Wood Mackenzie’s note says four-hour storage is now cheaper than gas peakers across global markets, and the reason is the part I like. Peakers got expensive because everyone wants a gas turbine at once, so there’s a backlog, and fuel prices have been jumpy. Batteries didn’t win by doing anything dramatic. The competition got stuck in a queue.

Data centers show up in the same sentence as the reason storage and renewables look better in North America. The loads that were supposed to drag us back to gas are, through the supply chain, making the alternative look good. I don’t think anybody planned that.

Meanwhile DOE filed something rare at FERC, pressing PJM to track whether a project actually enters service or gets delayed, shrunk, or cancelled, so the cost of new generation lands on the customers who caused it. That’s the same instinct as the $1 letter of credit from a couple of weeks ago: if you want a gigawatt, show me the paper. It’s a little funny that a department not known for fretting about ratepayers is the one asking.

Then Massachusetts, using alternative compliance payments (the fees suppliers pay when they miss clean energy targets) to help people heat their homes this winter. So the penalty for failing the climate target pays for the heating bill. It’s tidy, and a little perverse in a way I can’t decide whether to admire. If suppliers get better at hitting targets, the fund shrinks. Does anyone want to make the relief program depend on the mandate being missed?

And Grist is running a piece on a bipartisan energy bill splitting the climate movement, which I’d bet is the permitting deal. When the fight is between people who mostly agree on the goal, the disagreement is usually about who gets to say no, and for how long.

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