Santa's wearing shorts this year. Christmas 2025 is forecast to be the warmest mean temperature across the Contiguous U.S. in the past half century. h/t my colleague Erik Smith for the analysis: 2025 temps from GFS 06z, 1975-2024 from ERA5, area-weighted (lat) and averaged over the CONUS.

"Hard-to-abate" is sometimes code for "we haven't looked closely yet." This great new report shows opportunities for clean heat (low/medium-temp industrial process heat) through electrification, which also has public health benefits.

Solar wait times in interconnection queues are increasing, too.

Wind developers: "We're ready to build." Grid: "Please hold. Your call is very important to us. Estimated wait time... 8 to 12 years."

South Australia has an impressive amount of wind and rooftop solar. It also relies on gas and imports, which range from 2% of daily demand (Nov. 17 on the left) to >80% (Jun. 26 on the right). This great chart is courtesy of my colleague Mike Caravaggio.

#ModelingMonday: A key modeling assumption with big consequences is non-economic deployment constraints. Permitting, land access, local ordinances, supply chains, social acceptance. These shape what can get built but are tricky to model.

AI looks great on multiple-choice... but ask it to explain something and the wheels come off. EPRI's new benchmarking shows a 27-point accuracy drop when moving from MCQs to open-ended questions. Apparently the electric sector is more complex than the International Math Olympiad.

Batteries aren't the future; they're in the grids many states are building now. In a few years, storage has gone from a rounding error to double-digit capacity shares in AZ, NV, CA, TX, and others. The energy storage map is being redrawn a lot faster than people think.

Wow... NYC's congestion pricing has led to big drops in PM2.5 and real improvements in local air quality.

Everyone's arguing about how much power AI data centers will use. EPRI's new Speed to Power report is about something more fundamental: how fast that power can be delivered while making data centers grid resources (flexible load, faster interconnections, cleaner mix).

Successful technologies decrease in cost on average by about 20% or so for each doubling of cumulative capacity, but past departures from this rate are not good predictors of future departures from this rate. Skillful prediction requires technoeconomic analysis, and not just a rearview mirror.

We love to say "costs fall X% every time capacity doubles." This paper looks at 87 technologies and says: actually, no. Past learning rates are not reliable predictors of future learning.

Households face annual costs of roughly $400–$900 from climate change—mainly from disasters, higher insurance, and energy costs—with lower-income families and certain regions hit disproportionately, from @kclausing.bsky.social, Knittel, and @cwolfram.bsky.social www.nber.org/papers/w34525

RIP Frank Gehry, a legend in every medium.

New RFF study finds: -Techs that cut grid demand (rooftop PV) can push avg. prices up and hurt low-income non-adopters. -Techs raising demand (EVs, heat pumps) push prices down and help them. In high fixed-cost systems, spreading pizza over more slices makes each slice cheaper.

How do we connect data centers to the grid quickly and avoid driving up costs for other electricity consumers? The solution: a 2-part combo of flexible interconnection agreements & bring-your-own-capacity (BYOC) arrangements, according to a new report out today from Camus, my ZERO Lab, and encoord.

Updated data: US EVs have basically flatlined around ~10% of new car sales since 2023. That's well below Norway/China/EU/California and on the low side of recent model projections, most of which assumed IRA tax credits that have now expired.

Updated CEPR eBook is stacked with great writers and, for some reason, me on "Changes in Federal Climate Policy." I'm assuming this was a data entry error, but I'll take it. Check out the rest of the free eBook here: cepr.org/publications...

There's a lot of new solar and energy storage in the hopper across the country. Texas and California get the headlines, but look at that swarm of projects popping up across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.

Worldwide clean energy investment is now roughly 2x fossil fuel spending, per IEA.

If your Thanksgiving table isn’t arguing about the Jones Act, are you even on #EnergySky?

Good figure from a recent ESIG report showing how marginal abatement costs in the electric sector start out low but increase sharply as you approach zero emissions.

If you're headed home this week, remember: you're not just debating relatives, you're debating decades of lead exposure. Be kind.

Battery export boom: China has exported approximately $60 billion in battery energy storage systems and components in the first three quarters of 2025, up 24% from last year www.reuters.com/markets/comm... US export comparisons in 2024: Soy, $25b. LNG, $28.9b. Auto exports, $59.2b. 🔌💡

Interesting update to NREL's data center map with Baxtel data.

Here's the wild part: IEA's solar projections have usually just matched the actual additions in the year the forecast was made... basically assuming solar additions stay flat forever. Thankfully, the future keeps showing up early.

Solar keeps blowing past expectations, but expectations are catching up. The latest IEA WEO now has PV topping 600 GW per year, though this year's scenarios are actually lower than last year's.

The U.S. is on track for another record year for clean electricity in 2025: 59 GW additions, which is 92% of new builds. Solar leads again, and storage nearly doubles. The grid is changing fast.

Peak chart crime: IEA invents Gt₂CO and non-Euclidean timelines. The x-axis is emissions, the labels are years, and a mannequin hikes an Escher ramp to nowhere.

📢 What’s current in #REEP? 📢 "Inflation Reduction Act: Origins, Policy Implications, and Research Gaps" by John E. T. Bistline ( @bistline.bsky.social ) and Catherine Wolfram ( @cwolfram.bsky.social ). 🔗 Read it here: buff.ly/xlWk4NK 📈📉 #Econsky

Modeling Monday: In honor of George Dantzig's 111th birthday, everyone knows the "late to class/solves two open problems thinking they were homework" story. Fewer know the hilarious backstory of the diet problem. Buckle up for an operations research thread... 🧵

Updated data on renewables and energy storage deployment. The race between California and Texas is... how shall we say... no longer close.

20+ years of climate impacts research in one figure. Climate change hits everything, everywhere, all at once. From Solomon Hsiang's new NBER paper on empirical methods and economic impacts of climate change: www.nber.org/papers/w34357

Updated UNEP Emissions Gap just dropped. Current policies are projected to lead to peak warming of 2.8°C (with a range of 2.1-3.9°C). NDCs can push this down to 1.9-2.5°C.

Everyone's talking about AI's electricity demand. But new EIA data show planned gas builds look... pretty normal. Additions through 2030 track the last decade, not a 2000s style surge. Is this turbine supply constraints, lagging data, or something else?

Big EV gap between China and the USA. - China has 52 BEV models with >400-mile range with many under $50k; USA has 4 all priced above $75k - EV sales share in 2024: China 47%; USA 10% Great paper in Science by @jhelvy.bsky.social.

🚨The Moore Lab at UC Davis is hiring!🚨 Post-doc for a project with @adamsobel.bsky.social on the valuation of climate information for adaptation Could be a good fit for an environmental economist or a climate scientist - flexible start date and location Apply by Dec 1st: recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07346

Interesting takeaway from a new ESIG report: Half of recent planning studies assume at least one emerging technology by 2030. Do these timelines seem realistic for advanced nuclear, e-fuels, direct air capture, and the ever-popular "generic resource?"

Be careful out there. They're putting RCP8.5 in candy bars.

Celebrate Bat Week by reading about bat bombs or listening to my colleague Christian Newman talk about how the electric sector is working with conservationists to protect bats from white-nose syndrome on EPRI Current: epricurrent.podbean.com/e/63-a-bat-w...

The Wikipedia article on bat bombs is full of crazy details. My favorite is the section euphemistically labeled “Setbacks” with a photo of a towering inferno caused by an errant bat carrying an incendiary bomb that escaped, parked itself under a fuel tank, and blew everything up.

Eight AP1000s would be big news. But quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050 means building 1.5x that every year for the next 25 years.

This adds to a growing body of literature that very clearly shows the use of short run marginal emissions rates is NOT a credible measure of consequential emissions impacts of various actions. Here, it's rooftop solar... 🔌💡

“When things have to go quickly.” The Louvre heist brought to you by a “whisper-quiet 230V electric motor.” Clean energy meets clean getaway.

Load projections for ERCOT should called the "Loch Ness Monster" curve. Demand is projected to nearly triple over the next 10 years.

Here's the key takeaway from our new Nature Climate Change piece.

New in Nature Climate Change: @asawatten.bsky.social and I show how common marginal emissions methods can miss system effects and substitution. Using hourly, long-run modeling can materially alter emissions benefits, which we show for rooftop solar. Paper + summary 👇

🚨Oh hey @bistline.bsky.social and I have a short piece in Nature Climate Change out today. It's a response to a great study on global rooftop solar, but it's *really* about the misuse of marginal emissions rates. Something we've been thinking a lot about. #energysky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

McKinsey version of "there's no such thing as a low-energy rich country."

Good news / bad news on U.S. solar in the new LBNL report: • Utility-scale solar >50% of 2024 nameplate additions • But solar's average costs are up ~25% vs. 2022 Record build, rising costs. Two things can be true at once. emp.lbl.gov/utility-scal...