Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth
None of them through the Strait of Hormuz
[As I begin, an aside. This is becoming a difficult moment economically for some—thanks to the war the stock market is plummeting, and more people are unemployed. I worry there may be a few people who graciously volunteered to pay the voluntary and modest subscription fee to help underwrite this project and who now find themselves strapped. Here’s instructions for how to cancel those payments. And conversely if you’re in a place where you can afford to help support this community, it would be graciously welcomed).
A week ago I made my geopolitical point about the then-new Iran war—any leader with a brain would be trying to build up their clean energy capacity to avoid the kind of fossil fuel squeeze now underway. The message has spread (eloquent explanation from the venerable Paul Krugman this morning).
But since this is a teachable moment like few others, I wanted to in a sense make the same point again, but this time in a way that I hope is useful to all of you as you try to explain the possible futures to friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers. I think it’s an exercise perhaps worth copying and pasting, because it highlights something important: the incredible simplicity of clean energy, as compared to the Rube Goldberg contraption that is fossil fuel.
We’re very used to the fossil fuel paradigm, and so it doesn’t strike us as complicated. But consider.
If you want a gallon of gas for your car, someone first needs to have drilled for oil—in a few places (Saudi Arabia) this is still relatively easy, but increasingly it means figuring out how to go a mile beneath the surface of the sea, or frack the subsurface geology, which is to say blow it apart. Once you’ve collected your crude, you need to carry it to a port, often through a pipeline that must cross mountain and desert, and there load it on to a giant ship, which must sail the seas. Upon arrival somewhere, it needs to be piped to a refinery, which is among the most complicated pieces of machinery known to man. There it must be separated by heating in a distillation column, so that the light products—gasoline—rise to the top, and heavy products—say, asphalt—sink to the bottom. You use heat and pressure and chemical catalysts to “crack” some of the heavier molecules into lighter, more valuable products, and then you treat what you’ve got to remove impurities like sulfur. You pipe it part of the way to its final destination, and load it into trucks for delivery to gas stations, where it is stored in underground tanks, until someone appears with a credit card to pump it into his vehicle. In the engine of the car it is mixed with air inside a cylinder and compressed; a spark plug fires, forcing a piston to move; this linear motion is converted by a crankshaft into rotational energy to move the car; meanwhile the piston pushes out the burned gases.
This “works”—the proof is all around us, in a society built for cars. But man is it inelegant. Think of all the things that can go wrong. Your oil well can leak, coating the surrounding water with oil; if you’re fracking, you can trigger earthquakes. The pipeline can leak too—and they do so fairly routinely, coating waterways or farm fields with crude. Your ship might run aground and spill oil—or it might be held in place by oh I don’t know an ill-advised regime change war because it must travel through a narrow strait. Refineries can catch on fire—in wartime because they become easy targets for your enemy. The underground storage tank at the gas station can leak too, often polluting groundwater. And the engine where you’re burning this gas can break, because the drivetrain—depending on how you count—has hundreds of thousands of moving parts. (A crankshaft, say, typically rides on five main bearings, each with two bearing shells).
And even when they work perfectly, internal combustion engines waste enormous amounts of that gasoline—only about 25 percent of its energy actually moves the car, with the rest spent on heat, friction, and idling. And when you burn that gas, you produce a fair amount of pollution. The quantities of carbon monoxide and particulates can be reduced fairly dramatically with good pollution control equipment, like a catalytic converter that needs some platinum or palladium or rhodium. But there is no way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide per gallon of gasoline burned—indeed, if you make the engine “cleaner,” it actually produces slightly more co2. How much carbon dioxide? A gallon of gasoline weighs about six pounds. When you burn it, the carbon atoms mix with oxygen atoms in the air to form about 19 pounds of carbon dioxide. The average American car driven the average American distance releases about its own weight in co2 each year. And that is why the polar ice caps are melting. That is why we just had the second-warmest winter in American history. That is why hundreds of millions of people have to flee their homes.
Now think about an EV instead. The sun produces energy by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium. It travels 93 million miles in about eight minutes and 20 seconds (seven seconds more when our orbit takes us furthest away). Those photons then strike the silicon atoms in a photovoltaic panel, knocking loose electrons that produce a stream of direct current electricity; an inverter, now usually contained in the panel, converts that to AC power, which can be pumped directly into the battery of an EV where the motor uses electromagnetism to create a rotating magnetic field in a stator, which spins the inner rotor to propel the car. There are about 20 moving parts in the engine, and it is 80 to 90 percent efficient. There is no exhaust and almost no noise. That’s it. And if you poured those electrons into an e-bike instead of an EV, it’s even better: a penny’s worth of power is good for three miles or so. The same principles apply to electric buses, electric ferries, and so on.
This method cuts maintenance and operation costs in half for drivers, and the EV is at this point not much more expensive than the average car (in China and most of the rest of the world, it’s less). More to the point, it produces no pollution—this would reduce global health costs by a trillion dollars a year or so. And it produces no carbon dioxide, whose warming effects are expected to cost the planet $38 trillion annually by mid-century. Those numbers represent millions upon millions of people who would get to live instead of die.
Also, no one can use a missile to shoot down a photon in mid-air. It is essentially war-proof.
Also, you can do it on your roof or your balcony, or in your community. You don’t require an oligarch. It would impoverish Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, the CEO of Exxon. (And that’s why we don’t work harder to get it done; they’re in the way).
For a long time we couldn’t do this. The solar cell wasn’t invented until 1954, and for decades it produced very expensive power. But now, thanks to activists and engineers, it produces the cheapest power on planet earth.
In a sane world we would be spending all our time and money building solar panels just as fast as we could. The Trump administration is expected to ask Congress next week for $50 billion in supplemental funding for its war in Iran—we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day to blow up schoolgirls. Bringing solar power to 380 million Africans who currently have no electricity would require about $91 billion.
Sooner or later we’ll wake up. Let’s hope this absurd war helps speed up the timetable.
In other energy and climate news:
+India is feeling the squeeze as LNG from the Gulf dries up. As the Economic Times of India reports
India, which depends on long-term LNG contracts with Qatar for a significant share of its gas needs, has seen a temporary suspension of cargoes, leading to supply cuts up to 40 per cent for a range of industrial consumers and city gas distribution (CGD) companies.
While some industrial users can switch to alternative - though costlier - fuels, the CNG-retailing city gas sector has warned of severe stress. CGD operators said replacing contracted Qatari volumes with spot LNG priced at more than double the contracted rate could erode CNG's price advantage and result in a permanent shift of customers to electric vehicles.
And that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg. Akshat Rathi, at Bloomberg, describes the way that the current crisis is pushing players around the world in the right direction.
Take the case of Europe, which was plunged into a gas crisis after Russia attacked Ukraine four years ago. In the immediate aftermath, the region paid steep prices for whatever liquefied natural gas it could get its hands on. But in the years that followed, Europe saw a rapid rise in solar deployment and a subsequent battery boom.
Solar installations globally reached a record 655 gigawatts last year. Before the war in Iran broke out, BNEF analysts expected solar growth to be roughly flat this year, while they forecast energy storage for the grid would rise more than 50%, given battery prices are expected to fall further.
That could change if the disruption to oil and gas supplies last, BNEF analysts wrote in a report published Monday, adding that there is plenty of inventory of green technologies so any supply chain snarls are likely to be minimal. “It could push customers toward technologies like solar and batteries,” they said.
+Interesting side note here. The last two weeks have seen a sudden surge of interest among some leading MAGA figures in solar power. The reason appears to be two-fold: one, they’re worried that rising electric prices are undercutting their political chances in the midterms and so they want some of that cheap power. And two, they’re getting paid by the solar lobby—which actually is probably a pretty smart investment, considering the Trump administration is essentially a cash upfront business. Evan Halper:
A growing number of prominent Trump allies — including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, veteran strategist Kellyanne Conway and GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio — are promoting solar as electricity demand surges and energy affordability climbs the list of voter concerns.
Their clean energy advocacy may be having an impact, as the White House signals it is reconsidering power from the sun. The tone of Trump himself has even changed.
In an interview, Stephen Miller’s wife Katie said solar is crucial to delivering on the right’s energy and AI dominance agenda. “Look at what Australia did,” she said. “Solar solved their rolling blackout issues. President Trump has prioritized lowering the cost of energy for the American people … I am simply advocating that solar can and should be a driver of the solution.”
Asked if she is getting paid for her advocacy, like some other MAGA heavyweights promoting solar, Miller would not comment. Regardless, these full-throated endorsements of a renewable energy source that has been much maligned by Trump and his advisers represents a departure from what had been a pillar of the MAGA energy agenda.
It reflects a realization taking hold more broadly among Republicans that solar power — long embraced by liberals — is increasingly indispensable to America’s bid to dominate AI, close a yawning “electron gap” with China and contain runaway residential electricity costs. These conservatives describe it as crucial to U.S. competitiveness, the grid’s reliability and their own movement’s political survival.
+If you’re looking for some really expensive power, Bill Gates and the Terrapower company got a key federal permit for a small modular nuclear reactor in Wyoming.
While the initial plant built in Wyoming is expected to be expensive — $4 billion or more — the company hopes to drive down the cost in the future by building more plants and learning from experience. (The Energy Department has agreed to pick up part of the cost of TerraPower’s first reactor.)
“Our first plant will cost more than our tenth plant, because we have all these non-recurring initial costs,” Mr. Levesque said in an interview. He predicted that TerraPower’s reactors would eventually produce electricity at half the cost of traditional nuclear plants because they are simpler.
+Texas is poised to overtake California for the leadership in battery storage capacity, Michelle Lewis reports
Two-thirds of utility-scale storage installed in 2025 was built in red states, including nine of the top 15 states for new installations. Texas is projected to surpass California as the country’s largest battery storage market in 2026.
Standalone battery projects accounted for nearly 30 GWh of new capacity in 2025, while solar-plus-storage installations made up about 20 GWh. Residential storage deployments reached 3.1 GWh last year, a 51% increase year-over-year. Analysts say virtual power plant programs in states such as Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois are helping drive adoption by reducing costs and easing strain during peak demand periods.
The supply chain is shifting to support the boom. In 2025, some battery cell manufacturers pivoted production from EV batteries to dedicated stationary storage cells, converting existing lines and adjusting future plans. Lithium-ion cell manufacturing for stationary storage reached more than 21 GWh in 2025, enough to power Houston overnight, according to SEIA’s Solar and Storage Supply Chain Dashboard. Meanwhile, US factories now have the capacity to manufacture 69.4 GWh of battery energy storage systems annually.
+As I reported a couple of weeks ago, the drive to pause data center construction is gaining steam around the nation. This week it’s New York, where the indomitable state senator Liz Krueger has introduced moratorium legislation. As she writes
Five states are already considering legislation to implement a temporary moratorium on new data center construction, with two of those bills introduced by Democrats and three by Republicans. New York just became the sixth state to propose a moratorium.
Data centers use an obscene amount of energy. As of Dec. 31, proposed new data centers in the New York Independent System Operator’s interconnection queue totaled 9.5 gigawatts of electric load, which is approximately double the energy use of all the households in the state combined. National statistics show that data centers are a major driver of increased electricity rates on the grid. That’s unsurprising, given how much energy generation and transmission infrastructure are needed to support them.
They also have significant environmental costs. They are fossil fuel-intensive, with a dirtier carbon footprint than the U.S. grid average. In the Northeast, where temperatures vary widely throughout the year, they depend at least partially on water systems to capture heat from the computer processors, using an immense amount of water. The water is then discharged back into local waterways at high temperatures, causing problems like algal blooms and ecosystem damage. They convert farmland and other open spaces to industrial use. And they create millions of tons of electronic waste.
Meanwhile, an important essay from Amory Lovins and Justin Locke shows that if we have to build data centers renewable energy is the only way to go
Globally, data centers — roughly one-ninth of which are devoted to AI — use about 1.5% of today’s electricity. The International Energy Agency forecasts they’ll grow in this decade while renewable supplies grow 11 times more. Thus, solar and wind power, now swiftly displacing costlier fossil-fueled and nuclear power, dwarf the AI boom. Speed to market is paramount for AI developers, so many smart tech companies choose renewables to get their data centers built and running quickly and cheaply.
Renewables also offer essential speed. In Sparks, Nevada, the world’s largest solar-powered microgrid continuously powers modular data centers. Solar panels laid on desert ground feed hundreds of second-life electric-vehicle batteries joined to form a superbattery. It was all built in four months and delivers electricity that’s cheaper, quieter, and more reliable than grid power; uses virtually no water; emits nothing; and is even portable. This is what clean, scalable, market-speed power looks like. Gas isn’t it.
And there is one interesting piece of data center news. In Minnesota, Google seems set to deploy what will be the world’s largest “iron-air battery” to power a development there. As Ryan Kennedy explains
While lithium-ion batteries are effective for 4-hour shifts, they cannot handle the multi-day storage. Form Energy said its iron-air batteries can store renewables-sourced electricity for 100 hours at system costs competitive with conventional power plants.
The iron-air battery is composed of cells filled with thousands of iron pellets that are exposed to air and create rust. The oxygen is then removed, reverting the rust to iron. Controlling this process allows the battery to be charged and discharged.
The technology is less energy-dense than its lithium-ion counterparts, making it a better fit for large grid-scale applications. Form Energy said an individual battery module is about the size of a side-by-side washer/dryer set and contains a stack of approximately 50 one meter-tall cells. The cells include iron and air electrodes, the parts of the battery that enable the electrochemical reactions to store and discharge electricity. Each of these cells are filled with water-based, non-flammable electrolyte, like the electrolyte used in AA batteries.
We live in a world where rust can power the grid, which seems to me far more remarkable than the latest chatbot’s gurglings.
And as further proof that innovation isn’t confined to China, word comes from the Philippines of what will be the largest solar plus storage facility on earth.
The MTerra solar project features a planned 3.5 GW solar and 4.5 GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) being built on the island of Luzon, which is set to be the world’s largest integrated solar-plus-BESS facility once completed. It is being implemented in two phases, the first of which is expected to cover approximately 2.5 GW of solar alongside 3.3 MWh of BESS.
Without being too technical, I’ll just say: those are big numbers.
+Some fairly troubling research: scientists have apparently been systematically underestimating how high sea levels are around the world, which means that as global warming raises those oceans the inundation point will arrive sooner. From Tara Russell:
Globally, the research found ocean levels are an average of 30cm higher than previously believed, but in some areas of the global south, including south-east Asia and the Indo-Pacific, they may be 100-150cm higher than previously thought.
The new calculations reveal that following a relative sea level rise of 1 metre, it is estimated that 37% more coastal areas will fall below sea level, affecting up to 132 million individuals.
“If sea level is higher for your particular island or coastal city than was previously assumed, the impacts from sea level rise will happen sooner than projected before,” said one researcher.
+As water grows ever scarcer in the West, some farmers are fallowing their fields to build solar projects
“We’re farmers, and we would rather farm the ground,” says Ross Franson, president of Woolf Farming and Processing, his family’s business. “If we had the water to do it, we would farm it. But the reality is, you don’t. You have to deal with the cards you’re dealt.”
Franson is on the board of the Westlands Water District, a farmer-run organization that’s a key player in this effort, negotiating with solar companies and government regulators on behalf of its members. Westlands is an agricultural power and has long represented the interests of farmers in a large swath of land on the western side of the San Joaquin Valley, between the towns of Firebaugh and Huron. Decades ago, it helped persuade the federal government to build a giant canal to deliver irrigation water to this area from rivers far away in Northern California.
Just a reminder that clean electrons are a crop, and a crucial one!
+Veteran climate reporter Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press covers a new study that shows that the world’s biggest companies are responsible for a cool $28 trillion in climate damages to date.
A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation.
For comparison, $28 trillion is a shade less than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.
At the top of the list, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused a bit more than $2 trillion in heat damage over the decades, the team calculated in a study published in Wednesday’s journal Nature. The researchers figured that every 1% of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 has caused $502 billion in damage from heat alone, which doesn’t include the costs incurred by other extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts and floods.
People talk about making polluters pay, and sometimes even take them to court or pass laws meant to rein them in.
The study is an attempt to determine “the causal linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability,” said its lead author, Christopher Callahan, who did the work at Dartmouth but is now an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University. The research firm Zero Carbon Analytics counts 68 lawsuits filed globally about climate change damage, with more than half of them in the United States.
+Finally, in Lincoln CA, pickleball players will have to look for alternate courts for a few months: city officials are erecting a giant solar shade over the pickleball center at McBean Park.
For now, local pickleball players will need to plan around the March 16 shutdown and wait for reopening updates. City officials say the payoff will be cooler, covered courts and long-term energy savings once the solar system is up and running.
The work is part of a $17.9 million package that officials say will be financed through a lease-purchase arrangement and offset with federal incentives. Lincoln projects about $19.2 million in net savings over 30 years and plans to use Inflation Reduction Act funds to prepay roughly $3.2 million of the financing, according to The Sacramento Bee.
According to the Pickleheads database, there are 68,000 pickleball courts across the country. Just saying.