On his first day in office, Trump laid out his wind policy in one simple sentence: “We aren’t going to do the wind thing.”
With stop-work orders, red tape, and wild claims about whale-killing electromagnetic fields, the White House has stepped up its war on wind.
The flashpoint is Ørsted’s $5 billion Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island, which was weeks from delivering 700 megawatts of clean power to New England, and now frozen by federal order. The threat against the project is more than a local fight: It signals that even fully permitted, nearly finished clean energy assets can be derailed for political leverage.
Analysts warn that this is sending shock waves through the entire energy sector, raising the cost of capital for everything from solar farms to advanced nuclear.
In this week’s Open Circuit, we unpack the wider impacts. What does it mean when federal approvals don’t hold? And can states, governors, and utilities step in to keep projects alive when Washington is trying to kill them?
Plus, we look at the split story for clean energy jobs. We’ve seen a fresh round of layoffs, bankruptcies and canceled projects, even as the government projects tens of thousands of new renewable and battery jobs by 2030. What is the long-term picture for employment?
We’ll end with a look at Amory Lovins’ new piece on nuclear, where he argues the AI boom won’t rescue reactors from their economic flaws. Is the current demand picture enough to revitalize the U.S. nuclear industry?
Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Katherine Hamilton. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand.
With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026 . Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms.
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Transcript
Speaker 1: Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.
Stephen Lacey: Are you a Vegas guy?
Jigar Shah: I honestly hate it when RE+ is in Vegas. Just because yesterday I was lost twice. I was like, “Wait, I passed this four minutes ago. Am I going in circles?” So that’s Vegas.
Katherine Hamilton: Plus, what you do there has to stay there, so that’s inefficient.
Jigar Shah: Well, not if you’re podcasting. We are like, “We are going to change that today.”
Stephen Lacey: Okay. You’ve been going to RE+ formerly known as SPI for a lot of years. Pop quiz for you. Do you remember who the keynote speaker was in 2008?
Jigar Shah: No. Was it Obama?
Stephen Lacey: No. It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Jigar Shah: Well, I mean we definitely have our share of duds.
Stephen Lacey: From Latitude Media, this is Open Circuit. On his first day in office, Trump laid out his wind policy in one simple sentence, “We are not going to do the wind thing,” he said, before halting approvals for wind projects. And that was certainly true and was just a preview. With stop work orders, red tape and wild claims about whale killing, electromagnetic fields and underwater drone threats, America is indeed not doing the wind thing anymore.
We’ll look at the carnage in the wind industry and more importantly why it matters for all clean energy. Plus layoffs are sweeping around clean energy. What does it mean for the broader economy when the jobs’ engine sputters. And finally, Amory Lovins is arguing the AI boom won’t save nuclear, but Silicon Valley and the Trump administration are betting it will, who is right?
Welcome to the show, I’m Stephen Lacey. I’m joined by Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah are my co-host. Katherine is the co-founder and chair of 38 North Solutions and the executive director of Common Charge. Hi, Katherine.
Katherine Hamilton: Hello. Instead of heading out to Vegas tomorrow, I’m heading up to my alma mater Cornell to give some talks to the engineering school and the business school. So I’m super excited about heading back to Ithaca.
Stephen Lacey: What’s the thesis of the conversation?
Katherine Hamilton: Kind of transition in a time of chaos, like what’s happening? How is the transition going? And I’m there to buck them up, I think.
Stephen Lacey: Jigar is a clean energy investor. He’s the former director of the DOE’s Loan Programs Office. Jigar, what is on the docket for RE+? What’s the vibe check right now?
Jigar Shah: It’s a fascinating thing, right? I have been traveling a lot this year because there’s a lot of people who want to understand how to process this moment. I think they feel the aggression that has come for our industry and they did not expect it because many folks here frankly are conservative.
And I think that they are now recognizing that they have a lot of opportunity in front of them, particularly on the distributed generation side. And that they need to actually look inward and figure out how we cut costs by 40% and figure out how to meet this moment. In the same way that the fracking industry frankly did when the Saudis came after them in 2014, 2015 and they rationalized their supply chain, they figured out where all the bloat is.
I have been very impressed by how many residential solar installers in particular have dramatically changed the way that they’re doing customer acquisition. They’re moving away from door-to-door sales, they’re moving to AI enabled tools to dramatically reduce the cost of bringing a contract to installation. And so I think a lot of people believe in the Tesla white paper that they can cut 40% of the cost of their installation over the next 18 months.
Offshore wind under siege
Stephen Lacey: Okay, let’s roll into the show. So let’s tackle offshore wind, the problems in that industry and what it means for everything else that needs to get deployed quickly. So 20 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cut the head off a dead whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to the roof of his car. That is a real story recounted by his daughter, and I can think of no better metaphor for what the Trump administration is doing to offshore wind.
The past eight months have brought frozen permits, yanked funding and flimsy investigations into electromagnetic fields and drone attacks under offshore wind farms. A few weeks ago, his administration ordered work to stop at Orsted’s $4 billion Revolution Wind Project off Rhode Island. A project that was 80% complete and weeks from delivering 700 megawatts of clean power to Connecticut and Rhode Island. And now the administration is pulling back hundreds of millions of dollars in port funding that was approved under Biden. So I could go on and on and on here. Katherine, give us the lay of the land. Have you ever seen anything like this in your career?
Katherine Hamilton: No, although there are a lot of different angles to this. So there are five offshore wind projects actually under construction, two of which have been issued stop work orders. So that still leaves three under construction. And I’ll just say first there’s a really big pushback. So as you noted, Orsted, the Revolution Wind Project, challenged the DC, District Court, they filed for preliminary injunction this last Friday night on that stop work order.
They have people stranded on a ship in the water until they know what they’re supposed to be doing. All their labor forces out there, Connecticut and Rhode Island have filed in the Rhode Island district also about Revolution, US Wind in Maryland and then 17 states in the district are suing the government and challenging the presidential authority from the day one executive order. And they’ve done an oral argument but no ruling yet.
And what that shows is that this is a big industry and a lot of these projects are mostly done. Some of them like Vineyard’s already generating electricity, even though their project is not completely done, they’re already starting to generate electricity. And these are projects that are ready to go. Those that have already been under construction are ready to put electrons on the grid and this administration is with a lot of misinformation, and we can dive into what that is, has just decided that it doesn’t like it.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, I think a big part of this is that Trump personally hates wind, but another question is whether this is a tactic to extract concessions from governors. So you mentioned the offshore wind project in New York and that was allowed to move forward after supposedly Kathy Hochul made concessions on approving gas pipeline infrastructure. I think her office denies that exactly. But many are speculating whether this is just going to be another way that Trump can extract concessions from people and exercise raw power. What do you guys make of that element of this stop work order?
Jigar Shah: Well, I mean it’s clear that the reporting at least is that he did successfully do that in New York. So if a playbook works, you sort of continue to do it again. But I want to make sure that we hearken back to episodes that we did back in 2017, 2018, 2019 to talk about the fact that we predicted that this would happen.
Stephen Lacey: What did we predict?
Jigar Shah: Well, when projects are fully approved for construction, like XL Pipeline was fully approved, like Mountain Valley Pipeline was fully approved, and then later an administration cancels the permit after it was fully approved. Then the challenge with that is that, and I’m not suggesting this equivalency, what we’re talking about here is completely and utterly beyond any sort of logic that I could possibly think of, but I think that we have so politicized energy in this country now that we are now in a place where everything is on the table.
And I think that that is a really bad thing. I think that we should understand that having an abundant energy supply in our country is what allows us to be innovative. It’s what allows us to be artistic, it’s what allows us to do all the things that we do and we sort of politicize all these things to our peril.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think there’s a long history of energy infrastructure being politicized. When you look at a lot of the fracking bans, many of the pipeline bans, a lot of cities creating regulations to push gas connections out of buildings. I think people inside the Trump administration and a lot of people on the right generally would say the left has been doing this for a long time. To your point, I think it’s important to separate just how different the Trump administration’s tactics are, but I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who see them as part of the same story.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah. So that may be true, but I also feel like this is different and very specific and maybe you can find linkages. I just hadn’t quite thought of those linkages, but in the case of the wind projects, it feels like a very emotional rationale for stopping something that is just electrons that are ready or already being fed to the grid. That New England ISO, which is not exactly right, left leaning group, they’re just like, “Hey, we’re just the ISO New England. We’re just the guys that control the grid.” They’ve basically said that stopping Revolution Wind would undermine system reliability. That is a big deal.
But if you look at what the rationale is from the government, they’re just making things up. So they said that there’s something about national security because of underwater drones being able to attack when why would that not also affect sub-sea oil and gas lines or sub-sea internet service? They’re just things that they’re making up and they’re all kind of in it together. And I would say RFK Jr., the whale head dude, he’s been saying a couple of things. One is that it’s super expensive, that it’s 34 cents a kilowatt-hour.
It’s not. The fixed price contracts are between seven and 15 cents a kilowatt-hour. Revolution Wind is 9.80 cents a kilowatt-hour. That is not 34 cents a kilowatt-hour. And then RFK Jr.’s also saying that this is very harmful, that there are 109 whale groundings in 22 months. Zero whale groundings have been linked to wind at all. None. Whale groundings are linked to vessels and fisherman’s nets and climate change migration and all kinds of other things but not wind. And so it just feels like they’re coming up with things pre-textual, like, “We’re going to find things that are wrong to make up for the fact that this is a very emotional decision on the part of the president.”
Stephen Lacey: Mm-hmm, and it’s been just such an extraordinarily hard time for the offshore wind industry. They got hit particularly hard by inflationary pressures and this Revolution Wind project was so close to being done, it is so close to being done. But, Jigar, Orsted now says it needs like nine and a half billion dollars to keep this project afloat. Is this project financeable? Is offshore wind generally financeable still in the US?
Jigar Shah: You’d have to think twice. And remember, it’s not just this project. I think that part of this is recognizing that the work that we’re doing here is impacting our relationships with Denmark broadly in the same way that the raid in Georgia affects our relationship with South Korea broadly, these are countries who have decided to invest billions of dollars into our country and bring their expertise, which is considerable.
And I would think twice, but more than that, remember they also have invested in supply chain jobs. So when you think about the towers and you think about all the ships that are being produced, part of this is the ship that was used here was produced in Steve Scalise’s district down in Louisiana. I just think that the shock waves of this project being paused, but also the jobs that are being impacted across the entire country is profound.
And it’s something that I have a really hard time wrapping my brain around. Because if you’re the Danish government and you get wronged on this front, would you invest in circular economy projects? Would you invest in other areas where you have expertise that you want to bring in to the United States? I think that they would’ve to think twice.
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, I just spoke with a wind executive who said that a huge amount of the investment is from upfront lease acquisition, hundreds of millions of dollars, even a billion dollars to acquire a lease. And the good news on that front is that these are long-dated, so 35 years, these are long-term lease arrangements. So that as long as you have that under your belt, if you can bide your time, we might find a way out because a lot of that upfront investment has been made.
Stephen Lacey: To your bigger point, Jigar, what other technologies could this impact? So a lot of analysts are worried about this sending shock waves through clean energy writ large, forcing financiers to reassess risk for everything from gas plants to advanced nuclear potentially. So if government approvals can be undone at will, what is actually safe? How big are the potential casualties across the energy system or the grid system?
Jigar Shah: Well, and remember we also got a cancellation which was illegal of the loan for a Grain Belt Express. And so this is a transmission line that is so desperately needed to bring power from SPP to MISO. And so you’re in this world where there’s a lot of people who provide capital along the way. So I think we think sometimes about capital around at the end of the project so that at the completion of the project you have debt, you have equity, et cetera.
But along the way you have development capital, you have other types of capital, and if routine things, like for instance permits at the Department of Interior might have to provide for solar projects that are on private land but have some sort of routine checkoff from some local office. I’m now hearing that some local offices are working fine as if they got no new instructions from the Trump administration. Other local offices are paralyzed, because they’re not sure what the Trump administration wants them to do in terms of these routine approvals.
And so, if you’re providing development capital to a project, and you’re like, “I don’t know whether that routine approval is going to come through,” do you fund that project? I think that there’s just all this uncertainty and even if things move forward, the cost of capital goes up. And so then now the PPA price that someone needs to sign at the very end goes up. And so I don’t understand on the macro world here, which I think the Trump administration is operating under, is that they believe that there is so much natural gas in this country that if they just built unlimited amounts of natural gas that we could just solve all of our electricity problems with AI, et cetera. And the math is just not on their side.
Just to give you one example, if you take the Permian Basin because you can’t get gas from the Marcellus down to the LNG export terminals, there’s not enough pipeline capacity. So if you take the Permian Basin and you power the entire 500 gigawatts of Stargate data centers with natural gas that would use up a third of all of the natural gas in the Permian Basin through the next 32 years. You’re saying that that would have no impact whatsoever on the cost of natural gas in that region? That that would have no impact on our ability to export LNG gas with the natural gas terminals that have already installed? It’s maddening.
Nobody in their right mind would ever go all in on natural gas when we’re already at 40% natural gas. We need diversification. You need offshore wind, you need solar, we need geothermal, we need to keep our nuclear plants running. All of that stuff needs to happen in this moment if we’re going to meet the load growth. And I just think that all of these data points are confusing to normal voters. They are not looking to become PhDs in electricity design and technologies and development. But I think that for many people, like Trump’s Truth social account is supposed to be telling them that, “We could just do this all with natural gas, but for all these woke leftists.”
Katherine Hamilton: We’re also going to see knock on effects of all these other industries that the administration purports to care about. For example, shipping. Well, the offshore industry has improved ports, Empire Wind improved South Brooklyn. Revolution, New London. Vineyard, New Bedford. These are all improved marine terminals and those are also getting funding reduced when we need more of those.
And those would also help boost those priorities that the president claims to have for building more ships, for doing other kinds of trade. And so there’s always a knock on effect if you curb one industry and offshore wind has created so much additional both supply chain and other types of industries that are surrounding it, that you’re going to have an adverse impact on a bunch of other things too.
Jigar Shah: I think that actually, yes, they’re winning some sort of meme war on Twitter, but they’re not winning the main street argument. And I think the ones who are the most nervous about this that I’m talking to are the electric utilities. They really believe that they are going to be blamed fully for these rate increases and that they believe that Trump is going to aim the Eye of Sauron on them.
Stephen Lacey: Yes, he will.
Jigar Shah: And when that happens, then they are going to have to respond in kind around why they’re doing battery storage and why they’re doing solar and why they’re doing all this other stuff because there’s no other choice. Even if they wanted to do whatever Trump wanted to do, it’s not possible. They can’t build natural gas power plants in time to bring all these loads on board. They can’t build nuclear plants in time to bring all these loads on board. And so they are caught in the middle and right now they’re keeping their mouth shut because they frankly have no political power given the changes at EEI and all the other things.
But what I’m worried about is that this offshore wind piece is giving all of this confidence to people in the administration. And what’s in fact going to happen is that you’re going to see a rallying of all of these different people including oil and gas. Remember the oil and gas industry is not happy with this administration. The steel and aluminum tariffs, all this stuff, has made their profitability go way down, right? Chevron just announced that they’re cutting 20% of their entire global workforce.
And so you’re seeing all of these negative ripple effects and no one is willing to stand up to the president this week. But I think collectively you will see that people will have to stand up to the president at some point because we’re just not going to be able to meet our energy goals.
Katherine Hamilton: But all of those utilities, all of these companies, offshore wind included, they all have employees and people, many of whom voted for this president for very different reasons. Those folks that are stuck on that boat in the middle off the coast because of the revolution stop order, a lot of those I’m sure voted for this president because they didn’t think that their job was a woke job. They just thought it was a really good construction job.
And so I think you’re going to start seeing, if he goes too hard, an erosion of support from people who just want work and they want really good work and they found a good job in an industry that was growing. And I think that’s going to come back to bite all of those folks who are not standing up for the industries that are being kneecapped.
Stephen Lacey: All right. So do you think this is the end of the US offshore wind industry?
Katherine Hamilton: I do not. I actually think they’re going to keep going. I think some of them may kind of wait it out a bit. I think the ones that are about to go online are going to get online. They’re going to find a way through the courts. They’re going to get online. I think some of those who already have leases and have spent gobs of money trying to make sure that they’ve got those in place and that have the long-term contracts and OffTEC agreements, I think they might wait it out because they will see that it will turn around. This is a long-term big infrastructure industry. I don’t think it’s dead.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, I would say it a little bit differently, which is that I agree with Katherine, but I think that the president is putting us into a massive recession. Through that massive recession, you’re going to start to see some harmonization of some of the inflation stuff and some of the other sort of cost drivers that were hurting offshore wind. And I think offshore wind will come roaring back strong sort of in that 2030, 2031 timeframe. But it’s just the most maddening thing to see the politicization of energy.
Because what I worry about is that if a Democrat comes back in the White House, they’re going to be pressured to politicize all sorts of other energy sources that we also need to keep the lights on. So I just think that we need to be very careful about politicizing energy sources.
Is the clean energy jobs engine sputtering?
Stephen Lacey: So I just had a news alert pop up on my computer from the Wall Street Journal, “Revised BLS data show the US likely added 900,000 fewer jobs than initially reported over the last 12 months that ended in March.” So that brings us into our jobs’ conversation. We got a weak August Jobs report, job creation was down 75% from last year. The overall clean energy jobs story is a schizophrenic right? On one hand, many of the headlines are pretty brutal. PosiGen shutting down power and in bankruptcy, AES cutting thousands of people. Of course we talked about this E2 study of dozens of projects that have been canceled or downsized, erasing over 15,000 jobs and tens of billions of dollars in investment.
But on the other hand, I have not looked at the latest data that just popped up on my screen here, but the last data that I saw from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that clean energy is still a pretty fast-growing part of the US workforce. They’re expected to add over 40,000 jobs by 2030. And so I want to kind of understand where we are on the macro level where clean energy is a bright spot, but on the micro level, how individual companies are suffering or recalibrating. So Katherine, how do you reconcile those two realities?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, so I think there are a few things at play. There are very specific business models that right now are in real jeopardy and I would say PosiGen falls into that. They’re very much pegged to LMI communities that are reliant on government funding, the Solar for All program, all of those things that the Inflation Reduction Act put into place with a lot of investment. When that was pulled back, some of those entities that had really relied on that to beef up their workforce are now finding themselves without the funding to do so. So those are very specific examples of types of business models.
Now that’s terrible because it negatively affects communities that most need access to solar. And then there’s another piece, and I would say vote solar probably falls into this and a few other entities that rely on philanthropic funding. And a lot of the philanthropies are being pulled in a bunch of different directions including internationally because everything that’s happening with the US government pulling out, so you’re just finding more strain on philanthropic organizations.
So if you don’t have government support and your philanthropies are strained, you have to have something else. You have to have a really strong business model. You have to be able to pivot quickly. You have to be able to rely not just on public policy, but actually on market signals and on cost-effectiveness. And so I think that’s part of what you’re seeing and that the folks that have had strong business models that have been able to pivot or be able to double down on what they do best are going to be okay.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good read of the landscape. Jigar, are there any commonalities among the companies where we’ve seen widespread layoffs?
Jigar Shah: Well, I think when you say layoffs in the clean energy sector, I think we’re talking mostly about bankruptcies. I don’t know that there’s a lot of people that are cutting 10% of their workforce. It’s more people who are like, “We ran out of cash and we have to shut down.” I think that what’s interesting in the broader clean energy marketplace is that we have a lot of weak companies, and those weak companies were, I think buoyed really by low interest rates out of COVID. I think as the interest rates went way up over the last two years, a lot of them faced a lot of strain in their business model and figuring out how they navigated that I think was already quite challenging.
And I think that as Katherine’s suggesting, I think with all the headwinds from the political rhetoric, there’s a lot of investors going, “Do I really want to put more money into some of these companies right now?” The good thing is that there’s a tremendous number of clean tech companies who actually have been quite disciplined over the last two years and they grew a lot less quickly because they’ve been more disciplined, and so they decided to grow more slowly and they are doing fine. And so they are hiring like crazy right now and they are actually taking over the market share from the companies who are going bankrupt.
And so, the overall deployment of clean energy has never been stronger, and I’m more bullish today at RE+ than I was coming in on my airplane flight into Vegas. And so I do think there’s a lot of people with a good head on their shoulders. I don’t think that that means that everyone is going to make this pivot well. I think that there’s going to be some percentage, a healthy percentage of companies that go bankrupt here over the next six months, but I think all of that market share will be taken up by the companies that are healthy. And so, as a result, we will have net job creation through 2030.
I think that people will continue to get jobs in this sector. I think this is the place where young people want to work. As I talked to young people this year, they still want to work in this sector. And so I think the future is very bright and I do think that clean energy also is broad. It’s not just solar. It’s going to be a lot of battery storage over the next five to eight years, which I think is super exciting.
Katherine Hamilton: I would pick up on that and say exactly, I’m seeing a lot of companies that are now scooping up the assets of those that are going under and finding that is tremendous opportunity for growth. As you say, they’ve been kind of lying in wait to see where the detritus landed. And then the other piece is on the job side, Jigar, jobs are changing a little bit because of the way our AI and all these other industries are moving. New manufacturing, advanced manufacturing, some of the jobs are changing, some of the skill needs are different, but that just creates more opportunity I think for people coming out of school.
Stephen Lacey: So the BLS data shows that on the generation side, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, we could see 41,000 jobs by 2030. While battery and electrical component manufacturing could add almost 50,000 positions. Jigar, do you think there are any particular areas that are poised to grow the workforce faster?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, to Katherine’s point, I think that the jobs are changing radically. So when you look at some of the new companies that I met here at RE+, we have reduced the cost of developing a project by 80%. So it used to cost X dollars to build or to find the right spot for a battery or the right spot for solar. It now costs 80% less than that money.
And why? Because a lot of those standardized reports, a lot of the work around which substations are the best, a lot of that stuff can be done with AI models and with outsourced models and that kind of stuff. And so reports that used to cost $30,000 are now costing $6,000. And so that to me means a lot of jobs are moving out of those places, reports and just reading unstructured data, and AI is doing a lot more of that. And you’re seeing a lot more jobs in revenue maximization.
So the value of some of the revenue streams in battery storage, for instance in Texas, has gone down 82% the last two years because batteries have taken the volatility from the ERCOT market. But you find that there’s actually five additional revenue streams that they’re getting access to now, and they’re stacking a lot of those value streams. And so there’s a lot of new jobs in people who are experts at unlocking those new value streams. So those are jobs that are being created.
But the tried and true jobs that continue to be there are the trades. We still have a shortage of electricians and we still have a shortage of LIUNA workers and the laborers and operating engineers and all of those people. And so every single EPC contractor I’ve talked to in the last 24 hours has said that they are fully booked out through ’26, just no space whatsoever in their dance card and that they are short workers. And so if you know somebody who just graduated from college but doesn’t have a job, they would be happy to take them on as apprentices and figure out a way to get them a meaningful career in the trades.
Stephen Lacey: What do you make of the way the green jobs’ policy political conversation has shifted? We’re like two decades into the mainstreaming of the term green jobs. No one really uses the term green jobs anymore, at least in mainstream political discourse. Katherine, how has it changed?
Katherine Hamilton: Well, I think you were getting people who had environmental leanings to get into industries that are hard tech industries. These are real jobs with real people. As Jigar says, a lot of them are trade jobs, and so you have a confluence of people who are interested in doing things that are mitigating or adapting for climate change.
At the same time, you get people who just want jobs and these are good jobs. And so, I think what that means is that when you bring all that together, it ends up just being economic driver. It doesn’t matter if you want to call it green or not. And right now in some places green, the term, seems to be out of favor, but the result is the same. And I think it’s a good thing that these are just considered good jobs.
Jigar Shah: Well, we also don’t need to classify stuff anymore. I don’t call us alternative energy, I just call us dominant.
Katherine Hamilton: No, right.
Jigar Shah: That’s what happens these days, right? You’re in this place where when you’re 85% of everything that gets added to the grid, I mean so much winning.
Is the AI bubble inflating nuclear?
Stephen Lacey: Speaking of winning, the question we want to ask now is nuclear winning. And Amory Lovins, the longtime nuclear skeptic, the founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, now RMI, just penned a piece in Utility Dive on why he thinks the AI boom will not rescue nuclear power. He called it a bubble within a bubble, and he writes that, “Nuclear lost the race to power the grid. So new reactors have no business case or operational need at this moment.”
So Lovins main point is that, he’s been arguing this for a long time, but he applies this to the AI era, “While AI-driven data center demand is real, it’s being exaggerated potentially.” And we’ve talked a little bit about whether that load growth number is being exaggerated on the data center side. And he says that, “Renewables can mostly meet that growth at lower costs,” and he argues that, “Nuclear keeps missing the same targets, big reactors that arrive years late and billions over budget. The smaller designs cost more per kilowatt-hour and create more waste per unit of energy.”
And so, I don’t think it’s any surprise that Lovins is writing a piece like this, but it does bring up an important question that I want to tackle with and I think that we will continue to wrestle with, which is that is the current demand picture enough to drive this renaissance in the nuclear industry? So, Jigar, you were in this at DOE, you did a lot within DOE to try to get nuclear back on track, what do you make of Amory’s arguments? I know that you’re probably not going to agree with them, but maybe we start with what do you think he gets right and what is off the mark?
Jigar Shah: Well, it’s very clear that the Western governments have had persistent cost overruns on all the nuclear plants that they built, whether it’s Finland or the UK or Vogtle down in Georgia. And he might actually even be right throughout his piece, but I think that the part that bothers me about this way of thinking, and it’s the same way that Jane Fonda thinks about things or Jerry Brown thought about things, is that they just believe that America can never do big things.
Their point of view is basically all of these projects that don’t benefit from manufacturing excellence, the learning curve that we’ve talked about for so many years, cannot be done by the United States. Whether it’s the Big Dig in Boston or whether it’s large port projects, we just can’t do big things and we’re never going to be better. And I just feel like that point of view is stupid.
Why in the world would you believe that America can never do big things? It’s one thing to say that we do not implement the best practices from Brent Flyvbjerg’s book and some of the other books that have come out recently around how to do big things. You have to spend 10% of the entire budget up front, have to measure 34 times and cut once. You can’t rush into projects. There’s lots of things that we can say that are productive in this time. But saying that, “Nuclear power, which I’ve hated since I protested with Jane Fonda at Diablo Canyon is not going to work and here are the random arguments I’m going to use to actually hurt nuclear power,” why?
Just say that we have a hard time doing big things, whether it’s sustainable aviation fuels, whether it’s clean hydrogen, whether it’s decarbonizing, cement and steel. We have a hard time with all of these big things. Why single out nuclear power?
Stephen Lacey: Katherine, what do you think he gets wrong and what do you think he gets right?
Katherine Hamilton: This is so funny when I hear Jigar saying this, I feel like that’s the argument that the Trump administration is making against offshore wind, “Those are big projects. Can we build big projects?” And given that demand is rising and price of electricity is rising, it seems like we have to use whatever we can get our hands on and if there are nuclear plants that are available and able to be brought online cost effectively and in a way that handles demand.
And the trick about demand that Amory Lovins is completely correct about is that it’s uncertain. We don’t really know what’s going to happen. We know for some places what’s going to happen, but it’s also very localized. So making sure that we match whatever we’re building, whether it’s large or small, with where we think demand is going and with affordability, I think that’s going to be the secret sauce. And whatever is going to be the cheapest quickest to get online I think is what we’re going to need to get in the short term. And then we need to think about what do we want to invest in over the long term?
Because yeah, we may need to invest in big projects. I would argue that we need to invest more in transmission projects. Those are big hard projects to do, but those are going to be able to get us what we need in a lot of ways, whether it’s nuclear or any other kind of large generation source.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. This was not a surprise, as I said, that Amory penned this piece. I think what was interesting to me is thinking about the demand picture for data centers, and I think that a lot of the load growth projections are inflated and that has consequences for what you invest in in the long-term to serve the boom in AI and in computing.
And so I think what he gets right in this piece is that we should be sort of skeptical about some of these long-term demand projections, and we should ask whether that is enough to really drive the nuclear industry in particular forward. So, Jigar, what do you think about the demand signal we’re seeing? A lot of this new demand is coming from the tech industry through partnerships and order books and a verbal commitment to the industry. Do you think it is enough to move the industry forward and get projects in the ground?
Jigar Shah: Well, I think the proof is in the pudding. It’s very obvious that the restart of the TMI plant is because of a contract with Microsoft. So that’s pretty clear, right? It’s very clear that when you look at the announcements that Google has made with Kairos, that Google is quite serious about Kairos. And they believe that that 50 megawatt size range is something that is more manufacturable than the 300 megawatt small modular reactors or the AP1000.
And so Google has gone all in on Kairos, and that is interesting. I think when you look at what OPG in Ontario is doing with GE Hitachi’s 300 megawatt reactor at Darlington, they’ve decided that it’s smarter to build four 300 megawatt reactors and learn from each reactor than it is to build one 1,200 megawatt reactor. And so we’re going to know exactly. Those are projects that are absolutely moving forward. They’ve already gotten financing, they’ve already gotten offtake agreements, they’ve already got these things.
Now VC Summer is supposed to announce very soon, and Lindsey Graham has said that they’re definitely restarting the process there. So we’ll see who they pick. And then I can tell you whether I believe that they’re capable of actually restarting the process of finishing VC Summer or not. Holtec has decided to go public as a publicly traded company, and they’re going to use that balance sheet to build to Holtec 300s at Palisades in Michigan, and they also have a deal that they’ve announced in India. So these are real data points with real commercial contracts, with real things.
Now, there’s lots of stuff that I don’t believe. So there’s like a hundred other companies that have announced that they’re doing stuff, and I have looked into whatever I can there and have found nothing underneath there. So nothing that gives me comfort that they’re going to be real. So of the 150 names that have been floated, I think I named six or five. So those are the ones that I think are real.
Now, separately, I think the question becomes how much wealth creation has our country experienced out of owning the internet? I think a lot, right? Then social media companies, then all these cloud computing companies. And so I think it is very clear that if you believe that the US is unlikely to challenge China to be the manufacturing hub of the world that we were in the 1940s, then we need to continue to have these new acts.
And one of the new acts that we think we want to win on is AI. Do I think that AI is going to be fully powered with nuclear? Unlikely, but there are a lot of really commercial contracts being signed right now by companies. Even in Maryland, there’s a very serious conversation happening with the hyperscalers and building another reactor at Calvert Cliffs. And so that’s real. And so it’s an interesting conversation.
Do I think it’s going to get to a final investment decision? I don’t know. I feel like the Loan Programs Office right now is not a place that I would like to hang my hat around efficiently giving me a loan for any new projects. And I don’t see how a lot of these projects move forward without that loan. So we’re going to have to see where that goes. But I just think that like the enthusiasm that I feel for Fervo and all the geothermal names, I also feel enthusiasm for the three, four, five names in the nuclear space that I think are sober who are reading Brent Flyvbjerg’s book and actually really learning from what it takes to do things slowly, methodically, and better this time around.
Are they going to succeed? Hell if I know, but I believe in the commercialization of technologies that have a much lower carbon footprint. I just do. And I don’t think that we’re going to become bankrupt as a country because we try to build $40 billion worth of next generation nuclear plants when at the same time we’re building $550 billion of clean energy from electric vehicles to solar, plus battery storage, to wind to other things on the other side. I feel like there’s a way to be balanced about this conversation without being hyperbolic.
Stephen Lacey: Very well said. I agree with most of that. I think the biggest bottleneck for me right now, sort of taking the handful of examples of things that could move forward is the disorganization within government and what it could do to the public-private partnerships to eventually finance these plants. And it feels to me like that is the big wild card that could prevent some of these plants from going forward.
Katherine, what’s your read on the way the Trump administration is emphasizing nuclear right now? What’s working and not working and how’s the industry reacting?
Katherine Hamilton: Yeah, there’s this whole storyline about nuclear being more American as a technology. And I checked to see how about the supply chain for all these different technologies, which is more American? The most American is hydropower, 75% of the equipment in the hydropower industry in supply chain. And second is geothermal. It’s basically oil and gas industry, 65%, geothermal. Wind, 55%. We have a lot of wind manufacturing in this country, so a lot of it is American. Nuclear comes down to at 45% and solar is 30%, so solar is the lowest.
But nuclear mining and conversion happen in Canada, enrichment in the EU, especially France, and then reactors and forging are in Japan, South Korea and Europe. It’s a global industry. So anything that the administration does on international relations is going to impact the nuclear power industry as much as if not more than it impacts others. So it’s just something that if the administration believes it’s more American, that’s a great narrative, but it may not be true, especially when you have to rely other countries and rely on trade from other countries to make it happen.
So that’s just something to keep in mind because this is a global marketplace and in order to build big things, you got to work with other countries to do it. And that’s where I think some of the gaps are and what the administration would like to do, what their narrative is and what may happen on the ground.
Stephen Lacey: I guess the last question that I have is about cost. Are we seeing learning curves in nuclear, Jigar? Are you bullish about cost reductions?
Jigar Shah: So we certainly are seeing learning curves out of China, but I think there’s a lot of people who are worried that we can’t match that here in the United States. I think when you read the Liftoff Report that we published in January of 2025, as we were leaving office, we were very sober, so we said it was going to cost $20 a watt for the first reactor and then it was going to come down. We have an entire cost curve. I’d say that the vast majority of Wall Street as well as the reactor construction folks believe that cost curve, right?
So whether or not it’s true, I can’t tell you, but I think that they think that it was thoughtful and that we made it high enough that they actually thought that if you took the best practices approach, that that is the best case scenario that you could see. And that shows that we never get to Chinese numbers, we never get to like $4,000 of kW. We get down to like $8,000 of kW in the west.
And so the other thing I would say though is with Kairos and then some of the microreactors, so think Oklo, Radiant, some of those types of folks, they really are a manufactured product. So they are a twenty-foot shipping container. You would create a manufacturing facility, you would create a hundred reactors a year that came out of that manufacturing facility, which is similar to offshore wind.
Offshore wind are very complex units, and the manufacturing facilities for offshore wind make 50 of those like nacelles a year. They’re manufactured, but they’re complex. So we have experience on how to do that kind of manufacturing, which could drive down the cost. And so I am bullish on the cost structure. I think that we can consistently get to pick a number, let’s say 9.9 cents a kilowatt-hour. I don’t think it ever gets to 2 cents a kilowatt-hour.
And then remember, the way that nuclear is financed is that these reactors will last 60, the current fleet of reactors now have been permitted to 80 years. And so the cost structure I’m talking about is only for during the first 30 years, right? When the loan program’s office provides a loan, et cetera. So as soon as you pay off the loan, then you drop to where nuclear power plants are today that are on the grid, which are like three and a half to 4 cents a kilowatt-hour depending on whose math you’re using and which reactors.
The last thing I would say is that the value of nuclear is very high. So when you look at the decarbonization scenarios from NREL, the cost of a high clean firm grid is 37% cheaper than a high solar and wind grid. Because you have to build so much transmission, you’d have to 3X the transmission grid to be able to handle 80% solar and wind power with battery storage. And so you can have high specific generating costs while reducing overall system costs. And so that’s important.
And then one more point is people have been talking a lot about the PJM auction and how the costs have come way up and it’s impacted prices in New Jersey and Maryland. The one place in the PJM where you did not see spikes in the capacity auction Illinois. Why? Because it’s 70% nuclear. So part of the challenge here is thinking this through from a systemic point of view. And so I think you could see nuclear continue to be high cost, let’s call it a hundred dollars a megawatt-hour, and still see lower overall decarbonization costs for our entire grid.
Stephen Lacey: All right, Jigar, we’re going to let you go off to RE+, what are you going to do today? You’re not going to sit in the casino, right? You’re going to actually go talk to people.
Jigar Shah: Well, honestly, I am going to hang out with Neil Chatterjee who’s here, whose Fox News piece, by the way, two days ago was a masterstroke in politics.
Stephen Lacey: I didn’t see it.
Jigar Shah: He wrote this great news piece on Fox News that talks about how Trump’s energy policy is going to drive a wedge between Silicon Valley and MAGA, which I thought was a fascinating political analysis. So I’d have everybody watch and read that. And I’m going to go see our friend Nico at the SunCast stage and do his podcast.
And so, I’m super excited about all of the folks who have boosts on the trade show. I am one of those people who always walks the trade show floor just because I find all the cool stuff that people are doing to just be so inspiring. And so I’m going to let myself be inspired.
Stephen Lacey: Katherine, good luck at Cornell.
Katherine Hamilton: Thanks so much. Ithaca is gorgeous. So if you like anything about geothermal, that’s the place to go and I can’t wait.
Stephen Lacey: All right. Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah are my co-hosts. Open Circuit is produced by Latitude Media. You can find this show anywhere you listen to your podcasts, and please give us a rating in review. You can find transcripts of this show on Latitude Media. You can also sign up for our newsletters. And the show is produced and edited by me. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Anne Bailey is our senior story editor.
For more in-depth reporting, just head on over to Latitude Media and you can find lots of articles that pertain to this stuff that we are talking about on this show, and we will see you next week. Take care, everybody.
