Apollo with the Chart Combo of the Day. 🔥

I missed this excellent piece a few months ago from @timhade.bsky.social on why meeting data center demand with off-grid gas plants is way more complicated than many assume. steelforfuel.substack.com/p/data-cente...

WoodMac makes the case for why we're in for a future with higher natural gas prices. www.woodmac.com/horizons/why...

🔌💡 Clean energy can reliably meet the American economy’s insatiable demand for #electricity, at lower costs than if we primarily rely on aging coal plants and volatile natural gas. thepowerline.substack.com/p/clean-ener... by @brendan.bsky.social

US data center construction reached another new record high in official data released today, hitting a pace of nearly $60B/yr (and this only includes data center facilities, not the expensive computers within) Spending's up 23% over the last year and 328% since ChatGPT's launch

Texas has no clean energy mandate. It just beat fossil fuels with wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro on 62% of days this year. Nobody told the grid to do this, just the market.

Looks hot out there. @gridstatus.io

Opportunity for huge impact on the way data centers get powered? Or recipe for a smart person with good intentions to get railroaded by short-term commercial pressures to power data centers? You decide! jobs.ashbyhq.com/Crusoe/8eb03...

Great argument from @ricoconnell.bsky.social that flexible interconnection for large loads only solves half the problem. Generation should also have a fast, flexible path to access the grid if we're going to meet new demand. gridlab.org/fercs-new-lo...

A new WoodMac report finds that the Trump administration's refusal to issue lawful permits for renewable energy development is putting 92 gigawatts of energy and $121 billion worth of investment at risk. The same administration that says the need for power is a "national emergency."

The case for meeting load growth with renewables? $5 billion in savings -- great coverage of our new report by Catherine Boudreau at @latitudemedia.bsky.social www.latitudemedia.com/news/the-cas...

New @energyinnovation.org study from me, @matthiasfripp.org and @michelle-solomon.bsky.social shows that clean energy can meet rapidly growing electricity demand, saving money and reducing the risk of fuel price spikes. Read here! #energysky energyinnovation.org/report/let-t...

🚨New Report🚨 Modeling shows that meeting forecast #electricity demand growth with fossil fuels will add $29.7 billion annually to customer bills by 2030. But #CleanEnergy can reliably meet load growth and save $5 billion per year. 🔌💡 energyinnovation.org/report/let-t...

Here’s what the air conditioning discourse illuminates: to deal with climate change we need to electrify & we need zero carbon electricity, we also need more electricity- like double or triple what we have. And we need more cooling & cooling equity. There will be folks fighting against all of that.

Incredible work from @amywestervelt.bsky.social details just how compromised that famous original "wedges" study was by the involvement of BP -- not just funding, but direct rewriting & editing.

Inflation has a new catalyst: America’s massive artificial-intelligence build-out is beginning to push up prices on everything from smartphones to electricity. www.wsj.com/economy/the-...

Some wild trends out of the American Time Use Survey. We are socializing less, playing more video games, and cooking!

new insane SoftBank deck dropped group.softbank/media/Projec...

Rural electric cooperatives turn to batteries: www.utilitydive.com/news/not-for...

16 GW of distributed capacity for the grid 🔋☀️: www.canarymedia.com/articles/vir...

Microsoft was leading the field on clean energy procurement practices and ambitious climate goals, but this project seems like a pretty clear abandonment of all of that: www.chevron.com/newsroom/202...

A great resource on fossil fuel price volatility and the benefits of clean energy transition from the Energy Transitions Commission. www.energy-transitions.org/publications...

Well, this situation is confusing. www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...

There is a common trope about how solar energy has low power density so it would use land way more than fossil fuels, and let me tell you...https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

Behind the meter data centers don't provide ratepayer protections. They may end up increasing prices for consumers more than grid connected data centers. www.utilitydive.com/news/data-ce...

We have some really cool jobs open right now at EPI, if I may say so. An early-career fellowship, a data engineer position, and a CA-focused research manager. My colleagues are amazing. We have fun and we make a difference. energyandpolicy.org/jobs/

Google and Intersect are building over a gigawatt of solar, wind and battery energy storage to power a new Texas data center with an on-site clean energy park. blog.google/innovation-a...

Republican, independent, and Democratic voters agree on this: Government corruption is hurting democracy. A new Brennan Center survey finds strong support for bold solutions to combat corruption. bit.ly/4apvVns

New research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human. doi.org/10.32866/001...

It's sort of like if a coal plant had been permitted in Northern Virginia and nobody knew? www.sierraclub.org/articles/202...

Backup generators at Virginia data centers are permitted to emit nearly as much NOx each year than the dirtiest coal plant (New Madrid in MO) produces in a year. 👀

On The Climate Brink, I write about how hard it is to predict the future of our energy system. The failure of past predictions should make us hesitant to put too much faith in future predictions. #energysky 🔌💡 www.theclimatebrink.com/p/nobody-kno...

Predicting the future of energy is hard, and reality has a way of moving in directions we don't anticipate. Andrew Dessler has a new piece over at The Climate Brink on how energy systems have evolved in the US compared to expectations: www.theclimatebrink....

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

I made a thing (well, Claude made a thing) to explore electricity generation trends by state. This is work in progress, but welcome feedback! bpierpont.github.io/state-genera...

Great stuff from @knowledgeproblem.bsky.social on how large loads like data centers are different. knowledgeproblem.substack.com/p/you-cant-j...

By November the data centers are going to be Biden’s fault.

NextEra and Dominion have proposed to merge into a mega utility. One interesting part of the proposal is buried here in the investor deck - proposing bill credits for Dominion customers! A sign of how much extra value NextEra sees in this deal...

Something remarkable is happening in hyperscale infrastructure. Google, Meta, and AWS are quietly converging on the same infrastructure philosophy: → Limit gigawatt-scale off-grid campuses → Stay connected to the public grid → Smaller, distributed facilities for AI inference

Then there is what happened just last night on California's grid with the arrival of the extra SunZia wind power. Those natural gas plants that wait poised to surge at sunset ... just weren't needed. 1.5 GW of gas during the day to be ready went to 1 GW at sunset with 9 GW of batteries. Amazing.

We're gonna have to do something about this eventually and eventually is a lot sooner than anyone thinks.

It's February 2020 all over again. I think we're all so conditioned to the news cycle being fleeting and moving on to the next thing that nobody actually takes big structural risks that take months/years to play out seriously.

According to oil analysts, the world is about to exhaust its standing oil reserves, at which point the demand destruction from the strait closure will bite relatively suddenly, oil will shoot up as much as 2X, & we could very well enter a second Great Depression. Look around. Do we seem ready?

Seizing the moment: Pakistan targets 95% renewable electricity by 2040, 60% by 2030! The key rationale is cutting reliance on imported fossil fuels.

This is definitely a trend to watch.

Congrats Fervo friends - you've built something world-changing and folks are starting to see it. @timlatimer.bsky.social @serrurier.bsky.social @jackconness.bsky.social

⚡️ ICYMI -- released a report last week on utility distribution costs! ⚡️ Our Goal: help stakeholders understand the scope, scale, and drivers of recent increases in IOU expenditures on local distribution power grids: emp.lbl.gov/publications... thread 👇️ 👇️ 👇️

Projected increase in household energy costs from curtailing IRA's power sector credits: ~$55-640/year in 2035. States matter more than the national number.

NEW: “Once a climate project, electrification is now a geopolitical insurance policy. A fossil fuel supremacist government has made oil and gas costly and unreliable—and accelerated the turn to the electric world order.” @katemac.bsky.social & I @phenomenalworld.bsky.social