Really excellent piece on data center load growth, the obligation to serve, and ideas about where we go from here.

Geothermal upstart @zanskargeothermal.bsky.social just announced its biggest finding yet By @kbrigham.bsky.social via @heatmap.news heatmap.news/climate-tech...

Okay we're there.

1) New paper! Replacing US fossil-fueled vehicles & appliances with electric versions could improve health & climate outcomes, but could cost up to $790 billion in distribution grid reinforcement. Strategic demand-side management could cut 2/3 of those costs.🔌💡 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How does Big Tech achieve "speed to power" for data centers given clogged interconnection queues & supply chain bottlenecks? How to avoid saddling ratepayers w the costs of grid upgrades? @rewiringamerica.bsky.social has answers: pay for heat pumps, rooftop solar & storage.

🔌💡 The #ClimateTechAtlas is your guide to identifying the technologies that can accelerate decarbonization at scale. climatetechatlas.com Developed with contributions from Breakthrough, Elemental Impact, Energy Innovation, McKinsey Sustainability & Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability 👇

Latitude reports on a new study showing that combined-cycle gas turbines slated for service in 2030–31 are now going for $2,000+ per kilowatt — up to 75% more than near-term projects. www.latitudemedia.com/news/gas-tur...

The #PragmaticClimateReset is a two part-essay calling for a reset in our approach to climate action. Part I shows why narratives trumpeting the failure of efforts to date are wrong. Part II says that, nevertheless, the climate community now needs to change its approach. 1/n

Excellent new resource from the NRDC team on tools and solutions to meeting rising data center demand growth: www.nrdc.org/resources/cr...

It is a pretty shocking that near-complete energy independence through home solar+storage is inching towards viability. If you're an eccentric affluent person you could probably afford to pay $200k right now and live a normal middle class life off-grid

Time for the world to install a gigawatt of solar power capacity 2004: A year 2010: ~ a month 2015: ~ a week Now: A day ourworldindata.org/data-insight... 🧪

Great survey / interview based study on barriers to clean energy siting policies at the state level. Biggest barriers: local opposition and misinformation. Top solutions: Siting standards and prioritizing brownfield redevelopment. www.dataforprogress.org/memos/9/15/f...

Claude, "We all know among Sauron's many evils was that he ran Mordor using an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs. Show me the spreadsheet" It made 12 tabs "so bureaucratically complex that even the Eye of Sauron would need reading glasses to review it." Some very funny stuff. Creative, even.

California lawmakers announced a last-minute climate and energy package, extending the cap-and-trade program to 2045 — a program seen as crucial for the state to meet its climate goals. @hayleysmith.bsky.social www.latimes.com/environment/...

One of the good uses of this time where climate has extremely little juice in the U.S. would be to sit down and map out exactly what we have to do if climate is an imperative again, primarily on social and fiscal policy.

California's SB 79 has now passed the State Senate, after passing the State Assembly yesterday. It's now on to the governor's desk. It's a big change in zoning policy for California's cities that will encourage substantial additional housing in neighborhoods around the state's transit stations.

Related to this trend, Texas regulators recently approved two new gas plants from Entergy (in the vertically integrated part of the state), but imposed a cost cap of roughly $2000/kW. Likely a response to ballooning gas plant costs across the country: www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-r...

🚨 New SHIFT KEY just dropped 🚨 This week, @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social and @jessedjenkins.com talk about why utility regulation sucks and how to make it better. Listen to the full episode on how to fix the power grid below, or wherever you get your podcasts:

Great piece outlines the pathway for energy storage on India's grid: iecc.gspp.berkeley.edu/resources/re...

Here are 10 provocations on climate and energy. Tell me if you agree, disagree or have a nuanced take. Drop your own provocations in reply or quote post. Start: 1. By 2030, the use of air conditioning will lead to greater increase in electricity demand than data centers. And it's not even close!

Gas plants have gotten a lot more expensive. Time to update those input spreadsheets. gridlab.org/portfolio-it...

The current administration has claimed renewables are making the grid less reliable. If that were the case, I'd expect states adding the most renewables over the past decade to have the largest increase in outages. However, the opposite seems to be true!

“Portland, it’s unbelievable what’s going on in Portland. The destruction of the city.” “It’s like living in hell.”

Two new papers find renewables are good insurance (they stabilize electricity price volatility in welfare improving ways) www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🔌💡

That quote below was from me, yesterday, expressing concerns about a slowdown in the labor market. Today's weak jobs report makes things worse. Here's why. 🧵

Very cool job alert. x.company/careers/8149...

Some really interesting thinking on where we need to go next on interconnection, from Travis Kavulla (NRG) and Eric Blank (CO PUC). www.utilitydive.com/news/custome... Summarizes a longer brief they just published: www.eba-net.org/wp-content/u...

🤔 www.calculatedriskblog.com/2025/09/trad...

This was completely predictable. As I’ve been noting for several years, if you build LNG terminals you will increase domestic natural gas prices. It is designed to shift wealth from US energy consumers to gas producers - and it’s working.

Well, the Energy Emergency is for real now, but the damage is coming from inside the (White) House

The HIFLD data portal (home to countless valuable geospatial datasets) has been shut down, but these guys have archived the whole thing and made layers available in a web viewer or GIS web service: www.seer.ai/the-open-pla...

💡 New Transmission Paper alert 💡 “Electric transmission value and its drivers in United States power markets” just went live in Nature Communications! Kudos especially to Julie Mulvaney Kemp for getting this work to the finish line. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

We’re on hour 7 of a power outage impacting 15k people across Portland (I think a distribution substation transformer exploded!) - a good time to remember that bulk electricity grid outages are extremely rare and most reliability issues occur on the distribution grid.

Official data is in today, and America set a new record-high for solar power in June, with generation up 25% compared to last year!

With electricity costs in the news lately, it's worth remembering that wholesale energy supply costs - for example, generating electricity from wind/solar vs. coal/gas - make up just 7% of residential utility bills, and less than 1% of overall housing-related costs for typical American households.

“The postwar order rested on three pillars: American hegemony, the fossil-fuel energy system, and an open, multilateral trading order. America has now attacked each pillar at the foundation of its hydrocarbon global order.” — New: @katemac.bsky.social & I www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/bri...

Seems bad

Data visualization and public power fans will love this storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bced...

Man, do I have a report for you: energyinnovation.org/report/clean...

So obvious + needed to share interconnection capacity at POI = allows for incremental increases in gen without requiring new physical network upgrades surplusinterconnection.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/PJM.pdf

Permissionless DERs doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I nominate "guerilla solar"

Being the person they have to call when the LLM hits its limit and they're running in circles is already the position I and some of my peers are already in. The problem here is the pipeline. You don't get to my capability, by replacing younger less experienced me with an LLM. This is gonna be bad.

Agreed! Though I think the US is perhaps the least interesting country for this development. 1 kW of plug-and-play PV in every Indonesian household is 70 GW… would knock down a huge swath of daytime coal generation

I think we're at the tip of the iceberg for permissionless DERs. Imagine a 1200 W plug in solar, with a few kWh of storage on the same circuit acting as a UPS for your fridge or room AC. Could get interesting.

Offshore wind can be an effective hedge against volatile natural gas prices. www.utilitydive.com/news/offshor...

New from me: Do we need a new regulatory paradigm to stop data centers from completely mucking up our power system? I spoke with two legal scholars about one possible path: insideclimatenews.org/news/2808202...

We have an electricity regulatory construct that assumes we need to meet everyone's demand all the time. Really interesting piece on the potential to shift to a paradigm where we manage scarcity through flexibility. "Demand Side Connect and Manage": papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Offshore wind has higher capacity value than gas CTs, according to PJM. So when the Trump admin claims offshore wind makes no contribution to resource adequacy/reliability, it's lying. #energysky #greensky www.pjm.com/-/media/DotC...

ICE is arresting contract firefighters on active wildfires. This is especially significant for the fire workforce in the PNW because of the heavy reliance on contract workforce. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...