Clean, Cheap Energy Looks Like A Political Winner

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Inflation and higher energy costs were among the issues that helped Democrats notch larger-than-expected wins in last week’s off-year elections, particularly in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, as well as in Georgia, where voters elected two Democrats to the state’s utility board, the first time any members of that party will serve on it in almost two decades.

In Virginia, Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger made clean power, including renewables and offshore wind, central to her goal of lowering energy prices for the state’s residents. Likewise, in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill pledged to declare a state of emergency over rising utility costs on her first day in office and freeze rate increases for residential customers. She said her administration will also “massively build out cheaper and cleaner power generation.”

Surveys consistently show that a majority of Americans favor increased use of renewable power, though earlier this year, Pew and Gallup found support for doing so had weakened considerably from past levels. Perhaps that’s because Donald Trump was elected on a promise of lowering costs for Americans, particularly energy prices, by setting aside environmental concerns to dramatically increase oil and gas production and even expand coal use. So far, that strategy has failed.

While gasoline prices are down slightly from a year ago, residential electricity rates have jumped about 10% this year, more than double the rate of overall inflation. The rapid increase in power demands from AI data centers has been a big factor in why electricity prices are rising. At the same time, the Trump administration’s elimination of federal incentives for clean power threatens to make it harder over the next few years for utilities to keep up with rapidly growing electricity demand, given that wind and solar systems, combined with battery storage, can be added faster.

And setting aside the climate benefits, clean power is now competitive with conventional natural gas, if not cheaper in many cases. “A gas-fired power plant, a simple cycle plant with a combustion turbine, is probably in the neighborhood of $2,000 a kilowatt to build,” Bob Frenzel, CEO of Minnesota-based utility Xcel Energy, told Forbes. “That’s probably the same price as a wind farm, as a rule of thumb. … So you can see where if you’re measuring sheer energy, wind can be competitive on a megawatt-hour basis.”

A year from now, when voters go to the polls to decide on who they want in Congress, politicians pushing cheap, clean power could have an edge.

The Big Read

Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Pay Plan: The Case For Magical Thinking

The only thing more outlandish than Elon Musk’s demand for a $1 trillion pay package is the idea that Tesla’s shareholders would grant it. And yet that is how things played out, with everyone from massive investment funds to small, individual investors approving compensation so vast the new Pope decried it. It’s a bet that lightning will strike again for the most successful U.S. industrial entrepreneur of the 21st century — that Musk can overcome Tesla’s falling electric vehicle sales and his tarnished image by pivoting to AI-powered robotaxis and humanoid robots.

With its stock already trading near an all-time high, at over 300 times projected earnings, many investors appear to think that’s a foregone conclusion even before votes were tallied at today’s annual meeting. Over 75% of shareholders approved the package, Brandon Ehrhart, Tesla’s general counsel, told attendees.

“Tesla’s current valuation only makes sense if you attribute magic powers to Elon Musk,” said Gautam Mukunda, a professor with the Yale School of Management. “If you break out the new business lines he’s talking about, there’s no particular reason to believe that Tesla is the leading company for self-driving cars. Waymo’s technology is clearly better. … The only evidence that Tesla is the leader in this technology is that Elon Musk says so.”

And that’s also the crux of the proxy. “Musk’s greatest skill is his ability to convince investors that he can do the miraculous,” said Mukunda.

Read more here

Hot Topic

Dandelion Energy CEO Dan Yates on its leasing program for geothermal systems to cut home heating and cooling costs

What you’re doing is different from conventional and next-generation geothermal systems that generate energy. How does Dandelion’s tech work?

We are not generating electricity or power at all. We are using a bore in the backyard effectively to exchange heat with the earth. So we’re sucking heat out of the earth using a heat pump inside the house. The result of that is an ultra-high efficiency furnace and air conditioner. The vast majority of building emissions are from heating and cooling, not climate change, but climate control-related. We basically cut that in half. The big driver for our business and for the industry is that everything is getting electrified – and we’ve been an unexpected and happy beneficiary of some evolution in the federal regulatory landscape that’s supporting geothermal.

But again, things are getting electrified. We’ve seen it first and most notably with transportation and electric vehicles, but it’s coming for heating now, too. In fact, for the last two years, more heat pumps have been sold than natural gas furnaces in the U.S., which is surprising to most people. That’s trend one. Trend two is that there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on the electric grid, and demand is going up most notably from AI data centers, but also just from the broader electrification initiatives.

Geothermal is by far the least impactful on the electric grid of any electric heating option. A homebuyer will enjoy half the energy consumption or utility bills from a geothermal system compared to a conventional air source heat pump.

How deep do you need to drill for a home system?

It’s a question of the capacity or the heating demand of the house. As a general matter, it’s about 100 to 150 feet for every ton of heating. A typical new home requires maybe three tons, so that’s about 400 feet.

What’s the approximate size of the hole you’re boring? And what are you installing in it?

Five-and-a-half inches. It’s a very narrow bore.

We install a ground loop, which is two pipes that are really right next to each other, and then they’re connected at just the bottom with what’s called a U-bend that connects the two pipes of the water. It flows down one and then comes right back up the other one. We run that down to the bottom, along with a third pipe that’s called a tremie line. You end up with a fully cemented-in finished product where there’s really no environmental interaction. It’s locked in there, it’s done.

I jokingly call our kind of geothermal “lukewarm geothermal.” A system like Fervo’s is going much deeper and looking for 500-degree heat, where they’re trying to make steam. … What we do is suck the heat out of the water that’s circulating through this loop and concentrate that heat up to 110 degrees, then pump that, blowing air over it to circulate air into the house to heat the house. Then we’re pumping water back down into the hole that’s now almost at freezing, so we actually put antifreeze in the water. You’ll have 30-degree water going back into the hole, and then that water gets heated up from the 50-degree Earth. Then we suck the heat out of that water again and push it into the house. It’s a classic refrigeration cycle where you’re making something hotter than the surrounding area by pushing heat into the hotter area.

The classic performance metric for a heat pump is COP, the coefficient of power, which is how many units of energy do you produce for every unit of heat that you consume from electricity? Our systems regularly have a COP around 5 or in the low 4s, and that’s the full seasonal lifecycle of the system. What you’ll see listed as the highest efficiency air source heat pumps will be in the 3s, but then when you get to the coldest days of the year, they drop into the 2s, and many of them drop into the 1s. So we end up having this major overperformance relative to conventional heat pumps.

You’re leasing systems to homeowners. So what does using this type of heating and cooling system cost, factoring in federal and state incentives?

We are already the happy recipient of a number of state-level incentives. We’ve got a lot of activity in the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast and in Colorado. All of these regions have pretty robust state-level incentives that encourage geothermal.

One detail with federal rules is the tax credit is only available to commercially-owned geothermal systems. You can’t build a home with geothermal, sell it to the home buyer, and then they go and file for the credit. They’re not a commercial entity. The system doesn’t have to be in a commercial building. It just has to be owned by a corporation, essentially.

That’s where leasing came in. [Congress] inserted language that said geothermal systems can be leased. And that allowed us to take this sizable credit. The base credit is 30%, but you get 10% extra if the system is built, predominantly, in the U.S. – and essentially all geothermal systems are. So it’s effectively a 40% credit across the board.

Our leasing partners typically will structure something like 20-year leases. The punchline is that the homebuyers are paying anywhere from as little as $15 bucks a month to $60, sort of in that range. And they’re saving anywhere from $600 to $1,000 a year.

What Else We’re Reading

World’s biggest polluters are no-shows at start of UN climate summit in Brazil (PBS NewsHour)

China has big plans to supercharge global battery energy-storage systems by 2027 (South China Morning Post)

How thousands of fossil fuel lobbyists got access to UN climate talks – and then kept drilling (The Guardian)

Renewables are the key to true energy sovereignty: John Kerry editorial (Semafor)

Blending solar power into farms could revolutionize food and energy production (KOMO)

Global warming made Hurricane Melissa more damaging, researchers say (New York Times)

Five ways Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change (Yale Climate Connections)

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