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Earlier this month, an odd little ad began appearing on TVs in Michigan. On first watch, it plays like any other political advertisement you’d see on television this time of year. In it, Michigan governor and Biden surrogate Gretchen Whitmer touts the high-paying electric vehicle manufacturing jobs that the Democratic administration has brought to her state. Watch the spot a few times, though, and it soon becomes clear what it’s missing.
Climate change.
The 30-second ad by Evergreen Action, an advocacy group linked to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, promotes “electric cars that power our economy and our future,” “training Michigan workers for high-paying jobs,” and policies that are “good for our economy.” This is all clearly referencing programs in the Inflation Reduction Act, arguably the most significant piece of climate legislation ever enacted in the United States, and yet the spot doesn’t once mention the one big upside all these upsides have in common. According to new polling that Third Way, a center-left think tank, shared exclusively with Heatmap News, that’s a good thing.
“Climate, as a message, is not going to drive turnout,” Emily Becker, the deputy director of communications for Third Way’s climate and energy team, told me.
While most Americans believe the planet is warming due to human activity and overwhelmingly want the government to do something about it, “climate change” — at least in those words — is almost never their most important issue. According to prior polling by Third Way and confirmed in issue polls run by firms like Pew, voters who say the economy is their No. 1 priority make up a plurality of the electorate, while “climate-first” voters represent a much smaller (and typically, whiter, older, and wealthier) subsection.
The new poll, conducted in mid-May and released on Monday, was done in partnership with Impact Research, a progressive polling firm that also works directly with Biden. What Third Way wanted was a better understanding of when and where climate becomes a make-or-break issue. The results show that just over half of Americans (54%) would back a candidate who views clean energy as a priority. When presented with the hypothetical of picking between a candidate who wants immediate climate action and one who “feels we must address inflation before combating climate change,” the numbers dip; just 40% of respondents said they’d vote for the former candidate, and 47% picked the inflation-busting latter.
Of course, this is a made-up scenario. For one thing, the clean energy build-out is inflation-busting, and lest we forget, the 2024 election is between a candidate who passed the most substantial climate legislation in U.S. history and one who still claims climate change is a hoax. But inflation is the heavy-weight issue in America right now. “People are going to prioritize anything that impacts them personally,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, a strategic communications consultant and the host of the podcast Words to Win By, told me.
Shenker-Osorio said she interprets the candidate question as a victory for climate advocates. Sure, when forced to make a binary, zero-sum choice between climate and inflation, the respondents to this poll chose the latter — but only by 7 points, and with a margin of error of 3.1. Climate advocates have done an “extraordinary job to bring voters into a place where they’re only 7 points underwater on this make-believe question, where somehow tackling corporate price gouging and raising people’s wages can’t be done if we are also tackling climate change,” Shenker-Osorio told me.
Shenker-Osorio did agree, however, that the word “climate” needs to be used carefully, at risk of confusing or alienating voters. “I’m not arguing that the winner here is to say ‘climate change’ over and over and over again,” she said. “I also don’t use that in my messaging. It’s way too abstract.” Shenker-Osorio pointed to phrases like “damage to our climate” instead, and stressed to me that it is important for Democratic candidates and their surrogates to “present a positive vision, which is: the clean energy future is ours for the taking.”
Becker, of Third Way, acknowledged that the question presented a blatantly artificial scenario, but argued that “using measures that can be imperfect can still be revelatory in terms of how individuals think about this issue.” For example, while emissions reduction is an obvious upside of clean energy — it’s literally emphasized in the name! — the polling confirmed that centering discussions of things like solar power and EVs on the high-paying jobs and cost-saving upsides was more productive than opining about saving the planet.
Finding the right balance might not seem too hard, but when you have a 30-second ad spot running in living rooms across Michigan, every single word needs to be high impact. And manufacturing electric cars because they “power our economy and our future?” That’s an upside everyone can agree on.
North America has about 37.5 gigawatts of total virtual power plant capacity, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie’s latest estimate, published last year. That capacity is spread across roughly 2,000 VPPs, which aggregate distributed energy resources like batteries, smart thermostats, and heat pumps to cut, shift, or supply electricity when the grid is under strain — effectively turning them into a single, coordinated power plant.
On Thursday, Google and VPP operator Voltus announced plans to add another 1 gigawatt of clean capacity over the next three or four years — or nearly 3% of North America’s existing total. Under Voltus’ “bring your own capacity” model, Google will fund the VPP to help meet its booming data center power needs, while Voltus will enroll businesses and households across the PJM Interconnection, the notoriously overstrained grid region spanning parts of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, compensating them for their participation either directly or through electricity bill credits.
The announcement expands on a three-year, 100-megawatt deal the two companies signed in June, extending their commitment through 2040. Voltus CEO Dana Guernsey told me that the smaller deal gave the companies a starting point for a much more ambitious partnership. “It’s a lot easier to explain to people how you’re going to 10x if you’ve already 1x, and so we had to start somewhere,” she said. “We always had our eyes set on bigger things.”
Earlier this month, Voltus closed an oversubscribed $225 million Series D round led by Generation Investment Management to scale its VPP portfolio to 20 gigawatts by 2030. The first phase of the Google partnership is also oversubscribed, Guernsey told me. While that flexible power won’t come online until next year, this means Voltus has already lined up over 100 megawatts of accredited capacity that PJM can count on to deliver when needed, much as it would a natural gas plant or solar-plus-storage installation.
In the meantime, the VPP operator says its broader PJM portfolio has already demonstrated what it can do. Last week, an unseasonably warm stretch of fall weather required PJM to activate its Emergency Load Response Program twice. With 46 gigawatts of generation offline for planned maintenance or construction and another 15 gigawatts unexpectedly unavailable, “distributed resources came through,” Guernsey posted on LinkedIn. “This is how a modern grid should work.” Based on preliminary data, she told me that Voltus delivered about 105% of its committed load reduction during the events.
And VPPs can do more than help avert emergencies. Grid operators are increasingly calling on distributed resources for routine grid management too, such as to ease daily price spikes, reduce emissions when the sun or wind isn’t available, or relieve congestion on a local line. “It’s nearly constant. I think soon we’ll be able to say it’s like every hour,” Guernsey told me.
So far this year, Voltus has reduced electricity demand in PJM by more than 200 gigawatt-hours. Now the company plans to lean more heavily on batteries, particularly at commercial and industrial sites, to accelerate its growth. Guernsey told me that with battery costs falling, electricity prices rising, and fixed payments to participants through 2040, the math now works to deploy batteries at scale, without exposure to unpredictable wholesale electricity prices.
She’s betting that other hyperscalers will see the value in large-scale battery deployments too. Most of the buzz today has revolved around hyperscalers bringing their own generation online — both to secure power faster and head off community opposition by paying their own way. Thus far, Google is the only hyperscaler committed to bringing its own distributed capacity through a VPP. But getting the big players to embrace these new “bring your own capacity” contracts, which Voltus launched last September, is central to its growth strategy.
Guernsey has likened these novel capacity contracts to the corporate renewable power purchase agreements that Google also helped pioneer in the early 2010s. Now she sees a similar opportunity for VPPs to move from a promising concept to a mainstream procurement tool.
“There’s been this notion that we’re coming up on an inflection point for a very long time,” she said of the VPP market. “And I want to be able to say we came up on the inflection point, we went past it, and now we are scaling. And this is an awesome proof point.”
The Federal Reserve raised the federal funds rate by a quarter point, the central bank announced Wednesday afternoon, its first rate change since Chairman Kevin Warsh took his seat in May and its first rate hike in over three years.
The federal funds rate will now sit between 3.75% and 4%. According to projections by regional Federal Reserve presidents and members of the Board of Governors, the central bank expects to hike rates one more time this year.
In its now characteristically brief statements, the Federal Open Market Committee said that the hike “will support a timelier return to the Committee's 2 percent goal” for inflation. Inflation is currently running at 3.4% and has been above the Fed’s 2% target since 2021.
The FOMC’s (brief) statement explaining the hike pointed to “resilient” domestic spending and “robust” capital investment. It characterized the economy as “expanding at a solid pace,” albeit with “elevated” uncertainty due to “geopolitical developments.”
This combination of factors — high oil prices due to the partial shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and high investment in data centers — have helped push up yields on Treasury bonds, which helped maneuver the Federal Reserve into its rate hike. These rising Treasury yields have made raising capital more difficult for sectors besides artificial intelligence, very much including the capital-intensive renewable and clean energy industries.
Warsh attributed higher Treasury yields to “economic strength, competition for capital, and geopolitics,” in his press conference following the rate announcement. The yield on the 10-year treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of money throughout the economy, rose to over 5% on the news, the highest level since 2007.
Across the country, average household electricity bills are up 2.7% in the first eight months of the year, according to the latest update to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub, tacking on $4 per month to the typical bill. This level of rise is consistent with the pace set in 2024 and 2025, but faster than 2021 and 2023.
As we’ve discussed before, some of the fastest growth in prices comes either in the Atlantic Seaboard — with Washington, D.C., Virginia, and New Jersey all having year over year growth rates of at least 7.5% — thanks largely to increased demand and capacity payments in the PJM Interconnection marketplace. Another standout so far this year is Hawaii, which is uniquely dependent on imported oil to power its grid and has seen its 12-month trailing average prices rise by over 8% so far this year.
California, which is well known for seeing especially sharp price increases in recent years largely due to wildfire-related costs, has seen somewhat restrained bill growth so far this year across the state, with the 12-month-rolling average bill rising just 3% in the past 12 months and prices going up 4%. (That price level is still quite high, however, at almost 32 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to a national average of around 19.)
Rates charged by Southern California Edison, one of the state’s big three investor-owned utilities, are up almost 15% in the past year, averaged across its baseline regions. The MIT researchers attribute this increase to two major factors: one, a decrease in the California Climate Credit, which is paid out to electricity customers from the state’s emissions cap-and-invest program. This year, the credit for Southern California Edison ratepayers is $72, applied to bills in July and August in tranches of $36. Last year, by contrast, Southern California Edison handed out $112 in two tranches, April and October.
The second factor in Southern California Edison’s inflated bills is an increase in the fixed charge portion of the bills ratepayers receive. Following changes in California state law designed to distribute the cost of the grid more equitably, SCE revamped its rate structure at the end of last year to include a “Base Services Charge” of $24 per month for customers not enrolled in any special rate program. At the same time, SCE instituted a roughly 10% decrease in its per-kilowatt-hour electricity rate in order to protect lower-income ratepayers (who would pay a fixed charge substantially lower than the baseline $24). PG&E moved to a similar system earlier this year.
When it introduced the new rates in November of last year, SCE said that “medium energy users” would likely see little change in their bills. Price Hub data suggests, however, that the typical household has seen a bill increase from the new service charge of 13%, even before accounting for the smaller climate credit.
