Cheap renewables and batteries are creating demand destruction in the global natural gas markets including in the country with the cheapest natural gas in the world - the USA. Climate change is also helping drive this demand destruction. @kevinjkircher.com

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

Solar and storage are going to transform electricity markets for decades to come and we're just getting started. Really interesting analysis from IRENA on the cost of solar firmed with energy storage. www.irena.org/Publications...

Public finance could be a really powerful tool for improving and revitalizing communities, reducing costs for residents, and addressing climate change. But the model is so broken, so we get stuff like this instead.

Following up on reporting by the Financial Times, the NYTimes confirms that the Pentagon is holding up proposed wind projects across the US by stalling what used to be routine reviews (gift link). 🔌💡 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/c...

Rhodium Group just dropped a detailed report on why your electricity bill keeps going up. It’s excellent. The diagnosis is right. The prognosis is too defeatist. A thread. 🧵

We recently installed an induction range, and the ability to inject 5 kW of power directly into the bottom of a pan is a feeling of raw power not unlike the first time you floor it in an EV. The future really is better.

Sopaipilla lmao.

The researchers at LBL have done a deep dive on rising distribution costs and what is driving them. Really great stuff: emp.lbl.gov/publications...

Wonderful visuals and discussion in this piece, but misses a big part of this story that I highlighted in a recent thread (👇) Most of these collapses in Buxton/Rodanthe from late last year were bought in the last 5 years. Often as vacation rentals. Now the beach is strewn with their debris.

We have reached the point where firmed renewable energy (FRE) is economically favored over FF. Building renewables & storage at 2:1 enables excess renewable power to be used 24/7. As nations fight over dwindling FF the cost advantage for FRE grows. 🧪💡🔌☀️💨💧🔋 www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/30/r...

Great news ICYMI: the huge CHPE renewables transmission project from Canada to NYC is now running power. Atm it’s in test mode. Very soon it’ll send commercial electric power. It’s HUGE: it’ll be about 20% of the power for the entire NYC grid, which will go from ~10% to ~30% hydro, solar & wind!

Word, when you have one word document open that is a couple MB in file size.

America’s economic story is just 10 giant companies. What could go wrong.

Indiana communities aren't anti-tech. They're anti-being-lied-to. A $5B data center banned live questions at its own town hall. That's not engagement, that's reading a press release in a crowded room. Genuine engagement matters. @latitudemedia.bsky.social @maeveallsup.bsky.social

Happy EDAM go-live day for those who celebrate 🔌💡: www.caiso.com/about/news/n...

Coal kills Americans. A lot of us. www.sierraclub.org/coal/mapping...

I think wonky discussions of electricity market design can be fun and entertaining. If you agree, you’re the target audience of CAISO’s new podcast.

A reminder that over 6,500 people die prematurely each year because of air pollution from coal plants. www.sierraclub.org/coal/mapping...

New peer-reviewed finding: Have you tried plugging it in? (Eight models confirm electrification of transport and buildings is the primary driver of emission reductions in every scenario consistent with the Paris Agreement… and can lower energy wallet spending)

New work from Pew highlights how to scale up distributed resources to meet the demand growth and affordability needs of today's grid. 🔌💡 www.pew.org/en/research-...

A lot of talk about encouraging data center flexibility integrate new loads. But what does that actually involve? Some good recommendations and approaches in this report. 🔌💡https://www.esig.energy/reports-briefs/large-loads-resource-adequacy/

NEW: Falling fossil everywhere: For the first time in 2025, fossil electricity generation fell in EVERY OECD country, compared to its peak. Solar and wind are helping the power sector to transition away from fossil fuels #TAFF

This is an actual line that was added to the official system prompt for Codex for GPT-5.5 by OpenAI. Usually the system prompt is as minimal as possible, so I assume it would otherwise mention goblins a lot. AIs are weird.

Read every word here from @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social in today's NYT. I like the idea of a "national grid modernization fund," but would think more broadly about capturing surplus from the tech sector and broadly investing in America's physical layer. (1/2) 🔌💡 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Okay I did some updated calculations using more realistic assumptions about emissions rates and a range of values. My average estimates: - 63.6 TWh - 31.61 MMTCO2e - 2,513.3 tons NOx - 97.3 tons PM2.5 - 810.7 tons SO2 - 729.7 tons VOCs

So much cost that could have been avoided with a big rollout of electric busses.

The same week the president invokes the Defense Protection Act to protect the fossil fuel industry a court stopped DOI from throttling solar and wind permitting. Plaintiffs’ report found @57.2 GW of projects were cancelled or face delay or cancellation due to DOI actions.

Distribution connected storage gaining steam in VA www.utilitydive.com/news/virgini...

Every system that was regulated, either explicitly or implicitly, by the fact that they were effortful for humans (letters of recommendation, government filings, essays, or, as this paper finds, lawsuits) will break under a wave of AI.

Another competitive retailer using storage to enable lower costs and better customer reliability: heatmap.news/climate-tech...

Ember has (finally) posted world electricity data for December, January, and February. Based on the 12-month rolling totals from this data, the order of the 4th, 5th, and 6th place sources has reversed: Solar 8.96% Wind 8.87% Nuclear 8.78% 🔌💡

Fascinating and unsettling conversation about the embedding of AI and automation systems in defense. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

If this is what "open" looks like then "closed" won't be declared until someone pulls the big bathtub plug and drains the whole damn waterway. #Iran #uspol#iran https://www.ishormuzopenyet.com/?lat=25.56470&lng=55.95330&zoom=7

Finally made it through this long read that has been sitting in an open tab for two months, on how the political left is engaging with AI. It's well worth a read: www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...