Instead of delving into my library, I’ve been preoccupied with online articles and digital content that’s focused on politics, energy, and power. Fortunately, this summer, I got back to reading books, and it has been a real joy. Here are two fantastic books that I read cover to cover, along with two recent articles that deserve your attention.

Rickey: The Life And Legend of An American Original

I don’t watch baseball. (Who does?) The games and the season are too long. The only time I care about baseball is during the World Series, and even then, I’m not overly invested. That said, I have an affinity for baseball books, and Howard Bryant’s biography of Rickey Henderson, baseball’s greatest base stealer, is superb.

Bryant tells Henderson’s life story with verve and style. He explains how Henderson came of age in the sport when salaries were soaring, and along the way, he makes a convincing case that Henderson is among the greatest players in the history of baseball. For me, one of the best parts of the book is when Bryant explains why Henderson’s family left Arkansas during the Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South. By landing in Oakland in 1969, Henderson joined a Who’s Who of great African American athletes who came from that city during that same time period, including Frank Robinson, Curt Flood, Dave Stewart, and Bill Russell. Reading Bryant’s story about Henderson and his reporting on the Great Migration led me to another remarkable book.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

This book by Isabel Wilkerson is among the best books — fiction or non-fiction — that I’ve ever read. While growing up in Tulsa in the 1960s and 1970s, I was aware of Jim Crow laws and school segregation. In 1973, when I was 13, Booker T. Washington High School, an all-Black school, became the first in the city to voluntarily desegregate. But my knowledge of the real history of what had happened in Oklahoma and other parts of the South during Reconstruction and the first seven decades of the 20^th century was, well, limited. Like every other freshman in our high school, I was required to take a semester of Oklahoma history. And while we were taught about its status as Indian Territory, the many tribes that call the state home, and its relatively recent statehood (In 1907, Oklahoma became the 46^th state to join the Union), the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was never mentioned. Not once.

I bring up that history because Wilkerson’s book, published in 2010, is a masterpiece of journalism and history. She interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the Great Migration, the largest internal migration in US history. From the 1910s to the 1970s, about 6 million Black Americans fled the South for cities in the North and the West. Wilkerson is unflinching in her reporting about the brutality that prevailed in that era, including the lynchings and everyday violence. The Great Migration, she explains in the first pages of the book, was the “first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free.” The Warmth of Other Suns is a riveting read. It’s 550 pages. I read it in three days. Highly recommended.

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“If Grid Utilization is Good, Wind and Solar Are Bad”

I’m a big fan of the Energy Bad Boys, Mitch Rolling and Isaac Orr. I always read what they publish here on Substack. Their latest article provides yet another example of why they are so good. In “If Grid Utilization is Good, Wind and Solar Are Bad,” the two analysts make an essential point: the massive increase in deployment of weather-dependent generation has led to a big increase in the need for transmission lines, and that has “led to a significant decrease in the overall utilization rate of the generation resources already serving the grid.” (Emphasis in the original.) They continue, writing that “You can have a grid with a higher utilization rate, or one that incorporates large penetrations of wind, solar, and battery storage capacity. You can’t have both.”

As seen in the graphic above, Orr and Rolling show that as installed generation capacity has soared, grid utilization (which they define as “the average fleet-wide capacity factor of all of the installed generating capacity”) has fallen. Those trends help explain why US electricity prices have increased by 107% since 1990. They note that grid utilization “peaked in the United States peaked in 1999 at 53.7%, and has since fallen to just 39.4 percent as of 2025.”

Orr and Rolling’s article is timely given the big push to build large amounts of new high-voltage transmission across the US. That effort is particularly strong here in Texas, where Oncor (a division of Sempra), AEP, CenterPoint Energy, CPS Energy, and the Lower Colorado River Authority are aiming to build nearly 2,500 miles of new 765-kV lines and 649 miles of new 345-kV lines. (For more on that, see my July 31 article: “Power Grab: Texas’ $33B High-Voltage Heist.”)

In their conclusion, Orr and Rollings say that grid utilization is falling:

Because we added approximately 312,000 MW of wind and solar resources during a two-decade period when demand was essentially flat — which is also a great explanation on why prices have increased as much as they have. Now that demand is surging again, the wind and solar advocates are using load factor as a red herring to hide the fact that they’ve spent billions of dollars increasing the size of the generation fleet, driving down overall utilization rates and increasing electricity prices as a result.”

Again, the Energy Bad Boys are a must-read here on Substack.

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It has been a few months since this article, “The Sovereign Signal: Nuclear Energy as Strategic Infrastructure,” was published in American Affairs. But it is still timely and relevant to the US nuclear sector. The article was written under a pseudonym, John Arden. The author, with whom I am acquainted, works in banking and finance. The article is heavily footnoted and takes a high-level look at the challenges facing the revival of nuclear energy in the US. The gist of Arden’s argument is that if nuclear energy is going to succeed, it has to be treated as “sovereign infrastructure.”

Here is a key excerpt:

Conventional explanations — such as regulatory inefficiency, permitting bottlenecks, market conditions, or public skepticism — identify real frictions but miss the underlying inertia. For instance, despite the NRC’s procedural reforms, licensing delays persist because the system lacks a unifying mandate, revealing a deeper misalignment. What we are confronting is a failure of classification: a category error. Nuclear energy is not just one option among many within a diversified clean energy portfolio; it is strategic sovereign infrastructure, analogous to missile defense, civil aviation control, or central banking. It is a system whose development cannot be delegated, whose coordination cannot be crowdsourced, and whose permanence transcends commercial return. As long as we continue to frame nuclear deployment as a market‑based policy challenge, we will remain frozen—not because of bad actors, but because the logic of the frame itself cannot produce motion.

He continues:

All existing efforts to scale nuclear deployment are structurally misaligned, and that only a reframing — not as invention, but as restoration — can return nuclear energy to the policy architecture that makes sense.

The article was prescient. On Friday, the US Army announced it had selected five nuclear energy vendors under its Janus Program to build and operate microreactors on five Army bases in the continental US. In a press release, the Army said it “expects to build and operate more than 20 nuclear microreactors across War Department installations.” The Army’s announcement shows how the government can lead the development, financing, and deployment of new nuclear technologies. And that is exactly what Arden’s article is arguing for. Again, I encourage you to read the entire piece.

I’ll stop there. I will be writing more about the grid and microreactors in the next few weeks.

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Last week, I spoke at length with Robert McNally, the founder and president of Rapidan Energy Group, a Washington, DC-based energy consulting firm. McNally served in the White House under George W. Bush as senior director for international energy on the National Security Council. He’s also the author of the 2017 book, Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices. I met McNally a few months ago when we were both presenting at a conference at Southern Methodist University. As you will see below, McNally has deep knowledge of oil markets. In particular, his understanding of previous market disruptions and conflicts in the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz is helpful for understanding where we are today. Here’s an edited and condensed transcript of our discussion.

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Making predictions can be dangerous. Predictions are particularly tricky when it comes to energy.

To prove that point, consider some of the claims that have been made about biofuels. Back in 1976, Amory Lovins, the co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and a darling of the Green/Left, claimed that with better efficiency in automobiles and a large enough installation of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”

Thirty-five years later, Lovins was still hitting the biofuel bong. In a 2011 book titled Reinventing Fire, Lovins and several co-authors claimed that by 2050, the US will get 23% of its total energy from “non-cropland biofuels.” That same year, in his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama declared that “We can break our dependence on oil with biofuels.”

What’s the reality of biofuels?

Today, biofuels supply just 6% of the energy used in transportation, and nearly all of that fuel is blended with gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel before it is consumed. Put another way, of all the energy consumed in the US (about 94 exajoules per year), just 1.8% comes from biofuels. And remember, producing those biofuels (mainly corn ethanol and biodiesel) would be impossible without abundant supplies of oil and natural gas.

Forecasts about natural gas supplies have also missed the mark.

In 1922, the US Coal Commission, an entity created by President Warren Harding, warned that “the output of gas has begun to wane.”

In the mid-1950s, M. King Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist who became famous for his forecast known as Hubbert’s Peak, predicted that US gas production would peak at about 38 billion cubic feet per day in 1970.

In 1977, John O’Leary, the administrator of the Federal Energy Administration, told Congress that “it must be assumed that domestic natural gas supplies will continue to decline” and that the US should “convert to other fuels just as rapidly as we can.”

In 2003, Matthew Simmons, a Houston-based investment banker, predicted that natural gas supplies were about to fall off a “cliff.” Simmons went on, claiming that “All the big deposits have been found and exploited. There aren’t going to be any dramatic new discoveries and the discovery trends have made this abundantly clear.”

Four years later, Lee Raymond, the famously grouchy CEO of Exxon Mobil, claimed that “gas production has peaked in North America.” Except it didn’t peak. And US consumers should be thanking their lucky stars for that.

Why?

Since 2007, when Raymond made that claim, domestic gas production has more than doubled. And the shale gas revolution, which began in the Barnett Shale in Texas, has reordered geopolitics. Instead of becoming a major gas importer, the US is now the world’s largest gas exporter, and countries like France, the Netherlands, Egypt, Belgium, and Germany rely heavily on US LNG to fuel their economies.

But forget the foreigners. The real beneficiaries of the shale revolution are American consumers. According to a recent analysis, since 2007, the tsunami of gas coming from formations such as the Permian, Haynesville, Marcellus, and Utica, has saved US consumers about $3.7 trillion. Put another way, the shale revolution is now saving every American citizen about $571 per year.

Before you rush out to kiss a roughneck, let’s look at three new documents that spotlight the stunning gains being made in the Gas Patch and why those gains are benefiting everyone in the US.

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to my son, Jacob, about the situation in Germany. After hearing his observations about what he’s seeing in Berlin, I encouraged him to write this essay.

An American In Berlin

By Jacob Bryce

Berlin has a reputation as one of Europe’s “cool” cities. And it’s true, the vibe in Berlin — its nightlife, restaurants, and cultural scene — is amazing. But Berlin isn’t Germany. And as an American who’s been living in Berlin on and off for the past three years, I can tell you that Germany is in the midst of a self-inflicted decline.

Many of the young Germans I’ve met here, including several of my German friends, are hoping to leave the country. Why? They don’t have hope for the future. They see the German system as intractable, a place where upward mobility feels nearly impossible.

While many things are contributing to Germany’s decline, I believe there are three main drivers. As I mentioned above, the most important one is that young Germans have lost faith in the country and aren’t eager to work. Second, the bureaucracy and tax burden are absurd. Third, the energy costs are crushing the economy.

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In 2019, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that his charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, would give $500 million to the Beyond Carbon campaign, an effort designed to “finish the job” of transitioning the US “from coal and other fossil fuels to 100% clean power.”

In 2021, Bloomberg’s charity launched a campaign “to close a quarter of the world’s 2,445 remaining coal plants and all 519 proposed coal plants by 2025.” Bloomberg said his group would achieve that goal by expanding its efforts from the US and Europe to “25 developing countries where coal power is projected to rapidly grow.”

In 2023, Bloomberg was at it again. He announced that he was donating an additional $500 million to the Beyond Carbon campaign, which Earthjustice said was “one of the largest philanthropic efforts to fight the climate crisis in the US.” In a press release, the group said that by 2030, it aims to “shut down every last US coal plant.”

Yes, well. Bloomberg may be lavishing a cool $1 billion on his activist pals at Earthjustice, Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and other groups, but a bunch of Asian countries didn’t get the memo about quitting coal.

I recently returned from a trip to three of the world’s fastest-growing countries: Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. It was my first trip to Southeast Asia, and it was a remarkable experience. Saigon is a boom town. Construction cranes were visible throughout the city and all along the Saigon River. In Singapore, new buildings were going up all around the Marina district. From the top floor at the Hilton Kuala Lumpur, I counted more than 30 construction cranes. All three cities were clean and safe, the people were friendly, and the vibe was optimistic. There’s reason for the optimism. The major economies in Asia are booming, foreign capital is flowing in, and incomes are rising.

What’s fueling Asia’s economic boom? Coal-fired power plants.

I may be spoiling my own punchline, but here it is: The US isn’t really using less coal. Instead, it has exported its coal use to Asian countries. These seven charts tell the story.

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I do my best to avoid listening to President Trump. The man talks way too much. As US Sen. John Kennedy, the Republican from Louisiana, recently said, Trump gets “anxious when he has an unexpressed thought.”

But try as I might to plug my ears and cover my eyes, I can’t ignore the loony-round-the-bend comment that came out of Trump’s hyperactive mouth on Monday when he claimed that Exxon Mobil and Chevron were making “too much money” and that the oil giants “ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price.”

I’ll be darned if Trump doesn’t sound just like US Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Independent (Socialist) from Vermont.

In May, Bernie wrote on X/Twitter that “Big Oil is making a $30 million windfall profit every HOUR by using the Iran war as an excuse to rip off commuters at the gas pump.” Sanders went on to say the US should end the Iran war and “pass a windfall profits tax – NOW.”

It’s remarkable to hear a Republican president — particularly one who made $1.4 billion last year on his cryptocurrency investments — sounding so much like a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s also remarkable to hear him lambast the oil industry when he was the one who started the Iran war, which is fueling the surge in hydrocarbon prices.

Sure, Exxon made a lot of money ($14.7 billion) in the second quarter. But neither Trump nor Sanders bothered to note that the Texas-based oil giant lost $22.4 billion, the largest loss in its history, back in 2020. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall Bernie holding a bake sale in Burlington for Darren Woods.

Trump’s latest bout of logorrhea spurred me to dive into the 2025 revenues, profits, and profit margins of the biggest corporations in the US. Doing so tells a story that even a politician could understand.

And to paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the margins, stupid.” Let’s take a look.

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The legacy media has woken up to the backlash against data centers. Unfortunately, much of the analysis misses the mark. Last month, a conservative writer published a piece in the New York Post in which he claimed that “The effective voices against data centers, after all, are the same Luddites who’ve spread environmental apocalypticism to stop modernization projects such as pipelines and power plants and fracking.”

A few days later, the New York Times ran an op-ed that was headlined, “The Environmental Case Against Data Centers Is Misguided,” in which the writer claimed to “empathize with the environmental opposition to data center construction, but the arguments are shakier than they seem.” (The writer completely ignored the serious problem of noise pollution, among other things.)

While pundits would like to dismiss the opposition, the numbers don’t lie. A poll published last week by Fox News found that “by a 40-point margin, voters opposed data centers in their area to support artificial intelligence.”

As I have explained in my previous coverage of this issue — see here, here, here, here, and here — as well as in our short documentary, “The Data Center Backlash,” the opposition to data centers is similar to what I have seen in my coverage of the opposition to Big Solar and Big Wind projects. As I explained in May, in “Top 10 Reasons Why Communities Are Fighting Data Centers,” the simple truth is that people “all across the US and around the world are fighting data centers because these projects are not providing sufficient value to their communities.”

That fact helps explain why last week, Willie Nelson declared on Instagram that “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light-polluting, data center anywhere near our town.” Willie’s comments provide further proof that what we are seeing is a cultural backlash against Big Tech. That’s why I’ve been covering the issue so closely. Energy policy and land-use policy are two sides of the same coin. Energy policy (data centers are an example of energy policy) determines land-use policy and vice versa. Further, the backlash against Big Tech reflects deep anger in the American electorate. As one Democratic strategist told the Wall Street Journal last week in an article about the rise of the far-left socialists, “Voters are pissed off.”

Over the past few weeks, Jacob and I have been combing through news articles and other outlets to make sure we have the latest figures. Here they are: Since January 1, 2026, we have documented 275 bans, rejections, restrictions, or moratoriums on data centers in the US. For comparison, there were 49 rejections in all of 2025. All of these rejections are documented in the Data Center Rejection Database, which is the only free, online, searchable database of its kind.

I’ll end by reiterating a few points. First, I have no dog in this fight. I have been reporting on data centers and power demand for more than 25 years. I’m continuing my coverage because the growth of data centers and AI involves many of the topics I’ve been focused on for years, including land-use conflicts, electricity demand, power generation, and the rise of Big Tech.

Second, I use AI nearly every day. It’s amazing.

Finally, here’s a prediction: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will run for president in 2028 and a key part of her platform will be opposition to data centers, Big Tech, and AI.

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The billionaires, bureaucrats, and academics make it sound easy.

In his 2021 book Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now, John Doerr, the climate activist and Silicon Valley billionaire, claimed that the US could slash its emissions to zero by 2040. Making that happen, he wrote, would require electrifying nearly everything in our society, and “a doubling of the transmission system above business as usual.”

In 2022, Michael Polsky, the billionaire founder of Invenergy, a Chicago-based alt-energy firm that has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies and has repeatedly sued rural communities to try to force them to accept solar and wind projects they don’t want, co-authored an article which claimed that the US “should invest in long-distance, high-capacity transmission lines” and “modernizing” the grid to accommodate more renewable energy. Doing so, Polsky claimed, will “increase reliability” and “send an important message to the world.”

In 2023, the Department of Energy released the “National Transmission Needs Study,” which said that “in future scenarios with moderate load but high clean energy assumptions,” the US will need “a 57% growth in today’s transmission system.”

Also, in 2023, Jesse Jenkins, who heads the Zero Lab at Princeton University, told Utility Dive that by 2035, “we’re going to need to add about 75,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines, enough to run from New York City to Los Angeles and back 15 times...That sounds like a lot for a country not used to building big things. But we have built big things in the past, this is not unprecedented, and shouldn’t be viewed as impossible.”

In 2025, a report by Americans for a Clean Energy Grid and Grid Strategies lamented the lack of growth in the high-voltage grid. It said the US needs to build “roughly 5,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission per year,” to ensure “grid reliability, support economic growth, and deliver low-cost power to customers.”

But as I noted in these pages in 2024, the odds of building such huge amounts of new high-voltage transmission capacity are “as my father used to say, ‘slim and none, and Slim left town.’”

That historical context is relevant because one of the hottest political issues in Texas today (along with the backlash against data centers) is ERCOT’s 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan (STEP).

If built, STEP will be one of the largest grid expansions in US history. The project calls for building 2,468 miles of new 765-kV lines, 649 miles of new 345-kV lines, and acquiring (or rather, condemning) about 3,400 miles of new right-of-way. It would also roughly double the amount of 765-kV capacity in the US. But the project, which the Texas Legislature never mandated, is facing fierce opposition. Last month, over 40 Texas state lawmakers signed an amicus brief asking the Public Utility Commission to delay action until the commission “fully evaluates the overall need” for the transmission lines. On Wednesday, I watched a hearing at the Texas Capitol, where more than 200 landowners, including country singer Tanya Tucker, testified before the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee. Tucker, who lives on a ranch in Burnet County, told the committee, “I’m very disappointed in how this has been handled. This isn’t the way we do things in Texas.” Tucker was followed by passionate pleas and testimony from ranchers, landowners and officials, all of them opposed to high-voltage lines. The hearing lasted more than 15 hours.

There’s no doubt that the US power grid needs more capacity, and more high-voltage capacity is being built. But a sober look at the STEP project shows that it is little more than a massive cash grab and land grab by some of America’s biggest electric utilities. Further, while big utilities and Texas bureaucrats are claiming the new 765-kV lines will help accommodate more generation capacity and increase reliability, the project provides yet another example of how Texas regulators are bending over backward to connect more weather-dependent generation to the ERCOT grid and, in doing so, saddle ratepayers with billions of dollars in new costs.

Let’s take a closer look.

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For decades, pundits and politicos have been telling us that solar energy is right on the cusp of global dominance. For instance, way back in 1978, the year I graduated from high school, Ralph Nader claimed that “everything will be solar in 30 years.”

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter called for “a national commitment to solar energy” so that the US would “derive 20% of all the energy we use from the sun” by 2000. Twelve years later, three officials at the Worldwatch Institute claimed that “within a few decades” the US “might get 30% of its electricity from sunshine.”

In 1996, Senator Ted Kennedy said that “solar energy may well become the primary energy source for America and the world in the 21^st century.”

In 2021, President Joe Biden released a plan claiming that the US should obtain nearly half of its electricity from solar by 2050. Three years after that, the Energy Institute, which publishes the Statistical Review of World Energy, enthused that “China is establishing itself as a green energy leader with an unrivaled build-out of renewable energy and export of renewable technology.”

In April, Ember, the London-based consultancy, gushed that “Solar surge halts fossil electricity growth worldwide in 2025.” The article went on to say that solar met almost three-quarters of the growth in global electricity demand and that the increase in solar “drove clean power to meet all global electricity demand growth in 2025.”

Let me be clear: Solar is growing. It’s growing on rooftops and in utility-scale projects. I have 8.5 kilowatts of solar panels on the roof of my house in Austin. (I got three different subsidies to do the installation.) Over the past decade, global solar output has been growing by an average of 27% per year. That means solar is doubling every three years or so. That growth continued last year, when, according to the Statistical Review of World Energy, global solar production jumped by 30%.

Those are gobsmacking numbers. But amid the never-ending hype, it’s time for a reality check. And here it is: The deployment and use of solar energy is dominated by a handful of wealthy countries while the locations that desperately need more low-cost juice — and African countries in particular — are largely left in the dark.

I’ve spent several days crunching the latest numbers to give you the facts, not the spin, about solar energy. Here’s a sober look at solar with 11 charts.

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Holtec Nuclear Corporation is the antithesis of Hadron Energy.

As I reported here last month, Hadron Energy, a startup that aims to build a 10-megawatt light-water reactor, went public on May 26 via a SPAC merger. The IPO quickly made the company’s founder, Sam Gibson, a 25-year-old who graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in mechanical engineering in May of 2023, a centimillionaire, or at least it did on paper. The company’s website includes photos of Gibson on the university campus and informs us that he “brings midwestern values of putting others before himself.”

Gibson’s selfless attitude may be admirable, but Hadron isn’t a business; it’s little more than a business plan.

Hadron hasn’t begun serious regulatory engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it hasn’t begun fabricating a prototype reactor, and it’s approximately 2,432 miles behind the 41 other US companies that are trying to develop, license, and deploy small modular reactors. (The US now has eight publicly traded pure-play SMR companies that have a combined market capitalization of about $21 billion.)

But Hadron’s IPO — and Deep Fission’s on June 18 — provides yet another example of the froth and hype that are hallmarks of today’s SMR sector. Like many of their SMR competitors, Hadron and Deep Fission are riding the wave of AI-related excitement. On its website, Hadron says it aims to provide juice to “defense installations, AI and hyperscale data-center campuses” and “remote industrial sites and communities.”

Now compare Hadron to Holtec, which filed its S-1 with the SEC on July 10. If Hadron represents the hype, froth, and foam of the current moment, Holtec is the beer — a stout beer. While Hadron is a rank SMR startup that will soon be running out of cash and prospects, Holtec is a 40-year veteran of the nuclear sector that is generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and boatloads of cash.

I’ve been digging into Holtec’s 400-page S-1. What I found was a successful company that is generating lots of cash — and, due to its strong balance sheet, huge backlog, and long-standing position in the nuclear sector — it could generate even more cash in the years ahead.

Let’s take a look.

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On Tuesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order banning the construction of large data centers for one year. It’s the first statewide ban in the US, and yet another example of the growing backlash against Big Tech and data centers. Hochul’s ban is the 179th rejection or restriction of data centers in the US in 2026. For comparison, there were 49 rejections in 2025 and just 9 in 2024. All of these are documented in the Data Center Rejection Database, which is the only free, online, searchable database of its kind.

In this 7-minute video, I discuss the New York moratorium and a report recently released by Milltown Partners that confirms what I’ve been saying for months: What we are seeing is a cultural backlash against Big Tech. As Milltown puts it, the backlash is being driven by “anti-tech sentiment more than NIMBYism or environmentalism.” Milltown’s findings are based on a survey of nearly 6,900 registered voters in five large states: Texas, Georgia, Michigan, California, and North Carolina. Rather than write an article about these developments, I decided to make this short video. I hope you like it. And if you do, please share it. Thanks.

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Of all the Enron executives, Lou Pai was one of the most arrogant and most flamboyant. Pai was also one of Jeff Skilling’s closest lieutenants. As I explained in my 2002 book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, And The Death of Enron, Pai had two passions in life: “Money and watching young women take their clothes off — but not necessarily in that order.”

Pai rose to the top at Enron because, as I wrote 24 years ago, he “had the intellectual firepower and focus needed to create the computer programs and systems that allowed Skilling to fulfill his vision of changing Enron into a quasi-investment bank.” And the more money Pai made for Enron, the more Pai was inclined to spend the company’s money. On one occasion in 1990, Pai submitted an expense report to the company that included a lunch at Rick’s, one of Houston’s most famous strip clubs. As one executive told me, the bill was “$757 for one lunch.”

Pai is also famous for his excellent timing. He left Enron in mid-2001, several months before the company collapsed in December 2001. That timing was fortuitous. He was never charged with any criminal wrongdoing at the company. But Pai didn’t leave empty-handed. In all, Pai sold $270 million of Enron stock, more than any other insider at the company. Enron CEO Ken Lay was the second-largest insider seller, with $184 million in sales.

Those Enron numbers come to mind because of what is happening at Oklo Inc., the SMR company that went public in May 2024. As I wrote on March 10, in “Oklo’s Other Enrichment Cycle,” the company has been a darling of Silicon Valley and its co-founders, Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, are among the most prominent faces of the new generation of nuclear entrepreneurs. Cochran, a photogenic graduate of MIT, has appeared at numerous high-profile events, including the Aspen Ideas Festival. DeWitte was part of a contingent that visited the White House last summer for a photo op with President Trump.

While Oklo (market cap: $8.6 billion) has received a metric ton of positive media coverage, the company is trying to commercialize its advanced reactor design in a fiercely competitive market. Oklo is one of 42 US companies now seeking to commercialize a small modular reactor. Dozens of foreign companies are trying to do the same thing. On May 12, the company reported a first-quarter operating loss of $51 million. In the same report, the company noted it has recorded an accumulated deficit of nearly $274 million.

One key difference between Enron and Oklo, of course, is that Enron was a profitable business for decades. For instance, in 1999, two years before it collapsed in one of the biggest bankruptcies in US history, Enron’s revenues totaled $40 billion, and its net income was $957 million. Meanwhile, Oklo, which was formed in 2013, still has not recorded any revenue or profit. Despite Oklo’s ongoing losses, Cochran and DeWitte are continuing to sell significant chunks of their Oklo stock. In fact, their stock sales are leaving Lou Pai in the shade.

Here are the details on Oklo, plus two other SMR items: Deep Fission’s IPO and why the July 4 criticality hurdle matters.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has never been known for his strong political convictions. His views on any given issue are, well, malleable.

For instance, on November 14, the three-term governor raved about Google’s plan to spend $40 billion on AI and data centers during a press event in Midlothian. Abbott declared that Google was helping make Texas “the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy...We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.”

Since that event, the political sentiment around AI and Big Tech has changed — and so have Abbott’s views.

This week, during a speech in the East Texas town of Bullard, Abbott announced he would pursue a ban on data centers in rural communities. “We must prohibit them from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbott declared. He continued, “Any AI data center even thinking about coming here — they got to bring their own money, bring their own power, reuse their own water and do it in a way that reduces the cost of electricity for residents across our state...We must eliminate the tax break they are getting.” Abbott’s about-face reflects the growing backlash against Big Tech, AI and data centers. And it’s a clear reflection of what he is seeing and hearing in Texas.

As Ted Gioia noted a few days ago, “Every demographic group is now opposed to AI — especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.”

Want some examples of the public’s concerns about data centers and AI? Look no further than Texas. Last month, county commissioners in Hays County voted unanimously to approve a moratorium on data center projects until the end of this year. Also last month, a planning commission in Hamilton, Ontario, rejected a data center project after “dozens of opponents of the proposal packed the public gallery and over a hundred waited in the halls.” According to CBC, prior to the meeting, chants of “f--k AI” filled Hamilton’s city council chambers. Need another example? On a single day last month, three counties in Florida issued moratoria on data centers.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We are seeing an unprecedented cultural backlash against Big Tech and AI.

Here are several items, including an updated chart on data center rejections, a rundown on Google’s soaring electricity and water use, and a link to my recent appearance on Scott Tinker’s most-excellent energy and climate talk show on PBS, Energy Switch.

Let’s take a look.

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Construction cranes are everywhere in Saigon.

From our hotel room near the banks of the Saigon River, we could see more than two dozen of them. Construction is happening all over the town, which is properly known as Ho Chi Minh City.

Five decades after the US military left the country after an ignominious war, Vietnam has become an industrial powerhouse with one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. As one media outlet put it recently, Vietnam is “Transitioning from a developing frontier into a sophisticated, high-tech industrial giant.”

I wanted to visit Vietnam for many reasons. Among them: I wanted to see the place that’s making more and more of the stuff I buy. Last month, I bought a new laptop. It was made at a Foxconn factory northeast of Hanoi. A few days after the computer arrived, I went to Costco to get a few items and stopped to investigate the men’s clothing. Regardless of the brand, nearly all of it was from Vietnam. I went home and looked at my dress shirts. Vietnam. My spiffy new sneakers? Vietnam.

Yes, China is still the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods. But Vietnam is catching up, and fast. Last year, the country’s economy grew by 8%. That means its economy is doubling in size every nine years or so. And what’s fueling Vietnam’s ability to manufacture everything from laptops and semiconductors to shoes and shorts? Massive amounts of electricity — and that juice ain’t coming from solar panels and wind turbines.

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As seen above, more than half of Vietnam’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants. And Vietnam will be burning coal, and lots of it, for many years to come. Last year, the country set a new record for coal imports. In April, it inaugurated a new 1.3 gigawatt coal-fired power plant in north-central Vietnam. And according to Enerdata, over 6 GW of new coal plants are under construction, and another 3 GW of coal-fired capacity is in development.

I’ll be publishing more about Vietnam soon. We are heading to Singapore in the morning for some speaking engagements. (I’m talking about — what else? — booming electricity demand in Southeast Asia.) After that, I have another engagement in Kuala Lumpur.

I’m hoping this visit to Vietnam won’t be my last.

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In 2016, I interviewed Sanjay Kar Chowdury, a manager at the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation. Chowdury explained that his company was founded in 1879 and that Kolkata was the second city in the British Empire, after London, to be electrified. He was particularly proud that CESC had drastically reduced the number of blackouts affecting residents of the sprawling city of 4.5 million people. When I asked him about the importance of coal to the Indian electric grid, he did not hesitate.

Coal, Chowdury said, “is a lifeline. It is a lifeline of all the thermal power stations. Without coal, you cannot survive...It’s not possible to keep the lights on without coal.”

Nothing has changed since I did that interview. (Chowdury was featured in our 2019 documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World, which is available for free on YouTube.)

Over the past decade, India’s coal use has surged by more than 40%. Last month, during a heat wave, India’s thermal power stations, nearly all of them coal-fired, provided 62% of the country’s juice. Furthermore, according to the latest figures from Global Energy Monitor, India (population 1.4 billion) is building more than 23 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity.

Alas, these facts don’t matter to the richest anti-energy NGOs in the US.

Last month, the Sierra Club (2024 revenue: $169 million) and Earthjustice (2025 revenue: $207 million) issued a press release about their lawfare campaign to shutter coal plants in Michigan and Indiana. The release quoted a “beyond coal campaign organizer” as saying that the Trump administration is “propping up the coal industry” while consumers are “stuck shouldering the costs.” It also quoted a Sierra Club attorney who said that the administration was trying to throw “archaic coal plants” a lifeline.

Those statements show, yet again, that the anti-industry industry’s campaigners know nothing about the realities of the global energy market. Far from being “archaic,” coal plants around the world, including ones in India, Japan, South Korea, and Europe, are running full tilt.

Why? The Iron Law of Electricity.

Five years ago, I coined the Iron Law of Electricity, which says, “People, businesses, and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.” I have seen the Iron Law at work with my own eyes. I’ve watched as people steal electricity (in India), pay the “generator mafia” in Lebanon) and run their own small generators (in Puerto Rico and Louisiana) to ensure they have the electricity they need to refrigerate their food, cook dinner, and heat (or cool) their homes.

Among the many impacts that the Iran War has had on the global economy -- including price spikes for everything from diesel fuel to fertilizer -- is its effect on power generation. Due to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, global LNG prices have soared, leading electricity generators to reduce their natural gas consumption and increase their coal burn. My friend, John Hanekamp, who writes the excellent International Coal & Energy Summary here on Substack, recently told me he estimates global coal use is up about 6% from a year ago due to the war in Iran and other factors.

Here’s a fresh look at what’s happening in the global coal market. It includes seven new charts, one of which shows coal’s total dominance of China’s energy sector, as well as some remarkable new numbers on coal investment from the International Energy Agency.

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Last month, Heatmap News, a relentless cheerleader for the solar and wind sectors, ran an article headlined, “Trump Is Getting Away With Murdering an American Industry.” The article lamented that dozens of proposed wind projects with 30 gigawatts of generation capacity are now stranded because the Trump administration is deliberately slow-walking — or just ignoring — Big Wind’s permit applications.

The Federal Aviation Administration is doing the slow walking. The FAA is charged with assuring aviation safety. As such, it must provide a “no hazard” determination for any structure over 200 feet tall and ensure that those structures won’t interfere with civilian or military aviation. In previous administrations, the agency has routinely issued clearances for wind turbines, that can stand 500 feet tall or even taller. No longer.

Last month, the War (Defense) Department told a reporter from the Associated Press that it “intends to complete review” of all of the wind industry’s applications “efficiently without compromising the integrity of the review.” In other words, the Trump administration is telling Big Wind: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

The administration’s delay tactic is coming at a key moment. If wind developers can’t demonstrate that they are making significant progress on their projects by July 4, they are unlikely to qualify for the production tax credit, the federal subsidy that has been fueling wind energy development for decades. (Earlier this month, a federal court judge ruled that the Trump administration has to justify the halting of the subsidies. But that ruling can’t force the War Department to speed up its review.)

The Heatmap News article dutifully quoted an unnamed “energy lawyer” who whined that the Trump administration has created an “uninvestable climate.” Meanwhile, Jason Grumet, who heads the American Clean Power Association (2025 revenue: $67.5 million), moaned to the New York Times that it has become “impossible to build a new wind project” in the US.

Well, cry me a fucking river.

I’m a long-time critic of the wind industry, and proudly so. Over the past 16 years, I’ve watched Big Wind collect tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies while trying to bully individuals and rural communities across the US into accepting wind projects they don’t want. And now that Big Wind is getting shut down, I couldn’t be happier.

You should be happy, too.

Here are five reasons to cheer the garroting of Big Wind.

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On Friday, SpaceX will go public in the biggest IPO in history. The deal is expected to give the company a valuation of $1.8 trillion. SpaceX will raise about $75 billion in the transaction, and, due to his massive ownership stake in the company, Elon Musk will become the richest person in history, with an estimated net worth of $1.1 trillion.

Last week, CNBC’s Jim Cramer added to the hype when he said that SpaceX could “end up with a $5 trillion valuation on the day it comes public.”

Is SpaceX worth the $1.8 trillion? Or $5 trillion? Perhaps it is. As a friend, a longtime commodities trader, told me on the phone this morning, “The market is always right.” We both agreed that Musk is a modern-day Edison. We also agreed that the world of finance and investing has become increasingly perilous. (For the record, my pal likes US Treasury bonds.) As one media outlet noted today, the IPO is leaving common investors with “no choice but to bankroll Musk’s AI dream.” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal said: “Investors’ acceptance of SpaceX’s mammoth valuation will likely hinge on whether they believe Musk can deliver on his ambitious ideas, which include colonizing Mars and launching data centers into space.”

I don’t own SpaceX stock and will not be buying it. But it’s also clear that this IPO marks a turning point in the US equities market. Sure, the market may always be right, and yes, Musk might (repeat, might) eventually build villages on the Moon and on Mars. But the IPO numbers are completely unmoored from traditional financial valuation metrics. I made the chart above to illustrate that point. As I explained on May 30, “At a valuation of $1.75 trillion, the company’s stock will be trading at 93 times current revenue.” Add in the fact that Musk will retain 85% of the company’s voting shares and that less than 5% of the company’s stock will actually be sold to the public, and the deal becomes even more incredible.

Perhaps SpaceX is worth trillions of dollars. But we live in the Age of Hype. Has the hype around SpaceX lost all contact with reality? We are about to find out.

Another Power Density Chart

Density is green. Whether we are talking about food or energy production, the goal should always be to have a small footprint. As I wrote back in 2012, “The real organizing principle for a green future is density, which not only provides the goods that we need to survive and prosper but also achieves the land-preservation goals of genuine environmentalists.”

On Sunday, I re-published a 2023 article on the Iron Law of Power Density. And since I’m mining the archives, I’m following up with the chart above, which I published in 2010 in my fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of The Future. As shown above, the power density of corn ethanol (and all biofuels) is pitifully low. Meanwhile, note the high power densities of natural gas and nuclear energy. Those numbers support my thesis, which hasn’t changed in nearly two decades: the best no-regrets energy policy is N2N, natural gas to nuclear.

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Note: You can’t understand energy and power systems if you don’t understand power density. As I explained in the article below, published on August 20, 2023, here on Substack, power density is the most important and least understood metric in physics. I’m reposting it because it is just as relevant today as it was in 2023. It’s also heartening to see that the Trump Administration has adopted power density as a key metric for determining its approach to energy policy. Last summer, Interior Secretary Doug Burghum issued an order that underscored the importance of density and noted that an offshore wind project requires 5,500 times more area to produce the same amount of electricity as a modern nuclear plant.

Before going further, I must give credit where credit is due. Jesse Ausubel’s landmark 2007 essay, “Renewable and Nuclear Heresies,” changed the course of my career. In the very first sentence of the abstract, Ausubel boldly declares, “Renewables are not green.” His essay, along with various books and articles by Vaclav Smil, forced me to think more deeply about land use, land sparing, and material intensity. That, in turn, helped me forge the thesis for my 2010 book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and The Real Fuels of The Future. Power density has since become the north star for my thinking about energy and power, and it led me to coin the Iron Law of Power Density, which says the “lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity.”

Okay. That’s a long enough introduction. Here is the 2023 article again. Please note that I’m offering a 30% discount on annual subscriptions. To get the discount, please click here.

My August 13 article, “The Power Of Power Density,” is the second most popular article I have published here on Substack. The article struck a chord. Why? I suspect that lots of people want to have a better grasp of the physics that rule our energy and power systems.

As I explained last week, power density is perhaps the most important — and yet least understood — metric in physics. Indeed, many people who work in the energy and power sectors don’t understand it. In addition, the Iron Law of Power Density — which says the lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity — helps us understand why wind and solar energy cannot, will not, ever be able to power our society. In addition to their incurable intermittency and dependence on the weather, they require too much land and other resources.

Given the favorable response to last week’s posting, I am going to expand on it here. First, I’ll explore another key metric: energy return on energy invested or EROEI. Like power density, EROEI is a critical tool for understanding why our energy and power systems continue to be dominated by hydrocarbons and why we should be focusing our efforts on natural gas and nuclear energy.

In addition, I am publishing two new graphics. The first is an updated resource intensity graphic that looks at electricity generation capacity, measured in kilograms per megawatt. The second graphic looks at the resource intensity of electricity production by measuring it in kilograms per megawatt-hour of energy produced. Spoiler alert: the new graphic shows even more clearly why offshore wind is such a loser.

Before diving into EROEI, a quick refresher: power density is a measure of energy flow that can be harnessed from a given area, volume, or mass. Thus, power density can be measured in watts per square meter, per liter, or per kilogram. I largely focus on areal power density — measured in watts per square meter — because it is the key to understanding land use and why the paltry power density of wind and solar has led to land-use conflicts from Erie County, Ohio to the Golan Heights. If you want to dive into volumetric and gravimetric power density — measured in watts per liter or watts per kilogram, which are essential to understanding motors and engines — I suggest you read my fifth book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong.)

Now, EROEI. The importance of this metric is obvious: we want maximum return on the cash we put in the bank or the stock market. We also want maximum return on the energy we spend. Just as it takes money to make money, producing energy always requires using energy. Whether it’s chopping wood for the fireplace, the diesel fuel needed to run the generators that power a drilling rig, or the electricity needed to spin the centrifuges that enrich the uranium fuel that we put in our nuclear reactors, we have to spend energy to get energy. And the less we have to spend, the better.

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As can be seen in the graphic above, wind and solar have a woefully low EROEI of 3.5:1, that is, for every unit of energy put into wind and solar, you get 3.5 units of energy out. Meanwhile, nuclear has an EROEI of 100 to 1.

Many analysts and scientists have written about EROEI, but one of the best explorations of the topic was published last year by Leigh Goehring and Adam Rozencwajg. In their essay, “The Distortions of Cheap Energy,” which is the source of the numbers in the graphic, Goehring and Rozencwajg wrote that the explosion in global economic growth that has occurred over the past 140 years or so “was entirely driven by improving EROEI. The modern world we enjoy today is the direct result of efficient and abundant sources of energy.” (Adam Rozencwajg was on the Power Hungry Podcast on January 17 talking about EROEI and other topics.)

Goehring and Rozencwajg, who run a New York-based investment firm of the same name, regularly publish analyses on trends in energy and natural resources. They continued their essay by listing the enormous amount of stuff needed to make a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine: 235 tons of steel, 600 tons of concrete, 15 tons of carbon fiber, and nine tons of copper. They sum up the problem by concluding that it would take 10 wind turbines to replace the energy produced by a single oil well in the Permian Basin. They go on:

Much of Europe’s energy crisis today is related to their massive renewable investment, all of which sports an extremely low EROEI. The questions we get asked the most are: “How could renewables possibly have such poor EROEI without anyone realizing it, and how could so much renewable investment be made with so little recognition of the problem?”

They then talk about the factors that are now coming back to haunt the wind sector, and in particular, offshore wind:

Our modeling suggests that declining (and cheap) energy prices have distorted and partially hidden the true costs of wind and solar over the last decade. Now that energy costs have surged, the true cost of installing and operating renewables are obvious. The relationship between energy input costs and the cost to produce renewable electricity is based upon our propriety research. We have not seen this argument laid out anywhere before, but the more we study the issues the more we’re convinced we are correct... Amazingly, no one has connected declining energy costs and cheap capital with the proliferation over the last decade of energy-hungry, capital-intensive projects such as wind, solar, and lithium-ion battery manufacturing. We think the two are fundamentally linked. What will happen when energy prices normalize and interest rates rise — as is happening right now?

They continued, writing. “It is no coincidence that the proliferation of renewable energy occurred during a decade of abundant cheap energy and abundant cheap capital. As both resources become scarcer and more expensive, the inherent limitation of renewable energy (i.e., its significantly worse EROEI) will come to the fore.”

By now, it should be easy to see how the Iron Law of Power Density and EROEI fit together. Low power density sources like ethanol, biomass, wind, and solar, require more resources like steel, concrete, copper, and zinc. All of those resources require expending energy. Therefore, EROEI can be interpreted as a way to prove the Iron Law of Power Density. Why? The greater the resource intensity (read: energy-hungry ingredients) the worse the EROEI.

Goehring and Rozencwajg concluded their essay with a point that I have been making since 2008: we need to embrace nuclear energy. They wrote, “We have long argued that nuclear must be part of any energy future — green or otherwise. No other energy source offers superior energy return on energy investment…than nuclear power. Furthermore, no other energy source can dispatch the carbon free baseload power needed to run the modern world.”

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Now, to the graphics. I updated the graphic above, a version of which was published last week. As you can see, I added a call-out bubble to underscore the 13 times difference between offshore wind and natural gas-fired generation.

After getting some constructive criticism about that graphic, which uses a screen grab from this 2021 International Energy Agency report, I decided to take another stab at the resource intensity of electricity generation by calculating the amount of metals and minerals that are needed per unit of energy produced. I discussed this idea with my friend, Roger Pielke Jr. (who coined the Iron Law of Climate Change). Roger, who holds a degree in mathematics, agreed to combine the IEA’s numbers of resources with the capacity factors for those forms of electricity generation.

Capacity factor is another critical metric needed to understand our energy and power systems. Capacity factor measures how much energy is produced by a given power plant relative to how much it can produce at peak capacity. Solar plants have relatively low capacity factors because the sun doesn’t shine at night. Coal and nuclear plants generally have high capacity factors because they often provide baseload power and their output doesn’t depend on the weather. The capacity factors used in the graphic came from a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was authored by Natanael Bolson, Pedro Prieto, and Tadeusz Patzek.

As can be seen above, when you include capacity factors for the various forms of generation, offshore wind looks even worse than before, requiring about 27 times more metals and minerals per unit of energy produced than gas-fired generation and more than 10 times more than what’s needed for coal and nuclear plants. This helps explain why so many offshore projects are now in financial trouble.

In their paper, “Capacity factors for electrical power generation from renewable and nonrenewable sources,” Bolson and his co-authors write that “capacity factors are needed for an accurate quantification of the nominal generation capacity needed to replace and expand the current electricity infrastructure.” They looked at global capacity factors for “biomass, fossil fuels, geothermal heat, water, uranium, solar light, and wind over the period 2000–2017. Global and regional values are estimated to highlight the differences in the performance of different technologies. These average CF values are then used to calculate the required nominal capacity to be installed in the future for our unavoidable energy transition.”

Using the capacity factors from the PNAS paper, Roger made a couple of assumptions. The first: gas-fired generation requires one kilogram of metals and minerals per megawatt-hour. He also assumed 1,000 megawatts of capacity for each technology with the power plants operated for one year. The results are eye popping. Solar energy requires about 27 times more metals and minerals than gas and onshore wind requires about 19 times more. Even if these calculations overstate the differences among the different energy sources by 20% or 30%, they still show why solar and wind are the wrong way to go.

In summary, whether we are looking at our energy and power systems through the lens of EROEI, or material intensity of generation capacity, or material intensity of electricity production, the conclusions are irrefutable: the Iron Law of Power Density will not be repealed. If we are serious about cutting emissions, land sparing, preventing the industrialization of our oceans, saving the North Atlantic Right Whale, saving Bald and Golden Eagles, protecting bats, and reducing the amount of mining we have to do to produce the metals, minerals, and magnets needed for our energy and power systems, the way forward is now — and always will be — N2N: natural gas to nuclear.

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