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“At least 14 Tarrant County residents died from extreme heat last summer … Of those who died from heat, at least eight cases included residents with no air conditioning, no working air conditioning, or who had their air conditioning turned off at the time of their death…” –The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 25, 2023
Air conditioners aren’t supposed to make that sound. The gray-white box in the window had always rattled, but this morning it has begun to grind. The grandmother puts her hand in front of the AC’s dust-covered gills, feels nothing but a weak, lukewarm breeze.
She thinks about calling her daughter, whose husband installed the unit in her trailer’s living room window the summer before. She shakes her head to herself: No, they have the baby; it’s a 40-minute drive; she’s a burden enough as it is. She doesn’t have internet in the trailer to see the day’s excessive heat warning. Her cell phone, another gift from her daughter, is dead more often than it’s not, and she can’t find the weather app on it half of the time, anyway.
But the grandmother has been hot before — prides herself, even, on her 68 Texan summers. Besides, she’s not planning anything strenuous today, which would elevate her chances of exertional, or “activity-induced,” heat stroke — the kind that makes the news for killing the young, fit, and healthy, like the California couple who were found dead on a trail with their 1-year-old baby and dog in 2021, or the stepfather who died last month while trying to rescue his 14-year-old stepson, who also died, while hiking in 119-degree weather in Texas’ Big Bend National Park. Like the dozens of promising high school and college athletes who collapse during training, games, and meets every year.
Or like the characters in longtime Outside correspondent and adventure historian Peter Stark’s cautionary tales about succumbing to the elements. Stark is perhaps best known for his second-person narrative about what it’s like to die from hypothermia, which recirculates every winter, but he has a particular, morbid fascination with heat strokes, having now written two different versions (a competitive cyclist dies in one; a hungover, hiking surfer is brought back from the brink in the other). “Out of all the research I’ve done into ways to die — or come close to dying — heat stroke is the one I found the scariest,” Stark told an Outside interviewer last year.
Like Stark’s characters, the grandmother is fictional and illustrative. Unlike Stark’s characters, she has not elected into risk. Exertional heat stroke is often described as “sporadic” because it is circumstantial; it is also less deadly since an athlete often begins to feel terrible, or collapses, before the point-of-no-return. “Classic” heat stroke, which results from unbearably high temperatures, “occurs in epidemic form” in the sense that it strikes the vulnerable at once and all together: the ill, the elderly, the unhoused, the bedridden, the prepubescent. Though heat-related mortality can be hard to pin down, by some estimates classic heat stroke is fatal in over 60% of intensive care cases — part of the reason extreme heat is credited as the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States.
The grandmother goes to her sink and fills a glass of water. She looks out the window, at the tall grass growing alongside her neighbor’s trailer, and thinks about her grandbaby. Her trailer, which had stayed cool overnight before the AC conked out, has already begun to feel muggy, but she isn’t alarmed.
It is 97 degrees outside and getting hotter.
The human body is a contradiction: It can run a marathon in under two hours; it can scale the tallest mountain in the world; and it can survive episodes of extreme cold and starvation. At the same time, it is hilariously delicate: Only about 8.2 degrees separate our core body temperature of 98.6 from multi-organ dysfunction, which begins somewhere around 106 degrees, depending on the person and circumstances. Because this leaves little margin for error, our bodies spring into a well-rehearsed response when blood warmed by our environments at the surface of our skin makes its way to our brain, causing our hypothalamus to rustle through its bag of cooling tricks.
The grandmother’s body begins to run through them as the trailer’s temperature rises to 100 degrees, the point at which the body ceases to give off heat and begins to absorb it. Her hair follicles relax to release any trapped warm air against her skin. Her sweat glands are activated, and soon she’s covered in a light sheen that serves to transport heat away from her body via evaporation. Crucially, her blood vessels dilate so that the warmed blood can pass closer to the surface of the skin, where it will ideally be cooled by the heat pulling away from her body.
But as an older adult, the grandmother’s blood vessels don’t dilate as well as they used to. Her body strains to cool itself and her heart pumps harder. And despite her glass of water, the grandmother begins to notice she feels … off. She is experiencing some of the most common heat-related symptoms, the ones most of us are probably familiar with: Her stomach starts to cramp and she feels slightly nauseous as blood is redirected from her gut to the surface of her skin. She begins, also, to feel fatigued — unbeknownst to her, the drowsiness is because her body is running its cooling mechanisms full-blast, compensating for the broken AC.
But today, these systems are fighting an uphill battle. The trailer is humid, meaning the grandmother’s sweat isn’t evaporating as efficiently as it would in dry air. She has a sunburn from sitting on her lawn the day before, and her body is using water to try to heal it, leaving her with less liquid overall to sweat out. She can’t drink enough water to replenish what she’s lost, either, since the human body can only absorb, at max, one liter of water an hour, and those in extreme heat conditions can lose that or more in the same span of time.
Little does the grandmother know, either, that because it’s now over 95 degrees in her trailer, the fan she’s turned on is no longer having any cooling effect. Her core temperature tips toward 100 degrees.
Heat exhaustion sets in when the core body temperature is between 101°F and 104°F, as the grandmother’s is now. (Core body temperature cannot reliably be read on an oral thermometer, which is part of why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends watching for symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke rather than taking your own measurements). In addition to her fatigue, she now feels dizzy. Her heart is pounding as her body tries to regulate itself; if she had a preexisting cardiac condition, she would be in even more danger than she already is. She stands up to get more water and feels a woosh of lightheadedness — a result of low pressure stemming from her dilated vessels — and her vision momentarily goes black. She nearly faints, but steadies herself with a hand on the back of a chair.
If a neighbor checked in on her, as the weathermen on TV are advising good samaritans do, they would see that the grandmother looks pale, that she’s grown irritable and unfocused. The neighbor might suggest she take a cold shower before asking her to come to their air-conditioned trailer, or a local cooling center, for the rest of the day. The most crucial thing, though, would be that she gets to a safe temperature, and fast, before her core hits 104, the threshold of heat stroke.
In her delirium, the grandmother thinks to take an Advil, foggily hoping a fever-reducer might help lower her core body temperature. And though the damage wrought by extreme heat is similar internally to that inflicted by a dangerously high fever, the response systems at play in each case are completely different. For extreme heat, there is no magic pill, no shut-off switch for how the grandmother is feeling aside from getting somewhere cool.
It might seem like a simple thing: getting somewhere cool. In this sense, classic heat stroke is, agonizingly, preventable. Though most Americans have air conditioning, over a quarter — 34 million households — “said they could not [financially] meet their energy needs at some point” during 2020, according to Energy Information Administration data. Of those who were struggling, 10% reported enduring dangerously high temperatures in their homes due to concerns about cost.
Because Americans typically do have access to AC, though, losing air conditioning for reasons beyond their control — say, due to grid failure, a localized blackout, or a mechanical issue — actually makes people more susceptible to dangerous heat-related illness, in part because acclimation has such a large role in how well we tolerate heat. The shock of living in climate-controlled rooms and suddenly finding yourself without one can be deadly.
The grandmother’s internal temperature is now over 105 degrees and still rising; she is well within the realm of heat stroke. Her pulse is rapid and now she is confused and agitated — she stumbles, directionless, toward her living room and collapses on the floor. Her body is rationing water away from vital organs, like her kidneys, which begin to shut down. Her brain is swollen. She cycles in and out of consciousness on the floor.
Her body is past the point of being able to bring its temperature back down by itself. A heat stroke victim may stop sweating. Their cells begin to die — the cerebellum, which controls motor functions, is one of the earliest parts of the brain to fail. They may have seizures or hallucinate or, nearing the end, feel a soaring sense of euphoria. Internally, the body is in freefall; by one estimate, there are 27 different pathways to death once heat stroke sets in, ranging from heart failure to the proteins that control blood clotting becoming overactive and cutting off flow to vital organs.
When the grandmother’s daughter arrives and calls the paramedics, it will only have been two hours since the grandmother first noticed her air conditioner’s grinding. “That’s part of what makes [heat stroke] so lethal,” Willamette Week wrote after the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021 killed an estimated 250 Americans: “You can go from feeling bothered by the heat to dead in 90 minutes.”
Victims of classic heat stroke are often elderly, often have pre-existing health conditions, often are socially isolated, and often are low-income. In an analysis of heat deaths in Multnomah County (where Portland, Oregon, is located) in 2021, The Washington Post found 61 percent of confirmed deaths were in areas with above-average poverty rates. In the same story, the reporters found that a “direct outreach” program in Philadelphia — which includes a “mass notification system,” “the number for a 24-hour hotline staffed by nurses [flashing] from one of the city’s tallest high rises,” and a 5,000-strong volunteer team that mobilizes “to check on high-risk neighbors” — saves an average of 45 lives per year.
If the grandmother had been younger, she might have been treated with “cold-water immersion,” which is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to address heat stroke. (Willamette Week reports Oregon paramedics resourcefully filled body bags with ice and had those suffering from heat stroke crawl inside). In the case of the elderly, though, it is advised to treat heat stroke with more easily tolerable cooling methods, like the application of ice packs and cold, wet gauze.
Either way, the outcome past the threshold of heat stroke is uncertain. As Stark, the master of the cautionary tale, writes, “A study reviewing 58 of the severe heat stroke victims [after a 1995 Chicago heat wave] found that 21 percent died in the hospital soon after admission, 28 percent died within a year, and all the remaining subjects experienced organ dysfunction and neurological impairments.”
But he sees a grim silver lining. “It could be a small measure of good fortune,” writes Stark, “that confusion, semiconsciousness, or coma overcome victims as they succumb to severe heatstroke.”
The laborer puts the nail gun down on the nearest cinderblock and sweeps the back of his hand across his brow, a portrait of I’m hot. Though the elimination of water breaks won’t go into effect until the fall, his employer has threatened to fire anyone who “slacks off” anyway, and the laborer needs this job. He watches for a moment as the heat makes strange shapes in the air above the new asphalt driveway. He thinks he might have a headache coming on.
There are five more hours to go. It’s 96 degrees out with 66% humidity.
And tomorrow will be another scorcher.
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On FERC’s ‘disastrous misstep,’ the World Court’s climate ruling, and 127 SMRs
Current conditions: West African countries including Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Senegal and The Gambia are facing flash flooding from heavy rainfall • The southwestern corner of New Mexico is suffering “exceptional” drought, the highest possible level in the U.S. Drought Monitor. • Already roasting in excessive heat, Des Moines, Iowa, is bracing for thunderstorms.
The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project designed to move wind power from Kansas to the industrial upper Midwest. After more than a decade of development, the power line won bipartisan support and secured $4.9 billion in federal financing late last year to fund the first phase of the project, running from Ford County in Kansas to Callaway County in Missouri.
As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explained, the project eventually drew the ire of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who recently stepped up his attacks in the hopes that a more friendly administration could help scrap the project. The transmission line’s developer, Invenergy, told Heatmap in a statement that “a privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance.”
The microreactor startup Oklo inked a deal with Liberty Energy, the fracking giant where Secretary of Energy Chris Wright served as chief executive before entering government. Liberty was already an early investor in Oklo, and Wright served on the nuclear company’s board. But the new deal is a strategic partnership with a plan to deploy Liberty’s gas equipment alongside Oklo’s reactors, mirroring similar pairings that other small modular reactor developers have promoted.
Oklo is among 127 small modular reactor designs currently under development worldwide, according to a new tally from the Nuclear Energy Agency at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the 38-member club of rich countries. Of those designs, 51 are in pre-licensing or licensing processes, and 85 are in active discussion between SMR developers and site owners. Just seven are either operating or under construction.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved fast-track interconnection processes proposed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and the Southwest Power Pool. The new processes will allow power plants to sidestep the standard reviews for a grid hookup. Gas-fired power plants are “likely to be the main beneficiary of the fast-track processes, with standalone batteries also potentially being included,” Utility Dive reported. The American Clean Power Association, the biggest renewable energy lobby, called the decision “a dangerous misstep.”
Southern California’s landmark rule to spur the electrification of certain boilers and water heaters survived a major court challenge. A federal court last week upheld the first-in-the-nation regulation that applies to light-industrial and commercial boilers, steam generators, process heaters, residential pool heaters and tankless water heaters. The ruling, which only applies to the 17 million people in large parts of Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs, could “help reenergize efforts around the country to replace fossil-fuel-burning equipment with electric heat pumps and other clean technologies,” Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci wrote.
Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported earlier this week on an effort in Newton, Massachusetts to beat back new gas pipelines block by block. But overall, the fight for electrification has recently faced repeated setbacks. In 2023, a federal court struck down the northern California city of Berkeley’s pioneering ban on new gas hookups, which was replicated in cities across the country. Last year, gas utilities staged something of a coup at the quasi-governmental organization that writes the building codes used in nearly every state.
Children stand outside a church destroyed in a cyclone in Vanuatu.Mario Tama/Getty Images
In a historic decision on Wednesday morning, the International Court of Justice ruled that countries must act on climate change. While non-binding, the verdict from the United Nations’ high court was dubbed “the biggest climate case in history,” as it established the first international legal precedent of a nation state’s responsibility to curb planet-heating emissions.
The tiny South Pacific island republic of Vanuatu called the ruling a “milestone in the fight for climate justice” and vowed to “take the ICJ ruling back to the United Nations General Assembly, and pursue a resolution that will support implementation of this decision,” said Vanuatuan climate minister Ralph Regenvanu. He anticipated opposition from Washington. “Even as fossil fuel expansion continues under the U.S.’s influence, along with the loss of climate finance and technology transfer, and the lack of climate ambition following the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement,” he said, “major polluters — past and present — cannot continue to act with impunity and treat developing countries as sacrifice zones to further feed corporate greed.”
Researchers at Japan’s Shinshu University have demonstrated for the first time that a new eco-friendly plastic made from microbes safely decomposes in deep ocean conditions
“This research addresses one of the most critical limitations of current bioplastics—their lack of biodegradability in marine environments,” said Professor Seiichi Taguchi at the Shinshu’s Institute for Aqua Regeneration. “The study provides a pathway for safer alternatives to conventional plastics and supports the transition to a circular bioeconomy.”
NextEra CEO John Ketchum projected serenity during the company’s earnings call Wednesday.
The business of renewable energy development in the United States is the business of NextEra. The company’s renewable division is one of the country’s largest and most sophisticated, with almost 30 gigawatts in its project backlog — including 3.2 gigawatts added in the past three months.
NextEra’s financial results and outlook for the future can be a guide to how the sector is thinking — or wants people to think it’s thinking — about the state of the development landscape. Now especially, that landscape looks confusing and contradictory, with power demand increasing sharply alongside hostility to wind and solar development.
The way NextEra sees it, NextEra will come through fine. But many other — especially many other smaller — players may struggle.
“Bottom line, America needs more electricity, not less,” NextEra Chief Executive John Ketchum told analysts during the company’s earnings presentation Wednesday.
“America needs it now, not just in the future. We are firmly aligned with the administration’s goal to unleash American energy dominance. And to do so, we need all of the electrons we can get on the grid. There’s truly no time to wait.”
That alignment may be one way, however. From sunsetting tax credits to ordering enhanced reviews of wind and solar projects by federal regulators, the Trump administration has made it clear that it does not see wind and solar as part of its energy strategy.
The rhetoric coming from Washington hasn’t been particularly constructive, either, no matter how often renewable energy companies try to label their work as part and parcel of an “energy dominance” agenda. Just in the past few weeks, Trump has claimed that China has “very, very few” wind farms (in fact it has very, very many), and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright called wind and solar a “parasite on the grid.”
NextEra is not unaware of the tone and policy emanating from the administration. The company issued a new risk disclosure, first noticed by analysts at Jefferies, saying that its guidance on future performance assumes “no changes to governmental policies or incentives, including continued applicability of existing Internal Revenue Service tax credit safe harbor guidance,” i.e. that it can “commence construction” the way it always has, by following existing IRS guidance.
Although that would be awfully nice, it may not be the case for much longer. Soon after signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, President Trump issued an executive order calling for “new and revised” tax guidance “to ensure that policies concerning the ‘beginning of construction’ are not circumvented, including by preventing the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility and by restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
It doesn’t take a terribly close reading to intuit that Trump wants to narrow the window for renewables developers to claim tax credits even beyond what Congress has already done. According to conservative members of Congress who wanted the tax credits to phase out even sooner, the president was merely fulfilling a promise he’d made to win their vote.
Ketchum at least projected serenity about the safe harbor situation, telling analysts that the definition of construction has been understood “for well over a decade,” that it “is informed by longstanding Treasury Department guidance,” and that the OBBBA’s language “definition is consistent with the settled meeting.”
He also noted that NextEra had “made significant financial commitments over the last few years, including in the first half of 2025, to begin construction under these rules that were in effect at the time those commitments were made,” i.e. before the bill was signed.
“We believe that we’ve begun construction on a sufficient number of projects to cover our development expectations through 2029,” Ketchum continued, adding that the company has determined it will be eligible for tax credits based on “our belief as to what the statute provides based on our experience in this industry over the last couple of decades.”
If anything, Ketchum suggested, NextEra might be advantaged by the harsh deadlines for commencing construction (July 4, 2026) or being placed in service (the end of 2027) in the new law. “It comes down to who’s safe harbor, right?” Ketchum said. “We know we compete against a lot of really small developers who don’t have the balance sheet, the construction financing to do things around safe harbor.”
In this kind of environment, Ketchum said, size matters.
“If you’re in a market where you have folks drop out, right, because they didn’t plan ahead, they don’t have the ability to get construction financing, they don’t have the ability to safe harbor. It obviously creates bigger opportunities for us.”
NextEra could be left to pick up the pieces from smaller developers that don’t make it, Ketchum said. “If we do see some small developers kind of fall away, there’ll be more projects that could potentially hit the market and come up for sale.”
It sure looks that way, at least. Democrats should start coming up with a plan.
For the first six months of President Trump’s term, the big question was about what would happen to the Inflation Reduction Act. We now have something like an answer.
President Trump’s memorably named One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed many of the IRA’s most important clean energy tax credits, including incentives for wind, solar, and electric vehicles. And while it’s still unclear whether the Trump administration will let developers actually use the tax credits that remain on the books — especially the now-denuded credits for wind and solar — fewer “unknown unknowns” remain about what might come next.
So I’ve been trying to figure out where climate and energy policy might go from here. And one story that I keep coming back to is the flashing red lights around what could become a serious electricity affordability crisis.
It’s now widely understood that electricity demand is rising in the United States for the first time in a generation. The Energy Information Administration projects that electricity use will grow 1.7% in the next few years, after increasing by just 0.1% per year from 2005 to 2020. That growth is projected to come from new data centers, new factories, the (now) slow(er) but (still) steady adoption of electric vehicles, and population growth.
What is less well understood is how poorly the United States is prepared to match this rise in electricity demand with an equivalent increase in supply. To some degree, American electricity prices are already rising: So far this year, utilities have received or requested permission to increase customers’ bills by $29 billion, according to a July report from PowerLines, a think tank and advocacy group. That’s a large number in its own right, and it’s more than twice as much as had been approved at this time last year.
But when you look across the power system, virtually every trend is setting us up for electricity price spikes:
On top of all this, of course, the Trump administration has made it much more uncertain which new solar, wind, and battery projects will be able to secure tax credits — and with them, secure bank financing.
None of these trends alone would guarantee price increases or electricity supply constraints. But taken together, they reveal an electricity system that is coming under a variety of strains.
In the 2010s, cheap natural gas and technological advances in energy efficiency pacified much of the power system. We won’t have the same luxury this decade.
This is all going to be bad for the economy, bad for the climate, and bad for climate policy.
It’s a setback for the U.S. economy because, as President Trump somewhat alluded to in his second inaugural address, energy is a key input to virtually every other economic process, including manufacturing. But it’s especially bad for climate policy. The dominant plan to decarbonize much of the U.S. economy is to “electrify everything” — cars, appliances, home heating, and even many industrial processes. Americans will be far less eager to electrify everything if electricity is expensive.
If energy price hikes do arrive, Democrats are going to have a relatively straightforward time communicating about them in a narrow political sense. The story is just too simple: Democrats passed a law to encourage clean energy called the Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans repealed it. Energy prices inflated. QED.
That story alone might be too contrived, but the evidence we have suggests that OBBBA will raise energy bills. The REPEAT Project at Princeton University — led by Jesse Jenkins, my Shift Key podcast cohost — has a new report out projecting that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase Americans’ electricity bills by $165 a year by the end of the decade. (If the law is allowed to stick around, and in the absence of intervening policies, it could raise bills by hundreds of dollars a year by the middle of next decade.)
OBBBA’s explosion of the federal deficit will make the situation worse: By expanding the deficit for such little public gain — that is, merely to memorialize earlier tax cuts, not even to make new ones — the Federal Reserve will have a more difficult time cutting interest rates in the future. That will in turn make it even more difficult for utilities and developers to finance new energy projects.
The political story will be so compelling here, I think, that Democrats will come under a lot of pressure to reinstate the wind and solar tax credits. And maybe they should do that — it could make sense as part of a larger energy or permitting deal. But stacking more solar and wind on the grid will not on its own lower people’s electricity bills.
Going into 2028, Democrats will need an actual plan to stabilize or cut electricity costs. They will need ideas about how (and whether) to speed up permitting, restructure wholesale power markets, and build new power plants in order to stabilize the power grid.
One thing that’s already clear is that in this inflationary environment, states like New York with publicly owned power authorities are able to intervene more forcefully in their own power markets than states that lack such capability. That’s because the state itself can act to build its own large-scale power plants. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently directed the state’s power authority to build a new nuclear power plant upstate in order to grow the supply of zero-emissions electricity. Using their state own power authorities, governors in other states — or even the federal government, with an entity like the TVA— could take a similar step.
With all that said, I’ve been trying to come up with a scenario under which these price hikes will not materialize. In the late 2010s, for instance, America’s liquified natural gas exports surged essentially from zero, but domestic consumers didn’t see significant price hikes because drillers increased gas production to match the exports. Maybe that could happen again. And maybe utilities will — and this would, to be clear, be horrible for the climate — run their aging coal plants much more than they once anticipated doing.
Or maybe load growth won’t be as bad as we think. When Jesse and I spoke to Peter Freed, Meta’s former director of energy strategy, for Shift Key, he told us that the current data center boom is different from any previous buildout because of the presence of speculators. For the first time, he said, speculative data center developers are buying up prospective sites and requesting utility-scale hookups with the expectation that they will find a tenant for the data center in the future. In other words, the demand side of the electricity system is filled with an unusual amount of froth at the moment.
We also know that, more generally, the demand side of the power system is a mess. In the past few years, climate analysts have gotten used to talking about the power grid’s interconnection queue — that is, its supply side. But the demand-side queue — the process that lets new data centers, factories, and other new electricity users connect — is even more broken. In some jurisdictions, it’s little more than an Excel file that projects move up and down within as local politics requires.
We also know that one source of new demand — one planned factory or, more often, one data center — will sometimes apply to hook up to multiple states or utilities at the same time. It will get utilities to bid against each other, suss out the best construction sites and power rates, and only relatively late in the process make a final decision about where to build.
So if I were putting together a bear case for electricity demand, I would start here. Maybe aggressive data center speculators are bidding in multiple utilities, driving up projections across many states. That’s causing utilities to freak out about their supply, leading them to project the need for a lot of new investment — and, with it, a lot of electricity rate increases. But as data center speculators actually begin to build (or abandon) projects — and as some of the air inevitably comes out of the AI boom — some of this projected demand will start to evaporate. Perhaps the data centers that do get built will find ways to reduce their power usage, too.
Even this story won’t fully eliminate load growth on its own, though. Data centers make up the largest share of new electricity demand, but even then, they’re not the majority of it. The rest comes from, roughly, new factories, the slow electrification of the vehicle fleet, and new residential construction. But let’s say the One Big Beautiful Bill Act succeeds in hobbling the electric vehicle sector in the United States, many EV and battery factories get canceled, and fewer Americans buy EVs overall. Calculate in a mild recession, too, since all the AI and EV investment will be drying up.
In that world, most new sources of power demand really will be in abeyance. That’s how some of these power projections might not come true. But in most other scenarios, it’s time to hold on — and for blue-state leaders to think about how they can find cheap, zero-emissions electrons, as soon as possible.