Europe's energy price squeeze: data centres, clean energy job losses and an oil windfall

The pitch came during a special session on the new Churchill Falls agreement in mid-September. Energy and Mines Minister Lloyd Parrott said the provincial government could consider selling excess power to a data centre company, according to CBC News. "We said our door is open for business and we're looking forward to doing business with the world," Parrott said at the time.

CBC reported on 29 September that the province has already been approached by companies. A department spokesperson, Brodie Thomas, said in an emailed statement that data centres may be considered where proposals align with government policy objectives. CBC also quoted Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, saying AI workloads are "really computationally intensive" and that tech companies needed far more computation to power them.

The demand side is not the only problem

Europe's own electricity bill is being written by the same forces. Oil prices spiked after the US and Israeli attacks on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, according to an analysis in The Conversation published on 29 September. Federal data cited in that piece put the US crude hub price at $66 a barrel in late February 2026 and $101 a barrel on 13 April.

That is a windfall for producers. The Conversation notes that Permian Basin operators get a gain because prices rise faster than costs in the short run, with money flowing to shareholders through dividends, debt reduction and buybacks. Middle East producers face higher insurance, security and transport costs, but low production costs mean higher global prices still translate into strong profits.

For European industry, the picture is harder. INEOS has idled Europe's last world-scale acetyls plant as gas prices soar, according to reports cited in recent headlines. Those headlines are context, not dossier facts, but they point to the same pressure.

The jobs data already shows the cost

The clearest hard number in the dossier comes from the United States. The US lost 36,949 clean energy jobs in 2025, the first annual decline since the pandemic, according to E2, which analysed Department of Energy employment data. Electrek reported the figures on 28 September.

Clean energy employment fell to 3.52 million. The losses erased nearly 40% of the gains made in 2024 and reached 35 states. California shed nearly 21,000 clean energy jobs, the most of any state, while Florida gained about 3,800. Energy efficiency, renewable energy and EVs all lost jobs; battery storage and grid work, along with biofuels, posted small gains.

E2 links the downturn to federal policy reversals and a rise in cancelled projects. Its tracker recorded 142 clean energy manufacturing, generation and storage projects cancelled or downsized in 2025. The broader US energy industry shed an estimated 86,000 jobs in 2025, according to the DOE data cited by E2, with clean energy accounting for roughly 43% of that decline. Clean energy remains the largest part of the energy workforce, employing more than 3.5 million people, compared with 958,000 in oil and gas, 125,000 in coal and 70,000 in nuclear.

Those figures are initial. E2's full Clean Jobs America 2026 report is expected in October.

Efficiency as the escape route

One argument for optimism comes from electrification itself. Hannah Ritchie's Substack, published on 29 September, walks through numbers from Oxford professor Nick Eyre. In a decarbonised system where suitable sectors are electrified and the rest run on hydrogen, global final energy demand falls from 416 to 247 exajoules. Electricity demand rises from 110 to 189 EJ. The study suggests final demand could be about 40% lower.

The model assumes no efficiency gains beyond electrification and a move to hydrogen. It does not account for energy growth as countries develop, and it assumes all non-electrified sectors run on hydrogen. Those caveats matter, but the direction is clear: electric cars are around four times as efficient as petrol, with only 20% of petrol energy converted to motion against around 80% for electric vehicles. Heavy goods vehicles are assumed to electrify about half their distance, buses 80%, short-haul aviation fully, and marine transport only 10%.

Faster processors are supposed to help too. Efficient Computer said on 29 September that it raised a $97M Series B round led by TQ Ventures. CEO Brandon Lucia wrote that the company is building the most energy-efficient processors that have ever existed and that performance can no longer come at the expense of efficiency. The company argues that narrowly specialised AI accelerators create obsolescence risk and leave unaccelerated workloads on inefficient CPUs, citing Amdahl's Law.

Infrastructure is being rebuilt around trust

Europe is also spending on the plumbing. Orange Business said on 29 September that it has been selected as the trusted network partner for TESTA-EIRIS, the EU's Enhanced Infrastructure for Reliable Interconnectivity and Security. The backbone will connect EU institutions, bodies, agencies and member states through at least 12 Points of Presence across five strategic European regions, with 99.999% availability claimed.

The contract is a press release, not an independent audit, and the availability figure is Orange's own. Still, it shows where public money is going: secure, sovereign connectivity for administrations, built on a single backbone with cloud connectivity and VPN technologies. Orange says its Evolution Platform will replace dedicated hardware with software-based virtual services.

None of this settles the price question. The dossier does not contain a single European retail electricity price for 2026, and the headline feed is full of gas and diesel warnings that cannot be cited as facts here. What the dated sources do show is a system pulling in two directions: demand for computation and electrification is rising, while the workers and projects that were meant to supply it are being cut.

David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air remains online, last modified in 2015, as a reminder that the arithmetic has not changed. The politics around it has.