Battery storage has long been touted as the solution to wind and solar intermittency—or the variable nature of wind and solar electricity production. A recent report co-authored by Mitch Rolling and Jonathan Lesser, Ph.D., for the National Center of Energy Analytics (NCEA), put this to the test. The report, Batteries and the Grid: Hype, Hope, and Economic […]

As if to welcome the nation’s utility regulators to Minneapolis for the National Association of Regulatory Commissioners (NARUC) summer meeting next week, MISO declared an Energy Emergency Alert Level 2 on Wednesday, July 15th, citing forced generation outages, above-normal temperatures, and higher-than-forecasted load. Interestingly, MISO did not mention that its wind resources, which constitute 33,687 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity and […]

Big Tech companies continue to hit new high scores with respect to their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Despite the climate pledge Microsoft made in 2020 to be carbon-neutral by 2030, the company’s latest sustainability report shows that the company’s GHG emissions exceeded 21 million metric tons in fiscal year 2025, up 27 percent from the year before. […]

The June 2026 edition of our newsletter marks America’s 250th birthday by remembering that “net zero” isn’t anything new. It’s what energy looked like in 1776. Colonial Americans heated with wood, cooked over open fires, lit their homes with candles and whale oil, and ran mills with water wheels, windmills, and draft animals. Coal, oil, […]

Isaac Orr, Vice President of Research at Always On Energy Research, joined Fox 5’s Good Day D.C. to discuss whether the electric grid can keep up with AI-driven data center growth. Orr said data centers are currently winning the race against new power plant construction, and that the fastest fix is to stop retiring coal […]

In President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the administration has sought to boost the coal industry’s fortunes by reducing regulatory and permitting hurdles, opening millions of acres for coal leasing, issuing 202(c) Emergency Orders to temporarily keep several coal plants from closing, and approving Department of Energy (DOE) funds for upgrades, extensions, and even new coal builds […]

When we started in the energy industry over a decade ago, it was very common to hear the claim that “renewables are the cheapest energy sources,” based on Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) metrics. Many advocates added, “even without subsidies!” These claims went largely uncontested for years, with journalists and the mainstream media seemingly eager to parrot common […]

The May 2026 edition of our monthly newsletter features our latest research, Introducing the Social Cost of Blackouts. Federal and state regulators already attach a dollar value to carbon emissions through the Social Cost of Carbon and rely on it to justify burdensome regulations and subsidies. Nothing equivalent prices the outages those same rules produce. […]

Always On Vice President of Research Isaac Orr joined Good Morning Liberty to explain why grid reliability went from a 2030s worry to a near-term one. AI data centers and electric vehicle mandates are piling new demand onto a system that keeps retiring coal and nuclear capacity, and Orr points to NERC warning of high […]

The AI hype machine is running at full steam, and the expectation of massive growth in data center load is causing a storm in the energy industry. As the narrative is currently told, data centers are going to devour gigawatts of power, leading to a massive increase in electricity usage and peak demand—with the costs […]