Sarah Knuth

Adding all 6 data centers (at 700 MW nameplate) at the same time leads to complex outcomes → further analysis required Overall curtailment increases, particularly for the most constrained site(s), likely due to transmission congestion being contained to a small number of lines. This highlights both the importance of continued transmission upgrades for the most constrained lines and the need to study large load additions in correct sequence (clustered or one-at-a-time). It's unlikely all six of these data centers would interconnect at the same time, in the same region, but it would clearly increase the size of on-site resources required to manage network constraints.

This is basically the endpoint of all of this discussion about flex loads -- so it's pretty funny to me that rather than an extremely decisive "yes this is a great idea, do it now!" conclusion, the actual end state makes "further analysis required" because the models used can't do it.

Who wants to see a new Federal Offshore Wind Authority? 👀 We gotta lay the ground for the demand now. Check out this awesome interview about a report i was lucky to work on with @jbozuwa.bsky.social, @saraheknuth.bsky.social, and @bridgetmoynihan.bsky.social

How do we rebuild offshore wind? The next administration should enable a federal Offshore Wind Authority to make up for the renewables capacity lost in the Trump Admin. A public option could help OSW clear important coordination hurdles: climateandcommunity.org/research/off...

Off the charts? Reasons to be skeptical of the growth in biodiversity finance Recent estimates point to dramatic increases in private capital flowing to biodiversity. Examining main sources of this increase — equity investments …

The world needs to radically ramp up investment to support biodiversity- estimates put the gap at nearly $1T. Public money (especially from the rich world) has been sparse, so policy makers have turned to private finance, and we are supposedly seeing a boom in these investments- but is it real?

Final changes to the One Big Brutal Bill to get Murkowski's vote

- rural hospital (Alaska) fund doubled to $50 billion
- the wind/solar excise tax dropped, clean energy tax credits rolled back slightly less aggressively
- SNAP work requirement for states w/high error rates (Alaska) delayed

Going on hour 26, but we're still fighting.

A big win for Massachusetts: Republicans tried to kill off new clean energy projects, but we just forced them to take out that terrible provision.

There’s a lotta awful still in there. But pressure does matter. Keep it up.

Oracle Corp Oracle shares hit record high on $30bn cloud contract Data centre group says business from unnamed new client will start to generate revenue by 2028 Oracle signage is displayed outside of the company’s headquarters in Redwood City, California, US The deal nearly triples the $10.3bn in revenue Oracle generated from its data centre business in its 2025 fiscal year © David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Okay, so Oracle claims to have signed an unnamed $30bn-a-year customer that would "bring in revenue starting in 2028." It basically has to be OpenAI, right? They're the only tenant in Abilene's Stargate data center. Quick question: how does OpenAI afford that?
archive.is/RFs3h

Can We Remake Finance? - Dissent Magazine We have witnessed the destructive effects of financialization. Can the millions held in bank deposits, corporate equities, and bonds be used instead to provide for society’s most pressing needs?

Now unpaywalled: Fred Block on remaking finance.

Can the millions held in bank deposits, corporate equities, and bonds be used instead to provide for society’s most pressing needs?

www.dissentmagazine.org/article/can-...

alex trembath of the breakthrough institute claims to be a democrat, but he is really just a republican lying to try to infiltrate democratic circles

A•bun•dance

is

a•dumb•dance

to

socialize the right's deregulatory fixation into Democratic circles.

Mr. Coal Doug Burgum, the Koch network, the Waltons, crypto, Big Oil, AI, and Facebook are all on board.

The #Abundance agenda means silencing and crushing our friends to benefit the elite.

Make sure to follow @valspacepower.bsky.social for future updates, and also check out the rest of the @sheffieldurbanism.bsky.social summer program!

WelcomeFest Wants Politicians Who Choose to Believe in Nothing At centrism’s largest gathering, what was offered as the best path forward for Democrats is what sank their 2024 chances.

I'm up in @prospect.org with a piece on how #WelcomeFest & the Abundance Neoliberals 2.0 venerate as undeniably correct a political approach... that they just tried and failed to execute in 2024.

It's the biggest ostensibly center-left gaslighting effort in my lifetime! prospect.org/politics/202...

We know only a little about why Spain and Portugal's blackout occurred on Monday, but enough to what went wrong and what should have happened but didn't.

Javier Blas's conference call with REE gives us the clues
1/

Really pleased to see Katie Meehan's brilliant 2023 RGS Keynote, alongside short responses by @saraheknuth.bsky.social, @natemillington.bsky.social and myself. Available on @politicalgeography.bsky.social latest issue.

#GeoSky

www.sciencedirect.com/journal/poli...

⚡️ The historic moment of Estonia leaving the Russian-fed power grid.

On February 8, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia left Russia and Belarus energy system. By the end of the day today, they will have joined the European grid.

Reports of yet another battery project on the rocks:

Freyr Battery is canceling plans for its $2.6B gigafactory in Georgia, which promised 723 jobs and 34 GWh of annual battery manufacturing capacity.

This project did not have a DOE loan.

www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/02/06/f...

🔌💡 🔌🚗

‘The Devil Will Bite You,’ Environmentalists Tell Japan’s Prime Minister on Eve of Trump Summit - Inside Climate News Gulf Coast advocates traveled to Japan to warn lawmakers and financiers about the environmental impact of U.S. LNG.

“The oil and gas industry lied to you when they said LNG was clean energy,” @txsharon.bsky.social , who also addressed the Diet on Jan. 30, said as she spoke before the body.

Sandeep Vaheesan presents "Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States" in conversation w/ Patrick Bigger Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.

Baltimore! Next Tuesday I'll be riffing with Sandeep Vaheesan at @redemmas.org on his new (fantastic) book Democracy In Power about the history - and future- of public ownership for electricity and everything else we need popular control over in the climate crisis. redemmas.org/events/sande...

Screenshot showing title and abstract of a journal paper titled 'Financial geography II - green finance and climate transition'

Progress report 'Financial geography II - Green finance and climate transition' is now online (open access): journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... With thanks to Sabine Dörry, @saraheknuth.bsky.social and Felicia Liu for useful discussion and suggestions.

Threatening Dystopias by Kasia Paprocki Threatening Dystopias engages the problem of climate change and the highly charged politics of how climate futures are being defined, foreclosed, and contested across an increasing number of sites tod...

New forum up @societyandspace.bsky.social magazine organized by @saraheknuth.bsky.social, with contributions by @nithyaaa.bsky.social, Alex Loftus and Jason Cons

Thrilling to have the chance to think with such generous engagements - thanks to them all!

www.societyandspace.org/book-review-...

The Insurance Industry Is Not the Victim The rapidly worsening home insurance crisis is often understood as primarily a problem for insurers. Yet the overarching policy question should not be, “how do we save the home insurance industry from...

In light of State Farm's request that CA allow "emergency" insurance premium rate increases, citing claims for the LA fires, I'll re-up this blog for @lpeblog.bsky.social which looks at how the industry obscures how its finances work in an effort to keep profits high.
lpeproject.org/blog/the-ins...

The AI bubble was inflated based on the idea that we need bigger models that both are trained and run on bigger and even larger GPUs. A company came along that has undermined the narrative - ways both substantive and questionable - and now the market panicked that $200bn got wasted on AI capex

As someone who has reported on AI for 7 years and covered China tech as well, I think the biggest lesson to be drawn from DeepSeek is the huge cracks it illustrates with the current dominant paradigm of AI development. A long thread. 1/

Our article "The resource-making state: liquefied natural gas production networks and state strategies for domestic market development in Indonesia" is now published in a ZFW special issue on the "State-GPN nexus" edited by Rory Horner and Martin Hess 🎉 doi.org/10.1515/zfw-...

This Solar Panel Kills Fascists New York’s Build Public Renewables Act will reduce carbon in the atmosphere, combat inequality, and help workers. It might also defeat Trumpism.

🫡

www.thenation.com/article/envi...

Love and Work: Affect and Ideology Beyond ‘The Great Resignation’ - Lawrence Wishart Taking the scene of �The Great Resignation� in the USA and UK (2021-2023) as its starting point, this paper explores how love �

Open access! In which we critique the romance of work and how it props up our world - as part of a special issue on Affect and Ideology @dcockayne.bsky.social @derek-ruez.bsky.social
journals.lwbooks.co.uk/newformation...

Doctors hail first breakthrough in asthma and COPD treatment in 50 years Results of trial of benralizumab injection could be ‘gamechanger’ for millions of people around the world

Some good news for any of you / your people living with asthma: www.theguardian.com/society/2024...

"These coastal connections have helped Appalachian coal take on an intl. orientation...While Wyoming, the US's top coal producer, exported less than 1% of its coal in 2018, West Virginia, the #2 producer, exported 41% of its coal, w/ Baltimore and [Hampton Roads] accounting for 53% of all exports."

Attention folks - great-looking Professor of Human Geography job posting at Uppsala (obviously for a slight more senior scholar): www.jobb.uu.se/details/?pos...