This is Not Cool

The Weekend Wonk: Finding Power in the Grid’s Couch Cushions

We’ve been sitting on it the whole time.

Description:

Amit Narayan is the founder and CEO of GridCARE. His thesis: America doesn’t have a power shortage, it has a visibility problem. The grid runs at only about a third of its capacity, and GridCARE uses AI to scan it the way an MRI scans a body, finding power utilities simply cannot see with planning tools built decades ago. The company has unlocked more than a gigawatt in the last six months and is actively analyzing over ten. Narayan’s bet: 300 gigawatts are reachable on existing infrastructure within three to five years.

Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan dig into why the grid sits so underused, and the detail that captures the whole problem: hyperscalers are so power-starved they’re eyeing data centers in space, when the power they need is already on the grid at home.
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I’m going to keep hammering these points til everyone gets it.

Washington Post:

Imagine a restaurant open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that always maintains a full staff. With the exception of weekend nights and the lunch rush, the restaurant will be empty a lot of the time. But the restaurant’s owner is paying to keep it open all the time — spending money on staffing and rent even when the number of customers is low.

That’s the reality of the U.S. electricity grid. It is built to handle “peak demand” — moments of high electricity usage that often happen in the height of summer or in the frigid cold of winter. Power outages can be life-threatening, so utilities have to make sure that, at all costs, the power stays on.

“Hurtling Toward the Wall” – Oil/Gas Crisis not Over

It’s incredible the inertia of even the relatively sane, fact based media, to keep ignoring the continuing deficits owing to the Hormuz closure, and act like every thing is back to normal.
Not so, according to the expert interviewed by Bloomberg.

Mathew Cappucci: Americans “Uncomfortable with Science”

Mathew Cappucci is one of our best science explainers, here addressing current heat waves in the US and Europe, and finally, America’s continual difficulty understanding climate change.

UPDATE: Senior Meteorologist John Morales weighed in similarly on the heat wave.

U.S. heatwave to peak on the 4th of July. But it’s already dangerous, and I’m most concerned about *minimum* temperatures of 87 in Newark and 84 in New York & Washington. Human suffering worsens when the body can’t cool down at night. My @CNN interview on the #heatwave and more. pic.twitter.com/OvDxWLXf9Y
— John Morales (@JohnMoralesTV) July 3, 2026

Not Your Founding Father’s Heat Dome

How hot was it on July 4, 1776 ?

Tony Pann, Meteorologist, WBAL Baltimore, on Facebook:

PHILADELPHIA WEATHER JULY 4th, 1776: the image (above) is a picture of Thomas Jefferson’s actual weather notes from July of that year! (monticello.org) At 1 PM on July 4th, it was 76 degrees and dry…rather cool for this time of the year.

New York Times:

Heat and humidity as severe, prolonged and far-reaching as this week’s would have been “virtually impossible” in the Northeast and eastern Canada before humans began warming the planet, a team of scientists said on Friday.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of oil, gas and coal have trapped more of the sun’s heat at Earth’s surface, raising temperatures worldwide for more than a century. Summer hot spells are nothing new, but because of the excess heat around the planet caused by global warming, they can produce higher temperatures today than they once did.

Video: How Data Centers Can Lower Electric Rates

PBS Newshour, October 29, 2025:

Ryan Hledik, Principal, The Brattle Group:

I think the important thing to understand about the power sector is, a big portion of the cost that you’re paying in your electricity bill is a fixed cost. It’s the poles and wires and power plants and substations that power companies have already gone out and invested in. And they’re recovering those costs from you based on how much you and your neighbors and other customers are consuming, how much electricity you’re consuming.

And so if utilities can bring in a new large customer like a data center that’s going to consume a lot of energy, if they can do that without needing to make big additional investments in infrastructure because they already have capacity on their system to accommodate that new customer, it actually can bring more energy into the system that you can spread those fixed costs out across, and that can actually have downward pressure on rates.

Where electric rates have gone up, it is sometimes because Utilities have taken the route of “we’ve always done it this way” – and just built more capacity which gets added to the rate base, and customer’s bills.
There are other choices.
The first link here is to a Reuters piece that deserves to be read in entirety, I include only an excerpt here, but definitely go to the link.

Reuters:

NEW YORK, June 29 (Reuters) – Data centers are being blamed for America’s rising electric bills. But the real issue is not that AI — and consumers in general — are boosting energy usage. The real problem is structural, opens new tab, and it began long before the latest infrastructure boom.

Average residential electricity rates rose 6% last year — more than twice the inflation rate. Roughly one-third of American households now spend more than 5% of their income on electricity.

Jigar Shah on Data Centers and Pipelines

Ahem.

Above, Jigar Shah answers a question I submitted on Data Centers and gas pipeline capacity.
Which begs some more clarification.

Prompt:
Do gas pipeline constraints impact power for Data Centers?

ChatGPT:
Yes. In some regions, gas pipeline constraints can become a significant limitation on power availability for data centers, especially during periods of extreme demand.

Here’s why:

Gas plants often provide the marginal power

Many large data centers depend on the regional grid rather than having dedicated generation. In much of the Midwest, Texas, and the eastern U.S., natural gas plants are the primary source of dispatchable electricity that can ramp up when demand rises.

If pipelines are full, gas plants may be unable to obtain additional fuel, even if they are technically capable of generating more electricity.

Winter is often the biggest concern

During severe cold spells:

Residential and commercial heating demand gets first priority on many gas systems.
Pipeline capacity becomes constrained.
Gas prices spike dramatically.
Some power plants cannot obtain enough fuel.

This was a major factor during:

Winter Storm Uri in Texas.
Several cold-weather reliability events in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions.

Battery Demand, Driven by AI and New Tech, is Shocking

Ok, it’s “Electrifying”.

Financial Times:

Battery start-ups are moving into AI data centres where their specialist technology helps to smooth split-second power surges, driving what executives describe as “crazy” demand.

The rapid growth of AI data centres is creating a profitable niche for the battery makers, as operators seek technologies capable of responding to energy surges that can be equivalent to the electricity demand of a small town, occurring multiple times per second.
Alsym Energy, a US sodium-ion battery start-up backed by an investment arm of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, said interest had soared over the past three months from data centre operators seeking ways to manage the frequent power transients caused by AI computing.

These extreme energy fluctuations meant that the facilities were otherwise not able to connect to the grid, Alsym chief executive Mukesh Chatter told the FT. “Battery has become an essential component, not a desired component of data centres,” he said.
Sodium-ion batteries could discharge power more quickly than traditional lithium-ion products, making them suitable for balancing AI-driven fluctuations, he said.

Trump’s Nuclear “Renaissance” Sputtering

Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration is so eager to see a nuclear power renaissance that it is starting to fund billions of dollars for reactor orders.

In a new deal expected to be announced Tuesday, low-interest loans amounting to $17.5 billion from the Energy Department will be available for utilities to finance equipment orders for the Westinghouse AP1000, the company’s flagship nuclear reactor, a version of which China is building at industrial scale.

The loans are intended to speed up construction of 10 reactors in the U.S. Five loans will be available for projects with two reactors each, the Energy Department said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the conditional loans were part of a broader Trump administration mission to “unleash the next American nuclear renaissance.”

They “will also help accelerate the timeline of building those large-scale reactors by up to three years, lowering construction costs and ensuring the United States is able to deliver on President Trump’s bold and ambitious energy addition agenda,” Wright said.

The hope is that new AP1000s could come online starting in 2035, said Dan Sumner, chief executive of Westinghouse Electric.

“It really kick-starts fleet-scale nuclear development in the United States,” Sumner said.

Seven utilities have already signed formal letters of intent for the five available project loans, according to the Energy Department, which didn’t name the utilities.

The companies would form partnerships with Westinghouse and each have at least one potential site for a reactor, primarily locations with an existing reactor or large power plant, or sites that have done previous licensing work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Energy Department said.

Several large power players have told regulators and investors that they aim to bring new large or small nuclear projects online sometime in the coming decades, including Duke Energy DUK -0.64%decrease; down pointing triangle, Dominion Energy D -0.73%decrease; down pointing triangleand PacifiCorp. States including New York and Illinois are also interested in expanding their nuclear generation.

Cleanup Begins on Storm Damaged Wind Farm in South Dakota

After a destructive thunderstorm, with wind gusts measured at 131 mph, damages at a wind farm in Highmore, South Dakota, will now have to be cleaned up.
Pictures indicate that typical safety setbacks for wind turbines are more than adequate. Stories about blades sailing thru the air are Bullshit. All infrastructure will need to be hardened as climate extremes increase.

Mathew Cappucci in The Washington Post:

Something powerful just hit Hyde County, South Dakota.

A severe thunderstorm brought tornado-like wind speeds to the area in the predawn hours on Monday morning, which resulted in a 131-mph wind gust recorded in Holabird in Hyde County at 6:15 a.m. local time. The same storms produced a 112-mph gust at the Joe Creek Recreation Center in Hughes County, and a separate 114-mph gust was logged in Highmore in Hyde County. Then again at 6:44 a.m., another 112-mph gust occurred just north of Ree Heights in Hand County.

These may be the strongest straight-line thunderstorm gusts directly measured since Aug. 1, 1983, when a microburst hit Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland shortly after Air Force One landed with Ronald Reagan. A gust to 149.5 mph was clocked that day.

Higher Costs Might Be The Business Downside to this Extinction Event

Who knew?

Above, Sarah Kapnick is former chief scientist of NOAA from April 2022 to October 2024, and presently the inaugural Global Head of Climate Advisory at JP Morgan Chase.

Bloomberg:

Extreme weather events — such as the heat wave gripping Europe — are making a growing number of assets too risky to insure, according to a director at Europe’s largest primary insurer.

“Certain locations and perils cannot be covered as we would wish them to be covered,” Günther Thallinger, who sits on the management board of Allianz SE, said in an interview. “We cannot help it.”

Heat, floods, storms and wildfires “could become so frequent that they challenge traditional insurance models,” he said. “Risk-adequate pricing would not be affordable any longer.”

Insurers, bankers and financial analysts are now trying to calculate the short-to-medium-term costs of continual temperature rises. Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING Group NV, said in a client note this week that heat waves represent a “new downside risk” to the region’s economic growth.

The analysis feeds into a growing awareness across Europe that homes, schools, hospitals, transport networks and other forms of infrastructure will need significant investments in order to adapt to the rapidly changing climate. Brzeski says Europe faces an accumulated economic loss equivalent to 0.8% by 2029, as tourists stay away, people become less productive and supply chains get disrupted.