The EV debate in one picture: Even the smallest, most efficient gas car has a higher life-cycle footprint than the largest BEV. Size matters. Power matters. Powertrain matters more. This figure comes from this great paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

"The grid is decarbonizing" is not the same as "everyone benefits." New EPRI analysis connects nodal power system modeling with community vulnerability data to track distributional air quality impacts. The who is the point.

We just released an EPRI report on how market drivers and state policy could alter U.S. energy investments through 2050. The headline isn't subtle: planning is now dominated by load growth and build-rate constraints.

Big EPRI study out today on "Energy System Implications of Market Drivers and State Policy" Short version: load growth, state policy, federal incentives, and exports are colliding. These collisions alter build rates, fuel deliverability, and customer bills.

🚨Our new paper led by Dr. @zialyle.bsky.social looked at how climate change poses risks to US drinking water utilities & if their bonds disclose these risks to investors. Utilities serving 67 million people have high risks, but 36% of their bonds don't mention climate: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

New paper on US iron and steel decarbonization pathways from our crew based on the global NetZeroSteel model. Lead by the indomitable fgnxl.bksy.social. NetZeroIndustry.org Free access here to March 22 kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

Weird. That didn't feel like anything more than a 1.6993571859512.

Can load growth ever lower electricity prices? EPRI's new Win-Win Watts paper: sometimes yes; it depends.

Clean energy cost projections that ignore actual financing terms are wishful thinking. Cool new paper finally gives empirical, national-level WACC for 10 key technologies across 176 countries. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two lines tell the story of U.S. coal jobs 📉 U.S. coal production: ~884M tons (1985) → ~513M (2024) 📉 Coal mining employment: ~174k (1985) → ~43k (2024) Automation meant jobs fell faster than production. For scale, Tesla has ~120k U.S. employees... ~3x the mining workforce.

Texas power buildout in one picture: wind (green) laid the foundation, solar (yellow) is the new wave, and energy storage (purple) is clustering around load. This is the grid transition, mapped.

This is an impressive data visualization.

Every circle on this map is a real project with steel (or lithium) in the ground or on the way. Zoom in on the Central Valley and tell me again that nothing ever gets built in California.

New Rhodium data show U.S. economy-wide emissions rose in 2025. To hit net-zero by 2050, the pace of decarbonization would need to roughly triple. We're now closer to 2050 than the first season of Survivor.

Let's check in on clean energy deployment in California and Texas. Texas surpassed California as the leading utility-scale solar state in 2025 with roughly 12.9 GW added last year alone. CA still has more total solar when you include distributed capacity. And lots of batteries everywhere.

Your great-great-grandparents commuted about an hour a day. So did Roman merchants. So do you. No matter how fast we make transportation, people just live farther from work regardless of income. It's called Marchetti's constant, basically Jevons paradox for your morning commute.

Transmission discourse is usually: "Build more lines = cheaper + cleaner." This great new paper by @knittelmit.bsky.social and others is spicier: The big tradeoff is cost vs. extreme weather reliability, where interconnection is an insurance policy.

Carbon isn’t the only thing that matters for carbon capture. New modeling from my colleagues shows amine solvent emissions can create nitrosamines/nitramines and even affect PM2.5. But acid wash can dramatically cut these levels. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New year, new profile pic. Same ideas, just a few more gray hairs from 2025.

Starting the year with a little reflection. Happy 2026.

Without intervention, higher income is strongly associated with higher car dependence across ~800 cities; doubling income ~37% more car journeys. Electrifying a car-dependent city still means congestion, space, safety risk, and asphalt eating your budget. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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.