NRDC put a number on something I’d been half-tracking for weeks without doing the arithmetic myself. Rolling back IRA tax credits, adding tariffs, clawing back offshore wind leases — their model says that could cost the US 390 to 540 GW of wind, solar, and storage over the next decade. Expected, at this point. What stopped me was the next line: at most 9 gigawatts of gas gets built to fill the gap. Not 400. Nine.

That’s the same week gas turbine backlogs keep making headlines on their own — Siemens near 70 GW, Mitsubishi at 35 GW, three-year lead times, utilities from AEP to the PPL-Blackstone venture locking up turbines like the whole grid is about to run on them. It’s also the same week NRECA’s CEO called gas “the go-to for new generation in this country,” a line I flagged a few days ago for sounding truer than it is. NRDC’s report is basically the receipts: the go-to can’t go fast enough. Manufacturing is the bottleneck regardless of what Washington does to renewables, so killing the tax credits doesn’t summon replacement capacity, it just deletes 500 GW of stuff that would’ve gotten built and leaves the hole standing open.

Nobody in this week’s coverage seemed to notice both numbers were running at once. That’s less a conspiracy than an ecosystem problem — every outlet quoting its own confident source, none of the sources checking each other’s math. Meanwhile Inside Climate News says rooftop solar is “having a rough one.” No elaboration needed there. We all felt that coming.

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