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On a permitting bill shocker, spiking gas bills, and China’s nuclear progress
On ravenous data centers, treasured aluminum trash, and the drilling slump
On power prices keep climbing, TVA’s ‘historic’ gas buildout, and mounting climate woes
On America’s climate ‘own goal,’ New York’s pullback, and Constellation’s demand response embrace
On Massachusetts’ offshore headwinds, Biden’s gas rules, and Australia’s free power
Current conditions: The Pacific Northwest is getting blasted with winds of up to 70 miles per hour • Heavy snow is coming this week for the higher elevations in New England and upstate New York • San Cristóbal de La Laguna in the Canary Islands saw temperatures surge to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill. Kena Betancur/Getty Images
Democratic candidates swept to victory in key races with implications for climate change on Tuesday night. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — who vowed to push forward with offshore wind, new nuclear reactors, and fusion energy — seized the governor’s mansion in the first major race to be called after polls closed. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who campaigned on building new nuclear plants and pressing the state’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to cut electricity prices, trounced her Republican opponent. In New York City, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who said little about energy during his campaign but came out in the last debate in favor of nuclear power, easily beat back his two rivals for Gracie Mansion. Yet the Georgia Public Service Commission's incumbent Republican Tim Echols lost his race against Democrat Alicia Johnson, a defeat for a conservative who championed construction of the only two nuclear reactors built from scratch in modern U.S. history. In what one expert called a sign of a “seismic shift” on the commission, Peter Hubbard, another Democrat running to flip a seat on the commission, also won.
At a moment when the Trump administration is “disassembling climate policy across the federal government,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “state elections are arguably more important to climate action than ever.”
A federal judge in Washington ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration can reconsider the Biden-era approval of SouthCoast Wind off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The decision, reported in The New York Times, is a setback for the joint venture between EDP Renewables and Engie, and handed the White House a victory in what we’ve called here the administration’s “total war on wind.” Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the project developers would not “suffer immediate and significant hardship” if the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management were allowed to reevaluate the project’s construction and operation permits.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld Biden-era Department of Energy efficiency rules for gas-fired residential furnaces and commercial water heaters in a ruling that rejected the gas industry’s challenge on Tuesday. “Overall, we find that DOE’s economic justification analysis and conclusions were robust,” the panel ruled, according to Bloomberg Law. The decision will maintain the status quo of how the agency enforces energy efficiency rules for the appliances. Under standards updated in 2021 and 2023, the Biden-era bureaucrats proposed raising efficiency levels to 95% for furnaces and using condensing model designs to heat water.
White House budget officials pressed the Environmental Protection Agency to expand its rollback of tailpipe regulations this summer as the agency sought to repeal the foundational policy that undergirds federal climate rules, E&E News reported. Documents the green newswire service obtained showed the White House Office of Management and Budget pushed the environmental regulator to weaken limits on vehicular pollution, including soot and smog-forming compounds in addition to planet-heating carbon. The EPA initially pushed back, but the documents revealed the staffers at OMB demanded the agency pursue a more aggressive rollback.
Australia launched a new plan to force energy companies to offer free electricity to households during the day to use excess solar power and push the grid away from coal and gas. The policy, called the “Solar Sharer” plan, aims to take advantage of the country’s vast rooftop solar panels. More than 4 million of Australia’s 10.9 million households have panels, and the capacity has overtaken the nation’s remaining coal-fired power stations. The proposal, the Financial Times reported, would also extend the benefits of distributed solar resources to the country’s renters and apartment dwellers.
For years, nuclear scientists have dreamed of harnessing atomic energy from thorium, potentially shrinking radioactive waste and reducing the risk of weapons proliferation compared to uranium. In the West, that has remained largely a dream. In China, however, researchers are vaulting ahead. This week, Chinese scientists announced a major breakthrough in converting thorium to uranium in a reactor. “This marks the first time international experimental data has been obtained after thorium was introduced into a molten salt reactor, making it the only operational molten salt reactor in the world to have successfully incorporated thorium fuel,” Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
Rob and Jesse touch base with WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava.
Data centers aren’t the only driver of rising power use. The inexorable shift to electric vehicles — which has been slowed, but not stopped, by Donald Trump’s policies — is also pushing up electricity use across the country. That puts a strain on the grid — but EVs could also be a strength.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Apoorv Bhargava, the CEO and cofounder of WeaveGrid, a startup that helps people charge their vehicles in a way that’s better and cleaner for the grid. They chat about why EV charging remains way too complicated, why it should be more like paying a cellphone bill than filling up at a gas station, and how the AI boom has already changed the utility sector.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: In your experience, are consumers willing to make this deal, where they get some money off on their power bill in order to change how their car works? Because it does seem to include a mindset change for people, where they’re going from thinking of their car as a machine — I mean, this is part of the broader transition to EVs. But there’s an even further mindset shift that seems to me like it would be required here, where you go from thinking about your car as a machine that you wholly own — that enables your freedom, that is ready to drive a certain amount of miles at any time — to a machine that enables you to have transportation services but also is one instantiation of the great big cloud of services and digital technologies and commodity energy products that surround us at any time.
Apoorv Bhargava: Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have seen faster adoption rates than any other consumer-side resource participating in energy has. So I feel very good about that. But ultimately, I think of this as a transition to the normal experience for folks who are going through what is a new experience altogether.
Again, similar to my cell phone plan, if this was just offered to me as a standard offering — you buy an EV, your utility offers you a plan, it’s called the EV plan — in the same way that we have EV time-of-use rates, quote-unquote. If you’re just offered an EV plan where it’s exactly the same thing — I’m going to make sure you’re fully charged every night in the way you want it to be charged, with the cleanest, cheapest, most reliable charging possible, and it’s just being taken care of.
I think what’s so hard for most folks to grok, is that the way this experience works is it’s supposed to be completely frictionless, right? You’re really supposed to not think about it. It’s actually only in the few moments where you need to change your 99% behavior to the 1% behavior — where you’re like, Oh, I need to go to the airport, or, Oh, I need to go on a road trip. That’s where you need to think about it. It’s flipped from thermostat management programs where you actually need to think about it actively in the moments where the grid is really strained.
Where we’ve overinvested, in my view —and this is a controversial view — we’ve overinvested in trying to make EVs be like gas stations or like the gas station model. We keep talking about it all the time. We’ve over-talked about range anxiety. The fact of the matter is 80% of charging still happens at home. Even in the long run, 30% of charging will happen in the workplace. 50- plus-percent will happen at home. It’s very little charging that’s gonna happen on fast charging. But we’ve talked so much, ad nauseam, about fast charging that we’ve actually forgotten that underpinning the iceberg of the electrification cost is the grid itself. And never before has the grid been so strained.
Mentioned:
Rob on how electricity got so expensive
Utility of the Future: An MIT Energy Initiative response to an industry in transition, December 2016
Previously on Shift Key: Utility Regulation Really Sucks
Jesse’s downshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
Uplight is a clean energy technology company that helps energy providers unlock grid capacity by activating energy customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy. The Uplight Demand Stack — which integrates energy efficiency, electrification, rates, and flexibility programs — improves grid resilience, reduces costs, and accelerates decarbonization for energy providers and their customers. Learn more at uplight.com/heatmap.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
