Too Much News

Just Trying to Do This Jigsaw Puzzle

• From Heatmap: The U.S. just brought one of the Western Hemisphere’s biggest wind farms online
  SunZia Wind, the largest renewable energy project of its kind ever built in the U.S., has started generating electricity, nearly capping off a two-decade effort to supply Californians with wind power generated in New Mexico. The developer has begun testing the project’s 916 turbines ahead of planned full-scale commercial operations later this quarter, unnamed sources told E&E News. The project includes 3.5 gigawatts of wind and 550 miles of transmission line to funnel the electricity west from the desert state to the coast. “The impact is already evident,” the newswire wrote. “California broke its record for wind generation eight times in the last four weeks.”
  
  When Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer visited SunZia’s construction site in August 2024, he observed that, once it started running at full blast, the project would “generate roughly 1% of the country’s electricity needs…. We will need many more success stories like it if America is to meet its climate goals — 99 more, to be exact.”

• From Covering Climate Now: A new economic superpower could spark a global retreat from fossil fuels
  Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope

  Eighty-five countries have sought a roadmap to phasing out fossil fuels. A conference this month offers hope they could unite.
  At the UN Cop30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in vetoing calls to develop a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at Cop30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.
  

  Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on 28-29 April for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petrostates did at Cop30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics, but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text, but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.
  

  The conference is co-sponsored by Colombia and the Netherlands, a pairing rich with symbolism: Colombia is the world’s fifth-largest coal exporter, Royal Dutch Shell one of the world’s biggest oil companies. Conference organizers confirm that they have invited countries that endorsed the roadmap proposal at Cop30, as well as high-profile leaders of sub-national governments, including the California governor, Gavin Newsom, a presumed 2028 US presidential candidate.

  The conference aims to begin drawing up the roadmap blocked at Cop30. Energy and environment ministers of governments comprising a “coalition of the willing” will share plans to transition their economies away from oil, gas and coal without leaving workers and communities behind. Joining them will be climate activists, leaders of Indigenous peoples, trade union representatives and other civil society voices, sharing ideas and experiences on how to make the abstract goal of phasing out fossil fuels a practical reality.
  

  The goal of the conference is to agree on “actionable solutions” that follow-up meetings can refine so governments around the world can implement them. One area of focus will be how to phase out the $7tn a year governments spend subsidizing fossil fuels – but to do so without punishing communities, workers and tax bases that rely on such subsidies. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has urged the International Energy Agency to help create a “global platform” where public and private sector actors can “sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy”.

  The secret weapon of the “coalition of the willing” gathering in Colombia is its potential to function as an economic superpower.
  

From Carlyle: The revenge of the old economy - Jeff Currie
Since October of last year, technology or new economy shares are down 5-10%, while old economy shares like energy, metals, and mining are up 30-50%. We called this rotation out of the ‘new’ and into the ‘old’ the ‘revenge of the old economy’ when we first observed it in 2001/02 during the dotcom collapse.

It is easy to draw similar parallels to the dotcom era where AI is Web 1.0 (Microsoft), hyperscalers building datacenters are telecoms (WorldCom) laying broadband and gas and power (Enron) were expected bottlenecks. In fact, today’s mantra “own the AI compute, own the value”, sounds eerily similar to “own the network, own the value,” as the common wisdom in 2001 was to own the telecoms.

This simple comparison, however, stops there and misses a very deep difference between 2001 and 2026. This time the winners of Web 1.0 – Microsoft, Google, and Amazon – are vertically integrating and going upstream by morphing into old economy, big capex companies to own datacenters.

This suggests, as we have argued in the past (2025 and 2023), a better description of this rotation is not old versus new economy but rather asset-heavy versus asset-light. We don’t want to downplay the structural productivity shock that AI represents and the impact it has had on sectors such as SaaS.

Our key point here is asset-heavy sectors of which the hyperscalers are now joining with current levels of physical capex are creating a new twist to an old story. In fact, if we strip out the technology companies that are directly tied to AI, what we find is that this rotation started in late 2022 when interest rates first started to rise in response to rising commodity prices, which historically was the normal catalyst for the ‘revenge of the old economy’ rotation. ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 simply masked and delayed a process that was already underway. Now that the AI hype is fading, the rotation is just becoming more visible once again.

• And speaking of AI, again: Data Center Electricity Demand Is Going to Make Us Choose Between AI and Any Other Use of Power
  From Heatmap:
  Matthew Zeitlin•

  March 12, 2026
  The independent market monitor of PJM Interconnection, America’s largest electricity market spanning some or all of 13 states from the Jersey Shore to Chicago, took advantage of its latest annual report to share eye-popping figures on how data centers raise electricity costs and lambast existing proposals to fix it.
  

  “Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” the independent market monitor said in the report, released Thursday. Some PJM states like New Jersey and Maryland have seen some of the fastest retail electricity price hikes in the country, in part due to spiraling costs stemming from capacity auctions, in which generators bid to be available when the grid is stressed. Capacity prices have risen from $29 per megawatt-day to the statutory cap of around $330 in just a few years, costing ratepayers some $46.7 billion over the past three auctions. The total from the three prior auctions: $8.3 billion.
  
  And happy Earth Day to us all.