Trump’s Energy Plan: Gaslighting on Fossil Gas

And since we are stuck at less than 10GW of new NG per year, all of this will come from batteries. Everyone knows it except for maybe this guy. If only he had all of the experts working for him that he could call. https://t.co/E73DdwpGGc
— Jigar Shah (@JigarShahDC) September 21, 2025

Above, Jigar Shah points out that due to constricted supply of combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT), the Trump administration’s plan to block inexpensive and quick-to-build solar, wind, and battery projects, (and presumably speed construction of gas plants with unspecified magic), is a dangerous fantasy.

Have I told you the Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a Galactic scale pseudo-intellectual boob and fossil fuel shill?

Latitude Media:

Demand for gas turbines is soaring — and the price of a combined-cycle gas turbine is too, new research finds. Projects slated for completion in 2030 or 2031 are now “routinely reporting costs of $2,000 per kilowatt or more,” a jump of as much as 75% over near-term prices.

(As a point of comparison, projects that are slated to come online in the coming years reported costs of between $1,116 per kW and $1,427 per kW.)

These findings are the result of a collaboration of GridLab, Energy Futures Group, Component Reliability Consultants, and Halcyon. In their recent report, the authors attempt to put numbers to the anecdotes of rising prices for gas infrastructure, which is a surprisingly difficult task given that costs are also kept confidential in integrated resource plans and other public documents.

By pulling together what little data is available, though, the researchers provide a fuller picture of a market staggering under an unexpected boom in demand, one that is “a stark departure from historical cost assumptions and public cost projections.”

A combination of electrification, onshoring, and data centers has caused the U.S. to enter a period of major load growth. And while much of the new demand for energy is being met by renewables, the reliability requirements of especially data centers has prompted a surge of demand for gas.

“These elevated costs are likely to persist rather than decline, at least in the short-midterm,” the authors wrote; they add that this conclusion is supported by the financial reports of major gas turbine OEMs like GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, and Mitsubishi Power, who “are reporting strong demand and robust order backlogs.”

These three OEMs, they found, now require a reservation fee to secure a manufacturing slot; two Kentucky utilities, for instance, paid GE Vernova a $25 million reservation fee to reserve a turbine to be delivered in time for a facility to reach commercial operation in 2030.

And these are prices that will largely trickle down to utility customers in the form of higher bills. Utilities this year have already sought record rate increases, and electricity prices are increasingly a political sticking point.

Predictably, timelines for installing these high-price turbines are also getting longer. New combined-cycle resources often are looking at coming online in 2030 or 2031, a delay that is already complicating the tech industry’s race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure; increasingly, the AI race is a race to secure enough power.

The delays and higher prices are not just a function of the OEMs exercising their pricing power, however. Bottlenecks in engineering, procurement, and construction services (or EPC) are plaguing the energy industry more broadly, and contributing to delays.