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Don’t mess with Texas’ power demand.
Load growth is becoming controversial in Texas, where its isolated, uniquely free market electricity system makes a sometimes awkward fit with the state’s distinctive right-wing politics. They crashed together Wednesday, when the state’s conservative Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who a few weeks ago was attending Donald Trump’s criminal trialin New York City, expressed skepticism of the state’s bitcoin mining industry and the prospect of more data centers coming to Texas.
Responding to “shocking” testimony from the head of ERCOT, which manages about 90% of Texas’s electricity grid, Patrick wrote on X, “We need to take a close look at those two industries [crypto and AI]. They produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid. Crypto mining may actually make more money selling electricity back to the grid than from their crypto mining operations."
Texas has become a center of the crypto mining industry precisely because of how flexible and market-oriented the state’s grid is. Crypto miners in Texas can take advantage of ERCOT’s “demand response” programs, which pay large users of electricity to be willing to shut down when power is scarce and expensive on the grid, and have a relatively easy time getting onto the grid.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that crypto mining makes up about 2% of the country’s electricity demand, and the industry’s power usage has come under scrutiny from politicians before, but typically from Democrats.
Riot Networks, a crypto miner based in Texas, has at times made dramatically more money from its interactions with the grid than by actually generating Bitcoin. Last August, when Texas was setting records for electricity demand, the company made $31.6 million from selling power back to the grid that it had previously bought for a prearranged price, or from incentive payments for being willing to power down in moments of peak demand, compared to $8.6 million from crypto mining. The result, the company’s chief executive said in a statement, “was a landmark month for Riot in showcasing the benefits of our unique power strategy.”
The miners have also been blamed for raising pricesfor Texas residents and businesses who can’t be as flexible with their power demand, as well as for the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their activity.
Patrick, oddly enough and almost certainly inadvertently, echoed an extensive 2013 New York Timesstory when he said that “Texans will ultimately pay the price” for high power demand from this crypto and data operations. “I’m more interested in building the grid to service customers in their homes, apartments, and normal businesses and keeping costs as low as possible for them instead of for very niche industries that have massive power demands and produce few jobs. We want data centers, but it can’t be the Wild Wild West of data centers and crypto miners crashing our grid and turning the lights off,” Patrick wrote.
(The New York Times: “Other major energy users, like factories and hospitals, cannot reduce their power use as routinely or dramatically without severe consequences,” and “other industries, including metals and plastics manufacturing, also require large amounts of electricity, causing pollution and raising power prices. But Bitcoin mines bring significantly fewer jobs.”)
At the same time, Trump has been making a concerted play for the crypto community, including miners. He has promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, who operated The Silk Road, an online marketplace (for, among other things, illegal drugs) that used crypto. (He’s serving a life sentencefor narcotics distribution and a host of conspiracy charges.) On Wednesday, Trump posted to Truth Social, “Bitcoin mining may be our last line of defense against a CBDC,” a.k.a. a central bank digital currency. “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”
Trump in the past has sounded the Bitcoin skeptic, having tweeted in 2019, “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity....,” but has since seemed to have, for now, come around.
While Trump is making a concerted play to win over new constituencies for his election bid, Patrick was responding to testimony from the head of ERCOT that Texas’s power demand will grow faster than previously estimated, and that electricity supply may need to almost double in the next 10 years at the latest.
That will require substantial new supply. While Texas is leading the nationin installation of utility-scale solar and is the number one state for wind thanks to a combination of its large size, growing population and electricity demand, large sunny and windy areas,and a more light-touch approachto regulation and hooking up to the grid, it is also embracing state planning for its fossil energy sector. Texas has established a $5 billion fund to provide low-cost financing to developers of dispatchable power generatorsthat can be turned on and off at any time — largely natural gas.
Patrick had said earlier in a statement, “We must bring new dispatchablegeneration (primarily new natural gas plants) to Texas to ensure we maintain reliable power under any circumstance.”
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
The company managed to put a positive spin on tariffs.
The residential solar company Sunrun is, like much of the rest of the clean energy business, getting hit by tariffs. The company told investors in its first quarter earnings report Tuesday that about half its supply of solar modules comes from overseas, and thus is subject to import taxes. It’s trying to secure more modules domestically “as availability increases,” Sunrun said, but “costs are higher and availability limited near-term.”
“We do not directly import any solar equipment from China, although producers in China are important for various upstream components used by our suppliers,” Sunrun chief executive Mary Powell said on the call, indicating that having an entirely-China-free supply chain is likely impossible in the renewable energy industry.
Hardware makes up about a third of the company’s costs, according to Powell. “This cost will increase from tariffs,” she said, although some advance purchasing done before the end of last year will help mitigate that. All told, tariffs could lower the company’s cash generation by $100 million to $200 million, chief financial officer Danny Abajian said.
But — and here’s where things get interesting — the company also offered a positive spin on tariffs.
In a slide presentation to investors, the company said that “sustained, severe tariffs may drive the country to a recession.” Sounds bad, right?
But no, not for Sunrun. A recession could mean “lower long term interest rates,” which, since the company relies heavily on securitizing solar leases and benefits from lower interest rates, could round in the company’s favor.
In its annual report released in February, the company mentioned that “higher rates increase our cost of capital and decrease the amount of capital available to us to finance the deployment of new solar energy systems.” On Wednesday, the company estimated that a 10% tariff, which is the baseline rate in the Trump “Liberation Day” tariffs, could be offset with a half percentage point decline in the company’s cost of capital, although it didn’t provide any further details behind the calculation.
Even in the absence of interest rate relief, a recession could still be okay for Sunrun.
“Historically, recessions have driven more demand for our products,” the company said in its presentation, arguing that because their solar systems offer savings compared to utility rates, they become more attractive when households get more money conscious.
Sunrun shares are up almost 10% today, as the company showed more growth than expected.
For what it’s worth, the much-ballyhooed decline in long-term interest rates as a result of Trump’s tariffs hasn’t actually happened, at least not yet. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday decided to keep the federal funds rate at 4.5%, the third time in a row the board of governors have chosen to maintain the status quo. The yield on 10-year treasuries, often used as a benchmark for interest rates, is up slightly since “Liberation Day” on April 2 and sits today at 4.34%, compared to 4.19% before Trump’s tariffs announcements.
Meta and Microsoft both confirmed plans to invest heavily in AI infrastructure.
Big Tech said this week that it’s going full steam ahead with building out data centers, and the power industry loves it. Since Microsoft and Meta reported their earnings for the beginning of the year on Wednesday, including announcements either reaffirming their guidance on capital expenditures or even increasing it, power sector stocks have jumped.
Shares of Vistra, which has a fleet of power plants including nuclear, natural gas, coal, and renewables, are up almost 7% in early afternoon trading. Constellation, one of the largest nuclear producers in the country, is up 8%. GE Vernova, which makes in-demand gas turbines, is up 4%. Chip designer Nvidia’s shares are up 4%.
Microsoft, which has been dogged byanalyst and media reports that it’s canceling some data center builds or slowing down its overall pace of deployment, reaffirmed its previousguidance that it would spend around $80 billion on data centers for its fiscal year. The affirmed guidance, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a note to clients, came “put to rest” the earlier chatter.
Meta, meanwhile, raised its guidance for capital expenditures from a range of $60 billion to $65 billion to at least $64 billion and as much as $72 billion.
Looking at these hyperscalers, as well as the data center company CoreWeave, Morgan Stanley estimates 38% annual growth in capital expenditures for cloud computing in 2025, to $392 billion — a $29 billion or 7 percentage point jump from its estimate a month ago. This increased spending will be a “boost to AI capex/power enablers.”
These companies, which make up the larger artificial intelligence supplier complex, were some of the most affected by Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs announcements, as energy production ishighly sensitive to the global macroeconomy. (Not to mention power plants and power plant suppliers are themselvesoften major purchasers of foreign goods and commodities.) GE Vernova, for example, told investors last month that it would take a several hundred million hit thanks to tariffs.
But in the topsy turvy world of post “Liberation Day” markets, these companies’ investors are optimistic about the future again.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s earnings call that “we will be short power” when it comes to building out data centers, and that “I need power in specific places so that we can either lease or build at the pace at which we want.”
How that power will be provided is one of the key questions of the energy transition.
Big tech companies tend to have some kind of commitment to using renewable or low-carbon power, and are among the country’s largest voluntary purchasers of non-carbon-emitting power. Microsoft, for example,is helping pay for the planned restart of one unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant by agreeing to buy its power output.
There is a tight market for all sorts of power equipment right now, especially gas turbines, which will remain in short supply well into the back end of this decade based on current production plans. Renewable developers such as NextEra argue that solar, wind, and batteries make the most sense to quickly meet the needs of power-hungry data center developers and utilities because of how quickly and cheaply they can be built.“We should be thinking about renewables and battery storage as a critical bridge to when other technology is ready at scale, like new gas-fired plants,” NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said on an earnings call late last month, reversing the typical line that natural gas can serve as a “bridge fuel” to a low carbon future. “Gas turbines are in short supply and in high demand.”
In the meantime, load growth from data centers could push up power prices across the board. So even if you can’t build a new gas plant anytime soon, the one you’re operating that’s powering a data center right now is as good as gold.