iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

This week I found permits and satellite photos suggesting Amazon is backing what could be the largest gas power plant ever built in the US. I just got off the phone with the company and confirmed they're behind it. Full story here: newsletter.cleanview.co/p/scoop-amaz...

newsletter.cleanview.co

Scoop: Amazon Is Behind One of the Largest Planned Gas Power Plants in the US

The company confirmed to Cleanview that it acquired the GW Ranch site in West Texas, where a 7.65 GW gas plant will power its first off-grid AI data center

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Reposted by Michael Thomas

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 24/10/2025

Here's a really great, clear explanation from @michael-thomas.bsky.social of what we know about why US electricity prices are rising. (No, it's not data centers, except in some very specific local areas.)

distilled.earth

Why Are Electricity Prices Rising?

Probably not for the reasons that you think

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Reposted by Michael Thomas

Ross Macfarlane @rossmacfarlane.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

We could save more than $1 trillion nationally and cut utility bills for the average household by $1,600 per year by streamlining permitting of rooftop solar. No federal policy needed -- this can all be done by cutting red tape at state and local level. @michael-thomas.bsky.social 1/

distilled.earth

Rooftop Solar Could Save Americans $1 Trillion Dollars

But we have to make it easier to permit and install

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

In this world, I think we’d all be wise to form our opinions more slowly and be skeptical of what we read. I'm planning to publish a full summary of the report and what it says about the real reasons for rising electricity prices in my newsletter tomorrow.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

Affordable and reliable electricity is the bedrock of modern civilization. But in a world of hot takes, disinformation, and AI-generated deepfakes, it’s easy to overlook what makes electricity cheap and what makes it expensive.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

With the chart above, it’s easy to imagine a virtuous cycle where: - More people buy EVs and heat pumps - Electricity demand grows, and prices fall - Cheaper operating costs encourage more adoption

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

But the data shows that rising demand for electricity doesn't need to result in higher prices. And that's a really good thing from my perspective. Mitigating climate change will require "electrifying everything." And that will result in a lot more electricity demand.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

All of this is from a new report by LBNL. The report makes clear that this relationship is not guaranteed to exist in the future or everywhere. More recently data centers have led directly to rate increases (e.g. the recent PJM auction).

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

In Virginia—home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers—rising electricity consumption from data centers actually prevented prices from rising as much as they otherwise would have between 2019 and 2024, according to the report.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

North Dakota is the only state in the US that didn’t see its electricity prices rise between 2019 and 2024. Over that period, rates actually fell in inflation-adjusted terms.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

In North Dakota, crypto and AI companies have driven some of the fastest electricity demand growth in the country. You might expect the state to have seen the fastest growth in utility bills. But intuition would fail you.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

This was surprising to me: In states with the highest electricity demand growth—from sources like data centers—electricity prices actually fell over the last 5 years. Totally opposite of the prevailing narrative that data centers raise electricity prices. 🧵

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Glad to hear you think so! GIS is powerful. Everything in the story is just using basic Google Earth and historical images.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

This thread is getting long, so I'll leave it there for now. I wrote more about all this in my latest newsletter. You can read the full story here: www.distilled.earth/p/these-data...

distilled.earth

These Data Centers Are Getting Really, Really Big

Gigawatt-sized data centers are becoming the new normal

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Meta is also working on a data center in Louisiana that would be twice the size of its Ohio data center. The floorspace will be about half the size of lower Manhattan. At peak power, Hyperion will consume about half as much electricity as the entire city of New York.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

To build its first 1 GW data center, Meta is sticking thousands of $60k NVIDIA GPUs in tents in Ohio. That might sound crazy, but it's cut the time to build in half. The first few buildings at its site in Ohio took 2-3 years to build. The tents will take less than a year.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

The only hyperscaler that isn't working on a giga-scale data center in the US is Google. Instead, they've built a distributed cluster of 4 data centers connected by fiber on the border of Nebraska and Iowa. By 2026, the cluster will have 1 GW of capacity.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Microsoft recently announced the first phase of its Mt. Pleasent, WI data center. It will eventually use 1.5 GW, according to the grid operators documents. xAI is working on Colossus 2, which will eventually use 1.5 GW of power.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Stargate isn’t the only gigawatt-scale project progressing quickly in the US either. Amazon recently finished the first phase of a data center in Indiana that will eventually use 2.2 GW of power. The first phase (525 MW) took a bit more than a year to build.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Another way to understand the scale of the project is to compare the 1.2 GW of peak demand the facility will use to that of one of the nearest utilities. El Paso Electric, a utility that serves 465,000 customers west of the project, has a peak system load of 2.4 GW.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

It’s hard to really put the scale of this project in perspective. One way to do it is to look at the project from space. The satellite image below shows Stargate’s first two buildings. Each of those tiny little dots is a construction worker's car. There are 6,000 of them.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas is one such project. Just over a year ago, the project was nothing more than some permits and a few hundred acres of dirt in West Texas. Today there are 100,000 of NVIDIA’s most advanced chips consuming 200 MW of power.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

I’ve been skeptical of the AI power demand story at times. But in the years since I first started writing about it, many AI infrastructure projects have gone from the realm of press releases to actual operating projects. And they’ve done it at breakneck speed.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, tech companies have spent huge sums of money building data centers. In just three years, spending on data centers in the US has gone from $13.8 billion to $41.2 billion per year—an increase of 200%.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

For the last few months I've been going through public documents, permits, and satellite images to track the largest data centers in the US. Today I published the first story about what I've learned. 🧵 www.distilled.earth/p/these-data...

distilled.earth

These Data Centers Are Getting Really, Really Big

Gigawatt-sized data centers are becoming the new normal

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Reposted by Michael Thomas

Joe Rattata (he/him) @joerattata.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Wanted to help amplify this post from @michael-thomas.bsky.social to my small group of followers. The fate of life on Earth is quite literally at stake. open.substack.com/pub/heated/p...

open.substack.com

The Senate is about to destroy clean energy to give tax cuts to billionaires

The bill could pass within the next 24 hours.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

I just published a story with @emorwee.bsky.social about the latest Senate bill. The bill is much worse than climate advocates thought possible. The window to stop it is rapidly closing. But to do that climate advocates need to speak up. www.distilled.earth/p/urgent-the...

distilled.earth

URGENT: The Latest Senate Bill Is Worse Than Climate Advocates Thought Possible

The bill could pass the Senate in the next 24 hours

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Reposted by Michael Thomas

Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

It’s so important to understand WHY the new Senate bill has such drastic provisions to kill renewable energy Fossil fuel industry lobbyists and Big Oil-funded activists have been ALL OVER the GOP in recent weeks, telling them that clean energy jobs are “fentanyl jobs” and “a cancer”

heated.world

The Senate is about to destroy clean energy to give tax cuts to billionaires

The bill could pass within the next 24 hours.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Yesterday the House voted to end this economic boom with the passage of their "Big Beautiful Bill Act." Now the bill heads to the Senate. Time to make some calls to these Senators and convince them to keep the economic boom going.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

These clean energy projects have created huge demand for factories making solar panels, wind turbine components, and batteries. The vast majority of these factories have been built in red states and districts. They have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and brought billions in investment.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

This clean energy is cleaning up our air and mitigating climate change. But it's also powering an economic boom in America. The clean energy tax credits that Congress is attempting to repeal require that companies build US supply chains.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, 43 GW of clean energy has been built in state's led by Republican Senators. To put that number in context, that's enough to power millions of homes every year with cheap, carbon-free electricity.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

In the coming weeks, the Senate will decide the fate of clean energy in America. So I decided to crunch some numbers and see how much solar, wind, and storage capacity has been built in each Senators' state.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Thanks for sharing but also 😭😭😭 because you're probably right.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

This week, Republicans released their budget bill that aims to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. I analyzed every clean energy project that has been built since the IRA passed—3,570 in all. The proposed budget bill would hurt Republican districts the most. www.distilled.earth/p/the-republ...

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

You can explore the interactive data on solar imports by country here: cleanview.co/content/sola...

cleanview.co

Cleanview

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

The domestic solar manufacturing industry was booming thanks to the IRA. But now factories will almost certainly be delayed and domestic products will get more expensive. It will take years to rebuild these supply chains. And in the meantime, we'll all be paying the price.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Tariffs are going to hurt domestic manufacturers in the short term. US manufacturers rely on a global supply chain to source everything from the solar cells that go into solar panels to the steel that goes into their factories.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

93% of solar panel imports came from just 6 countries in 2024. These countries have some of the highest tariffs going forward.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

But factories can’t be built overnight. Solar panel demand still outstrips domestic supply. That means developers will still need to import panels in the short term. The result is going to be higher electricity costs for American consumers and businesses.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Tariffs are going to make it more expensive to build solar. And that is going to make electricity more expensive for everyone. The US solar supply chain has been growing since the passage of the IRA which offered big incentives to make solar panels and cells in the US.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

How are tariffs going to impact the solar market in the US? At Cleanview we just published a new dataset and dashboard to help folks understand the potential impact of the latest tariffs. Here are a few takeaways from the data: cleanview.co/content/sola...

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

🌎 Climate tech job alert 🌎 I'm hiring a Data Engineer at @CleanviewEnergy to build data pipelines that will power our clean energy intelligence platform. If you know anyone who loves working with clean energy data, please send them my way. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

docs.google.com

Cleanview Data Engineer (Contract) Job Description

About Cleanview Cleanview is a market intelligence platform that makes it easy for investors, business development teams, and clean energy professionals to track renewable energy projects and trends. ...

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

We're tracking hundreds of planned clean energy projects and 400+ developer pipelines at Cleanview. More on our clean energy project tracker here: cleanview.co

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

Texas will add more battery storage capacity in 2025 than any other state. Developers plan to build 7 GW of new capacity—as much as the entire US built in 2023.

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Michael Thomas @michael-thomas.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

One of the most overlooked energy stories of 2024: Battery storage grew 65% last year, with the U.S. adding 10.9 GW of new capacity. And growth is accelerating—we're on track for 18.1 GW in 2025, a 68% increase. Just 5 years ago, this technology was considered experimental.

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