This is amazing: @ladwp.com, the Los Angeles utility, has launched a program that will install solar+battery systems on qualifying low-to-moderate-income households, *for free*. Yes: free. If you know someone eligible, tell them to apply!

Thank you, Judge Young. Thank you, AAUP (proud to be a member).

“A broad shift to electric vehicles -- which are quieter than traditional vehicles -- could yield noise reduction benefits of $77.3 billion, concentrated among low-income families in dense urban areas.” www.nber.org/papers/w34298

A new paper led by Cody Warner at Berkeley shows that utilities can mitigate wildfire risk much more quickly and cheaply by using dynamic grid management (such as fast-trip switches that very quickly de-energize power lines in response to faults) than by trimming trees or undergrounding lines.

At the Nicholas Roerich Museum, since I can’t go to the Himalayas.

A rather brilliant idea from Massachusetts. 🔌💡

The OpenAi preprint on arXiv arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04664

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░ 72.12%

I enjoy cool descriptive papers so much

Also hospitals. There's a serious shortage of doctors, especially in rural areas.

Quite a rough morning. This means I will not be able to travel and see my family and partner for the foreseeable future. www.reuters.com/business/med...

Importantly, the employer files the petition, so the employer would be required to include a $100,000 check with the petition. But the ban on entry appears to also apply to ANYONE with an H-1B currently, and says that petitions must be "supplemented" with a $100,000 fee, so who knows who pays that.

Quite interesting that despite having much more expensive electricity and gasoline, the average Californian resident spends less on energy than one in West Virginia. [From EPRI's Energy Wallet: energywallet.epri.com/en/map.html]

Our new @pnas.org study, out today, finds #EVs are not only clean cars, they can be catalysts in building a cleaner power grid too. Here's what that means for the U.S. study /w Lily Hanig, @destenie.bsky.social & @cdharper.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cool paper! Only ~33% fast charging stations provide real-time data. Making real-time data available for all highway fast chargers would raise the EV share of car sales by 8% in 2030; expand the total EV fleet by ~13% over baseline. Easy, cheap, low-hanging fruit. www.nber.org/system/files...

India has broken my graph. 30 GW of renewables added so far this year, ahead of 28.6 GW for all of 2024. robbieandrew.github.io/india

Important new paper from @marshallburke.bsky.social on the devastating toll of wildfire smoke in @nature.com "climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the US" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

The School of Planning, Policy, and Environmental Studies at San José State University is hiring an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies. We welcome applicants from all fields of environmental studies who apply an environmental justice lens to their work. jobs.sjsu.edu/sj/en-us/job...

As autonomous vehicles spread across the US, they could turn urban streets into a congested, chaotic mess. But it’s not inevitable. In @vox.com, I proposed specific ways cities can future-proof themselves for self-driving cars. 🧵

producing electrons — generation — is NOT what California IOUs (and POUs for that matter) are spending their increased revenues on

criminal that i'm so close to toronto to go see a PUP show but can't [border]

Anyone around for Climate Week NYC?

Goldman sees hyperscaler capex growth slowing down dramatically, beginning in Q4. A reversion “back to early 2023 levels would imply 15-20% downside to the current valuation multiple of the S&P 500 ..” 👀

Cancelled New England Wind, which was planned for 2–2.6 GW, enough for 900,000 homes. That’s a massive chunk of the region’s future capacity. Can't be replaced by NG, not enough capacity. www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/e...

California quietly guts ambitious virtual power plant bill www.canarymedia.com/articles/vir... via @jeffstjohn.bsky.social

New paper in Nature finds that global geologic CO2 storage potential is ~90% lower than previously believed. Many candidate sites could leak CO2 back into the air or into groundwater, undermining climate mitigation efficacy or putting nearby human health at risk. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Will the future be forward-looking, green and bravely planetary—or will it be backward-looking, carbon-intensive and stridently sovereigntist?” Great piece that looks past technology to understand the energy transition and implications for “axis of petrostates”. foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/01/e...

The Department of Energy hired five academics to raise doubts about climate change. 85+ climate experts (organized by @andrewdessler.com) reviewed their report. Our conclusion, detailed in 450 pages of analysis: it is biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policy making.

Whoopsie. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and highway engineers surprised by induced demand

A Casualty of Trump’s Tariffs: India’s Nascent Solar Industry www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/c...

Our comment on the DOE CWG report is done. It tips the scales at 439 pages, approx. 3x longer than the DOE report. This is related to Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Example: refuting one sentence.

Very surprising to me given EU standards are much less stringent than US and we haven’t seen these shares in on-road monitoring studies in the US.

Lovely to chat with Heatmap news and provide some California context on rising electricity prices.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ heatmap.news/energy/why-i...

Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use *Three Times* as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the *Entire City Of New Orleans*, every year. Y'all this isn't sustainable.

This comes from our new Energy Wallet white paper: energywallet.epri.com If you're interested in why California's prices increased sharply check out the paper below in The Electricity Journal: bsky.app/profile/mada...

How have residential electricity prices changed over time? Many states have tracked inflation in recent decades, even states in the midwest with extensive wind deployment.

vibes continue to be not very immaculate but the new deftones album comes out in 6 hours

We've finally got some hard numbers on AI's energy demand from a major tech company: Google says a median prompt to Gemini uses 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. 🧵 @technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

Wow. I knew that part of the cost difference between Municipal power companies and investor owned utilities (IOU). Urban NIMBYs have pushed CA housing production into the flammable WUI or deserts. This is the price

Electricity prices in California's investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and community choice aggregator (CCA) territories have more than doubled in a decade, after accounting for inflation. What are these power providers spending the increased revenues on? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"AI Is Power-Hungry" by @pkrugman.bsky.social . And, given how prices are determined in the regulated power market in the US, consumers pay the price of the energy demand of data centres. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

ninedotsprize.org/extract-from... Look forward to this book! Been thinking about this for a while, and enjoyed the excerpt

I don't know why this lad is building a subterranean city for cats, but I'm all for it.

Probably would help if we could keep these. amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/08/...

How China went from clean energy copycat to global tech leader www.nytimes.com/interactive/... 🔌💡