power

Somalia, Saudi Arabia sign defense pact as Mogadishu aligns with Egypt to reshape Horn of Africa power balance RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Somalia has entered a strategic military alignment with Saudi Arabia and Egypt after signing a defense cooperation pact with Riyadh, a move that positions Mogadishu within a powerful Red Sea security bloc and challenges the United Arab Emirates’ expanding influence in the Horn of Africa. The agreement was signed in the Saudi capital by Somali Defense Minister Ahmed Moallim Fiqi and Saudi…

Russia launched a massive overnight air assault on Ukraine’s energy network, striking electricity generation and distribution facilities with more than 400 drones and about 40 missiles, Ukrainian officials said Thursday. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the barrage targeted the grid, generation sites and distribution substations across the country, as winter temperatures begin to plunge. “Every day, Russia could choose real diplomacy, but it chooses new strikes,” he posted on X. Moscow did not immediately comment on the…

Japan will switch the world’s largest nuclear power plant back on next week, after an alarm-setting glitch forced a halt to its first restart attempt since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the operator said. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, known as TEPCO, said it plans to resume the start-up of a reactor at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa station in Niigata prefecture on Feb. 9. A previous bid to relaunch the unit last month was suspended just hours into the process. “We plan to start up the reactor on February 9,” Takeyuki…

LISBON — Portugal braced for another bout of heavy rain and gale-force winds as nearly 200,000 homes and businesses remained without electricity days after Storm Kristin swept the country, killing five people, officials said. The national weather agency, IPMA, placed all of mainland Portugal on alert through Monday for persistent downpours accompanied by gusts up to 100 km/h. With rivers already swollen and soils saturated, authorities warned that the new system could bring flash flooding in urban areas, as well as…

Mass power outages swept across Ukraine on Saturday after a “technical malfunction” knocked out high-voltage lines linking Moldova and Romania with Ukraine, disrupting water supplies in Kyiv and forcing a complete shutdown of the capital’s metro, officials said. “Today at 10:42 am (0842 GMT), a technical malfunction occurred, causing a simultaneous shutdown of the 400-kilovolt line between the power grids of Romania and Moldova and the 750-kilovolt line between western and central Ukraine,” Ukraine’s energy minister Denys…

Widespread Power Outage: Electricity Grid Faces Third Collapse in a Month The electricity grid has recorded its third collapse in a month, raising significant concerns about the reliability of power infrastructure in the region. The latest failure, which occurred on Wednesday evening, affected millions of residents, leaving businesses shuttered and homes in darkness. This repeated instability points to deeper issues within the electrical system that demand urgent attention from authorities. Approximately 6 million people…

More than 4,000 U.S. flights were canceled and power outages stretched from Texas to Tennessee as a sprawling winter storm barreled across the eastern two-thirds of the country, threatening crippling ice, heavy snow and life-threatening cold through the weekend and into next week. Forecasters warned of snow, sleet and freezing rain across a vast area from the Southern Plains to New England, with the National Weather Service urging residents to “take this storm seriously” and prepare for an “astonishingly long swath” of snow…

Denmark is weighing the use of small modular nuclear reactors to bolster its power supply, a move that would require lifting the country’s 1985 ban on nuclear energy, the Climate and Energy Ministry said. A government framework to examine the “potentials and risks” of new nuclear technologies—and to study ending the moratorium—is now in place, the ministry added. “Green energy from solar and wind is now and will continue to be the backbone of the Danish energy supply, but we can also see that it cannot stand alone,” Climate,…

Ukrainian and Russian drone strikes battered energy infrastructure and residential areas on both sides of the front, leaving more than 200,000 people without power in occupied Zaporizhzhia and killing at least two across Ukraine, as U.S. and Ukrainian officials met in Miami to discuss security guarantees and a post-war recovery package. In Ukraine’s southeast, a Ukrainian drone strike cut electricity to more than 200,000 consumers in the Russian-held portion of the Zaporizhzhia region, according to Moscow-installed regional…

Kyiv is operating with barely half the electricity it needs as Ukraine’s capital endures its most severe wartime energy crisis after waves of Russian strikes on critical infrastructure, city officials and aid agencies said, forcing school closures, dimmed street lighting and mounting risks of hypothermia amid bitter winter cold. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Kyiv requires about 1,700 megawatts to power services for its 3.6 million residents, but current supply falls far short. “It’s the first time in the history of our city…