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The U.S. Department of Energy has ordered another power plant, this time an oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania, to keep its turbines running through the hottest summer months as a precaution against electricity shortfalls in the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid. The department’s order to the grid operator, PJM Interconnection, regarding the Eddystone power plant just south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River, is the department’s second use of federal power under President Donald Trump to require a power plant to keep operating on the mainland United States. Constellation Energy had planned to shut down Eddystone’s units 3 and 4 on Saturday, but Trump’s Department of Energy ordered the company to continue operating the units until at least Aug. 28. The units can produce a combined 760 megawatts. The department, in its order, cited PJM’s growing concerns about power shortfalls amid the shutdown of aging power plants and rising electricity demand. PJM last year approved Constellation’s request to shut down the units, but it welcomed the department’s order to keep them operating, saying it’s a prudent, term-limited step that allows PJM, the department, and Constellation to study the longer-term need and viability of Eddystone’s units. The department took a similar step last week, ordering Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant open in Michigan past its Saturday retirement. The grid operator there, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, said the order was unnecessary, that there was no energy emergency there, and that there should be enough energy in the region through the summer. An environmental advocacy group, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, criticized the move to keep Eddystone operating as an “environmental injustice.” Shutting down the units would reduce hazardous pollution and carbon emissions from the decades-old facility and help the region meet federal clean air standards for smog, it said.
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A construction project on one of Newark Liberty International Airport‘s three main runways wrapped up nearly two weeks early, so the Federal Aviation Administration expects to be able to ease flight limits next week despite the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. Federal Transportation Department officials said Monday that some of the runway equipment must be tested before the FAA can increase the flight limits at the second busiest airport in the New York City area. The runway began to be used for departures Monday but won’t be available for arrivals until after that testing is completed early next week. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that if all goes well, the runway should be certified by June 10. Crews worked day and night to complete the $121 million construction project 13 days ahead of schedule and ease some of the problems at the airport. But Newark has also been plagued by cancellations and delays this spring because of a shortage of air traffic controllers after the FAA had technical problems that twice briefly knocked out the radar and communications at a facility in Philadelphia that directs planes in and out of the airport. Five air traffic controllers went on 45-day trauma leaves after the first radar and communications outage at the Philadelphia facility on April 28, and another one is out on medical leave. That left the facility with only 16 certified controllers and five supervisors. Officials have said there are another 16 experienced controllers in training who should get certified sometime between now and October. The FAA limited the Newark airport to 28 arrivals and 28 departures an hour last month because of the construction and staff shortages. The agency has said that it expects to be able to bump up the number of flights daily in Newark to 34 arrivals and 34 departures once the runway construction is done. The controllers on trauma leave are scheduled to return around the middle of the month. But Duffy said the FAA has enough controllers now to handle the higher limit of 34 arrivals and departures per hour. Before the air traffic control problems this spring, 38 or 39 flights typically took off and landed hourly at the Newark airport. The FAA has said it will revisit the limits again in October because it hopes to have more controllers trained by then. The government also upgraded the software at the air traffic control facility after a second radar outage on May 9. That helped prevent a repeat problem on May 11 when there was another problem with the lines carrying the radar signal down from New York. Verizon has installed a new fiber optic line between Philadelphia and New York after the problems but that isn’t expected to go into service until July after testing is completed. Josh Funk, Associated Press
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The fifth and final season of Netflixs Stranger Things is dropping on Netflix just in time for Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And also New Years Eve. The industry-leading streaming service, whose stock reached a record high on Monday after the weekends successful Tudum 2025 event, just announced that the conclusion to its monster hit series will arrive in three batches. The first four episodes are set to debut on November 26 (the day before Thanksgiving) at 8pm ET, the following three air on Christmas Day at the same time, and the final episode will come out on New Years Eve, also at 8pm ET. Its an innovative, carefully calibrated twist on the staggered streaming release schedule, although some fans seem to find Netflixs upcoming stranglehold on holiday viewing as diabolical as a demogorgon. Streaming services can go any number of ways these days when putting out a new season of a beloved show. As they assess the right drop pattern, executives tend to consider target audience, episode length, and total number of episodes, alongside other less tangible factors such as whether the show has a 10-hour movie-style continuous story, lending itself more to the binge model, or an intense character-study vibe, which smolders as its doled out. Netflix has been breaking up hits like Bridgerton into two batched binges for years, while Hulu sticks with full-binge for The Bear, Prime Video offers three episodes to kick off The Boys before slowing down with weekly episodes, and Maxs Hacks sometimes airs an episode or two per week with seemingly no rhyme or reason. If it could be said that there are any rules to how a streamer releases a hot show, these services are rewriting and codifying them in real time. When Netflix released the most recent season of Stranger Things three summers ago, it set out to monopolize two close-together holidays: Memorial Day and July 4th. The first volume of the fourth season arrived on May 27, 2022, with seven episodes, and then concluded on July 1, with two more. It proved a successful scheduling gambit. All told, the season racked up a seismic 1.352 billion hours of viewing in its first 28 days, ranking as Netflix’s most-watched English-language series, and second overall after the first season of Squid Game. Even more impressive, the fourth season of Stranger Things had no small part in helping the company add 2.41 million subscribers in Q3 2022, when it dropped. Netflixs approach to scheduling the final season of Stranger Things takes that blatant holiday-ownership approach a step further, though. By stretching out the season across three major end-of-year holidaysduring which families are frequently hunkered down together, hunting for crowd-pleasing popcorn fareNetflix is capitalizing on its captive audience. As if to underscore the point, the service is bumping up its usual 3am ET drop time for new releases to what is known in terrestrial TV world as prime time, at 8pm ET, when families are more likely to fill up couches together. Its an ingenuous tactic for driving up end-of-year subscriptions, one that will almost certainly end up breaking viewership records. But it also feels rather brazen in its attempt to conquer all family holidays with a gargantuan four-quadrant hit. When Netflix offered a holiday release for the second season of Squid Game last year, for instance, the service waited until the day after Christmasperhaps out of respect for the sanctity of the holiday, or in fear of being crowded out by too many Home Alone, Elf and National Lampoons Christmas Vacation viewingsand dropped the entire season all at once. This year, Netflix is owning its ambition to dominate the holidays. (To that end, its also building on last years Christmas Day NFL games, which collectively attracted 65 million U.S. viewers, a record for most-streamed NFL games ever, with two more Christmas Day games.) The service clearly has faith that the draw of Stranger Things wrapping up is enough to put A Muppet Christmas Carol and its ilk on the backburner for one year. Plenty of Stranger Things fans are only too happy to have their family time supplemented by the suburban, supernatural hijinks of the worlds most twentysomething teens. Guess Im spending the holidays in Hawkins this year, a typical commenter replied to Netflixs tweet announcing the release dates. (And were happy to have ya nerd, Netflix wrote back.) Not all fans were as excited, though, about the way the final season is being teased out. Some of them complained about Netflix breaking up the conclusion theyve been waiting three years for into three chunks, prolonging their anticipation. Others seem more opposed to the idea of Netflix encroaching on so much family time with an offer Stranger Things fans cant refusethe TV equivalent of bumping up Black Friday deals to Thursday around dinner time. All of them will likely tune in to watch, though, along with a billion or two fellow subscribers. If the grand finale succeeds at the level Netflix expects it to, perhaps the end of Stranger Things will spell the beginning of a new arms race for holiday streaming content, launching in 2026.
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