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Trump’s new tariffs seem to make few exemptions for clean energy.
A new 60-home pilot program aims to expand vehicle-to-grid charging.
On Trump’s power pledge, America’s offshore nuclear, and Japan’s offshore wind
The spinoff of Lawrence Livermore National Lab has a new 10-point plan to get onto the grid by the 2030s.
Frontier model developers still keep their energy use largely a secret, but Watershed is proposing a new formula that will at least get you close.
Average U.S. gasoline prices have slipped back above $4 a gallon.
A decade ago, the Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson published a paper about a fact that they called “not nearly as widely known as it should be”: The U.S. economy has done better under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents.
Blinder was not a completely impartial observer — he served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Clinton later appointed him vice chair of the Federal Reserve — but he and Watson compiled a lengthy list of statistics to back up their claim. The U.S. economy has grown faster, produced more jobs, had a lower unemployment rate, seen higher corporate profits and investment, and experienced better stock market performance under Democrats than Republicans. While the original paper described this divergence from 1947 to 2013, recent research has shown that it held through the subsequent Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
The only metric where the two parties come close is inflation, but Democrats still seem to have a tiny edge there, even after the Biden-era inflation.
Why? Blinder and Watson found that it didn’t entirely come down to timing. (Other observers have disputed this, arguing that Republicans tend to get elected at the peak of economic booms, while Democrats win during or just after recessions.) Instead, Blinder and Watson found that a few factors — oil shocks, productivity growth, a more favorable international growth environment, and perhaps better consumer confidence — could explain much of the divergence.
Of course, these factors can’t be entirely separated from a president’s record in office. Oil shocks, for example, tend to drag down global growth, which in turn slows the U.S. economy. And as Watson and Blinder write, some of those oil shocks “may have been induced by [American] foreign policy.” By that mechanism, presidential bellicosity in the Middle East can translate into poorer economic outcomes. This belligerence may even be, as the writer Matt Yglesias contended earlier this year, Republican presidents’ “worst economic policy.”
Why am I recounting all this? Because average U.S. gasoline prices have slipped back above $4 a gallon, according to AAA. (As I write, they stand at $4.01.) The collapse of the ceasefire with Iran — and President Trump’s inability to figure out how to end a war he started — are once again driving up fossil fuel prices.
The numbers add up. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress today that the Iran War has cost $37.5 billion so far, but according to a tracker from Brown University researchers, Americans have already paid nearly double that — $71 billion! — on more expensive gasoline and diesel fuel. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real economic underperformance. That estimate suggests the burden of higher energy prices from the Iran War has wiped out the expected $65 billion consumer boost from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s expanded tax refunds.
Of course, from a decarbonization perspective, higher gas prices are good, in theory. They encourage people to drive less and to switch to more fuel-efficient — or even fully electrified — vehicles, reducing carbon emissions. (This is part of why I joke about Degrowth Donald, raising fuel prices as he goes.) But short-term oil shocks are the second worst kind of emissions reductions after recessions: They are unlikely to last; they will probably not lead to real decarbonization; and they produce a lot of human misery along the way.
Perhaps this oil spike won’t persist. Perhaps Trump will find a way out of the quagmiring conflict in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps Republican presidential underperformance really does all come down to luck, too. (Or maybe, as a 2020 paper argued, Democratic presidents benefit from a “pre-election growth surge” just before a Republican wins.) But I think it’s worth noting that the recent trickle of news — and the recent and less noticed surge in gas prices — is how an oil interruption results in slower growth overall. If oil shocks really are responsible for GOP presidential underperformance, this is what it would look like.
The irony is that technology finally exists to make the American transportation sector — and the overall economy — less dependent on oil. This technology was developed at the American public’s expense to help manage a scenario much like this one. And the administration has undermined it at almost every opportunity.
The latest forecast from BloombergNEF raises its estimate for AI electricity demand by 83%.
Energy analysts at BloombergNEF predicted last year that U.S. data center electricity demand would reach 106 gigawatts within the next decade. In its latest outlook, released Tuesday, the group increased its forecast by 83%, to 194 gigawatts — enough to light up 150 million homes, or roughly every single household in the country today.
Even that may be a conservative estimate. If data center developers were to max out the total number of the high-powered chips used to train and operate AI models forecast to be delivered by 2035, electricity demand would reach 229 gigawatts.
Over 100 gigawatts of that demand has entered the development pipeline since the beginning of this year, the result of both rising demand for artificial intelligence and shortened construction timelines for data centers. Some developers have oriented their site selection around energy availability, redeveloping brownfield energy generation sites for quick access to electricity and developing relationships with utilities. Others have eschewed grid interconnection entirely and instead relied behind-the-meter power generation.
As Mark Daly, head of technology and innovation at BNEF and a co-author of the report, pointed out to me, a growing share of the project pipeline comes from first-time developers. He and his colleagues project that non-hyperscaler data center capacity will nearly quintuple over the next decade, as hyperscaler capacity almost triples. That could ultimately create pipeline risks, however, as small-scale developers lack the capabilities of more experienced developers to optimize around pre-construction bottlenecks and navigate rapidly growing local opposition. Although local opposition to data centers has become prevalent, historic trends and predictions on how quickly developers are able to navigate hostile environments are built on the proficiency of experienced developers. Because first-time developers may face more challenges, Daly told me that data center projects overall “would see an increase in the number of delays.”
All of this, of course, comes with a big asterisk. The data center sector is rapidly evolving, and therefore highly uncertain. Among leading market research firms, BNEF said, there is a 100-gigawatt spread between the lowest and highest predicted electricity demand from data centers in 2030. Driving this spread are differences in assumptions about the average development timeline for a data center project. Daly told me that BNEF’s “project-based estimate is middle-of-the-road to bearish compared to other outlooks,” but also acknowledged that the fickle nature of local opposition on development timelines may place more constraints on future data center development than currently modeled.
No matter which prediction turns out to be most accurate, hourly U.S. electricity demand will come under intensifying pressure. BNEF predicts that average hourly U.S. electricity demand from AI workloads will grow five-fold over next nine years, reaching 120 gigawatts by 2035. That will put data centers at 12% of total electricity consumption on average by 2030, and 20% in 2035, up from 5% in 2025, according to figures from the International Energy Agency. This will put particular strain on electricity prices in markets like the Mid-Atlantic’s PJM, where data centers already comprise nearly a third of electricity consumption, and Texas’ ERCOT, where data centers currently consume a fifth of the market’s electricity.
Even the most conservative bet on future data center electricity demand is a scenario we’re not prepared for. If the Electric Power Research Institute’s prediction that just 56 gigawatts of new data center capacity will be up and running by 2030 — the lowest estimate BNEF cited — that would still consume the equivalent of Sweden’s total energy supply. Absent investments from utilities into grid resilience and intensive permitting reform to speed up renewable energy siting and development, PJM and ERCOT customers will not be the only ones feeling a serious squeeze in their wallets when their monthly utility bills arrive.
