Paul Gerke and Mike Casey cover a nationwide Election Day backlash against data centers, with voters in dozens of jurisdictions passing bans or limits. Akshat Rathi makes the case that electrification cuts pollution even on a fossil-heavy grid, and a Brattle report finds distributed energy could save the U.S. power system $614 billion by 2050. The hosts look at Meta’s green cement deal with Sublime Systems. Then Clara Hudson of The Wall Street Journal explains why Big Tech is soft launching data centers early. The Cleantecher of the Week is Franco Rodriguez Viau of Satellites on Fire.
Paul Gerke: Hey everybody and welcome to the latest edition of This Week in Cleantech, your favorite 15-minute or so roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week. Today is Friday, November 13th, 2026. We have a returning guest in waiting, Clara Hudson from the Wall Street Journal, will be joining the show shortly. I’m back with this, content director Paul Gerke, joined as always by cleantech commentator and uh the guy who invested most of his life savings in Nvidia stock, Mike Casey of Tigercomm. Mike, great great morning for you, right? Everything is fine. You’re in a chipper mood, per usual.
Mike Casey: You know, kick a guy when he’s down, Gerke. Gerke, kick a guy when he’s down. Fine. You know, listen, first off, I’m still basking in the in the industrial-sized can of whoop ass that was administered to a bunch of cleantech haters last week. But I want to give a shout out to the biggest cleantecher in the world, Elon Musk. Do you know that he fruitlessly spent $445 million this year on politics?
Paul Gerke: Twitter.
Mike Casey: Um, different. But here’s a fun fact, Paul Gerke. $445 million spent on elections was only $10 million less than his total tax bill from 2014 to 2018 according to ProPublica. How do you like that? Um, I also want to give a listener shout out to listeners Sasha Heinemann and Michael Seymour who just also happen to be new members of our team here at our firm, but want to give them a shout out.
Paul Gerke: And now we have named all of them. We’ve named all of the listeners now on episode 120, whatever it is, we’ve gotten each of them. So, congratulations. Yeah, we’ve got everybody’s name mentioned on the show. You’re all equally famous. Uh, no, I tease. We do appreciate hearing from you guys anytime you shout us out. Uh, we try to parrot that love right back on this program. So, if you want uh your opinions on the show or have two cents to spare, we’ll always take it. We’ve got a special email address that you can send that stuff to. It’s twic@tigercomm.us. As always, we cover five stories on the show. Well, Mike, what’s the first one this week?
Mike Casey: Uh, hey, and I got bad news for you, dude. Um, Kelsey Tamborrino just messaged me.
Paul Gerke: True.
Mike Casey: And she said, “I tend to say the long a in data like you. Just let Paul know.” Just want to let you know.
Paul Gerke: But yeah, it’s always bad news when people agree with you and not me. Clara Hudson has come back to resupply you with validation on your malapropism.
Mike Casey: So, but you know what? We dither. Uh, for the love of Michael Peron, we’re going to keep this under 20 minutes because we’re starting with our first story.
Mike Casey: Three people from the Washington Post, Miriam uh Wild Vogle, Shira Ovide, and Evan Halper, who’s moving over to the New York Times. They write, “A nationwide backlash against data centers erupts at the polls.” Paul Gerke, what eruption do you see in this story?
Paul Gerke: I was going to make a joke about how you have the pulse on the movings and shakings of the journalists uh in the clean energy industry so well that you’re like, actually, he’s not going to stay there for much longer, but I too didn’t...
Mike Casey: Put it on LinkedIn, dude. It’s a big...
Paul Gerke: Well, if it’s on LinkedIn, that’s a public town hall. Everyone should have seen it then. Shame on me. Uh, voters in at least 38 jurisdictions passed bans or restrictions on data centers on Election Day. I think it’s actually more than that. It’s dozens and dozens. There weren’t very many, uh, if if maybe one that went the opposite direction. A lot of those weren’t very close at all. If data centers were on the ballot, uh, the people were against them. In Ohio, a group called Conserve Ohio uh helped residents draft 10 local ballot measures that ban large data centers. Its co-founder, a former Trump delegate, says all 10 passed. That group now wants a statewide ban on the ballot next year. Bloomberg found the one community that went the other way. It’s out in Harwood, North Dakota, a town of 800 that voted down restrictions on industrial development. But I have to note here though, Mike, that the phrasing for that one was reversed. It was one of those tricky ones where it was like yes means no and no means yes. So if you weren’t paying close attention, I do wonder if that small North Dakota town got hoodwinked. Uh, back in April, we covered Port Washington, Wisconsin passing the nation’s first data center referendum. Uh, 7 months later, we’re seeing this all over the place. Mike, something that we’ve had our eye on for a while. Don’t want to say it’s unexpected. Uh, your thoughts?
Mike Casey: Yeah, you know, you and I are going to RE+ next week in Las Vegas, and a larger and larger percentage of the people who are attending there have something to do with data centers because um cleantech and tech are merging through the buildout of AI. Um, I will note that our friend Michael Thomas at Cleanview has found that 41% of the nation’s planned data centers now sit in states where an incoming governor has campaigned on pausing or a or banning data centers. That would be a bit of a problem. A poll last month found seven in 10 Americans, including a majority of Republicans, oppose new data centers in their communities. The big complaints are noise, water use, high electric bills, and no say-so in the process. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon say they’re dropping contract terms that kept early project details secret from residents and infuriating them. And OpenAI has started calling them AI compute campuses instead of data centers. Paul, story number two.
Paul Gerke: A little rebrand for for data centers. I think that there’s some legs to that. We’ll talk about it more a little later.
Paul Gerke: Our second story this week, Akshat Rathi from Bloomberg. “Why everything should be electric even if the power comes from coal.” Mike Casey.
Mike Casey: That would be Dr. Akshat Rathi to you, Paul Gerke.
Paul Gerke: I apologize. Dropping balls left and right over here.
Mike Casey: Today, the Turkish hosts at COP31 are pushing for a pledge to raise electricity’s global share of energy use to 35% by 2035. Today, it’s just a quarter. The argument is that electrification is a smart economic choice for rich and poor countries alike. It cuts carbon pollution across the board because electric equipment is so much more efficient than burning fossil fuels directly. MIT researchers found that driving an EV in the U.S., where 40% of power comes from natural gas, produces 40 to 60% less carbon pollution than a comparable car running on gasoline. Electric motor vehicles turn about 90% of their energy into motion. A combustion engine manages less than 30%. Paul, what do you think?
Paul Gerke: Heat pumps are pretty similar to that. They produce about half the carbon pollution of a gas boiler. Same level of comfort, even after counting losses at the power plant and on the grid. High diesel and natural gas prices are pushing electrification into heavy trucks and low-heat industrial processes like making chemicals and food. Cement, steel, shipping, and aviation are going to be much harder. Those are the real difficult ones to solve for. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are speeding things up on the electrification front. The Philippines added some solar incentives. Bangladesh and Cambodia, uh, Cambodia rather, cut tariffs on EVs. At least six European countries identified in this piece have added new funding for heat pumps. Story number three.
Mike Casey: Number three, Bethany Bashioum from Factor This. Uh, I wonder who pushed that story, Paul Gerke. Uh, “Distributed energy could save the U.S. power grid $614 billion,” with a B.
Paul Gerke: Let me be clear. I didn’t push a darn thing. And shout out to Bethany Bashioum making her debut here on This Week in Cleantech. Going to have to let her know. Uh, this was a really interesting report from the Brattle Group. It found that expanding DERs, distributed energy resources, could save us a ton of money on the power system, like $614 billion through 2050. DERs are exactly what they sound like. Distributed resources like rooftop solar, home batteries, flexible demand like thermostats. It’s on the customer side, not on the utility side. Removing regulatory and market barriers to harness those resources could more than quadruple DER capacity, something like 400 gigawatts of potential by midcentury. And it could really cut down on the amount of gas that we have to build or or coal that we have to keep running. This Brattle report found that it could cut uh new gas capacity by about 70 gigawatts. That’s 175 different gas plants, uh, replacing about 105 gigawatts of utility-scale storage and helping utilities avoid costly infrastructure investments that we all know get passed down to the ratepayer. For households, average electric bills could be $122 a year lower by 2050. I think that might be a little wishful thinking from the folks at Brattle. That offsets roughly half of the projected increase above inflation. Mike, your uh thoughts after diving into this piece.
Mike Casey: So the most important finding might be about what happens if demand forecasts are wrong. So utilities, they’re planning around uh big load growth from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification, but no one really knows when, where, or how much of that’s going to show up. So Brattle modeled a scenario where demand falls short. In that case, leaning more on distributed resources could cut the cost of overbuilt infrastructure by $33 billion between 2030 and 2040. It’s about a 40% reduction. I hope the hyperscalers screwing around with behind-the-meter gas take note. Brattle says three policy changes alone could could avoid $266 billion in costs, about 43% of the total. Those are building DERs into utility distribution planning, lowering local permitting costs, and streamlining interconnection. Paul, our fourth story.
Paul Gerke: Story four by Martha Muir from the Financial Times titled, “Can green cement decarbonize the data center building boom?” Mike.
Mike Casey: Yeah. Meta. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. Perhaps you wear their glasses, but maybe you don’t. Committed to buying the...
Paul Gerke: The Facebook? You mean the Facebook guys?
Mike Casey: Yeah. Committed to buying the equivalent of 180,000 metric tons of low-carbon cement from the startup Sublime Systems, which will help Sublime build its first commercial plant in the U.S. But Meta isn’t getting the actual cement. It’s buying environmental attribute certificates, which let it claim credit for the carbon pollution Sublime cuts without using the material itself. Sublime creates one certificate for Meta for every ton it produces. Cement is roughly 7% of global carbon pollution. Most of the scrutiny on data centers has been about how much electricity they use, but building them with cement and steel creates a lot of pollution, too. Sublime skips the traditional kiln, which heats limestone to about uh 1,450 degrees Celsius. It uses calcium silicate rock and an electrochemical process instead. It says it cuts carbon pollution 70 to 80% while competing with regular cement on strength and price, around $160 to $180 a ton. Paul Gerke, your thoughts.
Paul Gerke: Critics point out the obvious, and that’s how this is similar to NFTs, and that a piece of paper or a picture of an ape is not exactly the same as the real deal. Um, companies claiming climate wins with a certificate without actually reducing carbon in any way. Is that really doing a damn bit of good is a fair question. Sublime says the deal actually funds real low-carbon cement, not carbon pollution shuffled around on paper, though. Meta says those certificates support its direct supply chain work rather than replacing it. And it can buy physical cement if Sublime builds a plant close enough to its data centers. My opinion, that sounds like too many ifs. The U.S. is the world’s largest cement importer, bringing in 22% of what it uses. Its plants average about 36 years old. You’re supposed to replace them at 40. That’s not good. Sublime has a lot to prove. The first plant’s going to cost, I don’t know, 600, 700 million. What’s a few hundred million between friends? That process hasn’t been shown at commercial scale yet. Another problem, running on electricity could expose it to volatile power prices, too, which will only make those costs go up. Let’s not wait another moment for our guest, Mike.
Mike Casey: Absolutely not. Clara Hudson, the Wall Street Journal. She wrote a story which I will read, because when the Romans visit, you do what the Romans do, right? “Big tech is la... soft launching data centers early, bracing for scrutiny.” Paul Gerke, Clara Hudson, welcome back. Uh, Paul Gerke has desperately missed you. You guys can malapropism together, but um, this is a cool story. Give us a... give our listeners the bottom line, because we want them to read it, but if they haven’t, bring them in.
Clara Hudson: Yeah, thanks for having me. And yeah, on the data, data centers, sort of a tomato, tomato situation, I guess. Um, so this was a story about hyperscalers essentially trying to get ahead of all of this data center pushback. So what I was seeing is that they were kind of soft launching their plans, like getting ahead of this, putting the information out early. And for this story, I looked at Google, and what they did is they put out a website, and this was for a small town in New Mexico called Lea County, which is sort of like oil country on the Texas border. So the website was explaining, here’s how we’re going to be responsible. This is what our water impact is going to be. That sort of thing. But I think overall the gist of the piece was really that this kind of soft launching strategy might not work. It’s... they’re in sort of a weird position because it gives communities more time to organize against them, but they have to get that information out early because they’ve also been criticized for not being transparent.
Mike Casey: Yeah.
Clara Hudson: So, it’s this sort of rock and a hard place situation, and it, I mean, it it could backfire too. And so in this case, locals set up a Facebook page immediately after they heard about the the Google plans. And I I spoke to the Facebook group organizer, and he was basically saying, “We feel like we’re teaching the company how to sell its data center to us,” because they were giving community feedback that that Google was asking for. So they they felt that the the approach was kind of disingenuous. Obviously, you know, Google disagrees and says, like, we have to get this information out early, and it’s better that we do it that way, and we can actually have a, like, a real dialogue with the community.
Paul Gerke: When we were chatting in the virtual lobby before the show, you made an interesting point and a bold prediction, and we love to hold people’s feet to the fire on this very responsible, journalistically integrity uh program. Uh, so I’m going to I’m going to put you on the spot, Clara. Uh, you think that data centers are in need of a rebrand. Um, tell me a little more about that and what you think they should be.
Clara Hudson: Yeah, I I think that the term has become... it has such negative connotations at this point that I I would put money on it getting some kind of rebrand, and I... you you alluded to that earlier in one of one of the stories that you mentioned.
Mike Casey: What do you think it’s going to be? I mean, like, when you think about Trump renaming AI super intelligence, would would they be a super center? Is is that something that uh that you think sounds like the the next name?
Paul Gerke: Doesn’t Walmart have a claim on that term, super center?
Mike Casey: Oh, well, maybe. Maybe.
Paul Gerke: And has super intelligence stuck? I mean, I I I feel like it’s akin to, like, renaming one of the Great Lakes. Like, I’m not sure anyone’s actually using that. Like, it might show up on a map or something, but eventually we’re just going to kind of forget about it for the most part. I still hear people talking about artificial intelligence, not super intelligence. But when the super intelligence shows up, maybe it’ll have a strong opinion about what it wants to be called, and we’re just going to have to kowtow to it. So maybe we just put that on the back burner for now.
Clara Hudson: Well, as a plug, I wrote a separate story about what tech CEOs are... what terms they’re they’re using. Are they using super intelligence? Are they using art... artificial intelligence? So kind of walking through how they’re uh kind of dealing with that fine line on, like, what what is the branding that we’re using.
Paul Gerke: So I love that. A two-for-one plug on the show.
Mike Casey: Tightrope, I would say. All right, Clara, in your reporting, how do these companies define a soft launch? Because I I... there’s going to be probably a quarter of the people going to Las Vegas next week for RE+ that would be very interested in the answer to that question.
Clara Hudson: I mean, so they’re trying to get the information out as soon as they can, and a lot of them have been criticized for signing non-disclosure agreements with local officials. And I I think that the problem here is that the community feels like stuff is happening behind the scenes and that they’re not brought in until the last minute, and then they only have, like, a couple weeks to organize and and push back. So I... in in this situation, for the story that I wrote, Google was saying, “We got to this early. We put out all of the information.” But then the locals that I spoke to said, you know, from their perspective, “But we only had a couple of weeks to really even understand what’s happening before there was, like, a local commission vote.” So there are go... there’s going to be a difference of opinions as to what is, like, early enough, but I would say that the the hyperscalers are definitely, I think they are announcing their plans earlier than they have before. I think the question is, like, whether or not it’s early enough for locals to feel appeased.
Paul Gerke: Well, last question, or should we go to Cleantecher of the Week, my friend? I think it’s about that time to move it on to the Cleantecher of the Week by Casey.
Mike Casey: All right, let’s do it. For the love of Michael Peron, we’re going to finish this thing under 20 minutes.
Paul Gerke: Go, man.
Mike Casey: This week’s Cleantecher of the Week is Franco Rodriguez Viau, CEO of Satellites on Fire. Hell of a name for a rock band, if you want to rebrand, Franco. After family friends in Argentina lost their homes to wildfires, Franco and two pals launched an AI wildfire early warning system when they were 16 years old. What were you doing when you were 16?
Paul Gerke: Sneaking. Nothing. Nothing that cool.
Mike Casey: Yeah. The team says it can spot a fire within the first 3 minutes, about 35 minutes faster than NASA can do it on average. They alert the firefighters via WhatsApp. Last year, it helped authorities respond to more than 2,000 fires across 21 countries. Congratulations, Franco of Satellites on Fire, our Cleantecher of the Week.
Paul Gerke: Clare Quirin and Alex Petersen. Thank them all. Your pals that helped put this whole show together. Without them, we are nothing. Same thing with our guests. One last shout out for Clara Hudson for joining This Week in Cleantech. Really nice to have you back on.
Clara Hudson: Thanks for having me.
Paul Gerke: Of course. Please subscribe if you like the show. You, Clara, but you the listener as well. Leave a little feedback if you want, a comment, a story suggestion. We love to hear from the people. You can check out every article we shout out each week. There are links in the episode description as well as in the post where this thing lives on factorthis.com. Until next time, be good everybody.
Mike Casey: See you at RE+.