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We chatted about U.S. Wind’s project off the coast of Ocean City, oil jobs, and the future of the IRA.
I may have met the future of conservative climate politics on Tuesday, and he was standing next to piles of dead fish.
Larry Hogan, a Republican former governor of Maryland, is campaigning for an open Senate seat in one of the bluest states in the country. He faces an uphill run against Angela Alsobrooks, an acolyte of Vice President Kamala Harris and a Black woman who runs one of the state’s most populous and diverse counties, Prince George’s. Before President Biden dropped out as the Democrats’ nominee for president, internal polls indicated that Hogan had a chance; since Biden’s exit, despite Hogan’s name ID from eight years in Annapolis, his chances for victory now appear uncertain.
So I was surprised when, out of the blue, as Democrats were convening in Chicago around Harris as their nominee, Hogan’s team invited me out to a campaign stop along the Chesapeake Bay. Hogan was going to announce new plans on how he’d fight for protecting the Bay if elected, and I’d get to ask the candidate whatever I wanted about … climate. Not the usual offer from a Republican congressional campaign.
Hogan, however, has a long track record of bucking his party on climate change, and could be regarded as one of the most aggressive Republican governors on the issue in modern American history. In 2017, he signed into law one of the nation’s few state-wide fracking bans. In 2018, after then President Trump began pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, he joined with other states to meet the goals of the accord regardless. Three years later, he oversaw the creation of a plan to reduce Maryland’s emissions 50% by 2030 and achieving “net-zero” by 2045. Those emissions targets happen to be the same ones Alsobrooks has endorsed, too.
I went to his campaign website to see what it says about climate and found almost nothing. Nowhere on Hogan’s website is there a discussion of emissions or energy policy, and climate-related laws like the Inflation Reduction Act barely come up. The only possible reference I can find is one paragraph saying he’d “stand against unaffordable spending and mandates raising [the] cost of energy, food, and basic necessities.”
So I said yes. Not just because I’m a Marylander who deeply cares about the future of the planet, but also because of Hogan’s importance for the future of the IRA. If he somehow found a way to win, he’d be a crucial voice on the future of the landmark climate law, the fate of which will be decided next year as lawmakers look to rewrite tax policy.
That was why, on Tuesday I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove two hours to Tilghman Island, a bucolic enclave popular for fishing and tourism along the eastern shorelines of Maryland. It might’ve been a rural part of the state, but every now and then along my route I’d see an array of solar panels in front of a farm or a house. I arrived at the meeting place to find it was a seafood plant along the water. Hogan arrived right after me in a jet black SUV and exited in attire so casual you’d hardly recognize him as a two-term governor: a simple baseball cap, a dull blue shirt, and, believe it or not, shorts.
I walked alongside Hogan and people who ran the processing plant as they surveyed flats of oyster shells and the guts of catfish I was told were an invasive species in the area. Finally, Hogan and I settled down to chat in an open garage. There are “more Republicans who actually are more environmentally sensitive than you think,” he told me, “but they’re certainly not in the majority, and they’re not the ones getting all the attention. My hope is to try to be a voice to get them to do some of the things we did and focus on.”
Of the IRA himself, he told me, “It concerns me that it was rushed through in a very partisan way without a single Republican vote. I think there are some really good things in it. I think there’s some things that weren’t very well thought out.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Things that are going to have a more harmful effect on the economy and killing jobs,” he said, adding that “we ought to at least look at how to tweak it.”
That statement puzzled me — recent analysis indicates at least 334,000 new jobs have been created since the law was enacted in 2022. But writ large, the transition to clean energy will mean people lose jobs in the oil and gas industry — was that what he was referring to?
“Yeah. I mean, we’re not ready,” Hogan replied. “It was going to shut down existing industries without any transition period when we didn’t have the ability to provide enough energy to accomplish what we wanted. We just gotta figure out a way to make the transition, but you can’t do it too rapidly or it’s going to have the opposite impact.”
The funny thing about Republicans talking about climate and the IRA is that you essentially need a translator to know their positions. Lawmakers will say one thing on the record to a reporter and then the next minute say the exact opposite thing off the record. The truth is — and I know this from many years of covering Capitol Hill — many Republican politicians support the vast majority of this law and will never admit it.
Most voters today still do not know much about the IRA, or even what the Biden administration has done on climate change. That’s unlikely to change soon as Democrats have so far eschewed mentioning the topic much at all, including during their convention in Chicago this week. Congressional Democrats put a lot of time and effort over the last year into messaging the law and their other signature industrial policy achievements. But for now, it seems it’ll be largely absent from the campaign trail.
Should Republicans take full control of Congress and the presidency, the IRA is in legitimate danger from influential coalitions on the furthest flanks of the right-wing. Think the Heritage Foundation. The Freedom Caucus. The Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Jim Jordans and Lauren Boeberts roaming the halls of the Capitol. These power-brokers have proven through fights over the debt ceiling and government funding that they appear willing to put their votes where their mouths are to satisfy a political base of support that cares less about corporations and climate change than sticking it to liberals and the left. Hogan is correct that the IRA was passed entirely by Democrats without a single Republican vote, making it a ripe target for partisan pummeling.
And yet there’s so much in the IRA that Republicans typically should like. Climate policy that’s heavy on carrots for big business and light on penalties for corporate pollution has long been Republicans’ preferred route. Why does the most moderate Republican candidate for Senate in one of the nation’s bluest states have to bash the climate law at all, let alone claim its killing jobs? I’ll be honest, when I went out to the Bay to meet Hogan, I thought I was about to hear the first major Republican endorsement of the IRA.
I asked John Hart, a fellow Marylander who helps run the conservative climate group C3 Solutions, about why Hogan would claim the IRA is killing jobs when there’s no evidence to back that up. Hart authored a campaign messaging book for Republicans trying to talk about climate change and energy policy without denying the existence of the problem, on the one hand, or alienating their own voters on the other.
“It’s an American cultural and political problem,” Hart told me. “You have to be very cognizant of those head-scratching moments, and you have to address that very clearly.”
There’s two reasons why Republicans like Hogan have to bash the IRA even if they might support a lot of the underlying climate provisions, he said: GOP voters instinctually see such ideas as “picking winners and losers,” and the climate law has been lumped in with other policies like auto regulations that Republicans largely oppose.
“Candidates are viewing it not through the narrow lens of what that legislation alone does, but how it fits into a broader agenda,” Hart added. “With the IRA, [it becomes] part of a broader effort. A lot of Republicans do believe that the Biden administration wants to ban trucks.”
Hogan did not develop his approach to climate action overnight. While as governor, he pushed for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% through 2030, he also opposed going any faster than that. (The legislature ultimately enacted the more aggressive plans without Hogan's signature.) The Alsobrooks campaign has attacked him on this, and in a statement to me said that if elected, “Larry Hogan would give [S]enate Republicans the majority they need to gut the IRA and roll back efforts to protect our environment.”
Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for the Hogan campaign, told me Hogan is “glad the [IRA] created clean energy jobs like he did as Governor in Maryland.” His concerns with the law have to do with “some of the new taxes and overspending in the bill [that] has and will contribute to inflation and job loss, and is disappointed that the bill was forced through a party line vote.”
Governor Hogan also loudly backed wind development off the Maryland coast, which is now a contentious issue along the eastern shore.
Ocean City, a popular vacation destination, is now considering legal action against the federal government if it approves efforts by U.S. Wind, a subsidiary of an Italian wind energy company, to actually build turbines off the state’s coastline. It’s a conflict that mirrors other fights waged by beach communities, resort areas, and fishing hubs against offshore wind. These parts of the country are far removed from cities and often Republican-leaning, and the loudest champions of these grievances have also been prominent GOP politicians. Most notable, of course, has been former President Donald Trump, who’s pledged to halt new permits, but Republican policymakers at all levels from New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, among others, have all been making political hay from wind farm projects in their states.
Hogan has made a name for himself in recent years as a bulwark against Trump and his brand of politics. But when I brought up Ocean City’s legal threat, his passionate support of the town led him to interrupt my question.
“They probably will and probably should [sue]. That’s an example where I was very supportive of wind energy and creating a market for that in our state to create jobs and further the production of wind energy. But on that project, there was not very much transparency. They didn’t work with the local community very much. That’s impacting the fishing industry, the tourism industry, and they’re concerned that their entire livelihoods are going to be ruined.”
Heatmap’s own polling shows the political vulnerability renewable energy faces from the environmental impacts of development. Yet earlier in our interview, Hogan had boasted about the jobs wind has brought to the transportation and logistics hub Tradepoint Atlantic in the Port of Baltimore. He spoke effusively about the jobs in industries like welding that wind development creates. (One tidbit: His campaign released an ad a few days ago featuring a Democrat-registered welder in Baltimore who says they’re voting for Hogan, with no mention of the wind industry.)
In my mind, at least, failing to build those turbines could present a bigger risk to Ocean City in the long run than building them. If we didn’t construct them, it would take away an opportunity to dramatically increase the amount of renewable energy available for Maryland to wean off of carbon-based power. Failing to do so would pose a longer-term threat to the town of Ocean City from sea level rise and intensifying extreme weather.
So I told Hogan that while, as a Marylander, I couldn’t imagine wind turbines at Ocean City, I also couldn’t stop thinking about the trade-offs. I asked him, how does he view those tradeoffs?
Hogan stood firm. “I think you can accomplish the goals without putting them on the beach. I think you move them further out. It’s a pretty simple process. The federal government required them to put them in a place that no one wants. There’s no reason for it.”
This began to sound like some sort of Republican party line, trying to sell voters on a vision of the future that derails the energy transition along the way. But as one of my personal favorite Republican-splainers on energy, Sarah Hunt of the Rainey Center, explained to me, this kind of misconstrues how politics ordinarily works.
The normal thing is that constituents go to their representatives and voice their concerns, and a lot of these beach towns and fishing areas just happen to be Republican. In other parts of the country like Louisiana, where the politicians are more open to offshore oil, they’re similarly supportive of offshore wind.
“I think that is individual to Maryland and specific areas of Maryland,” Hunt told me. “I think offshore wind is a wonderful thing. I think it’s legitimate to say it doesn’t belong everywhere, and I think it’s reasonable to have a process for communities to provide input into the placement of such projects.”
After Hogan and I concluded our interview, I drove home in the gas-powered car I inherited from my late grandparents and passed more solar paneling in front of rural homes. Driving over the Chesapeake Bay, I tried to imagine seeing wind turbines on the horizon one day, and a world where Republicans support tax credits for renewables while fighting to make sure those projects adhere to the Clean Water Act. May we live in interesting times, I guess.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Maryland was already a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative when Hogan became governor.
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Want to understand what’s happening to electric cars? Look at the Golden State.
As California goes, so goes the American car scene. This sentiment has long been true, given that the Golden State is the country’s biggest automotive market and its emissions rules have helped to drag the car industry toward more efficient vehicles.
It is doubly true in the EV era, since California is where electric vehicles first went big and where electric adoption far outpaces the rest of the nation. A look at the car sales data from the first half of 2024 shows us a few things about what the electric car market is and where it’s headed.
Electric cars went mainstream in a hurry here, growing from 5.8% of California car sales in 2020 to 21.5% in 2023. Then the graph flattens out: For the first half of this year, EVs made up 21.4% of new registrations. That would seem to support the gloomy narrative of a supposed EV sales slump. The truth, as it tends to be, is more complicated.
Look at the numbers broken down by quarters, rather than years, and the chart looks a little different. EV sales reached a peak in the third quarter of 2023, dipped a bit, and then jumped back up in April to June 2024 to the second-best quarter ever. That’s a blip, not a crisis, as EVs appear poised for slow growth but growth nonetheless.
Consider the context for a moment: California reached a place where 1 in 5 new cars sold are electric even with the EV affordability problem. That trend wasn’t going to continue unabated up to 30, 40, or 50% of auto sales without the industry putting out vehicles that can compete on cost with a $25,000 Honda Civic or a $30,000 Toyota RAV4. In its summary of the numbers, the California New Car Dealers Association blames inflation and rising monthly car payments for suppressing all vehicle sales at the moment, EVs included. Money matters will decide where things go from here.
The flipside of this year’s EV doomerism is the notion that drivers are turning to hybrids instead. The numbers bear out that sentiment for the moment in California. Traditional hybrid vehicles (excluding plug-in hybrids) more than doubled their market share from 6.1% in 2020 to 13.2% in the first half of 2024. Not too surprising, considering their wide availability and how appealing they are for California drivers who buy some of the nation’s most expensive gasoline.
Plug-in hybrids accounted for 3.4% of sales in the first half of this year, not far from the number they posted back in 2021. That might sound odd, given automakers’ rumblings about turning to these vehicles instead of true EVs, but a new wave of PHEVs is still in development. For now, the difficult calculus remains: Plug-in hybrids are a great choice for a lot of drivers, but they are significantly more expensive than combustion cars for not much electric range, and PHEVs can be hard to come by.
Take all these electrified powertrains together, however, and the picture is clear. Compared to 2018, when gas- and diesel-burners made up 88.4% of auto sales, that number is down to 62% for the first half of this year. Combustion-only is sinking fast, a trend that will spread from the West Coast to the rest of the nation.
My eyes don’t deceive me. Since the start of 2024, it has felt like Rivian’s trucks and especially SUVs are all over Los Angeles, driven by the kind of people who used to own Range Rovers. It turns out RJ Scaringe’s company is the fastest-growing car brand of any kind in California, with sales up nearly 77% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
Now, that number is deceiving. It’s easy to grow by big percentages at the beginning, and Rivian’s sales numbers are relatively small: It moved just shy of 7,000 vehicles through June, which pales in comparison to the 100,000 Teslas and 150,000 Toyotas registered in California during the same period. But Rivian’s early success in California suggests the brand is finding traction and that it might pick off plenty of drivers from Tesla's bread-winning Model Y once the more reasonably priced R2 and R3 arrive.
After all, the story of the supposed EV slump is actually the story of Tesla squandering its huge halftime lead. Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, Rivian, BMW, and Hyundai/Kia EV sales are up this year, but Tesla’s slump wipes out much of their gains.
The Model Y and Model 3 remain California’s best-selling EVs by far, with the second-place Model 3 selling three times the volume of the third-place finisher, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5. Yet Tesla sales in California are down 17% from the first half of 2023, and its market share dropped from 64.6% to 53.4%. Its only new model, the Cybertruck, sold 3,048 in the first half of this year. Californians bought nearly a thousand more Chevy Bolts — and GM isn’t even building that car right now.
Current conditions: More than 300,000 people in Louisiana are without power after Hurricane Francine • Hungarian lawmakers met in a dried riverbed yesterday to draw attention to the country’s extreme drought • An Arctic blast could bring snow to parts of the U.K.
More than 60 scientists have co-authored a new study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, warning that human activity is damaging the natural systems that support life on Earth. Almost all of these support systems – including the climate, soil nutrient cycles, and freshwater – have been pushed into danger zones as humans strive for ever more economic growth. Thus, the researchers say, the health of the planet and its people are at risk, and the poor are the most vulnerable. The study concludes “fundamental system-wide transformations are needed” to address overconsumption, overhaul economic systems, improve technologies, and transform governance.
The Lancet
Carmaker Stellantis announced yesterday it is pouring more than $400 million into three facilities in Michigan to ramp up electric vehicle production and boost the company’s “multi-energy strategy.” The Sterling Heights Assembly Plant will be Stellantis’ first U.S. facility to build a fully electric vehicle, the Ram 1500 REV. The Warren Truck Assembly Plant will be “retooled” to produce the upcoming electric Jeep Wagoneer. And the Dundee Engine Plant will be upgraded for parts production for the company’s STLA Frame architecture. As The Associated Pressexplained, Stellantis “is taking a step toward meeting some commitments that it agreed to in a new contract ratified last fall by the United Auto Workers union after a bitter six-week strike.” The company is aiming for 50% of its passenger car and light-duty truck sales in the U.S. to be electric by 2030.
Police arrested a 34-year-old man suspected of starting a wildfire in California that has now burned more than 36,000 acres and is less than 20% contained. The Line fire is one of several large blazes burning in the state and threatening thousands of structures. Last month another man was charged with arson on suspicion of igniting the Park fire, which consumed 430,000 acres in Northern California. As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange reported, arson officially accounts for only about 10% of fires handled by Cal Fire. But when there are thousands of fires across the state during a given season, that’s not an inconsequential number. And a warmer world has made extreme fire conditions more common, as have decades of misbegotten fire suppression policies in the Western United States. As a result, arson fires in rural areas are more likely to burn out of control than they would have been half a century ago, Lange wrote. Experts warn that California’s fire season, fueled by “weather whiplash,” is only just ramping up and is likely to intensify with the arrival of the Santa Ana winds.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pledged to finish the paving of a controversial road through the Amazon rainforest. The BR-319 highway would connect some major cities and improve cargo movement, which has been disrupted by record-low water levels in the Amazon River due to drought. But its construction could also hasten deforestation, including in old growth forests. “Without the forest, there is no water, it’s interconnected,” said Suely Araújo, a public policy coordinator. “The paving of the middle section of BR-319, without ensuring environmental governance and the presence of the government in the region, will lead to historic deforestation, as pointed out by many specialists and by Brazil’s federal environmental agency in the licensing process.” Lula made the pledge during a visit to assess the damage from massive fires in the rainforest, which his Environment Minister Marina Silva blamed on extreme drought caused by climate change.
A new survey of more than 1,000 EV owners in California has some interesting insights into what these drivers want from a charging station. It found they were 37% more likely to choose a charger with additional amenities like restrooms and convenience stores. “This symbiotic relationship between businesses and EV chargers may benefit both EV chargers and local businesses,” said Alan Jenn, assistant professor at the Electric Vehicle group of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.
Next 10
Also, California’s EV drivers really don’t want to wait to charge up, and are willing to pay almost a dollar more per 100 miles of charge if there’s no wait time at the charger. With every minute of extra wait time, a driver’s willingness to use a charger falls by 6%. The survey was conducted by the non-profit Next 10 and the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis.
“If Harris is now bragging about her administration’s support for fossil fuels, if she is casting the Inflation Reduction Act as a law that helped fracking, that means climate activists have much more work to do to persuade the public on what they believe. The Democratic Party’s candidate will not do that persuasion for them.” –Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer on Kamala Harris’ energy playbook.
The rapid increase in demand for artificial intelligence is creating a seemingly vexing national dilemma: How can we meet the vast energy demands of a breakthrough industry without compromising our energy goals?
If that challenge sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The U.S. has a long history of rising to the electricity demands of innovative new industries. Our energy needs grew far more quickly in the four decades following World War II than what we are facing today. More recently, we have squared off against the energy requirements of new clean technologies that require significant energy to produce — most notably hydrogen.
Courtesy of Rhodium Group
The lesson we have learned time and again is that it is possible to scale technological innovation in a way that also scales energy innovation. Rather than accepting a zero-sum trade-off between innovation and our clean energy goals, we should focus on policies that leverage the growth of AI to scale the growth of clean energy.
At the core of this approach is the concept of additionality: Companies operating massive data centers — often referred to as “hyperscalers” — as well as utilities should have incentives to bring online new, additional clean energy to power new computing needs. That way, we leverage demand in one sector to scale up another. We drive innovation in key sectors that are critical to our nation’s competitiveness, we reward market leaders who are already moving in this direction with a stable, long-term regulatory framework for growth, and we stay on track to meet our nation’s climate commitments.
All of this is possible, but only if we take bold action now.
AI technologies have the potential to significantly boost America’s economic productivity and enhance our national security. AI also has the potential to accelerate the energy transition itself, from optimizing the electricity grid, to improving weather forecasting, to accelerating the discovery of chemicals and material breakthroughs that reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Powering AI, however, is itself incredibly energy intensive. Projections suggest that data centers could consume 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030, up from 4% today. Without a national policy response, this surge in energy demand risks increasing our long-term reliance on fossil fuels. By some estimates, around 20 gigawatts of additional natural gas generating capacity will come online by 2030, and coal plant retirements are already being delayed.
Avoiding this outcome will require creative focus on additionality. Hydrogen represents a particularly relevant case study here. It, too, is energy-intensive to produce — a single kilogram of hydrogen requires double the average household’s electricity consumption. And while hydrogen holds great promise to decarbonize parts of our economy, hydrogen is not per se good for our clean energy goals. Indeed, today’s fossil fuel-driven methods of hydrogen production generate more emissions than the entire aviation sector. While we can make zero-emissions hydrogen by using clean electricity to split hydrogen from water, the source of that electricity matters a lot. Similar to data centers, if the power for hydrogen production comes from the existing electricity grid, then ramping up electrolytic production of hydrogen could significantly increase emissions by growing overall energy demand without cleaning the energy mix.
This challenge led to the development of an “additionality” framework for hydrogen. The Inflation Reduction Act offers generous subsidies to hydrogen producers, but to qualify, they must match their electricity consumption with additional (read: newly built) clean energy generation close enough to them that they can actually use it.
This approach, which is being refined in proposed guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department, is designed to make sure that hydrogen’s energy demand becomes a catalyst for investment in new clean electricity generation and decarbonization technologies. Industry leaders are already responding, stating their readiness to build over 50 gigawatts of clean electrolyzer projects because of the long term certainty this framework provides.
While the scale and technology requirements are different, meeting AI’s energy needs presents a similar challenge. Powering data centers from the existing electricity grid mix means that more demand will create more emissions; even when data centers are drawing on clean electricity, if that energy is being diverted from existing sources rather than coming from new, additional clean electricity supply, the result is the same. Amazon’s recent $650 million investment in a data center campus next to an existing nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania illustrates the challenge: While diverting those clean electrons from Pennsylvania homes and businesses to the data center reduces Amazon’s reported emissions, by increasing demand on the grid without building additional clean capacity, it creates a need for new capacity in the region that will likely be met by fossil fuels (while also shifting up to $140 million of additional costs per year onto local customers).
Neither hyperscalers nor utilities should be expected to resolve this complex tension on their own. As with hydrogen, it is in our national interest to find a path forward.
What we need, then, is a national solution to make sure that as we expand our AI capabilities, we bring online new clean energy, as well, strengthening our competitive position in both industries and forestalling the economic and ecological consequences of higher electricity prices and higher carbon emissions.
In short, we should adopt a National AI Additionality Framework.
Under this framework, for any significant data center project, companies would need to show how they are securing new, additional clean power from a zero-emissions generation source. They could do this either by building new “behind-the-meter” clean energy to power their operations directly, or by partnering with a utility to pay a specified rate to secure new grid-connected clean energy coming online.
If companies are unwilling or unable to secure dedicated additional clean energy capacity, they would pay a fee into a clean deployment fund at the Department of Energy that would go toward high-value investments to expand clean electricity capacity. These could range from research and deployment incentives for so-called “clean firm” electricity generation technologies like nuclear and geothermal, to investments in transmission capacity in highly congested areas, to expanding manufacturing capacity for supply-constrained electrical grid equipment like transformers, to cleaning up rural electric cooperatives that serve areas attractive to data centers. Given the variance in grid and transmission issues, the fund would explicitly approach its investment with a regional lens.
Several states operate similar systems: Under Massachusetts’ Renewable Portfolio Standard, utilities are required to provide a certain percentage of electricity they serve from clean energy facilities or pay an “alternative compliance payment” for every megawatt-hour they are short of their obligation. Dollars collected from these payments go toward the development and expansion of clean energy projects and infrastructure in the state. Facing increasing capacity constraints on the PJM grid, Pennsylvania legislators are now exploring a state Baseload Energy Development Fund to provide low-interest grants and loans for new electricity generation facilities.
A national additionality framework should not only challenge the industry to scale innovation in a way that scales clean technology, it must also clear pathways to build clean energy at scale. We should establish a dedicated fast-track approval process to move these clean energy projects through federal, state, and local permitting and siting on an accelerated basis. This will help companies already investing in additional clean energy to move faster and more effectively – and make it more difficult for anyone to hide behind the excuse that building new clean energy capacity is too hard or too slow. Likewise, under this framework, utilities that stand in the way of progress should be held accountable and incentivized to adopt innovative new technologies and business models that enable them to move at historic speed.
For hyperscalers committed to net-zero goals, this national approach provides both an opportunity and a level playing field — an opportunity to deliver on those commitments in a genuine way, and a reliable long-term framework that will reward their investments to make that happen. This approach would also build public trust in corporate climate accountability and diminish the risk that those building data centers in the U.S. stand accused of greenwashing or shifting the cost of development onto ratepayers and communities. The policy clarity of an additionality requirement can also encourage cutting edge artificial intelligence technology to be built here in the United States. Moreover, it is a model that can be extended to address other sectors facing growing energy demand.
The good news is that many industry players are already moving in this direction. A new agreement between Google and a Nevada utility, for example, would allow Google to pay a higher rate for 24/7 clean electricity from a new geothermal project. In the Carolinas, Duke Energy announced its intent to explore a new clean tariff to support carbon-free energy generation for large customers like Google and Microsoft.
A national framework that builds on this progress is critical, though it will not be easy; it will require quick Congressional action, executive leadership, and new models of state and local partnership. But we have a unique opportunity to build a strange bedfellow coalition to get it done – across big tech, climate tech, environmentalists, permitting reform advocates, and those invested in America’s national security and technology leadership. Together, this framework can turn a vexing trade-off into an opportunity. We can ensure that the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in building an industry of the future actually accelerates the energy transition, all while strengthening the U.S.’s position in innovating cutting- edge AI and clean energy technology.