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Climate change and energy production are in a kind of twisted embrace. There’s the obvious aspect of it: Much of the energy produced today comes from burning hydrocarbons, which leads to further building up of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing climate change. To fix that, more energy has to be generated from sources that don’t emit carbon.
But here’s the less obvious aspect: The weather, and therefore the climate, also affects how much energy can be produced from non-carbon-emitting sources.
This can mean something as simple as smoke produced by wildfire obscuring the sun and leading to less solar power production, but it really matters a lot for power derived from rain and snowmelt.
In the United States, a major portion of our non-carbon-emitting energy comes from hydropower. And hydropower capacity — literally the amount of water stored in reservoirs — is affected by the climate.
In the Pacific Northwest, which has an extensive system of dams that provide much of the region’s power, the Energy Information Administration expects that hydropower generation will fall off by about a fifth for 2023 compared to 2022 — 19 percent to be exact.
The EIA credited the forecast reduction to “above-normal temperatures in May ... [that] melted snow rapidly, resulting in a significant loss of water supply.” In the first six months of the year, hydropower generation fell off by 24 percent.
But what climate can take away in one region, it can give in another. While the Northwest has about half of the country’s hydropower, much of the remainder is in California, which experienced a record-setting wet and snowy winter. And that means very full reservoirs. The EIA said that the state had 94 percent more hydropower generation in the first half of the year compared to 2022 and expected almost double 2022’s generation for the whole year.
And that pattern may be repeated.
The expected El Niño weather pattern this winter “is associated with wetter-than-average conditions in the Southwest United States, including parts of California, and warmer-than-average temperatures in the Northwest,” according to the EIA.
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Last Energy just raised a $40 million Series B.
Nuclear energy is making a comeback, conceptually at least. While we’re yet to see a whole lot of new steel in the ground, money is flowing into fusion, there’s a push to build more standard fission reactors, and the dream of small modular reactors lives on, even in the wake of the NuScale disappointment.
All this excitement generally revolves around nuclear’s potential to provide clean, baseload power to the grid. But Washington D.C.-based Last Energy is pursuing a different strategy — making miniature, modularized reactors to provide power directly to industries such as data centers, auto manufacturing, and pulp and paper production. Size-wise, think small modular reactors, but, well, even smaller — Last Energy’s units provide a mere 20 megawatts of electricity, whereas a full-size reactor can be over 1,000 megawatts. SMRs sit somewhere in between.
Today the company announced its $40 million series B round, led by the Austin-based venture capital firm Gigafund. Last Energy aims to deploy its first microreactor by 2026, and CEO and founder Bret Kugelmass told me the company has already reached commercial agreements for 80 units, all in Europe. Nearly half of these will be deployed at data centers, the notoriously energy hungry server farms powering the AI boom.
Kugelmass told me the goal is for Last Energy’s reactor to be transportable in the back of a truck. “We decided to focus most of our specific design criteria based on supply chain and logistics constraints,” he said. Every part of the system is “built in a factory, first tested in a factory, mass manufactured in a factory, and then snaps together like a Lego set out in the field.”
There are currently no operational microreactors anywhere in the Western world, though other companies, including Radiant, Westinghouse, and BWX Technologies are also trying to build one. Last Energy’s investors are betting, however, that it could be one of the first to market.
As of now, the company has reached the permitting stage for some of its European projects. Kugelmass told me that Wales, England, Poland, and Romania are the company’s top markets, and that the decision to start in Europe was mainly financial. “Energy is so expensive in Europe compared to the U.S. — I mean, we're talking like two, three times higher for the exact same thing that we're going to deliver. We can make two or three times more money.”
The company estimates that its reactors can be fully manufactured and assembled onsite within two years. And while Kugelmass wouldn’t reveal an exact price, he said Last Energy will be cost-competitive with solar or wind plus storage. Problem is, there’s not really any precedent that would indicate how realistic these targets are, and nuclear doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to arriving on time or on budget.
At the very least, though, Kugelmass told me the reactor’s smaller size makes a meltdown “practically impossible,” meaning securing regulatory approval should be much simpler than it is for full-size plants. And building on the customer’s side of the meter also allows the company to supply power before it’s officially grid-connected, meaning Last Energy can work around the interminably long interconnection queues that plague the European clean energy market just as they do the U.S.
As manufacturing ramps, costs come down, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission streamlines its process for approving new projects, Kugelmass told me he could see Last Energy entering the domestic market in a few years. After all, with American companies driving the boom in AI and cloud computing, the U.S. has far more data centers than anywhere else on earth. Last Energy has aggressive plans to meet that demand, aiming to deploy 10,000 reactors in the next 15 years.
“But it doesn't stop there, because that's still only like 1% of global energy,” Kugelmass told me, saying that Last Energy’s ultimate goal is to “fundamentally transform global energy.” But that’s for tomorrow. For the unglamorous now, some more prototypes and permits are in order.
Believe it or not, it doesn’t have anything to do with Elon Musk.
It shows up when you are most vulnerable. Maybe it’s under a reel of Fleabag’s season 2, episode 5 confession scene, in which Phoebe Waller-Bridge finally gets together with Andrew Scott’s “hot priest.” Or maybe it’s slapped on a TikTok of an industrial hydraulic press squashing some gummy bears. No matter what, it’s always the caption of the video you find yourself transfixed by without quite knowing why: “The Tesla Cybertruck Is an All-Electric Battery-Powered Light-Duty Truck.”
For the past few months, Instagram and TikTok users have been inundated by posts with the same caption, a seemingly AI-generated paragraph about Tesla’s Cybertruck, providing a “comprehensive overview of its key features and specifications.” The caption could be applied to anything and pops up seemingly at random, creating the disconcerting effect that Elon Musk is lurking around every digital corner. This is not because legions of social media users have suddenly become lunatic Cybertruck stans, however (though there are certainly some of those, too). Rather, it’s a technique for spam accounts to game the algorithm and boost their engagement.
Allow me to explain: According to the social media experts on Reddit, while hashtags were once an easy way for accounts to get more clicks without having to spend too much time producing actual content, they are now out of fashion. Instead, both Instagram and TikTok have started rewarding posts with original captions — i.e. those that would cause someone to stay on a post for longer or even save it. That might be easy for influencers, who have their own voices and curated audiences, but not so much for “spam accounts,” which only repost what is already popular. The solution? A well-written paragraph about the Cybertruck, of course!
For the owner of @fucksayingx on Instagram, who posts clips of famous movies and TV shows (and who didn’t want their real name to be used), longer captions seem to attract wider audiences. They told me they have only used the Cybertruck caption on a few posts and noticed that one of them (a clip from the rom-com Love & Other Drugs) got almost 1.7 million views — though they’ve gotten more views on other posts without it. It seems that the Cybertruck hack is no more effective than any other engagement-juicing technique. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
A similar trend was going on in the beginning of the year, when accounts started posting a very similar paragraph about the Mercedes CLR GTR, which is likely a mistranscription of the Mercedes CLK GTR, a rare internal combustion racing vehicle from the 1990s. That might mean the Tesla caption also won’t last for long, especially as the apps shift more and more toward prioritizing originality. (Funnily enough, Musk thought that shift was a terrible idea when Instagram announced it in the spring, claiming that there’s virtually no originality to be found in those platforms.)
At some point, Zuckerberg’s algorithm will realize that no one is actually that interested in the Cybetruck and the caption will lose its power. As for which car will be next, I’m hoping Ford’s Mustang Mach-E. Who doesn’t love a classic car suped up for the post-fossil fuel era, am I right?
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comment from an Instagram user on the success of the technique.
And if it doesn’t, that’s very good news, indeed, for global emissions.
First it was the reservoirs in China’s massive network of hydroelectric dams filling up, then it was the approval of 11 new nuclear reactors — and it’s all happening as China appears to be slowing down its approval of new coal plants, according to a research group that closely follows the Chinese energy transition.
While China is hardly scrapping its network of coal plants, which power 63% of its electric grid and makes it the world’s biggest consumer of coal (to the tune of about half of global coal consumption), it could mean that China is on the verge of powering its future economic growth non-carbon-emitting energy. This would mean a break with decades of coal-powered growth and could set the table for real emissions reductions from the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
It is true that many researchers consider it necessary to essentially halt approvals of new, unabated fossil fuel assets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and hold global temperatures rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. But any world where emissions are falling will have gone through a transitional period where Chinese coal construction first slows down.
The report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that in the first half of this year, China has approved just 9 gigawatts of new coal plants, an 83% drop from the first six months of 2023; in 2022 and 2023, the country approved 100 gigawatts of new coal. For scale, the United States added a total of 40 gigawatts of new capacity in 2023 across all sources of energy, including non-emitting ones like solar and lower-emitting ones like natural gas.
CREA attributes this slow down to “the rapid development of clean energy, which is now being installed at levels sufficient to meet China's electricity demand growth.” But China’s power mix is changing on the demand side, as well. If the government continues to shift from a strategy of rapid urbanization and massive new construction projects that depend on huge amounts of steel and cement (both of which require coal to produce) to high-value manufacturing like (electric!) automobiles, the demand for coal will likely plateau and fall, with emissions following.
The report adds to a growing body of data that shows China may have hit its emissions peak already, well before its 2030 goal. Even late last year, some experts speculated that peak emission would come by 2026. “If renewables continue to cut into coal generation then a peak in China’s CO2 emissions — pledged to happen before 2030 — is on the horizon, if not already here,” CREA said in a release accompanying the report.
But the report cautioned that the coal sector in China is hardly down and out. There were over 40 gigawatts’ worth of coal construction projects started in the first half of this year. And even if its emissions have peaked, 30% of the global total still comes from China, according to CREA, and the country is responsible for 90% of emissions growth since the signing of the Paris Agreement.
China has no issue deploying non-carbon-emitting power on a gargantuan scale — it makes up almost a third of the world’s hydropower and is installing roughly the electricity consumption of France in new, non-emitting power generation on an annual basis — but still, meaningful emissions reductions won’t come until these capacity additions can at least match the country's economic growth without the help of new coal.
Now, the trends may finally be pointing in the right direction. “If China maintains the trend of increasing renewable power capacity observed in [2023 and the first half of 2024], it will lead to a 20% reduction in coal power generation and a 35% reduction in overall coal consumption by 2035,” the CREA report argues.