Published

1 year ago

January 10, 2025

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

California burning

‘MOST DESTRUCTIVE’: At least 10 people have been killed and more than 9,000 buildings have been gutted in wildfires “scorching communities” across Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported in its latest update on Friday. There are multiple fires burning across LA county, including the 15,800-acre Palisades fire that CNN described as the “most destructive fire in LA history”.

INFERNAL LA: LA’s firefighters are struggling with water supplies and are “unaccustomed to fighting multiple blazes at once”, BBC News reported. “There are not enough firefighters in all of LA County to address four separate fires of this magnitude,” LA county fire chief Anthony Marrone told the outlet. The Los Angeles Times said the fires have already caused at least $50bn in losses, which could also threaten hundreds of thousands of Californians who already struggle to “find and keep affordable homeowners insurance”.

TINDERBOX CLIMATE: Many outlets examined the climate “drivers” of the wildfires. The Washington Post said the flames were fanned by a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm. BBC News said that California’s decade-long drought and a four-inch decline in LA’s annual rainfall had left the region dry and so “particularly vulnerable” to the spread of fires. The Guardian cited research finding that climate change has caused a 172% increase in California’s burned area since the 1970s.

Hello, goodbye

CAN’T TOUCH THIS: US president Joe Biden announced a “permanent stop” to new oil and gas drilling across more than 625m acres of US coastal waters, thus protecting 20% of the seabed, the New York Times reported. While Biden called the move a “climate imperative”, the Guardian pointed out that the law does not explicitly allow presidents to “unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without going through Congress”. Alaska, meanwhile, sued the Biden administration over oil and gas drilling leases in the Arctic, Reuters said.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS: In a “lengthy tirade against windpower”, US president-elect Donald Trump pledged that no wind farms will be constructed during his second term, threatening billions of dollars in planned projects, Bloomberg reported. Earlier in the week, Trump criticised the UK government’s energy policy, with a call to “open up” North Sea oil and gas production and “get rid of windmills”, Reuters reported.

HYDROGEN BREAK: After “months of intense lobbying”, the Biden administration finalised rules that “offer billions of dollars in tax credits to companies that make hydrogen”, the New York Times reported. The rules include relaxed criteria for the “struggling sector” to claim tax credits, the Financial Times wrote.

Around the world

RECORD HEAT: Multiple climate datasets have confirmed that 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, with temperatures breaching 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, BBC News reported. Carbon Brief has all the details in its latest state of the climate” quarterly update.
ADIEU, TRUDEAU: Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as Canada’s prime minister on Monday, ending a near-decade “of [the country’s] most climate-conscious federal government”, but with a “physically enduring legacy” of oil pipeline expansions, the Narwhal reported.
MECCA FLOODS: Torrential, unseasonal rain lashed cities in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, with the holy city of Mecca facing the “worst floods”, Down to Earth reported.
WATER WOES: Last year, water-related disasters claimed more than 8,700 lives, drove 40 million people from their homes and caused $550bn in economic damage, according to the 2024 Global Water Monitor report covered by the Guardian.
TAPS TURNED: Climate-induced sea level rise will “overwhelm” many of the world’s biggest oil ports, including Houston, Rotterdam and Ras Tanura, according to new analysis by cryosphere scientists who described the threat as “ironic”, the Guardian said.
BANKS BOUNCED: Bloomberg reported that there are “zero” big Wall Street banks left in the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, after the biggest US bank JP Morgan quit the UN-backed climate coalition weeks before Trump assumed office.

10 days

The time it took for the world’s richest 1% to “burn through” their 2025 “share” of the global “carbon budget” for keeping warming under 1.5C, according to new Oxfam analysis.

Latest climate research

Arctic marine heatwaves could intensify “on orders of magnitude” during the rest of this century under climate change, posing “major challenges for Arctic ecosystems”, according to new Nature Climate Change research using high-resolution climate models.
A new study in Science estimated that building materials used in new construction could potentially store 16bn tonnes of CO2 every year.
New research in Nature Cities found that high-income city dwellers in China were more likely to “order in” food during heatwaves, revealing the “transfer of heat exposure from consumers to delivery riders.”

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

The map above uses squares to illustrate 1,682 studies where communities are taking on-ground measures to adapt to climate change, from the islands of Tuvalu to the high mountains of Nepal. These studies were collated as part of the most comprehensive assessment to date of the scientific literature on climate adaptation. Carbon Brief has produced an interactive article based on the database that pulls out some of the key findings and explores global trends.

Spotlight

What listening to crickets reveals about rainforest change

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to scientists studying what sounds from wildlife can reveal about change in an Indian rainforest.

On Christmas night in Coorg (Kodagu) – prime coffee country in India’s Western Ghats biosphere – the rainforest was anything but silent.

The night air – though drier than it should be this time of year – was charged with an electric score of cricks, chirps, trills, hisses, croaks, whoops and whistles.

The Western Ghats is one of the “hottest hotspots” of biodiversity on Earth, hosting 325 globally threatened species. Coorg, on its eastern slopes, is a micro hotspot that receives more than 4000mm of rainfall on average and is the source of the Kaveri river, whose waters are bitterly disputed among the south Indian states seeing increasingly hotter summers and devastating floods.

A short climb reveals physical scars of extreme weather: beyond thick canopies are hilltops bearing gashes from devastating landslides in 2018 that killed 20 people and displaced 18,000.

To understand the less-visible impacts of climate and land-use change on non-human species in Coorg’s dense forests and plantations, sound has emerged as an important tool.

Biodiversity symphony

Bio-acoustics is the science of sounds produced by biological systems and what they react to. Prof Rohini Balakrishnan at the Indian Institute of Science described her work as a “bridge between symphony, cacophony and silence” and said that there are “signatures” of land degradation in sound that photographs cannot capture. She told Carbon Brief:

“When we first came to the Western Ghats 20 years ago to try and actually figure out an entire acoustic community, most people thought we were completely crazy, because nobody had tried anything at that scale.”

Those first years, she said, were “very, very hard” on her team, involving months of fieldwork in forests “full of poisonous snakes, gaur (Indian bison) and some density” of elephants.

A hillside in Coorg (Kodagu) in southwest India. Credit: Aruna Chandrasekhar, Carbon Brief

The “tech part”, however, has become significantly easier since, with machine learning and algorithmic approaches being trained to look at an entire soundscape and, possibly, to decide if a landscape is degrading. Balakrishnan said:

“When we started, all we had were those little Sony Walkmans and bat detectors. There were no recorders that you could programme and leave outdoors. So it was painful: follow an insect, get a recording. You had to be there doing the recording.”

For Dr Vijay Ramesh, a postdoctoral scientist at the K Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University in New York state, an ongoing question is whether biodiversity can fully return to degraded landscapes that are being actively restored. Acoustics have played an essential role in helping answer that question, with soundscapes failing to detect insects in many restored sites.

“I don’t think we would have got that particular understanding of insects without using audio recorders, because these are all high frequencies we cannot hear,” Ramesh told Carbon Brief.

Cutting through noise

With so many species calling at the same time, isolating individual sounds in a complex noise environment can be a challenge. To Balakrishnan, the rainforest can sound like a Christmas party where “everybody’s screaming and you’re interested in one conversation, one person”.

Rohini and her team spent 15 years working on the “cocktail-party effect”, eventually finding that “what sounds to us like a cacophony actually can be close to silence for an insect”.

Anthropogenic sound often shows up in recordings: sirens still go off at dawn to signal the start of a morning shift for tea plantation workers. Pouring rain can serve as a major “masker” of sound.

While evidence of climate change’s impacts “still needs more long-term monitoring”, Rohini worries about humanity’s ability to “ignore planetary alarm bells”. She concluded:

“[M]echanised noise, traffic or construction…we sort of learn to filter them out, or we live in these artificial worlds we create by putting on headphones. And I feel, in the end, it takes away your ability to listen to your surroundings and to be influenced by it.

“Listening really is a survival skill for our species, but it also gives joy, and I think we are losing that ability to focus on sounds around us and think and ask: ‘What does that mean?’”

Watch, read, listen

BLACK MARKET: Context News interviewed Nigeria’s illegal oil refiners risking everything to meet their energy needs amid soaring fuel prices in the country.

POLYCRISIS NOW: Tim Sahay spoke to the Centre for Science and Environment about what to expect from climate policy in 2025 as the global “polycrisis” unfolds.

OFF THE CHARTS: A long read in the Atlantic examined how “extreme events are taking scientists by surprise” and “outpacing” the predictions of even the “best” climate models.

Coming up

14-15 January: UN “high-level retreat” on investing in ocean solutions, Incheon, South Korea
16 January: Vanuatu parliamentary elections
16-17 January: G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group Meeting, South Africa

Pick of the jobs

Network of African National Human Rights Institutions, climate justice officer | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi, with travel
University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, postdoctoral fellows | Stipend: $66,300 with travel and relocation allowances. Location: Philadelphia
Electrify Britain, director of policy and advocacy | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
E3G, policy advisor, trade and climate | Salary: £40,500-£45,000. Location: London or Brussels

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The post DeBriefed 10 January 2025: Los Angeles burns; Trump tilts at ‘windmills’; What cricket chirps reveal about rainforest change appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 10 January 2025: Los Angeles burns; Trump tilts at ‘windmills’; What cricket chirps reveal about rainforest change

Climate Change

DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids

Published

10 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

UK, Europe and India battle heatwaves

‘MIND-BOGGLING’ MAY: The UK and continental Europe have set “mind-boggingly crazy” temperature records for May amid a deadly heatwave, reported the Financial Times. According to the Associated Press, the UK “smashed a century-old temperature record for the second time in 24 hours on Tuesday”. The newswire added that records “also fell in France, where temperatures reached 36C on Monday in the country’s south-west”. On Wednesday, Portugal hit a record May temperature of 40.3C, said BBC News.

‘BRUTAL REMINDER’: In parts of Italy, the heatwave triggered blackouts, reported Reuters. The heatwave has also been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the UK and France, including from people drowning and suffering heat-related deaths while competing in sporting events, said ABC News. Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change, said the intense heatwaves were a “brutal reminder” of the cost of global warming, reported Politico. Carbon Brief has in-depth coverage of the record-shattering heatwave.
INDIA’S DEADLY HEAT: In the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, more than 100 people died within three days following an intense heatwave, reported the Khaleej Times. The publication noted that authorities urged people to stay indoors and avoid direct exposure to the heat. Meanwhile, some parts of India are “grappling with power cuts as record-breaking heat has pushed electricity demand to an all-time high”, reported Reuters.

Around the world

CRUDE DIPS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said global investments in oil projects will fall below $500bn in 2026, continuing a three-year decline, reported Bloomberg. Carbon Brief’s analysis of the data shows the US’s “data-centre boom” means it is now investing more in fossil-fuel power than China.
DODGING NET-ZERO: The world’s biggest miner, Australian giant BHP, has backtracked on climate action by halting or delaying projects to cut “vast” amounts of emissions, according to a Guardian investigation.
SOLAR SLIP: China’s new solar installations dropped for a fourth straight month, reflecting weakening domestic demand, said Bloomberg.
NO LOGGING: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a new report, said Agence France-Presse.
EXECUTIVE ACTION: Puerto Rico’s governor announced a state of emergency to fight a surge in coastal erosion, citing the need to protect natural resources and vulnerable communities, reported the Associated Press.

Four million

The number of homes in the UK with air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, reported the Guardian. There are 29m households in the UK.

Latest climate research

Carbon Brief will soon be launching a new fortnightly newsletter focused on climate research. Sign up for free today.
LGBTQ+ households in the US are “significantly more likely” to face energy poverty and insecurity than the general population | Energy Research & Social Science
Global rice-paddy greenhouse gas emissions have doubled over the past six decades | Nature Food
Vegetation greening and human-caused warming are the “main drivers” of a surge in flash floods over the last decade | Science Advances

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Map of the UK showing that at least 67 NHS sites have been forced to close due to weather-related flooding since 2021

A Carbon Brief investigation has shed light on the impact of weather-related flooding on National Health Service (NHS) facilities across the UK. At least 67 NHS hospital wards, departments and other sites have been forced to temporarily close or relocate due to weather-related flooding. The chart above shows sites of weather-related flooding incidents at NHS facilities. The size of the circles indicates the number of incidents reported at each site.

Spotlight

How solar mini-grids can ‘help boost’ Nigeria’s economy

This week, Carbon Brief covers a new report on Nigeria’s solar mini-grid industry.

Amid the impact of the US-Iran war on the Nigerian economy, a new report has argued that solar-mini grids can help to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and create more than 200,000 jobs.

In Nigeria, Africa’s third-largest economy, the war has led to an increase in energy prices and a decrease in petrol consumption. Petrol is one of the country’s main sources of transport and household fuel. According to one estimate, prices have surged by up to 40% since the conflict commenced in February.

Although the Nigerian treasury has benefited from rising crude oil prices – the country is a major exporter of oil and gas – the impact has been most visible on the wider population.

Rising energy prices “have affected the purchasing power of workers”, Agnes Funmi Sessi, a labour union leader in Lagos, told Carbon Brief.

However, scaling the deployment of solar “mini-grids” could help the country move away from fossil fuels, stimulate rural economies and improve livelihoods, according to the new report authored by the thinktank, the Africa Policy Research Institute.

“We estimate that, by deploying over 10,000 mini-grids, the sector could create 212,688 direct full-time informal and productive-use jobs across the off-grid and under-grid market segments,” the report said.

A nascent industry

Solar “mini-grids” are small-scale, localised electricity generation and distribution systems powered by solar panels.

The report positioned Nigeria’s mini-grid sector as one of the fastest-growing in Africa, with the country having just 11 mini-grids in 2015 and 155 by 2024, along with at least 42 active developers.

Many of the companies within the sector are young and apply novel local techniques in their deployment of solar technology, the report said.

However, access to finance remains a huge barrier. According to the report, the sector may require up to $8bn to connect 35.4 million people to mini-grids.

“Most Nigerians want solar power in their homes, but it is a capital intensive business for vendors and customers,” Dr Ben Iheagwara, a renewable energy entrepreneur and policy analyst, told Carbon Brief.

The report urged the Nigerian government and its international partners to “attract private capital by de-risking investments and ensuring regulatory clarity and long-term planning”.

Other key recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders include investment in skills development and paying attention to the gender gap.

Powering rural communities

Many rural communities, which make up about 37% of the country, are disconnected from the national grid system, so often have to generate their own electricity through mini-grid systems.

According to Nigeria’s electricity regulator, NERC, a mini-grid is defined as a power generating system with an installed capacity of up to 10 megawatts.

A mini-grid can be powered by fossil fuels such as diesel or petrol, but solar power is now considered a cheaper and cleaner source.

With more than 80 million people lacking access to electricity in Nigeria, solar mini-grids are increasingly viewed as the lowest-cost electrification solution, the report said.

Watch, read, listen

MOVING FORWARD: The Energy Transition Show dug into electricity reform in South Africa, discussing the country’s coal legacy and the role of renewables.

ENERGY POVERTY: In an opinion article for Project Syndicate, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, argued that the energy transition in emerging and developing economies is driven by economics and security rather than emissions targets.
VANISHING CITY: BBC News reported on a coastal community in Nigeria where the ocean has “already swallowed more than half of the town”.

Coming up

31 May: Colombia presidential elections
31 May-5 June: Global Environment Facility council meeting, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
2-5 June: The Venice Agreement for Peatlands workshop, Kisumu, Kenya

Pick of the jobs

National Oceanography Centre, engagement assistant (external communications) | Salary: £28,254. Location: Southampton, UK
Dangote Industries, decarbonisation specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lagos, Nigeria
City of New York, chief decarbonization officer | Salary: $261,469. Location: New York City
Climate Central, writer and associate editor | Salary: $72,000-$75,000. Location: US (Remote)

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The post DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 29 May 2026: Europe’s ‘mind-boggling’ May | Indian heat deaths | Nigeria’s solar mini-grids

Climate Change

Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?

Published

11 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

At the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meetings this week, several African leaders called for investments in electricity infrastructure which go beyond lighting homes to powering economies.

Applauding the AfDB for its energy programmes like Mission 300 – which aims to provide electricity access to 300 million Africans by 2030 – the Central African Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera said that without power supply “we will not be able to achieve development”.

Speaking alongside him, the Republic of Congo’s President Denis Sassou Nguesso echoed this, saying that “as we need to help our people to turn towards agriculture, to turn towards livestock rearing, we also need to provide power to them.”

As the Mission 300 initiative advances, attention is increasingly shifting from simply connecting households to ensuring that electricity access translates into economic opportunities and livelihoods. That shift is driving the launch of a new Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy being developed under Mission 300 by the philanthropically funded Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).

Apr 30, 2026

Clean Energy Frontier

Kenya seeks regional coordination to build African mineral value chains

Kenyan President William Ruto is the latest African leader to announce an end to raw mineral exports as governments want to add more value to their resources

Read more
Mar 11, 2026

Clean Energy Frontier

Africa needs more than export bans to cash in on critical minerals, experts say

Restricting raw materials exports is well-intentioned but without other policies to foster domestic processing, they can backfire

Read more
Feb 4, 2026

Energy

Africa records fastest-ever solar growth, as installations jump in 2025

Africa’s solar power installations have increased sharply, driven by utility-scale projects and privately financed rooftop and commercial systems

Read more

In an interview with Climate Home News, Carol Koech, GEAPP’s vice president for Africa, said the initiative is designed to ensure that electrification supports income generation, agriculture and local economic development rather than only basic household access.

Q: What is the Centre of Excellence for Productive Use of Energy aiming to achieve with Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 is increasingly being seen as a job platform and so the role of the Centre of Excellence in translating those electricity connections to jobs. So we want the centre to do four things. First, as a delivery engine, which enables countries to embed a cross-institutional advisor that supports the electrification components, but also other components that are happening in the country.

Second, we want the centre to be an innovation and strategy hub. Today, there’s really no place where you can go to find the state of the industry for productive use of energy across the globe, and we want to make the centre of excellence the place where you can go and get information about what technologies are available, where deployment is happening and how much is being deployed.

Campaigners in Africa are demanding their governments stop the development of fossil fuels on the continent and embrace the opportunities of renewable energy
(Photo: Lighting Global/SunCulture/World Bank)

The third pillar is to coordinate and mobilise capital. We anticipate the centre coordinating internally within the ecosystem but also mobilising additional financing to help productivity. The last piece is how to scale businesses, enterprises and partnerships around this centre because we anticipate that as we grow this space, new industries will emerge and those industries will need to be supported.

Q: Why is productive use of energy becoming important under Mission 300?

A: Mission 300 gave us a bigger platform to demonstrate that energy is truly an enabler for economic development. It’s not sufficient to just provide a connection, but it is required that that connection truly translates to economic development for the communities that benefit.

We shouldn’t bring electricity and then start thinking about what people can do with it. We need to think about both at the same time and ensure electricity arrives together with the things that will make a difference in people’s lives. Historically, we’ve brought electricity and imagined a miracle would happen, but we know that hasn’t been the case.

The question is how to ensure universal access in the cheapest way while still transforming communities. Some mini-grids have been deployed in places where demand is extremely low, making them too expensive to sustain. But when mini-grids are paired with productive uses, the economics start to change. If businesses currently running on fossil fuel generators move to solar or renewable energy, operating costs fall and the business case for mini-grids becomes much stronger.

Q: How could this work in practice for agriculture and rural communities?

A: I’ll give you a practical example in our pilot country Zambia. Zambia has two programmes, they have the ASCENT programme for energy access and they also have the Zambia agribusiness and trade platform (ZATP). Some of the components of the ZATP programme – which is an agri-business program to help farmers to be productive – have a productive use component but don’t have an energy supply component. So we’re offering things like mills, processing facilities, irrigation and others. In some parts of Zambia, these productive use equipment has been supplied but has not been powered, so communities are not benefiting from that.

So the whole point is if we coordinate where the agribusiness programme is deployed together with where the energy access programme is deployed and layer those two programmes together in one place, then you could solve the energy access problem and solve productive use together and therefore have really meaningful outcomes for communities.

Q: How will the centre help both households and small businesses use electricity productively?

A: The question on whether we should electrify households or businesses is neither here nor there. We need to electrify all. The argument is really once we electrify businesses, the owners of those businesses will be able to pay what they need for their households as well as increase production for their businesses.

Electricity consumption is usually an indicator of economic development and by pushing productive use into households, especially where households are also smallholder farmers, the question becomes: how can electricity access translate to additional economic development for them? If you are connected onto a mini-grid, then you can actually use that connection to run irrigation, put in a dryer, or a cold storage system, whatever you require to improve your income but the fact that you have energy means that you can access productive use. Now, we need to ask ourselves how do these farmers or these households then get access to these appliances, because that’s another barrier.

Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?

The cost of these appliances is usually extremely high, and when you have programmes such as the ZATP running in Zambia, that’s already a public funding approach to making these appliances available and potentially reachable for farmers, either at household level, at farm level or at community level.

Q: How does this complement the already existing Mission 300 national energy compacts designed by countries?

A: Each of the national energy compacts have a productive use component, a pillar that talks about distributed renewable energy, productive use, and clean cooking. This is actually complementing the work of the countries, and this centre is like an available support, back office for countries to tap into as they implement their national energy compacts, if they have specific requirements and support for that pillar three.

So the advisers that will be embedded into countries, their role is to coordinate within country programs that are running where energy could make a difference. The advisers will be sourced from the country and so they will make sure that the donor money is coordinated to benefit the country fully. Their role will include going to ministries of agriculture or any related ministries and understanding where they are prioritising programmes that require electrification. In many cases, programmes and money have already been allocated, but this component is about how do we deploy it in a way that it actually truly brings a difference, so those advisers will do that.

Q: How will the centre address financing and private sector investment challenges?

A: What we’re really looking at is different financing mechanisms. In the past, we have provided subsidies and results-based financing to suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to help create markets for productive-use appliances. I see this as one mechanism the centre could use, but the bigger opportunity is aligning public funding across different programmes so that more of it can support productive uses, either through direct funding or subsidies.

Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies

When it comes to private sector investment, the reality is that Africa’s energy sector still faces serious constraints. Most private investment has gone into power generation, particularly through independent power producers, and even then that has only been possible in places where the off-takers, usually utilities, are bankable.

To unlock more private capital, countries need the right policies, reforms and regulations, but even more importantly, utilities must become financially viable. If the off-taker is not bankable, then the project is not bankable.

Another major question is how to attract private investment into transmission infrastructure. There are different models being explored, but the reality is that public funding alone is not sufficient to achieve Mission 300, so finding new ways to mobilise private capital will be critical.

The post Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Q&A: How can African electricity access power jobs not just lightbulbs?

Climate Change

AI boom means US is now ‘investing more’ in fossil-fuel power than China

Published

11 hours ago

May 29, 2026

Alice Rush

The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

A rapid expansion of data centres across the nation is at the heart of the US tech sector’s plans to continue “dominat[ing]” the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

High demand for electricity to power these data centres has led to companies rushing to build new gas-fired power plants across the country.

This trend, combined with “soaring” gas-turbine prices, drove a threefold increase in US gas‑power investment in 2025 – and the IEA expects this to continue throughout 2026.

As the chart below shows, Chinese investment in coal- and gas-fired power is expected to drop this year, amid domestic policy changes and the Iran war sending gas prices spiralling.

Together, these trends mean the IEA expects US investment in fossil-fuelled power plants to overtake China’s in 2026.

Annual investment in fossil-fuel power in China and the US, $bn. The figure for 2026 is an IEA estimate, based on current trends. Source: IEA.

The IEA’s latest world energy investment report shows that spending on renewables and electricity grids continues to dominate at the global scale.

In the US, Trump administration policies such as the phase-out of tax credits for renewables has led to the IEA revising its forecast for new wind and solar power downwards.

At the same time, US electricity demand is expected to rise by an average of 2% per year from 2026 to 2030, with data centres contributing half of the overall increase.

This is leading to what the IEA calls an “AI-driven push” to build new gas-power plants in the US, the world’s largest data-centre market and largest gas producer.

Globally, orders for new gas-power plants increased to 130 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 – a 25-year high – and US demand was a “major factor” in this, according to the IEA.

Much of the demand is coming from tech companies in the US seeking to bypass grid connection queues by building “captive” gas-power plants.

As the chart below shows, since the start of 2025 these US captive data centres alone have signed off on more investment in new gas turbines than any country in the world – aside from the US itself.

Total value of new gas generation final investment decisions by country, region or use-case, between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, $bn. Source: IEA.

Overall, investment in grid upgrades, power equipment and electricity generation to support the buildout of data-centre infrastructure around the world hit $105bn in 2025, according to the IEA.

This is more than the total invested in the energy sector across the whole of Africa – a continent where more than 600 million people do not have access to electricity.

The IEA notes that strong demand for gas-power plants for data centres in the US – and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East – is “limiting the availability of turbines for near-term deployment elsewhere in the world”.

The agency also points out that as the tech sector becomes a “major energy investor”, accounting for around 40% of all corporate power-purchase agreements, it is also “underpinning momentum” for emerging clean technologies, such as small modular nuclear reactors and advanced geothermal.