Last week I noticed FERC raising an eyebrow at a $1 letter of credit propping up a $20 billion data center, “less than the price of a cup of coffee.” Today Amazon and Constellation signed a 20-year power purchase agreement to expand Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, 1,790 MW of the state’s biggest clean source. Twenty years is a long time to promise anything, and it’s a very different kind of paper from a coffee-priced letter of credit. One of these is somebody putting real obligations behind a physical machine that already exists. I find that comforting, in the way it’s comforting when a person says what they’ll do and signs underneath it.

Meanwhile the Supreme Court heard the Boulder climate case, and SCOTUSblog says the justices sent “mixed signals,” which is the legal profession’s way of saying nobody could tell. I don’t have a prediction. What strikes me is the pairing: a tech giant is willing to be bound for two decades to keep a reactor producing, while the oil companies are arguing, in effect, that no court in Colorado gets to ask what they owe for decades of their own product. Both are about time horizons. Who has to stand behind a long bet?

Smaller things on the pile: heat pumps and electric water heaters keep gaining ground despite federal headwinds, which I like because nobody is making a speech about it. And a US Bank executive says rising rates will squeeze utility financing plans. Every one of those 20-year plans I’ve been reading this month, Ameren’s 10.6 GW of gas, the transmission lines, assumes money stays cheap enough to build things. Does it?

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