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Revisiting a favorite episode with guest Ilaria Mazzocco.
Rob and Jesse talk with the deputy White House official in charge of implementing the Inflation Reduction Act.
Rob talks Ford and GM with BloombergNEF’s Corey Cantor. Plus, Rob and Jesse dig into the Trump transition.
Jesse and Rob talk overshoot with NASA’s Kate Marvel.
Jesse and Rob download with Johns Hopkins professor Jeremy Wallace.
Rob and Jesse talk about what comes next in the shift to clean energy.
Rob and Jesse do a pre-election power hour.
It’s all happening. The presidential election is a week away, and our cohost Jesse Jenkins is back from vacation. There is so much to talk about in the world of decarbonization and energy. So we tried to catch up on all of it. Are EV sales starting to rebound in the U.S.? What’s up with the Cybertruck? And what about Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting reform bill?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob attempt to discuss all those questions and more. Peak oil demand — the IRA’s focus on manufacturing — the emerging political economy of decarbonization — we hit it all. Or we try to, at least. 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, 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 want to do a branching pass here for a second. If Trump wins and Republicans want to pass [the Manchin-Barrasso permitting] bill, I think Democrats should take them up on it. Because all the changes to the oil and gas regime — almost all the changes to the oil and gas permitting regime that are contemplated by the bill will be done by a Trump administration. They could be done through executive action, or through a helpful Congress in a Trump administration. But the transmission stuff can’t be. So you might as well take the transmission tailwind and then just do the stuff that a Trump administration can do anyway.
To be clear here, when you talk to the modelers — not Jesse, other modelers — they say that the expansion oil and gas that happened during Trump would dwarf any sense of the changes contemplated by the bill. If Harris wins, then I think we have the real conversation about whether this bill makes sense for Democrats. But if Trump wins, I think, number one, Republicans aren’t going to be interested in passing the bill. But if they are interested, Democrats should take them up on it.
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, so you have kind of a narrow range of circumstances where this bill might be considered seriously in a lame duck, right? I think you’re right that if Trump wins somehow they’re going to offer it, Republicans are going to offer it, that’s an interesting deal for Democrats. I just don’t think that’s too likely.
I think the most likely scenario where this bill is taken seriously is if Harris wins and if the House and Senate are split. Whether they flip sides or whatever the control looks like, going forward, if the Democrats have the House and the Republicans have the Senate, or vice versa, this could be the type of bipartisan bill that is sort of the best deal on the table that, that might be able to get through regular order — that’s, this bill would require 60 votes to get past the filibuster in the Senate.
So you know, it by nature has to be bipartisan. And by definition, at this stage, a bipartisan bill is going to have some things that climate advocates really don’t like. And if it has enough that outweighs that, that’ll be the serious question.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Rob and guest host Jillian Goodman talk atomic politics with Third Way’s Josh Freed.
Over the past two months, the country’s biggest tech companies have announced a flurry of deals with advanced and conventional nuclear companies. At the same time, Democratic candidates running for federal office — including Kamala Harris and a handful of Senate candidates — have touted their support of building new nuclear power plants. Has nuclear’s moment finally arrived?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we have Josh Freed, the senior vice president of Third Way’s climate and energy program, discussing why nuclear might be about to boom, why Democrats are embracing nuclear, and whether a Trump administration could derail the investments. This episode of Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jillian Goodman, Heatmap’s deputy editor.
Shift Key co-host Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, is out 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: There’s a set of conflicting facts, or slightly contradicting pieces of analysis about this that I believe can all be accommodated together, but I’m still trying to understand how they all fit together. Which is at this point, when we look at the sources of power demand growth in the U.S., as we’ve covered on Shift Key, demand for electricity in the U. S. is rising now for the first time in 20 years. It’s a big deal.
When you look at where that demand growth is coming from, very little of it — or not a ton of it — is actually coming from data centers. It’s coming from EVs, it’s coming from new factories, it’s coming from electrification, it’s coming from air conditioning, it’s coming from all these more typical sources of demand growth in the economy — lots of places, by the way, where we want demand to grow. Because part of how we’re going to transition is that we’re going to move people from combusting fossil fuels to using electricity.
The IEA also just said in a report — it’s big global wrap of energy — last week that it was not very concerned about data centers for AI driving energy scarcity because data centers ultimately are only going to use, even in a high-growth situation, they’ll only use as much electricity as desalination plants. And, yeah, these tech companies are acting as if … Microsoft is seemingly acting as if it’s ready to pay between four and five times the market cost for electricity for the next 20 years because of how much it anticipates its power needs going up.
So on the one hand, data centers are not driving electricity demand growth. On the other hand, they do seem to be driving this new set of deals. How do we work that out?
Josh Freed: Yeah, look, I think the first thing: My approach to all of these issues is the reality — having worked in the energy and climate space since 2009 — is that it is a very humbling sector. And whatever assumptions we’re operating under today are going to be proven wildly wrong in a year or two or five years. So the simplest answer is, we just don’t know. And I think that companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon are looking at the potential need for a significant amount of clean, firm electricity in specific parts of the grid, and saying, Let’s get ahead of this and ensure that as we’re planning, we have clean electricity in the right places, built at roughly the timeframe we expect need to escalate significantly, so that we have certainty for planning purposes.
And in some cases there’s, I think, also the expectation that there is enough electricity demand growth, both domestically and in other advanced or rapidly modernizing economies, that being a partner with an advanced nuclear company or another company that is going to be able to provide a lot more electricity is a win-win for them.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
