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A longtime energy analyst argues that there are no solutions to the hyperscale problem, only tradeoffs.
A climate scientist goes back to the numbers to argue that we’re overestimating the cost of the energy transition.
A group of energy researchers have a three-part prescription for Washington, D.C.’s exploding energy costs.
The founder of one-time sustainable apparel company Zady argues that policy is the only that can push the industry toward more responsible practices.
Invest in Our Future’s Peter Colavito on why funders and advocates should pay more attention to the solar farm down the road.
The CEO of Climeworks argues that the buildout of technology to suck greenhouse gas from the air should be considered part of the cost of artificial intelligence.
Party orthodoxy is no longer serving the energy transition, the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang and Peter Cook write.
President Trump has announced a dizzying array of executive branch led critical mineral policies since taking office again last year. While bombastically branded as new achievements, many elements from critical mineral tariffs to strategic stockpiling to Defense Production Act financing trace back to bipartisan recommendations and programs spanning the past several administrations.
Many Democrats in Congress, however, are stuck on the defensive. During a recent House Natural Resources hearing, for instance, Washington Representative Yassamin Ansari singled out the SECURE Minerals Act, a bipartisan proposal for a strategic minerals reserve, as “a framework ripe for fraud, corruption, and abuse.” Yet the draft bill actually contains strong safeguards: Senate confirmation of board members, annual independent audits, public tracking and annual reporting to Congress, conflict-of-interest prohibitions, and more.
In another House oversight hearing considering the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, California’s Maxine Waters expressed concern over President Trump’s mere contact with mineral producing countries in Africa, asking simply, “What is he doing?” The President of EXIM responded by reminding Waters of the bank’s charter to engage in sub-Saharan Africa.
In both cases, distrust of the administration and Republican lawmakers seems to have blinded Democrats to a larger strategic goal: building a secure critical mineral supply chain. Democrats who want to strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness and cultivate domestic clean technology sectors cannot afford to engage in partisan posturing at the expense of real policymaking. Nor can they afford to waste time — America’s vulnerabilities loom too large to wait until Trump leaves the White House.
Doing so will require Democrats to embrace certain positions that are at odds with recent party orthodoxy. First, they must accept the basic math that both the U.S. and the world will need new mine production and support incentives and regulatory reform for new critical minerals projects, not just recycling, re-mining, and substitution. And second, they must admit that mining projects in the U.S. and in democratically-governed partner countries offer a far better foundation for achieving high environmental and social standards than the currently dominant production routes for many raw materials today.
A recent hearing question from Texas Representative Christian Menefee hints at the risks of overly narrow minerals policy: “Should byproduct recovery be the first priority before we open up a single new mine?" While advocacy organizations and academic researchers have lately argued that operating mines dig up enough minerals to meet U.S. needs yet are currently neglecting to recover them, such analyses only consider the theoretical potential of extracting every element present in mined rock, not technical feasibility. Feasible recovery will be the exception, not the rule. Efforts to produce lithium as a byproduct from a copper-gold deposit might confront concentrations of under 20 parts per million, relative to concentrations at U.S. lithium mines currently under development that range from around 850 to 2,000 parts per million. Compared to cobalt concentrations of 2,400 parts per million at the Jervois Idaho Cobalt mine, Alaska’s large Red Dog zinc mine might boast 39 to 149 parts per million. For many elements, recovery would require new, first-of-a-kind extraction equipment consuming added water, energy, and chemical reagents — akin to burning a barn to fry an egg.
Recycling, too, is a meaningful category of solutions but ultimately limited. For instance, improved batteries and solar panels with longer service lives delay the point at which significant flows of materials become available for recycling. An increasing number of batteries and solar modules may also be redirected towards second-life use markets — electric vehicle batteries repurposed as electric grid storage assets, for example — diverting even more materials from recycling facilities.
To put such constraints into numbers, growing grid storage battery cell manufacturing capacity in the U.S. may surpass 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year, requiring over 17,000 tons of lithium content — alone equivalent to half of all worldwide lithium consumption in 2015. China’s tightening of rare earth export restrictions last year forced one of Ford’s auto plants to pause operations, and the shift to electric vehicles will only drive U.S. rare earths demand higher. The U.S. alone produced around 1 million EVs last year, relative to total auto manufacturing of 12 million to 14 million vehicles per year.
Even modest domestic manufacturing goals of 10 gigawatts of wind turbines and 2 million electric vehicles per year would require at least 100 tons of dysprosium and praseodymium, heavy rare earth elements that the U.S. is only just beginning to produce from recycling efforts and its sole operating mine. Globally, the International Energy Agency estimates that successful recycling expansion could avert around 5% to 30% of new mining activity, depending on the commodity.
The math is unforgiving. We need more minerals, and we need them soon.
For years, progressives have critiqued current U.S. mining regulations as antiquated and inadequate, insisting that standards governing existing mines expose marginalized communities to unacceptable impacts. While understandably reflecting past harms inflicted by mining prior to the enactment of stronger laws and regulations in the 1970s and 1980s, such a position exposes lawmakers to an uncomfortable contradiction: If modern mining and refining are structurally problematic industries, then not only must U.S. lawmakers advocate for improved industry standards domestically, logic dictates that they also use trade policies and international frameworks to penalize the unjust economic advantages benefiting irresponsible producers globally. The sum total of such actions might well slow the country’s transition to clean energy as opposed to speeding it.
Activist narratives that U.S. mining regulations offer the mining industry a smash-and-grab free-for-all obviously conflict with the reality that domestic mining has long been viewed as borderline uninvestible, with the U.S. seeing a 70% decrease in the number of active metal mines over the last 40 years. Insisting that more public engagement, extracting higher royalties to fund community projects, and quartering off certain areas with mineral potential for conservation will speed U.S. mining projects by neutralizing community opposition must consider how such high-cost projects can survive in a global market. China produces 10 times more graphite, rare earths, and polysilicon than the next largest producing country — and not by excelling at public engagement and community benefits-sharing. Continuing to indulge such domestic-only remonstrations will solve none of the nation’s supply challenges.
Meanwhile, efforts by both the Trump and Biden administrations are already driving progress towards improved recycling and utilization of unconventional wastes and resources. Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funded numerous programs to produce new critical minerals without new mining, including Department of Energy grants to equip operating facilities with byproduct recovery systems, new mapping programs from the United States Geological Survey to locate historic mines with viable levels of critical minerals in abandoned wastes, and a Rare Earth Elements Demonstration Facility program at the Department of Energy to prioritize the use of waste as a feedstock. The Trump administration has continued to issue notices for IIJA-funded, waste resource, and recycling-focused opportunities into 2026. In short, maximization of byproduct potential, recycling, and remining is already established bipartisan policy.
Above all, Democrats must capitalize on the chance to start alleviating national critical mineral constraints now, in the middle of a Trump presidency, to position the U.S. industrial base to produce impressive economic and technological results in 2028 and beyond. Trump will depart the Oval Office in less than three years, whereas U.S. critical minerals strategy must play out over the next five to 10. Passing up promising opportunities today in the name of scoring short-term political points serves neither the nation’s best interests nor those of the Democratic Party.
Over the next two years, critical minerals policy offers rare bipartisan opportunities to supercharge innovation and build projects that will not only produce strategic materials but also solutions for cleaner industrial processes. In most cases, new U.S. production will already be less carbon-intensive than the global average. Meanwhile, federal policy support will foster U.S. process engineering know-how that might ultimately drive long-term breakthroughs in transformative cleaner solutions.
All of that said, policymakers must also balance environmental and innovation ambitions against realistic expectations and resist the temptation to chase only fully clean projects. For now, truly zero-carbon metals produced using green hydrogen or other novel techniques remain dramatically more expensive than metals produced with the most cost-efficient mix of energy inputs and feedstocks. Depending on the sector, domestic industries that have first achieved scale and rebuilt domestic expertise may position America better for catalyzing such shifts.
Cost competitive industries, after all, are also key for advancing Democratic priorities. More favorable costs for U.S.-produced critical materials and increasingly secure upstream secure supply chains will help make U.S.-manufactured technologies such as electric vehicles, solar modules, and electrolyzers more competitive. Responsible production capacity that is operating at scale will increase bargaining power for pressuring irresponsible producers overseas to reform, while creating new markets for American raw materials among principled partners and corporate offtakers.
Miners and metallurgists deserve an equal place of honor in the energy transition economy alongside rooftop solar installers and electricians, and such heavy industry workers can help rebuild a stronger U.S. labor movement.
But the risk of squandering such long-term opportunities is real. During the Biden administration, progressives reflexively fielded proposals that would add regulatory burdens and make mining more difficult — proposals which largely went nowhere. Meanwhile, the bipartisan Mining Regulatory Clarity Act — one of the few specific regulatory reforms proposed for the mining sector to date — still has not passed since its introduction in 2023. The current version is stalled over the inclusion of provisions that would redirect mining administrative fees to cleaning up abandoned mines. Remediating legacy sites is an important federal government obligation, but the quid pro quo calculus of extracting concessions for simple regulatory reforms both complicates their passage while also procrastinating standalone measures to address abandoned mines.
Certainly, the current political moment could not be more charged. Another recent House Natural Resources hearing on oversight ended abruptly after Oregon Representative Maxine Dexter moved to subpoena Donald Trump, Jr. over concerns that administration financial support favored mineral companies in which he was invested. This episode highlights the challenge for Democrats — holding the federal government accountable to the U.S. public while simultaneously working to address the country’s critical mineral priorities.
This is less complicated than it sounds. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle can agree on strong oversight provisions to ensure that programs prioritize the nation’s interests and achieve political longevity. Democrats should therefore lean in to their desired guardrails, be they mandatory public transparency, reviews of company history and project feasibility, or conflict-of-interest restrictions. Stronger congressional oversight and robust environmental and human rights safeguards are worthy Democratic goals, but advancing them requires that Congress do its job and legislate.
It’s an idea with bipartisan appeal, but AOC’s former policy adviser argues that the scale of the data center problem is too big for that.
Last night, between the trumpeting of fossil fuels and the lengthy honors awarded to both veterans and hockey players, President Trump devoted a portion of his State of the Union address to announcing a “ratepayer protection pledge,” under which big tech companies pay for their own power plants for data centers — a show of how central energy prices are becoming to today’s affordability debate.
Electricity in the United States is rapidly becoming expensive and unreliable. Vast swaths of the United States are at elevated risk of outages. January’s winter storms wiped out power for millions of Americans from Louisiana to Brooklyn. In 2025, utilities requested a record $31 billion in rate increases from captive customers. Gas and electricity prices are the two highest drivers of inflation.
The main driver of these new stressors on the grid: the expected $6.7 trillion to be deployed in data centers by 2030.
Policymakers at all levels of governments are coalescing on a strategy for dealing with rising data center demand that mirrors Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge: “bring your own generation,” or BYOG. Bipartisan bills introduced in Washington by Senators Chris Van Hollen, and Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal; and by Representatives Rob Menendez and Greg Casar, among others, would require hyperscalers like Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft to pay for their own power plants and grid upgrades in order to plug in. Michigan, Oregon, Florida, Washington, Georgia, Illinois, and Delaware are all at various stages of enacting BYOG legislation for data centers.
BYOG would create something like a regulatory sandbox for data centers, insulating utilities and ratepayers from the risks of data center demand. But while efforts at consumer protection are important, these policies do not grapple with the scale of data center deployment.
A sandbox won’t withstand a tidal wave. Over the next five years, the equivalent of 17 to 32 New York Cities’ worth of electricity demand is expected to be added to the grid, more than half of which will come from data centers. This incredibly wide estimate means that generators risk overbuilding.
Amidst all this uncertainty, BYOG does not address who pays for new capacity in the event the AI bubble bursts and energy infrastructure is left stranded. Neither does BYOG address the drastically mismatched lifetimes of the chips powering AI (one to three years) and power plants (25 to 30 years). The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission expects 22 New York Cities’ worth of generation to be added to the grid by 2028. Who pays for all of this generation in a decade if even 5% of projected data center demand disappears?
AI is a promising technology, but that does not prevent it from being overvalued. Policymakers must consider the risks when data centers eventually disconnect from the grid, not just when they interconnect. This means ensuring that ratepayers and taxpayers are not left footing the bill for stranded energy infrastructure if data centers disconnect prematurely.
Rather than cordoning off data centers from the rest of the electricity market, policymakers should take a stronger hand in planning these deployments for social and economic benefit. Colocating datacenters with energy-intensive industries and requiring long-term commitments from hyperscalers are more efficient solutions that would also make new data centers more politically palatable.
Public sentiment has turned overwhelmingly against data center development. These vast facilities create relatively few jobs beyond their construction, but colocated with the manufacture of energy-intensive products like aluminum, steel, or fertilizer, suddenly they’re supporting employment. Colocation will also help diversify economic growth. Data center investment was responsible for a whopping 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025, creating a potentially dangerous dependency on continued expansion.
There are also simple legal guardrails that can provide a first line of defense against stranded costs. One is requiring long-term power purchase agreements between hyperscalers and generators. Thirteen bipartisan governors and the Trump administration recently urged the country’s largest grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to require 15-year generation contracts for hyperscalers. Notably, Van Hollen’s bill would only require states to “consider” the extension of “minimum utility contract lengths,” while the Hawley/Blumenthal and Menendez/Casar bills make no mention of contract length or stranded costs.
Hyperscalers can also curtail usage during peak demand, a policy that has seen bipartisan support in Texas. A now-famous study from Duke University last year found that if data centers were to curtail 1% of their usage during peak hours, they could avoid installing 126 gigawatts of new generation — that’s 21 New York Cities’ worth. Lawmakers have since taken to the idea. Several states are considering mandating so-called “demand response” programs, and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Kathy Castor inserted a federal study on demand response into the appropriations bill Trump signed in January.
Regardless of how it’s done, ratepayers should not pay full freight for the tidal wave of infrastructure coming online, and most utility balance sheets should not be exposed to that risk. BYOG’s flaws have more to do with what it leaves out — namely that the planning of significant parts of our economy and electric system is left to tech companies, and little thought is given to the long-term ramifications of overbuilding. Rather than deal reactively with the nasty politics of a bailout, policymakers should make muscular interventions now to reduce risks for ratepayers and taxpayers.
Energy markets are not free markets. For the past century they have been heavily regulated at the state, regional, and federal level. Any discomfort with planning (or “statutory tools”) must be set aside if policymakers are going to efficiently manage the growth of data centers.
