Category: Energy
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Filipino households are buying solar panels at scale to escape some of Asia’s highest electricity prices, pushed higher by the war involving Iran. The boom is real. So are the objections about farmland, grid readiness and where the panels come from.
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Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says the Strait of Hormuz is closed and that three tankers have been hit, one of them carrying two million barrels on what it called an unauthorised route. Whether a declared closure becomes a real one is decided by insurers, not announcements.
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Trump has told European governments to release their emergency diesel reserves or risk losing American supply. Those reserves exist precisely so that an exporter cannot use fuel as leverage — which is what makes the demand unusual.
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Data centres and prolonged heat are both pushing Malaysian electricity demand up, and they compound: hot air makes cooling systems work harder, so server halls and household air conditioners peak on the same afternoons.
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Oil has hit a four-month high as Iran attacks US warships and America strikes Iranian tankers. Part of the rise is lost supply and part is risk premium — and the two behave very differently when a conflict eases.
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Fifteen countries spend more subsidising fossil fuels than on their entire health budgets, against an estimated 546,000 heat-related deaths a year. Both numbers are built from methods worth understanding before the statistic is used as a slogan.
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Chinese crude imports have fallen to an eight-year low, quietly absorbing part of the shock from the Gulf and holding down prices elsewhere. Whether that is cyclical or structural is the most consequential open question in energy markets right now.
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Nigeria’s national generation fell to 1,132 megawatts on the night of 22 August, from more than 4,000 earlier that day, with twelve plants showing zero output. No cause was given. The country’s real electricity cost does not appear in the tariff at all — it appears in the generators people have to buy.
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US Central Command says it struck three Iranian oil tankers on Friday after the Revolutionary Guard fired at two American navy vessels. Tankers are not bases: they carry civilian crews from countries with no part in this.
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Blasts were heard near Kharg Island this morning. One Iranian agency says the origin is unknown and no smoke was visible; another says the US hit a tanker. Nobody has confirmed anything — which is the story worth understanding.