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The project is still on budget when the infrastructure lead tells the steering committee that the upgrade it depends on is not in this year's plan. The sponsor thought the shared service had it covered, and the shared service thought the project would pay. Both teams have been reporting accurately against budgets that do not cover the same scope. PJM, the largest U.S. grid operator, is dealing with a much larger cost-allocation dispute. It was supposed to begin buying backsto

WestJet says it has seen no in-service events from the software issue the FAA flagged on the 737 MAX. The same issue is holding up certification of the MAX 10, which had been widely expected in October. ✈️ The software comes from GE Aerospace and affects automated flight guidance during a go-around, when pilots abandon a landing and climb away to try again. The FAA plans a review board to assess the safety risk. Asked how long a fix might take, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford

On Monday, Metro's Russian business said it was operating as normal and meeting its obligations to shoppers. The same day, its German parent said it had lost operational control. Both statements can be true. A presidential decree placed Metro's Russian assets under temporary management by a company registered three weeks earlier and owned by the head of its Russian business. The 91 wholesale stores can keep serving customers while the parent no longer controls them. From the

The person accountable for an AI agent may not be able to stop it themselves, and by the time the vendor suspends it, the work may already be with another agent. The original agent may also have started a transaction that stopping it will not reverse, so the payment could already be out the door or the records already shared. A policy saying a human can intervene is not much of a control if nobody can show that person can stop the agent while it is still running. Naming an ow

On June 18, an OpenAI agent looking up public medical spending figures for an internal evaluation bypassed blocks on Australia's Medicare statistics portal and accessed non-public files. OpenAI says it became aware on August 11, 54 days later. Australia heard on September 10, another 30 days on, and according to the Prime Minister the notice arrived as an email to a public mailbox. For operators, that timeline is at least as interesting as the breach. There are two different

The FAA has 11,389 project schedules for the first phase of its air traffic control modernization. What it does not yet have is one integrated schedule. The number comes from a GAO review released this month. The modernization is also happening while the existing air traffic control system still has to operate every day. On Monday, a failed primary communications circuit and a severed backup fibre line disrupted thousands of flights, with arrivals halted for hours at major Ea

Canada is proposing to have major federal project reviews finished within a year, partly by running more work side by side. Parallel work is where schedules either recover months or quietly lose them again to rework. It's one of several big decisions this week. South Korea is working through a $350 billion US investment package and has reached the point where individual projects have to prove they make commercial sense. Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery deal cle

Texas stopped issuing new state data-centre permits this week. Alberta now has more than 100 projects proposed. Capital Power says the Meta project has raised Alberta’s credibility with other hyperscalers, that it is talking to several more, and that the province could become a multi-gigawatt market. On its own, that sounds like an attraction problem being solved, and it mostly is. But success changes the problem you are solving. Texas has paused new state-issued permits whil

Reuters reported Saturday that Defiance, Ohio put a six-month hold on data center approvals. No company has announced one there. After the county's economic development office fielded inquiries from tech companies, residents gathered signatures for a November 3 ballot measure to ban all but the smallest data centers. City officials imposed the moratorium. Defiance isn't isolated. The Ohio Capital Journal reports that voters in 18 Ohio communities will decide data center measu

In 2009, Georgia Power asked regulators to approve two AP1000 reactors at Plant Vogtle, a standardized design that used modular construction to make the build simpler and more repeatable. The units were expected to cost about $14 billion and be running by 2016 and 2017. They entered service roughly seven years late at more than $30 billion. The causes cited include first-of-a-kind learning, an immature supply chain and workforce, Westinghouse's bankruptcy and the pandemic. So

Kkiefuik This photo was taken with Canon EOS 90D, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Two energy stories landed in my feed today, one out of Washington and one out of Madrid, and at first glance they have nothing to do with each other. In the U.S., the House is expected to vote on a bill meant to keep the power costs of large AI data centres off ordinary household bills. In Spain, the government raised planned investment in its trans

Ursula von der Leyen stood up in Strasbourg Wednesday for her State of the Union address and said she wants to open the door for Canada to become the EU's first "associate member." That phrase will carry the headlines, though I think the bigger story is what Canada and Europe seem willing to build underneath it. The caveat matters, because EU treaties don't provide for associate membership, so member states would have to agree on what it means, and nothing guarantees they wil

E3 Lithium's announcement this morning is short, and the most interesting thing in it is the buyer's address rather than the volume. A non-binding agreement with Epsilon CAM in India, for up to 5,000 tonnes a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate out of the Clearwater project in Alberta. It lands in the same week Canada is putting more than 160 projects in front of global investors, with a headline ambition of C$1 trillion over five years. E3 is one of them. There is a lot

Canada's share of merchandise exports going to the United States fell from 75.9% in 2024 to 71.7% last year, and Statistics Canada clocked July at 66.3%, the lowest reading since 1997 outside the pandemic. That is a remarkable shift in the customer mix, and it has not yet moved a single rail line. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Mark Carney is exploring whether Canada could hold some form of associate membership with the European Union. The status does not exist y

Chinese refiners have a supply problem this week. A pipeline from Alberta is already part of the answer. Reuters reports that Chinese independent refiners have bought more than 20 million barrels from Canada, West Africa and South America as supplies from Iran and Russia become harder to secure. Canadian heavy crude moving through Trans Mountain is part of that buying wave. Most of the case for diversifying Canada’s oil exports is about us: what happens if our largest custome

103 Search and Rescue Unit, Canadian Forces Base Gander I turned on the news that morning mostly for white noise. Minutes later, I watched Flight 175 hit the South Tower. It was a beautiful early morning in Vancouver, the sky only just beginning to brighten, and I was getting ready to head to the office. It took me a minute to realize something was terribly wrong, and even as I watched it happen, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. There are moments when the world cha

GE Aerospace has agreed to pay $11.75 billion for Consolidated Precision Products, a castings company most people outside aerospace have never heard of, and one GE has been buying from for more than 15 years. CPP makes highly engineered castings that go into jet engines, and castings have become a persistent constraint on engine output. GE says it wants more capacity, but it also wants design and manufacturing closer together so it can apply its own operating system to the pl

Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons In January, Trump threatened a 50% tariff on Canadian-built aircraft and said he would decertify Bombardier’s Global Express jets. This week it became: if you want the U.S. market, build here. Same company and same president, seven months apart, but a very different problem. A tariff changes the economics of selling into a market. A localization requirement changes the operating

We put a team of young developers in charge of code that was older than most of them. Seven applications, thirty years of patches, billions of dollars in operating revenue running through them, and a service provider that was winding down whether we were ready or not. We had bought the legacy software from them, and responsibility for keeping it running was moving to us. Naturally, we asked for the documentation. We got a user manual from 1996. Most of the original developers

Four of us heard the same wrong word on a Gino Vannelli record last weekend. And I was the reason. I was golfing with some friends at a beautiful course in Kananaskis Country. Dave was kind enough to drive, which meant I got to look around instead of paying attention to the road. At one point, I noticed several dark bovines standing by the side of the road, out of the sun. And for reasons that made perfect sense in my head, I immediately belted out: "Black cows look better in