iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I'm all the above energy and pro-nukes + normal caveats. Nuke bros - keep the same energy when we see headlines & stories like this. -EDF Must Not Rush Into New Nuclear Projects, Auditor Says - Cost of Sizewell C nuclear project expected to reach close to £40bn

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A fire-resistant home in LA survived devastating wildfires due to strategic design: minimal vegetation, concrete walls, simple roof lines, and fire-rated materials. This highlights how architectural choices could help protect homes as climate change intensifies wildfire risks.

AI boom is fueling massive datacenter and power infrastructure buildout, but critical mismatch exists: compute adapts in months while power takes years to deploy. Lag is potentially causing overordering of power capacity, mirroring past boom-bust cycles but w/ long lead times.

Biden's order fast-tracks AI infrastructure by letting companies build data centers on federal land and streamlines power grid connections. Key shift: federal sites can help speed up permitting and interconnection for both data centers and clean power facilities.

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Has anyone confirmed these $ or do they just assume a market price * the tons announced? "Microsoft, Google and others have recently invested close to $300 million in startups that believe they can realize that goal and develop carbon credits in the process."

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"American household electricity consumption grew at an accelerated clip over the past five years amid hotter and longer summers, data going back to the late 1990s from the US Energy Information Administration show"

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Fortress announces funds managed by affiliates have acquired assets of APR Energy, comprising 30 mobile gas-powered turbines with a combined energy generation capacity of 850 megawatts. The turbines are immediately available for deployment [for datacenters]

The US plans massive gas power expansion: Enverus forecasts 80 new plants by 2030 (+46GW, 20% more than last 5 years). Wood Mackenzie and S&P project it can get even faster growth at 35-66% increase over 5 years, driven by AI computing demands and need for reliable power.

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Excited to share that I got the opportunity to make an appearance on one of my favorite energy transition podcasts, 🎙Redefining Energy hosted by Laurent Segalen and Gerard Reid! We discussed market performance and outlooks for Cleantech and 'Cleantech-adjacent' equities. Listen below!

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CEG +25% on the day (reminder was +111% pre-announce). Market telling you it likes purchase price. Believes in load growth. Likes angle of nuclear + gas & sees growth in TX and CA. Calpine operates 79 facilities totaling 27.7 GW, mainly in TX, PJM, & CA; mainly natural gas.

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Moar Power deals (maybe): Virginia Transformer is exploring a sale that could value them at $6 billion+, amid soaring demand. "Hitachi Energy, the world’s largest producer of transformers, in November warned that the industry is overwhelmed and unable to meet exploding demand"

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The pushback against using climate change as a universal scapegoat is HEALTHY SOCIETAL DISCOURSE. Rather than an excuse for inaction, climate risks should catalyze immediate, concrete steps to strengthen infrastructure and build community resilience IN ADVANCE OF DISASTER.

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Power M&A is so back: AEP agreed to sell a minority stake in its transmission business to KKR & Co. and Canada’s PSP Investments for $2.8 billion. Acquire a ~20% interest in AEP’s Ohio, Indiana and Michigan transmission companies. Investing in tx as electricity use set to surge.

Constellation buying Calpine for $16.4B in stock/cash + $12.7B debt (8x '26 EBITDA). Combined co. will have ~60GW capacity across nuclear, gas, renewables spanning US coast-to-coast. Major presence in TX, CA, NY, PA. Creates leading retail energy provider serving 2.5M customers.

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Good summary from Claude after feeding a few articles, will share a helpful NYT one in the replies to this. It's a doom loop. "The fundamental challenge is pricing climate risk accurately while keeping insurance accessible"

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The preliminary estimate of financial impacts from the LA fires rank the incident among the costliest ever natural disasters in US, and likely nation’s most expensive ever wildfire.

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Pros: Merging at 9x EBITDA creates one of largest U.S. IPP company with $400M+ savings and solid growth, below current IPP valuations. Cons: Losing nuclear focus and adding debt raises concerns, while PE selling could signal peak valuations and trigger wider consolidation.

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Constellation in talks to buy Calpine in a deal close to $30 billion. Calpine is a privately held independent power producer w/ 77 generation facilities across 22 states and Canada. Adds fuel diversity with experience in gas, geothermal and renewables to CEG's nuke fleet.

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Shanu Mathew @shanumathew.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Winds have always sparked CA fires, but climate change has created pattern: wet springs grow more vegetation that becomes kindling during dry summers. When winter winds hit parched landscape packed w/ homes traditional ways of managing risk via insurance collapse.

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Remember when NVIDIA was a gaming company? How quickly fortunes can change - right time, right place.

Damac Group CEO Hussain Sajwani announced a planned $20+ billion investment to build data centers across 8 US states: Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. The announcement was made alongside President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

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McKinsey forecasts data center demand growth: 31GW (+6GW) in 2025, 9GW in 2026, 11GW in 2027-28, and 9-13GW annually in 2029-30. Major acceleration expected late 2027, raising questions about timing of forward curve pricing impacts.

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McKinsey: Companies are expanding their environment/nature-related targets to beyond carbon and the proportion of companies focusing on multiple dimensions of targets is increasing. Biodiversity saw the largest percentage increase.

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EIA provides net capacity additions (or in some fuel sources, net subtractions) over time as well as forward capacity installation projections and the additional capacity figure continues to tick up materially. Net additions of Nat Gas towards back half of decade picking up.

What a visual: CA interconnection applications accepted per month

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[Virginia's] state’s energy demand was flat 2006-2020 b/c, even though population increased, offset by energy efficiency. However, independent forecast shows that unconstrained demand for power in VA would 2x w/in next 10yrs, w/ data center industry being main driver.

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Great piece w/ 2 big ideas 1) Cloud providers need cost-efficient models while AI labs chase performance at any price 2) As compute gets cheaper, we're approaching an inflection point: when does AI reasoning power per dollar overtake knowledge worker salaries?

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"US-built infrastructure and lots of it... it is wild how difficult it has become to build things in the US. Power plants, data centers, any of that kind of stuff. I understand how bureaucratic cruft builds up, but it’s not helpful to the country in general... And the US really needs to lead AI."

"One of my learnings, looking back, is everybody says they’re not going to screw up the relative ranking of important versus urgent, and everybody gets tricked by urgent." Love the Eisenhower matrix.

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"Electric vehicles are expected to outsell cars with internal combustion engines in China for the first time next year, in a historic inflection point that puts the world’s biggest car market years ahead of western rivals."

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Microsoft 'pauses construction' on part of data center site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin Company evaluating "changes in technology"

Based on the filing yesterday and BBG for historical, TSLA storage continues to scale up at an impressive pace.

5 Green Finance Qs for 2025 via FT: -Will green protectionism intensify (US vs. China)? -Will intl. climate finance develop ($300bn/yr pledge)? -How will insurers handle rising climate costs ($135bn 2024 losses)? What's AI's net clean energy impact? -How far will anti-ESG backlash go?

1) Utility-scale PV solar installations vs. contracted pipeline (MWs) - Lumpy additions with pipeline stable 2) US Installed Battery Capacity - Expected to >2x next 2 years

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Blocking out bank estimate as rest are in public domain. Popular opinion among forecasting entities implies ~Mid-teens growth CAGR for data center demand growth. Btw, table isn't updated for McKinsey new report in Sept that had starting point 25 GW 2024 to 80 GW by 2030.

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Inside the World's Largest AI Supercluster xAI Colossus

Really informative video and cool to see what a massive cluster actually looks like in practice. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf8E...

youtube.com

YouTube video by ServeTheHome

RBC: Historically speaking, opex budgets have expanded at ~3% CAGR between 1956-2017 according to CBO data on public spending on water utilities

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Some $10BN+ datacenters announced in 2024 - AMZN (2), ORCL, META

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Vistra opposes PJM's lengthy rulemaking process for data center interconnection, arguing only two issues need addressing: (1) fair cost allocation and (2) capacity treatment of co-located loads. Urges guidance through statement or action, as current tariff enables co-location.

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I've seen <5%, this seems too high? "Today, 22% of data centers are using liquid cooling, according to IDC analyst Sean Graham... global data center liquid cooling market was estimated at $2 billion in 2022 and expected to grow at a CAGR of 15% between 2023 and 2032."

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GSA's largest power deal: 10M+ megawatt-hours over 10 years from Constellation, including 2.4M MWh new nuclear capacity. Powers 80 federal sites and supports clean energy goals. Fixed pricing protects against increases. Starts April 2025.

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Green energy firms seek GOP allies & rush year-end projects to lock in tax credits. $350B potential investment drop looms from policy changes. Industry shifts message from "clean energy" to "meeting needs" amid political pressure.

PA Gov Shapiro filed complaint to cut PJM's capacity price cap from 1.75×Net CONE to 1.5×Net CONE. Critical as blocked interconnection queues mean no new supply can respond to signals, yet tiny shifts cause huge price swings. Would save ratepayers $20B by 2026 during transition.

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Another question for the legal experts here; how real is this?

Anyone closer to the legal side of things know whether these are real fines that can be levied and/or will ever be paid (whether these are legit in reason are separate debate). 30k ft view looks more like signaling and something that gets legally challenged to death

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Just finished What’s Our Problem? by Tim Urban—thought-provoking. The middle focused heavily on ‘woke’ in institutions but could’ve balanced more on right-wing tribalism (briefly touched later). A strong call for open dialogue, idea labs, and rejecting echo chambers. Vital conversations ahead.

Shanu Mathew @shanumathew.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

GFANZ climate coalition loosens membership rules after latest exits from Citi and BofA, following major exits from Goldman and Wells Fargo. Change follows departures from banking, insurance & asset management sub-groups amid regulatory pressure and litigation threats.

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Shanu Mathew @shanumathew.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

More cracks in ‘everyone has to invest billions and billions’ of infra to develop AI…