Wilson Ricks

Jigar is correct!

One little minor detail was they voted no on the fix.

The “breaking news” is as a result, this assumption is rolling straight into the backstop auction and is worth est $10B+ of gas capacity?

LCOE as a metric has so many flaws, but the yoy change tells you where the market is headed

Interesting trends here from Lazard’s 2026 update

- New combined cycle gas LCOE at 15-year high
- Wind & Solar also go the wrong way on costs, solar costs up 18% yoy
- VC/academic viewpoint might be that wind/solar only gets cheaper with time but not a surprise to folks tracking PPA market, LevelTen says wind/solar PPAs at their highest ever since their data began in 2018 (!)
- Solar continues to get more expensive due to tariffs, cost of capital increases
- Storage also reverses years of declines, went up notably over 25-26, new FEOC concerns repricing supply chains
- Lazard: "relative economics of existing generation have improved as rising new-build costs across all technologies, together with execution challenges tied to supply chains, inflation, tariffs, permitting and macroeconomic uncertainty, have made replacement capacity more expensive and difficult to deliver"

Latest LCOE report: Standalone LCOE makes wind and solar look like roughly half the cost of gas, but that number strips out the variable gas gets for 'free' (see below): firm, dispatchable capacity. Price in firming and the gap narrows hard or flips outright, especially once storage gets added. The renewables discount many people quote is real only if the resource doesn't have to match gas on reliability.

>Standalone (v19.0): solar $40 to $98/MWh, wind $37 to $99, versus CCGT at $51 to $129.
>New-build renewable LCOE also clears marginal cost of existing conventional generation almost everywhere: cheapest wind and solar ($37 to $40) sit above nuclear's marginal-cost ceiling ($36) and near CCGT's ($51), so building new only competes with running what's already there in gas peaking, where existing marginal cost ($52 to $122) still overlaps new-build LCOE.
>Firmed across six ISOs: solar $92 to $135, wind $87 to $118, solar plus storage $115 to $167, wind plus storage $103 to $146. Firmed wind sits inside the CCGT band rather than below it. Firmed solar clears the top of that band in ERCOT and PJM. Solar plus storage breaks through gas peaking's own floor of $144 in PJM.
>Caveat that cuts the other way: Firming charge is one-sided. It taxes renewables for intermittency but applies no matching charge to CCGT for fuel supply, pipeline, or outage risk, so the true all-in gap, priced symmetrically, is likely narrower than these firmed figures suggest.

Having been called back to public service after almost a decade in private life & on the eve of America's 250th, I am deeply honored.

Will have more to say about this, but for now, thank you to my family (especially my wife Laura -- it is our anniversary today!), my friends, and my colleagues for their support in this endeavor.

I am humbled by the trust that's being put in me by the federal government as well as regional stakeholders of @bonnevillepower to lead an institution whose history is synonymous with the development of the Pacific Northwest and which has been an important source of America's strength.

It is bittersweet to be leaving what I am up to today at @basepowerco, but I look forward to this challenge.

Please send your prayers my way as I take the oath of office next Monday in Portland.

is corporate carbon accounting a huge waste of time? heatmap.news/sustainability…

Next-generation #geothermal could dramatically reduce the cost of achieving #California's clean energy goals, but only if the state acts now to remove critical development barriers.

catf.us/2026/05/califo…

🚨🚨🚨Google and Amazon data centers in northwest Indiana will be served by COAL from the Merom power plant, new filings show.

NIPSCO GenCo signed a 12-year contract with Hallador for ~500 MW accredited capacity.

Capacity to be used by Google, Amazon, & future data centers.

BIG SCOOP: Energy reps tell me the Trump administration is now extrajudicially blocking all new wind projects in the United States

Apparently the Pentagon is refusing to sign off on FAA airspace clearances even when military assets aren’t around

For @heatmap_news (link below)

My hottest take is that the entire PJM cap market story is effectively a gas weatherization issue.

NERC is taking it seriously, but there is no way for the market to integrate those standards!

If we could harden gas back to pre 2024 accreditation (which is when the price spiked!) there would be effectively no market shortfall.

/1

Dumb opposition to New York's nation-leading *public nuclear* goal from a New York DSA candidate for Congress clearly aligned with their Ecosocialists.

The green left clings to enhanced geothermal as a softer, safer alternative without considering: similarly long pathway to commercial viability; studies showing **how much less viable it is in the Northeast**; complete lack of state capacity in it; and inevitable environmental opposition. For more: publicpowerreview.org/p/debunking-th…

3 Biden staffers who worked intimately on the Inflation Reduction Act tax credit rollout have a big post-mortem out today, with lessons like...
- help the govt compete for talent!
- maybe don't base tax credits on LCA!
- clarify policy goals!

more: heatmap.news/politics/infla…

I still think this table from ⁦@cleanaircatf⁩ is the best re: affordability, describing a range of solutions tackling different drivers over different timescales.

One interesting note. I believe EGS is on a cost trajectory where it will be cost effective (grid parity) nationwide in the US by the 2030s. But places with good geothermal resource will always be structurally cheaper. This will have huge implications on energy security and cost.

PJM capacity auction for 2027-28 hits the CAP; falls SHORT of reliability need

- Capacity price hits $333/MW-day
- Auction ~6.6 GW UCAP short of RTO reliability requirement of 152 GW UCAP
- Load flex: demand response (ICAP) DOWN vs last year

PJM to file solutions at FERC soon?

Senate fails to terminate Green New Scam

The Senate bill *looks like* it has a 2027 "placed in service" cutoff for new solar/wind subsidies.

But one last-minute paragraph makes it worthless—because projects making a recoverable 5% investment in the next 12 months are exempt!

The idea of a 2027 "placed in service" cutoff was that new subsidies would actually end during the Trump administration.

But under the last-minute carveout, Big Green has 12 months to initiate as many subsidized projects as it wants using the insanely-easy-to-meet "construction" threshold. (All you need to do is commit 5% of expected project cost to buying re-sellable assets like solar panels.)

Once they declare "construction"—e.g., in July 2026—they'll have 4 years (e.g., July 2030) to "place in service." And then some of those projects, e.g., most wind projects, will get 10 years of subsidies.

So we'll still have wind subsidies on Donald Trump's 94th birthday!

Here's how much worse the Senate bill just got:
* Two days ago: "Placed in service" by 12-31-27—with new subsidized solar/wind projects stopping very quickly, and Trump being able to let subsidies truly end.

* Today: "Placed in service" by JULY 2030—with new subsidized solar/wind projects absolutely spamming the rid and ripping off taxpayers like never before, and Trump having no control over whether the subsidies end.

The current Senate bill is arguably worse than the original Senate Finance one. At least that bill decreased solar/wind subsidies starting in 2026 to 60%. The current bill just increased them to 100%.

The current bill is a solar/wind lobbyist's dream. It does not terminate the Green New Scam in any way, shape or form. It absolutely perpetuates it. And offensively so, I might add, by keeping the "placed in service" cutoff language so many people courageously fought for, then totally undoing it with a single last-minute paragraph that makes it worthless.

If the Senate wanted to extend the Green New Scam it should have said so, not insulted our intelligence by trying to bury the extension in one sneaky little paragraph.

PS Several Senators have already told me they didn't know about or understand this last-minute paragraph. If that's the case they should do whatever they can to fix the situation.

My ultimate goal is to kill the three pillars as a concept. The idea that we have to build power plants, deliver electricity, and match load is not that deep.

Did @wilson_ricks leak our newest paper?