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Hell is shopping for eco poop bags.
As much as I’m aware that blaming the climate crisis on individual consumer choices is a favorite smokescreen of large corporations and fossil fuel companies, it still totally kills me to buy single-use plastic bags. So when my household recently ran out of the 900 black disposable litter bags we’d bought on Wirecutter’s recommendation eons ago, I decided to be a Good Person and replace them with the most environmentally friendly option I could find. I mean, how hard could it be?
Hoo boy.
What started out as a naïve quest to find the greenest pet waste receptacle has become my Joker origin story. It’s turned me into Mark Ruffalo in Dark Water, except instead of taking on Dupont, I’m hounding companies with names like The Original Poop Bag and Doggy Do Good for the chemical makeup of their “green” bags. I’ve been red-pilled on advanced recycling. And, worst of all, I still haven’t actually bought a replacement — because the entire “green,” “biodegradable,” “plant-based,” “compostable” pet waste bag industry is built on misdirections, half-truths, and outright lies.
This might seem like a ridiculous thing to have spent my time obsessing over (and I don’t entirely disagree with you). But the greenwashing and obfuscation around these bags is part of a bigger story. Plastics are the fossil fuel industry’s last stand. The renewable energy transition, albeit in fits and starts, is here. Seeing the writing on the wall, companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are heavily investing in petrochemicals, which are used to make plastic and are expected to make up half of oil demand growth between now and 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). As Armco president and CEO Amin Nasser has reassured his cohorts, oil demand from petrochemicals is expected to remain high “no matter which energy transition scenario plays out.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This story starts with much cuter villains: my cats.
Meet the adorable antiheroes of this story, Marinka and Virginia:
This whole piece is just an excuse to show you a picture of my cats.Jeva Lange/Heatmap
These two cutie pies don’t know it, but they diligently contribute to the 5.1 million tons of feces produced by America’s dogs and cats every year. One estimate of the dog sector alone found that disposing of all that waste adds some 500 million single-use bags to U.S. landfills annually.
The evils of single-use plastic bags have already been drilled into most of our heads by now: They take years to break down and when they do, they don’t decompose but rather turn into tiny microplastics that end up in the soil, waterways, food chain, and even our bloodstreams and breast milk. There is one seemingly great and trendy way to get around this: compostable bags!
Alas, if something sounds too good to be true, it is. For one thing, the “compostable” claims made by eco-friendly pet companies are wildly misleading. Though brands like to imply that their bags decompose and disappear like any other yard waste, these products only break down within a year under the extremely specific conditions of a commercial composting facility — very, very few of which even accept pet waste in the first place. As a result, the FTC has flagged that “compostable claims for these products are generally untrue.”
A "compostable" poop bag available on Chewy.com...Chewy.com
...and why you should always read the fine print.Chewy.com
Companies love to exploit consumers’ lack of knowledge around these terms and processes, though, and are mostly free to do so since the language isn’t strongly regulated. Often brands will brag that their compostable bags meet the “ASTM D6400 standard,” which just means they meet the industrial composting standard — again, pretty useless for us in this context. (Touting the ASTM D6400 standard is also often a way for brands to hide that their bags are made with virgin fossil fuels … more on that soon).
The bigger question when it comes to composting pet waste is, do we even want to? Dogs and cats are meat eaters, which means their poop contains parasites and bacteria like roundworms and hookworms, which can last for years in the soil and even be passed onto humans if used as a fertilizer for edible plants. While maybe this doesn’t sound like it could be that big of a problem, it is: “A study by the Bureau of Sanitation found that 60% of the bacteria in a Marina Del Rey, [California,] waterway was because of animals, domesticated and feral,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Gross.
This is one time you’ll ever hear me say that dog people have it better, though. Done correctly, dog owners actually can home compost dog waste if they’re so inclined. That said, a major downside of compostable bags is that they seem to lead some people to the impression that they can litter trails and parks with their “green” bags since the bags will eventually “go away.” As previously discussed: No, they won’t.
Cat waste, however, never basically should end up in your garden: Felines carry the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can be passed onto humans via compost but has been found to kill wildlife, including the sea otters in California. “Toxoplasma infections contribute to the deaths of 8 percent of otters that are found dead, and is the primary cause of death in 3 percent,” The New York Times explains. While feral cats used to be blamed for spreading the parasite, new evidence shows house cats almost certainly are, too — through their waste.
So compostable pet waste bags are out. As one municipality put it, dog and cat poop should be treated like what it is: not a fertilizer, but a pollutant. That means it needs to be sequestered, one way or another, in a landfill.
Just going to nip this one in the bud. For the same reason that composting pet waste isn’t advisable due to parasites and bacteria in four-legged meat-eaters’ feces, flushable pet waste bags and litter aren’t a safe or responsible choice, either.
Many waste treatment facilities don’t kill Toxoplasma, so putting cat poop in the toilet just expedites its journey into your local waterway. Indeed, in responding to an utterly unhinged email I sent them about cat waste, the California Association of Sanitation Agencies confirmed that “the only thing that should be flushed is human waste and toilet paper.”
Biodegradable pet waste bags are what radicalized me.
At first glance, these bags appear to be the best option. A number of them come on the recommendation of the sustainability website Treehugger. The product websites usually feature blogs full of reassuring information about how harmful plastic waste is, or boast 1% for the Planet certifications, or mention something about being made of cornstarch. Even the bags are green!
And almost all of them, despite their lofty claims, are made using virgin fossil fuels.
Polybutylene Adipate Terephthalate, or “PBAT,” is a biodegradable plastic made from the petrochemicals butanediol, purified terephthalic acid (PTA), and adipic acid. Translation: Fossil fuels must be extracted in order to make any bag that contains PBAT, which is virtually all of them.
Companies are exceptionally sneaky about this, though. Some of the brands boast outright about using PBAT as a traditional plastic alternative, likely assuming customers have no idea what the acronym means and won’t bother looking it up. Yet as Alice Judge, a former veterinarian and co-founder of the U.K.-based sustainable pet website Pet Impact, found in her own investigation, PBAT rarely makes up less than 60% of these supposedly “plant-based” pet waste bags. “There is some really concerning greenwashing and outright lying” going on in the industry, she told me. “We’ve found brands that are very big, reputable brands even saying explicitly ‘100% plant-based’ and in the same sentence saying ‘made from cornstarch and PBAT.’”
"Zero plastic" — but contains a fossil fuel-derived chemical called PBAT.Sirwaggingtons.com
PBAT is typically combined with cornstarch or sugarcane, so a “plant-based” bag advertising those ingredients can often be a tip-off that a fossil fuel product is also involved. Additionally, companies will frequently flag on their packaging that they meet the ASTM D6400 or BPI standards, though these have no provisions against certifying biodegradable products that contain PBAT.
Pet waste bag companies appear to go out of their way to avoid these admissions. Doggy Do Good, a popular sustainable pet waste company, told me in an email they use a “proprietary bio-based material” for “60.9% of the composition of their bags” — that is, the expected amount of PBAT — and added that “this fully biodegradable copolymer is an excellent alternative to polyethylene.” When I pressed to clarify if their proprietary “biodegradable copolymer” in question was PBAT, as I suspected, they stopped replying to my emails. The Original Poop Bag, another green bag company, didn’t answer me at all when I asked if their bags contained the fossil fuel product.
Despite these avoidance tactics, biodegradable bag companies aren’t using PBAT because they nefariously want to ruin the planet. It’s just the dirty secret of the pet waste bag business. As Judge explained in a blog post, “All poo bags have to include PBAT for strength and structure. If they were 100% plant-based, they would turn to mush very quickly when wet, lack strength, and tear easily (some qualities you really don’t want in a poo bag!).”
Fair enough. It’s the lack of transparency that is the problem: Most of these companies are selling fossil fuel-based products to customers who think they’re buying bags made from corn.
What's the other 62%?Doggydogood.com
Ultimately, there are two ways to think about the impact of the pet waste bags you buy: the impact of the materials used to make them and the impact of their disposal. If the latter is your biggest concern — what happens to bags after they’ve been used — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are still probably the best, if imperfect, option available on the market. You can throw them in the trash (where they belong because again, pet poop is a pollutant) but also know at least that they’ll eventually biodegrade in a landfill (it should be noted, though, that everything is technically biodegradable, and the word means nothing without specification about the timeline and conditions).
From an “input” perspective — what the bags are made of, and how — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are a little less exciting. They require less virgin fossil fuel than buying a bag entirely made out of traditional single-use plastic, though some research has suggested there is “no real difference in lifetime emissions between” products made with traditional plastic and those made from bioplastics. By another estimate, greenhouse gas emissions “are typically higher for bio-based plastics than recycled and virgin plastics” because “corn requires large amounts of energy, space, and water to grow industrially” and “turning the corn starch (once cultivated) into a polymer requires considerable energy.”
There is one major exception to all of this: Avoid “oxo-biodegradable” products. These are banned in the EU because they break down, sure — but into toxic microplastics.
Though they’re comparatively rare, you can find “recycled plastic” pet waste bags on the market. They apparently cut down on virgin fossil fuels by recycling plastic that’s already been extracted. (Judge’s company, Pet Impact, sells its own poo bag made from recycled ocean plastic, oyster shell waste, and “about 25 to 30%” virgin fossil fuels).
Even 100% recycled materials have their problems.
But while recycled plastic sounds great, it has — you guessed it — its own complications.
“Chemical” or “advanced” plastic recycling is the current sweetheart of the oil and gas industry, despite evidence that recycling plastic isn’t nearly as good as it’s chalked up to be. For one thing, the process of converting old plastics into new plastics is incredibly emissions-intensive and thus requires the burning of fossil fuels to generate the required energy. The recycling process can also spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air that disproportionately poison low-income communities of color, like those in “Cancer Alley.”
This is a problem that stretches far beyond the humble poo bags: Hundreds of companies now sell everything from clothes to shoes to shampoo bottles on the boast that they’re made from recycled plastics. Yet “by feigning ‘recycling’ (really, downcycling) of plastic pollution, companies can divert attention from their role in perpetuating this crisis while pulling in profits,” stresses the advocacy group Plastic Pollution Coalition. Recycled plastic can be just another smokescreen when what’s really needed is a reduction of single-use plastics altogether.
But it was reducing single-use plastics that got me into this whole mess in the first place.
In March 2020, a month when nothing else of note was happening, New York City banned single-use carryout plastic bags, joining San Francisco and a number of other towns around the country. But like many pet owners, grocery store plastic bags had been our go-to litter scooping bags. As we became more conscious of single-use plastics in some parts of our lives, it led us to buy … a bunch of single-use plastics to use for our pets.
As the pandemic wore on, my husband and I eventually decided to fly across the country with Marinka and Virginia in order to be with our families. There, my stepmother introduced us to a revolutionary new poop bag. It didn’t require the extraction of any new fossil fuels, and while it doesn’t break down in a landfill, it also won’t poison any otters.
The name of this holy grail of poop bags? Trash.
Empty bread bags can become the perfect chutes for scoops of litter. Plastic packaging gets a second life as a final resting place for kitty unmentionables. Bags of dry cat food, once exhausted, can be refilled.
This isn’t a perfect solution, either (for example, “produce bags aren’t engineered to be particularly durable, nor to hold in liquids or odors,” Wirecutter warns with the confidence of experience). But if I’ve learned anything in this mad, scatological journey, it’s that there is no perfect solution. What satisfies one person’s environmental concerns — about greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel extraction, or waste and pollution — might not satisfy someone else’s. And at a certain point, you have to make a choice, and likely a compromise, and then move on to focusing on the things that make a bigger difference, like what you drive, where you get your power from, or what you eat.
All this is to say, the trash method works for me because it makes single-use plastics destined for the landfill anyway into twice-use plastics. And at least it allows me not to think about cat poop anymore.
I think I’ve done enough of that to last me a lifetime.
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On a copper mega merger, California’s solar canal, and Bahrain’s deep-sea mining bet
Current conditions: Cooler air is dropping temperatures on the Pacific Coast and Nevada by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit • Hurricane Kiko lost intensity and passed north of Hawaii • The volcano Mount Semeru in East Java, Indonesia, is erupting today for the 19th time this week, spewing an ash plume nearly 2,000 feet high.
The Trump administration disbanded a group of five climate contrarians brought together to write the Department of Energy’s controversial report challenging the scientific consensus on the severity of climate change, CNN’s Ella Nilsen reported. In a lawsuit last month, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists alleged that the formation of the group of researchers — the University of Alabama’s John Christy and Roy Spencer, the Hoover Institution’s Steven Koonin, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry, and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick — violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s public disclosure rules by failing to promptly disclose its formation and make its meeting and notes available to the public. The litigation also accused the Trump administration of breaking the law by assembling a government working group deliberately designed to represent a one-sided argument, which is prohibited under the same statute. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright confirmed in a September 3 letter that the group was dissolved. Still, the Energy Department has not retracted its assessment.
Wright’s regular messages on X about climate science and clean energy have drawn blowback and corrections appended by followers as Community Notes. “I can’t claim to know what’s happening in Wright’s mind. But I do know what’s happening with his policy — and this weak messaging, in my view, points to the intractability of Wright’s position,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote on Tuesday. Wright is both the chief lieutenant in Trump’s culture war against those who advocate for a transition to clean energy and the mouthpiece of the president’s effort to convince the country he’s fulfilling his promise to curb energy prices. Wright’s social media behavior, however, “is not how someone acts when he is focused on energy affordability above all,” Robinson wrote.
The price of copper hit a record high this summer as the Trump administration slapped 50% tariffs on imports of the globally-traded metal needed for new electrical infrastructure and growth in demand far eclipsed any associated increase in supply. Now a mega-merger of two mining giants is set to capture a larger share of the fortunes generated by the new copper boom. Anglo American and Teck Resources inked a deal to merge, creating a mining behemoth with a combined market value of more than $53 billion. It’s one of the largest-ever deals in the mining industry. If completed, the tie-up will form one of the world’s top-five biggest copper producers, with mines stretching from the bottom of the Western Hemisphere in Chile to the top in Canada producing some 1.2 million metric tons of metal per year. More than 70% of that combined production would be copper.
“The energy industry has been dealing with the copper issue for years,” Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in March, when prices were even lower. “More specifically, it’s worrying about how domestic and global production will be able to keep up with what forecasters anticipate could be massive demand.” This deal doesn’t necessarily quell those concerns, since, as The Wall Street Journal noted, it “also illustrates a challenge for bolstering commodity supply: Many miners figure it is easier and cheaper to buy rather than build mines.”
Wright’s posts about climate change and solar energy may be drawing criticism. But his agency’s support for nuclear energy has largely won praise across the political spectrum. That now includes fusion. On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced $134 million in funding for two programs designed to boost U.S. efforts to harness the type of atomic reaction that powers the sun, long considered the holy grail of clean energy. The agency pledged to give out a combined $128 million through the Fusion Innovative Research Engine to seven teams working on fusion energy science and technology. Another $6.1 million is set to flow to 20 projects through the Innovation network for Fusion Energy program to improve research in materials science, laser technologies, and fusion modeling. “DOE is unleashing the next frontier of American energy,” Wright said in a press release. “Fusion power holds the promise of limitless, reliable, American-made energy—and programs like INFUSE and FIRE ensure our innovators have the tools, talent, and partnerships to make it a reality.”
As I reported in this newsletter last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinout Commonwealth Fusion just raised one of the biggest venture rounds of the year. In July, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported on $10 million funding for the Seattle-area startup Avalanche Energy, which promises to build “micro” fusion reactors.
Shadeless land is a constraint on solar power’s expansion, inspiring high-profile projects in Portugal, Brazil, and China to build vast floating panel arrays on dammed bodies of water, a whole sector of the industry called agrovoltaics that marries farming and solar power production, and recent studies forecasting huge potential to line highways with panels. A new 1.6-megawatt solar installation in California that just came online highlights another option involving a manmade waterway: covering canals. Project Nexus, a $20 million state-funded pilot, has transformed stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District's canal system throughout California's Central Valley into what Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci called “hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.”
President Donald Trump stirred a global controversy this year with his executive order directing the U.S. to stockpile minerals obtained through deep-sea mining, an as-yet nonexistent industry still awaiting a global agreement on international regulations that would create a global legal framework for commercially harvesting nodules from as deep as 20,000 feet down. As I previously reported in this newsletter, countries that opposed Trump’s push to unilaterally kick off mining without worldwide agreement on how to regulate the activities ended up siding with China, which opposed the U.S. move, along with conservationists, who say it risked damaging one of the last wildernesses untouched by humans. Yet this week Bahrain placed a big bet on the future of U.S. efforts, the Financial Times reported. The Gulf kingdom and U.S ally backed the California startup Impossible Metals’ plan to explore an area of ocean largely controlled by Beijing. Bahrain is also the first Middle Eastern country to sponsor the measure to legalize deep-sea mining at the obscure United Nations-linked agency, the Jamaica-headquartered International Seabed Authority. The investment is more proof that, as Katie wrote this week, “everybody wants to invest in critical mineral startups.”
A view of the Russell Glacier in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where I visited in 2017. Alexander C. Kaufman
Anyone who has been to northern Greenland can tell you how eerily lifeless the ice cap can seem when you’re looking out to a boundless horizon of treeless frozen expanse. But in what looks like dirt spotted in ice cores taken from the outer edges of the polar cap are diatoms — single-celled algae with outer walls made of glass. Far from a new presence, these non-plant photosynthetic organisms were long believed to be entombed and dormant in ice. But researchers from Stanford University extracted diatoms from ice cores and recreated their environments in a lab. The scientists discovered that diatoms travel through the ice via narrow channels as thin as a strand of hair. “This is not 1980s-movie cryobiology,” Manu Prakash, associate professor of bioengineering in the Schools of Engineering and Medicine and senior author of the paper, said in a press release. “The diatoms are as active as we can imagine until temperatures drop all the way down to -15 [degrees Celsius], which is super surprising.”
On Rick Perry’s loan push, firefighters’ mask rules, and Europe’s heat pump problems
Current conditions: The Garnet Fire has scorched nearly 55,000 acres in Sierra National Forest, east of Fresno, California, and now threatens 2,000-year-old sequoia trees • Hurricane Kiko is losing intensity as it reaches Hawaii • Tropical Storm Tapah has made landfall over China, forcing evacuations and school closures.
U.S. emissions cuts under Trump's current policy versus the Biden-era policies. Rhodium Group
The United States’ output of planet-heating pollution is on track to continue double-digit declines through 2040, even if the Trump administration successfully eliminates all the policies it’s targeting to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That’s according to the latest assessment from the Rhodium Group consultancy. A new report published Wednesday morning found that U.S. emissions are set to decline by 26% to 43% relative to 2005 levels in 2040. While that sounds like a significant drop, it’s a “meaningful shift” away from Rhodium’s estimates last year, which showed a steeper decline of 38% to 56%. In all, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, the Trump administration’s policies could halve U.S. emissions cuts.
“Perhaps the only bright side in the report is a section on household energy costs,” Emily added. “The loss of tax credits for renewables and home efficiency upgrades will raise electricity bills compared to the projections in last year’s report. But despite that, Rhodium expects overall household energy costs to decrease in the coming decades — in all scenarios. That’s primarily due to the switch to electric vehicles, which lowers transportation costs for EV drivers and puts downward pressure on the cost of gasoline for everyone else.”
Fermi America, the company former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry founded to build one of the world’s biggest data center complexes in Texas, plans to push the Department of Energy for loans to finance its project, E&E News reported. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission for its initial public offering on Monday, the developer laid out its vision for a 5,263-acre gas and nuclear complex in Armadillo, Texas, on land owned by the Texas Tech University. The company said it was in “pre-approval” process with the Energy Department’s loan office, which it hoped would “finance key components” of its energy infrastructure. The company has filed an application for up to four Westinghouse nuclear reactors at the site, which federal regulators confirmed they’re reviewing. In his executive orders on nuclear power in May, Trump directed the Energy Department to approve at least 10 new large-scale reactors. “We believe the Trump Administration’s renewed focus on expedited permitting and the expansion of nuclear infrastructure in the United States presents a favorable backdrop for Fermi to replicate its business model,” the filing said.
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Solar developer Pine Gate Renewables has started consulting advisers to deal with liquidity constraints amid the Trump administration’s push to derail the clean energy industry, Bloomberg reported. The company is working with Lazard Inc. and Latham & Watkins. It has some high-profile backers with loans from Brookfield Asset Management and Carlyle Group, while Blackstone provided preferred equity.
The move to enlist advisers is a sign of the challenges ahead for renewables. With new restrictions on imported solar panels coming into force, solar prices could soon rise. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in April, that could erode solar’s price advantage over gas. With tariffs staying in place and tax credits going away, Morgan Stanley analysts warned that power purchase agreement prices for solar could go up as high as $73. That’s just a few dollars off from the cost of natural gas.
For decades, the U.S. government banned wildfire fighters from wearing masks that officials deemed too cumbersome, allowing only bandannas that offer no protection against toxins in wildfire smoke. But the Forest Service proposed new guidance Monday acknowledging for the first time that masks can protect firefighters against harmful particles in the smoke, The New York Times reported. The move came as part of a series of safety reforms meant to improve conditions for firefighters. In its reversal, the agency said it has now stockpiled some 80,000 N95 masks and will include them in standard equipment packs for all large fires.
Keeping firefighters employed has been difficult as blazes grow with each passing year. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange wrote last year, “retirements and defections from skill-based work like firefighting are especially damaging because with every senior departure goes the kind of on-the-job expertise that green new hires can’t replace. But that’s if there are new hires in the first place. Rumors abound that the agencies are struggling to fill their openings even this late in the training cycle, with a known vacancy rate of 20% in the Forest Service force alone.” As I reported last week in this newsletter, the Trump administration’s arrest of immigrant firefighters battling the largest blaze in Washington last month has spurred blowback from lawyers who say the move jeopardized the effort to contain the disaster.
After booming in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European heat pump sales are slumping. It’s part of what one of the world’s largest manufacturers of the appliances called a “structural problem,” as demand dropped to a third of previous projections. In an interview with the Financial Times, Daikin president Naofumi Takenaka said orders for heat pumps have fallen as the economy has weakened and subsidies have decreased. “When we compare the market demand we had projected for 2025 at the time to the current market, it has stopped at roughly one-third of that, so it will take three to five years to return to such levels,” Takenaka said, speaking at Daikin’s headquarters in Osaka. “This is a structural problem.”
Beaked whales are considered one of the least understood mammals in the world due to their cryptic behavior and distribution in offshore waters, diving deeper than any other mammals on record and going below the surface for more than two hours. But scientists at Brazil’s Instituto Aqualie, Juiz de Fora Federal University, Mineral Engenharia e Meio Ambiente, and Santa Catarina State University set out to record the elusive whales. By doing so, they identified at least three different beaked whale species. “The motivation for this research arose from the need to expand knowledge on cetacean biodiversity in Brazilian waters, with particular attention to deep-diving species such as beaked whales,” author Raphael Barbosa Machado said in a press release.
Rob and Jesse riff on the state of utility regulation in America — and how to fix it.
Electricity is getting more expensive — and the culprit, in much of the country, is the poles and wires. Since the pandemic, utility spending on the “last mile” part of the power grid has surged, and it seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
How can we fix it? Well, we can start by fixing utility regulation.
On today’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why utility regulation sucks and how to make it better. In Europe and other parts of the world, utilities are better at controlling their cost overruns. What can the U.S. learn from their experience? Why is it so hard to regulate electricity companies? And how should the coming strains of electrification, and climate change affect how we think about the power grid? 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.
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: This is, I think, exactly where the wonky habit of referring to this as “T&D,” or transmission and distribution —
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, we should split those.
Meyer: — simply because it’s a part of people’s bills, is actually driving the misnomer, because it allows renewable opponents — like the current administration, like officials in the current administration to say, Oh, well, the transmission and distribution section, the wire is part of the grid, is the surging part of electricity costs, this is driven by renewables. And that kind of does cohere to a mental model people might have of, oh, you have to build a lot of solar farms everywhere, or, oh, you have to build a lot of wind farms everywhere. They’re distributed over the landscape, unlike a single big power plant or something, and therefore that is driving up transmission spending.
And indeed, for renewables, as Jesse was saying, you do have to build more transmission. But where you look at the actual increase in prices is coming from in that T&D section of the bill, it is not at all that story. It’s all coming from distribution.
Jenkins: It’s certainly not coming from long-distance transmission because we’re not building any long-distance transmission, right?
And that’s the other big problem, is we have not been building transmission at anywhere near the pace that we have historically during periods when demand was growing rapidly to tap into the best resources around the country. But also, then, we should be, if we were to try to tap into American renewable energy resources that could lower consumer costs. The transmission we are building is mostly also local, short-distance, reliability-related upgrades that the transmission utilities are able to build with much less regulatory oversight.
Mentioned:
Rob on how electricity got so expensive
Matthew Zeitlin on Trump’s electricity price problem
Ofgem’s price cap
Previously on Shift Key: How to Talk to Your Friendly Neighborhood Public Utility Regulator
Jesse’s upshift (plus one more); 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.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.