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Former President Trump wants to know: Would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark?
On Sunday, during a rally in Las Vegas, the Republican nominee floated the question for what is
at least the second time this campaign season (an odd choice, perhaps, given that Nevada is hardly shark territory, and therefore his supporters there are unlikely to have given the question much thought).
Trump’s fear of sharks is
well documented at this point, and I myself have given that question a fair bit of thought, as well. Personally, I’d choose electrocution because of its merciful speed, but unfortunately for both me and Trump, “electrocution” isn’t a realistic option in the scenario he went on to describe. According to Trump, an unidentified “they” want to make boats all-electric, which — according to the representative of a “boat company” Trump spoke to in “South Carolina” — would require a battery so heavy that “it can’t float.”
As Trump goes on:
“I said, let me ask you a question. And he said nobody ever asked this question. And it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart. I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there.”
Can you believe nobody ever asked this question?! “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, you notice that?,” Trump briefly digressed before returning to his main point:
“... Do I get electrocuted? If the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking — do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because, I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it's a good question.’”
Luckily for Trump,
I answered his question last year. And, as the former president ought to be reassured, while all-electric boats are still in their relative infancy (and no mysterious “they” is trying to make them all-electric, anyway), boats more generally have been using batteries for over a century.
Furthermore, marine architects actually design their boats with the understanding that they may get wet. It’s true! The electric boat manufacturers I spoke with
for my article told me that their designs typically meet a waterproofing standard similar to what is required for submarines, and that the high-voltage batteries on board are kept in puncture-resistant shells to prevent exposure even if the boat were to get incredibly mangled.
While electric shock
is a danger in water, electric shock drowning is usually caused by faulty wiring at a dock or a marina. However, this overwhelmingly happens in lakes and rivers; saltwater, where most sharks live, is a better conductor of electricity than human bodies, so it will go around a swimmer to ground unless they grab something that is electrified, such as a dock ladder or a boat propeller.
All this is a long way of saying: If your boat — electric or otherwise — is sinking, electrocution might not even be an
option for a swift, toothless death. You’ll have to deal with the shark 10 yards away, whether you’d rather or not.
And for that, I can offer no reassurances. After all, as a “very smart” person recently observed, there have indeed been
a lot of shark attacks lately.
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With higher temperatures come higher electricity bills. Whether through higher seasonal charges or greater usage, Americans across the country were paying more for electricity in June.
In Virginia, the epicenter of the data center boom, the typical household electricity bill was $192 in June, up from $172 in June of last year, according to the latest data from the Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. Rates, meanwhile, were about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to just over 15 cents in June of last year, a 12% hike. Rates were also up from the end of last year, when they were about 15.5 cents.
The rate increase is largely due to prices set by Virginia’s largest utility, Dominion. Its rates are up 8% so far this year, according to MIT researchers, and 17% over the past 12 months, the result of a base rate increase that took effect at the beginning of the year. The average base rate alone is up 7.5% year over year for the average Dominion customer.
But that’s not all: The fuel portion of the bill is rising $8 a month for the typical customer, Dominion said according to local media reports, as a result of rising costs. The fuel charge went into effect at the beginning of July. Already, Dominion customers are paying about $78 per month for the generation portion of their electricity bill, according to Heatmap-MIT data.
The price hike will likely increase pressure on Dominion as it seeks to sell itself to Florida utility and energy developer NextErain a $67 billion deal announced in May.
Earlier this week, Virginia's lieutenant governor Ghazala Hashmi sent a detailed letter to the State Corporation Commission, Virginia’s utility regulator, with 64 questions about the proposed merger. She said the deal “carries unprecedented implications for Virginia’s consumers and regulatory landscape.”
Hashmi asked regulators to extend their review of the deal beyond the six-month period mandated by its utility regulations, writing that “forcing this process into the six-month timeline will render an already inadequate period completely unworkable.”
In May, when the deal was announced, NextEra said it would provide over $2 billion of bill credits over two years to Dominion customers in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, which Dominion executives estimated would add up to $10 per month over the two years.
Enhanced geothermal company Fervo has drilled another well.
This one is 19,448 feet deep, the company announced Thursday, and includes a 7,500-foot span laterally across the sub-surface. The well — called Sawtooth 7, part of Phase II of its flagship Cape Station project in Milford, Utah — took 21 days to drill, the company said. That matches the time required to drill the wells in Phase I, though the new one is nearly 35% deeper than those, on average, with a 50% greater lateral extension.
The greater depth and distance means greater energy potential from the well, while faster drilling times mean much lower costs. Tim Latimer, Fervo’s co-founder and chief executive, compared the timeline to that of the company’s 2022 Project Red well in Nevada, which achieved a depth of 11,220 feet in 70 days.
“Today, we are drilling deeper, hotter wells that will produce multiples more [megawatts] per well than our Project Red pilot, and we are doing it in a fraction of the time,” Latimer wrote.
Fervo says that its drilling rates at the Cape Station site have improved by 143% since it broke ground there in 2023.
The company says it’s now on track to get project costs down to $5,500 per kilowatt, working toward a goal of $3,000 per kilowatt over the long term. In its IPO filing, Fervo said costs at Cape Station were around $7,000 per kilowatt, indicating significant improvements in drilling efficiency in a relatively short period of time.
The news should be welcome to Fervo and its investors. Shortly after going public in May, the company announced that one of its Utah wells blew out. The company said at the time that there were no injuries, nor was there any environmental damage or “material impact to either cost or schedule of the project” at Cape Station.
Fervo raised almost $2 billion in its IPO, which it said will go to fund further progress on the flagship installation. Shares were trading at around $26 on Thursday afternoon, just shy of their $27 IPO price and up over 13% on the day.
Trump’s Department of Justice is giving up on defending the president’s wind permitting moratorium.
The DOJ filed a motion on Wednesday to dismiss its appeal of a federal court’s December decision vacating the order to halt wind energy approvals. The plaintiffs in the case — New York and 16 other states, as well as the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a trade group — did not oppose the motion. The case will not be officially dismissed, however, until the First Circuit Court of Appeals approves the request, which typically happens quickly when both parties support the dismissal.
The case stems from an executive order President Trump issued on the first day of his current term temporarily withdrawing all areas of the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing and pausing all federal authorizations for onshore and offshore wind projects while the administration conducted a review of leasing and permitting practices.
States took the administration to court last May, arguing that the order was arbitrary and capricious and violated the Administrative Procedures Act. They claimed it harmed their ability to source reliable and affordable energy and threatened billions of dollars in investment in supply chains, workforce development, and wind industry-related infrastructure.
On December 8, Judge Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled in the states’ favor and vacated the wind order. More specifically, the judge vacated the portion of the order directing agencies to pause permits and other authorizations. The withdrawal of areas eligible for new leases remains in effect.
What it means is that federal agencies will now have to proceed with permitting wind projects using the existing statutory and regulatory framework, Kit Kennedy, the managing director for power, climate, and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me in an email. “The door to federal permitting is now unlocked again and each developer will be able to make the case for permitting their individual project based on the facts and the law,” she said.
The Trump administration appealed the ruling to the First Circuit in February, but never submitted an opening brief. The initial deadline was May 11, but on May 4, the DOJ requested additional time to file the brief. The judge gave the defendants until June 10. On that date, the defendants filed the motion to dismiss.
This is a developing story and we’ll update it as we learn more about the administration’s actions and their effects.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the freeze and ruling apply to onshore as well as offshore wind. It also adds a quote from Kit Kennedy.
