White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Birth of a New Reactor: Thorium Past and Present

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If you are designing a car from scratch, there are certain essentials to begin with. You need to start with the wheels on the corners, for example.

But when it comes to building a nuclear reactor, things are different. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of ways of doing it. The constant is that you need fissionable fuel and a moderator to collect the heat and manage the neutron flux.

That embarrassment of choice — now reflected in the number of small modular reactors (SMRs) vying for market acceptance — may be why thorium reactors, which began with promise, have been left on the shelf.

The nuclear establishment, goaded by the Nuclear Navy’s Adm. Hyman Rickover, wanted light water technology. That is what the first 100-plus U.S. civilian reactors employed.

At the dawn of the civilian nuclear age, it was a straight contest between two fuels: uranium and thorium. Thorium is fertile but not fissile: It can’t start a chain reaction unless it is triggered by a small amount of the isotope uranium-235.

Once this happens, thorium becomes uranium-232 and fizzes wonderfully with a steady stream of neutrons, producing heat in the moderator, which is where the first steps in making electricity are taken.

That heat is captured to create steam that turns a turbine.

Thorium was used in part in the first power-producing, commercial nuclear reactor: the 60-megawatt Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. With three different fuel assemblies, it ran for 25 years, starting in 1957. It used solid fuel, which was to become the standard for civilian nuclear power.

Meanwhile, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, under its director, physicist Alvin Weinberg, work went ahead on what would become a legendary fast-breeder thorium reactor, using a liquid fuel embedded in molten salt. It went critical in 1965 and operated for five years before it was closed by the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Department of Energy) in a political move.

A fast reactor uses extra neutrons to create new fuel and burn up radioactive waste. The process is akin to perpetual motion — but isn’t, of course.

Now a charismatic nuclear engineer, Yash Patel, founder and CEO of AMReactor, is planning to bring thorium back as a viable future option for space exploration, power generation and, eventually, ship propulsion.

Patel told me that his reactors – he has designs for a microreactor (under 20 MW) and for a SMR (250 MW). The planned reactors are molten salt-moderated, thorium-fueled fast reactors.

He believes they will not only be cheaper, but will also operate better than the SMRs now entering the market.

Patel’s plan for Austin-registered AMReactor is to outsource as much of the fabrication as possible.

A fast reactor is called a breeder reactor because it generates more neutrons than are needed to produce fission, and these transmute waste into additional fuel.

Patel went to school in California and while looking for a career, a break came that changed the trajectory of his life. He got an internship with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There he worked on Curiosity, the plutonium-fueled Mars rover. His nuclear love affair, he told me, was “complete and instant.”

From NASA, he went to Texas A&M and graduated in nuclear engineering. He was well along with his PhD, when a family illness caused him to abandon it.

Patel lists two great blessings in his life. “The first was that I moved to America from India. The second was attending Texas A&M. That was another wonderful break.”

After a stint in biopharma, where he prospered, Patel started designing reactors in all his waking hours along with a friend, D’mitri Scott, now the chief technology officer at AMReactor.

Patel said the numbers didn’t work for their plans until they switched to thorium. It was a eureka moment.

There followed a period which he likened to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak working on the first computer operating system. The two young men were obsessed and inspired by what they believed was extraordinary. “Our girlfriends, now our wives, saw very little of us. We sometimes worked all night,” Patel said.

With thorium, they found all they were looking for: a stable source of reliable power that was safe, couldn’t melt down, and was able to handle most of the fission products.

And it was proliferation-proof because of the presence of intense gamma radiation, which made it hard to process, steal or divert. “Thorium was the winner,” he said.

A new reactor is on the way.

 

Air Conditioning Costs Threaten Summer of Sun Belt Catastrophe

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The summer of our discontent is at hand. When I asked a professional weather forecaster what we might expect this season, he said, “Hades.”

That was as disturbing as everything else in this disturbing year.

America has a summer culture. You could say the whole of the Northern Hemisphere has one, but there is a special reverence, a profound intimacy that Americans have with summer. It is a happy place for healing hurts, meeting old friends, making new ones, and the extraordinary joy of just basking, even romancing.

The British usually make jokes about summer. One goes, “I missed summer. I went to a movie and when I came out, it was over.”

Clearly, they aren’t making jokes like that this summer when temperatures have set records and forced people to do extreme things to cool off. Untold deaths have resulted.

The French have always had their own reverence for summer and, as a nation, down tools in August and head to the beach, often in the South.

They, like the British, are suffering in the current heat wave because there isn’t a lot of air conditioning — almost none in homes and a limited amount in public buildings. Only one in five British homes has air conditioning. In France, there is more in the south, but not in the north around Paris. It was never needed.

I have been in London when it is hot, but not as hot as it has been so far this summer. Sitting in a theater in London in summer was excruciating, made the more so because Britain is humid.

Anyone who lives in America’s coastal regions, especially the South, knows the awful combo of heat and humidity.

Deaths from heat in Europe are widespread and are still being reported.

Air conditioning has shaped America for the last seven decades. It has made living with year-round comfort possible in the South, the Southwest and the West.

If it weren’t for our ability — with enough electricity — to reverse the climate in places like Florida, Texas and Arizona, the migration from the north wouldn’t have happened. Once there was air conditioning, people felt they could live comfortably anywhere in the nation.

Even so, all isn’t well. Indeed, this may be the summer of catastrophe, and deaths from heat and uncontrolled fires. The prognosis isn’t good.

The impending social pushback was pointed up by my colleague Herman K. Trabish, writing in Utility Dive. He was attending the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Las Vegas in early June, and wrote in a brief, “Protesters shouting affordability claims and chanting slogans interrupted a speech by NV Energy President and CEO Brandon Barkhuff.”

Trabish continued, “The confrontation shows the extent to which rising energy costs have stoked public anger, raising pressure on utilities and their regulators.”

The protests were directed at a demand charge approved by the utility commission that wouldn’t take effect until next year, but it opened deep anxiety in southern Nevada about the cost of electricity in weather that is getting hotter and hotter.

Protest leader Leslie Vega said, after the protesters were escorted out of the meeting, “In Las Vegas, one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, you cannot live without electricity.”

Vega’s remarks might well reflect a truth for the whole of the South, Texas and the Southwest. Cheap electricity has been a factor in the migration of tens of millions from the northern states. It was never mentioned; it was just there.

Now the price of electricity is rising inexorably as temperatures appear to rise with equal, threatening vigor.

The natural response from those facing disaster in the heat zones will be to blame the electric utilities and the ubiquitous data centers. There will be calls to nationalize investor-owned utilities like NV Energy, and calls will go out to curb utilities that are already publicly owned, including rural electric cooperatives and those owned by towns and cities.

Additionally, residents in many states with wildfire exposure will, from time to time, have their power cut off entirely for periods to reduce the risk of new fires caused by sparks from line shorting. That will cause new anger.

Most of the world accepts that extreme weather, now common, is associated with global climate change, which is blamed in part on greenhouse gas emissions. That isn’t accepted by the Trump administration, which favors further use of greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. The president has said that global warming is a “hoax.”

Hot people have short tempers. They can be expected to have something to say as they suffer, and death tolls rise.

Microgrids Offer Community Solution to Electricity Challenge

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You may have heard of microgrids in passing, maybe at a town meeting or when the future of your electricity supply is under discussion. Mostly, they aren’t headliners like data centers.

However, microgrids are becoming an important part of the future electric infrastructure. They provide a valve to release some of the pressure building up to supply more electricity to data centers and transportation.

Burns & McDonnell, an architecture, engineering and construction firm, figures that by 2030, 50 percent of in-city deliveries will be made with electric vehicles of all types, and these will have to be charged daily.

There are 700 microgrids operating in the United States, and 7,000 are planned or under construction. While they got off to something of a slow start, they are now going full-speed ahead.

Originally, microgrids were seen as appropriate for military bases, college campuses, and other uses with a defense or social purpose, or for remote locations far from the grid.

Utilities were cool or actively hostile to them, although it can be argued that the first microgrid was established by Thomas Edison in Manhattan.

One utility executive said to me four years ago, “What is it about ‘micro’ that the promoters don’t understand?” Now utilities are beginning to embrace microgrids as part of the solution, not a raid on their customer base.

A microgrid, as explained by the futurist-entrepreneur Chase Weir, CEO of Distributed Sun and its spinoff truCurrent, is a way of bringing “kilowatt-hour liquidity” to the electricity industry, smoothing out the periods when demand meets maximum capacity, often beginning as the sun sets.

It is a self-contained electric generation and localized distribution entity, using storage, renewables, and, at times, traditional generation to create a grid that can operate either independently of the national grid or be connected to it. It is usually separated from but linked to a utility.

Oisin O’Brien, senior director of commercial solutions at truCurrrent, walked me through the dynamics of a microgrid that the company is building for a large food distribution company in Northern California.

Its assignment was to develop a charging station for 30 Daimler electric-tractor trailers used for food distribution. The challenge: To provide 2 megawatts of power for charging the Class 8 trucks during largely off-peak hours. Each truck has a 200-mile range on a single charge and must be charged daily.

On this project, O’Brien explained, truCurrent is working closely with the local utility, PG&E. “We were able to harness the utility’s flexible service program,” he said.

The full power plant — which is awaiting permission to operate from PG&E — will team 800 kilowatts of solar power with battery storage to create a contained system.

Currently, solar collectors are being installed on the facility’s roof, but two dozen of the company’s trucks are already using the charging points in the parking lot. The 180-kilovolt (which equals 1,000 volts) fast chargers can fully recharge a truck in three to four hours.

This first-of-a-kind pilot is remarkable in that it has brought “speed to power,” going from contracting to charging in 13 months. It meets the food distribution company’s need to charge when they need to, provides resilient backup and load flexibility, and provides a price hedge at a time of record-high diesel prices.

“Our solutions are only becoming more valuable as cost, reliability and power availability worsens,” Weir said.

According to O’Brien, truCurrent has plans to deploy microgrids nationwide, using a system of turnkey installations where the infrastructure is owned and operated by the local company or the community, but the planning, procurement and installation is provided by truCurrent.

“This project was driven by regulatory pressures in California, the company’s sustainability targets, and the increasing economic benefits with updated analysis, showing lower operating costs for electric fleets compared to diesel (pre-Iran war calculations),” O’Brien said.

The truCurrent project is for transportation usage, but there is a growing demand for microgrid deployment in suburbs and even in apartment complexes.

It is an example of Weir’s vision for the electrical grid of the future, which, in addition to liquidity and speed, must be designed for abundance and affordability.

The project “turned every challenge into an advantage for the developer, the customer, the utility and capital markets,” Weir said.

Shared prosperity with a microgrid: What’s not to like?

The Electricity Future for New England: Uncertainty and High Prices

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These days, in terms of resources, New England is poorly positioned to make electricity. As Gregg Cornett, president of Rhode Island Energy, told me in an interview, it doesn’t sit on abundant coal reserves and natural gas — the critical fuel in today’s electricity generating mix — or hide beneath the surface, waiting for the gasman’s drill.

Going forward the prognosis is that New England will make it through without electricity disruption unless there is severe cold, in which case the system will be stretched and blackouts could result.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry-supported, not-for-profit authority that studies electricity supply and predicts problems, says New England is at “moderate risk” this summer, but sees changes and stress in consumption patterns as the region shifts from summer peaking to winter peaking. This will put further pressure on the delivery of gas into the region.

Winters are going to be tough for the New England electric grid and the collective transmission organization that distributes power from and between the region’s utilities, the New England Independent System Operator (ISO-NE).

Rhode Island Energy’s Cornett points out that the area has continued to grow, but the infrastructure to support that growth — especially of pipelines bringing in natural gas — has languished.

In part, environmentalists have been responsible because of their desire to restrict all fossil fuels. Times of crisis, though, lead to the burning of oil — a much greater environmental challenge.

Also, because of the lack of pipeline capacity, New England imports liquified natural gas (LNG) from as far away as Norway, adding to the cost of electricity throughout the region. It also imports electricity from Canada.

This means that New England has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Inaction has consequences.

The bright spots for the future are renewables, wind and solar.

At present they contribute only 12 to 15 percent of the total New England mix, but they represent the one resource that the region has aplenty, especially offshore wind. Currently, this is hamstrung by opposition from President Donald Trump, but the future is hopeful in years to come.

Cornett says Rhode Island Energy is enthusiastic about solar and expects this to grow, although power from rooftop installations now represents a decided challenge for the utility. It is by law obliged to pay top dollar for this electricity, and that is more than the power is worth in the market.

The law guaranteeing the high rate was passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly in 2014 to encourage solar installations, not to hobble Rhode Island Energy with high costs. Cornett says the utility, which is the dominant one in the state, gets no gain from the solar power which it has to buy under this arrangement.

There is irony in the energy shortage in New England because twice in its history, it has led the nation in energy production.

According to the 1840 U.S. census, there were 5,000 water-powered log mills in the region and many other mills, making cloth and grinding corn. New England had dominance in milling of all kinds, thanks to its abundance of rivers on which mills were granted “privileges.”

Rhode Island — with five rivers that had sufficient flow for mills — was a beneficiary of the boom. Most of the mills that survived were converted to steam and those that survived after that, mostly textile mills, turned to electricity.

In the 1990s, there were six operational nuclear power plants with eight reactors. Today there are just two: Millstone in Waterford, Connecticut, with two reactors, and Seabrook in Seabrook, New Hampshire, with one reactor.

All six New England governors have signed a commitment to investigate the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs), but at present there are no commitments to build. This may reflect a national uncertainty about which of the many competing SMR designs with their various technologies will eventually be market-dominant and lead the way to a nuclear renaissance.

Meantime, power executives across the region are grateful they aren’t feeling pressure from data center developers and are hoping for mild winters ahead.

Electric utility executives used to list cybersecurity as their No. 1 worry. Now they say it is the weather.

You can engineer defenses against cyberattack, but when it comes to the weather, the answer is to hope for the best and respond quickly if there is an outage. The supply future is cloudy.

A Revolutionary Calls Out the Utility Industry

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The demand for electricity continues to rise, and there is a wide recognition that there is going to be pressure on the grid as never before, and that it is time to think about the grid in new ways. 

We need to think about how it operates, how it might operate, and the technologies — including artificial intelligence as a tool in its management as well as a demand stimulator — that could assist in developing a more-reliable, better-balanced grid going forward.

The grid, after all, is the infrastructural backbone of how our society operates; how we live and how we will live. Almost everything, from transportation to manufacturing, from the humblest kitchen appliance to the heating and cooling of homes, will be powered through electricity. Its ubiquity is real today and will be more so tomorrow.

So if we are to have an electricity hegemony, we had better lay down some coordinating philosophy.

Over the last half century, two visionaries have shaped the dimensions of the electricity supply system in America. Initially neither of them was received with enthusiasm, but their impact has been profound.

The first was S. David Freeman, who headed the energy policy staff in the White House Office of Science and Technology during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and who, in 1974, received funding from the Ford Foundation to examine the energy crisis and suggest future options. His study, “A Time To Choose,” was seminal and started new thinking about growth and conservation.

Freeman would become president of the Tennessee Valley Authority and in turn several other big public utilities, including the Lower Colorado River Authority and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).

The second, and the most influential thinker, was Amory Lovins. In a single article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1976, Lovins introduced the concepts of “soft power” that would lead to today’s renewable energy revolution. His study was called, after Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.”

Both men were criticized for their conclusions: Freeman for introducing the idea of conservation as being a part of the energy mix, and Lovins for wholesale support of conservation, wind and solar, opposition to big central stations, and a small-is-beautiful philosophy. He opposed big, new nuclear power plants.

Lovins, who is chairman emeritus of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, which he founded, wasn’t criticized so much as vilified. Seldom has a public intellectual been so attacked – or been so effective, leaving an indelible mark that can be seen on rooftops and in the ubiquity of wind turbines.

I knew both men well and frequently debated Lovins on nuclear and other issues before various audiences. While I agreed with his overall idea that there were other ways forward in energy, many of his visions either weren’t viable or he had reached too far in his arguments.

Over the years, I wrote a lot about Lovins and provided platforms for his ideas.

Now the battle for the electric industry’s future is joined by another revolutionary thinker about the future of electricity supply.

He is Chase Weir, whom I think of as a dreamer who is tethered to the ground by experience, an idealist who knows the reality of keeping the lights on, and a doer who will change other people’s thinking by example as much as by proselytizing.

Weir created the Earthshot Foundation in 2008, co-founded Distributed Sun in 2009, and truCurrent, its spin-off, in 2024. He has laid out his ideas in a series of three Forbes articles (he is a member of the Forbes Business Council), published over the last three months. They approach the electric utility challenge differently, philosophically.

He paints a picture of an industry that is misdirected in its responses to market stimuli. He sees a market that is seeking to build generation against its highest demand – a cold day in winter at 6 p.m. — when electricity use is at its peak. 

If this were a financial market, Weir argues, this demand stress would signal market illiquidity and there would be measures to rectify it.

Weir sees a future where the kilowatt-hour becomes, in effect, currency and which has to be managed as such, aiming for flexibility and liquidity. 

Nothing or truly little, he believes, is as important to modern life as dependable, abundant, and environmentally wise electricity.

He has four cardinal rules for achieving this:

  1. Get the intent right. Intent is the driver and needs to be a force in utility planning.
  2. Non-zero thinking. This is the concept, expounded by the author Robert Wright, that one value doesn’t necessarily degrade a competing value. That is distinct from net-zero, which applies quite differently to carbon reduction, but can be confused.
  3. Time is the vital element and must be understood in the mix. All actions, including regulation, market design and flow must be cognizant of time. Weir talks about “return on time” as being similar to return on investment.
  4. The objectives of a liquid KWh market can be achieved with the new tools of energy storage, renewables and traditional generation working in concert through microgrids and similar arrangements managed by AI.

Above all, Weir emphasizes, is item No. 1: intent. Get that right and the rest can fall into place.

Traditionally, Weir believes, profit for utilities has been tied to return on investment not on performance. To achieve a functioning liquid KWh market, a modern grid must be designed to dynamically employ the available resources of technology, capital, capability and time.

He told me, “If we don’t design with intent and seek liquidity, we will lock in decades of systemic failure.”

It seems to me that the price, quantity and reliability of electricity are all open issues and Weir is onto something. More of everything is needed, including a clear understanding of where we are going and how we are going to get there. 

Weir is driving the thinking with his question: “What does a truer, better, smarter, future-proof grid look like?Thinking is good, essential actually, as we careen down the electric highway.

Tech Giants Will Boost Nuclear but Won’t Help With Your Bill

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There is an abiding faith that if someone is good at one thing, they must be good at many things. At heart, it is a belief that outside the metaphorical box, there is much greater ability than inside it.

This is once again on display with widespread enthusiasm for the idea that the looming shortage of electricity can be solved by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta because they have been so wildly successful at what they do — and have mountains of cash to demonstrate it. Also, it is thought they will somehow do it better than the entrenched utilities.

The argument is that those who use vast new quantities of electricity for data centers will pay for its generation, and somehow the rest of the electricity supply system will be unaffected. It won’t.

The new dedicated generators will still buy steel, connectors (wires), transformers, switches, and the myriad bits that go to generating and transmitting electricity. They will still buy uranium, natural gas, strain the gas pipelines and the transmission system.

They will still buy available solar cells, wind turbines and dominate the competition to site these. They will be exerting four-square price pressure for all supplies, including utility-scale batteries.

The data center-dedicated generator will still compete in the labor marketplace for precious skilled workers, now in perilous short supply as the utility industry, without counting data center generators, spends well over $2 billion yearly on upgrading its systems.

I am not saying it isn’t a good thing to shake up the utility industry. I am saying not to expect magical new electricity developments that won’t affect everyone. The bills will still come, and they will be hefty.

Also, big tech will learn some sharp and costly lessons.

The thing about the internet and the world of computing is that they have been a zero-sum game. There are no rules, there is no legacy drag, and every invention, every step forward, enters the marketplace unencumbered.

There was nothing and no one to hold things back. There still isn’t, except for the availability of power for the data centers.

Not so in the electricity ecosphere. There are rules — local, state and federal. There is political oversight, and issues such as land use, water supply and air pollution must be factored in.

The new generation has to accommodate the rules of yesterday. It will be examined, debated, disputed and delayed.

For big tech and artificial intelligence, its latest frontier, everything is possible. But in their new role of making kilowatt hours, there are entrenched stakeholders and they are vociferous and opinionated, and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is an ever-present reality.

Building a power plant isn’t like designing an algorithm. It isn’t done in secret and then released to the world, as ChatGPT did in November 2022. It must be collaborative and transparent at every step.

The tech giants are betting on nuclear power for their future power needs. Two of them, Microsoft and Google, are supporting restarting mothballed reactors, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Duane Arnold in Iowa. All of them are interested in small modular reactors and have working arrangements with SMR developers.

In this way, the future of nuclear power may rest with the tech giants: They have the money to take the risk. Microsoft has even signed an agreement with Helion, a company planning to bring fusion power to market.

These developments favor a bright future for all electricity as the tech giants assume the challenges and risks of new nuclear technologies. But they won’t contain electric bills in the years ahead. These will continue to rise.

The utilities are doing what they can to contain these bills. The future demands significant expenditures, and, in some way, these will be reflected in consumer electricity costs.

The fact that the tech giants with money aplenty are going to shoulder greater risks doesn’t mean that their presence as ever more demanding electricity consumers won’t affect the commodity’s cost.

The war with Iran will affect global electricity demand. Countries will seek to substitute electricity for oil and gas where they can, thereby straining already-tight supply chains for generation and transmission components.

The essentiality of electricity is growing, as is the household outlay on it. Ouch!

The AI Tsunami Is Approaching Shore; Jobs at Big Risk

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The Big One is coming, and it isn’t an earthquake in California or a hurricane in the Atlantic. It is the imminent upending of so many of the world’s norms by artificial intelligence, for good and for ill.

Jobs are being swept away by AI not in the distant future, but right now. A recent Stanford University study found that entry-level jobs for workers between 22 and 25 years old have dropped by 13% since the widespread adoption of AI.

Another negative impact of AI: The data centers that support AI are replacing farmland at a rapid rate. The world is being overrun with huge concrete boxes, Brutalist in their size and visual impact.

Meta Platforms (of which Facebook is part) plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers; the first called Prometheus and the second Hyperion.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform: “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”

Data centers are voracious in their consumption of electricity and are blamed for sending power bills soaring across the country.

But AI has had a positive impact on the quality of medicine, improving accuracy, consistency and efficacy, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Predictive medicine is on a roll: Alzheimer’s Disease and some cancers, for example, can be predicted accurately. That raises the question: Do you want to know when you will lose your mind or get cancer?

Where AI is without downside is medical “exaptation.” That happens when a drug or therapy developed for one disease is found to be effective with another, opening up a field of possibilities.

AI also offers the chance of shortening clinical trials for new drugs from years to a few months. Side effects and downsides can be mapped instantly.

Life expectancy is predicted to increase substantially because of AI. Omar Hatamleh, an AI expert and author, told me, “A child born today can expect to live to 120.”

Likewise, predictive maintenance with AI is already useful in forecasting the failure of industrial plants, power station components and bridges.

Oh, and productivity will increase across the board where AI and AI agents — the AI tools developed for special purposes — are at work.

The trouble is AI will be doing the work that heretofore people have done.

Pick a field and speculate on the job losses there. This may be fun to do as a parlor game, but it is deeply distressing when you realize that it could happen in the very near future — like in the next year.

Most are low-skilled white-collar jobs, such as those in call centers, or in medical offices checking insurance claims, or in an accounting firm doing bookkeeping. In short, if you are a paper pusher, you will be pushed out.

Look a little further — maybe 10 years — and Uber, which has invested heavily in autonomous vehicles, will have decided that they are ready for general deployment. Bye-bye Uber driver, hello driverless car.

Taxis and truck drivers might well be the next to get to their career-end destinations quicker than they expected.

By the way, autonomous vehicles ought to have fewer accidents than cars with drivers do, so the insurance industry will take a hit and lots of workers there will get the heave-ho. And collision repairs may be nearly outdated.

These aren’t speculation; they are real possibilities in the near future. Yet the political world has been arguing about other things.

As far as I am aware, when the leadership of the U.S. military gathered at the Marine Corp Base Quantico in Virginia recently to get a pep talk on shaving, losing weight and gender superiority, they didn’t hear about how AI is transforming war and what measures should be taken. Or whether there will be work for those who leave the military.

The Big One is coming, and the politicians are worrying about yesterday’s issues. That is like worrying about your next guest list when an uninvited guest, a tsunami of historic proportions, is coming ashore.

This Isn’t the Time To Politicize Electricity Again

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The future of electricity is being discussed in terms of how we make it: whether it should be generated by nuclear, wind and solar or by coal and natural gas.

Nuclear is favored by the utilities and the Trump administration, but it will take decades and untold billions of dollars to build up a sizable nuclear fleet.

The administration has muddied the situation by denouncing wind, halting most offshore wind development, and heavily favoring coal and natural gas.

The utility companies that make and deliver electricity favor what has been described as “all of the above,” weighted by regional resources and state laws.

Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have zero-carbon goals. Their laws say that by a certain date, carbon-emitting power plants must be phased out.

The administration says turn right, and the states say turn left. But the nation can ill afford a debate over electricity supply.

America needs more electricity now and will need much more in the near future, reflecting the growth in demand for transportation, manufacturing and, above all, the demands of data centers and artificial intelligence — demands that are growing relentlessly.

Changing how we manufacture electricity isn’t helpful if the nation is to avoid blackouts and brownouts. They could begin any time, depending on that great variable: weather.

It used to be that if you asked utility executives what kept them awake at night, they would say, “Cybersecurity.” Now they say, “Weather.” I know. I ask some of them regularly.

Electricity is fundamental. It is unlikely to be replaced. Its essentiality is uncontested. However, what we use to make it — hydro, wind, solar, natural gas, coal, geothermal and nuclear — is changeable. The methods can be superseded by something else.

It is impossible to conceive of electricity being replaced by another force. Electricity is in nature as well as the wall plug. In short, we may well have different kinds of cars, airplanes and homes in the future, but electricity will be the constant, as vital as water.

In recent years, as summers have gotten hotter and drier, electricity has become more and more important. With some places having temperatures of over 100 degrees for weeks and months, air conditioning has moved from being a source of comfort to being essential for life. In Arizona alone, heat deaths are running over 600 a summer — and it is hard to measure accurately who has died because of heat.

There is some good electricity news that doesn’t seem to have been politicized.

Batteries are getting better, and more of utility scale are being installed. The electricity systems operators in California and Texas — California ISO and ERCOT — have both said that in critical times, their systems have been saved by utility batteries. They are the silent heroes of the moment.

Likewise, another critical change has been the development of better transmission wires, known in the industry as connectors. Traditionally, they have been made with a steel core and the electricity moving in aluminum around the core, which provides strength and stability. The new connectors have light carbon fiber cores, which don’t sag when hot and carry nearly twice as much electricity as the steel-cored variety.

The so-called Big Beautiful Bill savages the renewable power sector by phasing out tax credits, which had become the building blocks of the sector. Now many solar and wind projects will evaporate, and some companies will fail.

Part of the genesis of today’s problem is that another kind of polarization hampered the ordered growth of nuclear power — the logical new frontier of electric generation — in the latter three decades of the 20th century. Fears over nuclear safety were fanned by politicians and the environmental movement.

The environmentalists favored coal over nuclear before wind and solar were perfected. That legacy means nuclear power is now in need of a whole new workforce and supply chain.

President Donald Trump wants to build 10 big nuclear plants of the kind that make up the present nuclear fleet of 95 reactors. He will find that the workers and expertise for that kind of effort are in perilously short supply and will take years to rebuild.

To take any power source off the table today for political reasons is to endanger the nation.

Trump Hostility To Wind And Solar Has Utilities Treading Softly

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This commentary was originally published in Forbes.

President Donald Trump reiterated his hostility to wind generation when he arrived in Scotland for what was ostensibly a private visit. “Stop the windmills,” he said.

But the world isn’t stopping its windmill development and neither is the United States, although it has become more difficult and has put U.S. electric utilities in an awkward position: It is a love that dare not speak its name, one might say.

Utilities love that wind and solar can provide inexpensive electricity, offsetting the high expense of battery storage.

It is believed that Trump’s well-documented animus to wind turbines is rooted in his golf resort in Balmedie, near Aberdeen, Scotland. In 2013, Trump attempted to prevent the construction of a small offshore wind farm — just 11 turbines — located roughly 2.2 miles from his Trump International Golf Links, but was ultimately unsuccessful. He argued that the wind farm would spoil views from his golf course and negatively impact tourism in the area.

Trump seemingly didn’t just take against the local authorities, but against wind in general and offshore wind in particular.

Yet fair winds are blowing in the world for renewables.

Francesco La Camera, director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, an official United Nations observer, told me that in 2024, an astounding 92 percent of new global generation was from wind and solar, with solar leading wind in new generation. We spoke recently when La Camera was in New York.

My informal survey of U.S. utilities reveals they are pleased with the Trump administration’s efforts to simplify licensing and its push to natural gas, but they are also keen advocates of wind and solar.

Simply, wind is cheap and as battery storage improves, so does its usefulness. Likewise, solar. However, without the tax advantages that were in President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the numbers will change, but not enough to rule out renewables, the utilities tell me.

China leads the world in installed wind capacity of 561 gigawatts, followed by the United States with less than half that at 154 GW. The same goes for solar installations: China had 887 GW of solar capacity in 2024 and the United States had 239 GW.

China is also the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles. This gives it market advantage globally and environmental bragging rights, even though it is still building coal-fired plants.

While utilities applaud Trump’s easing of restrictions, which might speed the use of fossil fuels, they aren’t enthusiastic about installing new coal plants or encouraging new coal mines to open. Both, they believe, would become stranded assets.

Utilities and their trade associations have been slow to criticize the administration’s hostility to wind and solar, but they have been publicly cheering gas turbines.

However, gas isn’t an immediate solution to the urgent need for more power: There is a global shortage of gas turbines with waiting lists of five years and longer. So no matter how favorably utilities look on gas, new turbines, unless they are already on hand or have set delivery dates, may not arrive for many years.

Another problem for utilities is those states that have scheduled phasing out fossil fuels in a given number of years. That issue – a clash between federal policy and state law — hasn’t been settled.

In this environment, utilities are either biding their time or cautiously seeking alternatives.

For example, facing a virtual ban on new offshore wind farms, veteran journalist Robert Whitcomb wrote in his New England Diary that the New England utilities are looking to wind power from Canada, delivered by undersea cable. Whitcomb wrote a book, “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future,” about offshore wind, published in 2007.

New England is starved of gas as there isn’t enough pipeline capacity to bring in more, so even if gas turbines were readily available, they wouldn’t be an option. New pipelines take financing, licensing in many jurisdictions, and face public hostility.

Emily Fisher, a former general counsel for the Edison Electric Institute, told me, “Five years is just a blink of an eye in utility planning.”

On July 7, Trump signed an executive order which states: “For too long the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable sources like wind and solar.

“The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy resources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration puts electricity consumption growth at 2 percent nationwide. In parts of the nation, as in some Texas cities, it is 3 percent.

 

Requiem for America’s Helping Hand in the World

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I have seen the U.S. Agency for International Development in action — in Bolivia, Botswana, Pakistan and in Eastern Europe — and I can say that it is sometimes ragged and sometimes wasteful, but overall it is a great value for the money.

It is the face of America in 100 countries and its work is independent of the State Department, which has been one of its strengths.

The purpose of State is to represent American policy abroad and all that it entails. The purpose of USAID is to extend a helping hand.

It is the agency which shows the world through its actions our goodness, our decency, our humanity. USAID makes a difference, whether it is fighting AIDS, Ebola and malaria in Africa or helping electrify the Americas.

I have chanced upon — and that is the word — USAID at work in my travels. In Bolivia, I saw a village enjoying the luxury of electricity for the first time. In Pakistan, I saw trucks of American grain going into an Afghan refugee camp — the only source of food for the inhabitants.

I have heard from my family about the work in Southern Africa, about the treatment of AIDS, malaria and other diseases, where it is most needed. My father suffered from malaria, and I have a special feeling for its ravages.

My wife, Linda Gasparello, has a special feeling for Egypt, where she has lived. She has noted the impact of USAID in Egypt, where it has helped build schools and train teachers, helped create jobs in agriculture and tourism, helped provide access to clean water, helped reduce child and maternal mortality, and helped eliminate polio.

USAID has probably convinced more people that the United States is the good guy in the world than most diplomatic efforts or even the reporting of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia.

If the work of USAID ceases, as Elon Musk has engineered, or is subsumed into State, people will die and Russia and China will fill the vacuum. They won’t fill it with the same human touch, but they will be there and we will be gone — and our good works and influence with the departure.

I grew up in Zimbabwe and even before President John F. Kennedy created USAID, there was general hostility to the idea of foreign “do-gooders.” In those days, the do-gooders were volunteers and the churches. The white community worried about ideas of democracy and equality that would upset the balance of privilege in colonial society.

Later, in the countries I know best (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi and South Africa), that fear and resentment was transferred to the international aid community. The dethroned white ruling class spread the word that foreign aid was corrupt, wasteful, and ineffective. American conservatives signed on.

Did Musk — who is irrational and pathological in his hatred of USAID and wants it abolished, and has  gone a long way to achieving that aim — absorb these prejudices when he was growing up in South Africa?

Musk and President Donald Trump have presented no evidence, sought no information nor commissioned a study on USAID’s efficacy. Based just on hearsay and a paranoia that the world is out to cheat America, take its money and otherwise kick sand in its face, they are dismantling one of our pillars of statecraft.

It is an abiding myth among MAGA conservatives that foreign aid is a sinkhole, corrupt and indefensible. I have seen otherwise. But you can’t see if you don’t look.

Remember the Marshall Plan, the expensive but so worthwhile rebuilding of devastated Europe after World War II? It is cherished here and in Europe as an act of American magnanimity and statecraft that was unique in its scope and its preparedness to use American wealth for the good of others.

The plan paid off as one of the smartest investments we could have made as a country. It is an extreme example of the effectiveness of soft power.

It convinced Europe of the fundamental goodness of the American project and enabled more than 70 years of openness and sharing, convincing generations that America had certain values of human concern that would always prevail even when there were disputes.

In trashing USAID — and what mindless trashing it has taken! — the United States has opened the door to Russia and China to take on the good-guy mantle and to manipulate global opinion in their favor; and to make an always dangerous world into a more hostile one for the United States.

Without food and medicine, staples of the USAID efforts, the poorest and most wretched will suffer unspeakably. In Africa, where Musk and I grew up, people will die.

There is a ghastly irony that they will do so at the hand of the richest man in the world, acting for the richest nation in the world.