Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force
reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to
that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile
here
.
Informative, engaging analysis and insights about climate issues
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will
renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of
your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may
apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey,
you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and
take advantage of our introductory offer.
Informative, engaging analysis and insights about climate issues
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will
renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of
your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may
apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
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.
Subscribe to access Heatmap’s expert analysis of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability. Save $57 on an annual subscription, just $156 $99/year.
Democrats in Congress claim that a new Trump administration proposal will have a chilling effect on the energy sector by subjecting renewables and fossil fuel pipelines alike to an obscure, rarely cited Cold War-era law requiring detailed information on foreign farmland ownership be submitted to the Agriculture Department.
In late June, the Agriculture Department released a proposal to change implementation of the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978, which requires companies to provide information to the federal government on foreign investors in farmland holdings, acquisitions, and sales. If finalized, the new rule would expand the definition of “agricultural land” in regulation to include all renewable energy facilities and pipeline corridors by explicitly tying the term to those industries’ formal codes under the North American Industry Classification System.
Top Senate Democrats on Monday argued that taken together with expanded investor reporting thresholds and land boundary mapping requirements, this rule change “may exceed what is necessary” to deal with national security issues around farmland ownership.
One of the letter’s signatories, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, has previously joined the GOP in railing against foreign companies purchasing U.S. farmland as a potential national security concern. And indeed, there certainly exists a broader bipartisan anxiety around Chinese influence on essential industries, e.g. mining and critical minerals. That Fetterman is now joining climate hawks Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse in opposing the administration’s move is a striking moment of unity, especially as Fetterman bats away beltway rumors that he’ll flip parties.
The letter demands a briefing from the Agriculture Department that includes the proposal’s “anticipated impacts on the energy, infrastructure, and agricultural sectors,” as well as the legal basis for changing its definition of “agricultural land.”
“[W]e are concerned that USDA’s proposed rule may exceed what is necessary to address those objectives, have unintended national security consequences, and may create substantial compliance burdens on agricultural producers, landowners, infrastructure operators, energy developers, and investors that could undermine efforts to address rising energy and food prices without a corresponding national security benefit,” the letter reads.
As I have previously written, the USDA is an increasingly vital organ in the Trump administration’s war on renewable energy projects, and focusing its laser beam at project development on what it calls “prime” farmland. Trump also recently tapped country music star John Rich to be his “special envoy for American landowners,” which directly led to the USDA working with people fighting solar on farmland in upstate New York.
The Trump change goes after pipelines as well as renewable energy, although logic suggests that solar development could be more vulnerable due to the sheer acreage often required for utility-scale project construction and property setbacks.
The Agriculture Department responded to my request for comment with a statement: “As Secretary [Brooke] Rollins has noted before, the regulations governing the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 are extremely outdated and need to be updated to better reflect today’s conditions. USDA looks forward to considering all public comments before finalizing the rule.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include the statement from USDA.
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.
