Monica B. retweeted
This to me is the bottom line
In my view emissions guessing is potentially missing the forest for the trees. U.S. policymakers will not solve a global emissions problem by preserving a domestic status quo where longstanding obstacles to faster, large-scale clean energy technology deployment persist, with activists meanwhile regularly quite unsuccessful in blocking fossil infrastructure.
In the long intervals between federal reform opportunities, countless environmental reports and conference panels seem to bemoan America’s familiar bureaucratic barriers and sluggish clean energy progress. Congress should seize the chance now and catalyze the structural transformation that clean energy transition efforts fundamentally demand.
breakthroughjournal.org/p/th…
Monica B. retweeted
We got your back, New York!
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Several figures here aren’t federal results or NY-specific. The $472B combines US wide pledges: Micron's $250B is nationwide (NY site $100B) Anthropic's $50B covers TX and NY. The 48% murder drop is from NY's state run GIVE program (28 departments, Jan – May 2026).
arkolith.com/news/news-micr…
therepublic.com/?p=843020
governor.ny.gov/news/safer-str…
Monica B. retweeted
Grid experts with a report today that finds that the ratepayer protection provisions in BAAJA mean data centers pay over $50 billion/10 years just for transmission & $100 billion+ more if states follow the guidance to pay for generation! Make them pay!
gridstrategiesllc.com/grid-f…
Monica B. retweeted
US power reactors get their fuel from three licensed plants. A fourth is under construction in South Carolina. Westinghouse builds reactors and makes their fuel, and its new factory goes up beside its plant at Hopkins, outside Columbia, which has made fuel since 1968. All three plants make fuel enriched to 5% uranium-235.
Hopkins' new factory will make fuel enriched to between 5% and 8%, and it starts up in 2030. A reactor on it can run 24 months between refuelings instead of 18. Fuel from Hopkins feeds reactors that produce a tenth of the country's electricity.
ALT Diagram in section: how reactor fuel is made. Uranium hexafluoride gas enriched to 5% uranium-235 arrives in cylinders and a kiln turns it into uranium oxide powder; a press forms pellets that a furnace bakes at about 1,700 C; pellets go into zirconium alloy tubes about 12 feet long; 264 rods form a 17-by-17 assembly. Sources: US Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Westinghouse. Frontier diagram.
Monica B. retweeted
A geothermal plant can power a data center and cool it with the same heat
Turbine waste heat runs an absorption chiller that feeds chilled water into the data center's cooling loop. Project InnerSpace modeled up to $3.2B of cooling savings over 30 years for a 1 GW geothermal campus.
Cooling is 30-40% of energy use at dense AI sites, so developers should be siting campuses on subsurface heat.
Monica B. retweeted
The climate case for the permitting reform bill is simple: Making all energy infrastructure easier to build will enable renewables to flourish — and erode fossil fuels' market share.
And we have good reason to believe that's true — it's called Texas.
vox.com/politics/508196/perm…
I can never resist watching every showing of Star trek, it's a problem. #livelongandprosper
Monica B. retweeted
Gas power plants are not cheap. They're not going to help you win over the neighbors and community hosting a data center. Most of them are booked out until 2031 even if you wanted one. And as Anthropic noted in their S1, they leave you exposed to gas price volatility. There's a better way: firmapower.com
New pre-approval request for a combined cycle gas plant in Oklahoma.
$2,315/kW
Previous two units on the same site:
$738/kW
$1,038/kW
(@Halcyon clients got it first)
Monica B. retweeted
Mines in the US produced 2.1 million pounds of uranium last year. The country's reactors bought 46.9 million.
Twenty US plants hold licenses to mine uranium with wells instead of digging a pit. The wells pump water with oxygen and carbon dioxide into the ore layer underground. The uranium dissolves, a second set of wells pumps the water back up, and resin columns at the surface catch it before a central plant dries it into yellowcake.
Five of the twenty plants were running in the first quarter of 2026, and a sixth started in April. The sixth, Burke Hollow in south Texas, runs 126 wells.
ALT Section drawing of in situ recovery of uranium at Burke Hollow, south Texas: oxygenated water goes down an injection well into the sandstone, the uranium dissolves and flows to a recovery well, resin columns in a satellite plant catch it and the loaded resin goes by truck to the central plant, which dries it into yellowcake. 2.1 million pounds mined in the US last year; 46.9 million bought by US reactors; 126 wells at Burke Hollow. Process from the US NRC; wells and plant from Uranium Energy Corp filings. Own graphic, not to scale.
Monica B. retweeted
More NEWS here in MIDDAY: The wind projects approved so far by Trump's DOD (not including the 2 today) have all been smaller projects classified as “category 5,” which basically represent an upgrade of an already operating wind farm in that same location, @USCleanPower told me
The Trump administration is releasing more wind projects Wednesday that were stalled at the Pentagon — part of a rolling set of approvals aimed at winning over Democrats for the Senate’s bipartisan permitting reform deal.
@SiegelScribe has more:
punchbowl.news/article/energ…
