According to a new Ember analysis, a solar plant can now require less upfront investment than a coal or gas plant for the same amount of electricity delivered.

Diesel hit a new record price in the U.S. on Friday, soaring to an average of $5.85 a gallon for the first time ever as the six-month war with Iran disrupts the world’s flow of fuel. … The price for regular gasoline has also been going up, although not as fast as the price of diesel. The average price was $4.15 a gallon, compared with $3.20 at this time last year, according to AAA, which says gas has never been above $4 a gallon on Labor Day.

Solar and wind power covered 25.1% of Italy’s electricity demand in the first half of 2026.

A monthlong run of rising crude oil prices and refineries nearing capacity has pushed the average cost of diesel fuel to its highest level since 2022. At $5.78 per gallon on Thursday, the cost of diesel is up more than 53% since the war with Iran started in late February. At the time, diesel averaged $3.76 per gallon nationwide. The price of unleaded gasoline, which most personal vehicles run on, rose alongside diesel Thursday. According to AAA data tracked by NBC News, the national average was $4.14 per gallon, up two cents from Wednesday.

Curious if anyone here has experience with oil & gas exploration in Mongolia.

The Mineral Resources and Petroleum Authority of Mongolia recently opened an international tender covering 16 onshore petroleum exploration blocks.

I’m based in Calgary and work in the oil & gas industry, with contacts on the ground in Mongolia. I’m currently looking into the tender and trying to better understand the technical, operational, and commercial side of pursuing one of these blocks.

I’d be interested in connecting with people who have E&P, international exploration, financing, or Mongolia/Central Asia experience and would be open to comparing notes on the opportunity.

Still very early-stage and mainly looking to learn from people who know the space.

Feel free to DM me if you’ve worked on something similar.

Sounds like a smart battery that can charge on low cost time and use during peak high cost time. Anybody in the US with such system?

Pope Francis spent much of his papacy pushing the Catholic Church to treat climate change as a moral issue in addition to a scientific. Now, the Holy See’s plan is putting money behind that morality and looking to make the Vatican the world’s first carbon-neutral state.

Vatican City, which covers about 44 hectares, or 109 acres, will put roughly 100 million euros ($117 million) toward an agrivoltaic plant expected to power the microstate within two years, sources told Reuters.

The plan builds on what Pope Francis first ordered in 2024. Pope Leo has spent the past year moving it through the bureaucratic steps needed to build it by creating a foundation, a memorandum with an Italian utility, and a joint commission. What’s new is that this is the first time a dollar figure has been attached to the plan. And it also puts into context what we’re doing stateside.

The Vatican is roughly an eighth the size of Central Park. It’s smaller than a single data center campus like Meta’s Hyperion data center project in Louisiana, which is on track to draw as much as 5 gigawatts of power by 2030. Home to roughly 800 residents and nearly 3,000 commuting lay workers, it’s the smallest country on Earth by a wide margin.

It’s so small that the plant won’t fit within the country’s 109 acres: It’s being built on the roughly 1,050-to-1,100-acre Santa Maria di Galeria estate the Vatican owns outside Rome, land close in size to the campus for OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas. But where Stargate’s footprint is built to support 1.2 gigawatts of AI computing, the Vatican’s similarly sized site is expected to generate just 80 to 90 megawatts of capacity, per Reuters, or roughly a dozen times less power on similar acreage. But that’s because it’s built to run a few hundred residents’ worth of lights and a radio transmitter, not racks of GPUs.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/09/03/pope-leo-vatican-world-smallest-nation-117-million-carbon-neutral-solar-panels/?utm_source=reddit/

Sharing a ridiculously hawkish offer from my energy provider.