Power Plays: Part III
solar wins the AI race, footing the fossil bill, hat tricks and Sun Day
Power Plays Part I: energy efficiency, growing an economy, climate change, buying time & solar gains
Power Plays Part II: highjacking the narrative, intentional ignorance, grooming LLMs, politicizing AI
HELLO SUNSHINE
In a recent TED talk, Al Gore, the master of the inconvenient truth, pointed out that China installed 45 gigawatts of solar in April. “That’s the equivalent of 45 brand-new giant nuclear reactors in one month,” said Gore.
Not only is solar cheap, it scales. Quickly.
It also turns out that solar is a much better choice than coal for supplying electricity to data centers.
From a new RMI white paper: Reality Check: We Have What’s Needed to Reliably Power the Data Center Boom, and It’s Not Coal Plants | RMI
Coal boosters often point to the “always-on” nature of coal plants as evidence of their reliability. But that characteristic is a liability, not a strength, when it comes to supporting large, fast-changing loads like data centers. Coal units are inherently inflexible: they ramp slowly, respond poorly to sudden load shifts, and are difficult to turn on or off quickly. This rigidity is a poor match for the dynamic and often unpredictable nature of data center demand. Further, inflexible coal plants can worsen grid congestion; by occupying limited transmission capacity with inflexible generation, they prevent cheaper or cleaner resources from being delivered. This issue has already been flagged by independent market monitors in regions like MISO — which covers 15 US states and a Canadian province — where congestion-related market distortions have cost over $1 billion a year. Coal plants displace faster-responding resources that are better suited to follow load. And the stakes are high.
If a data center either loses access to load or goes offline rapidly, a grid’s generation needs to respond at sub-second speeds. The average coal plant ramp rate is 4 percent per minute which translates to spending over 20 minutes to respond to a large load event. From a cold start, the average coal plant would take over 12 hours to reach max capacity. Coal plants simply can’t respond fast enough to support the reliability needs of modern data centers. Whether it’s the hours-long startup time from a cold state or sluggish ramp rates to turn off, these plants are too slow to provide the real-time flexibility required during sudden load changes or outages.
China has shown that solar can be deployed in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost it takes to build a nuclear plant. Or a gas plant (factor in a multi-year backlog for gas turbines). In the race for AI dominance, solar provides a formidable competitive advantage. Which makes the US policy to tack on tariffs even more of head-scratcher.
Getting the energy generation mix wrong with AI could be an economic disaster and an environmental catastrophe, warns Amory Lovins, co-founder of RMI. “A speculative surge is driving massive investment in data centers and new electricity supplies, risking a 12-figure overbuild. Avoiding an electricity bubble requires clear-eyed analysis, disciplined planning, and using markets to allocate risks fairly to potential beneficiaries,” writes Lovins.
In other words, there is a real risk rate-payers will be left to pay the bill for power plants and transmission lines that may not be needed, built to supply power to data centers that were never built.
According to a recent analysis from Carnegie Mellon and North Carolina State, American’s electricity bills are set to spike anywhere from 8% to 25% over the next few years thanks to data centers, while power plant emissions could soar by as much as 30%.
What happens next—what happens now—either will send us careening toward runway climate change or accelerating toward a next chapter full of remarkable possibilities.
The future has yet to be written. Almost anything is still possible.
HAT TRICKS
The laws of physics trump executive orders. Attacking science doesn’t change facts. Declaring an alternate reality by decree simply doesn’t make it so. A gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, will trap heat in the atmosphere no matter what it’s called or how it’s legally classified.
With a nod to Aesop—and as any child can plainly see—the emperor has no clothes.
In 1859, Charles Dickens opened a story about the French Revolution with words that always seems to fit the moment:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." — A Tale of Two Cities
In 2025, we are also surrounded by wisdom and foolishness, torn between Light and Darkness, ricocheting between hope and despair.
It is exhausting. Also, maybe just a little bit exhilarating. This is the moment for a hat trick: a series of remarkable, though not impossible, wins. Or maybe time a whole bunch of hat tricks. This is the moment when everything can change for the better.
Energy efficiency is a hat trick. It grows economies, cuts utility bills, slashes carbon emissions, buys time and provides bipartisan common ground for environmentalists and industry. It can take almost any form, from a window shade blocking out solar gain, to an Energy Star-rated appliance, or an EV, or a more efficient AI model, or a building designed using Passive House principles. Whatever form it takes, efficiency keeps delivering value throughout the lifetime of whatever has been made more efficient.
Solar is another hat trick, now so cheap and ubiquitous, IKEA sells plug’n’play balcony panels (at least in Europe—not yet in the US). In Amsterdam, Biosphere Solar is developing panels that can be opened up for repair and recycling, which can extend the useful life of a panel by decades. A secondary market will bring costs down even further.
To celebrate all things solar, writer and activist Bill McKibben (or “The real Big Beautiful Bill,” as he’s tried to convince his wife) is organizing Sun Day, a global celebration on all things solar on September 21. Check out the website and make your own sun!
“…If you want to upend the balance of political and economic power on this earth—and we should, because grotesque inequality is deeply wrong—then there is no place better to start than by changing the way we make electrical power. Turning to the heavens for our energy instead of to hell is a profoundly subversive act…” B.M.
Advances in wind energy and batteries are two more hat tricks. The combination of cheaper renewables and storage with energy efficiency is a super hat trick.
The materials transition is another hat trick (one about which I am writing a book.) Everything we make really can be made better. There are innovations at the nano, molecular, cellular and structural levels; breakthroughs in process, systems and design; advances in every sector: textiles, packaging, construction, energy, mining, agriculture, digital, medical.
So.
It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
Power Plays Part I: energy efficiency, growing an economy, climate change, buying time & solar gains
Power Plays Part II: highjacking the narrative, intentional ignorance, grooming LLMs, politicizing AI