Month: February 2025

Bloomberg:

DOGE’s threats to cut staff and slash the budget suggests the Musk-led team may be following “Project 2025,” a proposed plan for reshaping the US government authored by a conservative think tank that calls for dismantling NOAA and distributing its responsibilities among other agencies. However, Howard Lutnick, a longtime financial services executive and Trump’s pick for secretary of commerce, testified at his confirmation hearing that he believes the agency should remain intact. But some small-government conservatives have long argued weather forecasting should be privatized, and Lutnick stopped short of promising to protect the National Weather Service.

Trump’s pick to oversee NOAA, atmospheric scientist Neil Jacobs, will likely face questions about NOAA’s future during his confirmation hearing sometime in the coming weeks. Jacobs led the agency in an acting capacity during the first Trump presidency. 

Can private weather forecasters replace the National Weather Service?

Project 2025 calls for privatizing the work of weather forecasting, pointing to the availability of forecasts from AccuWeather and other companies.

Continue reading “NOAA Next? Weather/Climate Agency in Crosshairs”

Cleanview:

Clean energy in the U.S. had a record-breaking year in 2024

• The U.S. added 47% more clean energy capacity in 2024 than in 2023

• 95% of capacity added in 2024 was carbon-free; solar and batteries made up 83% of new capacity

• Annual solar capacity additions rose by 65% in 2024

Continue reading “2024 Broke Records for Clean Energy”

Good PBS overview of the ways climate is pressuring water supplies, aquifers, and Agriculture in diverse regions of North America.

I’ve written recently about the heavy security presence at a recent County Planning meeting in Otsego County, Michigan – due to credible threats of violence from Anti-clean energy fanatics, possibly connected with the Michigan militia.

It’s not a one-off – it’s considered standard for local farmers and officials who are looking to site clean energy on their land and in their communities.

Above, a selection of interviews with farmers and local officials. The accounts are strikingly consistent.

Brittanica:

stochastic terrorism, the repeated use of hate speech or other vilifying, dehumanizing rhetoric by a political leader or other public figure that inspires one or more of the figure’s supporters to commit hate crimes or other acts of violence against a targeted person, group, or community. In legal terms, stochastic terrorism generally does not constitute incitement or solicitation to violence, which is a serious crime in many countries, because the speech involved lacks sufficient specificity. Incitement entails explicitly directing or encouraging an act of violence against a specific target at a particular time or place, thus immediately putting the target at an identifiable risk. In contrast, stochastic terrorists do not supply their followers with any detailed plan of attack, which means that the particular time and place of the eventual violence are unpredictable.

We’ve been hearing for several years now that big Data Centers and AI are going to need so much power that we MUST embark on a massive program to build fossil gas power plants, or the economy will collapse.
It’s not the first time there’s been a panic about generation capacity, and a few of them in the past did not pan out. Early predictions that the internet would suck up a huge portion of our supply fizzled.
In the 60s, similar predictions of demand doubling every 7 years forever stumbled when the energy crisis of the 70s showed just how cheap energy efficiency was – but not before a massive and costly overbuild of nuclear and coal plants that shook Utility finances.
Now, the wild card is new AI technologies that use vastly less energy to accomplish the same ends.
Not saying we don’t need to be building – we do, and it should be wind, solar and batteries – but getting too far out over our energy skis has risks, too.

Deep Impact:

In short, the recent AI bubble (and, in particular, the hundreds of billions of spending behind it) hinged on the idea that we need bigger models, which are both trained and run on bigger and even larger GPUs almost entirely sold by NVIDIA, and are based in bigger and bigger data centers owned by companies like Microsoft and Google. There was an expectation that this would always be the case, and that generative AI would always be energy and compute hungry, and thus, incredibly expensive.

But then, a Chinese artificial intelligence company that few had heard of called DeepSeek came along with multiple models that aren’t merely competitive with OpenAI’s, but undercut them in several meaningful ways. DeepSeek’s models are both open source and significantly more efficient — 30 times cheaper to run — and can even be run locally on relatively modest hardware.

Continue reading “How Much Power Will Deep Seek Suck? Can US Grid Handle Data Demand?”

Good episode of “Just Have a Think”, focusing on prospects for Energy grids.

Many Californians lost their insurance before they lost their homes.

FAFO. It’s real.

New York Times:

In less than three weeks, President Trump has thrown the U.S. clean energy industry into chaos, with much of the economic damage hitting Republican states and districts.

In a quest to eliminate any funding linked to climate change, the Trump administration has frozen federal grants for everything from battery factories to electric school buses and issued executive orders that have halted federal approvals for wind and solar projects.

Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress are also working to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is projected to pour hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade into low-carbon energy technologies through tax credits, loans and grants.

So far, Republican-voting communities have benefited the most from that law. In the nearly three years since it was passed, private companies chasing the law’s tax breaks have announced plans to spend $165.8 billion to build factories that make solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and more, according to new data from Atlas Public Policy, a research firm. Roughly 80 percent of those investments are in Republican congressional districts, where they are creating a once-in-a-generation manufacturing boom.

The Inflation Reduction Act, along with a separate 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, also provided tens of billions of dollars in grants that have since been awarded by the federal government to private companies, states and nonprofit organizations. These are legally binding obligations that have allowed companies to make investments, sign leases and hire workers, with the expectation that they would be reimbursed by the government.

Two federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to end its freeze and release money from programs authorized by Congress, but there is evidence that several agencies are still blocking funding.

Continue reading “Blowback from Trump Orders Hitting Red States, Oil/Gas, MAGA”

Above, PBS report on increasing acceptance of EVs in conservative Utah. On the negative side, they allow an EV skeptic to repeat the “they can’t be recycled” canard. The reporter seems well intentioned but not well-briefed.
On balance, we’ll take it.

Meanwhile, Trump administration continues trying to strangle the energy transition, in one case by blocking federal funds for vehicle charging stations.
Wondering when GM and Ford speak up about how this compromises their already shaky future?

Associated Press:

 Experts are questioning President Donald Trump’s latest effort to slow the electric vehicle charging buildout in the U.S.

In a letter Thursday night, the Trump administration directed states to stop spending money for EV charging infrastructure, funds they were allocated under former President Joe Biden. Trump has slammed federal funding for electric vehicle chargers as “an incredible waste of taxpayer dollars.” 

The administration may need an act of Congress for this, and it’s unclear there will be one. Industry leaders say customer demand will continue to drive growth in the charging network, regardless of federal funding.

The Tesla Supercharger network — led by CEO Elon Musk, now a prominent member of Trump’s inner circle — itself has received millions of dollars through the program that was just halted. But it also has a massive footprint of chargers across the country. Tesla will continue expanding its network regardless of federal money — and likely still benefit from its competitors receiving fewer funds.

Continue reading “Trump Squeeze on Charging Stations only Helps China”