Shift Key with Robinson Meyer

In the past few years, something surprising has happened in American energy policy: States and utilities have started trying to build new nuclear plants.A new kind of company — the nuclear developer — is now trying to handle those projects. The most prominent by far is The Nuclear Company, a startup that has hired many of the same people who built the new Vogtle plant in Georgia. On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Jonathan Webb, the CEO of the Nuclear Company. They discuss the company’s goal of building “fleet-scale” nuclear, why Jonathan believes nuclear is poised for a revival, and what has changed since the company began.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:Previously on Shift Key: The Lesson Nuclear Companies Should Take From the Dot-Com Boom--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

America has some of the world’s best data about its own internal energy, industrial economy, and carbon emissions. That’s thanks to a federal agency called the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which painstakingly collects and updates the data every week.But EIA data can be hard to access — and even harder to share and understand. A new project aims to change that. U.S. Energy Data takes federal energy data and repackages it, helping amateurs and experts understand the power grid, liquid fuels, and more. It is now the easiest way to make and share charts with federal energy data.On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and writer who advised and prototyped US Energy Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the World and Clearing the Air, as well as a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and the deputy editor at Our World in Data. Rob and Hannah discuss how the platform came together, what makes it such a valuable resource, and what we can learn from it about the state of the energy transition.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:U.S. Energy DataPreviously on Shift Key: Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures joined us to discuss permitting reform--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

As we catch up from summer vacation, we’re bringing you a favorite from the Shift Key archive. We’ll be back in your feed with more fresh episodes starting next week.What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This was the start of Shift Key Summer School, a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, Rob and former Shift Key co-host Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:Decarbonize Your Life--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …Verse’s software platform Aria helps data centers connect to the grid faster and optimize power operations in real time. Learn more at verse.inc.RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

The United States is staring down a natural gas buildout of gigantic proportions.Amazon wants to build what would be the country’s largest power plant in Texas — and run it entirely on natural gas. Not to be outdone, OpenAI is plotting an even larger power plant in Ohio that, if built, would become the world’s largest gas power facility. How should we think about this boom — and about the AI and technology companies behind it, who remain some of the world’s biggest buyers of clean energy?On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Emily Pontecorvo, a Heatmap founding staff writer. They discuss what Emily learned identifying the country’s 10 biggest gas projects, what surprised her most, and what this means for the country’s climate trajectory — and Big Tech’s corporate net-zero goals.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:The U.S. Is Building Natural Gas Power Twice as Fast as ChinaEmily on Amazon’s Gigawatt RanchRob on OpenAI and the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...Verse's software platform Aria helps data centers connect to the grid faster and optimize power operations in real time. Learn more at verse.inc.RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

Two years ago, Donald Trump made an outlandish campaign promise: He would cut Americans’ power bills in half.It was a ridiculous, impossible pledge — but even so, the affordability problem didn’t need to get this bad. A new report, out this week from the Natural Resources Defense Council, looks at the economic, environmental, and public health costs of Trump’s regulatory and legislative clean energy policies, including his rollback of the wind and solar tax credits.The report’s author, Amanda Levin, joins Rob on this episode of Shift Key. Levin is a Director of Policy Analysis at the NRDC’s Science Office. They discuss why Trump’s repeal will have long-term effects, the underrated public health impacts of the rollback, and why Levin believes the credits should be restored.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:Amanda Levin’s new report: An Affordability Crisis of Trump’s Own MakingA ‘Glass Half Full’ Isn’t Enough to Fight Climate ChangePreviously on Shift Key: The New Paper Arguing Biden’s Power Sector Emissions Cuts Are Largely Intact — Even Under Trump--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...Discover the Yale Clean and Equitable Energy Development online certificate program at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. In this fully online, 5-month program, you’ll learn from leading experts, develop practical skills, and grow a powerful network. Visit cbey.yale.edu to learn more and apply.Verse's software platform Aria helps data centers connect to the grid faster and optimize power operations in real time. Learn more at verse.inc.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

California now has the most expensive electricity in the continental United States. It also has expensive housing … and an increasingly broken home insurance market.Are the three phenomena linked? They might be. Due to a peculiarity in the state’s constitution, electricity utilities are incentivized to pay for a huge amount of wildfire prevention, above and beyond what would be seen as economically reasonable in another state. Fixing that constitutional peculiarity could help bring down energy costs and heal the home insurance market, but it will be complicated — and a number of policies will need to get passed at the same time.That’s what Lauren Teixeira argues in her new report, “Rewiring Risk.” Teixeira, a senior climate and energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, joins Rob for today’s episode of Shift Key. They discuss how California found itself in this situation, how it might be fixed, and why the state treats utilities as a sin-eater for wildfire risk.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:Lauren’s report: Rewiring RiskRethinking Utility Wildfire Risk in CaliforniaPreviously on Shift Key: How California Broke Its Electricity BillsPreviously on Shift Key: How Wildfires Destroyed California’s Insurance Market--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...Discover the Yale Clean and Equitable Energy Development online certificate program at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. In this fully online, 5-month program, you’ll learn from leading experts, develop practical skills, and grow a powerful network. Visit cbey.yale.edu to learn more and apply.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño.El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal year, it can trigger extreme weather around the world. Forecasters are worried that the current El Niño — which just began a few weeks ago — is going to be anything but normal. Models suggest that we could soon see the hottest El Niño ever measured, with unpredictable and catastrophic effects for ecosystems and societies around the world.What does that mean? And why does this El Niño look so bad? On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Zeke Hausfather, a climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. They discuss what forecast models are saying about this El Niño, why it gives us a glance at the future, and whether climate change itself is accelerating.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:NOAA’s El Niño page and the relative El Niño indexAn Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence, the 2020 paper where Zeke was a coauthorZeke’s blog post on AI emissions: The real energy use of agentic AIJohn Bistline’s post on AI emissions at WatershedHeatmap’s coverage of AI emissions: A New Guesstimate for Corporate AI Emissions--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...Discover the Yale Clean and Equitable Energy Development online certificate program at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. In this fully online, 5-month program, you’ll learn from leading experts, develop practical skills, and grow a powerful network. Visit cbey.yale.edu to learn more and apply.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

At this point, when you hear “venture capitalist,” you probably think of … software. Or artificial intelligence. Or cryptocurrency.The Engine Ventures, which spun out of MIT a few years ago, is different. It tries to fund what it calls “tough tech,” a somewhat nebulous category that includes companies working in energy, decarbonization, health, and infrastructure. As such, it’s backed some of the most interesting “climate tech” companies in business today, such as Form Energy, Commonwealth Fusion.On this episode of Shift Key, Rob chats with Katie Rae, the CEO and managing partner of Engine Ventures. They chat about what’s missing from America’s innovation ecosystem, how close fusion is to succeeding, and whether AI is a bubble (whatever that might mean). One more note: Early in our conversation, Katie says that Commonwealth Fusion has built “more than 300” tokamak reactors. That was, unfortunately, an overestimate. It’s actually built closer to more than 150 reactors. Her team contacted us after her appearance to correct the record.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:From Heatmap: Commonwealth Fusion Systems Wins Over New Class of Investors With $1 Billion RaisePreviously on Shift Key: Why John Arnold Is ‘Very Optimistic’ Permitting Reform Will Pass This Year--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...Discover the Yale Clean and Equitable Energy Development online certificate program at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. In this fully online, 5-month program, you’ll learn from leading experts, develop practical skills, and grow a powerful network. Visit cbey.yale.edu to learn more and apply.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.