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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.
Big tech is spending big on data centers — which means it’s also spending big on power.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced Wednesday that it expects to spend $175 billion to $185 billion on capital expenditures this year. That estimate is about double what it spent in 2025, far north of Wall Street’s expected $121 billion, and somewhere between the gross domestic products of Ecuador and Morocco.
This is a “a massive investment in absolute terms,” Jefferies analyst Brent Thill wrote in a note to clients Thursday. “Jarringly large,” Guggenheim analyst Michael Morris wrote. With this announcement, total expected capital expenditures by Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta for 2026 are at $459 billion, according to Jefferies calculations — roughly the GDP of South Africa. If Alphabet’s spending comes in at the top end of its projected range, that would be a third larger than the “total data center spend across the 6 largest players only 3 years ago,” according to Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.
And that was before Thursday, when Amazon told investors that it expects to spend “about $200 billion” on capital expenditures this year.
For Alphabet, this growth in capital expenditure will fund data center development to serve AI demand, just as it did last year. In 2025, “the vast majority of our capex was invested in technical infrastructure, approximately 60% of that investment in servers, and 40% in data centers and networking equipment,” chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi said on the company’s earnings call.
The ramp up in data center capacity planned by the tech giants necessarily means more power demand. Google previewed its immense power needs late last year when it acquired the renewable developer Intersect for almost $5 billion.
When asked by an analyst during the company’s Wednesday earnings call “what keeps you up at night,” Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said, “I think specifically at this moment, maybe the top question is definitely around capacity — all constraints, be it power, land, supply chain constraints. How do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand for this moment?”
One answer is to contract with utilities to build. The utility and renewable developer NextEra said during the company’s earnings call last week that it plans to bring on 15 gigawatts worth of power to serve datacenters over the next decade, “but I'll be disappointed if we don't double our goal and deliver at least 30 gigawatts through this channel by 2035,” NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said. (A single gigawatt can power about 800,000 homes).
The largest and most well-established technology companies — the Microsofts, the Alphabets, the Metas, and the Amazons — have various sustainability and clean energy commitments, meaning that all sorts of clean power (as well as a fair amount of natural gas) are likely to get even more investment as data center investment ramps up.
Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith described the Alphabet capex figure as “a utility tailwind,” specifically calling out NextEra, renewable developer Clearway Energy (which struck a $2.4 billion deal with Google for 1.2 gigawatts worth of projects earlier this year), utility Entergy (which is Google’s partner for $4 billion worth of projects in Arkansas), Kansas-based utility Evergy (which is working on a data center project in Kansas City with Google), and Wisconsin-based utility Alliant (which is working on data center projects with Google in Iowa).
If getting power for its data centers keeps Pichai up at night, there’s no lack of utility executives willing to answer his calls.
The offshore wind industry is now five-for-five against Trump’s orders to halt construction.
District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled Monday morning that Orsted could resume construction of the Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New England. This wasn’t a surprise considering Lamberth has previously ruled not once but twice in favor of Orsted continuing work on a separate offshore energy project, Revolution Wind, and the legal arguments were the same. It also comes after the Trump administration lost threeothercases over these stop work orders, which were issued without warning shortly before Christmas on questionable national security grounds.
The stakes in this case couldn’t be more clear. If the government were to somehow prevail in one or more of these cases, it would potentially allow agencies to shut down any construction project underway using even the vaguest of national security claims. But as I have previously explained, that behavior is often a textbook violation of federal administrative procedure law.
Whether the Trump administration will appeal any of these rulings is now the most urgent question. There have been no indications that the administration intends to do so, and a review of the federal dockets indicates nothing has been filed yet.
The Department of Justice declined to comment on whether it would seek to appeal any or all of the rulings.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the administration declined to comment.
Utilities asked regulators for permission to extract a lot more money from ratepayers last year.
Electric and gas utilities requested almost $31 billion worth of rate increases in 2025, according to an analysis by the energy policy nonprofit PowerLines released Thursday morning, compared to $15 billion worth of rate increases in 2024. In case you haven’t already done the math: That’s more than double what utilities asked for just a year earlier.
Utilities go to state regulators with its spending and investment plans, and those regulators decide how much of a return the utility is allowed to glean from its ratepayers on those investments. (Costs for fuel — like natural gas for a power plant — are typically passed through to customers without utilities earning a profit.) Just because a utility requests a certain level of spending does not mean that regulators will approve it. But the volume and magnitude of the increases likely means that many ratepayers will see higher bills in the coming year.
“These increases, a lot of them have not actually hit people's wallets yet,” PowerLines executive director Charles Hua told a group of reporters Wednesday afternoon. “So that shows that in 2026, the utility bills are likely to continue to rise, barring some major, sweeping action.” Those could affect some 81 million consumers, he said.
Electricity prices have gone up 6.7% in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, outpacing overall prices, which have risen 2.7%. Electricity is 37% more expensive today than it was just five years ago, a trend researchers have attributed to geographically specific factors such as costs arising from wildfires attributed to faulty utility equipment, as well as rising costs for maintaining and building out the grid itself.
These rising costs have become increasingly politically contentious, with state and local politicians using electricity markets and utilities as punching bags. Newly elected New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill’s first two actions in office, for instance, were both aimed at effecting a rate freeze proposal that was at the center of her campaign.
But some of the biggest rate increase requests from last year were not in the markets best known for high and rising prices: the Northeast and California. The Florida utility Florida Power and Light received permission from state regulators for $7 billion worth of rate increases, the largest such increase among the group PowerLines tracked. That figure was negotiateddown from about $10 billion.
The PowerLines data is telling many consumers something they already know. Electricity is getting more expensive, and they’re not happy about it.
“In a moment where affordability concerns and pocketbook concerns remain top of mind for American consumers, electricity and gas are the two fastest drivers,” Hua said. “That is creating this sense of public and consumer frustration that we're seeing.”
