DOE withdraws, postpones multiple appliance energy efficiency rules

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DOE withdraws, postpones multiple appliance energy efficiency rules

The U.S. Department of Energy on Monday announced it would withdraw four appliance efficiency standards and officially postpone the effective dates for three other rules, continuing the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency’s appliance efficiency program. While several of DOE’s actions were previously announced or are relatively minor, the agency’s decision to withdraw a […]

While several of DOE’s actions were previously announced or are relatively minor, the agency’s decision to withdraw a rule related to electric motors is “uncharted territory,” Appliance Standards Awareness Project Executive Director Andrew deLaski said.

DOE has “officially withdrawn four conservation standards, including standards on electric motors, ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, and external power supplies,” the agency said in a statement. “This continued commitment to the American people will slash unnecessary red tape and regulations that raise prices, reduce consumer choice, and frustrate the American people.”

DOE also announced it has officially postponed the effective dates for three home appliance rules, including those covering test procedures for central air conditioners and heat pumps, efficiency standards for walk-in coolers and freezers and standards for gas instantaneous water heaters.

“By removing burdensome regulations put in place by the Biden administration, we are returning freedom of choice to the American people, ensuring consumers can choose the home appliances that work best for their lives and budgets,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “This power should not belong to the federal government.”

DOE first said in February that it planned to postpone the implementation of several appliance energy efficiency standards finalized by the Biden administration. The natural gas sector hailed the announcement as a win for consumer choice, while efficiency advocates warn the decision could add billions to utility bills.

While delaying or not finalizing rule updates begun under the previous administration isn’t particularly noteworthy, deLaski said DOE’s decision on electric motors is different. That rule was signed by a DOE official and put out to the public, but was not published in the Federal Register.

“And that’s a big rule … a massive amount of energy consumed in industry and commercial buildings is in electric motors,” deLaski said. The rule was supported by manufacturers and utilities, he added, leading to the fundamental question: “When is a rule final?”

The now-withdrawn rule for electric motors was expected to save American businesses up to $56 billion on utility bills and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 156 million metric tons over 30 years of sales, ASAP said in January, pointing to DOE estimates.

The Energy Policy and Conservation Act says DOE must review appliance efficiency standards every six years. But Trump’s policies favor less regulation, and the Project 2025 platform created by the Heritage Foundation and shaped by numerous previous and current Trump administration officials, called for eliminating appliance standards completely.

The House Rules Committee this week is considering H.J. Res. 24, and H.J. Res. 75, to overturn DOE rules relating to conservation standards for walk-in coolers and walk-in freezers, and commercial refrigerators, freezers, and refrigerator-freezers, respectively.

The rules are “yet another example of the regulatory barrage that the Biden administration launched against Main Street as well as consumers,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., chair of the rules committee, said Monday. “Regulating this country into the ground benefits absolutely no one — that’s an indisputable fact.”

Under Biden, the DOE’s appliance efficiency program boosted the standards for more than two dozen product classes, though the implementation of those standards for some appliances is still years away. The agency in December estimated that the stronger appliance standards would save consumers about $1 trillion and cut emissions by 2.5 billion metric tons over three decades.

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Macquarie Strategists Forecast USA Crude Inventory Decline

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Shell Aims to Grow LNG Sales by 5 Percent Annually

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UK Oil, Gas Licenses Face Court Challenge

A conservation group is challenging Britain’s government in a London court over 31 North Sea oil and gas exploration licenses that it says could put marine protected areas and climate stability at risk. Oceana UK, part of an international conservation organization, said licenses granted by the previous Conservative cabinet in May last year were unlawful as they don’t account for the impact on marine life and the environment. The Labour government, which has since taken over, has shifted its attention to the North Sea’s clean energy future. Still, while the cabinet is committed to not issuing new field exploration licenses, it doesn’t plan to revoke existing ones. Oceana argued that an example from earlier this year should be followed, when a British court quashed approvals for two oil and gas projects known as Rosebank and Jackdaw, led by Equinor ASA and Shell Plc respectively. The ruling forced the fields to re-apply for environmental permits. The fate of those and other projects has big implications for the UK North Sea, an aging oil and gas region where major new developments are dwindling. Oceana said the licenses involved in the latest case are inside marine-protected areas, yet that potential oil spills were not considered in their impact assessments. It estimated there were more than two oil or chemical spills every day last year in UK waters. A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero declined to comment on ongoing legal proceedings. Units of TotalEnergies SE, Perenco SA and Neptune Energy are among the companies that received the licenses, according to Oceana. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you, join the conversation on the Rigzone Energy Network. The Rigzone Energy Network is a new social experience created for you and all energy professionals to Speak Up

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Ithaca Energy says it has ‘revitalised’ North Sea Cambo project

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PEAK:AIO adds power, density to AI storage server

There is also the fact that many people working with AI are not IT professionals, such as professors, biochemists, scientists, doctors, clinicians, and they don’t have a traditional enterprise department or a data center. “It’s run by people that wouldn’t really know, nor want to know, what storage is,” he said. While the new AI Data Server is a Dell design, PEAK:AIO has worked with Lenovo, Supermicro, and HPE as well as Dell over the past four years, offering to convert their off the shelf storage servers into hyper fast, very AI-specific, cheap, specific storage servers that work with all the protocols at Nvidia, like NVLink, along with NFS and NVMe over Fabric. It also greatly increased storage capacity by going with 61TB drives from Solidigm. SSDs from the major server vendors typically maxed out at 15TB, according to the vendor. PEAK:AIO competes with VAST, WekaIO, NetApp, Pure Storage and many others in the growing AI workload storage arena. PEAK:AIO’s AI Data Server is available now.

SoftBank to buy Ampere for $6.5B, fueling Arm-based server market competition

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Nvidia, xAI and two energy giants join genAI infrastructure initiative

The new AIP members will “further strengthen the partnership’s technology leadership as the platform seeks to invest in new and expanded AI infrastructure. Nvidia will also continue in its role as a technical advisor to AIP, leveraging its expertise in accelerated computing and AI factories to inform the deployment of next-generation AI data center infrastructure,” the group’s statement said. “Additionally, GE Vernova and NextEra Energy have agreed to collaborate with AIP to accelerate the scaling of critical and diverse energy solutions for AI data centers. GE Vernova will also work with AIP and its partners on supply chain planning and in delivering innovative and high efficiency energy solutions.” The group claimed, without offering any specifics, that it “has attracted significant capital and partner interest since its inception in September 2024, highlighting the growing demand for AI-ready data centers and power solutions.” The statement said the group will try to raise “$30 billion in capital from investors, asset owners, and corporations, which in turn will mobilize up to $100 billion in total investment potential when including debt financing.” Forrester’s Nguyen also noted that the influence of two of the new members — xAI, owned by Elon Musk, along with Nvidia — could easily help with fundraising. Musk “with his connections, he does not make small quiet moves,” Nguyen said. “As for Nvidia, they are the face of AI. Everything they do attracts attention.” Info-Tech’s Bickley said that the astronomical dollars involved in genAI investments is mind-boggling. And yet even more investment is needed — a lot more.

IBM broadens access to Nvidia technology for enterprise AI

The IBM Storage Scale platform will support CAS and now will respond to queries using the extracted and augmented data, speeding up the communications between GPUs and storage using Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs and Spectrum-X networking, IBM stated. The multimodal document data extraction workflow will also support Nvidia NeMo Retriever microservices. CAS will be embedded in the next update of IBM Fusion, which is planned for the second quarter of this year. Fusion simplifies the deployment and management of AI applications and works with Storage Scale, which will handle high-performance storage support for AI workloads, according to IBM. IBM Cloud instances with Nvidia GPUs In addition to the software news, IBM said its cloud customers can now use Nvidia H200 instances in the IBM Cloud environment. With increased memory bandwidth (1.4x higher than its predecessor) and capacity, the H200 Tensor Core can handle larger datasets, accelerating the training of large AI models and executing complex simulations, with high energy efficiency and low total cost of ownership, according to IBM. In addition, customers can use the power of the H200 to process large volumes of data in real time, enabling more accurate predictive analytics and data-driven decision-making, IBM stated. IBM Consulting capabilities with Nvidia Lastly, IBM Consulting is adding Nvidia Blueprint to its recently introduced AI Integration Service, which offers customers support for developing, building and running AI environments. Nvidia Blueprints offer a suite pre-validated, optimized, and documented reference architectures designed to simplify and accelerate the deployment of complex AI and data center infrastructure, according to Nvidia. The IBM AI Integration service already supports a number of third-party systems, including Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow environments.

Nvidia’s silicon photonics switches bring better power efficiency to AI data centers

Nvidia typically uses partnerships where appropriate, and the new switch design was done in collaboration with multiple vendors across different aspects, including creating the lasers, packaging, and other elements as part of the silicon photonics. Hundreds of patents were also included. Nvidia will licensing the innovations created to its partners and customers with the goal of scaling this model. Nvidia’s partner ecosystem includes TSMC, which provides advanced chip fabrication and 3D chip stacking to integrate silicon photonics into Nvidia’s hardware. Coherent, Eoptolink, Fabrinet, and Innolight are involved in the development, manufacturing, and supply of the transceivers. Additional partners include Browave, Coherent, Corning Incorporated, Fabrinet, Foxconn, Lumentum, SENKO, SPIL, Sumitomo Electric Industries, and TFC Communication. AI has transformed the way data centers are being designed. During his keynote at GTC, CEO Jensen Huang talked about the data center being the “new unit of compute,” which refers to the entire data center having to act like one massive server. That has driven compute to be primarily CPU based to being GPU centric. Now the network needs to evolve to ensure data is being fed to the GPUs at a speed they can process the data. The new co-packaged switches remove external parts, which have historically added a small amount of overhead to networking. Pre-AI this was negligible, but with AI, any slowness in the network leads to dollars being wasted.

Critical vulnerability in AMI MegaRAC BMC allows server takeover

“In disruptive or destructive attacks, attackers can leverage the often heterogeneous environments in data centers to potentially send malicious commands to every other BMC on the same management segment, forcing all devices to continually reboot in a way that victim operators cannot stop,” the Eclypsium researchers said. “In extreme scenarios, the net impact could be indefinite, unrecoverable downtime until and unless devices are re-provisioned.” BMC vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, including hardcoded credentials, have been of interest for attackers for over a decade. In 2022, security researchers found a malicious implant dubbed iLOBleed that was likely developed by an APT group and was being deployed through vulnerabilities in HPE iLO (HPE’s Integrated Lights-Out) BMC. In 2018, a ransomware group called JungleSec used default credentials for IPMI interfaces to compromise Linux servers. And back in 2016, Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) Serial-over-LAN (SOL) feature which is part of Intel’s Management Engine (Intel ME), was exploited by an APT group as a covert communication channel to transfer files. OEM, server manufacturers in control of patching AMI released an advisory and patches to its OEM partners, but affected users must wait for their server manufacturers to integrate them and release firmware updates. In addition to this vulnerability, AMI also patched a flaw tracked as CVE-2024-54084 that may lead to arbitrary code execution in its AptioV UEFI implementation. HPE and Lenovo have already released updates for their products that integrate AMI’s patch for CVE-2024-54085.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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