Data Centers Added $9.4 Billion in Costs on Biggest US Grid
Save
The rapid development of data centers connected to the largest US electric grid raised costs by $9.4 billion, a 180% increase, according to a report published by a market observer.
The growing energy needs of data centers was the primary cause of tight supply-and-demand conditions, as well as high prices, in the PJM Interconnection capacity market, which serves customers from Illinois to Washington D.C, said the grid's independent market monitor.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fast Company
2 minutes ago
- Fast Company
The secret to success in the AI Age: broadening yourself
We spend much of our professional lives narrowing our career identity: honing an elevator pitch, curating a LinkedIn profile, projecting a polished version of 'who we are' at work, and so on. On the one hand, this makes sense: after all, others (e.g., colleagues, bosses, recruiters, and hiring managers) are interested in understanding who we are, and providing them a simple, consistent, even archetypical snapshot of our professional self helps them believe that they know us, at least on a professional level, even when they actually don't (it takes much longer to know a person). On the other hand, this also encapsulates or traps our self within the unoriginal and predictable parameters of occupational stereotypes (the 'creative advertiser,' the 'progressive media person,' the 'power-hungry banker,' the 'geeky researcher,' etc.), washing away not just what's unique and interesting about us, but also eliminating the nuance and complexity underpinning the richness of our personality and personal history. Moreover, in light of AI 's impact on jobs and careers, which has completely disrupted how people add value and the skills they need to harness and display at work, even when they formally remain in the same role, there has never been a stronger case for expanding or broadening our work self, ensuring that our professional identity can evolve to future-proof our career. For example, a corporate lawyer who once spent most of their day drafting contracts may now rely on AI to produce first drafts instantly. Their value no longer lies in producing documents, but in interpreting nuance, anticipating risks, and guiding strategic decisions, essentially shifting from 'legal producer' to 'trusted advisor.' Or think of a marketing analyst who previously devoted hours to building performance dashboards. With AI handling data wrangling and visualization, their contribution becomes less about reporting and more about translating insights into bold, commercially savvy campaigns. Even a sales executive who used to focus on prospecting and pipeline updates can now use AI to identify leads and write outreach emails, freeing them to invest more in building deep, trust-based client relationships. The age of transilience One key psychological concept to broaden your self is the notion of transilience, the capacity to carry over skills and habits from one domain of life into another, transferring aptitudes and adaptations, as well as mindsets, across seemingly unrelated domains. Think of transilience as the flipside to skills adjacency, the process of broadening one's career prospects by picking jobs or roles that are a good fit for our current or past occupational skills (e.g., journalists becoming prompt engineers, chess players becoming strategy advisers, and lawyers becoming AI ethicists): instead of applying our current work skills to new career paths, we find new skills to bring to our current job. Take parenting. For many professionals, that part of their life is cordoned off from their 'leadership brand.' Yet what is parenting if not real-time problem solving, empathy under pressure, long-term coaching, and conflict resolution—all of which are vital leadership capabilities in a hybrid, high-uncertainty workplace? Or consider hobbies like writing fiction, hosting a podcast, coaching a sports team, or volunteering. These often develop storytelling, persuasion, patience, or emotional intelligence; the kind of traits that don't show up in a résumé, but make you more valuable at work, especially when AI takes over more predictable tasks. Importantly, transilience allows people to enrich their professional identity with underleveraged strengths. A people-manager who coaches their child's sports team might bring sharper motivational skills, patience, and an instinct for team cohesion into workplace leadership. A software engineer who runs a local community group could transfer skills in facilitation, conflict resolution, and cross-cultural communication into project work. Even hobbies like playing in a band or cooking for large gatherings can translate into improved collaboration, creativity under pressure, and the ability to improvise when plans go awry. These experiences often sit outside the 'official' résumé, but they are the very qualities that make professionals more adaptable, human, and valuable, especially when technology takes over the more predictable aspects of their roles. The point isn't to turn your life into a résumé. It's to mine your nonwork experiences for habits, strengths, and patterns of behavior that can expand your professional repertoire. Easier said than done Alas, most of us are not practiced at this. We have been taught to compartmentalize and specialize by role, in the name of work-life balance. One self for the office, another self for home, a third for everything else. It feels tidy and safe, yet it blocks cross-pollination. Psychologically, switching selves is normal. We deploy the traits that fit a given context, then swap them out for the next. That worked when lives were more linear. As roles multiplied, the model cracked. Dual-career households, caregiving, side hustles, and the discontinuities of parenthood, especially motherhood, turned the neat sequence into a mosaic. Over the past 60 years, more identities stacked up. Each one added another door to open and close, another set of resources to allocate. We learned to juggle like experts, and the juggling became the job. Technology finished off the old boundaries. Phones, chat, and collaboration tools keep the windows between compartments open. Context switches pile up. We handle personal matters during work hours and work after hours. The mental toll is real. The answer is not higher walls. It is smarter bridges. Use transilience to bring the relevant parts of your nonwork self into your work, on purpose. Treat your life like a portfolio of skills and habits, then deploy them where they matter. That is how you cut switching costs, widen your professional range, and get credit for strengths you already have. Not the same as 'bringing your whole self to work' Note that transilience should not be mistaken with the popular notion of 'bringing your whole self to work.' That phrase has often been taken to mean hauling every aspect of your personality (political opinions, personal grievances, private dramas, and quirky unfiltered impulses) into the workplace. In practice, this can be as counterproductive as it is distracting. Your colleagues did not sign up to be your roommates, therapists, or ideological sparring partners. Rather, the opportunity is to strategically and purposely transfer relevant aspects and skills from our nonprofessional self to our work persona. We all inhabit multiple selves; different identities that emerge in different contexts. You are not just 'you at work'; you are also you as a friend, you as a parent, you as a volunteer, you as a hobbyist, you as a citizen. Each of these selves has its own skills, habits, and strengths, many of which remain untapped in your professional life. In line, transilience helps us export unused adaptations from outside work into our work role, selectively bringing valuable aspects of your broader self into your career, but adapting them to the new context. It's the difference between showing up to a business meeting wearing the clothes you wore to your morning workout (literal 'whole self') versus showing up with the stamina and discipline that workout built (leveraged self-complexity). Think of it like cooking: you wouldn't dump every spice in your cupboard into a dish, but you would pick the ones that enhance the flavors you're trying to bring out. Or like packing for a trip: you don't bring your entire wardrobe, just the pieces that will work best in your destination's climate and culture. When done well, this is a form of professional adaptation. A parent might bring the listening skills and long-term patience developed with their children into team leadership. A musician might bring the ability to improvise and stay attuned to group dynamics into collaborative projects. A community volunteer might bring negotiation skills and empathy into client relations. These elements enrich your professional identity without burdening colleagues with irrelevant or overly personal content. When strategically executed, self-complexity also becomes a source of resilience and creativity. It allows you to expand the ways you add value in your role, something increasingly essential in the AI age, where machines may handle the routine, but humans still own the relational, the adaptive, and the deeply contextual. Science backs this up: being reminded of roles connected to meaningful values produces 'self-expansion,' enhancing performance and resilience. In other words, the more connected and coherent your different identities are, the more adaptable, ethical, and creative you become at work. In short, transilience is more than personal development; it's a survival skill in a world where AI automates the predictable. It lets you tap into the submerged part of your identity iceberg, enriching your professional repertoire with capabilities forged in personal, social, and volunteer roles. As AI reshapes what value looks like—even within the same job title—the edge will belong to those who can repurpose their whole self. Not just the sliver that fits in a job description. By practicing transilience, you make your professional identity a living, adaptive system.
Fast Company
2 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Finding leadership lessons from the best in business
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I'm Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Longtime Modern CEO readers know I love lists, from subjective packages such as Fast Company's Best Dressed in Business to the just-released Inc. 5000, which annually ranks America's fastest-growing private companies. In December, Inc. will unveil the winners of its Best in Business Awards, which aim to recognize the year's standout projects and initiatives across more than a dozen categories. 'If the Inc. 5000 is a snapshot of fast growth, Inc.'s Best in Business is a view into business excellence,' says Mike Hofman, Inc. 's editor-in-chief. Any CEO or executive trying to navigate the ever-changing business landscape will find inspiration—and more than a few good insights—in the winning entries: startups outmaneuvering corporate competitors with bold marketing or cheeky social media campaigns; unexpected partners collaborating on groundbreaking new products; and leaders transforming their companies by applying generative artificial intelligence (AI) in wholly inventive and creative ways. ' Inc.'s editors are looking for companies that are doing something new and different,' Hofman says. Financial results and other success metrics are table stakes, he says, but his journalists also are looking for projects that are 'cutting edge, forward-looking, and impactful.' For awardees, being named to the Best in Business list is more than a stamp of approval. 'The recognition boosted our national brand awareness, which is crucial for a company like ours operating in an emerging category,' says Jing Gao, founder of condiment maker Fly by Jing, a 2024 awardee in the consumer products category. 'This honor from Inc. not only helps our business, but it uplifts the entire category and shines a light on Asian American Pacific Islander-owned businesses across the country.' If your company has achieved greatness this year, apply for Best in Business via this link. And if you're a fan of a business that has done outstanding work we should know about, send your recommendations to me at stephaniemehta@ A few weeks ago I wrote about the need to reframe conscious capitalism in response to the backlash to 'business for good.' Now comes the backlash to the backlash. Some readers of Modern CEO feel reports of the death of stakeholder capitalism are greatly exaggerated. 'It's always tempting to announce the 'death of X' when the pendulum swings in a new direction,' says Susan Lyne, cofounder and managing partner of BBG Ventures. 'But stakeholder capitalism isn't a woke concept. It simply recognizes that the long-term success of a company is based on multiple factors: customers who love your product [or] service enough to be advocates; a work environment that draws more people than it churns through; and shareholders who trust your guidance. Yes, there were companies that jumped on the bandwagon without conviction, but the underlying management philosophy is neither radical nor new. As investors in early-stage companies, we look for founders who recognize that it's still the best way to build a lasting company.' Susan McPherson, founder and CEO of social impact and communications consultancy McPherson Strategies, notes that younger consumers continue to believe in business as a force for good. She cites a Deloitte study which found that 60% of younger millennials and Gen Z consumers believe companies have the opportunity to influence social equality, environmental protection, and responsible technology. 'Corporate leaders who remain independent and committed to their stakeholders and long-term value creation, rather than preemptively genuflecting to power, will see the most meaningful gains [over time],' she writes. Alan Fleischmann, founder and CEO of Laurel Strategies, a global CEO advisory firm, concurs: 'The ideal that business and markets are forces for good will endure—because key stakeholders will insist on it,' he writes. 'The challenge, and the opportunity, is to embed purpose and action so deeply into operations that they deliver positive outcomes alongside greater efficiency, meaningful innovation, and genuine trust. There is simply too much at stake to do otherwise.' Kate Williams, CEO of environmental nonprofit 1% for the Planet, also believes businesses can effect positive change, especially when they work together. She cites the work of a coalition of companies and other groups that successfully lobbied earlier this year to strike a measure calling for the sale of public lands from a U.S. Senate reconciliation bill. 'The challenges we face today are too big for any one business to solve alone—but when companies unite around a shared commitment, such as protecting our planet, our collective impact can be game-changing,' she writes.
E&E News
2 minutes ago
- E&E News
California's self-own on wind and solar
SACRAMENTO, California — A wind power farm in the mountains of far-Northern California was the first through the door of a new permit streamlining program that came with a lofty promise to renewable energy developers: Once a permit application was complete, the California Energy Commission would make a final ruling on the project within 270 days. It's been more than 650 days since Fountain Wind completed its application. But the agency still hasn't made a final ruling, after fierce local opposition successfully derailed the permit review. In renewable energy circles, the project has become a poster child of the sluggish progress California has made toward expediting the infrastructure state leaders say they so desperately want. Meanwhile, local officials and their advocates see the initiative as a prime example of why decision-making is better done within the communities where workers are breaking dirt. That argument will continue playing out in Sacramento in the coming month as language that would further empower the CEC's permitting authority is in one of the most-watched end-of-session bills. Advertisement 'Why champion a state permitting process that does authorize a local override if you're not going to wield it?' said Alex Jackson, executive director of the American Clean Power Association, a renewable energy trade group. 'In the face of federal attacks on wind and rising demand, the case for grabbing every zero-carbon electron in California could not be stronger right now.'
