Latest issue
The Grid Reliability Argument for Keeping Gas Plants Is Getting More Expensive to Ignore
9/2/2026
Natural gas plants are supposed to be stranded assets in waiting — expensive to run, carbon-intensive, and increasingly uncompetitive against wind and solar on a levelized cost basis. The retirement math has looked straightforward for years. Then European gas futures hit a three-…
Recent posts
The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive phase on January 1, 2026 — meaning importers now face actual certificate purchase obligations, not just reporting…
U.S. developers have plans to add 24 gigawatts of utility-scale battery storage to the grid in 2026 — up from 15 gigawatts in 2025, itself a record. The subsidy architecture is lar…
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act didn't repeal the Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy tax credits. It did something more surgical: it set a clock running that the physical infras…
The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism has a defensible core: if you price carbon at home, you need to price it at the border or production just moves somewhere cheaper. That…
Germany's electricity problem has a new price tag: €13.3 billion in consumer and industry relief, proposed for 2027, financed by raiding the very fund meant to build the infrastruc…
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act didn't just trim the IRA's clean energy credits — it turned a complicated subsidy regime into something closer to an administrative obstacle course.…
The European Commission's ETS overhaul lands Thursday. The direction of travel is already clear, and it runs directly against the logic that made the carbon market work in the firs…
When a tax generates so little revenue that abolishing it barely registers in a budget forecast, you have to ask what it was actually doing. The UK's Carbon Price Support — a floor…
Germany hit 57% renewable electricity generation in 2025, according to Federal Statistical Office data — solar alone jumped from 75.9 billion kWh in 2024 to 92.2 billion kWh, a gai…
The Inflation Reduction Act's clean electricity tax credits were always going to be expensive. The question was whether they were expensive in a useful way — buying down the cost o…
The EU just agreed to double the size of its ETS2 emergency release mechanism — and called it a feature. Last week, EU negotiators struck a provisional deal to raise the price-trig…
The UK government's decision to abolish the Carbon Price Support mechanism from April 2028 is being framed in some quarters as a retreat from climate ambition. The math suggests th…
The interconnection queue is supposed to be a planning tool. In Texas, it has become a stress test. ERCOT is currently tracking approximately 410 GW of large-load interconnection r…
The solar industry just handed Congress a compelling statistic: $43.1 billion in announced domestic manufacturing investments since 2022, deployed through the IRA's manufacturing t…
The EU Emissions Trading System is supposed to make pollution expensive enough that companies stop doing it. Right now, it's not doing that job as well as the people who design it…
The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its pricing phase on January 1, 2026. Within weeks, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih — one of Ukraine's largest steelmakers — reported t…
PJM Interconnection just reopened its generation interconnection queue for the first time in four years. Eight hundred eleven new projects totaling 220 gigawatts have applied to co…
Carbon pricing is getting more expensive — Bloomberg reports that carbon market costs are a growing financial risk for companies across oil, manufacturing, and other heavy industri…
Two weeks ago I wrote about the IRA's cost-per-ton problem. The numbers have moved again — in the wrong direction. The R Street Institute, working from updated EIA projections, has…
