@kostyack.bsky.social
Consulting on climate change & the energy transition for NGOs & foundations at Kostyack Strategies. Senior Contributor at Forbes.com & Senior Fellow at ceea.us. All opinions expressed here are solely my own.
Strong message from important new paper: Renewable energy "is the way forward, and the faster the transition is managed, the lower in cost the energy system will be."
ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
@christianonre.bsky.social @mzjacobson.bsky.social @aukehoekstra.bsky.social
For those like @energyandpolicy.org & @davidpomerantz.bsky.social that have been leading the charge on utility industry accountability, the work presumably gets more difficult once the world's largest companies are setting up shop. No ratepayers for now, and so no PUCs, but lots of cost-shifting.
OpenAI & other hyperscalers are building gas-fired power plants on the sites of their data centers, claiming they will be behind-the-meter. If they truly stay off grid, we'll have tech companies serving as their own utilities, with market power that today's monopoly utilities would envy.
Sam Altman on the monopoly utility business model, with struggling households forced to cover ridiculous profits & executive bonuses: Sounds awesome, count us in! “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
How much profit is your utility making off you?
Electricity costs are soaring - this tool from @energyandpolicy.org shows how much extra your utility charges per month.
Nationally, electric utilities took ~15% of your bill for profit last year.
energyandpolicy.org/utilityprofi...
No question, oil demand destruction is well underway. Which badly damages the business case for oil AND gas production.
Yes, that guy. My question back: Is there someone out there that knows how to effectively shame all of those people who once thought a violent insurrection was a bad thing and are now monetizing their Trump connections?
@kyleichan.bsky.social explains in this piece how Chinese AI firms are leading on model efficiency & their technical reports are detailing "genuine innovations." Quantization of model training "enables deployment outside large-scale data centers, possibly even on personal devices."
Wondering if the insane levels of energy & water consumption by US data centers will keep spiralling upward? I don't know the plumbing of AI research, but I know that waste is generally a bad business strategy, especially when your competition is making gains w efficiency and cost reduction.
Presumably @profmikeburger.bsky.social and his Sabin & ELI colleagues will see Barr's attack piece as a compliment, more evidence that their defense of climate science in the courts is having an impact.
The WaPo's descent into a giant suck-up-to-Trump operation continues. Today's edition features former Trump AG Bill Barr w laughable claims of a controversy over climate science & evidence-free attacks on the authors of the Federal Judicial Council's climate manual for deceiving the courts.
Largest oil shock in industry, and yet another reminder that those who team up w Trump always get splattered. "To deliver pain to Trump via the AI tech lords, [the Saudis, Emiratis & Qataris are] indicating they will start pulling back their vast foreign overseas investments." #AIBubble
Reaching net zero by 2050 is often framed as a cost burden.
The UK Climate Change Committee’s latest analysis suggests the opposite.
The real risk is fossil fuel dependency.
It takes a certain kind of…narcissistic nihilism to look across the country at people self-organizing against something that is generally a fairly good material symbol of the intangible class warfare that has alienated them and say, “what a silly distraction from what *really* matters.” And yet…
Expecting a pardon is not unreasonable considering that Ed Martin is Trump's point person on this. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
Typo. Meant to say "public power utility."
Billionaires' dark money is manipulating election outcomes everywhere. Turning Point USA's intervention in the election of the board of the nation's largest power public utility- one that will decide the impact of data centers on AZ's energy and water future - is disturbing to say the least.
Some of the biggest economies in the world are Democratic-led states. Really too bad NPR isn't paying attention to what's happening there, important progress that builds a foundation for a new federal industrial policy that drives down fossil fuel demand.
"For every dollar donated by billionaires and their immediate families to a candidate or committee associated with Democrats, five dollars went to Republicans. Much of that was a result of ultrawealthy people in the tech industry, who aligned with Mr. Trump’s tax and deregulation policies."
Considering that a large number of fossil gas projects are moving quickly through the planning pipeline, it's really important that we get reliable forecasts, and NOT buy into the tech industry's hyped-up "race to win AI" emergency, supported by the utility industry for its selfish reasons.
Perhaps the most important observation: "Many regulated utilities have an incentive to overstate load growth and interconnection success rates to justify additional rate-based investments in generation and other infrastructure."
Then there's the problem of data center operators “double counting,” starting development on far more sites than they intend to build, to preserve options.
In making its demand forecasts, NERC relies on customer-supplied information. As Grid Strategies points out, the data center customers have no clear methodology for their load
forecasts. So, no window into how supply chain constraints could affect projects.
Grid Strategies challenges many of its assumptions. For example NERC didn't consider many reliability issues are resolved with faster interconnection queue processing times and more interregional transmission lines. And...
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has issued a Long-Term Reliability Assessment (LTRA) that raises grid reliability concerns due to, among other things, rapid data center growth. But...
Asset manager Steve Schwarzman is someone who investors might want hold accountable for helping destroy their portfolio value. Perhaps someday... most likely after Senator Warren's prophecy comes true and we're picking up the pieces.
College or foundation endowments and public pensions have a choice of where to put their $. Time to use that leverage to challenge asset managers & portfolio companies about any role they might have in the growing authoritarian threat to portfolio value.
Far too many institutional investors make their work all about stock-picking and engaging on company-level risks. But systemic risks like the decline of the rule of law–and rising GHG emissions–require systems-level strategies.
@warren.senate.gov to institutional investors at @ciicorpgov.bsky.social today: protecting your portfolios requires speaking out on Trump's unprecedented corruption. It's "like an army of giant termites ..chomping their way through the entire foundation of our markets — and they are moving fast."
I work with investors trying to get market actors to address systemic climate risks. Geopolitical instability, climate destabilization, two sides of the same market failure