Fwd: Trump can't have AI without renewables

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Loretta Lohman

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Dec 4, 2025, 3:46:03 PM (2 days ago) Dec 4

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President Donald Trump is pro-AI and anti-renewables. But those two stances are increasingly contradictory: Data centers need quick power on the cheap, and that’s exactly what renewables offer.

Today’s newsletter takes you inside the mismatch and why opposing renewables might do more than hinder the US in the battle for AI supremacy. Plus, a look at the staggering economic and human toll of floods that left large parts of Asia underwater last month and a new report indicating some Arab countries are getting “too hot to handle.”

For more climate and energy news from around the world, please subscribe to Bloomberg News.

So you want an AI boom

By Kyle Stock, Mark Chediak and Josh Saul

The Trump administration is moving to fast-track the construction of power-hungry data centers as a matter of national security. At the same time, it’s adding roadblocks for new solar and wind farms.

But the two policies could be at odds: Hindering renewable energy projects risks slowing the AI boom — and could exacerbate rising electricity prices, a slew of data suggests.

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment right now to get the power to supply this,” said Robert Whaley, director of North American power at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy. “In the next 10 years, there’s really nothing to replace renewables.”

The AI explosion — and its energy demands — is happening much faster than the pace at which utilities typically plan and build large power plants. In response, tech giants like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have taken extreme measures to keep up, cobbling together data centers in tents and signing contracts for their own power plants.

Renewable energy so far remains the fastest and cheapest option to add power to the grid. Nearly 80% of the planned power plant capacity in the pipeline is tied to renewable sources, according to filings with federal regulators and grid operators compiled by Cleanview.co, an energy data company.

The number of applications for natural gas and nuclear facilities, the options President Donald Trump is embracing to power the AI surge, is much smaller, making up about 14% of planned capacity.

The dynamic creates a potential political challenge for Trump, whose goal of using the AI boom as an engine for the American economy risks blowback at the ballot box if voters blame the data centers he's championed for higher power bills.

“President Trump is expanding base load power from reliable energy sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear to support growing electricity demand from AI and data centers,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson. “Intermittent and unreliable energy sources like offshore wind that were propped up by the Green New Scam simply cannot generate the sustained power needed to make the United States the global leader in cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing.”

But the cost to build solar and wind farms plummeted in the years before those incentives were scrapped. Meanwhile, building up enough gas and nuclear plants to power data centers may prove too slow and expensive. Gas turbines, critical equipment to turn natural gas into electricity, are in short supply, and even though Trump is moving to accelerate permitting of the next generation of small-modular nuclear reactors, the next wave of those aren’t expected to be built until the end of the decade at the earliest.

At this point, battery storage systems, solar arrays and wind farms are faster and cheaper to build per kilowatt of capacity than anything else, according to Lazard.

Another advantage to renewable-powered data centers is that those equipped to supply their own power during heatwaves and other emergencies can begin operations much more quickly than those reliant solely on traditional utility hookups, according to a new study by Princeton University’s ZERO Lab in conjunction with energy software firms Camus Energy and encoord.

Installing onsite natural gas turbines, solar panels or batteries means data centers can achieve a speedier connection to the grid because they will represent less of a demand stress when electricity is tight. In some cases, the wait time can be cut by as much as five years — a significant difference in an industry where grid hookups can stretch up to seven years.

Read the full stories on how renewables projects are quietly getting built and on research showing data centers equipped with their own power sources can start operating much faster.

Buyers market

9.6

The number of gigawatts of clean power major tech companies bought in the first half of the year. That's enough power for 7.2 million homes.

Renewables’ other big benefit

“A very powerful lever to the underlying growth of an economy.”

Julian Wentzel

Chief sustainability officer, HSBC Holdings Plc

China’s big bet on renewables has put it in a “very unique position,” according to Wentzel, because once the upfront infrastructure is paid off, producing extra energy carries effectively no incremental cost.

Southeast Asia’s deadly storms

By Claire Jiao, Aaron Clark, and Mary Hui

Residents walk through floodwaters in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Photographer: NurPhoto/NurPhoto

Devastating floods have killed more than 1,300 people and caused at least $20 billion in losses since late last month across parts of South and Southeast Asia, underscoring the increasing risks from climate change and extreme weather for the region’s fast-growing populations and economies.

A sequence of three tropical cyclones coincided with the regular northeast monsoon to deliver rainfall totals unseen in decades in some locations, and triggered a wave of destruction from Sri Lanka to Indonesia — damaged homes, roads and rail lines, decimated crops, slowed factory output and inundated tourist spots.

Scientists and analysts have pointed to the likely aggravating impact of climate change on the flooding, along with exacerbating factors including deforestation, failures in flood defenses and a lack of funding for disaster resilience.

“Climate change is undeniably fueling more severe flooding in Southeast Asia,” said Davide Faranda, research director in climate physics at the French National Center for Scientific Research who led a study on Vietnam’s November floods.

The risk in Southeast Asia is that “compound disasters” — when multiple extreme events strike in close succession — will occur more frequently and inflict greater damage in the coming years, according to research firm BMI, a unit of Fitch Solutions.

Despite the climate risks, progress toward building resiliency in many countries lags other parts of the world partly because some authorities in Southeast Asia prioritized growth over planning and adaptation efforts, said Helen Nguyen, an environmental engineering professor with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“The development went so fast,” said Nguyen. “That came at the expense of the environment.”

Read the full story to find out why the toll of disasters is so high and what can be done to protect against future storms.

Arab Region is becoming “too hot”

By Laura Millan

Temperatures in the Arab world are rising at twice the global average and intense heat waves are pushing society to the limits, according to a new report by the World Meteorological Organization.

A number of countries reported temperatures of above 50C last year, and heat waves are stretching longer in a region that’s been simultaneously hit by drought and episodes of extreme rainfall that have resulted in deadly flash floods.

Air Temperature Anomalies Photographer: Source: WMO, ERA5 Land

“Human health, ecosystems and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50 °Celsius,” said WMO secretary general Celeste Saulo. “It is simply too hot to handle.”

The WMO’s State of Climate in the Arab Region marks the first time the UN body has partnered with the Arab League to produce research to inform climate policy in 15 countries in the region. Many of these nations are water-stressed and major producers of the fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases and cause global warming.

This week’s Zero

In his new book Breakneck, tech analyst Dan Wang argues China’s engineering mindset has given it an edge in all sorts of domains, including climate technologies, while America’s lawyerly mindset is holding it back. This week on Zero, Wang tells Akshat Rathi what the world can learn from China and how the US could start to compete on green tech in the future.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Photo finish

Spanish military personnel carry out decontamination Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Getty Images

Spain is using decontamination equipment and techniques from the coronavirus era, as well as deploying soldiers, police dogs and drones on the outskirts of Barcelona to track down wild boar and prevent a swine fever outbreak from spreading to commercial pig farms.

African swine fever was eradicated from Spain’s pig farms in the 1960s. But in the country’s forests, wild boar are thriving due to a combination of winters made milder by climate change, a lack of natural predators and human migration away from rural areas. The animals forage in rubbish bins belonging to houses near the forest, and sometimes even venture deep into the city.

Soaring wild boar populations wreak havoc across Europe. Efforts to cull them have so far failed, with authorities in Barcelona trying everything from controlled hunting to sterilization of females in recent years. In the nearby region of Aragón, authorities offer as much as 30 euros ($35) for each wild boar to encourage people to hunt them.

“Wild boar have become a problem,” said Joaquín Vicente, a researcher at the Institute for the Investigation of Hunting Resources in Ciudad Real. “They’re thriving around cities and they’re very hard to control in these areas because one can’t go in guns blazing.”