One reason I’m not as worried about overbuilding as others is that I don’t think this is a peak problem, but a *capacity adequacy* problem. If you aggregate data center demand in a region *and* electrify other sectors of economy, you end up short power for a lot of hours a year.

A utility industry schism -- FirstEnergy breaks with its peers and tells FERC that data centers should pay for transmission upgrades they impose and be billed the standard transmission rate paid by everyone.

I have two new pieces on transmission pricing for data centers. I explain that a 1990s FERC policy intended to spur competitive markets is being understood to prevent utilities from charging data centers for their full costs of service.

“The real surprise from the OECD’s subsidy numbers is that it cost China less than $18bn in sectoral support over 15 years to build an industry that can now provide more clean power than the world can readily absorb.”

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention. The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean. And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them. Record-breaking temperatures. A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse. The response? Yank out the instruments and walk away. That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency. For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives. The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident. That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first. cnn.com/2026/06/03/climate/o…

I remember some folks called me stupid for saying people out there are fighting data centers for the same reasons they fought masking. Well anyway they’re just saying it out loud now

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Right to Repair added to the NDAA ... despite huge industry push against it. Because it's common sense.

Leftist environmentalism needs to grapple with the possibility that a politics of scarcity may breed ethnofascism more readily than the socialism they desire.

I wrote a quick rant about why I'm landing so hard in the skeptical corner of the data center debate, this is more just letting off steam and trying to make it clear why my hair's a little on fire about it.

Yes to this entire rant. See Andy’s first paragraph where he acknowledges the concerns that do stand up to scrutiny. “For everything else…”

Despite some bogus grants, a lot of government is like this cartoon. I bet this "small team" would find a line item for "screwworm sterilization" and delete it, not knowing that they just devastated American farming: theatlantic.com/science/arch…

Georgia’s hidden money machine: Car-wreck lawsuits legalnewsline.com/newsletter…

several Rs in albany voting against the proposed data center moratorium on the grounds that it will increase renewable energy development

What the 👆 analysis of competitive renewables procurement in New York reveals is that when supply chain problems and inflation hits projects, developers can rebid at higher prices and push that cost onto ratepayers in 20-year contracts instead, with vociferous support from environmental groups. But when the same economic factors at the same time hit the Vogtle nuclear construction project in Georgia, with cost overrun and profits determined (poorly) by the state rather than resulting from closed-door corporate decisions, it's enough for environmental groups to lobby for a moratorium against new nuclear projects in New York.

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