Tony Dutzik

Data center energy use is giving old, dirty power plants a new lease on life The closures of 34 fossil fuel generators at 15 power plants have been postponed, in part to fuel the U.S. data center boom.

Speaking of turning the clock back ... at least 16 GW of old, dirty power plants have had their retirement delayed due to forecasts of rising power demand, including from data centers.
@frontiergroup.bsky.social's Quentin Good and Kylie Hanson name the names here: frontiergroup.org/articles/dat...

Data Centers Have Solved Their Speed-to-Power Problem — With Natural Gas “Old economy” companies like Caterpillar and Williams are cashing in by selling smaller, less-efficient turbines to impatient developers.

All the lip gloss being put on the AI boom as somehow good for climate or the energy transition is masking that, at the present moment, it's a disaster.

Not only more gas generation, but the worst, dirtiest, least efficient kind. Turning the clock back 25 years.
heatmap.news/energy/natur...

Highway Boondoggles Year after year, state and local governments propose billions of dollars’ worth of new and expanded highways that often do little to reduce congestion or address real transportation challenges, while ...

Since 2014, we’ve tracked 73 wasteful or damaging highway projects from coast to coast. You can find our freshly updated dashboard here. pirg.org/edfund/resou...

America Has a Golden Opportunity to End the 'Highway Boondoggle' Crisis — Streetsblog USA America's wasteful highway spending has gotten out of control — and if President Trump really wants to promote efficient government, he'll urge Congress to stop it.

Always a pleasure to talk with @usa.streetsblog.org, this time about our newly updated “Highway Boondoggles” dashboard and what it will take to make better transportation investments that solve real problems. usa.streetsblog.org/2025/10/09/a...

The big challenge here - and one that will likely grow as we electrify more home heating - is winter. Solar has made a surprising difference in reducing gas demand in winter but has obvious limitations. Which is why slowing offshore wind, a highly productive winter resource, is so devastating.

Let us now praise rooftop solar: A tale from New England Rooftop solar delivers benefits for the climate, the environment and consumers. New England is a prime example.

No. But among the resources available to us, that’s a big one. We’ve written before about progress on solar. And there are creative people trying to crack the gas home heating puzzle. frontiergroup.org/articles/let...

That’s all true, but the hope would’ve been that the experience/infrastructure built for the first couple of large projects would have carried over to future ones. That’s harder to envision now.

The federal government getting out of the way on offshore wind would help tremendously with that. We’ve got other work to do for sure, but it’s harder now.

Carbon dioxide removal: The right thing at the wrong time? We can’t keep digging up and reburying carbon in the ground in a perpetual cycle. Carbon dioxide removal may someday be needed, but it shouldn't be a priority now.

A good day to remember that both the energy and financial maths of near-term direct air capture deployment don’t math, and they math even less today than they did when the IRA was passed as the pace of grid decarbonization slows. frontiergroup.org/resources/ca...

Would have to be cheaper/faster/better to increase support for orgs/people/businesses already doing this work than setting up a publicly funded competitor.

Much gratitude to the New Englanders who, three decades ago, envisioned a regional grid without polluting coal and pushed to make it a reality. The day has finally arrived.

Has anyone added up the subsidies that the federal government, transmission grid operators, and electric utilities have given to AI companies so far and compared that amount (doubtless > $100 billion) to e.g. the entirety of IRA ten-year funding for clean energy technologies (~$350-400 billion)?

Good to hear this project - an old-school "ram a new-build highway through the middle of a neighborhood" type project - is on the ropes. But zombie highway projects can continue to haunt neighborhoods' future prospects for years to come. Time to end it for good.
www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025...

But if you have one EV battery catch fire, it seemingly justifies questioning the entire energy transition.

Who Doesn’t Have a Car? A new NRDC map shows car-free living and the factors affecting car usage in United States.

"We estimate that 36 percent of Americans over the age of 10 do not or cannot rely on a personal vehicle to meet their daily travel needs..."

Direct carbon capture falters as developers’ costs fail to budge Some experts say the technology is crucial for climate change goals but scaling up is proving hard

Direct air capture (DAC) continues to be small, slow, and very expensive.

Not because it’s an early stage technology, but because it runs into fundamental thermodynamic challenges that money can’t solve.

This is exactly why it’s not recommended by Project Drawdown.

www.ft.com/content/fa4c...

Data Centers Are Already Increasing Your Energy Bills. We Have the Receipts. Electric bills are going up around the country and some of those increases are due to an outdated practice that requires consumers to pay billions for tech giants’ grid connections. Our new analysis t...

Some might call it a "cost shift." One of many ways the broader public is paying the price for data center expansion. Much gratitude to @ucs.org for bringing this issue to public attention in such a clear and compelling way.

blog.ucs.org/mike-jacobs/...

Why yes, let’s repackage a broadly popular and historically crucial movement for clean energy - with a long history of policy successes - as being in rhetorical/ideological alignment with whatever this is. Should win hearts and minds.

I had a conversation a while back with someone who works with grassroots orgs in the Deep South regarding solar that left me ashen-faced in realization that it might already be too late to head off that possibility.

One of my grave worries these days - among many - is that clean energy comes to be seen by the country not as a tool of environmental improvement and liberation but rather as a handmaiden of Big Tech domination. Pleading w/my clean energy friends to read the room.

How the U.S. Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence These groups are far apart in their enthusiasm and predictions for AI, but both want more personal control and worry about too little regulation.

Americans are deeply anxious about AI and deeply skeptical of Big Tech. And, in many ways, that anxiety/skepticism is fully justified. www.pewresearch.org/internet/202...

No surprise that data centers attract more vehement opposition than wind/solar. They have tangible local impacts renewables don’t (power/water demand, sometimes air quality/noise) and approximately none of the pro-social “halo” of renewables.

EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194-1136 attachment 1

"Should EPA remove its regulation of GHGs, it increases the likelihood that environmental non-governmental organizations, advocacygroups, citizen groups, and other parties will seek to bring new tort suits and other litigation totest the bounds of continued CAA displacement of federal common law"

Agree with your general point but it’s not 100% anymore. Petrochemicals and exports are a bigger part of the picture than previously. Overturning the crude oil export ban was one of the most consequential climate decisions we made that no one ever talks about.

Def did not have wiping out while riding 2 mph in a straight line in my morning plan. Absolute lawsuit waiting to happen here.

hey @massdcr.bsky.social - the new coatings on the overpasses crosssing Morrissey Blvd are incredibly slick when wet. With more cyclists connecting from Morrissey to the Neponset Trail some warning signs are in order.

We estimated about 365 GW of solar potential on abandoned oil and gas fields in the United States, about 3,000,000 acres.
rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

Utilities are doing even worse on climate than they were five years… Major U.S. utilities earn an "F" on a new report card because they're planning to build far too little clean energy and far too many gas-fired power…

Sierra Club's new “Dirty Truth” report finds major U.S. utilities have collectively hit five-year lows on switching from fossil fuels to clean energy fast enough to combat climate change. Instead, they're doubling down on fossil gas, despite the costs:
www.canarymedia.com/articles/uti...
#energysky

Rest assured, I will not be dispensing financial advice on this webinar. I will be talking about the problems with fossil fuels, while actual experts on things financial share insights on how to put our money where our values are. Come join us!

Anyway, attended a lovely Sun Day celebration with some of the very best people in our community doing nitty-gritty clean energy work, and yes, we’re moving too slowly and the road ahead is uncertain, but we are moving.