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The Power Grid Logjam Could Soon Break

adminOctober 5, 20266 Mins read0

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Welcome back to Current Climate. U.S. electricity costs have risen by more than a third in the past six years as building new power generation couldn’t match the pace of fast-growing demand. The rapid opening of AI data centers by hyperscalers has been a driver of that imbalance, but another major factor has been the inordinate amount of time it takes to connect new power sources to the grid.

Renewable energy, particularly solar and battery systems, has been the biggest source of new power, yet the inability to connect it faster means the grid remains dirtier and more carbon-intensive than it might be otherwise. That might soon change, however, if bipartisan legislation passed in the Senate last week is signed into law.

The legislation, sponsored by two Republicans and two Democrats, would speed up permitting reviews for energy and infrastructure projects that currently can take years. The bill also ensures that AI data centers, rather than individual ratepayers, have to pay for their increased electric power needs. It also would make significant changes to current environmental rules that critics claim slow the process of building power projects.

If it passes in the House of Representatives and is signed into law by President Trump, it could be impactful on electric utility costs. That’s because it could get a massive amount of new supply hooked up. In July, Berkeley Lab estimated that at least 2,000 gigawatts of new energy generation and storage was waiting to get connected to the grid. And since 1 gigawatt is enough electricity to power at least 750,000 homes, there’s more than enough energy coming to make a big dent in the current demand and supply imbalance.

Some environmentalists are concerned that changes, which loosen environmental reviews for the impact of fossil fuel energy projects, are a gift to oil and gas companies and will lead to higher carbon emissions. The final form of the legislation won’t be clear until after the midterms. If Republicans retain control of Congress, it’s likely that the rules will indeed favor fossil fuel power plants.

“A truly convincing win in the midterms might embolden Democrats; a narrower win would convince them this might be the best deal they’ll get,” environmental writer Bill McKibben said in his newsletter last week. “A Democratic loss and the Republicans/oil industry might walk away from it, convinced that they’ll get what they want regardless.”

The Big Read

Tesla Semis near the Port of Los Angeles.

Tesla

Tesla’s Big Rig Bet Has A Big Problem

When it comes to trucking, fuel prices move the needle like almost nothing else. So, with the average price of a gallon of diesel hovering around $6.47, roughly 75% above the year-ago level, Tesla would seem perfectly positioned to sell as many units of its long-delayed electric Semi as it can crank out. There’s just one problem: The company still hasn’t built enough of the high-powered chargers the truck depends on, a bottleneck that could keep sales stuck in the slow lane.

Tesla, which began building Semis early this year, marked the start of “high-volume” production at its dedicated plant for the truck in Sparks, Nevada, late last week. Dan Priestly, director of Semi sales, said in the livestream that the facility will soon produce 1,000 units a week and up to 50,000 a year. That capacity may eventually matter. But Tesla has only opened a handful of its own “Megachargers,” direct current charging stations that can deliver up to 1.2 megawatts of electricity – enough to power more than 500 homes – so far and may only have 30 such stations operating by year-end. That means deliveries this year are likely to fall far short of the 5,000 or more predicted by Tigress Financial Partners early this year–and the tens of thousands Elon Musk has said he wants to sell.

“I might say 250 or less,” electric trucking researcher Jason Roycht, founder of Meridius Consulting in Detroit, told Forbes. “The problem is there’s not enough charging ready.”

Tesla has proposed setting up about 60 Megawatt Charger Stations (MCS), though few are operational. Each of those 30 MCS units the company hopes to power up this year would be able to handle multiple trucks charging at the same time, Priestly said during the factory event.

However, “only 14 MCS stations are listed as open, in development or in pre-construction, of which just five are open today, including two that are at Tesla sites,” said Loren McDonald, CEO and Chief Analyst for Chargeonomics. The other three are in California, operated by Tesla partners in Bakersfield, Fresno and San Bernardino. That number could soon rise owing to excitement over the Tesla Semi, particularly given the spike in diesel costs, though it’s unclear how quickly many more will be operational.

Hot Topic

The Ocean Cleanup’s Boyan Slat on the fundraising push to deploy hundreds of plastic trash interceptors in waterways around the world

At Climate Week in New York recently, you called for corporate investment to scale up the group’s plastic trash cleanup efforts. Are you finding support for that?

There’s just a lot of interest overall. The key that we’re working on now, and it’s quite a process usually, is getting from that to actually closing because then people have to convince all the stakeholders internally in a company. Experience teaches us that that takes a while. But yes, there’s a lot of new interest, and the math is pretty simple.

It’s the 30 Cities program to solve a third of global plastic pollution. It’s a $350 million program over five years. We secured a third of that through the Audacious Project, which we announced earlier this year. So now it means an exclusive group of 10 companies coming in with $5 million a year; that type of partnership is all it would take to get the job done.

That’s the initial investment in the first five years of operations. And our motto is that that’s how we kickstart these projects. Then within those five years, we transition the responsibility for the operational cost of the assets to the local government. That provides sustainability for the projects longer term.

How many trash interceptors in total would you deploy if you hit the funding target?

I think our best number right now is that roughly 250 interceptors need to be deployed in the 30 cities to stop 90% of the emissions coming out of those cities.

Right now we are at 27, so we’re building up to 10X in the next three years. Obviously, there’s the funding challenge, and then there’s the execution challenge. We’re juggling between the two in the meantime.

The team is working hard on accelerating. We have about 60 deployments at some stage in our deployment factory as we speak, so we should see a rapid acceleration of deployments pretty soon. By the end of the year, we will have so many projects in the pipeline that at that point in time, basically the Audacious money will be fully locked in. So that’s why, while the team is very focused on ramping up the deployment cadence, I’m personally very focused in the next few months on securing the additional funding to keep that acceleration going.

Do you find that in the case of what you’re doing, because it’s so concrete and easily understood – getting plastic trash out of rivers, waterways and the ocean – that it’s easier to find support than perhaps for some other environmental problems?

I’m sure it is. I think there’s a number of things that are helpful. It’s obviously very concrete. It’s very tractable. Literally one organization can solve this problem.

That’s quite rare. Also, what we do is very apolitical. Some of our local supporters are on the right side of the political spectrum, and we welcome support from across the political spectrum. It’s something that is thankfully not being poisoned by the culture wars and polarization.

Everyone understands that this is an issue, and also the type of solution that we propose is not drowned in any particular ideology or moralistic. There’s no moralistic angle to this. It’s like, “Hey, here’s a problem. Let’s solve it and let’s use the things humanity is uniquely great at: working hard and the ingenuity to fix it.”