📢 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...

Weird day to drive to San Diego.

A striking figure from our recent paper: China leads every step of the EV battery chain from material processing → cathode/anode → cell manufacturing. Also: >75% of the world's li-ion cells, and >2x its own demand in cell capacity.

HOT NEWS: Rondo just flipped the switch on the world's largest industrial heat battery. 100 MWh delivering continuous high-pressure industrial heat/steam with storage temperatures over 1000°C and 97% round-trip efficiency. The energy transition is heating up.

🚨New paper out in Nature Reviews Clean Technology🚨 EVs are now 22% of global car sales, 10% in the U.S., and rising. Charging, grid integration, and supply chains are catching up fast.

Narrative violation: Load growth has tended to depress retail electricity prices in recent years, according to a new LBNL study. A key caveat is that this relationship need not always exist. Higher growth can increase prices if new supply/delivery infrastructure is constrained and costly.

New LBNL analysis finds that market-driven wind and solar (roughly 75% of additions) have not contributed to retail price increases.

GHG Protocol revisions (especially Scope 2) are where this bites. With Asa Watten (@asawatten.bsky.social), I've got new work on how these dynamics could change rooftop PV's emissions impact. More soon.

Modeling Monday: How clean are EVs, really? Short answer: it depends on the question. Attributional vs. consequential LCA, average vs. marginal, short- vs. long-run... the metric can flip the answer. 1/🧵

Big move in long-duration energy storage: SRP is deploying a 5 MW / 50 MWh iron flow battery with ESS. A test case for iron + salt + water storage.

Integrated resource planner, LCOE spreadsheet guy, vibe-coding capacity expansion modeler

Climate-tech forecasting check: 🟢 Green H2 in 2024 -- forecasts: $4.50/kg ("superforecasters"), $3.50/kg (experts). Actual: ~$7.50/kg. 🔵 DAC in 2024 -- forecasts: 0.32-0.60 MtCO2/yr. Actual: ~0.01. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

One Battle After Another in 70mm. The only PTA that’s ever matched it for me was The Master premiere at The Castro, where Maya Rudolph was casually working the poster table. Is there a more iconic duo?

I'm pleased to share comments on the draft DOE Climate Working Group report that I coauthored with colleagues: www.epri.com/research/pro...

Great paper measuring the current costs of climate inaction in the U.S. @kclausing.bsky.social, @knittelmit.bsky.social, and @cwolfram.bsky.social find that wildfire smoke and higher insurance drive household costs more than direct temperature-related effects, both for costs and mortality risks.

It's great to see an updated edition of @gregnemet.net's excellent book "How Solar Energy Became Cheap." I reviewed the first edition and have been recommending it ever since: gregnemet.net/book Here's my review in The Energy Journal: www.jstor.org/stable/26937...

Interesting article from Science: "Exposure to coal PM2.5 was associated with 2.1 times greater mortality risk than exposure to PM2.5 from all sources. A total of 460,000 deaths were attributable to coal PM2.5"

Excited to be speaking as part of the plenary on nuclear energy at the 42nd USAEE/IAEE North American Conference, Nov 16-19 in Fort Worth. Hope to see you there!

🧵 (1/7) With @knittelmit.bsky.social and @cwolfram.bsky.social, happy to announce our new paper on “Who Bears the Burden of Climate Inaction?”, just posted for BPEA @brookings.edu. We find large climate cost impacts that vary by both geography and income. www.brookings.edu/articles/who...

NEW TOOL: a one-stop, searchable home for 250+ state energy and climate policies, targets, and incentives. Perfect for planners, policy-makers, and analysts. apps.epri.com/energy-polic...

Nominative determinism is undefeated. First Al Gore, next Al Roker runs climate model emulators.

Batteries are amazing.

Festivus came early this year, and I've got a few data visualization grievances to air...

Cool new AER paper uses data from Clean Air Act offset markets to assess the efficiency of air pollution regulation. The analysis finds that marginal benefits of abatement exceed mean offset prices more than ten-fold, across most regions and pollutants.

Giving a talk on energy modeling in Hollywood. “All models are wrong, but some are useful” hits different with locals.

Great new analysis that shows how a climate coalition could reduce emissions 7x more than current policies while raising ~$200B/yr in revenue, mostly from domestic carbon pricing. I was surprised to see that >80% CO2 in the steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers are already covered by carbon pricing!

California's electricity bills are rising, not because of clean energy, but because of how fixed costs are included in rates. Great post from Meredith Fowlie on the problem and potential policy levers: energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/09/15/r...

Interesting new AER paper uses the US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. They find a 77% social rate of return to NASA contractor spending, which is similar to the Bloom, et al. (2013) value of 55%. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Important research, not only for thinking about the environmental benefits of transport electrification, but broader emissions accounting for electric sector interventions like energy storage, data centers, and electrolytic H2. These issues are important as Scope 2 Guidance is being updated.

Incredible map of electric utility service territories, showing the complexity and significant overlap, from Billy Roberts at NREL