Reading and Podcast Picks is a collection of what I’ve been reading and listening to over the last week or so about energy topics.

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Opinion | How to Fix America’s Soaring Electricity Prices | The New York Times (gift link)

The cost of electricity is a highly salient political issue now. Tyler Norris has some ideas for how to bend the curve and, as usual, there’s a Texas angle.

For the moment, higher power bills stem mostly from volatile natural gas prices and the costs utilities are passing on to customers to modernize the aging grid and rebuild power lines and substations damaged by wildfires in the West, hurricanes along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts and other extreme weather.

Electricity markets are also beginning to feel the squeeze from an explosive growth in new users. Take the country’s largest power market, serving the Mid-Atlantic and some of the Midwest, where tight supply and dozens of new data centers have led to a nearly tenfold jump in the cost of guaranteeing enough power supply when it’s most needed.

The new electricity demand doesn’t automatically raise bills. A recent study showed that states where electricity use grew fastest often saw average household prices fall, while states with flat or declining use saw prices rise. The impact depends, in significant part, on how cleverly the existing grid is managed — and whether that new energy demand occurs at times when the grid is already strained.

…[In] Texas, regulators are beginning to require large users to be the first to cut their power use during emergencies, helping spare households from outages.

The federal government is now validating this approach. In an extraordinary move, on Oct. 23 the Department of Energy directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to propose a rule that would allow new data centers and factories to plug into the grid years sooner if they agree to lower their use during the rare hours when supplies run tight. The proposal has drawn strikingly broad, bipartisan support.

Some data centers that specialize in instant, on-demand services — like web search, streaming or chat — may find it impractical to dial back during peak hours. But even then, similar benefits can be achieved if data centers pay residential and business electricity consumers to shift their use during extreme peak hours with smart thermostats, networked appliances and battery systems that can adjust automatically. That could provide the same relief for the system while data centers compensate other users directly. (emphasis added).

I covered this idea of data centers paying for electricity demand – and cost – reductions on the podcast with Astrid Atkinson of Camus Energy and recorded one with Tyler on data center flexibility as well.

China’s clean-energy revolution will reshape markets and politics | The Economist (gift link)

The Economist did a fantastic job in a series of articles exploring China’s energy dominance.

The US absolutely could provide a meaningful counterweight – something I explored with American solar manufacturer T1 – but it would require broad political consensus to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy that includes both molecules and electrons, fossils and renewables.

The scale of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp… The 22m tonnes of steel used to build new wind turbines and solar panels in 2024 would have been enough to build a Golden Gate Bridge on every working day of every week that year…

In the context of the cold war, the distinctive measure of a “superpower” was the combination of a continental span and a world-threatening nuclear arsenal. The coming-together of China’s enormous manufacturing capacity and its ravenous appetite for copious, cheap, domestically produced electricity deserves to be seen in a similar world-changing light. They have made China a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale.

China is exporting its revolution to the rest of the world. America’s current government rejects renewable technologies. In Europe industry is hollowing out and voters are rebelling against expensive green policies. But it is in developing countries that the fight against climate change will be won or lost, and it is there that Chinese renewables will make the most difference.

China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels. This trend will continue simply because renewables are cheap; if you doubt the appeal, count the solar panels on Pakistani roofs.

Even if you don’t care about climate change at all for national security and economic reasons alone, the US needs to have a share of the renewable export market. If it happens, Texas will play a major role – and reap the benefits of having both electrons and molecules to export.

Doug Lewin and Nathan Peavey

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Oct 29

Most solar panels are imported from China which now has the ability to manufacture over a terawatt (1,000 gigawatts) of solar modules every year — roughly equal to the entire installed base of generation in the US inclusive from every energy source.

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The U.S. needs energy — fast — to compete with China. Texas can help | The Dallas Morning News

Building on the China theme, this was a great op-ed by the CEO of the Texas Energy Buyers Alliance:

By focusing on energy technologies that can be built most rapidly and affordably, Texas can meet ERCOT’s massive growth projections and bolster American competitiveness with China.