Energy

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

Geothermal: Clean Energy for People Who Like to Drill: With AI creating insatiable demand for electricity, an old but clean source is getting a second look thanks to favorable politics and new extraction technology. It’s Landman for environmentalists. (Markos Kounalakis and Theo Jan Snoey, March 12, 2026, Washington Monthly)

This renewable energy technology, once considered a niche, has been revitalized by bipartisan politics, financial backing, and, especially, new drilling technology: Enhanced Geothermal Systems, or EGS. The technology is controversial because it involves fracking. EGS uses techniques from shale extraction—high-skill drilling, subsurface mapping, and controlled stimulation—to create permeability in hot, dry rock. This fluid circulation brings usable heat to the surface as electricity. It’s “fracking” for steam, not oil.

EGS is one of the few ways to harness the existing drilling economy—rigs, crews, geologists, completion services, everything you see on Landman—toward a clean product. To a polity split on renewables and Donald Trump’s administration fetishizing fossil fuels like coal and oil, geothermal’s politics are refreshingly weird: clean energy for people who like to drill. California’s oil-rich Kern County and the state’s Central Valley would gain from a geothermal buildout—in part, by using tapped-out oil wells to store thermal energy and in part by pivoting phased-out oil drilling labor and expertise.

Trump’s Department of the Interior has announced emergency permitting procedures to accelerate geothermal reviews on federal lands, tied to the president’s national energy emergency declaration. Whatever you think of MAGA, the administration’s backing of EGS is a win.

The purveyors of AI should pay for expanding geothermal—and increasingly they are. President Trump’s State of the Union address announced a “ratepayer protection pledge” that major tech players and hyperscalers are expected to sign. That could lower consumer prices, shift demand, and alter funding for other power projects. Unfortunately, there are scant details about the “pledge.” The administration’s plans often have, shall we say, an inability-to-execute problem. But the idea is right: User pays.

THAT WAS EASY:

Trump’s Transportation Secretary Promises the ‘Future of Aviation’ With New eVTOL Program (Matt Novak, March 9, 2026, Gizmodo)

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced eight pilot projects to test Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing vehicles (eVTOL) that’s scheduled to start across 26 states this summer.

Officially known as the Advanced Air Mobility and eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, the Department of Transportation says the futuristic vehicles “have the potential to generate new jobs, connect communities, and strengthen American leadership in aviation.”

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

The strikes on Iran show why quitting oil is more important than ever (Hussein Dia, March 1, 2026, The Conversation)

In 2015, India blocked Nepal’s oil imports, triggering chaos. In response, authorities encouraged the very rapid growth of electric vehicles. Oil imports have begun to fall.

More recently, the Russia–Ukraine war and US strikes on Venezuela and Iran have brought new focus on reducing oil imports and bolstering domestic energy security.

In oil-dependent Cuba, US pressure has slashed the supply of oil. Blackouts are common and cars stay put. In response, authorities and businesses are importing 34 times as many Chinese solar panels as they did a year ago.

It’s not ideology driving this shift – it’s necessity. Electric vehicle imports, too, are soaring. “Cuba may experience the fastest energy transition in the world,” a Cuban economist told The Economist.

Renewables are the only reliable energy source.

THAT WAS EASY:

The Race to Build the World’s First Commercial Fusion Plant Is Heating Up (Gayoung Lee, March 2, 2026, Gizmodo)

Germany is not the first to pursue commercial fusion plants. In the United States, several private companies have expressed interest in realizing commercial fusion plants. For example, Helion intends to complete a fusion plant to power Microsoft buildings as early as 2028, whereas Type One Energy has partnered with the Tennessee Valley Authority and Oak Ridge National Laboratory for its project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has also explicitly stated it aims to bring fusion power to commercial grids by the mid-2030s.

In that sense, Proxima’s new contract—involving government interests, the country’s most prestigious research institute, and sizable private firms—reflects Germany’s keen interest in getting ahead of the competition. Or at least, to keep up.

IKE’S ONE UNFORGIVABLE SIN:

Finding and Losing Train Culture (Bruce Frohnen, February 27th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative()

And train culture itself helped integrate communities into the larger, state, and national society in a way that left local autonomy intact. The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. Trains come in at one or two points, and leave by those same points, on a more or less regular, but distinctly limited schedule. Even the train suburbs of our cities, when they existed, had an actual character of their own that is not duplicated by suburbs on the beltway (just compare Philadelphia—a tough town with vibrant suburbs, to Los Angeles, an extremely pleasant collection of communities in the early twentieth century that has been transformed into a literal concrete jungle).

Transportation by train is a distinct event, or series of events, rather than the constant flow that automobile traffic tends to be. Of course, change was a constant on and near the frontier as people passed through on their way West. But the train had a more direct, concentrated, and so geographically limited impact than our current web of “free”ways. This is not to say that roads do not both integrate and exclude communities. When Eisenhower insisted on that massive public works and nationalization program that became our freeway system, his engineers made a number of towns into large cities by putting them on the main freeway route—and destroyed many more by bypassing them.

AS EVERYONE KNEW BUT HIM AND THE LEFT:

Why Big Oil wants no part of Trump-seized Venezuela (Damian Tobin, February 19, 2026, Asia Times)

After the US captured Venezuela’s president at the start of 2026, Donald Trump promised to “unleash” the country’s oil supply. He wanted companies to invest US$100 billion to get hold of it.

Big Oil though, seems less than keen on that idea, appearing to consider Venezuela too expensive or risky.

THAT WAS EASY:

Record high fusion plasma temperature achieved in US to boost path to commercial fusion (Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Feb 14, 2026, Interesting Engineering)

Helion achieved plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Both milestones mark significant breakthroughs in Helion’s vision to make commercially viable fusion energy a reality and are firsts for the private fusion industry.

YOUR NEXT PLANE WILL BE A VOLT:

Giant 5-ton eVTOL just aced a tricky flight test (Abhimanyu Ghoshal, February 06, 2026, New Atlas)

Multinational aviation company AutoFlight says its Matrix aircraft is the first 5-ton eVTOL on the planet – and it’s just completed a public full-transition flight demo at the Kunshan Civil UAV Flight Test & Operation Base in China.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Scientists make 3D-printed, color-tunable solar cells for windows, flexible surfaces (Mrigakshi Dixit, 1/09/26, Interesting Engineering)

These panels shed the bulky, industrial look of solar arrays, giving designers the choice between a slightly transparent window or a vibrant, color-tinted architectural feature.

THAT WAS EASY:

US energy company installs first fusion magnet, nears clean power breakthrough (Sujita Sinha, 1/07/26, Interesting Engineering)

The newly installed D-shaped magnet is the first of 18 that will form a doughnut-like structure to confine and compress plasma. Each magnet weighs about 24 tons and can generate a 20-tesla magnetic field, roughly 13 times stronger than a standard MRI machine.

“It’s the type of magnet that you could use to, like, lift an aircraft carrier,” said Bob Mumgaard, CFS’ co-founder and CEO.

The magnets will sit upright on a 24-foot-wide, 75-ton stainless steel circle called a cryostat, which was installed last March. To operate safely, the magnets will be cooled to -423°F (-253°C) to conduct over 30,000 amps of current. Inside the doughnut, plasma will burn at more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million°C).

Mumgaard explained, “It’ll go bang, bang, bang throughout the first half of this year as we put together this revolutionary technology.”

Today is always ten years from now.