In August's issue of the Green Place we highlighted the Super El Niño triggering extreme weather activity around the world. The El Nino continues to intensify and NOAA Climate Prediction Center raised the odds of a “very strong” El Niño for Oct–Dec 2026 to 95%, up from just 81% in July. It forecasts a 70% chance the vent stays “very strong” through Dec-Feb 2027.
Seasonal-average sea-surface temperature anomalies are expected to exceed 2°C in key monitoring regions. Besides the strengthening El Niño, a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (a climate pattern in the western Indian Ocean becomes warmer on average, while the eastern Indian Ocean becomes cooler than average) has been forecasted.
Global capital investments in clean energy continue to rise with $1.96 trillion invested globally in 2025, an increase of 7% from 2024 and triple the figure six years prior according to Rhodium Group's Clean Investment Monitor. This growth is being driven almost exclusively by households with retail spending on EVs, home solar and batteries climbing 45% to $41 billion Quarter over Quarter. Distributed solar leaped ahead to $12 billion, outpacing home solar for the first time recorded.
Canada, meanwhile, made the largest bet on new clean generation in North American history. Prime Minister Carney announced nearly $70 billion CAD — including $10 billion in federal financing — to upgrade the Churchill Falls Generating Station, build the Gull Island hydro project, and add a Labrador wind project co-developed with the Innu. Together, the projects will add 14,000 megawatts of clean power — nearly triple Churchill Falls' current output and enough to supply Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver combined.
After a summer that kept delivering wins for the buildout, the biggest fight over data centers this month did not come from Washington or the courts — it came from Austin. Facing roughly 200 large-load grid-interconnection requests in Q1 2026 alone, triple the 2024 rate, and proposed data center demand that would require nearly five times Texas's current record peak load, Governor Abbott ordered a “pause” on new large data center approvals. The order applies to projects needing more than 75 MW and ERCOT sign-off while the state audits energy and water use. About 300 projects are affected; smaller facilities and data centers running their own private power plants are not.
Critics call the move toothless. Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller labeled it “all hat and no cattle” and is pushing for a special legislative session, while ERCOT's review timeline now stretches to April 2027 — well past when many of these projects hoped to break ground. It is a striking contrast to July and August's federal court wins for the clean energy buildout, including the First Circuit's dismissal of the wind-permitting freeze and the D.C. Circuit's unanimous decision upholding FERC's interconnection-queue reform. This month's bottleneck for the energy transition is not a fossil-fuel incumbent or a hostile administration; it is the sheer scale of AI's own appetite for power.
Our last two spotlights examined the physical inputs feeding the AI and clean-energy buildout: critical minerals, refining, and magnets. This month, we are looking at the other input: electricity. The AI boom is not landing on one national grid; it is landing on a patchwork of roughly 50 different grids, and the state where a data center is located determines much of its carbon footprint.
Among states hosting major data center capacity, grid carbon intensity varies by more than 22x. Wyoming's grid emits 1,655 lb of CO₂ per megawatt-hour — more than twice the national average — on a mix that is still roughly 70% coal. Washington emits just 74 lb/MWh, powered almost entirely by hydro. Virginia, home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, “Data Center Alley,” sits closer to the middle at 651 lb/MWh, roughly in line with the national average, but is moving in the wrong direction: Virginia utilities nearly doubled coal generation this year to keep pace with AI demand. That is not an outlier. Nearly every state outside the West burned more coal in 2025 than in 2024, reversing a decade of decline. “The AI boom is going to slow down that decline,” S&P Global's Steve Piper put it — “a rising tide lifts all boats phenomenon,” even for coal plants utilities had already planned to retire.
And it is not only coal. BloombergNEF is now tracking 126 gigawatts of planned on-site gas generation built specifically for data centers across 22 states, with a third of that capacity in Texas alone. The pipeline includes Amazon's 8,000-acre gas-fired site in Pecos County and a 2,000-acre, Chevron-powered complex for Microsoft. If the roughly 99 proposed gas plants behind this buildout come online and run anywhere near full tilt, they could push US power-sector emissions up by as much as a third.
The upshot: a hyperscaler's net-zero pledge means less than it used to when its marginal megawatt increasingly comes from a coal plant Wall Street had already written off, or from a gas plant purpose-built to bypass the interconnection queue. State, utility, and fuel mix are becoming central to the climate math. In fact, where a data center is sited may now be a bigger lever on AI's real climate footprint than any efficiency gain happening inside the chips themselves.