Here’s a small number to chew on: $4.8 million for roughly 187,000 acres of Nevada. That’s a couple of cents on the dollar compared to what the same ground would mean if a plant ever got built on it, and the sale still pulled in less per acre than last year’s. Geothermal is the renewable everyone nods at, firm and always on, no sun required, and the federal auction for it looked like a quiet Tuesday.

The detail I liked more is that two of the parcels that sold overlap the site of a proposed NextEra solar farm. So the same dirt now has two prospective futures, one that taps heat from below and one that collects light from above. Whoever gets there second inherits a negotiation. Every story in this month’s feed has been about scarce interconnection or scarce transformers, and here’s the older scarcity underneath all of it: somebody has to be standing on the land.

Meanwhile LevelTen says solar PPA prices rose 5% in the third quarter, mostly on the new tariffs, while wind held steady. Yesterday’s duty on cells from India, Indonesia and Laos is already in the price. It’s odd how quickly a trade ruling turns into a number on a contract, a few weeks and a few percent.

And the PJM capacity crisis gets a fresh defense from the Atlantic Council: the market drifted toward spot-price dependence, so the problem is design, not competition. That may well be right. It’s also what everyone says about a system after it breaks, and the hard part is that the design is the thing people were paying for.

Heat pumps cutting summer rates 13% in summer-peaking states is the quiet good news. More load, lower bills. That used to be how this worked.

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