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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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July is typically the season of high electricity bills, and this year is no exception.
Nationally, the average electricity bill spiked to $217, an all-time high, according to new data from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. That’s up from $177 in June, and $215 last July. Meanwhile, electricity rates were 19 cents per kilowatt-hour, virtually unchanged from June and slightly higher than July of last year.
Throughout the country, many ratepayers are seeing higher costs and charges in the portion of their bill covering the cost of power generation.
Once again, some of the most notable electricity price and bill trends were seen in the mid-Atlantic region, the heart of the data center boom and the anchor area of the PJM Interconnection. The region also includes Virginia, where Florida utility and energy developer NextEra is attempting to acquire the commonwealth’s dominant utility, Dominion.
In July, Dominion customers saw typical generation charges rise to $155 a month, up from $124 a year ago. Overall bills for Dominion customers were about $259 this past month.
The higher bills are in part due to the “fuel charge rider” that went into effect this past month to help recover about $1 billion in additional generation costs claimed by the utility. Those charges stem in part from higher fuel costs this past winter, when natural gas prices spiked to their highest level since the winter of 2022-23, Dominion officials said in a filing to the state’s utilities regulator. The MIT researchers estimate that the fuel charge added around $53 to July bills, up $12 from July of last year.
In neighboring Delaware, bills were $216 a month in July, a record high, while prices were around 19 cents per kilowatt-hour. Customers of the state’s main utility, Delmarva Power, saw a near 20% hike in the supply charge in their standard service offerings, as prices rose from around 16 cents per kilowatt-hour from last year.
The Delaware Public Service Commission voted at the beginning of last month to allow an interim rate increase of about $3 per month for the typical customer, which went into effect July 9. Soon after, Delaware Governor Matt Meyer signed a law giving the state’s regulators more discretion to reject putting certain utility costs into the rate base and thus limit subsequent price hikes requested by utilities. The governor’s office described the law as a mechanism “to prioritize prudent spending over unchecked cost recovery.”
Clearway says it is backing off its plans to build a data center and gas power plant on federal land, days after Heatmap revealed the energy developer’s proposal.
Last week, I reported that Clearway asked the Trump administration’s Bureau of Land Management to swap a five year-old application for a solar farm’s permits with “a proposed data center and natural gas facility.” Clearway’s chief development officer John Woody had written in a letter to BLM dated April 3 that the swap was “the result of a shift in our internal development priorities” and intended “to better align with the goals of our Administration.” He also noted the plans were in “exploratory early stages.”
This news fit a trend. I obtained Clearway’s letter right after reporting on a different solar project on federal land that was being swapped for a data center. But it turns out, the company’s internal thinking continued to shift: on Friday, they reached out to me saying they are now nixing the data center and gas plant, after concluding it wasn’t the right call for their business.
“Since our initial filing, we’ve evaluated how to make the best use of this public land in a way that serves its intended purpose: the public interest. As a clean energy developer and operator, our focus in Nevada remains solar and battery storage,” Clearway said in a statement it provided to me from an unnamed spokesperson. “We are in the process of amending our application to reflect the state’s growing demand for low-cost, reliable energy.”
In addition, Clearway on Monday sent a letter to BLM formally alerting the agency it has no plans to build the data center, which it also provided to me.
When I first broke news of Clearway’s plans, I said it was an apparent aberration – they oversaw relatively few fossil projects and had never worked in data centers. I chalked this pivot up to yet another energy developer changing its tune with the winds of national politics. Now that the company is apparently sticking to its guns, I’m mostly just left wondering what happened here – and relieved some still remain committed to zero-emissions power in the booming business of electrons.
Hydrogen fuel comes in myriad forms. There’s green hydrogen, which is extracted from water molecules using zero-carbon electricity. There’s blue hydrogen, derived from methane and scrubbed clean by carbon capture. And then there’s white hydrogen. Otherwise known as natural or geologic hydrogen, this type of hydrogen comes directly from naturally occurring deposits in the earth, can accumulate in considerable quantities and concentrations, and is highly energy-efficient to extract compared to manufacturing pathways such as electrolyzers and steam methane reforming.
It’s a seductive promise, but finding deposits with enough hydrogen to make the economics of exploration work is difficult. That’s where Koloma comes in. The startup uses a bespoke subsurface data set, which its founders developed over 20-plus years, to flag the areas most likely to hold sufficient hydrogen, after which they can extract it for power and derivative fuels.
On Thursday, the startup announced its latest exploration deal, its third in the Philippines, which will give it exclusive rights to a roughly 817-square-mile area in western Zambales Province on the island of Luzon. Altogether, the company now has rights to explore more than 1,600 square miles of the island.
The Philippines until recently imported 98% of its oil from the Middle East. Since the onset of the U.S. and Israel-led war in Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the country’s responses have included declaring an energy emergency, imposing a four-day workweek, tripling solar panel imports from China, and even planning to dust off the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, which has sat idle since 1986.
The country also sits between three active tectonic plates, which means it has a lot of young iron-rich rock formations exposed to water — exactly the conditions that continuously produce natural hydrogen.
“The Philippines is like the poster child of that,” Pete Johnson, Koloma’s CEO, told me. “The geology is very, very good.” Accordingly, the prospect of a plentiful, easy-to-tap domestic energy source has gotten Philippine policymakers excited. The government collects data on natural leaks of hydrogen from the ground to help companies like Koloma narrow their search.
In theory, once a viable deposit is discovered, extraction is straightforward. “If you drill a hole into that pressurized reservoir, the gas is going to flow by itself. It’s just like poking a hole in a balloon,” Johnson told me. Where electrolyzers need around 55 megawatt-hours of energy to produce a ton of hydrogen and gas-powered reformers need around 40 megawatt-hours, natural hydrogen extraction would take 3 megawatt-hours maximum, according to the CEO. And unlike some methods to artificially stimulate the formation of hydrogen deposits, which my colleague Katie Brigham wrote about last week, tapping into natural wells doesn’t require injecting high-pressure fluids, which keeps the structural integrity of the subsurface intact.
Koloma has no hard agreement with the Philippine government to earmark any of the hydrogen it may produce there for domestic consumption, Johnson told me. But given the difficulty of transporting the lightweight gas and the projected growth of the Philippine economy, he expects the country would be the overwhelming beneficiary of Koloma’s activities there.
Once it’s extracted, Koloma could sell the hydrogen as a primary resource (major population and industrial centers like Manila are close to exploration sites) or as a feedstock for products like ammonia and sustainable aviation fuel, which local manufacturers could then export. There may also be opportunities to sequester captured CO2, which easily bonds with the types of rock often found in natural hydrogen deposits and can in turn make the rock more reactive for hydrogen generation.
Hydrogen has figured heavily in the decarbonization and energy security plans of import-dependent East and Southeast Asian economies for a long time. As Katie explained earlier this year, it’s also a centerpiece of China’s latest five-year plan. Japan, meanwhile, has been a leader since the industry’s inception, rolling out the world’s first hydrogen strategy in 2017. The Philippines’ partnership with Koloma is a bet that there are enough hydrogen balloons under its land to put its energy plans on the same trajectory.
