What I missed last week
My roundup last week was inevitably inadequate in capturing all the great writing on BAAJA. A (still non-exhaustive!) list of some more pieces worth reading includes: A magisterial but highly readable digest of the main …
Willow Latham-Proenca
36 blurbs
A bigger, better BAAJA
Wholesale power prices across the U.S. grid on the evening of October 8, via Grid Status . Text for the long-awaited Senate permitting bill dropped last week, and it’s more ambitious, bipartisan, and cleverly drafted tha…
Data center announcements and property values
A new working paper by Garrison Schlauch and Simon Greenhill last week tries to estimate the property value impact of large data centers, based on a new sample of nearly 350 data center announcements since 2003 (drawn fr…
A cradle-to-grave infrastructure project tracker
Willow Latham-Proenca: Maybe more Calvino than Borges, but I’d like to be looking at a constellation of new papers following a huge geographic and sectoral expansion of (something like) the Critical Mineral Project datas…
Texas transmission and the Permian basin
Texas has long been an unlikely darling for the renewables industry, rocketing to leading positions in wind and solar deployment driven by a combination of a laissez-faire attitude towards permitting and ERCOT’s connect-…
The Growth Effects of Energy Shortages
Energy-rich countries may not be all alike, but energy-constrained countries are also often each unhappy in their own way. Taiwo Hassan Odugbemi, Meron Tesfaye and the Energy for Growth Hub break down the monolith of unr…
PJM’s large load experiment
PJM – the country’s largest regional transmission organization by population – recently filed plans for two big steps on large load integration. As covered by Maeve Allsup in Latitude , the plan is two-part. First, PJM w…
A new kind of problematic regulation
A forthcoming paper lends some structure to the intuition around regulated utilities (these are the vertically-integrated kind, with a local monopoly and their own generation facilities – they’re “regulated” because a st…
Ignoring the price signal
How much do prices affect how much electricity we use? It’s an increasingly relevant question, since changing when people and firms use electricity – usually to try to spread out short-term peaks – is often one of the fi…
Sobering takes on Canadian wildfires
If you were in the Northeast US last week, you probably got at least a noseful of Canadian wildfire smoke. We’ve written before about the extraordinarily high health costs of wildfires, but Zeke Hausfather makes a convin…
Western transmission and DOE needs
It’s been a busy few weeks in transmission – at the close of June, 11 western states agreed to improve coordination and permitting for transmission across their shared footprint (much of the western grid outside of Calif…
Trump v. Slaughter and the end of independent agencies
To add even more uncertainty to the fraught landscape of energy planning and regulation, the end of the Supreme Court opinion season last month brought a highly controversial ruling in Trump v. Slaughter , where the cour…
Remember data centers in space?
(... probably ). Semianalysis is out with a comprehensive comparative analysis of the costs and uncertainties around space-based datacenters, arguing that while technical, operational, and cost barriers mean that space-b…
40+ ways to plug in a data center
It may not be the most scintillating reading for the general audience, but the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is out with an extremely cogent, clear rundown of over 40 proposals to speed up how fast large loads – data ce…
Geothermal policy
Geothermal power station in Iceland. Source: Wikipedia The House passed a bipartisan geothermal package (plus a freestanding bill) last week – big hits are statutory formalization of a NEPA categorical exclusion, expandi…
Energy scarcity and heavy industry
There’s been so much focus on energy for data centers that it’s possible to forget that they’re not the only new large loads. A short report this week highlights a potential challenge for heavy industry – access to incre…
Why your grid isn't North Dakota's
It seems obvious that increased demand for electricity from data centers must raise prices. But electricity prices can move in counter-intuitive ways. We’ve talked before about how electricity price increases largely had…
Is cheap energy enough to spur innovation?
Matt Yglesias dropped an avowedly contentious take on energy abundance, arguing that “conventional environmentalism” is overly focused on efficiency and missing the upside of truly abundant energy generation. Yglesias ar…
The weak link between energy and growth
I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between energy and growth lately, which is less clear-cut than you might expect. I’ll be writing more about this soon, but this set of papers on energy and development does…
Fukuyama's case for state capacity
Willow Latham-Proenca: Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy . I frequently argue that Francis Fukuyama is an under-acknowledged intellectual godfather to t…
What actually bothers people about wind turbines
In the interest of getting our fair share of aesthetic controversy, we’ve been reading Zane Kasher’s job market paper on wind farm construction and the effect on local residents. While the paper focuses on implications f…
A stark proposed budget cut for DOE
The President’s Budget for fiscal year 2027 was released earlier this month - while it’s just the Administration’s proposal (actual appropriations will be enacted by Congress later this year), it’s a worthwhile barometer…
The quiet stalling of appropriated energy funds
Beyond the budget request, DOE has also been slow-walking grants it already committed to (a similar pause is now in place at NOAA ) as well as slowing the pace of the new solicitations and award obligations that keep app…
Untangling the rise in electricity prices
It’s a big week for electricity price data - the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory updated its Retail Electricity Price Trends and Drivers with 2025 data and new analysis, and a Heatmap/MIT/CleanEcon collaboration la…
First offshore power, and a costly lease surrender
The nation’s largest offshore wind farm to date, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project - which clocks in at 2.6 GW - sent its first commercial power to the grid this week (it joins Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind, wh…
Teaching AI to read the Clean Water Act
One of the big challenges in permitting reform is that it’s really hard to forecast how changing one piece of the massive US legal/regulatory permitting system will play out. At a more micro-level, it’s also a headache f…
Permitting reform's bipartisan moment
Federal permitting negotiations have re-started in the Senate, following the first steps of an apparent thaw in solar permitting. Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute has a timely piece in response, discussing the…
What grid bottlenecks cost us
Last month we posted a Kiesling/Macey paper, which argued that perverse incentives for incumbents help keep energy supply constrained. A paper published last week by Dasom Ham, Owen Kay, and Catherine Hausman dovetails n…
Geothermal's permitting patchwork problem
When novel technologies get shoehorned into ill-fitting permitting systems, the results are rarely enviable. In a recent piece , Samuel Roland tours the byzantine landscape of state-level geothermal regulation. While som…
Solar's surprisingly loyal MAGA fan base
On the trend of surprising public opinions, solar is remarkably popular among Trump voters, according to two MAGA-aligned polls released this month. The first, a survey run by Trump’s head campaign pollster, found 51% of…
Wildfire smoke's 24,000 hidden deaths a year
We don’t usually talk about permitting reform as a life-or-death issue. But evidence from a new paper suggests that maybe we should, at least where wildfire management is concerned. Min Zhang and coauthors find that wild…
Repealing the endangerment finding, uncertainty included
The EPA just repealed the endangerment finding – the 2009 determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and the regulatory foundation for US climate policy under the Clean Air Act. Philip Rosset…
Why electricity supply stays artificially scarce
Why is it so hard to build enough electricity supply to meet surging demand? A new draft paper from Joshua Macey and Lynne Kiesling argues that the current regulatory system creates perverse incentives for incumbents to …
Electricity prices: a patchwork crisis, not a national one
A geographical analysis of electricity prices published this week points out the fragmented nature of the affordability crisis. 2019-2025 price increases varied widely by state, with increases in California and the broad…
How NEPA became a litigation machine
Much of NEPA’s power to slow down project timelines comes from the lawsuits it enables. Litigation doesn’t just slow down projects directly - it also incentivizes agencies to spend time “bulletproofing” their environment…
Cheap clean energy beats expensive fossil fuels
Climate mitigation debates often pit restrictions on fossil fuel supply (mildly confusingly for abundance readers, called “supply side policy” in the article) against efforts to make clean energy more competitive. Zeke H…