Authored by Gary Abernathy via The Empowerment Alliance,
The political left is worried that the rapid expansion of data centers across the U.S. - a controversial but necessary development considering our competition with China - is increasingly accompanied by the corresponding construction of stand-alone natural gas plants to provide the power demands of the centers.
In Ohio, 10 gas-fired power plants are in the works to fuel new data centers. In West Virginia, a startup business building AI compute campuses plans to utilize hundreds of gas generators by 2028. Newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk has purchased a gas turbine company specifically to power the Tennessee-based data centers fueling Grok.
Across the nation, similar stories are playing out region by region, with dedicated gas plants often backed by tech giants who once swore off fossil fuels before reality set in.
Natural gas plants can be stood up relatively quickly and deliver the massive power required to keep the U.S. ahead of its adversaries in the AI/data center race. While data centers have resulted in controversies in some local communities - an unsurprising NIMBY reaction - other places have welcomed the developments.
As stated here before, artificial intelligence is here, like it or not. The only question is who will make the rules, the U.S. or China?
Soldiers in the anti-fossil fuel brigade are once again coming face-to-face with their biggest enemy: reality. And as usual, rather than seeking to engage fairly in the free market, backers of renewables are demanding that government write regulations requiring their use.
The Associated Press recently reported that "tech giants are demanding power at such speed and scale - some data centers consume more energy than a mid-size city - that the construction of wind and solar simply can't keep up," giving natural gas a substantial advantage. Most people call that the free market playing out as it naturally will. The climate change fearmongers call it foul play.
To level the field, the same old playbook is once again being deployed. For instance, in Michigan, Oregon and Minnesota, laws have been enacted in the last 18 months "designed to protect their pre-existing requirements that electric utilities use only emissions-free energy sources by 2040," AP reported, adding that similar bills are emerging in California, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
New York, not surprisingly, leads the way when it comes to the heavy hand of government mandates. There, legislation would force data centers over a certain size "to meet renewable energy benchmarks starting in 2030 and, by 2040, get at least 90% of their energy from renewable energies."
The arrogance of those demanding that alternatives be given special consideration was once more on display courtesy of a New York state lawmaker who wrote the bill in question. "We are literally talking about the wealthiest companies in the world that are looking to build in New York state," said state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez (D), adding, "and if they have the resources to put billions of dollars into data center development, then they certainly should have the resources to build out renewable energy sources to power them."
So there!
Insisting what other people can and should do with their money - and writing legislation forcing them to do it - is a familiar page from the playbook of the left. Such attitudes will only be magnified by the new crop of socialists who are winning Democratic Party primaries across the country.
Of course, to back up the demand that renewables be governmentally propped up to power data centers, the left will trot out friendly new studies to bolster its arguments. So, right on cue, here comes the Environmental Integrity Project with another study condemning the big, bad gas plants.
"Dozens of planned gas plants to directly power data centers in the United States could emit as much greenhouse gas annually as Australia or France," according to a Reuters story on the findings of the study.
"An industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past and the air pollution from fossil fuels that cause real harm to communities," said Jen Duggan, executive director of the EIP.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin countered, "I think that a lot of Americans would agree that we should win this race against China to be the AI capital of the world." Amen.
The climate change movement flourished under the Obama and Biden administrations, costing taxpayers billions of dollars and funneling industries and consumers into a no-choice scenario of less reliable, less effective alternative power options. Thankfully, the Trump administration has unleashed all American energy resources - including inviting alternatives to compete in the free marketplace.
For now, the left acknowledges that the federal government is not friendly turf. So, when it comes to emerging data centers, the subsidies-and-mandates game is playing out at the state level, because without such help, as AP reported, "the construction of wind and solar simply can't keep up."
In the free marketplace, things that can't keep up eventually fall by the wayside. But in the fantasyland of far-left (and socialist) idealism, government regulations keep them afloat or even put them in preferred positions - at least until their deficiencies become too obvious and too dangerous to pretend anymore. (For example, see the massive 2025 power outage in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, where alternatives failed and natural gas came to the rescue to restore power.)
The U.S. will likely win the AI race, but only because it got under way in earnest during the Trump administration. If it had happened under the Biden regime, our government would be mandating artificial benchmarks for renewables while China focused on controlling artificial intelligence for the world.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/27/2026 - 17:40Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,
A federal court ruled in favor of the Trump administration in a lawsuit challenging Illinois’ laws that offered education benefits to illegal immigrants while denying the same for out-of-state Americans.
In a July 24 order, the District Court for the Southern District of Illinois declared that in-state tuition provisions under the state’s Acevedo Bill (which became law in May 2023), its 2024 amendment, the DREAM Act, and the Retention of Illinois Students and Equity (RISE) Act, as applied to illegal immigrants, violated the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and are “unconstitutional and invalid.”
The Trump administration argued that these three laws, which provide postsecondary education benefits to illegal immigrants, were in violation of Title 8 of the U.S. Code Section 1623.
Section 1623 bans illegal immigrants from being eligible for post-secondary education benefits in a state unless the same benefits are provided to all U.S. citizens, regardless of their state of residence.
In its complaint filed last September, the Trump administration highlighted that the Acevedo Bill allows illegal immigrants to pay a lower tuition rate in the state’s public colleges and universities than a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident from other states.
The Illinois DREAM Act, signed into law in 2011, created a scholarship program funded by private donations.
This benefit was later limited to illegal immigrants students in the state.
The RISE Act, which came into effect in 2020, extended state financial assistance to illegal immigrants.
In a motion to dismiss filed in November 2025, Illinois challenged the validity of Section 1623. The state argued that Section 1623 violates the anticommandeering doctrine outlined in the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which recognizes that Congress has no power to issue direct orders to a state.
Section 1623 “runs afoul of the anticommandeering doctrine because it regulates states rather than private actors,” Illinois said. Because Section 1623 violates the anticommandeering doctrine, “all the federal government’s claims against all defendants must be dismissed.”
However, in the July 24 order, the court disagreed with this argument, affirming that restrictions under Section 1623 do not constitute “commandeering” under the 10th Amendment.
The doctrine bans the federal government from dictating what state legislatures can or cannot do. It also prohibits Washington from compelling states to enact or enforce federal regulatory programs. Section 1623 “does none of these things,” the court observed.
Instead, Section 1623 “functions as a limit on the eligibility of noncitizens rather than a command that states legislate or administer any particular program.”
The court permanently enjoined Illinois and other defendants in the case, including state entities, from enforcing the three laws disputed by the Trump administration.
The case was brought by the Department of Justice’s Civil Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Illinois, according to a July 24 statement from the department.
“Illinois sought to incentivize illegal immigration on the taxpayer’s dime by treating illegal aliens better than U.S. citizens living in other states, in clear violation of federal law,” U.S. Attorney Steven D Weinhoeft said in the statement.
“This ruling enforces the statute Congress wrote and stops the State from putting illegal aliens ahead of American citizens.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the office of Illinois governor for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.
The case is one of several in which the Trump administration is targeting state educational benefits being provided to illegal immigrants over U.S. citizens.
On July 23, the Justice Department announced that it had filed a case against Colorado over this issue. Similar lawsuits have been filed against California, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Kansas, and Minnesota, all of which are pending.
In Texas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, the Trump administration has succeeded in getting permanent injunctions against in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants.
Tyler Durden Mon, 07/27/2026 - 17:00