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Neither Republicans nor Democrats have a coherent idea of how to move forward.
A blast from the past with the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Severin Borenstein.
Reflections on a rock ’n’ roll road trip.
Lawmakers today should study the Energy Security Act of 1980.
On Google’s energy glow up, transmission progress, and South American oil
The hyperscaler is going big on human intelligence to help power its artificial intelligence.
Google is on an AI hiring spree — and not just for people who can design chips and build large language models. The tech giant wants people who can design energy systems, too.
Google has invested heavily of late in personnel for its electricity and infrastructure-related teams. Among its key hires is Tyler Norris, a former Duke University researcher and one of the most prominent proponents of electricity demand flexibility for data centers, who started in November as “head of market innovation” on the advanced energy team. The company also hired Doug Lewin, an energy consultant and one of the most respected voices in Texas energy policy, to lead “energy strategy and market design work in Texas,” according to a note he wrote on LinkedIn. Nathan Iyer, who worked on energy policy issues at RMI, has been a contractor for Google Clean Energy for about a year. (The company also announced Monday that it’s shelling out $4.5 billion to acquire clean energy developer Intersect.)
“To me, it’s unsurprising. I love the work of all the people they’ve been hiring,” Peter Freed, a former Meta energy executive and the founder of Near Horizon Group, told me. “Google has always been willing to do bleeding edge stuff — that’s one of the cool things about Google.”
Google declined to comment on its staffing moves, but other figures who have extensive energy experience argued that working at a big energy buyer like Google is a necessary step to becoming a well-rounded energy pro.
“I think that evangelists, technologists, compliance officers, and visionaries all have to be one and the same person, or a small gathering of a few people who can have and share all of those roles simultaneously,” Arushi Sharma Frank, an energy industry consultant and investor, told me of Google’s recent hiring push. She also told me that Spencer Cummings, the deputy chief digital officer at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, will soon join Google’s public service team, posting about the hire on LinkedIn. (Cummings himself did not respond to a request for comment.)
The spate of hiring suggests that Google sees its data center buildout and its longstanding clean energy goals as intertwined, and is throwing all the talent it can at the problem in an attempt to avoid unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions.
Google has been developing clean energy resources for almost 20 years, and has long been one of the most aggressive and innovative tech giants in creating new financial and legal structures to help support them.
After first matching its annual energy usage with renewable output in 2017, the company has since upped its goal, aiming to match its hour-by-hour energy use in the areas where its operations are actually located. This means making investments beyond wind and solar into more capital intensive and complex power generation, projects such as geothermal or even advanced nuclear.
At the same time, big tech companies are already facing political blowback from their buildouts of multi-billion-dollar, gigawatt-scale data centers for artificial intelligence at a time of rising electricity prices. Google has also been a leader in attempting to head off those issues, including by contracting with utilities to commit to paying the transmission costs over the long term so that they don’t get spread to the rest of a utility’s customers. Another way might be to have data centers work more intermittently, at times when the grid is least stressed, and thus not increase peak demand — i.e. the method Norris has proposed.
Google’s recent hiring indicates that these are strategies it will continue to refine as its data center buildout moves forward. Norris wrote on X that he’ll “be focused on identifying and advancing innovations to better enable electricity markets to accommodate AI-driven demand and clean energy technologies.” Lewin, meanwhile, said that his remit will be “creating and implementing strategies to integrate data centers into the grid in ways that lower costs for all energy consumers while strengthening the grid.”
That Google is after energy talent in Texas should be no surprise — the company is planning to invest some $40 billion in Texas alone through 2027, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote on LinkedIn.
“In general, all of the tech companies are so flat out trying to deliver any megawatt of data center capacity they possibly can,” Freed said.
In its most recent quarter alone, Google’s parent company Alphabet spent $24 billion on capital expenditures, the “vast majority” of which was “technical infrastructure” split between servers, data centers, and networking equipment, Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, said in the company’s third quarter earnings call in October. Ashkenazi said that full-year capital expenditures would be between $91 billion and $95 billion this year — and that 2026 would see a “significant increase.”
That spending “will continue to put pressure” on profits, Ashkenazi said, and specifically called “related data center operation costs, such as energy” a factor in that.
The data center buildout also puts more pressure on Google’ sustainability goals. “While we remain committed to our climate moonshots, it’s become clear that achieving them is now more complex and challenging across every level,” the company said in its 2025 environmental report. The issue, Google said, was a mismatch between accelerating demand for energy and available supply of the clean stuff.
The “rapid evolution of AI” — an evolution that is being actively spurred on by Google — “may drive non-linear growth in energy demand, which makes our future energy needs and emissions trajectories more difficult to predict,” the company said in the report. As for clean energy, “a key challenge is the slower-than-needed deployment of carbon-free energy technologies at scale, and getting there by 2030 will be very difficult.”
It’s not lost on people — okay, not lost on me — that many of these Google hires are some of the most prominent voices in energy and electricity policy today, with largely independent platforms now being absorbed into a $3.7 trillion company. But while this might be a loss for the media industry as the roster of experts available for us to consult gets absorbed into the Googleplex, it’s likely a good thing for energy policy development overall, Sharma Frank said.
“I think that we are under-indexing in this country largely on how important it actually is for strong public voices to go inside impact-creation companies," she told me, adding — “and then for those companies to eventually release those people back out into the wild so that they can drive impact in new ways.”
A lookahead with Heatmap’s own Emily Pontecorvo, Matthew Zeitlin, and Jillian Goodman.
2025 has been a rough year for climate and energy news. But enough about that. Let’s start looking at 2026!
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by some of Heatmap’s writers and editors to discuss our biggest stories and predictions for 2026 — what we’re tracking, what could surprise us, and what could happen next. We also discuss a recent op-ed in The New York Times arguing that Democrats should work more closely with the U.S. oil and gas industry. Today’s panel includes Heatmap’s founding staff writer Emily Pontecorvo, staff writer Matthew Zeitlin, and deputy editor Jillian Goodman.
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. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I was thinking when Matt was talking about how different the current moment is from 2020 that back then, here was this idea that there was some risk, maybe, that some costs would go up a little. But inflation had been out of the picture for so long that we were in an environment where unemployment was the concern and not the price level, and so the idea that prices might go up a tiny bit in exchange for economic activity seemed like an okay trade.
And I would actually say, this is where I think there’s some potential for a comeback for more traditional types of environmental and climate activism in 2026, which is, the unemployment rate is currently 4.6%, as of a release last week, which historically, it hasn’t been above 4.6% very much in the past several decades. And when it is above 4.6% usually means unemployment’s about to spike.
And I think in a world where we switch from talking about affordability to talking about unemployment and a lack of general economic activity — especially in a world where AI is a big deal and people are very worried about job loss from AI, suddenly all the ideas about generating economic activity by doing kind of pro-social decarbonization activities are going to swing right back into the conversation.
And we know what a Donald Trump administration is like when prices are increasing by 3% a year, and that is, he’s not very popular. We don’t know what a Donald Trump administration is like when unemployment’s at 5%, or 5.5%. And if that were to happen, the floor could really drop out, and we could see a huge swing back to the type of policies that we were talking about not so long ago.
Mentioned:
Trump Uses ‘National Security’ to Freeze Offshore Wind Work
Matthew Yglesias’ op-ed: Obama Supported It. The Left in Canada and Norway Does. Why Don’t Democrats?
Emily on California cities’ new heat pump rules
The House Just Passed Permitting Reform. Now Comes the Hard Part.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Heatmap Pro brings all of our research, reporting, and insights down to the local level. The software platform tracks all local opposition to clean energy and data centers, forecasts community sentiment, and guides data-driven engagement campaigns. Book a demo today to see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
