This is Not Cool

If you wonder why the Trump administration, and Energy Secretary and grifting Frack Baron Chris Wright have been so focused on sabotaging Wind Energy, this is why.

Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis:

Natural gas’ share of electricity generation in the market run by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) fell to a record low on May 16, dropping to just 3.1% of total generation. That day was not an outlier either; from May 13-17, gas’ share of daily CAISO output was less than 10%.

In 2021, gas’ generation share never fell below 20% and was 40% or higher on 99 of those 135 days. In 2025, the number of high-market-share days (more than 40%) dropped sharply, to 56, but gas’ minimum daily share still never fell below 20%. This year has been a different story. There have been 68 days already when gas’ market share fell below 20%, and there has not been a single day when gas accounted for more than 50% of CAISO generation.

Continue reading “Massive Southwest Wind Farm is Bad News for Natural Gas”

Utility Dive:

Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home could deliver nearly 17 GW of distributed energy capacity to unlock headroom in an increasingly congested U.S. power grid, the companies said Wednesday.

The three companies say they can provide 16.8 GW of capacity across 12 million devices in 9 million U.S. homes. Sunrun and Tesla manage 7.8 GW of installed battery capacity and Renew Home has about 9 GW of HVAC capacity based on its smart thermostats’ one-hour peak load shift potential, the companies say.

In Texas, which Rauscher said is the country’s second largest data center market, the companies have 1.3 GW of HVAC capacity and 440 MW of battery capacity. They have nearly 1.1 GW of HVAC capacity and 3.6 GW of battery capacity in California, the country’s third largest data center market.

Power system experts have been talking for years about the “theoretical” potential for distributed resources to unlock headroom on the grid, but “I don’t think anyone realizes the scale of the resource available right now,” Ben Brown, Renew Home’s CEO, told Utility Dive in an interview. 

In Virginia, home to one of the world’s largest commercial computing clusters, Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home have 37 MW of batteries and 276 MW of HVAC capacity. They expect the combined capacity there to reach 500 MW by 2030.

Continue reading “Data Center Solution: Have HyperScalers Help Home Owners”

In Ukraine, as everywhere else, renewable energy is a key defense against tyranny.
Polish TV interview in English.

Interesting report on GE-Vernova, leading builder of gas turbines.
Confirms at the end that there are long lead times for new turbines – 3 years estimated in this case.
Major advantage for renewables, particularly solar, which can be brought on line much faster.

Below, Uber Utility NextEra CEO John Ketchum on the relative time frame for building gas, nuclear and renewables.

Below, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya makes the same point.

Continue reading “Long Lead Times for Gas Mean Advantage Renewables”

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: “That news comes on the heels of the Trump administration also having to give in and give up on this inexplicable bizarre plan they had to go down to the bottom of the ocean, the deep sea off the coast of Oregon, Washington state, Alaska, North… pic.twitter.com/k7hYqkTm4B

— Emoluments Clause (@Emolclause) June 24, 2026

MSNOW:

As June got underway, Trump administration officials announced plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-sea observation system that, as The New York Times reported, “was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.”

There was no real point to the move. The money had already been spent, and the deep-sea instruments were already anchored. But members of Team Trump decided they simply did not want the information the observation system offered, so they said they’d destroy it.

At least that was the original idea. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators took steps to block the administration from dismantling the system, insisting the move would be both illegal and damaging to coastal communities. One day later, Team Trump announced the observation system would remain in place after all.

Continue reading “Trump Backtracks on Ocean Monitoring System”

The idea that the land under solar panels is wasted or not doing anything is an anthropocentric notion that ignores the living community of soil and the critters that can thrive on it when you stop pounding farmland with heavy machinery and chemicals.
There is a rapidly growing literature on how ecosystems evolve under and around solar sites, showing that solar can be a valuable adjunct to repairing and restoring biodiversity.

EcoNews:

Solar farms have often been treated like a threat to the countryside. The image is easy to picture: rows of dark panels, hot ground underneath, and a landscape that seems too quiet for birds, insects, and the small dramas of rural life.

Fresh evidence from Spain suggests that picture is, at least in some cases, incomplete. In several solar parks studied in 2025, researchers found more bird species inside the fenced solar sites than in nearby intensively farmed fields, raising a sharper question for the energy debate.What if the panels are not the whole story, but the way the land is managed beneath them is?

The clearest numbers come from three Spanish provinces. At Minglanilla, in Cuenca, researchers counted 32 bird species inside the solar plant and 19 in the nearby control area. At Revilla Vallejera, in Burgos, they found 39 species inside and 34 outside, while Trujillo, in Cáceres, showed 31 inside and 25 outside.

Those counts came from studies by the environmental consultancy EMAT and were highlighted by UNEF, Spain’s solar industry association. The same work also documented birds of special ecological interest, including stone-curlews, little bustards, European rollers, little owls, and lesser kestrels.

Continue reading “Conservoltaics – Solar Fields for Biodiversity”

Nice explainer for a fast moving field.
Helpful for those of us still waiting to make the jump.

In an administration where corruption is the rule, one of the more bald-faced payoffs to big fossil donors are these “emergency” orders to keep obsolete, expensive and polluting coal plants open, a direct transfer of ratepayer’s money to oligarch’s pockets. The kicker, they don’t even run to provide that vaunted “baseload” power.

Utility Dive:

Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy ordered the owners of 10 generating units at six power plants — five of them coal-fired — to run the units past their retirement dates to address what DOE says is a reliability emergency across most of the country’s grid.

So far, the emergency orders’ impact on power production has been mixed. One power plant hasn’t operated at all under its 202(c) order, one ran for a two-week stretch, three are producing less power than they did at the same time in previous years and one is generating electricity roughly in line with its previous output, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

Combined, five of the power plants produced 1.5 million MWh in the first quarter of this year under the DOE’s orders, down 65% from the 4.3 million MWh they generated in the same period last year. One of the six plants, in Pennsylvania, hasn’t reported its output to the EIA this year. It generated just 27,000 MWh in the first quarter last year.

Never before in the Energy Department’s nearly 50-year history has it ordered generating units to continue producing power after their scheduled retirement dates. To do so, it has used a string of 90-day emergency orders issued under the Federal Power Act’s section 202(c). DOE has reissued those orders for all the units before the initial orders expired.

Continue reading “Trump’s “Emergency” Coal Plants Not Producing”

The Slate truck is a basic body that you can customize to your heart’s content, but the 25k price is what has people’s attention.

Wall Street Journal:

A new automotive startup is betting that Americans are so fed up with high car prices they will consider buying a two-seat, all-electric pickup truck with hand-crank windows and no radio. 

Slate Auto, a Michigan-based carmaker backed by Amazon.com AMZN 1.74%increase; green up pointing triangle founder Jeff Bezos, is racing to begin production later this year of its first model: an overtly spartan, compact truck that will start at $24,950, the company said on Wednesday. Trucks like these have been missing from U.S. roads for over a decade.

Car buyers today have only eight new models to choose from under $25,000, with automakers warning that it is difficult, if not impossible, to turn a meaningful profit on such vehicles. 

Slate thinks it can buck that trend. “A U.S. automaker can make an affordable vehicle—and not only an affordable vehicle, but an affordable vehicle that people love,” said Peter Faricy, Slate’s chief executive.

Continue reading “25K Modular EV: First Look”

Not fast enough to head off climate change, but nevertheless satisfying.
Judge me if you will.

Nature -The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA:

Abstract:

Public health disparities provide an important lens for understanding social and political change in the USA. Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s. Here we find evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms. First, demographic realignment within political coalitions brought less healthy individuals into the conservative camp. Yet by the 2020s, demographic change, public policy and COVID-19 do not fully account for the widening gap in mortality rates. Public opinion data are consistent with a second mechanism: declining trust in medical professionals among right-leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness, even for issues unrelated to COVID-19. These patterns suggest that growing ideological divides in health behaviours are leaving conservative Americans increasingly vulnerable to preventable health risks.
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We find that conservative Americans in this cohort, who were about as healthy as liberals in the early 2010s, experienced worsening health through the 2010s and higher mortality in the early 2020s. Roughly half of this new health gap is due to people changing their ideology over time, with new entrants to the conservative coalition being less healthy than new liberals. But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time. Changes in the socio-economics of the liberal and conservative coalitions—including education, income and insurance status—contribute to both processes.

Continue reading “Science Denial Killing MAGA”