Uncanny Speed

In both directions

Our world seems to me to be moving very very fast these days—often that’s because of the feral energy of the Trump White House, feverishly trying to do the wrong thing on as many fronts as possible. In the last few cycles have come the news that that the White House is evicting bison herds from federal lands in Montana (a favor to ranchers, an insult to tribal leaders), approving fruit-flavored vapes (a favor to the big-donor vapor lobby, an insult to public health) and insisting that the Pope wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon (an insult to Catholics, a favor to his easily bruised ego). If the strategy is designed to wear us down, it’s definitely working on me.

But something else is moving fast too, and far more productively—that’s the ascension of new technologies. I don’t mean AI, which so far has had little impact on me and a generally dispiriting one on my fellow Americans, to judge from the polling; I mean the surging changes in clean tech, which are rewriting what’s possible in the course of months, even days.

Consider, for instance, the news from California. As I’ve noted before, the Golden State is suddenly supplying huge amounts of night-time energy from big grid-based batteries; basically, at night its running on stored sunshine. But the reporter Claire Barber, in an interview with grid expert Ed Smeloff, put a number on this yesterday: California’s new batteries, installed over the last 36 months or so, are the equivalent of a dozen new nuclear power plants. If California had installed a dozen nukes in a couple of years, you’d know about it—indeed, the fate of its single reactor, at Diablo Canyon, has inspired thousands of articles, documentaries, protests and counter protests over the same stretch of time. But batteries are…metal boxes that pose no great threat. They just…work. Smeloff:

The most remarkable change in the California energy market has been the very rapid addition of grid-connected batteries and the use of those batteries to provide peak demand capacity. California is transitioning fairly quickly from using primarily natural gas resources to now using batteries. The batteries are [used] during the peak period, which is in the evening, typically around seven o’clock, producing as much as 40 percent of the peak capacity requirements. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement in a short period of time.

Bottom line, from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson on Tuesday: California using 61% less natural gas this year to generate electricity than it did three years ago.

There’s also the sudden advent of a slightly smaller class of batteries, ones that as Elizabeth Ouzts observes are

designed to fill specific community needs and — due to their size — relatively quick and low-cost to build.

The Blue Ridge Power Agency, which serves a string of nonprofit utilities in central and western Virginia, is set to go live this summer with a collection of five batteries of about 5 megawatts each. The systems will help two rural electric co-ops and the city of Salem’s utility save money by storing power when it is cheap and abundant. They can then rely on that saved-up power when high demand on the grid spikes prices.

All in all, the projects are predicted to save the member utilities $100 million over the batteries’ 20-year lifespan, addressing long-held local concerns over rising costs.

And now move down one more order of magnitude, and consider the report, out this morning, from the Rewiring America think tank, about how solar, battery, and heat pump technology have advanced so quickly that a few policy shifts could allow the electrification of almost every home in America, turning them into useful and affordable parts of a national energy infrastructure. (Good coverage from Catherine Boudreau here). Consider, say, what we could require of data centers. If some must be built, then force them to supply their own electricity—by buying heat pumps and solar panels for surrounding homes. It’s cheaper than building new supplies, and much much faster.

Hyperscalers are driving more than $100 billion per year into energy generation and infrastructure investment. Directing even a portion of that spending toward distributed energy resources could mobilize tens of billions of dollars for household energy upgrades. Hyperscaler investment in home energy upgrades would make such upgrades affordable for an additional 19 million households (increasing affordability from 30 to 58 percent of eligible households) — unlocking average lifetime savings of $9,400 per household

Again—all this stuff is available right now. There are plenty of heat pumps and batteries; if Google wants a data center, it should be handing them out to the neighbors. And once they have, then all these homes can be easily knit together into virtual power plants (VPPs); as a new report from the good people at Pew points out,

Fully leveraging these existing and future Distributed Energy Resources through VPPs, including providing appropriate compensation for DER owners, could deliver power during peak demand at 40%-60% of the cost of traditional solutions.

And if you’re thinking—’yeah, but policy changes come too slowly to matter in a polarized America,’ well, your cynicism is justified. But not entirely. The last few weeks have seen something remarkable, with legislative action happening at a speed I can’t quite recall. Everyone who participated in Sun Day last fall (and that’s many of you) helped launch a nationwide campaign for, among other things, balcony or plug-in solar. And that’s already bearing fruit: just eight months later it’s passed legislatures in Virginia, Maine, Colorado, and Maryland. It’s through the Senate and the House in New Hampshire, and the Senate in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, through the House (and late last night the Senate) in Connecticut and through committee in Massachusetts (in the latter two, its part of important larger omnibus solar bills). It’s also before committees in California, Illinois, and DC. This is a reminder that activism can (and must) move as fast as technology—before the spring is out, and despite serious opposition from utilities, we’ll have enough states to establish a firm American market for a technology that has swept through Europe in recent years. (Here’s a great account from my colleagues at Third Act Upstate NY on the kind of organizing that is producing these wins).

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel alternatives are…slow to appear. Dan Gearino has an excellent account of plans for a truly massive gas-fired power plant in Ohio, announced in March by the always classy Howard Lutnick as AC/DC’s Back in Black blared from the speakers. “We’re operating in Trump time,” he told the crowd ahead of the ceremonial groundbreaking. But Trump time sometimes means fantasy time.

“The whole thing doesn’t add up,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a nonprofit that provides technical expertise on the electricity grid to policymakers and advocates.

O’Connell thinks the power plant’s high costs will make the project difficult to justify outside of a moment in which the Trump administration is seeking attention for big projects. Due to inflation on key components, the project would cost $3,586 per kilowatt, two to three times the cost of a combined-cycle gas plant two years ago.

“They’re just smiling and waving for the cameras, and then, as soon as Trump’s out of power, the [power plant is] going to get scaled way down or killed,” O’Connell said.

The clean energy build-out, of course, can’t come fast enough, because the climate crisis is pushing on inexorably. April saw the atmospheric level of co2 average 431 parts per million for the first time at the monitoring station in Mauna Loa (but don’t worry—Trump’s new budget zeroes out funding for the facility). A new report put a very human face on those statistics: as Oliver Milman reports, it found that the time may be coming to start thinking of the painful necessity to move people out of New Orleans, because climate change is in danger of putting it past a ‘point of no return.’

Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

The way to avoid this—or a thousand follow-on horrors—is to move with desperate urgency to rebuild our energy system. That won’t end global warming—too late for that. But not too late to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets, and every tenth of a degree we raise the temperature moves a hundred million souls from a safe climate zone to a perilous one. Maybe New Orleans is in that next increment. Maybe your house. Someone’s house, that’s for sure. So speed, speed, speed.

In other energy and climate news:

+Superb account from David Wallace-Wells of the meaning—political and scientific—of the fast-brewing El Niño. It’s very smart—and also, he’s a beautifully fluid writer.

An awful lot depends on the actual size of El Niño and the particular scale and distribution of suffering it might unleash. In general, I tend to think climate people overestimate the political impact of discrete disasters — and that we process even mind-bending catastrophes largely by normalizing them, as we’ve done in recent years with wildfires in Los Angeles and Maui, mass heat deaths in the Pacific Northwest and on the Hajj, and flooding events in places like Spain and Brazil beyond what has been observed, in those places, for decades. But coming during a Donald Trump presidency, this one even more nakedly hostile to climate concern than the last, and on the heels of a war that has illustrated unmistakably the dangers of fossil-fuel dependence and driven up the price of food and energy, I do think a pattern of unmistakable global climate disruptions could do a lot to dislodge our seeming complacency. What comes next, as ever, would be as much a matter of political economy as climate.

+Cuba is installing solar power as fast as any place on earth, because it literally has no choice—the U.S. has cut off virtually all its supply of oil, and Marco Rubio was last week seen posing with the general in charge of the U.S. Southern Command in front of a map of the island. As the FT reports

Thanks to Chinese technology, the Caribbean island has 34 solar parks in operation with a capacity of almost 1.2GW, a 350 per cent increase on 2024, enabling Cuba to more than quadruple its proportion of solar-powered generation to around 9 per cent of its total by the end of last year. Cuba plans to have built 92 solar parks with just over 2GW of capacity by 2028.

“In the last 12 months alone, the government successfully installed 1GW of that — so they’re halfway to the target,” said Euan Graham, senior analyst at energy think-tank Ember. “A gigawatt is a very significant amount in the system and getting to 2GW would be pretty transformative.”

+In the Guardian, Alexander Hurst calls for top American officials to be sanctioned for their support of fossil fuel expansion, much as America has sanctioned top leaders in countries like Russia and Iran.

It’s time to apply the same logic to a different caste of oligarchs, American this time, who seem inextricable from the apparatus of the Trump administration. They include Silicon Valley tech barons and fossil fuel industry executives whose names lurk deeper in Trump’s shadow, along with the apparatchiks who carry out an overall anti-environmental policy that should be rightly viewed as ecocide.

The foul men – they are mainly men – burning the planet should have access to as little of it as possible. Trump’s own name should not adorn the gates of his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and his minion Lee Zeldin, who leads the ironically named Environment Protection Agency (EPA), should not be flown to Munich to lecture Europe about its destructive policies. No billionaire in Trump’s orbit should be able to ski in the Alps, nibble vintage jamón in Mallorca, be served champagne at the Cheval Blanc, or splash out upwards of €100,000 a week for luxury villas in the Algarve or the Côte d’Azur if they are complicit in an active ecocide that threatens the very existence of all these places.

+If you’re spending part of the summer in Maine (maybe campaigning to beat Susan Collins), check out a show at the Shaw Institute in Blue Hills: FOREVER OURS, Microplastics and PFAS, Where Science Meets Art. Fifteen New England artists have contributed; check out the life-size seal made from unrecycleable plastics.

Meanwhile, old sustainability hand Jim Merkel has a new documentary, Saving Walden’s World, which will air soon on PBS. It profiles women in Kerala, Slovenia, and Cuba, and argues that small-scale solar is the ultimate tool of decolonialization and resistance. “The homestead is a tactical site of resistance,” he says. “When we harvest the sun for energy and the soil for sustenance, we strip power from the systems that use scarcity as a weapon.”

And here’s a good project: MobilizeGreen is connecting underrepresented students with summer jobs in green careers.

+If you’ve wondered about the practicality of space-based solar power, Mark Gongloff has done the math.

The most recent payload (for which we have disclosed pricing) that SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy system took to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), where spacecraft go to reach GEO, was the GOES-19 weather satellite in June 2024. That trip cost $152.5 million, or $30,500 per kilogram1. At that rate, Overview Energy’s space-solar system would cost more than $4,100 per megawatt-hour, roughly 45 times as much as solar and storage on the ground.

But let’s say Elon Musk, now 158 billion theoretical dollars richer, gets generous and prices a Falcon Heavy ride to GTO at $4,000 per kilogram.2 That still leaves space solar’s energy cost at $540 per megawatt-hour, about six times as expensive as earthbound solar and battery storage.

Meanwhile here on earth public school systems are learning to pair the solar panels on their roofs with other energy upgrades to dramatically reduce costs. Kaleigh Harrison describes one such project in Montgomery County, Maryland

The solar installations sit within a $23 million energy savings performance contract (ESPC) covering 25 schools. Rather than focusing only on generation, the program integrates multiple upgrades, including advanced energy management systems and LED lighting retrofits.

This combined approach reflects a shift in how public sector entities are tackling energy use. By addressing both demand and supply, districts can improve building performance while stabilizing energy expenses. MCPS estimates the broader initiative will deliver more than 5.9 million kWh in annual energy savings.

(By the way, this definitely beats building a school on an abandoned fracking site contaminated with radioactive waste, as Saul Elbein reports from Texas).

+Maybe hold off on your plans for a western mountain climbing expedition this summer. Jeva Lange reports that guides at places like Mt. Rainier are bracing for a very difficult season, after record low snowfalls and record high spring temperatures have left snowfields and glaciers crumbly and brittle.

Think of a mountain like a scoop of Rocky Road in an ice cream cone. Fresh out of the freezer, the scoop holds its shape because everything is frozen in place — but as it starts to melt, marshmallows and nuts begin to slough down the sides.

Except on a mountain, it’s not marshmallows and nuts but avalanches and rockfall. In addition to being a life-or-death hazard in the moment — and top-of-mind for the risk-averse concessioners guiding otherwise oblivious novice clients — the debris on a warming mountain can close routes to the peak, crowding the ones that remain. “When you have a bunch of people on a route, it doesn’t make things safer,” Zimmerman said. “It makes things more dangerous because people knock stuff onto each other, and because it slows things down.”

I’ve climbed Rainier twice—you go up in the middle of the night to minimize the time spent climbing down melting snowfields in the heat of the day. But the time may be coming when you need to ascend at night in the winter.

+Continuing with last week’s discussion of the disappointing performance by some state level Democrats, Kate Yoder brings news of shortsighted policy in Maryland, Rhode Island, and elsewhere where blue governors have decided to bleed energy efficiency programs to temporarily lower the price of electricity or gas. This is the ultimate in false economy.

Focusing on immediate savings misses the bigger picture, since it would hurt affordability in the long-term. An analysis from ACEEE found that the proposed legislation in Maryland would increase costs for the state’s electricity customers by a net $592 million.

“Unfortunately, cutting energy efficiency programs — it’s like trading in your car for one that gets worse gas mileage at a time when gas prices are going up, and it won’t do anything to address those real cost drivers that will only get worse,” Kevin Trombley at energy think tank CERES said. “Energy efficiency is one of the only options customers have to insulate themselves from the volatility coming from things like natural gas or an aging grid susceptible to extreme weather.”

+Two Emilys—Sanders, at ExxonKnews and Atkin at Heated—have grim accounts of the way our new, politicized Department of Justice has swooped in to try and stop discovery in a Minnesota case charging Exxon with consumer fraud. As Atkin puts it,

The DOJ’s complaint is an incredible piece of rage bait for anyone following these cases closely. It is, in essence, an exercise in the propagandistic practice of repeating something false over and over and over in the hopes that eventually, people will start to believe it.

The falsehood that the DOJ’s complaint is built on is that Minnesota’s lawsuit is a covert plot to set national energy policy. In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ claims Minnesota’s lawsuit is seeking to “regulate global greenhouse gas emissions,” which falls under federal authority, and therefore must be dismissed. I thought about listing all the times here, but I will spare you. You can just read the complaint.

What’s more important to sear into your brain is that this just… isn’t true. Remember when I told you what (Minnesota AG Keith) Ellison’s lawsuit is seeking? Reimbursement for climate-related costs, the return of profits tied to deception, a court-ordered public education campaign.

Meanwhile, from New Mexico, another lawsuit challenging Big Oil, this time to pay for the costs of abandoned wells. As Nicholas Gilmore reports,

The complaint centers around what are called “asset retirement obligations” in the energy industry. The ARO represents the legal and financial obligations to plug and remediate a well, which can involve sealing the well and various levels of costly remediation.

The 74-page lawsuit points to the 2021 sale of 670 “aging” and “low-producing” wells in Lea County from Exxon Mobil’s subsidiary XTO Holdings to Empire’s subsidiary Empire New Mexico. The lawsuit notes the companies’ financial records show a valuation of a little more than $6 million for the AROs of the wells, which are an average age of 63 years old.

Rogers and Horton cite state data, however, in their argument that a “conservative estimate” of the asset retirement obligations for the wells is actually almost $200 million. The discrepancy, they say, points to the companies’ intentions to skirt the ARO liability for the wells altogether.

+Andrew Moseman has gone inside the California “skunkworks” where Ford is trying to build its $30k EV. The building is a century old, originally used to churn out Model A’s. But now

EVDC represents a full embrace of the frictionless workplace: no corner offices, just open rows of computers amid a makeshift garage brimming with 3D printers, spools of wiring, and racks of gear. Coders are a short stroll from the visual designers tinkering with clay models. Electrical engineers are around the corner from the “lab car,” a rectangular steel frame meant to suggest the general shape of a vehicle, with a complete mockup of the future car’s electrical system strung along the skeleton so that workers can test any part of it. This is about process; the closest thing to the shape of a car is a wooden one with test car seats inside, set up in the fabrication shop. The shepherds of our tour met any question about the specifics of the forthcoming truck with a quick you’ll find out next year, though a prototype dressed up in that zebra camouflage just happened to sneak by as we moved between building.

+Is it a good idea to dam the Bering Strait to try and preserve the great currents of the Atlantic? Probably not, but as Raymond Zhong points out, it’s the kind of thing you start thinking about when you’re truly desperate

If the AMOC is strong, then closing the strait would cause less fresh water to flow out of the Arctic Ocean and into the Atlantic, they found. That would help keep the North Atlantic salty and the AMOC stable. But if the AMOC is already near collapse, then closing the strait would have the opposite effect, destabilizing the AMOC further. The timing, in other words, is key.

At the moment, though, scientists don’t know exactly how close the AMOC is to collapsing, said Aixue Hu, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Some projections suggest it could happen before the end of this century. But “the uncertainty is very, very large,” Dr. Hu said. That makes it hard to be sure whether damming the Bering Strait would help or hurt the AMOC, said Dr. Hu, who wasn’t involved in Mr. Soons’s study.

+In Australia, a push for a big tax on gas exporters and on windfall profits. In Canada, a call (from Galith Levy, proprietor of the Climate Prize) for much faster pathways to commercialize clean energy innovation. From Britain’s prestigious medical journal The Lancet a demand for a crackdown on fossil fuel propaganda. (Disinformation campaigns are life-threatening and pose a grave danger to both public health and the global climate. The tactics used mirror those used by the tobacco industry, which, for decades, spread doubt about the harmful effects of smoking.”)

I think you can sense a quickening of the global demand for action. The ever-falling price of clean energy, the ruinous insanity of the Iran war, the rising pace of climate disaster: we’re at the start of the next, decisive cycle in energy and climate politics. Stay tuned!

+Oh, and Disneyland is going to convert its kiddy car ride to EVs. As Pierce Sharpe reports:

The Anaheim theme park plans to replace the gasoline-powered cars on its classic Autopia attraction with fully electric vehicles — ending nearly 70 years of exhaust fumes in Tomorrowland as California regulators continue cracking down on emissions statewide

.