This week’s episode covers how the Iran conflict is reshaping global energy strategies, negative power prices in the U.S., and Michigan regulators pushing utilities toward virtual power plants. The hosts also discuss the UK’s plan to boost energy demand during renewable surpluses. Jennifer Hiller of the Wall Street Journal joins to explain why utilities plan to spend $1.4 trillion to support AI-driven data center growth—and what it means for ratepayers.
Paul Gerke (00:01.24)
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of This Week in CleanSec, your favorite 15 minute roundup with the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week. Today is Friday, April 17, 2026. We do have a guest on the line, Jennifer Hiller of the Wall Street Journal. Ever heard of it? Joining us shortly. If you don't know me or my sarcastic tone by now, I'm Factor, this content director Paul Gerke. Joined as always by cleantech commentator Mike Casey of TigerCom, who just poured himself a fresh cup of tea. Mike, I'm three cups of coffee deep.
How are you feeling so far this month?
Mike Casey (00:31.564)
I'm good, Paul, I hope you are not insulted by this, but you look neither inflated by helium or divinely anointed this morning. But I'm still going to take you because you got that rugged, handsome look to you that's right out of an action movie. No wonder your wife is crazy about you. Tell ya, looking good. I'm just...
Paul Gerke (00:48.164)
Where is this going? I feel plenty inflated by the way now. You pumped me up.
Mike Casey (00:55.968)
Well, don't be like Kristi Noem's husband. Don't do that. That's a bad look, fella. Don't.
Paul Gerke (01:00.22)
Jeez. I'm gonna grab the wheel and get us back on the track. So we do appreciate hearing from viewers and listeners of the program. If you guys want to get a shout out on the show or recommend a story for us, we'll always take whatever two cents you've got to spare. Just email us. Address is TWIC at TigerCom with two M's dot U S. Mike, we got five stories on tap this week. Let's get it started. Story number one.
Mike Casey (01:24.064)
And side note, I had to crack you up because Brian Mendes didn't do his job and crack us up before we started rolling, and fun fact, I'm gonna be heading to his hometown of Austin next week and actually having dinner with the mighty Brian Mendes because I'm coming in town to speak at Geronimo Power's executive summit because I'm important like that. I'm important like that. All right, good. So our first story.
Paul Gerke (01:43.225)
Very cool. You gotta take pictures to prove that it happened. That's what I hear. You're a big deal.
Paul Gerke (01:51.64)
Story one.
Mike Casey (01:54.048)
is by multi-time show guest Evan Halper from the Washington Post. Stung by Iran, countries are turning against U.S. fossil fuels. Paul Gerke.
Paul Gerke (02:03.46)
So if you've been following this space, you know that U.S. energy companies have been pouring billions of dollars into LNG export terminals to meet increasing demand from Europe and Asia. But the war in Iran right now is pushing those regions to reduce reliance on imported LNG. We want to get our energy from home if we can. It's disrupting U.S. expansion plans and the long-term outlook for fossil fuels, much to the chagrin of the fossil fuel bros who often get the blunt end on this show, to reduce dependence on imports.
Governments from Manila to Hanoi are pursuing a mix of alternatives that includes more coal, unfortunately, but also new nuclear plants, expanded EV adoption. There's a Wood Mackenzie report that says prolonged disruption could have global reliance on imported oil and gas by 2050, cut it in half from today's levels. The report also says this would not slow climate change by much, the aforementioned coal part. However, current U.S. LNG terminals are mostly protected by long-term contracts.
The future projects, though, rely on demand from countries who are now rethinking their energy use. Some Asian governments are already cutting energy consumption and speeding up clean energy development. Mike, what do you think about all of this?
Mike Casey (03:11.361)
So with apologies in advance to U.S. fracking secretary Chris Wright, here is a bummer for all the fossil fuel bros who, by the way, half of them don't have personalities because they're bots. Just want to be clear. But when you ship and install equipment to capture solar and wind, you have no more bottlenecks. With fossil fuels, the fuels are the bottleneck. So growing number of countries are seeing that. Officials in the Philippines rushing to bring more than a gigawatt of solar capacity online within weeks.
while advancing a massive solar and storage project designed to reduce alliance on, you guessed it, frac gas. Vietnam signed a deal to produce a new nuclear power plant and expand offshore wind. Indonesia is accelerating a major hydro project. All is to say, the Iran conflict has shown many people that LNG can no longer be considered a reliable, affordable fuel. Paul, story number two.
Paul Gerke (04:05.345)
Our second story this week is from Scott DiSabino from Reuters titled,
Mike Casey (04:16.533)
In the wait, there's more category. Mild weather drove power and gas prices negative in Texas and California Tuesday, as strong hydro and renewable output exceeded demand, forcing some producers to cut output to pay others to take their excess energy. At the Waha Hub in West Texas, gas prices have stayed negative for a record 47 days due to pipeline bottlenecks trapping excess gas from Permian oil production.
So analysts have long argued that negative prices were a sign that the Permian region needs more gas pipes. But while more pipes are on their way later this year, they are not coming soon enough to handle all the gas currently coming out of the ground. And this of course begs the question, Paul Gerke, if you're able to overproduce, do you really need all this government welfare you're taking from our pockets? Paul, your thoughts.
Paul Gerke (05:04.483)
I'll leave that alone and mention that California has also seen negative power prices recently. Spot power at the SouthPath 15 Hub dropped to a negative 72 cents per megawatt hour on Tuesday. That's down from a positive $1.88 on Monday. Energy traders noted that power prices turned negative more often during spring in the western United States when warmer weather melts snow in the mountains, boosting the supply of water for hydropower. Although, Mike, from my perch, I've heard some complaints lately about the amount of water available for a lot of hydropower plants who are operating well below capacity as a result of the ongoing climate problems that we talk about on this show. Moving on to story number three, what do we got?
Mike Casey (05:47.225)
So our third story is from this obscure blogger with a readership of three. One of them is his mom, who's he's writing out of his mom's basement. It's this guy named Paul Gerke from Factor This. And he wrote this piece, which we picked. I want to be clear, listeners and viewers, we picked this one. Paul did not. But we're expecting Venmo payments nonetheless. Michigan regulators and utilities incorporate virtual power plants or else. Paul Gerke, what do you have to say for yourself?
Paul Gerke (06:13.717)
Yeah, so I have to say that this is the third or fourth time that we featured some of my own journalism on the show and none of the times was I actually aware that the thing was in the show until we hit that part of the script. So I wasn't even preparing to talk about this today, but I'm glad you selected it because I thought the story was really interesting. I was turned on to it from a friend of mine over at Advanced Energy United, the advocacy group. They released a release about this that sort of put it on my radar and
the caveat here is that this is kind of a big deal in terms of the way that the Michigan Public Service Commission is issuing in writing a stern warning to the state's utilities that can be extrapolated to be a stern warning to utilities in general in Michigan and abroad that, hey, you need to get with the times or you need to stop asking us for money, one of the two. So the situation here is Consumers Energy, one of the big two utilities in Michigan, they keep filing for
rate hikes. That's nothing new. They're actually planning on asking for another multi hundred million dollar rate hike, literally the first day they can ask for one coming up later this year after just being granted the bulk of another one. They went to the Michigan Public Service Commission asking for this money and they more or less said, hey, if you don't come back with a plan to incorporate distributed energy resources, namely virtual power plants, et cetera, as a way of cutting back on the amount of money you're asking from your rate base,
and to lower electricity prices, then we're probably not going to approve those rate hikes. The MPSC also reinforcing existing requirements that we need to treat DERs as viable options in long-term planning and providing analysis and future filings. The crowd here says if you're ignoring VPPs at this point, you're definitely missing cost savings and reliability gains in your systems and we can't solve all of these problems with just poles and wires.
Michigan's Attorney General Dana Nessel has been a thorn in Consumers Energy's side for years now criticizing the utility for seeking hundreds of millions more from ratepayers. Mike, your thoughts about all of this and about, you know, somebody putting in writing, a PSC saying, no, we need to modernize our systems.
Mike Casey (08:22.688)
In a brilliantly reported Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of journalism, my friend Paul Gerke talked about how VPPs prove their real-world potential during a first of its kind coordinated test in California last summer, where all three major utilities in the state worked together to dispatch thousands of DERs at once. More than a dozen states have now established or are considering establishing the VPP-style programs. Paul, we are going to keep tracking the 15 minutes, so get to four stories now.
Paul Gerke (08:53.653)
Yeah, listen man, you're talking about myself, you put those 15 minutes in jeopardy every single time, just saying. Story four, baby! Jillian Ambrose from The Guardian. It's titled Great Britain Households to be urged to use more power this summer as renewables soar. Tell me about it.
Mike Casey (10:41.272)
So Great Britain's households are going to be urged to use more of the record renewable energy this summer to help balance the grid and cut power bills. Energy suppliers might offer free or discounted electricity during periods of predicted surplus to help deliver the plan. Here's the challenge. Many suppliers already offer 2 million households cheaper off-peak electricity, but this is the first time the system operator will use it to balance the grid. So the National Energy System Operator
hopes that this strategy can help them avoid making payments to turn wind and solar farms off when electricity demand is low, which are ultimately paid for through energy bills. The offer could be especially popular this summer as households prepare to face dual fuel energy bills rising to nearly 2,000 British pounds from July amid soaring costs driven by, you guessed it, the Iran War. Paul.
Paul Gerke (11:33.431)
Future grid upgrades should eventually allow renewable energy to reach demand centers more easily, which would reduce the need for curtailment payments. Rising demand from EVs, heat pumps, and green hydrogen makers by the 2030s should further reduce the need to curb renewable energy. Businesses and manufacturers also able to boost their demand for electricity at specific times in exchange for better rates as part of this program. We'll keep an eye on it, Mike, but let's not make Jennifer wait any longer. Story number five.
Mike Casey (00:00.814)
I like to hear the sound of my own voice. All right, heck yeah, we've got Jennifer Hiller of the Wall Street Journal. She's back with a really cool story that I think is definitely should be the one we talk to somebody about. So she writes, utilities plan to spend 1.4 trillion with AT over the next five years to power the AI boom.
Jennifer, Maine just banned data centers to serve AI and I see bans popping up all over the place and when I read this story I thought, my gosh, we've got to have her on because, I mean, this is a massive investment that they're planning to make. Can you tell us more about it?
Jennifer Hiller (00:48.677)
Yeah, utility spending is really set to rise by quite a lot and by ever increasing amounts, apparently. So just in the last year, they've boosted spending plans by about 20%. This is going to happen over a five year period. A lot of it still has to go through state regulators for approval. So it's not completely a done deal, but clearly the direction of spending is up. And as you said, there's a lot of concern about
the spending that might be related to data centers and whether that would bleed over to other customers. So you're seeing a lot of concern for a variety of reasons across the country about the data center build out. And part of it is tied to concern about rising power prices.
Paul Gerke (01:36.397)
Jennifer, I feel like this is a really old argument that just has a modern spin on it now that can be distilled to who's going to pay for it. And it's this ongoing thing with the utility infrastructure that's been going on for as long as we've had rate payers and poles and wires. But it seems like there's an accelerant poured on it now. And there's a disconnect between the people who use electricity and are paying more and more for it and continue to pay more for it versus what they're getting in exchange for that payment.
And it's like, well, I don't want a data center in my community. I don't get the tax benefits. All I see is my rates going up. And I feel like from my vantage point, and referenced a little in the Michigan virtual power plant story earlier in the show, is that there's going to be a line at some point for ratepayers and for public service commissions or PUCs where they have to step in and say, you can't do it. Jennifer, in your reporting, did you get that sense at all that there's an increasing distaste for these utility rate hikes?
Jennifer Hiller (02:35.397)
Well, definitely. And I think everything is getting more expensive. And even if there were not data centers being built out at these massive scales, electricity costs would be going higher simply because of inflation and supply chains and everything has gotten more expensive to build in that world. So when they have to replace equipment or do some expansion, it's just going to cost more. I think the concern that you're seeing now is
that the amount of spending that they're gonna need to do for data centers, like how well are regulators or utilities gonna be able to sort of ring fence that and keep it over in a different bucket from the rest of the ratepayers. I mean, in theory, what the utility industry is arguing is that if you have more users, because you do have some spare capacity in the system that you can spread costs over, you spread costs over more users, costs could
be lowered versus what they would be otherwise. So that is the ideal theory, is that it would not cause costs to bleed over and that it could lower system costs for all users. But we will have to see how that rolls out.
Mike Casey (03:49.09)
Jennifer, before the AI-driven data center boom and the massive rise in load, you would hear aging grid, aging grid, aging grid all over the place. So infrastructure does need to get updated at some point. Is anybody you talked to in your reporting offering what you find to be credible numbers that say of the increase in spending on infrastructure that utilities are going to embark on,
X has come from just aging what we already have and needing to make it more flexible to take on new power sources. And Y is the amount, is the delta that the tech companies are basically imposing on the system. I haven't seen anybody offer that breakdown in a way that I think normal people can understand. Have you seen that in your reporting?
Jennifer Hiller (04:44.289)
It's a little bit opaque. You'll see sort of broad breakdowns, but I think the issue is that all of these decisions happen in a very nitty gritty way during rate making processes that unless you are a participant in that process, either as the company is directly involved or as an intervener that has been okayed into that process, you don't have
exactly the visibility of where is all of the spending going and exactly how are all of the costs being allocated. So you're sort of trusting, you know, that the regulatory process is doing its diligence because it's just on a high level, you'll see breakdowns of these numbers, but these decisions are sort of made case by case across the country.
You know, just dozens and hundreds of times over the course of a year that, you know, these discussions are happening everywhere. And so it's really just, it's so detailed and we don't have complete visibility into exactly how this spending breaks down. And it gets really messy because some of the spending benefits all customer classes. And where's the line?
Mike Casey (06:01.379)
Yeah. Yeah, Paul, you want to do another question? This is amazing story. So before we go to cleantecher of the week.
Paul Gerke (06:06.952)
Yeah, I'll sneak one more in. I'm curious to learn if you discovered a regional discrepancy at all here. We talk a lot about the different grids and the different regional transmission organizations as having different responsibilities, not just for climate, but also for load. Is this, are we dumping more money into one particular region? Please say PJM, please say PJM. No, I'm kidding. I don't need my rates to go up any higher, but we do need the infrastructure improvement to Mike's point.
Jennifer Hiller (06:33.911)
Yeah, this is a report that PowerLines did, which is a consumer education group, and they broke it down sort of by regions of the country. Everybody is spending more money. So there is no area of the U.S. power grid where everybody's got this figured out and things are running totally smoothly and they're all updated and things are fine. Everybody is
needing to do some level of spending. The largest chunk of it was happening in the South, which they were sort of broadly defining as kind of Texas over to Florida, you know, up through, you know, Tennessee, Virginia, and, you know, quite a lot of spending proposed in those areas. And that does scoop up a lot of the big data center markets. It also scoops up a lot of the states that
have had a lot of weather damage to their system where they've got to do a lot of replacement from hurricanes or ice storms and that sort of stuff.
Paul Gerke (07:36.01)
Yeah, Mike, you know, not to go off the rails here, but that's the part of it that I think bears repeating, is that there's also this weather resilience component too. And yes, we need to harden these systems, but those storms aren't going to stop coming. We're going to have more requests for more damage on top of all of this, and it's going to get tricky in the years to come. But, Jennifer, we've wasted enough of your time. Thank you so much for sharing those insights with us.
Mike Casey (07:57.282)
Yeah, amazing story. We could talk to Jennifer all day long about these stories. She does. We need to go to our cleantecher of the week, my friend.
Jennifer Hiller (07:58.424)
Anytime.
Paul Gerke (08:02.73)
Yeah. Let's do it. Cleantecher of the week this week, drum roll please, Mr. Mendes, is Kerry Bowie, president and founder of Browning the Green Space, or BGS for short. It's a nonprofit in Massachusetts. They create job and business opportunities in clean energy for people of color through training programs, startup support, career pipelines, also bringing together companies and partners to take away those barriers and expand access to more affordable, equitable energy solutions. Congratulations, Kerry Bowie, president and founder of
Browning the Green Space, BGS, our cleantecher of the week.
Mike Casey (08:34.19)
We've got to thank our wonderful producer Brian Mendes and Alex Petersen and Clare Quirin for helping gathering these stories.
Paul Gerke (08:40.352)
Yes, and thank you one more time to Jennifer Hiller for joining us on the show and for you, the listener, the viewer, for joining us on This Week in cleantech. Thank you to Kelsey Tamburino. That was last week. You know what? We'll give Kelsey Tamburino a shout out for joining us on last week's episode. I'm glad we left that in the script. I tease everybody. Please subscribe, leave feedback, share story suggestions if you like. You can find all the stories we talk about each week. Just click on the links. They're in the episode description. You'll also find them in the post where this lives on factorthis.com. Until next time, everybody, be good.