Lead story: The weird nostalgia for coal
The US Department of Energy warns that by 2030, the risk of blackouts in the US could increase a hundredfold as power demand grows partly because of AI. It quantifies an urgent need for roughly 100 GW of new peak supply by 2030. Then the report becomes ideological pushing the administration’s recidivist love of thermal coal.
As we (and others) have long-argued, resilient grids are possible in the short term without coal or oil, and in the medium term without natural gas. CrusoeAI recently demonstrated a data center that ran around the clock on solar power and batteries, showing that continuous renewable supply is technically feasible. Carbon Briefing found that near-constant solar power can be delivered in many cities for about $100 per megawatt-hour—cheaper than new coal plants or nuclear power—and those costs are still falling. Time to build is also double the speed for renewables than fossil plants. Although renewables alone cannot meet one hu…