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Everything is getting more expensive — except for government debt.
On Palisades’ progress, Taliban minerals, and New York’s climate superfund
A bill awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature would require utilities to at least offer to subsidize home electrification.
With wars going on in Ukraine and the Middle East, margins for fuel producers have gotten “insane.”
Rob talks with Amanda Levin, head of climate science and policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, about why we shouldn’t give up on renewable subsidies just yet.
Temperatures are high, but electricity drama is low.
The Texas summer isn’t over — highs today are forecasted to be at or above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in much of the state — but so far the state’s grid has held up.
In the past month or so, Texas’ grid has hit a number of generation records, according to data collected by Grid Status. Those include its highest load ever (91,308 megawatts on July 22), its highest level of renewables generation (53,000 megawatts on August 13), maximum wind output (29,000 megawatts on June 29) and, most notably, its maximum battery discharge (some 13,256 megawatts earlier this week, on August 23, at 7:45 p.m.).
And all the while, the grid has been stable, which is by no means guaranteed in Texas.
The state’s grid operator, ERCOT, has not issued a single “conservation appeal” so far this summer, asking Texans to voluntarily reduce electricity consumption to support the grid. By contrast, in 2023, the grid manager issued six between August 24 and August 30.
Those conservation appeals were almost always given for the late afternoon and early evening, when demand typically peaks thanks to demand from workers returning home and cranking up their air conditioning. That’s also when the grid has to ramp up dispatchable resources quickly to compensate for solar falling off the grid as the sun sets.
“We’re really seeing peak demand divorced from peak prices,” Joshua Rhodes, research scientist at the University of Texas, told me. This means that when demand is at its highest on a summer day — say around 4 p.m. this past Monday, when load was over 90 gigawatts — real-time prices were about $46 per megawatt-hour, according to Grid Status. At that time, natural gas made up about 42% of the grid and solar 36%. Compare that to the same time in 2023, when real-time prices were $85 per megawatt-hour during peak usage times and wind and solar combined made up around 20% of the grid.
As Abby Lestina, principal market analyst at Grid Status, put it to me, “The lack of pricing action would lead to the conclusion that the grid is more stable.”
Another positive side effect of that stability is that batteries on the system can still charge even when demand is at its highest, and then discharge in the evening to help make up for lost solar. “Even when we were setting peak demand records, we’re still on net charging batteries, which at first blush feels so wrong,” Rhodes told me. “We have so much solar on the system that we’re charging batteries when prices are low, getting ready to discharge as the sun goes down before the wind picks back up.”
Let’s take Monday as an example again: At 7:50 p.m., when solar was down to just 1.5% of the mix on the grid, batteries were discharging 11,573 megawatts and real-time prices were around $125 per-megawatt-hour. On the same Monday of 2023, real-time prices at 7:50 p.m. were bouncing up and down from just below the statutory peak of $5,000 per megawatt hour and batteries were putting out just over a gigawatt.
“Because we have so much battery capacity online, it hasn’t been all that exciting,” Olivier Beaufils, head of US central at Aurora Energy Advisors, told me, referring to the hand-off from solar to batteries. “The price action, it’s like 150 bucks, not thousands, and that’s really because of this battery capacity.”
Texas is also aided by friendly geography — there are extensive solar projects in the western part of the state, while the load is largely in the Texas Triangle in the eastern part of the state, giving solar panels an extra hour or so to serve high demand later in the day.
Average electricity bills in Texas, an energy-hungry state, sat at $252 a month in July, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub, up just 2.3% in the past year, while rates are virtually unchanged at 16 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Along with California’s CAISO, ERCOT dominates battery deployment in the United States. According to the energy consulting firm GridLab, “ERCOT alone has deployed nearly 10 times more storage than PJM, MISO, SPP, and the Southeast combined.”
If anything, Texas’ solar and grid battery industries have been a victim of their own success. In Texas, where battery projects are brought online by investors seeking profits in the energy markets, generators make money by selling when prices are high. The same lower prices that show batteries are making the grid more stable are also revenues that battery operators are no longer getting.
“We’ve added so much battery capacity that they’ve cannibalized, they’ve eaten their own lunch,” Beaufils told me. “The situation’s a bit difficult for those operators.” California’s battery storage sector, by contrast, originated with a state mandate for utilities, jumpstarting the industry by force.
Of course, these types of cycles are nothing new to the energy business, especially in Texas.
“ERCOT’s characterized by these boom-bust cycles, and so the market’s never perfectly going to be in a supply-demand equilibrium,” Kevin Lee, head of advisory services for the central U.S. at Aurora Energy Research, told me. “Sometimes you have a little bit less capacity than you need, sometimes a little bit more. But generally, whenever you have a little bit less, the price signals go up, and then that’s driving more investment.”
While Texas still leads the country in battery additions so far this year, other states besides California are beginning to catch up, including Arizona. Thankfully, there’s still more sun yet to store.
On China’s peak oil, Indiana’s outages, and nuclear shipbuilding
Current conditions: A sleepy Atlantic hurricane season just snapped to attention as two tropical storms started forming near the Caribbean and off Africa’s coast • Southern California is bracing for a week of triple-digit temperatures • The Hawk Fire has forced 42,000 people to evacuate an area near Reno, Nevada.
Double trouble. GEM
The United States nearly doubled its pipeline of gas-fired power plant projects in the first half of this year, “but uncertainty persists about how and when this capacity gets built,” the watchdog Global Energy Monitor concluded in a new analysis. The country now has 189 gigawatts of planned gas projects, accounting for one-third of the global total. Completing all the plants would cost more than $647 billion. The U.S. is taking unique approaches to expanding its gas fleet, including building what would be the largest power station in the country as a federally-owned gas plant. As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo points out, however, there’s a big asterisk on these numbers: Many of the projects are still in nascent stages of development and may never be built. “When I went through the group’s data to try to identify the 10 biggest gas projects under development that are tied to data centers, it became clear how slippery the whole picture really is,” she says in her write-up of the report, which I highly recommend checking out.
Electric cooperatives, meanwhile, are lobbying to make building more gas plants even easier. Last week, Utility Dive reported, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association urged the Environmental Protection Agency to exempt more gas plants from emissions rules.
Last month, a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research made the case that “the glass is half full” on federal green spending, finding that President Donald Trump’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, preserved 74% of the clean energy gains from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. (You should listen to my colleague Robinson Meyer’s podcast conversation with the author, Lily Bermel, from last month.) Now the Natural Resources Defense Council has come out with the bearish counterargument. The environmental group’s new analysis, out this morning, found that the U.S. will lose between 390 gigawatts and 540 gigawatts of new solar, wind, and battery projects that would have been built before OBBBA’s passage.
“I see a glass much more than half empty,” Amanda Levin, the director of policy analysis at the NRDC, wrote in an op-ed for Heatmap. “The repeal of the key IRA tax credits and other Trump administration policies will result in 637 fewer gigawatts in added clean energy over the next 15 years and cost the average American household $4,500.”
One popular theory of Trump’s motivation for joining Israel in launching a war against Iran is that halting the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz would demonstrate China’s vulnerability as a top importer of foreign fossil fuels and America’s strength as the world’s No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas. But China’s actual response proved to be robust. In addition to ramping up domestic production of its own limited reserves of fossil fuels, Beijing deployed more renewables and nuclear reactors, electrified things that once ran on oil or gas, and made real progress on fuels such as hydrogen and its derivatives. Between that and China’s own carbon-cutting goals, last year was likely the peak of the country’s demand for oil, according to the state oil company Sinopec. In an earnings call Monday in Hong Kong, Sinopec Chairman Hou Qijun said demand had already crested, two years earlier than the 2027 peak the company had previously forecast, according to Bloomberg. Keep in mind that only means oil demand is no longer growing. The Chinese economy isn’t exactly on a GLP-1 treatment for crude just yet. In fact, Reuters noted that, on the call, Sinopec said it was now eyeing Brazil and Africa as new sources of oil imports. That’s probably partly why, as I told you last week, American oil giants are setting sights on Africa.
In the meantime, the People’s Republic may finally be sorting out carbon capture and storage. Last week, GD Power’s Jinjie Company issued a tender for engineering design of its 4 million tons per year full-sized CCS project for coal power stations. The project, according to the China Hydrogen Bullet, “is described as the world’s first full-flue-gas carbon capture facility at a coal-fired power plant.”
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Nearly two weeks after a powerful storm took out power for roughly 800,000 households in one of America’s most important industrial clusters, as many as 30,000 in northwest Indiana remained without electricity this past weekend. “My people are being overlooked,” Myles Tolliver, a Gary councilman whose family decamped to Chicago while the power was out, told The New York Times. “Our families are sitting in the dark. We don’t need any more excuses. We need the lights on.” By Monday evening, more than 8,300 households and businesses remained disconnected from the grid, according to data on PowerOutage.us, a tracker website.
The worst outage in the U.S. as of Monday night was in Shelby County, in the southwesternmost corner of Tennessee, where storms knocked out the power for nearly 32,000 households and businesses. Behind that was Washoe County, on the western flank of Nevada, where the aforementioned Hawk Fire damaged power lines.
The Trump administration is working with the British startup Core Power to help build a fleet of nuclear-powered merchant vessels to loosen China’s tightening grip over commercial shipbuilding. In an interview Monday with the Financial Times, U.S. Maritime Administration chief Stephen Carmel announced a public-private partnership agreement with Core Power in a bid to speed up commercialization of nuclear propulsion for ships. “We are not going to beat China by being a cheaper version of China. They have mastered the art of being cheap,” Carmel said. “The way we win in all this is to change the terms of the competition to something that is more favourable to us. So, we don’t compete on trying to be cheap. We compete on technology … and nuclear technology is something we are really good at.”
Vietnam just took a big step toward building its nuclear power station. On Monday, NucNet reported that the fast-growing Southeast Asian nation’s parliament had approved plans for its first commercial nuclear plant, a two-reactor, 2.4-gigawatt plant built by Russia. Hanoi is looking beyond just atomic energy to supplement its surging demand for power. The municipal government in Ho Chi Minh City, the nation’s largest metropolis, is reviewing a feasibility study into developing up to 6 gigawatts of offshore wind, according to offshoreWIND.biz.
The Trump administration fast-tracked a Rare Earth Resources’ plan for an open-pit mine in Wyoming to extract rare earth minerals. Even in a deep-red state that mines more coal than any other in the U.S., the project is getting pushback. “It was kind of hush-hush, in my opinion, as far as not much word about it around Sundance,” Sundance resident Justin Johnson told WyoFile. “All of a sudden, in July when it came to our attention, it’s like, ‘Holy cow. We got little time before the federal deadline to get our comments and concerns to the Forest Service … You would think there’d be a lot more time for the actual owners of public land — the citizens of the U.S. — to have a response to what’s going on.”
