← Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
Shift Key with Robinson Meyer
The Biggest Lessons of a Not-So-Great Year for Climate Policy
01:01:01
Jesse and Rob take stock of 2025.
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- [00:01]
A
You are listening to Shift Key Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we look back at the year's biggest energy and climate stories. The Trump effect, the data center boom, the EV retrenchment, what Jesse and I got right and especially wrong on energy and climate in 2025. It's all coming up on Shift Key after this. You might know about Heat Map for our award winning journalism covering the clean energy transition. And you may know about Heat Map for this podcast. But do you know we also have a data platform called heatmap Pro. Heatmap Pro is this special platform full of data and insights on political risk that energy developers can't get anywhere else. In heatmap Pro, we track contested renewable projects all around the country and county level restrictions and ordinances. Then we bring in additional data sources and proprietary polling, all to forecast the risk of local opposition to your project. We generate a political risk score for every county in the country. To learn more about using heatmap Pro for your community affairs strategy, visit heatmap News Pro. That's heatmap News Pro. Hi, I'm Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of heatmap News.
- [01:23]
B
And I'm Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
- [01:27]
A
And you are listening to Shift Key Heat Maps weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we are looking back. We are reexamining the assumptions, the beliefs we brought into 2025 and then what actually happened. Looking at what we got right and what we got wrong. It is your energy and climate wrapped for 2025. Your energy and climate replay. Jesse. It's funny, it's our anniversary. I think about two years ago you texted me over the weekend. That's right. But two years ago we gathered in a coffee shop in Princeton, New Jersey.
- [02:00]
B
And decide for the Thanksgiving weekend break when you were back in town visiting family and.
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A
Yeah, exactly.
- [02:06]
B
You know what? This crazy idea might just work. Let's do it.
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A
And here we are, it's two years later. We're actually also suspiciously close to the 100th episode, but this is not it.
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B
Oh yeah, we'll be counting down soon.
- [02:18]
A
Exactly.
- [02:19]
B
Well, as we approach the end of the year here, it's a good time for us, I think, to check some of our hot takes and see how stale or cold they are now, today, and what we maybe got right, what we got wrong. It's been a pretty tumultuous year at least in the US Context for the energy transition to maybe understate it. So I'm sure there are things that we some beliefs we held at the beginning of the year that have been checked by reality since then. So good to introspect a little bit, don't you think, Rob?
- [02:44]
A
I think that's right. And I think let's get right into it, don't you think?
- [02:48]
B
Yeah, let's roll.
- [02:50]
A
So item number one, the unmovable item would be what you've termed in our outline here the Trump effect, but which I would describe as both the huge set of actions Donald Trump has done in office, as well as the repeal of large sections of the Inflation Reduction Act. And so let me just start by asking you, what did you expect when we began the year and what has actually happened?
- [03:17]
B
Yeah, so I guess we went into the year, I certainly expect that Republicans would take aim, both legislatively and through executive branch actions, at the climate energy agenda the Biden administration and Democrats had implemented over the last four years. Going into the year, I think we kind of had sort of two scenarios in mind. One where Trump basically was able to do what he could do through executive action alone, things like repealing EPA regulations On, you know, EVs and emission standards for vehicles, power plant regulations for greenhouse gas emissions, of course, that were just being finalized, those sorts of major executive repeals. And then I think where I was a bit more optimistic, and I think we talked about this in a few episodes, nearing the end of last year, coming into this year, you know, this is one of the areas I think I got wrong. I said a lot in public, you know, as I was giving public remarks on where we were headed in this transition, I thought that the legislative side would have a lot more difficulty actually getting a majority to repeal a large number of these tax credits. And I thought that because the economic benefits that the policies were intended to deliver were starting to appear. You know, we were seeing large scale investment in manufacturing, largely due to incentives for domestic clean energy manufacturing, EV manufacturing, batteries, et cetera from the ira, plus the chips and science acts, investments in semiconductor manufacturing. We were seeing capital investment in new manufacturing equipment hit records we haven't seen in decades. And we were starting to see clean energy deployment at scale in a large number of areas. And mostly those were centered in Republican districts. And so my theory was that it would be difficult to get a majority given how narrow the Republican majorities were in both the House and Senate for large scale repeals that would be pretty economically damaging for their own constituencies. And some of their self professed objectives, like, you know, enhancing American energy supply, improving American manufacturing, reshoring, et cetera. Unfortunately, and this is where I do think the Trump effect is probably pretty apartment I do think Trump had an inordinate effect on that process. The way in which he exercises control over the Republican Party is pretty unique and I think moves us out of a world of fairly rational, interested politics where each member is sort of representing the interests of their district into a pretty lockstep party line type scenario where even though there was dozens of House members vocally and repeatedly saying we don't really want to do this, repealed these incentives for clean electricity, for manufacturing, at the end of the day they were all expected to fall in line and vote for the bill in both the House and the Senate. And the only senator who stepped out of line in the Senate, Thom Tillis from North Carolina, was basically excommunicated as a result of that. Right. He's not running again. At that point, he was free to speak his mind and he became a chief critic of the bill, but only at a point where there were enough votes already committed to pass the repeal. So I think it ended up a lot worse than I expected. And particularly with wind and solar and EV sales incentives, which are, you know, two of the bigger drivers of emissions reductions in the near term, at least under the bill, but also major drivers of investment in Republican districts and provisions that people had spoken up in favor of on the Republican side of the aisle but were simply not willing to vote against the party to protect.
- [06:21]
A
Well, and it does seem like not only was Donald Trump's control of the Republican Party central to the repeal here, but it was his control of the Republican Party and his identification of climate as a specific thing he wanted to repeal that that drove this effort because there were other Biden era legislation, legislative efforts that were successful that he did not decide he wanted to repeal right now, in some cases that's because they're more, they're less polarized already than climate change like the CHIPS act or parts of the infrastructure package. In some cases that's just because they may be slipped under the radar or passed with large enough Senate majorities that he didn't pick the fight. But it does seem like he decided that these climate policies that he described as part of a Green New Deal.
- [07:12]
B
Or Green New Scam.
- [07:15]
A
Yes, exactly, Needed to be repealed. And that decision then drove the legislative politics rather than the legislative politics, maybe driving what was or wasn't included in otherwise in the one big beautiful bill Act.
- [07:32]
B
Yeah, I Mean, he came out swinging with day one executive orders, right, Targeting these sorts of provisions, at least nominally at the high level. It's always unclear exactly what he's talking about when he says things like the EV mandate when there is no such thing in literal terms at least. Did he mean the EPA regulations? Does he mean this tax incentive, which is not a mandate in any means, it's a financial incentive, you know, what is he talking about? But he definitely came out swinging in some of those early day one executive orders, really upping the rhetoric and, you know, targeting these policies as key targets for repeal. So in that ways, it's not, maybe it's not surprising. You know, we saw that pretty early on in January. But I still thought it was unclear whether the, you know, the House and Senate would fall in line, at least the Senate, you know, tends to be relatively independent in its, you know, perspective on this, Stu. But yeah, but I was largely wrong there.
- [08:21]
A
So what do you think that being wrong about this means that kind of we should change our mind about going forward? Because this is something I'm thinking a lot about lately.
- [08:32]
B
It once again calls into question. We are out of an era of normal politics. We're in a particularly new political era where party faction and ideology, and particularly on the Republican side, at least obsequious to the party leader in this case, Trump is really the driving force in politics, as opposed to maybe a set of clear economic incentives that different regions or different parts of the country hold and then come together in Congress to sort of figure out who, what the balance of interest means for policy. It's really driven by ideology and in some cases by individual personal animosities that the president has or opinions that the president has. It's pretty hard to counter that with any kind of conventional political economy strategy, which I think was largely what the IRA was intended to be. And so I think the best strategy now is like, two things. One is like, try to keep the eye of Sauron off of you.
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A
Right.
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B
You mentioned that point, because he singled these out. They became so hard for Congress to sustain. If something falls under the radar and just doesn't rise up to the level of Trump actually truthing about it on truth, social, or talking about it in a press huddle or something, you're probably okay. But as soon as he turns his gaze on you and focuses on these topics as a priority, then everything sort of gets filtered through whatever the president wants. So I guess that's one thing is try to stay off the radar. And then the other would be, you Know, there's a very narrow circle of people that shape his views on some of these topics. And if you can't get into that circle somehow or influence the people in that circle, it seems very difficult to do much of anything to defend or support certain policy actions.
- [10:04]
A
Do you think that environmentalists, or it's not even environmentalists, but really like climate advocates, the climate movement, the kind of set of legislative groups and advocates that pushed for the ira, like, erred by making it so high profile and so central to climate, like, should basically. And go back to 2021, 2022, should the message have been, actually, let's talk about climate less, and let's phrase this not obviously, I think you and I were quite central to talking about this in climate. I'm not central, but like, we're talking about this in climate terms now, partially. That's because that's our jobs and people want to hear about this in climate terms. But, like, do you think that the lesson is kind of. Okay, maybe the lesson is a fewfold. I asked Brian Schatz this a few months ago at our New York Climate Week event and basically was like, look, seems like Democrats talked a lot about climate on the basis that this would bring young voters into the party and get young voters to kind of understand that the party actually did care about their interests. And it didn't work right. Even before the ruptures in the party coalition that happened after October 7th, it wasn't like young voters were like, yes, we really think Joe Biden, like, has our interests at heart. Biden got way more attention in the press for approving fossil fuel projects, for instance, than he did for signing the ira. So I asked Senator Schatz of Hawaii, should that change how Democrats go about passing climate policy next time? And should that suggest that Democrats shouldn't have talked as much about climate policy this time? And his view was that, look, Democrats wouldn't have done as much as they did in the ira. They wouldn't have gotten all the emissions reductions in, they wouldn't have supported the full range of technologies that they did support if they hadn't made climate central to their argument. And I think wrapped into that view is an understanding that Democrats don't really have places to talk and strategize that are outside the public view. Everything with the party happens out in public. And so the party was thinking and talking out loud and about climate. It made climate very salient. It was thinking about climate. It passed all these aggressive climate policies. But then it turned out that that same mechanism that allowed it to pass such aggressive climate policies. Also allowed. It also made those policies quite polarized when control of Washington swung. And so I guess my question is, knowing what we know now, does that mean people shouldn't have talked about climate change as much in 2021 or 2022?
- [12:36]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. I think Senator Schatz is right. And my experience aligns with this that we would not have seen such an aggressive, substantive piece of legislation move through Congress and sustain itself, despite all the headwinds that we had to overcome to get it through that final 50th vote in the Senate with Senator Manchin, if it weren't for a set of pretty motivated individuals on the Hill, Senate staff, House staff senators and House members themselves who were approaching this as if this was their one shot at making a big difference on climate. And that was a shot they had to take and do the most they could with it. And so that was certainly, I think, relevant. And so to the degree that, like the climate movement was successful in elevating the salience inside Congress, inside the building on climate, that was very successful. I think the outside the Beltway messaging certainly didn't need to lead with climate. And you know, we've seen years after year after year of polling that while there's generally broad support for action to mitigate climate change, it's very thin and low on most people's priority list. And if the idea was that there was some large motivated base akin to the maga, Right. Who was going to come out and energize themselves around climate, I think that was probably misleading or mistaken. And the way the policy was actually crafted, I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of this bill was crafted with the clarity that Senator Joe Manchin was going to be the median final 50th vote to get this thing through the Senate. A senator who literally owns a waste coal burning facility and you know, a senator from West Virginia which was, you know, what, plus 40 Trump or whatever it was. There are major elements of this bill that I think could have been emphasized in an outside the Beltway strategy and an on the ground political strategy that actually would have been successful at depoliticizing it and expanding the base of people who saw it as good for economic self interest reasons rather than for climate reasons. And basically no effort on that front was made that I could see. If the IRA was mentioned ever, it was mentioned as the biggest climate legislation ever. Right. That's how the Biden administration routinely referred to it.
- [14:38]
A
I do think There was an effort, let me put it this way. I think where it starts to get dicey is that I do actually think there were attempts made at that effort. People believed they were spending money to get the word out about the ira. How that money actually got spent. Well, look at it. Invest in our future. I mean lots of people told me.
- [14:58]
B
Yeah, but again, none of that was really on the ground spent trying to expand like Pennsylvania factory workers or North Carolina EV battery assembly workers or wind farm installers in Iowa. That was not the comm strategy that was out there.
- [15:14]
A
No, but I think that that's exactly what I'm saying is that I think people thought that they were funding part of that comm strategy. So there was this group called Invest in Our Future that has now spent down its playbook that was described before it started as the implementation effort. The group that was going to push for the successful implementation and aggressive implementation and communicate the win, you know, win the win, so to speak of the Iraq and lots of climate philanthropists funded it. What it wound up doing was not that. And when I talked to folks who worked there earlier this year, they told me that they, that they didn't see that as their goal. What they saw as their goal was to maximally increase IRA uptake by teaching nonprofits, churches, schools, non taxable entities how to take advantage of the direct pay tax credits in the ira. And the theory was that by putting solar panels on school and church roofs, et cetera, this would win the win politically of the ira. I'm calling this out because I think.
- [16:19]
B
I think it's very relevant.
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A
I think it's very relevant to kind of how the drift happens here, which is that the legislation was passed, it was seen as benefiting workers, seen as benefiting firms, and yet where a lot of spending wound up happening was to kind of increase how it benefited nonprofits or non taxed entities. People who were in some ways already organized and already accessible. Rather than organize going in and organizing communities or workers or even firms that were benefiting from this law but otherwise weren't kind of hooked into political legibility.
- [16:52]
B
Yeah, I think a huge part of it was over indexed on the grant programs in the IRA and not the tax credits in the IRA which were the vast majority of the total financial impact.
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A
There's about $100 billion of grants in the IRA and depending on how you counted and what estimate you used, perhaps 760 billion, 660 billion DOL. More than that, 900 billion of tax credits in the IRA. Most of the tax credits as most shift key listeners will know, were uncapped. So there was effectively, there was no limit on them. It would be spent as much as there was entities that were claiming them on their tax returns. And the only question was, okay, how many people are going to claim them on their tax returns, not how well funded are these programs.
- [17:36]
B
And while there was an effort, I think, to help individuals claim IRA tax credits and also rebates through organizations like Rewiring America, they were focused on those sort of consumer tax credit side incentives for energy efficiency or heat pumps or EVs, rooftop solar. Again, the emissions impact of that was quite minimal compared to the broader incentives out there. And I think that there was a lot of effort, of course, because it did require a lot of effort on the part of recipients to apply for grants, whether those were municipalities or nonprofits or schools or others, to actually access some of the funding available through the grant programs. That was a considerable effort. Like applying for federal grants is not easy. Most of these places were not staffed to do so. So in that sense, given the challenge of implementation, that sucked up a lot of the funding and effort to sort of help these organizations take credit. Maybe that's actually a critique of the policy design itself, more so than anything. But at the end of the day, what that meant, I think, is that while most of the impact and most of the key priorities for defensive action against repeal were the tax credits, very little effort went into organizing the direct and indirect beneficiaries of those tax credits on the ground into a cohesive political unit, into a voice that recognized, A, that they're benefiting from this law, which many didn't even know, and B, that that law was under threat, and C, that they had an interest in defending it and could bring their voices to bear that kind of classic on the ground organizing effort. So that, say you're in rural Georgia and there's a battery manufacturing plant coming, Hyundai's opening their plant, or LG Chem or whoever else. How many people there actually even knew that that factory was there because of some law that passed in Congress as opposed to just some broader economic force that's going on? Probably very few, right? And so then, you know, if you're not even at that level, how would you ever know that you need to make your voice heard to defend this facility that you're employed at, or that your friend is employed at, or that your parents are employed at, or whatever else?
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A
The issue is that those facilities were often not popular during their construction phase, or they were sometimes not popular during Their construction phase.
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B
Yeah, I think there was a couple of examples, particularly with Chinese related companies like Goshen in Michigan, but I don't know how often that was the case.
- [19:48]
A
I guess my feeling is that it's to get to a place where the facility would be having concrete benefits, you would need to have it be up and running for a little while at least. And it's hard for me to think about how.
- [20:01]
B
Yeah, that was the argument. That was always the excuse that I got when I pointed this out was, well, we have to wait for these benefits to materialize. A, many have, we had a lot of open facilities on the ground. And so that's kind of bullshit. There were dozens of facilities across the country that were employing people manufacturing things and B, the construction activity itself is a pretty substantial economic benefit for communities and a large amount of people employed at those. And see, even if 1,000 people haven't been hired for the plant yet, job openings have been posted, training programs are usually beginning. County commissioners, community college folks, they all know this is coming and could be organized into voices. A lot of them, a lot of the local elected officials have put considerable effort in to, you know, getting these facilities in their town. And so there's a ready made voice right there saying, hey, I'm Republican county commissioner X, Y or Z. Like I put a ton of effort in getting this thing into my community. I think it's good for these reasons. Maybe Republican representative, you don't want to destroy this thing that I work so hard at. So even if it's not the like factory workers themselves, the promise of that coming very imminently in a very concrete way activates or potentially activates certain communities. And very little effort was, if any was put into organizing those, which has been one of my consistent disappointments with the process here. Now again, all that maybe is moot because it's Donald Trump at the helm and none of that would have mattered anyway. But I do think if anything would have helped it to depoliticize the issue, it would be having MAGA coded voices saying, hey, actually this is good for me, I want this.
- [21:34]
A
Well, I do think the other thing is if anything would have helped to depoliticize the issue, it would have been to simply never refer to it as a climate.
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B
Yes.
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A
Law at all. Yeah, and, and, and yeah, it could.
- [21:45]
B
Have been an American energy and manufacturing revitalization strategy or whatever you want to.
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A
And when I look at the politics of this, I look and say now maybe look, Biden was a unique political figure, uniquely inarticulate yes, but when I look at the politics, I'm like, well, there was never any clear payoff to framing the IRA in climate like terms and it did nothing to help make these policies. Certainly the.
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B
There definitely was an assumption that there was a payoff, though I think that's where you're right, is like there was an operating assumption that there was a base on the left ready to be activated and turned out to vote or turned off to not vote if you didn't do this. The Biden administration staff were very attentive.
- [22:25]
A
To this is and it's communicated by groups on the left. You can go back. Before the Biden administration, the Sunrise Movement's message to Democrats was that there is a big, proud, well organized set of young voters who care about climate change and want to see aggressive action on climate change. And that argument was bought by elected officials and by the press. We were like, oh, okay, I guess there, maybe there is. And when, for instance, the Sunrise movement does a sit in in Nancy Pelosi's office on the first day of the new Congress in 2019, the message is we need a Green New Deal because young people demand a Green New Deal from Democrats. This was not like some crazy out there theory. This was at the center of what people were arguing in political discourse was that there was a reward, an electoral reward for centering climate change. And it turned out that there wasn't. I mean, I think it's just fair.
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B
To say there wasn't just no reward. There was also a substantial, there was a penalty because partisan penalty.
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A
Right before the major partisan penalty, frankly, you communicate to people, in addition to the partisan penalty that you care about things beyond just lowering their electricity bills, which doesn't help you in an inflationary environment. And it doesn't help you make the policy any more enduring either, because people come in and they go. Because it's harder to build a bipartisan constituency around a policy billed as a climate policy or an environmental policy than an energy or manufacturing policy. And so for me, I just look at this and go, these are just energy policies or manufacturing policies or competitive policies, which is.
- [23:59]
B
And I guess what I'm, I totally agree. And I think what I'm saying on the organizing side is that all of the organizing and comms effort was going in, as you pointed out, to a base building and turnout strategy, not a constituency expanding coalition building strategy. Right. The effort was to go deep, not wide. And I think that was the fundamental mistake because there wasn't a lot of depth there. There wasn't this big untapped pool of youth voters waiting to be turned out. And it meant we put basically no effort into expanding the broad set of constituencies that for various ideological backgrounds and various motivations could have all agreed that, hey, bringing manufacturing jobs back to america finally after 20 years of politicians talking about it is maybe a good thing we want to sustain, hey, lowering energy prices by building new energy supplies at a time when demand is growing, especially in electricity. Hey, that's a good idea. Maybe we should sustain that, right? Like creating tax bases in rural areas through investment in solar farms and wind farms. Like maybe that's a good thing we should sustain. Politics isn't about getting everybody to agree on motivation, right? It's about getting people to agree on what we're going to do as a body politic. And unfortunately, that's what I guess I'm getting at by this sort of hyper partisan, ideologically driven world is now it is all about getting everybody to agree on motivations and ideology. That's, that's the whole thing, right? And that's just a terrible way to make policy. And I guess it makes this all that much harder. But yeah, so I don't know.
- [25:20]
A
Well, I think for me, I fear we've run the climate base experiment so well now that people have gotten this message and people are starting to understand these policies in terms of energy affordability or clean energy policy, and that does mean lots of good things for clean energy. I think people should keep making the argument because it seems to me to be true that for instance, the one big beautiful Bill X termination of the wind and solar tax credits is going to mean bad things for American electricity customers. It's going to raise rates. I do think that we should take the full lesson of the IRA experience and say, look, if people care about affordability and you tell them you're working for affordability, you actually do need to put affordability at the center of your policies and you need to be willing to understand that there is a trade off between affordability and emissions. But unfortunately, the electorate might care about affordability and that doesn't mean you can't do things on. But I, for instance, yeah, I want.
- [26:22]
B
To agree with you, Rob. I want to agree with you because again, I like at my heart, I'm sort of a rational policy literalist. But President Trump said all of those things. I'm all about affordability. I'm going to lower your prices. And you know what he did? He did two things. He raised tariffs and he killed subsidies for clean electricity and vehicles and made Energy prices go up. So like, I guess he is polling.
- [26:44]
A
Now is as bad as Biden's on the inflation question. So, I mean, I think, for me, I think about this in terms of lng. So at the end of the Biden administration, the Department of Energy blocked a number of permits to build more LNG export.
- [27:02]
B
They paused a set of irrelevant permits for projects that were not yet permitted but were far beyond the need for new permits. Yes.
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A
And the argument that the Biden administration made and that the Secretary of Energy at the time made was not only that, like, not only about the kind of marginal math of is LNG worse than coal? Is LNG bad? It wasn't about emissions at all. It was about how anyway between 20 or it wasn't very much about emissions. It was about Primarily how between 2024 and 2028, 2029, North America's LNG export capacity was about to double and a large share of U.S. natural gas was about to be exported. And this was going to have a deleterious effect on low domestic natural gas prices and low DOM prices. This was like something that was of quite central concern to Secretary Granholm. And I think the thing is that it was like a plausible argument, but given the rest of the messaging around the question and given other choices that the Biden administration had made, it like, was not as credible, let's say maybe.
- [28:06]
B
As, I mean, I know that they did include some of that messaging. I mean, some of that used analysis that I performed at the time I tried to estimate the price elasticity effect. I just feel like while they may have said that stuff, the reason they initiated the pause was because of climate. Right. At the end of the day, that was the central motivation. They realized that was not a very good effective communication strategy. And so they did latch onto the one stronger argument. But yeah, there would have been a perfectly legitimate world where they never talked about climate, where the only thing they talked about was we're worried about the effect of huge LNG exports on domestic energy prices, heating prices for low income Americans, manufacturing input costs that make us less competitive. And we're going to reevaluate all of this in light of that and see maybe we've gone too far on export permits. That that was not how they started the conversation. This conversation was started around climate.
- [28:55]
A
But that's kind of my point is that they wound up wanting to end the conversation talking about affordability. And there was that because of how the conversation was started and because of, because the great cruise ship of environmentalism, like, turned from passing the IRA to blocking these LNG export terminals. And so then all the press coverage was about the climate impacts of these LNG export terminals. They were then in no place to make the case against this policy from an energy affordability standpoint. Even though now I know.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I guess it's just what we're getting at is that it's hard, it's hard to make a legitimate case that you're centering affordability in your agenda when you're actually using all tools available to advance a climate agenda. Some of those tools could be plausibly an affordability motivated strategy like subsidizing energy or subsidizing energy efficiency. But also you're mandating CCS on coal plants and you're blocking oil or gas pipelines and you're blocking LNG export and you're constraining leasing on public lands. Or at least your base is asking you to do all those things and very publicly flaying you if you don't do those things. So, so it's just very difficult, I think, to be seen as credible when you're doing both of those things at once. It's not hard to suss out what the underlying theme is there. And that's making progress on climate. A theme, a goal that I very much share. But yeah, it does make it harder to make that pivot when only a fraction of the agenda that you've been implementing over the last four years is actually an affordability agenda. The other that overlaps with climate.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So it puts us in a tough spot right now.
- [30:29]
A
There's one more thing about the IRA that's quite interesting, which is that it turned out to be very well timed in that the US government took an interest in expanding electricity supply about two years before we began to see really, really sharp increases in projected electricity demand. And a question I'd have for you, Jesse, and then I want to transition to talking about our next topic. In fact, this is the segue I'm going to use to talk about our next topic is that if you think about big energy stories in 2025, surely the first one is Trump his massive destruction of environmental regulation and climate regulation across the federal government doge at the beginning of the year and that's destruction of federal state capacity. And then of course the one big beautiful Bill act with its destruction of solar wind tax credits and EV demand side tax credits. The second story though would be data centers and AI and the huge rise in projected electricity demand from data centers and AI. And I think what's Interesting. First of all, let's talk about things we got wrong. One of our early episodes of the show was with Jonathan Koome, a historian and researcher into electricity demand from computing, who, without saying that this was not going to happen, did say that we've been worried about electricity shocks and electricity demand side shocks from computation before and they hadn't happened. And we could talk about why AI has maybe turned out to be different. But I think the second thing is that we did not. When the IRA passed, we were not thinking about how this was an industrial policy to like, create as much electricity as possible.
- [31:58]
B
Before it wasn't even in our data centers, weren't even in our models when we were building up our repeat project projections of electricity demand. It wasn't even part of it in 2020.
- [32:07]
A
But then it turned out to be absurdly well timed as policy. But not only was it well timed as policy, but now it's become quite a political liability for the Trump administration because with the one hand, they're embracing and encouraging as many data center projects and as much AI led growth as possible, while on the other hand, they're trying to suppress renewable construction and cancel renewable projects across the country, and the end result of that will be higher electricity prices. I guess the first thing I'd ask is like, it sounds like you're kind of saying this, but like we weren't thinking about data centers at all back at when the IRA passed, number one. And number two, why do you think that is? Why do you think we got this wrong even as recently as last year, kind of pooh, poohing the scale of demand coming from data centers?
- [32:57]
B
So I think it's interesting, I think we've sort of come full circle throughout the year, actually. Back to the GUMI argument, right? So, you know, at the time, every major utility in the country saying, I've got 40 gigawatts of large load interconnection requests from data Centers. I've got 30, I've got 20, I've got, you know, 50. And you add all those up and it was like hundreds of gigawatts of total demand requests that were not plausible. Right. We know that data center developers, they put in multiple, they shop the queues just like generators do. They put in multiple requests in different areas because they don't know which ones are going to be plausible because they're balancing a variety of risks, not just related to interconnection, but also permitting local opposition, tax credits, their abatements, they might get water availability, all these considerations. So they might be developing 3, 4, 5, 6 sites with the intention to only build one or two of them, or at least build those first and then have the other ones maybe come online later. And so we know there was a lot of phantom load right in the. In these requests. And I think part of what we were trying to do at the time with that episode, and I think was actually accurate, was to say, hey, hold on, like, don't double, triple or quadruple count the requests here. There's a lot of them, but there's not as many as you think. That said, I think my prior at the time for the amount of total data center demand for AI was somewhere on the order of 20 gigawatts of new load requests. I think now my priority would be on the order of 100 gigawatts. So we were still off by quite a lot. And that's because the demand requests just kept growing and growing and growing and growing as we got into this incredible arms race, I think of infrastructure investments between the different companies. And so I think that might have been the key piece that we missed, is beyond the demand for AI, which will continue to expand. I think it's incredibly useful in a variety of applications. Each company out there, each major hyperscaler, and some of the new challengers, like OpenAI and Anthropic and others, they very much view this period as their existential contest for who's going to be the next Google or Meta or Microsoft of the next era, right? Turned out the answer will it be them? Well, will it be them, or will it be some new challenger, or will one of them fall by the wayside in this process, like IBM or something? I think they very much see it in that light. They need to be building at scale because they got to stay ahead of the competition and keep their dominance in this area. Or if they're an insurgent like OpenAI, because that will ultimately make them one of the world's most valuable companies or sustain their status in that mind. And so we're seeing, I think, a lot of investment, right? And now that isn't necessarily driven by natural demand. It's driven by this sort of competitive arms race that I don't think we saw coming, at least I didn't see coming at the beginning of the year. Now, of course, we come back around and the dominant narrative you hear every day in the press is AI bubble. Are we in an AI bubble that's about to pop? Because everybody recognizes that everybody's sort of overinvesting thanks to this sort of arms race. The same way you saw railroads running, racing to be completed from city to city on different routes. Right. Because whoever got there first would win. It's likely that there is a bubble here, that there are some investments here that will not be sustained by natural demand and revenue generation in the long term. But they're still going to continue, I think for quite some time because of that arms race dynamic. And of course if anybody knew when the bubble was going to pop, they might be a very rich person. So I think we have kind of come back around to this realization that the projections are probably overinflated eventually, but at some point we don't know how long it's going to sustain. Right. Will it be three months or three years or 10 years?
- [36:24]
A
In addition to maybe thinking there were going to be 20 gigawatts of AI demand, now there's going to be 100. We also did not fully understand the difference between maybe AI and previous computation led moments two years ago or a year ago which were. And we talked about this on the last episode, but usually computing you can get some economies of scale, especially when you're talking about large cloud applications. As long as you're talking about frontier models trained on frontier chips, your energy demand does scale fairly linearly with every additional user you add.
- [37:01]
B
Yes. I mean I do think part of that is driven by the arms race nature of it. Right. Like, like chips are getting more efficient. They're like, I think they've made like a 30 fold improvement in efficiency in just a couple years, but demand for that processing power has gone up a hundredfold and so demand is tripling. It's just that because everybody has to be running on the best newest chips with the biggest data while and the biggest frontier model to stay ahead of the competition. There's no time for that efficiency driver to play out. There probably will be an era where that does happen when the bubble does burst and there are is some consolidation and the dominant market players are able to focus on their bottom line and lowering cost where over time they're going to realize some of those. But right now it's all capex, capex, capex, stay at the frontier, stay at the frontier, get bigger, bigger, bigger. And I think that's outweighing any improvements in efficiency because that's just not the priority.
- [37:54]
A
Well and I think we are in the kind of Uber or movie Pass era of AI right now where there's incredible subsidy, yes, equity markets from equity markets of these systems. And so we all have access to much more powerful tools than we might have in the future. They are priced competitively, they're often priced freely, despite the fact that they're churning through huge amounts of resources to grab market share, to grab data, to grab whatever. Though where that subsidy is washing out is energy markets. Right. Is the power system. The place you can see the impact of that subsidy most clearly is on the power sector, where these companies are just gobbling up huge amounts of electricity and we are not really paying. End users aren't paying for it in the same way that they eventually might be made to, because as the marketplace becomes more mature and how that feels at the moment is these incredible dislocations combined with the kind of consumer surplus of having all these models available. And whether that's a true surplus or not, I think depends on how useful you find the models and how beneficial you think they are for society. But that is the ultimate phenomenon that's happening and kind of washing out an energy market markets.
- [39:16]
B
Yeah. And so I guess we will expect the costs of using these services to go up at some point or advertising revenue generated by them to start to come into the picture.
- [39:28]
A
Right.
- [39:28]
B
And I think they're all trying to figure out what that model looks like right now. Like, what is the revenue model? Is it more like Google Search or is it more like Netflix? Right. And we'll find out over time. But I do think there is reason to believe that that revenue base can grow. These are extremely useful models. And if you think about how much people spend each month on their cell phone or they spend each month on Netflix and Google and Amazon prime and, and Apple TV or whatever, we routinely have kind of ongoing monthly expenditures on the order of 20 to $100 a month for these types of services that people have been paying once they become kind of indispensable common services. And I could easily see these AI models becoming similar. And if they do generate 20 to 100 bucks a month of revenue per user, that starts to add up and starts to be quite substantial. Especially if we see some industry consolidation down to a few leading players.
- [40:22]
A
Well, let's talk about the other big industry that's been changed by the one big beautiful bill act and by the Trump administration, which is electric vehicles. So the OBBBA basically got rid of all the demand side subsidies, the $7,500 tax credit for EV buying, the tax credit on the dealership side for leasing an EV, the $4,000 tax credit for buying a used EV, but it preserved, while making much harder to access the supply side tax credits, the tax credits that reward manufacturers for each, say, kilowatt hour of batteries that they produce. So what have we, you know, before the one big beautiful bill act passed? Part of the argument was like, look, they are going to get rid of these EV tax credits. It seems like that's what they're targeting. But it's useful for these supply side tax credits to stick around. And even I would say in 2023 or 2024, part of the argument you heard was that, look, it's these supply side tax credits that are actually much more powerful than the demand side tax credits.
- [41:25]
B
By that you mean the advanced manufacturing subsidies?
- [41:28]
A
The advanced manufacturing subsidies.
- [41:30]
B
I don't know if anybody's actually making that argument that they were more powerful. The auto industry spent more of an effort defending them because I think they're a more direct subsidy in some ways and kept them and did, yeah, succeeded in keeping them. And I don't know how much of that was because they just made a calculus that those are the ones they could save and that they gave up on the idea of saving the 30D and 40W tax credits, the new personal vehicle tax credit and the lease credit that were driving more of the sales. There's no world in which those translate to a larger reduction in consumer prices MSRP than the tax credits do. I mean, even if you assume full pass through of the subsidies for batteries and battery materials, it doesn't drop the price by $7,500. Maybe it's one or $2,000.
- [42:14]
A
I think that's totally right. We tended to hear like these are more important. It was that in terms of on a per vehicle subsidy where a lot of the costs were getting covered was on the supply side and the advanced manufacturing tax credit versus the demand side. Do you think that's wrong?
- [42:28]
B
No, I think that's wrong. Right. If you just sort of do the basic Math, it's like $35 a kilowatt hour. You got a 60 kilowatt hour battery. So it's, I don't know, roughly $2200 or something like that. And that's assuming everything gets passed through to the consumer, which it clearly doesn't. So. No, I mean, a 7500 tax credit's worth a hell of a lot more. I mean, it's roughly 30% of the cost of a new vehicle. Right. I do think there was a misperception amongst Republicans in the House that were seeing manufacturing investments in their districts. Right. Seeing battery plants open and things like that, that the driver of that was the 45x subsidy for manufacturing and not the corresponding demand that was juicing up overall market demand and contained, in the case of the personal EV tax credit, a set of North American sourcing requirements that were heavily favored to build out demand for U.S. manufactured components. They were meant to go hand in hand and they very clearly were working in that context. Now we've dismantled the demand side incentive for purchasing and removed any sourcing requirements. Right, because that credit is gone. Now all we have is the supply push subsidy for battery manufacturing and critical minerals, no requirement for assembly of vehicles in the United States except for Trump's tariffs to whatever degree they are currently in effect or not. And as a result, we've seen demand collapse and the battery manufacturing sector now face overcapacity rather than being capacity constrained in the us we're headed into a world where we will have more battery assembly capacity, battery cell manufacturing and pack assembly capacity than is needed to build the batteries for all of the EVs assembled in North America. And you know, repeat project put out a report on this in advance of the bill debate and tried to emphasize the importance of both sides of these to the current manufacturing investments that we were seeing. But that message either didn't break through in Congress or at least was not effective in driving votes at the end of the day and largely was not emphasized, at least in public, by the auto industry who really focused on 45x and preserving those manufacturing subsidies. So we have seen the market collapse in the last few months. So the tax credits for new leased vehicles and used new and used personal vehicle purchases expired on September 30th at the end of the month. And so we now have a couple of months of post subsidy world that we've gone through here. What we saw was a surge in buying to a record level. EV sales set a new record in September before the end of that subsidy and then plummeted by about half in October and presumably again in November, although we don't have the data yet on the month that just closed out. So it was a big pull forward of purchasing that probably would have otherwise occurred in the fourth quarter of the year into the third quarter. People rushing to get their purchases done before those tax credits expired. And you know, these were flying off lots at that point. Plug in hybrid and electric vehicles together were over 10% of sales, according to data compiled by Argonne National Lab. In September, battery electric vehicles reached an 11% sales share and plug in hybrids reached a 2% sales share, so 13% overall for plug in vehicles before then collapsing to 6% of sales. In October for battery electrics and 1% for PEV. So just about a 50% contraction in total sales volume, slightly less than that in sales share, because total vehicle sales are also falling in the US Expected to be down in the third quarter due to higher prices from tariffs. And so the consumer demand overall for light vehicles is also down at the moment, which has kept the sales share, you know, a little bit higher than it would have been for EVs. So now I guess the question is, what comes next in the sector? What are you looking at, Rob, as you try to sort that out in your reporting?
- [46:01]
A
Well, I think the, the main thing that's in my mind is that the next two years we're already scheduled to see the release of what we're kind of billed as the more affordable EVs coming to market. So the R2 comes out next year, in the first half of next year. We don't know exactly when. But Rivian, Rivian midsize vehicle, the new Rivian kind of midsize SUV slate, the electric pickup that they claim will retail for at this point, I think mid $20,000 truck will start production in late 2026 and they say they're going to deliver them next year as well. The Scout, which is the kind of Volkswagen backed SUV pickup brand that they're manufacturing in South Carolina, is going to start selling in 2027. And so we were already scheduled to see a number of affordable EV releases over the next year. One thing about the EV market so far is that it's been very motivated by like novelty. Like when there's a new EV outside of Tesla, when there's a new EV on the market, lots of people buy it and then it kind of taps that market and then it moves on. So that's potentially a good sign for these cars in the next few years as they struggle through. I think the other part of the story that hasn't been as well covered is that the Trump administration has suspended and broken the markets for compliance credits from heavy polluting vehicles to less polluting vehicles through the CAFE standard and through the EPA rules. So there's kind of two ways we regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and fuel economy or fuel efficiency in vehicles in the US we regulate fuel economy through these Department of Transportation standards. We regulate greenhouse gases through these EPA rules. The Trump administration has broken those markets intentionally. And that means that payments that would normally flow from more polluting brands such as Ford or GM or Chrysler or Toyota, to less polluting brands like the EV upstarts Rivian or Tesla that have sold their. That basically sell pollution credits into the market and then are compensated for them by the big truck builders, those markets have broken down and those companies have lost access to a source of revenue. It hasn't quite come through in the numbers yet, but I think we're going to start seeing it. That's worrying me because a key part of the path for these EV startups like Rivian or Scout is the ability to sell pollution credits into the market and have gas guzzlers basically cover parts of their cost in the name of achieving overall lower fleet mileage or higher fuel efficiency in the overall fleet nationwide. And if that mechanism was intentionally broken by the Trump administration, it's like very bad for these startups.
- [48:46]
B
Yeah. And for Tesla, who's like, often that difference is like the total of their profit margin. Right. If they lose that revenue all of a sudden, they go into.
- [48:54]
A
It's been about half of their profit margin lately, I should say. Yes, fair enough.
- [48:58]
B
But it's a big chunk.
- [48:59]
A
But at the beginning it was central. I mean, it was how they became profitable at first was selling those credits. Now it's only about half. Yeah.
- [49:05]
B
So in addition to the federal regulations, of course, California has set its own EV requirements for regulation and tailpipe emission standards that have been adopted by a number of other states that are collectively cover about a third, I think, of the US Vehicle market. The Trump administration has also challenged those waivers. What is the latest status there, Rob? Are those also dead or. I mean, I think from California's view, they're still moving ahead as if they're. They've survived, but I think Congress has other views on the matter. Yeah.
- [49:35]
A
So in June, Trump signed three resolutions that revoked the EPA waivers for the Clean Car 2 standard, the Advanced Clean Truck standard, and the Low Knox, the Low Nitrous Oxide program. Those had been passed by the Senate in defiance of a Senate norm that you couldn't revoke decisions at the agency level like that. California has filed suit against that claim, but the actual hearing won't start till next year.
- [50:06]
B
Yeah. So I guess tbd, and I wonder how, how that's leading to discounting in the minds of the automakers as well. The other thing I want to just note on the EV market, and I think this will be interesting to keep an eye on in Q4, and then we'll see if anything persists into Q1 of next year, is a lot of the EV makers are continuing to offer discounts, cash discounts for sale or lease of similar or even greater magnitude than the $7,500 credit. So trying to sustain sales through the quarter, get vehicles off their lots and inventories. I was just looking at this for November at least. We'll see if they continue this in December. Kia was offering, for example, a $10,000 cash incentive off the sale of a new EV9, I think a slightly smaller incentive for the EV5. These are incentives larger than the tax credit. So they're trying to kind of sustain that demand. That obviously is a losing strategy in the long run.
- [50:57]
A
Right?
- [50:58]
B
You can't continue to discount your car by 35% or whatever and turn a profit. And so I think the big open question for the industry is can any of these manufacturers achieve enough cost saving on the manufacturing side that they can survive and turn a profit in a pro subsidy world? And I think that's still a pretty big open question in the US Market. Obviously in China there are big manufacturers who can do that, but in the US we have a couple companies that just barely started to turn profits, or at least on paper, from their EV units. Hyundai, Kia, maybe GM. But without those tax credits, if they're offering $10,000 off their cars, that profit margins going to evaporate. So where are the next round of cost cuts coming from on the production side? And can anybody get good at manufacturing EVs in the US at an affordable price point? That's still, I think, the existential question for the industry. And unfortunately, instead of having, unfortunately, instead of having until 2032 to answer that question, they now have to answer it now because those tax credits are no longer in place, giving them that kind of learning period.
- [52:03]
A
I think as we continue to think about this, like whatever the next stage of policy looks like is going to have to respond to the fact that China has a much more competitive EV industry than we do. And it also has a much more competitive battery manufacturing system. In fact, it has the world's best and most competitive battery manufacturing ecosystem. And whatever the policy that takes us out of this moment, it has to, I think, respond to that for sheer competitiveness reasons. And as we talk about kind of emphasizing climate versus emphasizing other top topics, just seems like this should be a industry the US can play in. And finding ways to get the US to participate in it without providing the subsidies where they're needed, but not requiring them is going to be a huge question. And now it's time for Upshift Downshift, our weekly look at climate and energy news, where each of us brings one news item to share with the class and says whether it's making us feel more upbeat or downbeat about the energy transition. Jesse, what do you have for us?
- [53:14]
B
Well, I think a good segue from our recent conversation there about competitiveness with China. I guess I'll call this an upshift in the global context. Again, not exactly encouraging for the US's prospects here, but Reuters reported last week that China has exported approximately $60 billion in battery energy storage systems and components in the first three quarters of 2025. So those are batteries not in electric vehicles, of which they are also expanding their exports, but battery energy storage for the grid and related components. That's up 24% from last year, $60 billion in total export value. To put that into some context, I quickly googled some of these comparison points for the US exports. If you've been following the trade war with China, soy exports to China is featured pretty prominently in that conversation, right? The US exports exported in 2024, $25 billion of total LNG exports, another big focus of our export push right now from the US totaled $29 billion in 2024 and total auto exports from the US, I think mostly to elsewhere in North America totaled just under 60 billion. So in the first three quarters of the year. In short, China is exporting more economic value in battery energy storage components than the sum total of auto exports in a pretty good year for the us. And again, that's in addition to their EV sector. This is of course coming I think largely because there is an oversupply of battery manufacturing capacity in China and much of those in order to increase demand for their products, many of them are pivoting into selling batteries for the grid. The reason I think that's an upshift is I think much of that export is going not only to Europe but also to more emerging economies, to off grid installations in Africa, to other countries in Latin America. And that is a positive for the energy transition, again giving these countries a new tool in their toolkit to power more reliable power supplies than they currently have and to do so at pretty affordable costs given the price points that China is able to produce and export at. So again, challenging from a US expert perspective. But I think again another sign of how China is really stepping into this role as the electrostate or clean energy hegemon around the world using their exports to power economic growth and not inconsiderable amount of soft power I would imagine as well.
- [55:26]
A
I was recently in a conversation with Jeremy Wallace from Johns Hopkins University about whether China is becoming an electrostate or not. I think we should talk about this in future episodes because I think the absolute gargantuan amount of electronics they're exporting and electricity technology is one thing. I think one question I have is, are they exporting that partially because the domestic government is maybe less solicitous of these technologies than our Western press accounts think, like, it loves to have the manufacturing supply, but no.
- [55:57]
B
I mean, they're deploying, like, half of the world's solar panels and half of the world's batteries and half of the world's wind farms and over half of the world's nuclear plants. They can manufacture so much that they still have an overcapacity despite deploying hundreds of gigawatts of new clean electricity and storage each year.
- [56:13]
A
And yet their commitment under the Paris Agreement was not, like, as aggressive as it could have been. Right. Did not take the side of these new industries against, say, the. The incumbent coal industry. So to be discussed in a future upshift.
- [56:26]
B
Yeah, okay, I'm interested in that take. Yeah. Not sure about it, but that would be good one to hash out more. Rob, what do you got?
- [56:32]
A
I have an upshift, but it's quite limited upshift. So we've been talking about permitting reform forever and efforts to try to speed up the permitting system for energy projects and renewable energy projects, clean energy projects, and we're going to keep talking about it on this show. What I want to note is that I think for the first time since we've ever been talking about this, at least in two years, a permanent reform bill passed out of the Natural Resources Committee in the House. And while there's a lot in this bill to talk about, I'm not upshifting the whole bill. What I do want to note is that this bill contains a amendment from Jared Golden, a moderate Democrat from Maine, to basically block the executive branch from revoking energy projects after they were approved. It was passed unanimously by the committee. And as Jared Goldin argued, it would kind of stop this behavior that we saw Biden use on one project or two projects and Trump use on a whole variety of solar and wind projects across the country. The idea basically is that if the government approves a project that's great, you should be able to take that to the bank and a future president should be able to stop, step in and block it because they dislike that form of energy technology or something else about it. It's really the first, I think, legislative response we've seen to the just total carnage in the energy sector that has resulted from the Trump administration. Trying to block offshore wind or onshore wind projects. And so I'm going to call it an upshift.
- [58:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it is an upshift. It's disappointing and depressing that that qualifies as an upshift that we, you know, have to respect the basic rule of law and decisions by the federal government should be something you can invest accordingly. But it is an important step. I think, of course, where it's falls short is that the Trump administration is not just reopening certain closed permits that is the case for a couple of offshore wind farms, but more broadly, as heatmap has reported, they're simply not processing permit applications, many, in many cases, very routine permit applications for new projects across both federal lands and other areas with federal nexus where you're dealing with wetlands or navigable waterways, the Army Corps has to be involved in, or FAA permits or things like that. And that's a bigger threat, of course, to investability as well, because you just don't know if I'm going to develop a project, will it ever get permitted or when. That's a huge amount of regulatory uncertainty. That's completely unnecessary. And so I would love to see Congress take a step further here and try to either get rid of some of these reviews if they're not necessary, or restore the kind of regular order that they need to process those permit requests within a reasonable amount of time. And if they don't, then they're presumed to be granted or something like that. I know that has some risks in the future. It could work the other way or, you know, a project's gonna be problematic under environmental review. And so you just sit on it and let it get approved without any comment. But something needs to be done, I think, to also restore routine permitting for new infrastructure. And again, there could be bipartisan momentum for that because of course, the Biden administration, Democrats have targeted new oil and gas infrastructure with similar measures. Right. Death by a thousand, paper cuts or continual review. And that's not exactly a Trump only thing, although I think he's done it with quite a bit more gusto in the case of wind and solar. So, as always, permitting reform shall continue. And of course, this bill hasn't passed. Did it pass?
- [59:47]
A
Sorry, it didn't pass the House. It passed the House Natural Resources Committee.
- [59:51]
B
Yeah, the committee. So we still got a ways to go on that one.
- [59:53]
A
Yeah.
- [59:54]
B
But hey, we'll cover it here on shift key when it happens.
- [59:58]
A
That's exactly right. We'll discuss that and many other topics on future episodes of Shift Key. Until then, you can follow me on X at Robin or Bluesky or LinkedIn under my name. Jesse, where can people find you?
- [60:09]
B
You know, all over. No, I'm on X at Jesse jenkins and on blueskyessydjenkins.com I've been using LinkedIn more lately as well, so follow me over there. Yeah, I don't know what happened to Google Hangouts or Google or whatever, but you can find me on all the old school channels.
- [60:24]
A
Yeah, you can find me on AOL Instant messenger too.
- [60:26]
B
Yes. Are you on. Are you on TikTok, Rob?
- [60:28]
A
I'm not on TikTok, no.
- [60:30]
B
I'm gonna start doing more vertical video, Rob. That's what they say these days.
- [60:33]
A
I kind of believe me. I know. We'll be back next time at our usual time with a new episode of Shifts Key. If you enjoyed Shift Key, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Shift Key is a production of heatmap News. Our editors are Gillian Goodman and Nico Loricella. Multimedia editing. Audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick McCurry. Our music is by Adam Kramilau. Thank you so much for listening and see you next week.