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FERC Transmission Planning Overhaul streamlines interregional grid buildouts, enabling high-voltage lines, renewable integration, and grid reliability to scale, cutting fossil reliance while boosting decarbonization, climate resilience, and affordability across regions facing demand and extreme weather.

Key Points

Federal rule updating interregional grid planning to integrate renewables, share costs, and improve reliability.

✅ Accelerates high-voltage, interregional lines for renewable transfer

✅ Optimizes transmission planning and cost allocation frameworks

✅ Boosts grid reliability, resilience, and emissions reductions

The US took a significant step towards a cleaner energy future on May 13th, 2024. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the first major update to the country's electric transmission policy in over a decade, while congressional Democrats continue to push for action on aggregated DERs within FERC's remit today. This overhaul aims to streamline the process of building new power lines, specifically those that connect different regions. This improved connectivity is crucial for integrating more renewable energy sources like wind and solar into the national grid.

The current system faces challenges in handling the influx of renewables, and the aging U.S. grid amplifies those hurdles today. Renewable energy sources are variable by nature – the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. Traditionally, power grids have relied on constantly running power plants, like coal or natural gas, to meet electricity demands. These plants can be easily adjusted to produce more or less power as needed. However, renewable energy sources require a different approach.

The new FERC policy focuses on building more interregional transmission lines. These high-voltage power lines would allow electricity generated in regions with abundant solar or wind power, and even enable imports of green power from Canada in certain corridors, to be transmitted to areas with lower renewable energy resources. For example, solar energy produced in sunny states like California could be delivered to meet peak demand on the East Coast during hot summer days.

This improved connectivity offers several advantages. Firstly, it allows for a more efficient use of renewable resources. Secondly, it reduces the need for fossil fuel-based power plants, leading to cleaner air and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, a more robust grid is better equipped to handle extreme weather events, which are becoming increasingly common due to climate change, and while Biden's climate law shows mixed results on decarbonization, stronger transmission supports resilience.

The need for an upgrade is undeniable. The Biden administration has set ambitious goals for decarbonizing the power sector by 2035, including proposals for a clean electricity standard as a pathway to those targets. A study by the US Department of Energy estimates that achieving this target will require more than doubling the country's regional transmission capacity and increasing interregional capacity by more than fivefold. The aging US grid is already struggling to keep up with current demands, and without significant improvements, it could face reliability issues in the future.

The FERC's decision has been met with praise from environmental groups and renewable energy companies. They see it as a critical step towards achieving a clean energy future. However, some stakeholders, including investor-owned utilities, have expressed concerns about the potential costs associated with building new transmission lines, citing persistent barriers to development identified in recent Senate testimony. Finding the right balance between efficiency, affordability, and environmental responsibility will be key to the success of this initiative.

The road ahead won't be easy. Building new power lines is a complex process that can face opposition from local communities, and broader disputes over electricity pricing changes often complicate planning and approvals. However, the potential benefits of a modernized grid are significant. By investing in this overhaul, the US is taking a crucial step towards a more reliable, sustainable, and cleaner energy future.

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Thermoelectric Materials convert waste heat into electricity via the Seebeck effect; quantum computations and semiconductors accelerate discovery, enabling clean energy, higher efficiency, and scalable heat-to-power conversion from abundant, non-toxic, cost-effective compounds.

Key Points

Thermoelectric materials turn waste heat into electricity via the Seebeck effect, improving energy efficiency.

✅ Convert waste heat to electricity via the Seebeck effect

✅ Quantum computations rapidly identify high-performance candidates

✅ Target efficient, low-thermal-conductivity, non-toxic, abundant compounds

The need to transition to clean energy is apparent, urgent and inescapable. We must limit Earth’s rising temperature to within 1.5 C to avoid the worst effects of climate change — an especially daunting challenge in the face of the steadily increasing global demand for energy and the need for reliable clean power, with concepts that can generate electricity at night now being explored worldwide.

Part of the answer is using energy more efficiently. More than 72 per cent of all energy produced worldwide is lost in the form of heat, and advances in turning thermal energy into electricity could recover some of it. For example, the engine in a car uses only about 30 per cent of the gasoline it burns to move the car. The remainder is dissipated as heat.

Recovering even a tiny fraction of that lost energy would have a tremendous impact on climate change. Thermoelectric materials, which convert wasted heat into useful electricity, can help, especially as researchers pursue low-cost heat-to-electricity materials for scalable deployment.

Until recently, the identification of these materials had been slow. My colleagues and I have used quantum computations — a computer-based modelling approach to predict materials’ properties — to speed up that process and identify more than 500 thermoelectric materials that could convert excess heat to electricity, and help improve energy efficiency.

Making great strides towards broad applications
The transformation of heat into electrical energy by thermoelectric materials is based on the “Seebeck effect.” In 1826, German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck observed that exposing the ends of joined pieces of dissimilar metals to different temperatures generated a magnetic field, which was later recognized to be caused by an electric current.

Shortly after his discovery, metallic thermoelectric generators were fabricated to convert heat from gas burners into an electric current. But, as it turned out, metals exhibit only a low Seebeck effect — they are not very efficient at converting heat into electricity.

In 1929, the Russian scientist Abraham Ioffe revolutionized the field of thermoelectricity. He observed that semiconductors — materials whose ability to conduct electricity falls between that of metals (like copper) and insulators (like glass) — exhibit a significantly higher Seebeck effect than metals, boosting thermoelectric efficiency 40-fold, from 0.1 per cent to four per cent.

This discovery led to the development of the first widely used thermoelectric generator, the Russian lamp — a kerosene lamp that heated a thermoelectric material to power a radio.

Are we there yet?
Today, thermoelectric applications range from energy generation in space probes to cooling devices in portable refrigerators, and include emerging thin-film waste-heat harvesters for electronics as well. For example, space explorations are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, converting the heat from naturally decaying plutonium into electricity. In the movie The Martian, for example, a box of plutonium saved the life of the character played by Matt Damon, by keeping him warm on Mars.

In the 2015 film, The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) digs up a buried thermoelectric generator to use the power source as a heater.

Despite this vast diversity of applications, wide-scale commercialization of thermoelectric materials is still limited by their low efficiency.

What’s holding them back? Two key factors must be considered: the conductive properties of the materials, and their ability to maintain a temperature difference, as seen in nighttime electricity from cold concepts, which makes it possible to generate electricity.

The best thermoelectric material would have the electronic properties of semiconductors and the poor heat conduction of glass. But this unique combination of properties is not found in naturally occurring materials. We have to engineer them, drawing on advances such as carbon nanotube energy harvesters to guide design choices.

Searching for a needle in a haystack
In the past decade, new strategies to engineer thermoelectric materials have emerged due to an enhanced understanding of their underlying physics. In a recent study in Nature Materials, researchers from Seoul National University, Aachen University and Northwestern University reported they had engineered a material called tin selenide with the highest thermoelectric performance to date, nearly twice that of 20 years ago. But it took them nearly a decade to optimize it.

To speed up the discovery process, my colleagues and I have used quantum calculations to search for new thermoelectric candidates with high efficiencies. We searched a database containing thousands of materials to look for those that would have high electronic qualities and low levels of heat conduction, based on their chemical and physical properties. These insights helped us find the best materials to synthesize and test, and calculate their thermoelectric efficiency.

We are almost at the point where thermoelectric materials can be widely applied, but first we need to develop much more efficient materials. With so many possibilities and variables, finding the way forward is like searching for a tiny needle in an enormous haystack.

Just as a metal detector can zero in on a needle in a haystack, quantum computations can accelerate the discovery of efficient thermoelectric materials. Such calculations can accurately predict electron and heat conduction (including the Seebeck effect) for thousands of materials and unveil the previously hidden and highly complex interactions between those properties, which can influence a material’s efficiency.

Large-scale applications will require themoelectric materials that are inexpensive, non-toxic and abundant. Lead and tellurium are found in today’s thermoelectric materials, but their cost and negative environmental impact make them good targets for replacement.

Quantum calculations can be applied in a way to search for specific sets of materials using parameters such as scarcity, cost and efficiency, and insights can even inform exploratory devices that generate electricity out of thin air in parallel fields. Although those calculations can reveal optimum thermoelectric materials, synthesizing the materials with the desired properties remains a challenge.

A multi-institutional effort involving government-run laboratories and universities in the United States, Canada and Europe has revealed more than 500 previously unexplored materials with high predicted thermoelectric efficiency. My colleagues and I are currently investigating the thermoelectric performance of those materials in experiments, and have already discovered new sources of high thermoelectric efficiency.

Those initial results strongly suggest that further quantum computations can pinpoint the most efficient combinations of materials to make clean energy from wasted heat and the avert the catastrophe that looms over our planet.

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Australia's greenhouse gas emissions rose in Q2 as electricity and transport pollution increased, despite renewable energy growth. Net zero targets, carbon dioxide equivalent metrics, and land use changes underscore mixed trends in decarbonisation.

Key Points

About 499-500 Mt CO2-e annually, with a 2% quarterly rise led by electricity and transport.

✅ Q2 emissions rose to 127 Mt from 124.4 Mt seasonally adjusted

✅ Electricity sector up to 41.6 Mt; transport added nearly 1 Mt

✅ Land use remains a net sink; renewables expanded capacity

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rose in the June quarter by about 2% as pollution from the electricity sector and transport increased.

Figures released on Tuesday by the Morrison government showed that on a year to year basis, emissions for the 12 months to last June totalled 498.9m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That tally was down 2.1%, or 10.8m tonnes compared with the same period a year earlier.

However, on a seasonally adjusted quarterly basis, emissions increased to 127m tonnes, or just over 2%, from the 124.4m tonnes reported in the March quarter. For the year to March, emissions totalled 494.2m tonnes, underscoring the pickup in pollution in the more recent quarter even as global coal power declines worldwide.

A stable pollution rate, if not a rising one, is also implied by the government’s release of preliminary figures for the September quarter. They point to 125m tonnes of emissions in trend terms for the July-September months, bringing the year to September total to about 500m tonnes, the latest report said.

The government has made much of Australia “meeting and beating” climate targets. However, the latest statistics show mostly emissions are not in decline despite its pledge ahead of the Glasgow climate summit that the country would hit net zero by 2050, and AEMO says supply can remain uninterrupted as coal phases out over the next three decades.

“Nothing’s happening except for the electricity sector,” said Hugh Saddler, an honorary associate professor at the Australian National University. Once Covid curbs on the economy eased, such as during the current quarter, emission sources such as from transport will show a rise, he predicted.

Falling costs for new wind and solar farms, with the IEA naming solar the cheapest in history worldwide, are pushing coal and gas out of electricity generation, as well as pushing down power prices. In seasonally adjusted terms, though, emissions for that sector rose from 39.7m tonnes the March quarter to 41.6m in the June one.

Most other sectors were steady, with pollution from transport adding almost 1m tonnes in the June quarter.

On an annual basis, a 500m tonnes tally is the lowest since records began in the 1990s, and IEA reported global emissions flatlined in 2019 for context. That lower trajectory, though, is lower due much to the land sector remaining a net sink even as some experts raise questions about the true trends when it comes to land clearing.

According to the government, this sector – known as land use, land-use change and forestry – amounted to a net reduction of emissions of 24.4m tonnes, or almost negative 5% of the national total, in the year to June.

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“The magnitude of this net sink has decreased by 0.6% (0.2 Mt CO2-e) on the previous 12 months due to an increase in emissions from agricultural soils, partially offset by a continuing decline in land clearing emissions,” the latest report said.

For its part, the government also touted the increase of renewable energy, as seen in Canada's electricity progress too, as central to driving emissions lower.

“Since 2017, Australia’s consumption of renewable energy has grown at a compound annual rate of 4.6%, with more than $40bn invested in Australia’s renewable energy sector,” Angus Taylor, the federal energy minister said, while UK net zero policy changes show a different approach. “Last year, Australia deployed new solar and wind at eight times the global per capita average.”

ANU’s Saddler said the main driver had been the 2020 Renewable Energy Target that the Coalition government had cut, and had anyway been implemented “a very considerable time ago”.

Tim Baxter, the Climate Council’s senior researcher, said “the time for leaning on the achievements of others is long since past”.

“We need a federal government willing to step up on emissions reductions and take charge with real policy, not wishlists,” he said, referring to the government’s net zero plan to rely on technologies to cut pollution in pursuit of a sustainable electric planet in practice, some of which don’t exist now.

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Bitcoin Energy Debate examines electricity usage, mining costs, environmental impact, and blockchain efficiency, weighing renewable power, carbon footprint, scalability, and transaction throughput to clarify stakeholder claims from Tesla, Square, academics, and policymakers.

Key Points

Debate on Bitcoin mining's power use, environmental impact, efficiency, and scalability versus alternative blockchains.

✅ Compares energy intensity with transaction throughput and system outputs.

✅ Weighs renewables, stranded power, and carbon footprint in mining.

✅ Assesses PoS blockchains, stablecoins, and scalability tradeoffs.

There is a great debate underway about the electricity required to process Bitcoin transactions. The debate is significant, the stakes are high, the views are diverse, and there are smart people on both sides. Bitcoin generates a lot of emotion, thereby producing too much heat and not enough light. In this post, I explain the importance of identifying the key issues in the debate, and of understanding the nature and extent of disagreement about how much electrical energy Bitcoin consumes.

Consider the background against which the debate is taking place. Because of its unstable price, Bitcoin cannot serve as a global mainstream medium of exchange. The instability is apparent. On January 1, 2021, Bitcoin’s dollar price was just over $29,000. Its price rose above $63,000 in mid-April, and then fell below $35,000, where it has traded recently. Now the financial media is asking whether we are about to experience another “cyber winter” as the prices of cryptocurrencies continue their dramatic declines.

Central banks warns of bubble on bitcoins as it skyrockets
As bitcoins skyrocket to more than $12 000 for one BTC, many central banks as ECB or US Federal ... [+] NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
Bitcoin is a high sentiment beta asset, and unless that changes, Bitcoin cannot serve as a global mainstream medium of exchange. Being a high sentiment beta asset means that Bitcoin’s market price is driven much more by investor psychology than by underlying fundamentals.

As a general matter, high sentiment beta assets are difficult to value and difficult to arbitrage. Bitcoin qualifies in this regard. As a general matter, there is great disagreement among investors about the fair values of high sentiment beta assets. Bitcoin qualifies in this regard.

One major disagreement about Bitcoin involves the very high demand for electrical power associated with Bitcoin transaction processing, an issue that came to light several years ago. In recent months, the issue has surfaced again, in a drama featuring disagreement between two prominent industry leaders, Elon Musk (from Tesla and SpaceX) and Jack Dorsey (from Square).

On one side of the argument, Musk contends that Bitcoin’s great need for electrical power is detrimental to the environment, especially amid disruptions in U.S. coal and nuclear power that increase supply strain.  On the other side, Dorsey argues that Bitcoin’s electricity profile is a benefit to the environment, in part because it provides a reliable customer base for clean electric power. This might make sense, in the absence of other motives for generating clean power; however, it seems to me that there has been a surge in investment in alternative technologies for producing electricity that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. So I am not sure that the argument is especially strong, but will leave it there. In any event, this is a demand side argument.

A supply side argument favoring Bitcoin is that the processing of Bitcoin transactions, known as “Bitcoin mining,” already uses clean electrical power, power which has already been produced, as in hydroelectric plants at night, but not otherwise consumed in an era of flat electricity demand across mature markets.

Both Musk and Dorsey are serious Bitcoin investors. Earlier this year, Tesla purchased $1.5 billion of Bitcoin, agreed to accept Bitcoin as payment for automobile sales, and then reversed itself. This reversal appears to have pricked an expanding Bitcoin bubble. Square is a digital transaction processing firm, and Bitcoin is part of its long-term strategy.

Consider two big questions at the heart of the digital revolution in finance. First, to what degree will blockchain replace conventional transaction technologies? Second, to what degree will competing blockchain based digital assets, which are more efficient than Bitcoin, overcome Bitcoin’s first mover advantage as the first cryptocurrency?

To gain some insight about possible answers to these questions, and the nature of the issues related to the disagreement between Dorsey and Musk, I emailed a series of academics and/or authors who have expertise in blockchain technology.

David Yermack, a financial economist at New York University, has written and lectured extensively on blockchains. In 2019, Yermack wrote the following: “While Bitcoin and successor cryptocurrencies have grown remarkably, data indicates that many of their users have not tried to participate in the mainstream financial system. Instead they have deliberately avoided it in order to transact in black markets for drugs and other contraband … or evade capital controls in countries such as China.” In this regard, cyber-criminals demanding ransom for locking up their targets information systems often require payment in Bitcoin. Recent examples of cyber-criminal activity are not difficult to find, such as incidents involving Kaseya and Colonial Pipeline.

David Yermack continues: “However, the potential benefits of blockchain for improving data security and solving moral hazard problems throughout the financial system have become widely apparent as cryptocurrencies have grown.” In his recent correspondence with me, he argues that the electrical power issue associated with Bitcoin “mining,” is relatively minor because Bitcoin miners are incentivized to seek out cheap electric power, and patterns shifted as COVID-19 changed U.S. electricity consumption across sectors.

Thomas Philippon, also a financial economist at NYU, has done important work characterizing the impact of technology on the resource requirements of the financial sector. He has argued that historically, the financial sector has comprised about 6-to-7% of the economy on average, with variability over time. Unit costs, as a percentage of assets, have consistently been about 2%, even with technological advances. In respect to Bitcoin, he writes in his correspondence with me that Bitcoin is too energy inefficient to generate net positive social benefits, and that energy crisis pressures on U.S. electricity and fuels complicate the picture, but acknowledges that over time positive benefits might be possible.

Emin Gün Sirer is a computer scientist at Cornell University, whose venture AVA Labs has been developing alternative blockchain technology for the financial sector. In his correspondence with me, he writes that he rejects the argument that Bitcoin will spur investment in renewable energy relative to other stimuli. He also questions the social value of maintaining a fairly centralized ledger largely created by miners that had been in China and are now migrating to other locations such as El Salvador.

Bob Seeman is an engineer, lawyer, and businessman, who has written a book entitled Bitcoin: The Mother of All Scams. In his correspondence with me, he writes that his professional experience with Bitcoin led him to conclude that Bitcoin is nothing more than unlicensed gambling, a point he makes in his book.

David Gautschi is an academic at Fordham University with expertise in global energy. I asked him about studies that compare Bitcoin’s use of energy with that of the U.S. financial sector. In correspondence with me, he cautioned that the issues are complex, and noted that online technology generally consumes a lot of power, with electricity demand during COVID-19 highlighting shifting load profiles.

My question to David Gautschi was prompted by a study undertaken by the cryptocurrency firm Galaxy Digital. This study found that the financial sector together with the gold industry consumes twice as much electrical power as Bitcoin transaction processing. The claim by Galaxy is that Bitcoin’s electrical power needs are “at least two times lower than the total energy consumed by the banking system as well as the gold industry on an annual basis.”

Galaxy’s analysis is detailed and bottom up based. In order to assess the plausibility of its claims, I did a rough top down analysis whose results were roughly consistent with the claims in the Galaxy study. For sake of disclosure, I placed the heuristic calculations I ran in a footnote.1 If we accept the Galaxy numbers, there remains the question of understanding the outputs produced by the electrical consumption associated with both Bitcoin mining and U.S. banks’ production of financial services. I did not see that the Galaxy study addresses the output issue, and it is important.

Consider some quick statistics which relate to the issue of outputs. The total market for global financial services was about $20 trillion in 2020. The number of Bitcoin transactions processed per day was about 330,000 in December 2020, and about 400,000 in January 2021. The corresponding number for Bitcoin’s digital rival Ethereum during this time was about 1.1 million transactions per day. In contrast, the global number of credit card transactions per day in 2018 was about 1 billion.2

Bitcoin Value Falls
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 20: A visual representation of the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum ... [+] GETTY IMAGES
These numbers tell us that Bitcoin transactions comprise a small share, on the order of 0.04%, of global transactions, but use something like a third of the electricity needed for these transactions. That said, the associated costs of processing Bitcoin transactions relate to tying blocks of transactions together in a blockchain, not to the number of transactions. Nevertheless, even if the financial sector does indeed consume twice as much electrical power as Bitcoin, the disparity between Bitcoin and traditional financial technology is striking, and the experience of Texas grid reliability underscores system constraints when it comes to output relative to input.  This, I suggest, weakens the argument that Bitcoin’s electricity demand profile is inconsequential because Bitcoin mining uses slack electricity.

A big question is how much electrical power Bitcoin mining would require, if Bitcoin were to capture a major share of the transactions involved in world commerce. Certainly much more than it does today; but how much more?

Given that Bitcoin is a high sentiment beta asset, there will be a lot of disagreement about the answers to these two questions. Eventually we might get answers.

At the same time, a high sentiment beta asset is ill suited to being a medium of exchange and a store of value. This is why stablecoins have emerged, such as Diem, Tether, USD Coin, and Dai. Increased use of these stable alternatives might prevent Bitcoin from ever achieving a major share of the transactions involved in world commerce.

We shall see what the future brings. Certainly El Salvador’s recent decision to make Bitcoin its legal tender, and to become a leader in Bitcoin mining, is something to watch carefully. Just keep in mind that there is significant downside to experiencing foreign exchange rate volatility. This is why global financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF do not support El Salvador’s decision; and as I keep saying, Bitcoin is a very high sentiment beta asset.

In the past I suggested that Bitcoin bubble would burst when Bitcoin investors conclude that its associated processing is too energy inefficient. Of course, many Bitcoin investors are passionate devotees, who are vulnerable to the psychological bias known as motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning-based sentiment, featuring denial,3 can keep a bubble from bursting, or generate a series of bubbles, a pattern we can see from Bitcoin’s history.

I find the argument that Bitcoin is necessary to provide the right incentives for the development of clean alternatives for generating electricity to be interesting, but less than compelling. Are there no other incentives, such as evolving utility trends, or more efficient blockchain technologies? Bitcoin does have a first mover advantage relative to other cryptocurrencies. I just think we need to be concerned about getting locked into an technologically inferior solution because of switching costs.

There is an argument to made that decisions, such as how to use electric power, are made in markets with self-interested agents properly evaluating the tradeoffs. That said, think about why most of the world adopted the Windows operating system in the 1980s over the superior Mac operating system offered by Apple. Yes, we left it to markets to determine the outcome. People did make choices; and it took years for Windows to catch up with the Mac’s operating system.

My experience as a behavioral economist has taught me that the world is far from perfect, to expect to be surprised, and to expect people to make mistakes. We shall see what happens with Bitcoin going forward.

As things stand now, Bitcoin is well suited as an asset for fulfilling some people’s urge to engage in high stakes gambling. Indeed, many people have a strong need to engage in gambling. Last year, per capita expenditure on lottery tickets in Massachusetts was the highest in the U.S. at over $930.

High sentiment beta assets offer lottery-like payoffs. While Bitcoin certainly does a good job of that, it cannot simultaneously serve as an effective medium of exchange and reliable store of value, even setting aside the issue at the heart of the electricity debate.

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Nova Scotia Power smart meter billing raises concerns amid estimated billing, catch-up bills, and COVID-19 meter reading delays, after seniors report doubled electricity usage and higher utility charges despite consistent consumption and on-time payments.

Key Points

Smart meter billing uses digital reads, limits estimates, and may trigger catch-up charges after reading suspensions.

✅ COVID-19 reading pause led to estimated bills and later catch-ups

✅ Smart meters reduce reliance on estimated billing errors

✅ Customers can seek payment plans and bill reviews

A Nova Scotia senior says she couldn't believe her eyes when she opened her most recent power bill. 

Gloria Chu was billed $666 -- more than double what she normally pays, and similar spikes such as rising electricity bills in Calgary have drawn attention.

As someone who always pays her bi-monthly Nova Scotia Power bill in full and on time, Chu couldn't believe it.

According to her bill, her electricity usage almost tripled during the month of May, compared to last year, and is even more than it was last winter, and with some utilities exploring seasonal power rates customers may see confusing swings.

She insists she and her husband aren't doing anything differently -- but one thing has changed.

"I have had a problem since they put the smart meter in," said Chu, who lives in Upper Gulf Shore, N.S.

Chu got a big bill right after the meter was installed in January, too. That one was more than $530.

She paid it, but couldn't understand why it was so high.

As for this bill, she says she just can't afford it, especially amid a recently approved 14% rate hike in Nova Scotia.

"That's all of my CPP," Chu said. "Actually, it's more than my CPP."

Chu says a neighbor up the road who also has a smart meter had her bill double, too. In nearby Pugwash, she says some residents have seen an increase of about $20-$30.

Nova Scotia Power had put a pause on installing smart meters because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has resumed as of June 1, with the goal of upgrading 500,000 meters by 2021, even as in other provinces customers have faced fees for refusing smart meters during similar rollouts.

In this case, the utility says it's not the meter that's the problem, and notes that in New Brunswick some old meters gave away free electricity even as the pandemic forced Nova Scotia Power to suspend meter readings for two months.

"As a result, every one of our customers in Nova Scotia received an estimated bill," said Jennifer parker, Nova Scotia Power's director of customer care.

The utility estimated Chu's bill at $182 -- less than she normally pays -- so her latest bill is considered a catch-up bill after meter readings resumed last month.

Parker admits how estimates are calculated isn't perfect.

"There would be a lot of customers who probably had a more accurate bill because of the way that we estimate, and that's actually one of things that smart meters will get rid of, is that we won't need to do estimated billing," Parker said.

Chu isn't quite convinced.

"It is pretty smart for the power company, but it's not smart for us," she said with a laugh.

Nova Scotia Power has put a hold on her bill and says it will work with Chu on an affordable solution, though the province cannot order the utility to lower rates which limits what can be offered.

She just hopes to never see a big bill like this again, while elsewhere in Newfoundland and Labrador a lump-sum electricity credit is being provided to help customers.

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TransAlta Alberta Data Centre integrates AI, cloud computing, and renewable energy, tackling electricity demand, grid capacity, decarbonization, and energy storage with clean power, cooling efficiency, and PPA-backed supply for hyperscale workloads.

Key Points

TransAlta Alberta Data Centre is a planned AI facility powered mostly by renewables to meet high electricity demand.

✅ Targets partner exclusivity mid-year; ops 18-24 months post-contract.

✅ Supplies ~90% power via TransAlta; balance from market.

✅ Anchors $3.5B clean energy growth and storage in Alberta.

TransAlta Corp., one of Alberta’s leading power producers, is moving toward finalizing agreements with partners to establish a data centre in the province, aligned with AI data center grid integration efforts nationally, aiming to have definitive contracts signed before the end of the year.

CEO John Kousinioris stated during an analyst conference that the company seeks to secure exclusivity with key partners by mid-year, with detailed design plans and final agreements expected by late 2025. Once the contracts are signed, the data centre is anticipated to be operational within 18 to 24 months, a horizon mirrored by Medicine Hat AI grid upgrades initiatives that aim to modernize local systems.

Data centres, which are critical for high-tech industries such as artificial intelligence, consume large amounts of electricity to run and cool servers, a trend reflected in U.S. utility power challenges reporting, underscoring the scale of energy demand. In this context, TransAlta plans to supply around 90% of its partner's energy needs for the facility, with the remainder coming from the broader electricity market.

Alberta has identified data centres as a strategic priority, aiming to see $100 billion in AI-related data centre construction over the next five years. However, the rapid growth of this sector presents challenges for the region’s energy infrastructure. Electricity demand from data centres has already outpaced the available capacity in Alberta’s power grid, intensifying discussions about a western Canadian electricity grid to improve regional reliability, potentially impacting the province’s decarbonization goals.

To address these challenges, TransAlta has adopted a renewable energy investment strategy. The company announced a $3.5 billion growth plan focused primarily on clean electricity generation and storage, as British Columbia's clean energy shift advances across the region, through 2028. By then, more than two-thirds of TransAlta’s earnings are expected to come from renewable power generation, supporting progress toward a net-zero electricity grid by 2050 nationally.

The collaboration between TransAlta and data centre developers represents an opportunity to balance growing energy demand with sustainability goals. By integrating renewable energy generation into data centre operations and broader macrogrid investments, Alberta could move toward a cleaner and more resilient energy future.

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