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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.
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.”
The Vineyard Wind offshore wind project can continue construction while the company’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s stop work order proceeds, judge Brian E. Murphy for the District of Massachusetts ruled on Tuesday.
That makes four offshore wind farms that have now won preliminary injunctions against Trump’s freeze on the industry. Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Orsted’s Revolution Wind off the coast of New England, and Equinor’s Empire Wind near Long Island, New York, have all been allowed to proceed with construction while their individual legal challenges to the stop work order play out.
The Department of the Interior attempted to pause all offshore wind construction in December, citing unspecified “national security risks identified by the Department of War.” The risks are apparently detailed in a classified report, and have been shared neither with the public nor with the offshore wind companies.
Vineyard Wind, a joint development between Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, has been under construction since 2021, and is already 95% built. More than that, it’s sending power to Massachusetts customers, and will produce enough electricity to power up to 400,000 homes once it’s complete.
In court filings, the developer argued it was urgent the stop work order be lifted, as it would lose access to a key construction boat required to complete the project on March 31. The company is in the process of replacing defective blades on its last handful of turbines — a defect that was discovered after one of the blades broke in 2024, scattering shards of fiberglass into the ocean. Leaving those turbine towers standing without being able to install new blades created a safety hazard, the company said.
“If construction is not completed by that date, the partially completed wind turbines will be left in an unsafe condition and Vineyard Wind will incur a series of financial consequences that it likely could not survive,” the company wrote. The Trump administration submitted a reply denying there was any risk.
The only remaining wind farm still affected by the December pause on construction is Sunrise Wind, a 924-megawatt project being developed by Orsted and set to deliver power to New York State. A hearing for an injunction on that order is scheduled for February 2.
The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it has eliminated nearly $30 billion in loans and conditional commitments for clean energy projects issued by the Biden administration. The agency is also in the process of “restructuring” or “revising” an additional $53 billion worth of loans projects, it said in a press release.
The agency did not include a list of affected projects and did not respond to an emailed request for clarification. However the announcement came in the context of a 2025 year-in-review, meaning these numbers likely include previously-announced cancellations, such as the $4.9 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express transmission line and the $3 billion partial loan guarantee to solar and storage developer Sunnova, which were terminated last year.
The only further detail included in the press release was that some $9.5 billion in funding for wind and solar projects had been eliminated and was being replaced with investments in natural gas and building up generating capacity in existing nuclear plants “that provide more affordable and reliable energy for the American people.”
A preliminary review of projects that may see their financial backing newly eliminated turned up four separate efforts to shore up Puerto Rico’s perennially battered grid with solar farms and battery storage by AES, Pattern Energy, Convergent Energy and Power, and Inifinigen. Those loan guarantees totalled about $2 billion. Another likely candidate is Sunwealth’s Project Polo, which closed a $289.7 million loan guarantee during the final days of Biden’s tenure to build solar and battery storage systems at commercial and industrial sites throughout the U.S. None of the companies responded to questions about whether their loans had been eliminated.
Moving forward, the Office of Energy Dominance Financing — previously known as the Loan Programs Office — says it has $259 billion in available loan authority, and that it plans to prioritize funding for nuclear, fossil fuel, critical mineral, geothermal energy, grid and transmission, and manufacturing and transportation projects.
Under Trump, the office has closed three loan guarantees totalling $4.1 billion to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, upgrade 5,000 miles of transmission lines, and restart a coal plant in Indiana.
