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Podcast

Shift Key Is Opening the Mail Bag

Answering your questions on AI and energy, the economics of solar, the Green New Deal’s legacy, and more.

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Happy new year! On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse answer some of the questions they’ve received from readers throughout the year. Hot topics include: What happened to the Green New Deal, and is the Inflation Reduction Act part of its legacy? Should U.S. policy prioritize solar manufacturing or solar deployment? And how can normal people keep AI-driven data centers from blowing up the 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, 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:

Jesse Jenkins: If you build a tariff wall around America and you say, You must buy American-made panels or pay a huge tariff, we could build a domestic solar manufacturing sector, but it would by no means be required to be globally competitive. And if you were to remove those protections, it would probably immediately collapse. […] If you want to, you have a competitive agenda, you need to be developing a particular type of industry that can be competitive. And I think that Michael’s question hints that maybe that’s not that important in the case of solar because it’s just not a very high-margin business. It’s kind of a bad business to be in. There’s consistent overcapacity and margins are thin, if not non-existent.

Robinson Meyer: Jenny Chase At BloombergNEF, who is the master of solar manufacturing, consistently describes it as one of the worst businesses in the world because these Chinese manufacturers — and now, more broadly, these Chinese and Southeast Asian manufacturers — are just constantly competing each other out of business.

I will say, I want to attach an asterisk to globally competitive, right? There’s like a B part to that, which is, do you think dominating in this industry is going to create know-how that allows you to dominate future technologies we don’t understand yet?

Jenkins: Yeah, are there general-purpose manufacturing techniques or core technology components here that you think are going to be useful in a variety of other sectors? I think that’s true.

I look at batteries, for example, as a critical general-purpose technology for the 21st century, right? Like, good batteries are going to be in everything, and so the ability to produce those and to continue to innovate and be at the frontier there, it’s important to national defense. It’s important to the transportation sector. It’s important to consumer products. You know, it’s just a critical platform technology, and a lot of the innovations in material science and electrochemistry and other things that you need to develop for batteries have other broader applications in decarbonizing industry and producing other products.

So I think that’s a good example of a case where, even if you’re a little behind the technology or frontier, there’s a lot of value to trying to catch up there for, for broader reasons.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

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.

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Hotspots

Fox News Goes After a Solar Farm

And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.

Map of U.S. renewable energy.
Heatmap Illustration

1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.

  • Last week, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources said it wanted to lease more than 400 acres of undeveloped state-owned forestland for part of a much larger RWE Clean Energy solar project near the northern Michigan town of Gaylord.
  • Officials said they were approached by the company about the land. But the news sparked an immediate outcry, as state elected Republicans – and some Democrats – demanded to know why a forest would be cleared for ‘green’ energy. Some called for government firings.
  • Then came the national news coverage. On Friday, Fox News hosted a full four-minute segment focused on this one solar farm featuring iconoclastic activist Michael Shellenberger.
  • A few days later, RWE told the media it would not develop the project on state lands.
  • “[D]uring the development process, we conducted outreach to all landowners adjacent to the project location, including the Michigan Department of Natural Resources,” the company said in a statement to the Petoskey News-Review, adding it instead decided to move forward with leasing property from two private landowners.

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Policy Watch

How to Solve a Problem Like a Wind Ban

And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.

Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.

  • “They litter our country like paper, like dropping garbage in a field,” Trump said at a press conference Tuesday. “We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are built.”
  • Is this possible? It would be quite tricky, as the president only has control over the usage of federal lands and waters. While offshore wind falls entirely under the president’s purview, many onshore wind projects themselves fall entirely on state lands.
  • This is where the whole “wind kills birds” argument becomes important. Nearly all wind projects have at least some federal nexus because of wildlife protection laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
  • Then there are the cables connecting these projects to the grid and interstate transmission projects that may require approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
  • I’m personally doubtful he will actually stop all wind in the U.S., though I do think offshore wind in its entirety is at risk (which I’ve written about). Trump has a habit of conflating things, and in classic fashion, he only spoke at the press conference about offshore wind projects. I think he was only referring to offshore wind, though I’m willing to eat my words.

2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.

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Q&A

Are Anti-Renewables Activists Going Unchallenged?

A conversation with J. Timmons Roberts, executive director of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network


J. Timmons Roberts
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This week’s interview is with Brown University professor J. Timmons Roberts. Those of you familiar with the fight over offshore wind may not know Roberts by name, but you’re definitely familiar with his work: He and his students have spearheaded some of the most impactful research conducted on anti-offshore wind opposition networks. This work is a must-read for anyone who wants to best understand how the anti-renewables movement functions and why it may be difficult to stop it from winning out.

So with Trump 2.0 on the verge of banning offshore wind outright, I decided to ask Roberts what he thinks developers should be paying attention to at this moment. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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