and little new electricity supply is added.

PJM, which covers 67 million Americans across the Mid-Atlantic and ‌Midwest that include the world’s biggest concentration of data centers, has struggled with power shortfalls and surging electricity prices since demand in the region began to accelerate roughly two years ago.

Officials with the White House, state governments and power industry executives convened at a technical conference held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to discuss potential solutions to PJM’s supplies and pricing woes.

Some of those proposals included giving the grid operator’s board of managers more independence from its stakeholders, which include voting members like utilities and independent power producers, and more control to enact changes in the market that covers 13 states and the District of Columbia.

OPINION: If NJ governor’s #1 priority is energy affordability, why was she a no-show at FERC hearing?

PJM’s hundreds of members, including transmission owners and power ⁠plant operators, vote on market rules through a multi-layered process, with the board ultimately deciding whether to approve proposed changes.

Under proposals floated at the conference, those members would potentially serve in a type of advisory role instead of voting directly on PJM rules – a change that would shift more decision-making onto the board of managers.

“I don’t know how to get around it without breaking the system up to where the board is empowered to get a backbone,” said FERC Commissioner David LaCerte.

LaCerte said the board should take bolder action instead of caving to the demands of its stakeholders, whose conflicting interests can ultimately slow PJM’s primary work of ensuring the grid operates reliably and affordably.

Read the full story here

PJM’s electric grid structure comes under attack at FERC conference. Where’s Sherrill? Read More »

How AI Data Centers Glitch Simultaneously Caused a 1,000-Mile Disturbance

Image: Tara Energy — By Rex Edison, *Yahoo News*

On a Wednesday morning in northern Virginia, lights flickered. Air conditioners groaned. Refrigerators made sounds they shouldn’t. No storm rolled through. No transformer blew. Instead, a transmission line went down, and the AI data centers powering your cloud storage, your AI chatbots, and your streaming queues did exactly what their protection systems told them to do: they all disconnected from the grid at once.

More than 3 gigawatts of demand — enough to power several mid-size cities — vanished almost simultaneously. The grid wasn’t ready for that.

According to Reuters, utility Dominion Energy confirmed that data centers’ internal control systems detected the fault on July 22 and automatically switched to backup power. PJM Interconnection — the largest U.S. grid, serving 67 million people from Washington, D.C. to the Midwest — registered a sudden frequency shift, the electrical equivalent of a cardiac arrhythmia. Bob Marshall, CEO of sensor-network company Ting Labs, told Reuters that his company’s 1.4 million sensors picked up voltage disturbances stretching from D.C. all the way to Chicago. “The power quality took a pretty big hit,” Marshall said. Grid disturbances normally resolve in milliseconds. This one took roughly 10 minutes.

More than 3 GW of demand disconnected almost simultaneously on July 22 — roughly 3% of PJM’s total load at that moment
Voltage disturbances registered across 1.4 million sensors from Washington, D.C. to Chicago (Ting Labs, via Reuters)

Read the full story here

How AI Data Centers Glitch Simultaneously Caused a 1,000-Mile Disturbance Read More »

PJM, which covers 67 million Americans across the Mid-Atlantic and ‌Midwest that include the world’s biggest concentration of data centers, has struggled with power shortfalls and surging electricity prices since demand in the region began to accelerate roughly two years ago.

Officials with the White House, state governments and power industry executives convened at a technical conference held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to discuss potential solutions to PJM’s supplies and pricing woes.

PJM’s hundreds of members, including transmission owners and power ⁠plant operators, vote on market rules through a multi-layered process, with the board ultimately deciding whether to approve proposed changes.

Under proposals floated at the conference, those members would ​potentially serve in a type of advisory role instead of voting directly on PJM rules – a change that would shift more decision-making onto the board of managers.

“I don’t know ​how to get around it without breaking the system up to where the board is empowered to get a backbone,” said FERC Commissioner David LaCerte.

LaCerte said the board should take bolder action instead of caving to the demands of its stakeholders, whose conflicting interests can ultimately slow PJM’s primary work of ensuring the grid operates reliably and affordably.

Under proposals floated at the conference, those members would potentially serve in a type of advisory role instead of voting directly on PJM rules – a change that would shift more decision-making onto the board of managers.

“I don’t know how to get around it without breaking the system up to where the board is empowered to get a backbone,” said FERC Commissioner David LaCerte.