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The largest U.S. regional electric grid on Tuesday reported nearly 18 gigawatts of power plant outages, leaving a region of 67 million people with a thin buffer of power supplies against frigid weather and a forecast for record-breaking winter demand. The PJM Interconnection reported that most of the generation outages are due to power plants being forced offline amid freezing weather and constricted supplies of natural gas for the region. PJM, which serves 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states and [Read more]

Germany must seek new partners in light of a changing global order, the country's economy minister said on Tuesday, referring to deteriorated relations with the United States that have resulted in painful import tariffs. "The world has become more uncertain, and alliances that we have trusted and relied on are beginning to crumble," Katherina Reiche said at the Handelsblatt energy summit. "That does not mean abandoning them, but rather continuing to work together, however challenging that [Read more]

Donald Trump's Greenland tariff threat and U-turn last week may have been a watershed for the world's "middle powers." For them, rebooting globalization - with or without Washington - now looks far more realistic than it did during last year's trade shock. This year, the U.S. president has shifted from using tariffs mainly to air long-standing trade grievances to wielding them as tools of territorial and military leverage. And for the first time, that strategy has met firm resistance and [Read more]

The rumblings of a productivity boom are reverberating through the U.S. economy – and they may be going global. Technological leaps have long been the hallmark of U.S. economic efficiency, flexibility and dynamism – trends that artificial intelligence is expected to accelerate – but there are nascent signs that the benefits of AI may be spreading. Purchasing managers' index (PMI) figures on Friday showed that British business activity has started this year on a strong footing, with robust [Read more]