Volts

Should we feel good about the trajectory of clean energy post-Trump?

2026-07-29 · 10:06 UTC ·Volts ·66 min read

Brief

The conversation pivots to policy: Burmel urges immediate, bipartisan permitting reform and big transmission build‑out (she calls permitting reform essentially “free money”), and stepped federal commercialization finance for clean‑firm resources, rather than reflexively prioritizing extension of every tax credit. Roberts presses back on political framing and on the risk of short‑term gas build‑outs; both agree many levers should be used — speed to build, grid utilization, storage innovation, transmission, and durable design of policy to increase longevity and international credibility. They close by noting none of the modeled outcomes are final: policy choices over permitting, transmission, commercialization, and fossil‑sector regulation (methane fees, reporting and carbon intensity standards) can still materially change the next decade’s trajectory.

Why it matters

Lily Burmel (author of the MIT CEPR commentary 'Building a Dearbonized U.S. Power Sector') told host David Roberts the Energy Innovation modeling shows roughly 74% of IRA-era clean capacity and 71% of clean generation would still be deployed under the post‑Trump OBBBA trajectory (power sector only).

Key details

  • Burmel reported the power‑sector emissions reductions are stickier but reduced: the OBBBA scenario preserves about 67% of the IRA+regulation emissions declines over the coming decade, leaving a cumulative ~2.8 gigatons CO2 gap versus the IRA trajectory (she compared that to about two 2024 U.S. power‑sector years of emissions).
  • Technology split: Burmel said solar and batteries are far more resilient (utility + distributed solar preserved; distributed solar ~95% preserved) while onshore wind is hardest hit (~47% of onshore capacity preserved); offshore wind pipeline is so small the model shows ~100% preserved for that segment.
  • Fossil fleet composition shifts: Burmel quoted the model showing fossil capacity changes little (OBBBA ~4% higher capacity) but runs more carbon‑intensively — modeled fossil generation produces ~19% more emissions because coal is retained and dispatch increases.
  • Burmel and Roberts agreed many important factors were outside the model: the analysis covers only the electricity sector (not EVs, manufacturing, LPO grants), it doesn't fully capture the Trump administration's permitting/permit‑blocking campaign against renewables or behind‑the‑meter (BtM) gas growth, and it omits some near‑term clean‑firm developments (nuclear restarts, geothermal contracts).
  • Policy priorities Burmel recommended: push urgent bipartisan permitting reform and transmission build this Congress (she calls permitting reform 'free money'), and scale federal commercialization finance for 'clean firm' technologies rather than prioritizing a straight tax‑credit extension for wind/solar alone.
Source evidence

title: Should we feel good about the trajectory of clean energy post-Trump?
author: Volts
contenttype: podcast
publication: Volts
published: 2026-07-29T10:06:00+00:00
sourceurl: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/207516379/db699ae228e5a4fe0de42d316fb52f6c.mp3

word_count: 14821

Hello, greetings. Hello, and hi, everyone. This is Volts for July 29th, 2026. Should we feel good about the trajectory of clean energy post-Trump? I am your host, David Roberts. The Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats' historic climate bill, was signed into law by Joe Biden on August 16, 2022. Several people I know devoted their lives and hearts to the fight for that bill at no small personal sacrifice, and I covered its many twists and turns closely. At least in my world, there was enormous elation at its passage, a sense that the US was finally doing something serious about climate change after decades of lassitude. That all the years of frustrating work and heartbreak had not been in vain. Less than three years later, on July 4th, 2025, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, OBBBA, which seemed to crush the IRA entirely. By then, Trump's EPA had already reversed many of Biden's key climate-related regulations, like the mercury and air toxics standards, and more of those would fall in 2026, like the tailpipe standards. All of this violent destruction of their life's work left many climate advocates in a funk from which they have not entirely recovered. But a new report that has gotten a lot of attention lately says to turn those frowns upside down. Glass half full, Building a Dearcbonized U.S. Power Sector is a research commentary out of MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, written by Lily Burmel. She's currently a visiting fellow at Columbia's Center on Global Energy Policy. Before that, she worked under previous Volt's guest Brian Dees at MIT, and before that, she worked on John Kerry's State Department climate team. The report uses modeling from energy innovation to compare what would have happened in the electricity sector under the IRA versus what did happen under the OBBBA. It's basic argument is that things worked out better than many people predicted, that many of the clean energy and emissions gains are on track to be achieved, regardless, and further, that there is reason to believe that the incentives Republicans took from renewable energy are not what it most needs to continue growing in present circumstances. Within that argument is a great deal of nuance and some very interesting details. So I'm very excited to have Lily with me today to dig in. So let's do that. All right. With no further ado, Lily Brumel., welcome to Volts Thank you so much for coming. Hi, Dave. It's so great to be here, longtime listener. So thanks for all that you've taught the climate community so far. Thank you. Thank you. Well, let's start. Before we get into the report, just tell me what put this bug in your ear. Why did you do this? What made you want to do this analysis in the first place? What question were you trying to answer? Sure. I think I resonate a little bit with what you said about people who feel like they've dedicated their life to climate change. I was not one of those amazing thought leaders who led to the creation of the IRA, but rather have just been deeply motivated by climate and emissions reductions throughout my career and my life. And so, as I think with almost everyone in our community, the 2024 election, but really 2025, was a distressing time. There was a lot of debate, a lot of change in policy, and a lot of real attack on clean energy. And so, not only were there the emotional ups and downs throughout the negotiation process that led to the one big beautiful bill act. But I felt a little bit confused after the fact in just trying to grapple with the question of how bad is this really going to be? And therefore, you know, once you one day have clarity on that question, what do you do about it? And how do you move beyond this moment? So, for me, that was the question that I sought out to answer, really looking at the world we just left, Biden policy, really represented by the Inflation Reduction Act and the power plant regulations, and comparing that to what we now inherited, represented by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. I'll call it OB3, without those regulations in place. Is OB3 the term good? I've been grappling around for some non-awkward way to refer to that bill. I'm going to adopt that. I say OB3. I've heard O3BA, O-triple-BA. I don't know. I don't like any of the names, but I do whatever rolls off the time. Yeah, fastest. Exactly. And so the question that I was asking was, of the clean energy future that the old policy promised in the power sector specifically, how much will still show up over the coming decade? And that decade's important because that's, one, the near-term impact, but then also where the next policy decisions will have the ability to influence and change. And so what I found is that for clean capacity, 74% will still show up on the grid and emissions reductions in the power sector, 67% of those will still occur on average over the coming decade. Yeah. Okay. So this, I want to be clear up front about what's in the model and what isn't. So right now we're going to talk about what's in the model. And then once we sort of discuss those results a little bit, then we're going to talk about some things that didn't make it in and how they might influence our thinking about all this. So just to be clear, the model compared not just the IRA, but the IRA plus Biden's key climate regulations. And I'm wondering, like that included the tailpipe regulations, also the mercury regulations, most of the big ones. Yes. Yep. You're right. So the two models include the presence or lack thereof of the regulations. And the regulations in scope for this report are the power plant ones. So that's the mercury and air toxic standards, the section 111 power plant rules, and the effluent limitations guidelines. Right. Versus a world with the OBBB and none of those regulations since they all got nuked. I mean, you said this, I said this, but just to underline it, this is just about the electricity sector, not other things outside the electricity sector, which we might touch on in a minute. Exactly. Yep. Power sector only, laws plus regulations or lack thereof. Right. So 74% of the clean capacity, meaning clean energy built, and 71% of the clean energy generation from the IRA trajectory still show up in the OBBB trajectory. Yes? Yep. And then what happened about emissions? Right. So emissions in the power sector, the math is quite simple. It literally takes the current policy environment divided by the prior policy environment and looks at it as a percent. And so I see that 67% of the emissions reductions will still occur on average over the coming decade. And the analysis dives into, you know, what technologies are preserved at what share. And it's interesting to see that the fossil fuel plant is really sticky. And to me, a lot of the emissions increase that happens today is because of the retention of coal without those regulations. Right. So there are three buckets you compare. There's clean electricity. Yeah. There's fossil electricity. And then there's the emissions. Clean electricity, we just covered on 74%, 71%. Emissions reductions, 67% were preserved. And then on the fossil electricity score, it is interesting to talk a little bit about what happened there. Sure. And I think this is almost perhaps where I was most surprised in doing the analysis. I saw that the capacity of the fossil fleets did not really change much between scenarios. Meaning not a lot more built. Right. So the capacity in the OB-3 scenario is 4% higher than the prior trajectory. But the composition changes, right? So you have more coal and less gas. So it's more emissions intensive per unit. Right. 19% more emissions. So then the 19% comes from the generation. More fossil generation, right? And so what that speaks to is, you know, fossil power, fossil fuels are dispatchable and can ramp up or down. And so even though the capacity is more or less flat, it will run for more hours of the day to fill in for the less clean energy that's built. Right. And briefly, let's pick apart the clean electricity bucket because the composition there is really interesting. So solar and batteries retain 80, something like 80%, around 80% of their capacity and generation. And wind is down around 50% or a little bit below 50%. So the average there of 70, whatever percent sort of hides the fact that solar and batteries survive quite well and wind gets hurt quite badly. So can you explain why, what in your estimation explains that sort of disjunct there? Why do solar and batteries prove so resilient and wind gets hurt so badly? Sure, yep. So that 74% is an average and it represents the aggregate clean number. So in it, you can decompose it to all of those different numbers, basically weighted by the technology. So solar, interestingly, you can break it down between utility scale and distributed and distributed is far, far more resilient. About 95% of its capacity is preserved. And I attribute that to thinking about the strength of net metering and other state level policies that enable its deployment. And if we're seeing rising prices in the utility scale sector, that will incentivize folks to keep building on the distributed side. For solar and batteries, I think those are seeing great cost declines and the battery still retained its tax credit. So it's able to benefit from that as well. On the wind side, that, again, you can break out into onshore and offshore. Offshore is so tiny of a pipeline that the model shows that it will probably all get built because it's so small. So that's 100% preserved for offshore. But onshore is the biggest casualty of everything. It dips below that metaphorical glass half full threshold. And we only see 47% of its capacity preserved. And I attribute that to, it's a little bit like wind was already struggling. It was already down. And yanking the tax credit was kind of beating it on its way down. A lot of its struggles are, it's extremely transmission constrained. It's only, you know, able to be built and utilized in a specific region. It doesn't see the same cost declines that we're seeing because of innovation from on the solar and battery side. And it's just like more CapEx heavy. It's a hard technology to manage. And that, so it was already suffering and now it's taken a beating. Right. It's basically a measurement of how credit, how much these technologies depended on the credits, on the tax credits, because that's the main thing. Tax credits go away. Which ones were most dependent on it? Turns out wind really needed them, solar and batteries, somewhat less. Yeah, I would say, yeah, the difference shows the impact of the credits and then what remains shows the market momentum behind it. Right. And so one of my questions I had about all this is, it seems like there's been a real effort to spin this report as a positive, in the most positive way possible. So like, for instance, you talk about this 2.5 year time lag for solar and batteries. First, just say what you mean by that. Sure. I think, yeah, first thing I'll say is the report represents a really specific framing and the result is very positive. So I wouldn't say that it's spin for one. But number two, on the two and a half year lag, what I did there was really wanting to figure out how far behind the current trajectory is compared to what the IRA would have put forward. So I was trying to think of creative ways to do it. And I thought of this concept of what I coined a lag analysis. And basically what that does is it looks at a given year, so say 2031, and it looks at how many gigawatts of energy will be deployed. So for solar, the energy innovation model shows about 333 gigawatts of solar will be deployed. At what point, how many years later, will OB3 reach that time period? And it's only two and a half years later. And so for me, again, when I was doing this research, that was much smaller than I thought. And so that doesn't even equal two and a half years worth of capacity or deployment loss because it's still being deployed at about, you know, 75% of that high level. It's just looking at the total levels of deployment and at what point in time will you reach that milestone? Yeah, well, this gets a little bit at what I mean, which is that 2.5 year number is the per year average over the 10 years. But if you look, like the report says, by 2035, we've lost a cumulative 44 deployment years on clean capacity and 56 deployment years on generation. And like, if you look at wind, even the per year average on wind is 11.5 years deployment, all of which sounds to me, bad. You know what I mean? Like, another way of looking at this is we got 30% less of the clean energy than we would have gotten and 25% or like even more, like 33% less of the emissions losses and that seems bad to me. Like, those seem like big numbers to me, I guess. Yeah, I mean, you're right, it's bad. Any energy loss is bad. And that report does not hide that in any way. Page one, it talks about how Trump's policies are leading to less clean energy, less investment, fewer jobs, cancel projects, all the like. And so, on the lag, right, that was my honesty that and rigor in the analysis, that those lags compound and they add up. every single year Yeah, yeah, and they get, and they get bigger and bigger over time is the thing. And just as you asked earlier about the 74% number, you know, how, why is that rosy when wind sucks? It's the same thing on this side. Like, wind is clearly the laggard and the downweight in all of these numbers. And then at the individual technology level, solar and batteries fare far, far better than wind. Yeah. And it's also worth saying, I think that when you there's 2.8 gigatons of CO2 is the difference between these two, cumulative 10-year difference between these two scenarios. And that's also a lot. And that's, and, and unlike clean energy progress, you can't, you know, I'm not telling you anything, you can't get that back. Like it's a cumulative, it's a cumulative measure, how much is in the atmosphere. So, all of which is this is just me arguing for my natural pessimism, arguing for the glass half-empty perspective. Like, it just seems to me, like, your analysis shows, and as you say, it doesn't hide it, it says it right on the analysis, that these are big, these are big hits, basically, even if not as bad as some people might have thought or feared, they are big. Yeah, I'm glad you pointed out that 2.8 gigaton number. That's the amount of emissions that the current policy scenario we'll see over a 10-year time period. And actually, right before this, I did the math, that's equal to about two, like 2024 sized worth of power sector emissions. So that's just in the power sector. And again, I focus on that 10-year window because to me, it highlights that urgency of like, this is real. These losses are real. It's tangible. You know, you can calculate it or estimate it. And it's also the window that policy can do something about it. Like, this is not 2.8 gigatons that automatically happened the moment they signed the piece of paper for OB3. This is something that right now, you know, permitting reform negotiations can address, and that next Congress will have the opportunity to address, and the next administration will as well. Right. None of these are locked in. Yeah, we should say that. None of these numbers are locked in. They're out to 2035. So we could change this reality. Exactly. And I think one more thing I'll say about the framing is that any person in the climate community knew that the IRA was not enough to get us to net zero by 2050. And it put us within a stone's throw distance of it, which was really exciting and invigorating. And so, you know, when you know that what is this glass that we're measuring, it's the current compared to the prior, what we have now versus what we thought we had, and what made us really excited. And the glass is pretty full, more full than we thought. You know, of course, there is so much more to do. We don't just want to fill up the glass, we want to do way better than that. And again, I think that's pretty clear in the report because a lot of it's dedicated to talking to talking about solutions and how to move forward. Yeah, and I meant to ask this before, actually, why not a third scenario that's neither IRA nor OBBA. In other words, like, I don't think anybody thought that none of this clean energy build out would have happened absent the IRA. You know what I mean? So, I don't even know. Is it even possible to sort of estimate that kind of be a lot of kind of guesswork, I guess? But did you think about trying to include that scenario? Oh, yeah, I totally did. And I'll say that again, this is in the throes of last year, but I mean, I've heard this recently from some high-level former Biden DOE officials, like a real concern that clean energy was kneecapped. And so I think, yeah, it would be silly to think it's all gone, but I think there is a line of thinking that thinks the majority of things were lost. And so, again, why I took that specific framing. I asked Energy Innovation, who that team is amazing. They were really kind in giving me their modeling their data. So it's all their work, and I just did some extra math on top of it. But I asked them about that pre-2021 scenario because, of course, that's like the other counterfactual. And one thing that they told me is that it was built with different demand assumptions. So I can't apples to apples compare it. That's like mathematically illegal, you know? But you can kind of reason through what's the difference between Trump 1 policy and Trump 2 policy on paper. And Trump 1 policy also had zero regulations. Trump 1 policy also had wind and solar tax credits phasing down. And that's the same in Trump 2. Trump 2 also has the clean firm tax credits and more LPO funding, loan programs office, and more. And so you can imagine that on paper, they're a little bit similar, but there is better policy this time around. And then we also have higher demand, which is being a demand. Poll and an incentive to deploy as much energy as false as possible. Trevor Burrus We're going to get to that. So I guess you could say Trump 2 policy is better on clean energy than Trump 1 policy for the simple reason that Democrats passed a bunch and they were not able to get rid of all of it, basically. So, yeah, as you said, and as Jigger Shah, as previous guest Jigger Shah said, if we just went from Trump 1 to the OBB, it would look pretty good. It would look like a pretty strong energy boom. Yep. And that comment, I mean, I remember him saying that in the fall, and that's a little bit what perked my ears up to this originally because he was saying, right, if we only had OB3, we'd be shouting from the rooftops and like overjoyed. And Jesse Jenkins, too, was like the Republicans on a trifecta, you know, party line vote just agreed to create investments and spend money on zero carbon technology for a decade. And that's incredible. That's great. Just not wind and solar. They really just hate wind and solar, which I, which I think is just gets to sort of the kind of symbolic culture war aspect of a lot of the lamb. They just wanted to own the libs. They just took enough of the chunk out of it to own the libs, but you know, they didn't seem that concerned about the policy per se. Okay, so let's then talk about a variety of things that, for various reasons, could not make it into these model comparisons because they like some of them they weigh in different directions these things that got left out. They're interesting to walk through, I think. So I think the first thing to say, and this gets back to my glass half-empty insistence, which is that it left out all the non-electricity sector stuff, which is left out the EVs, which took the biggest hit, I think, probably like policy-wise, were hurt worst. A lot of the clean and manufacturing stuff got hit. A lot of the LPO stuff, the loan programs office stuff, the grants, loans, all that stuff. Yeah. Well, on that real on that, real fast. I mean, the report's only about the power sector. So of course it doesn't include EVs. I'll just say the news out the news outside of the electricity sector is grimmer than the news within it, I guess. Yes, and I think it is actually really valuable. My CJEP colleague, Noah Kaufman, has a really great point about how, you know, when you take such a narrow view, like a strength of the Biden industrial policy for climate was that it was a whole of economy, was that the manufacturing tax credits spoke to the demand tax credits, spoke to the transition funding for fossil fuel communities. And so, you know, when you look at one of which spoke also, as he said, to the international community and the international dynamic, just the signal to the international community that the U.S. had its shit together was in and of itself, an important. thing Right. And so, I mean, part of that, right, again, on this beat, like, I think it's, it's helpful to not then wonder what happened or prognosticate or theorize about the future based on vibes. It helps to have the data to point us in the right direction. Yeah, okay. So, another thing this that you couldn't get in the report necessarily is that the Trump administration has not just removed the tax credits from wind and solar, they're also very specifically going after wind and solar permits in a variety of ways. They've sort of launched this, you know, it's like the negative, it's like the mirror image. It's like a whole of government effort against wind and solar. It's creative. Yeah, how big it's hard to model for one thing because it's just hard to know what exactly is going on and how much of it's going to stick. But what's your sort of assessment of how big of a piece of the pie? How much worse would that make the OBB scenario look if you could have included it, I guess. Yeah, I think first, just to start with, you know, why could it not fit in the model? This, again, was an exercise that reminded me that a model is just a camera, it just captures a moment in time of what we think might happen. It's not a thermometer and it's not a live weather forecast. So, that aside, plus, it's just like simply hard to figure out how deep and how intense and how far-reaching are the Trump administration's efforts on restricting renewables. And how are the legal cases going to settle out? And the investment environment. And, like, I think about the July 2025 memo from the Department of the Interior, right after the law was signed, where they said, you know, any wind and solar project that wants to get permitted on public land has to get signed by the secretary with a 69-line item list of things that they had to check off, like, yeah outrageous and now that's been vacated by a judge. It no longer has legal standing. It's not in place. And, but, you know, there still is an impact of that last year. But does, but does that matter? Are they going to follow the law that the judge says. Who knows? The fact that a judge ruled on it doesn't even settle the question anymore with this administration. I think, yeah, I mean, the whole constitutional law thing is a whole other question we need to refer to our lawyers about. But I've been at least comforted, and yes, on a delay, speaking of a lag, I've been comforted that the judges have come in and tried to stop actions that are overbearing, far-reaching, or outright illegal, ranging from impoundment to the stop work orders to the wind projects, where all five instances, a judge came in and said, You can't do that. Yeah. Right. Speaking of offshore wind, you know, the model had all that getting built, but they are doing their best to scuttle those things or buy off those leases or whatever. Yeah. And so to me, those countervailing forces do matter, but of course, like, it's hard to measure how chilled is an investment environment and what impact does that have. I think two things that have helped me think about this: that like the near-term pipeline is very robust. Like, yes, because of the safe harboring of the tax credits, they're available. Projects are able to benefit from them if you qualify, you know, by all these really technical standards through 2030, and that matters. And so, I want to point out that the data that I use is pretty validated by the Rhodium Group, by Jesse Jenkins repeat lab. And so, Rhodium Group finds that deployment through 2030 is very strong and robust because of that safe harboring. Right. And the second way that I've liked thinking about it is Alfred Johnson, who's CEO of Crux Climate, who does the tax equity financing platform. He calls the grid something like light years, where what we see today, what gets deployed this year, was because of construction and permitting decisions made years ago. Right, right, right, right. So, all this stuff Trump is doing now is theoretically will show up five, ten years from now, right? Yeah, so it's a bull for right now, but then it's a bear for like Trump will have a lingering effect, but on like discrete, concrete projects, yeah, right, right, yeah. So we'll just say that Trump's executive branch campaign has some nebulous negative effect on the scenario that is difficult to measure, but that will also compound over time. Yeah. The other thing that was hard to get in is just this extraordinary surge in demand. Talk about that. Talk about why, what the sort of demand numbers were in the model versus what is showing up in real life. Sure. And can I just add one more thing on the Trump executive piece, which is I think it's also just helpful to remember that Trump's actions that directly affect projects on federal land is relatively small and distinct from just like the general investment environment in our country because 99% of wind is built on private land and 80 to 90 percent of solar is built on private land as well. And so while there's certainly like you need an FAA approval for every single Wind project that gets built, so Wynn's kind of screwed. Yes, now they're doing national security because of drones or something of the whales. I don't know. Yeah. They're trying, they're trying to go after the private land stuff, but I think they have much less, they have much less. Yeah, so that's like one of those weird comforting things: is like, oh, they sound so scary, but they can only go so far. But then at the same time, like, it's bad. Like why isn't wooded solar being built on federal land? Like, that's a whole other conversation, you know? So, anyways, that's on that. Okay, your question on demand. So, I intentionally conducted the analysis. Actually, the analysis had to be conducted using two scenarios with the exact same assumptions across the board. As time has gone on, since the IRA has been passed and every single year since, a demand and our projections for it have just skyrocketed. And of course, with that, the uncertainty about it. And so I think Energy Innovation came out this month actually with some of their updated OB3 scenario with the higher demand. And I purposely kept my analysis to ratios and percents just because the gigawatts, the specific numbers themselves were less important. So essentially, the analysis is robust and correct because it's kept within that frame, and I didn't push it beyond what it wasn't meant to do. Trevor Burrus: Right. The demand surge would have affected both scenarios equally. So it wouldn't affected the ratio between them, necessarily. But I think maybe we could say that it would have meant more fossil generation for both scenarios, all things considered. Yeah, I think what we see with more demand means more needs to get built And then there's, I think, a helpful discussion in the report that talks about how is that more demand being met in the real world? And we are seeing that with behind the meter, both gas and clean, you know, the work that Google's doing with their clean energy parks. But really, to me, what it crystallizes is that speed to power has a price that companies are willing to pay. Yes, this is so important about models. These models kind of run on cost optimization. They're kind of cost optimization exercises. But the real world is not that. Yeah, well, in the real world, these hyperscalers care about speed more than optimized cost necessarily. And speed, yeah, this was actually my next thing that didn't get included in the analysis for just because it couldn't be, which is the behind-the-meter stuff, which is, to my dismay, mostly right now gas. Some clean, but mostly gas. Seems like a big surge of behind-the-meter gas happening. Yep. And I'm a big fan of Michael Thomas's work at Clean View in his newsletter Distilled, where he has this amazing project database that's looking at behind-the-meter gas announcements, which ones actually have commitments from manufacturers for turbines? Only two-thirds do. And then which ones are actually getting built and which ones are delayed or canceled. So even though there's like, you know, a big, scary number of how much behind-the-meter gas has been built, I think it's 90 gigawatts. Only two-thirds of that might actually have turbines. And then only two gigawatts have actually been built so far. Yeah, I'm sort of of the jiggersha school on this question, which is that I think those projections are there's a large element of fantasy to that. I think once people start actually building those, they're going to find out that building your own energy grid and operating it is a lot harder than it looks on paper. It's a lot harder than your little model that you came up with on Claude, and that there's a lot of pieces to that puzzle. I think just a lot of that, a lot less of that, is going to get built than is projected, but it would nonetheless add to the fossil side of these projections. You're right, and off-grid stuff can't compete and can't compete with clean,. so So we, of course, want to direct all energy to get added to the grid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another thing that doesn't show up in the projections is these nuclear restarts. And I would say maybe I would broaden that to like the model doesn't show much clean firm getting built, but there's some reason to believe that there's going to be more clean firm than might show up from that number. And that includes nuclear restarts and maybe some geothermal that's already under a contract. So, talk a little bit about that and how you think that might have affected the outcomes. Sure. And first, on the why, I should point out that a model is also built on other data sources. And so energy innovation is able to track behind the meter and is able to track clean firm, but because their inputs don't yet capture it, right? Then, as a result, their output doesn't capture it. So, I could imagine in a couple iterations of their model, all the behind-the-meter stuff will be there. On clean firms specifically, as we discussed, right now, they have a series of assumptions that, to be frank, you know, I don't know. They set them, it's their model, but that are about costs and performance. And, you know, they're pretty stringent. And as a result, they don't see a lot of clean firm, be it nuclear, geothermal, hydro, you know, fusion, like other stuff, get built in the next decade. But per the conversation about hyperscalers having deep pockets for speed to power, that stuff is happening and changes then the economics of these projects. So we have on the nuclear side, we have three projects that are getting restarted that will add gigawatts of capacity within a couple of years. The Palisades Project, Crane, Duane, Arnold. And that's within the decade horizon of the model, of the projection, right? And even within like two or three years. It's pretty near term. So, that would help on both the clean energy generation side, the clean energy capacity side, and presumably on the emissions side, because you're not going to need as much coal running. Yep. If you've got nuclear, if you've got more nuclear, right? Yep. So that's one tangible thing. The second tangible bonus plus up on all those categories is nuclear extensions. I think a lot of these projects are running for 60 years, and we're seeing them revise their contracts to run for 80 years. So that's good news. And then on geothermal side, I often point to Google's framework that they have with Furvo Energy to deliver several gigawatts, three gigawatts of capacity through 2033. So those are all tangible. Things. And then the expectation that as commercialization timelines get pulled forward, more will precipitate as well. Right. So, the behind-the-meter gas thing might make the glass look a little emptier. The nuclear restarts thing might make the glass look a little fuller. There's a lot of nuance there in actual current events that are difficult to capture in the model. Yeah. And the report, you know, hopefully lays that all out so it's clear. It thinks through this. You know, on net, I still think it will run glass half full given, you know, it is near that three quarters mark, but time will tell, which is what is exciting. Yeah, yeah. There are some also medium term rather than short term, kind of medium term factors that are difficult to capture in the model, like how much clean firm will get commercialized, whether costs on the clean energy side will continue to decline faster than projected, which they seem to do. Yeah, every time. One of my favorite graphs of all time is like the solar expectation line, where every single line is more steeper and steeper and beats out expectations every time. It's so great. Yes, I'm very familiar with that graph, and makes me wonder why modelers keep doing it. But maybe medium term we can rely on that. There's intangible, but a real thing is, and this has proven true in the past too. I think when the clean energy industry goes through a contraction like this or a blow like this, they kind of tighten up. You know, they kind of like improve, they get more efficient, they get more resilient, and maybe come out of the other side of that a little better off in terms of just like having their stuff in order a little better. Yeah. I don't know how you'd measure that. Yeah. I was going to say, I was doing some presentations on this work in the spring and had a longer section in my presentation about this that I slimmed down for the report because I'd rather an economist give me some pretty explicit definitions of booms and busts and whatnot. But my sense is that in these capital-intensive encyclical sectors, busts are bound to happen at some point. And the boom is always bigger than the last time. And so one perspective that I, I mean, I remind myself is that 2021 was such like a euphoric, frothy moment in the clean energy market, right? Like peak woke, zero interest rate, so much excitement, like so much investments ready to go into this sector. And then all of a sudden, like inflation surge, interest rates got super high and stayed high for a long time. And so I think expectations versus reality, there was already a tiny mismatch there. And then when you had Trump come in, like, then you have a series of politically induced headwinds, which like are yucky and sticky and gross. And that just like makes the bust part feel so much worse. But, like, at some point, a bust was bound to happen. So, you know, at some point, the boom is going to happen, and it will surely be better than the last one. Yeah. And one final medium-term thing that's difficult to quantify is: there's some reason to think that this extraordinary demand growth could help clean energy, could help boost the ratio of clean energy. Talk a little bit about that, maybe that dynamic. Sure. I think we're seeing the fastest energy growth since World War II, and this is a really unique moment where all hands on deck, we need as much energy as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible, getting added to the grid. Clean energy, right now, the latest Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory numbers from their 2026 QDEP report is that 90% of what gets added to the grid last year was clean. And so, if we have more pull on that demand, like more need for those additions, that is such a strong incentive for clean to continue happening. And so I think the boom from data centers and from AI, which is the near-term stuff that we're seeing and is all that's being talked about is what's happening right now and causing that demand poll. But what's really helpful to think about is that the demand from electrification, clean electrification, which we love. Yeah, from EVs, from heat pumps, from buildings, from all the forms of decarbon electrification, that will end up being just as big, if not bigger, than the demand pull from data centers right now. And so, like, thank God that right now the demand growth that we are seeing is from customers with massive pockets who want to pay and are willing to invest in our grid. Like, literally, thank God. And we can do so much better and like really utilize this moment because. When the next wave of demand comes, we'll be in a better place and we'll have grown such that we can, you know, run through first base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is this point. I make on the pod over and over again. Thank you for making it again. Like, whatever you think about data centers, there's a giant wave of electrification coming in behind it. We need lots more electricity, we need lots more grid. We need to think about this whole thing a lot more. You know, don't get obsessed about AI to the point of forgetting that this is all this all matters regardless. Yeah, and I think that's something also just about like the concept of policing load growth, like good versus bad load growth. Like one could think that the load growth that's coming later is good. It's from decarb purposes electrification, but like it's going to happen regardless. And so let's welcome it and let's prepare our grid to be stronger and bigger and build more. Like, that's a great challenge. Yeah, I think what maybe not everybody, but I'm sure you and I agree on, is the scenario: We want eventually is for a big enough and robust enough and abundant enough grid that we can use all the energy we want. I know a lot of a lot of my maybe fellows in the environmental movement don't necessarily share that perspective, but that's certainly the perspective I take. I think that's the American dream right there. We want enough energy to power economic growth and prosperity, and do it in a decarbed way. Beautiful. Yeah. And like, and like, even aside from industry and transportation and heating and cooling, you know, maybe we want to like desalinate the oceans, maybe we want to like rewild the deserts. Maybe we want to send Elon Musk to Mars, you know, like all these things. Who knows if we have an abundant, abundant power system, I'm sure we'll find lots of pro-human ways to use that power if we got a bunch of it, you know, that we don't even know about now. Anyway, yeah, one more plug I'll put is the report kind of has that through line of building is the answer. Like, we need to build our way through to decarbonization, to the end state. And when you think about, and sorry if I'm ahead a bit, but if you think about two goals of like we need to build more clean and fill that glass all the way up and spill it over. Like, you need to build more wind and solar and batteries. And if you want to decarbonize and get rid of fossil fuel emissions, you need to build clean firm. And like the only solution is build, build, build. Yeah, we're going to get into that much more in a second. But one the one final thing which might be an X factor for the results of these models in the next 10 years is transmission and interconnection right now, you say, and I think there's good reason to say this. You know, Jesse Jenkins modeling shows this, Common Sense, I think, tells this that there's some reason to think that even the IRA projection would not actually come true because for it to come true, you have to build, you have to make permitting easier, right? You can't block it all, and you gotta build a bunch of transmission to make room for it on the grid. So there's some reason to think that both scenarios should be a little bit more glass half empty, given current transmission and interconnection restraints, right? But the flip side is: should we get our shit together and reform those, both scenarios could be higher, right? That the glass could be much fuller if we actually got our stuff together. So, just maybe like spell that out a little bit, the sort of like the ceiling, as you call it, for current clean energy deployment. Yep. Going, writing this report made me really appreciate like the literal ceiling that exists, and how much energy can get added of all types at any given point, and how fast it can be. And that's due to this, like, massive gauntlets and all the barriers that it, how long it takes to get permits and find a site and connect to the grid and construct a project. And the model itself actually does include this in its construct. It has a literal cap on how much energy can get added. So the model reflects that. And yes, if you lift the cap, you know, the results would be a lot better. And so Jesse was someone who, right after the IRA was passed, tried to put a number on how bad it is. And he found that 80% of the twenty-thirty emissions reductions from the IRA would be totally lost if we could not build transmission any faster. And the sad reality is that we've been building it slower ever since that report came out. God. And then John Bisling, who And then John Bistlin, who's another modeler, he put out this great paper in Nature with a lot of folks, a lot of different groups, and they compared every single IRA model. And one of the things I found most interesting about that report was that later assessments of the impact of the IRA had dimmer and dimmer outlooks because people began to appreciate this concept of the ceiling and the transmission constraints a lot more. Yes, but those are not technical restraints. Those are political and regulatory constraints that theoretically policy could ease, theoretically. Yes. Okay, so maybe this is difficult to answer, but just like taking into account all the things that were not really modelable, that were sort of exogenous to the model, or that are, you know, all the other factors. Do you think all those other factors increase or decrease your net, the net level of the class, as long as we're using that metaphor? Sure. Yeah, I mean, in the report, I take the time to really spell it out across different time horizons, dig into both the good and the bad news. And, you know, I come out still glass half full. I think the demand pull that we are seeing is really massive and really important to delivering clean energy. It comes with it, the hyperscaler's deep pockets to pay. It comes with it in urgency to build more and faster. And then, right, there's literal gigawatts and gigawatts that I enumerate in the reports of what will actually get added in the coming years that are plus. And, you know, I'm hoping that that will offset the behind the meter gas that we're seeing. So I still think it's glass half full. All right. Let's move on to a couple of things that I kind of want to argue with you about, even though I agree with you. Okay. If that makes any sense. I find myself in this position more and more often. It could just be that I'm getting cranky and old. But first is you argue that Democrats should get their act together and push for permitting reform and push for more transmission to lift this ceiling. Right. I totally agree with that. They should do that. But in the process of making that argument, you argue against pushing to extend the tax credits. And before I say anything about that, why don't you just say what's your political economy thinking behind that? Hey there, everybody. Don't worry. I'm not going to tell you about a new mattress or push a credit card on you. This isn't an ad. There are no ads on Volts. 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If you don't like subscriptions, you can make a one-time contribution, leave a review on Apple or Spotify, or just tell a friend about Volts. I am grateful for any and all support. If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you. And now, back to the show. And before I say anything about that, why don't you just say what's your political economy thinking behind that? I think, yeah, this is a fun discussion, and I'm glad we're going to dive into it. I think, first, an important clarification is that the report does not view any, you know, policy scenario as mutually exclusive. Like, if you do one, you can't do the other. Rather, it's an attempt to shine light on the different policy levers to figure out what they are, how they work, how effective are they really? Well, you're trying to prioritize, I think, which is God's work. Like, I think Democrats don't always do that. Yeah, I think, right, it's so now's the time to think about the strengths and the weaknesses of and these the weaknesses policies. which Yeah. encourages conversation about, can you design it better? What's most effective? Like, what is worth spending our money on? Because there will come a point in a few years where like the leadership in Congress will meet with the 50th Senator once again, and they will say, how much are we spending? Where and why? Let's, you know, have some good conversation now and think it through. But it's of course not taking things off the table or any of that. And so in the category of like, how do you build more clean? The clean stuff that's most at hand right now is that wind, solar, and batteries, because that's what's getting constructed the most. And so the two core levers are permitting reform at the federal level. The two core levers at the federal level are permitting reform, comprehensive, bipartisan, compromise, and the tax credits that the Republicans put on the chopping block. And so the political economy argument you started there is both thinking about like, what is more durable and how much does it cost? And like, you know, how triggering is it, I suppose? And so on the permitting reform, like it can only get achieved through bipartisan compromise and it costs $0. And so permitting reform, I've loved thinking about it recently, is like free money. Like it costs no fiscal space and then it will lower the cost of projects because they will not be delayed as often or canceled and it will take less time to build. And so like, that's free money in some ways that we can pick up. Versus the wind and solar tax credits have, you know, a sizable bill that comes with it. They've existed for almost 50 years since its inception and always extended on a bipartisan basis, bipartisan support, which is really cool. And as we discussed, it was like the sacrificial lamb for the Republicans right now. And so to me, like it's not just taking that fact in isolation. It's also recognizing that like, right, like there's so much antithope against renewables that has far predated Trump. But this was like another arrow in their sheath that was like, you know, wind and solar get free handouts from daddy Biden. And like Democrats are out here saying that clean is the cheapest thing on earth, yet they need to be subsidized. Like they're pointing out the incoherent politics of it all. And you have Republicans who will acknowledge that they are against transmission because of the slush funds that being able to build more would unlock if you have those tax credits in place. And so recognizing that, but then in conjunction with data that shows like, wow, these technologies are mature. Like there is 50 years of U.S. policy and then decades of policy in China and Germany that have driven down the cost. Like we've done such a good job as a planet and as a country supporting these two technologies that Trump can try to decap it and can't. And like that is so promising to me of their viability that it's not just some like emissions reducing target that like some people like that it is something that overwhelmingly is getting added to the grid even when there was no policy supporting it to do so. And so in that light, it makes me think, I mean, this is at a really high level and we can jump into the weeds on it. Like, oh, like they do less perhaps than we thought they did a few years ago and there's other first order policies that might make a bigger impact and there's still like other things we need to invest in and spend our money on. So in terms of prioritization, like maybe other things are worth prioritizing the next time around. Right. I guess the only thing, and this is just one of my hobby horses. Sure. The only thing that bugs me is this notion, which not necessarily from your, certainly not from so much in this report, but I hear this a lot in energy circles, which is, well, Republicans have polarized this and if we do it, they'll just undo it next time. They take power, so it's not worth doing. And I just find that kind of sort of like DC brain so poisonous because you are undercover of being savvy and realistic, just more or less explicitly allowing your political opponents to define the space of what's permissible and what's allowable. And like, we can't really take that literally, right? Because like, if we restore abortion rights, they'll just try to undo those next time. If we, you know, voting rights, like, name it. Like, they have shown that they want to undo most of modernity. Are we just going to say that like, oh, well, if we try to restore modernity, they're just going to undo it next time they take power so it's not resilient or not durable, so we got to give up on that. Like, it can't be that we're formally allowing them to define the space of the possible, right? You see what I'm saying there? I do. And I like your abortion example. And frankly, this is something that I think about often. And our country is very burdened, let's say, by the political pendulum. And we will have, my guess is, you know, a series of one-term administrations back to back to back going forward. And so, of course, it's about taking a few steps forward, you know, getting taken a step back and continuing that process. But I think for me, what really stands out is that there are so many reasons to do what you and I think of as climate solutions for non-climate reasons. And honing in on that and like exemplifying that and elevating that builds more support and increases durability. And so I think about like when the IRA was passed, for example, we were so excited because of the promise that it had and looking out at a 10-year horizon and all that it could do. But if we knew it would only have lasted a couple of years, you know, its impact is immediately hamstrung by how long it can last. And so to me, the best decarbonization, well, the fastest decarbonization is the best. And it happens via what is politically viable in a given moment and has the chance at lasting. And so to me, the strongest climate policy is the one that can last. And deliver durable, consistent decarbonization results instead of like a jump forward that, you know, by the time the IRA happened and guidance was out and there was a boom in investment and deployment right away, but you only had a year or two of impact and then it got cut back. And so I would love to see something that is a bigger amount of impact for a longer period of time. And then now we're in a moment where like wind and solar seem to be pretty self-sufficient in a really comforting way, right? Like that's not a bad news story. And meanwhile, there's these other technologies that need to get commercialized that like Republican support. They kept all the policy on the books for them, all the investment. And like... Well, for now, I mean, well, this is, I mean, this gets to another point, like transmission. Like what if instead of taking Republicans at their word that they just want economically rational policy, what if instead you look at their actions and you're like, oh, they just hate clean energy and they love fossil fuels. And if they get wind of the fact that more transmission will net net benefit clean energy, then they'll turn against that too, which as you say, we've already seen some of that happening. Like they can, they might say we're turning a transmission because clean energy gets all these credits and it's just going to build out a bunch if we build transmission. But then if they find out, if they read your report and they find out, oh, clean energy is going to get built out regardless if a bunch of transmission gets built, why wouldn't they just polarize against that? And then boom, that's not durable. That'll get undone next time they take power. So does that, are we going to take that off the table too? You know what, are they, are we going to let them define that out of the space of the possible too? Sure. I think two things. One, I would be very impressed with myself if the Republican machine took my report. The reason to not do wind and solar. I think there's other problems if somehow my report does that. Number one. Number two is that this shows, like again, wind and solar is 90% of what gets added to the grid. Like it is not in anybody's interest to take that 90% off as one thing. The third is that as we know, we want to fill the glass into a lot more than that. But I think this whole thing of like transmission helps renewables is not a secret. And I think about, you know, I'll, I'll point out explicitly that Travis Fisher, who's one of the most influential people on grid policy on the center right, he testified in front of Congress this year that the phase down of the wind and solar tax credits has made him come around to transmission. And so ironically there we see like the counter polarization is tangible and not just some like conspiracy theory or fear mongering or like us shooting ourselves in the foot preemptively. And so I think it's worth thinking through, like there's a deal space and there are things that are bipartisan, certain technology, certain policies. And of course, like we should still do things on our own that are ambitious in our own unique ways and attempt that, you know, three steps forward, one step back. Like it's, it's a multiple, all of the above approach there. Yeah. And I, and I would just say, and then, and then, and then I'll let this point go. Like I've seen many times over my career, the sort of technocratic DC liberal establishment take these think tank right wing guys at their word that like, Oh, do we just want some technocratic tweaks in this tweaks in policy? this So it's more economically rational and you're like oh then oh we can we can you know we can deal with these people we can compromise with these people and then when they take power they don't just do the little technocratic tweaks they use a sledgehammer you know to like crush the whole thing like travis fisher is not representative of the right wing coalition now which is full of like maniacs he's you know he represents a right wing think tank like what armies does he have what maga politicians are coming to him as opposed to just saying how can we hurt the left how can we hurt what the left likes like that's how they behave when they get power they don't put people like travis fisher in charge when they get power when they get power they go nuts yeah on that i do think for those technocratic changes are not the recommendations republicans are touting or purporting that they'll do on their own in a trifecta for one um but two i think it just speaks to policy design and how can you do it in a way that makes it harder to undo and so right like i think that all the stats and the math that my report shows and demonstrates which strengthens the case but even that aside like the ira there was no sledgehammer taken to it it was a scalpel right every single tax credit was preserved in duration and in amount except for wind and solar you applied the fiock restriction um and then they removed a lot of the grants and they kept the office of energy dominance financing office which does a huge amount of work on the loan side as well and so they did take a scalpel to it and it's in their interest to make it seem like they completely squashed it all well they squashed the ev parts they squashed the grants and loans back to the power sector as our yes yes well we'll see all right so moving on then yeah the other point which i agree with you on and want to argue with you anyway because i'm perverse like that is your second one of your recommendations is and this is the other big one is we should invest heavily in commercializing clean firm technologies which again i agree with hip hip hooray for doing that but in the process of arguing for that i feel like you're a little more pro gas than i am comfortable with on this score and one of the things i want to ask is like i see a consensus forming in the dc board the searchlight people the breakthrough people all these people that that that wind and solar and batteries are like good for satisfying new demand but they're not firm and furthermore can't be firm that there's some essential difference between them and firm and clean firm technologies that can never be bridged by renewables and storage and i guess i just don't no one's ever been able to explain that to me in a way i can understand i get that renewables with four hour batteries specifically can trim peaks right and they are trimming peaks they're trimming peaks visibly in texas and in california and south australia like not nothing they're reducing the amount of natural gas needed natural gas generation needed in those places but we have eight hour batteries already semi-commercial we have continued cost declines in batteries that might make further durations viable we have other chemistries coming online sodium ion we have i just did a i just did a pod hasn't come out yet about these new anodes made of silicon that boost energy density by 5x there's long-term storage coming online and i guess i just wonder like if you get enough storage why isn't it firm like what is the firmness of natural gas that sufficient storage can't get renewable energy to so that makes sense does that question make sense it does yeah um i mean i think you outlined some of it right now what we have on hand is four hour batteries and that's insufficient to provide around the clock reliability um and i think i mean i think i'm more bullish on on eight hour batteries in terms of their promise we need to commercialize that and the thing about batteries is that it like shifts the time of generation rather than making it dispatchable like at any time power can come from it you have to charge them up first um so there is a distinction between batteries and the storage that it provides and they're like around the clock always available stuff well let me stop you there like why like if you build enough solar right you had this enormous excess during the day which right now is a lot of it is just getting curtailed all over the place if you can fill enough batteries up with that Battery is up with that, then it will be there whenever you call on it in any way that seems meaningful to me. Like, why wouldn't it be there whenever you call on it if there's enough excess and enough is stored. Yeah, I mean, I would love to see numbers that show that like solar and storage can power everything. And I think some of the constraints are like back to the transmission and back to land. Like, do we need to build a solar farm the size of Manhattan to power the data centers? But oh, yes, that's possible. You know, you just need the storage to do it. Like, no, you're constrained by land and other things as well. And I just, I highly doubt that for an eight-hour storage will be able to do it. But, like, I mean, per the like, these aren't mutually exclusive, like, clean firm is something that is happening within this decade and is a really rich opportunity. And again, for more than just climate reasons, like this is a massive American export opportunity. This is a beautiful opportunity to transition fossil fuel communities in a way towards clean energy. And it's innovation, it's exciting, and it's really great rich power opportunity. And so, like, there is a difference, I think, between fully getting to supplant or substitute fossil versus just reduce its generation. And that was a theme running through the report: this concept I coined, like shallow versus deep decarbonization, and getting at how that happens. Yeah, that's what I guess I don't fully get. Like, I just don't know why there's some ceiling on storage that makes it intrinsically shallow. You know what I mean? Like, right now, it's only reducing fossil fuel generation, but why not? If there's more and more and more and more of it, won't it eventually eat into fossil capacity? Like, you say, for instance, you say, even in 90% renewable scenarios, you need some gas. And I'm just like, well, yeah, fine. Like, okay, but is that what we're talking about? Are we talking about a 90-10 ratio? Because if that's true, then I don't see the impetus for building a bunch more gas. Like, if we want, if we're aiming for a scenario where there's 10% gas, you're just going to have a bunch of plants sitting around that don't run most of the time. Yeah. It seems like we already have enough gas for that. Yeah, we do have enough gas, which is why the models don't build more gas. Because, because it's able to ramp up and down. But I mean, I'm excited to listen to your podcast with these battery people to learn more. And I also think there's some fantastic academics who do a lot of the like, what do stranded assets mean and looks like? And how do you get to that point? So that's kind of stuff that I don't really dip into at all in this report. Just because solar and storage and wind has the opportunity to power a high percentage of the power grid does not mean that you don't work on that last percentage and innovate there at the same time. Like, to me, it's an ex and basket thing, it's a timeline thing. Like, right, it doesn't make sense to start on the last 120% only when you reach the 80% threshold line. And I think there's some, I mean, you can look at data within energy markets and see that variable renewable penetration right now, like the average, it sits around 40% across all these grids and it can surge and spike up to 70 to 90%, but that's not a sustained level. So, right, we're tackling a whole bunch of stuff at once, like increasing that penetration at a sustained level, innovation to get that last percent over the line. Transmission, obviously, a huge piece of lifting that ceiling, as we said. Yeah. Like there's so many things to solve at once. And it's worth doing them all. Okay, one other thing, which is that's been bugging me, is people who are advocating for building a lot more grid, doubling the size of the grid, which again I'm all for doing that by way of diminishing the contribution of better grid utilization. And this is a very hot topic now that a lot of people are talking about. And I think in the report, you call better utilization marginal relative to what we need. And that just raised my hackles slightly. Like, you have Brattle out there with studies saying that there are like 200 gigawatts of unused capacity floating out there on the U.S. grid. That seems like a lot to me. That doesn't seem marginal to me. And I guess, like, in the spirit of doing everything, why shouldn't we pursue utilization with all our might, even as we are building more grid? Like, why do we need to dismiss the contribution of utilization? Sure. I think while I call it marginal, I also describe it as, again, free money and worth pursuing rapidly. And with urgency. When I worked for Brian, we were doing research about policy opportunities to increase the speed and quantity of these grid-enhancing technologies on the grid and in markets, and looking at the utility business model and all that jazz. So, totally worth doing. I'd say that the JP Morgan report by what was his name, Sembelas, but his first name. Oh, Michael. I could be getting my reports confused. There's so many reports, Lily. You know this. You know the report profusion. Yes, yeah. It might be problematic in its own right. But the, so anyway, that's aside. You don't need to say that, but, or meaning I don't say that. I've seen a report that quotes about like up to 40 gigawatts of demand flexibility capacity here in the US today, and maybe sure some of that amount more to come. If we need to be growing the grid by like a doubling of the grid would be 1300 gigawatts. So, if we have, I mean, you've cited 200 gigawatts of extra capacity available on the grid. That's just 15% for demand flexity. You know, that's only a couple percentage points. And so it's just in scale to what it can contribute and the amount that a building that really needs to happen. So, not to diminish what it can do, needs to pursue it at all costs. It just simply can't replace building, and that's a fact. Yeah, yeah, I get it. It's just that in the short term, there are these constraints on wind and solar that we are bumbling our way towards trying to lift. And while we're bumbling, you've got a bunch of tech guys out there pushing and pushing and pushing to build gas in the name of speed to power. So, all I'm saying is, you got utilization that could do what that short-term gas is doing as you are trying to raise those long-term constraints on wind and solar. I just want to avoid a big short-term gas build out, basically, is what I'm about. Yeah, I'm about that too. And I think pushing for utilization and demand flexibility is important and great. And can't wait to see more fruition of that come to pass, right? It's still a relatively novel thing. And I don't know where the demand centers are being, data centers are being built versus where that capacity is on the grid and the technicalities of how you reach all that. But I hope it's happening and hope it can come to pass. We'll talk about difficult to model as utilities getting over themselves and getting serious about this? Who knows how to model that? You would have thought it would have happened by now. Yeah. Okay, well, we are mostly out of time, but I just wanted to do a couple of final things. One is pulling the lens back, this, I think, a useful frame. You talk a lot about how the IRA was passed in a particular set of circumstances, not just technical circumstances, but political circumstances, political economy circumstances, economic circumstances, and now we face a very different set of circumstances, and that should inform how we approach policy today. So, maybe just take the camera back and talk about that on the sort of broadest level. Sure. I think about both the last six years of climate policy development, but then also the past 20. And first, the consensus in the climate movement, was that you needed to tax carbon. That's the best policy to do. And we tried that several times, many times, and of course, it never came to pass at a federal level. They're still in my inbox, Lily. They're like the soldiers on the Japanese islands that didn't hear about the war ending or whatever, like they're still out there. You know, and I respect their committed to their principles and their values and their priorities. But then, like, I think it's beautiful the conception of like make clean, cheap, and industrial strategy and incentivizing innovation and deployment in the demand side and manufacturing. And so there was able to be built a political coalition to make it pass. A lot of people spent years developing the policies, including the Energy Act of 2020 that happened during the Trump administration and bipartisan work that happened to lead up to the IRA, created a lot of the authorizations that then the Biden infrastructure law and IRA was able to appropriate and fund, which is a cool part of the history. But then I looked specifically at 2021 as a window, and it was a democratic trifecta. Interest rates were zero. Like the administration was prioritizing jobs over inflation, and there wasn't much room for climate bipartisanship. It was like peak woke era. And with that came a law that was built and sold as like man's greatest climate law. And it is on paper. It's the best climate law America has had. But then it got attacked that way. And now almost all of those conditions are like completely inverse, where cost of living and affordability politics is the name of the game. We have a massive demand growth that we did not see at the time. You know, geopolitical competition over this stuff has increased and interest rates have stayed high. And so and we're in a Republican trifecta, more polarized than ever, et cetera. And so I think as a result, like just simply looking at like the color of the room that we walked in in 2021, it's decorated really, really differently this time around. And so to me, that's like the first obvious sign that the next Democratic president should not try to redesign the room and decorate it, you know, the same way as what we had in 2021. It's just a different world. Yeah. The only thing I would add to that, and this is, again, just grinding my personal axis, which is like I have seen so many cycles of this over my life of like Republicans come in, spend all the money, right? Jack up the deficit, break everything. And then Democrats come in and have this reasonable conversation like, well, everything's broken now. So we have to, so we have to, you know, trim our policy ambitions because they broke everything. And I just like, well, they took all the money and gave it to rich people. Democrats could, if they got real ambitious, take it back. You know what I mean? And like they broke all our scientific research and they broke LPO and they broke all these institutions. We could rebuild those things. Like we could remove these barriers that are holding clean energy back. Like I just would like to see a little bit less, let's be reasonable given these constraints they placed on us and a little bit more F these constraints. Let's be ambitious, break the constraints and like try to, try to win rather than just accommodate. You know what I mean? I just want to see more ambition, Lily. I want ambition too. And I think I translate ambition to results. Like I want results more than I want ambition. So to me, it doesn't matter how colorful or massive or large a climate law is if it's only going to last a couple of years. So I care about durable, consistent results, but agree that like we should not do performative austerity, like make it a fetish for every bill or accept the framing that all spending is equivalent or put ourselves in traps. But it's possible to design policy in a way that doesn't cost as much ranging from permitting reform that literally is not a tax policy to just like the methane fee, I think is pretty underrated that it was able to survive because it has revenue sources beyond 10 years. And like, therefore you can't just repeal it that easily. And the Republicans had to figure out some other legally creative way to do so. So I think there's a lot of ways to have ambition, but most importantly, like as someone who cares deeply about climate and about climate mitigation, like to me, ambition is, are we actually doing it or not? Okay. Final question. Lily is in charge over the next 10 years. Miracle. Yeah. Big, big miracle. Just flagging that. Or just, or just, let's say, let's say a miracle happens in 2026 politically. And then again, in 2028, there's a democratic trifecta and Lily's in charge of the democratic trifecta, a slightly smaller miracle, still a miracle. What would you describe what you want to see over the next five to 10 years? What looks to you like good, smart, durable, clean energy policy that's going to produce results in advance decarbonization and advance clean energy? Just sketch out what you'd like to see. Sure. I think the report is pretty simplistic in that it looks at a couple building blocks of renewables, of gas, and of clean firms. So there is a whole myriad of like FERC technicalities and all this other stuff that maybe one day I'll be smart enough to dive into. But I'm not right now. I think on permitting reform, to me, that is a 1000% priority to happen this Congress. I do not want to do that next Congress or next administration. Like that needs to be done now. And I think if it's not done, the next administration will show up with an embarrassingly empty pantry of tools to use. Why this Congress and that next one? I mean, obviously, like, sooner is better on some marginal way, but why the extreme urgency? Why, why, if there's a better balance of next Congress, wouldn't there be a better bill? You're right that there's urgency as in the If urgency as in the sooner the better, negotiators are quite close to be coming to a final deal. And that's exciting. Next Congress. The people, the members who manage the committees in jurisdiction will change and it looks like they will be less favorable to a bipartisan deal. And because comprehensive permitting reform requires compromise on both sides, you need that to happen right now. And right now the conditions are most favorable to making that happen. Okay. Permitting reform. What else? Permitting reform. I think I would love to direct a lot of attention towards commercializing clean firm. One of my friends did an analysis looking at all of the federal support that has gone to energy technologies and found that solar has received 50 times as much as geothermal, for example. And so we have a long way to go in the amount of respective and adequate support that we can give to these technologies to commercialize them, accelerate their timelines. But you specifically say in the report that tax credits might not be the best. Yep. Like tax credits, which are the most familiar and easily reached for and, you know, like the usual. Yep. The closest thing we have to a usual support policy for clean energy might not be best for clean firm. What sort of things would you like to see? Sure. And just a note on that. It's interesting because a tax credit works best when the market is mature enough to respond to a price signal. So, therefore, right now you need more patient capital. You need long-term debts. And so the Office of Energy Dominance Financing is doing a really good job of living up to the promise that was revealed in the Biden administration and is continuing to do really good work. And so I'd really want to supercharge that and really complement it to make sure that the full capital stack across the federal government is represented and is able to contribute to commercialization. I'd want to spend a lot of time focusing on building out the grid, doing it as fast as possible, doing it, making the most of it of what already exists. And... You also mentioned some gas policies, which maybe you could shout out now in terms of... Oh, yeah. ...preventing the worst of the damage from gas. Yes. I have a nice list. I just want to pull that up. Yeah. I think the model highlighted that the fossil fleet is pretty sticky and there are things that we can't do. I'm a little bit assuming that the endangerment finding is going to be left for dead in some form or another. And at the very least, it's worth thinking through other regulatory opportunities to decarbonize fossil fuels and reduce their carbon intensity. And so, at least four ideas that, by my understanding, the oil and gas industry generally supports are to bring back the methane fee, expanding support for carbon credit, reinstating the greenhouse gas reporting program, which is making large emitters actually say how much they're emitting. Yeah. And all of that, which can be used for carbon tariff and it can be used to establish products level carbon intensity standards. And so, yeah, there's a lot of progress or a lot of opportunity to work there. And then, of course, my bread and butter and, like, the things that I spend the most time about is international climate policy and competitiveness and export opportunities. And so, there's a whole suite of packages you can do there, both thinking about, like, being able to defuse American clean tech abroad, but then also looking at tariffs and trade barriers and what can we do to alleviate costs here on Americans and what tariffs make sense to lift and how can we make deployment as fast and cheap as possible here in the U.S. Well, maybe on a final note then, because this will return us to something we almost began with, which is NOAA's sort of concern about the signal that the death of, or the seeming death, at least the optics of America's comprehensive climate plan getting destroyed, send to the international community. You worked on Carrie's international climate team. What can we say to other countries, basically? Like, what, you know, like, they, from the outside perspective, I think it looks like America abandoned the fight. As you say, and as your report very, very ably shows, that's not necessarily true. There's a lot of nuance. There's a lot still going on, but the optics are terrible. What would you like to see a new democratic administration do to try to repair that breach? Do you have any ideas on just how to, like, regain the trust and respect of other countries specifically on this fight? on this fight? Yes, that's something that I spent a lot of time thinking about. And there's a whole policy community of people putting a lot of time and energy into thinking that through. And I think one thing I'll point out is that other countries are upset with America for reasons far worse than climate and far deeper than climate in the Paris Agreement. Like, right, like how trustworthy we are is not because we pulled out of the Paris Agreement. It's because of everything else. Yes. Which would take too long to enumerate. One tiny piece of the puzzle. Exactly. So I think like it is helpful to show that like the American private sector and market momentum in states are still committed to this. And like the American federal government will one day reduce our efforts on climate here domestically. But something I think is interesting is that the U.S. positioning to be able to contribute to global climate change is really in our innovation here at home and the potential to diffuse clean energy abroad. And so to give an example, again, when the IRA came out, the Rhodium Group released some analysis that showed that the emissions reductions benefits of the IRA would be larger in the rest of the world by two to four X compared to here at home. And that's because of the power of the United States to commercial, to invent, to commercialize, to grow, and then to diffuse technology abroad. Yep. And so while the U.S. is obviously a massive historical emitter, the historical emitter, and there is a lot that we need to do to decarbonize ourselves, we are not in any way hamstrung from still being able to help the rest of the world. And so there is a whole set of policies in the economic, statecraft and foreign policy land ranging from international investments and foreign assistance and trade and all these other tools that, and like finding opportunities for climate and clean energy and normal pillars of foreign policy to be able to like get our solutions out in the world to incentivize innovation and yeah, to accelerate the energy transition abroad. So there's a really ripe and big tool kit that is not limited to the UNFCCC and to the Paris agreement. And that's really exciting because it means I think that the next administration will come in with a lot more creative ideas, a lot more heft behind the international climate fight. All right. Well, we'll leave it there. I kept you too long. It was great. Thank you so much. Really clever, interesting report, really stimulating a lot of interesting discussions. Thank you for doing it. And thank you for walking us through it. Of course. Really fun to talk to you and glad we got to spend time going through all the wonky stuff. That's my jam. All right. Thanks, Lily. Okay. Thanks, everybody. You've been listening to Volts, founded and hosted by me, David Roberts, produced by Nate Peavy, and supported entirely through the generosity of listeners like you. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider telling a friend about Volts. That's how this show grows and survives through word of mouth. See you next time. Bye.