Revenues from wind more than offset incentives

California Managed Decline of Fossil Fuels aligns oil phaseout with carbon neutrality, leveraging ZEV adoption, solar and wind growth, severance taxes, drilling setbacks, fracking oversight, CARB rules, and CalGEM regulation to deliver a just transition.

Key Points

California's strategy to phase out oil and gas while meeting carbon-neutral goals through policy, regulation, and equity.

✅ Severance taxes fund clean energy and workforce transition.

✅ Setbacks restrict drilling near schools, homes, and hospitals.

✅ CARB and CalGEM tighten fracking oversight and ZEV targets.

California’s energy past is on a collision course with its future. Think of major oil-producing U.S. states, and Texas, Alaska or North Dakota probably come to mind. Although its position relative to other states has been falling for 20 years, California remains the seventh-largest oil-producing state, with 162 million barrels of crude coming up in 2018, translating to tax revenue and jobs.

At the same time, California leads the nation in solar rooftops and electric vehicles on the road by a wide margin and ranking fifth in installed wind capacity. Clean energy is the state’s future, and the state is increasingly exporting its energy policies across the West, influencing regional markets. By law, California must have 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045, and an executive order signed by former Governor Jerry Brown calls for economywide carbon-neutrality by the same year.

So how can the state reconcile its divergent energy path? How should clean-energy-minded lawmakers wind down California’s oil and gas sector in a way that aligns with the state’s long-term climate targets while providing a just transition for the industry’s workforce?

Any efforts to reduce fossil fuel supply must run parallel to aggressive demand-reduction measures such as California’s push to have 5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2030, said Ethan Elkind, director of Berkeley Law's climate program, especially amid debates over keeping the lights on without fossil fuels in the near term. After all, if oil demand in California remains strong, crude from outside the state will simply fill the void.

“If we don’t stop using it, then that supply is going to get here, even if it’s not produced in-state,” Elkind said in an interview.

Lawmakers have a number of options for policies that would draw down and eventually phase out fossil fuel production in California, according to a new report from the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the UC Berkeley School of Law, co-authored by Elkind and Ted Lamm.

They could impose a higher price on California's oil production through a "severance" tax or carbon-based fee, with the revenue directed to measures that wean the state from fossil fuels. (California, alone among major oil-producing states, does not have an oil severance tax.)

Lawmakers could establish a minimum drilling setback from schools, playgrounds, homes and other sensitive sites. They could push the state's oil and gas regulator, the California Geologic Energy Management Division, to prioritize environmental and climate concerns.

A major factor holding lawmakers back is, of course, politics, including debates over blackouts and climate policy that shape public perception. Given the state’s clean-energy ambitions, it might surprise non-Californians that the oil and gas industry is one of the Golden State’s most powerful special interest groups.

Overcoming a "third-rail issue" in California politics
The Western States Petroleum Association, the sector’s trade group in California's capital of Sacramento, spent $8.8 million lobbying state policymakers in 2019, more than any other interest group. Over the last five years, the group, which cultivates both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, has spent $43.3 million on lobbying, nearly double the total of the second-largest lobbying spender.

Despite former Governor Brown’s reputation as a climate champion, critics say he was unwilling to forcefully take on the oil and gas industry. However, things may take a different turn under Brown's successor, Governor Gavin Newsom.

In May 2019, when Newsom released California's midyear budget revision (PDF), the governor's office noted the need for "careful study and planning to decrease demand and supply of fossil fuels, while managing the decline in a way that is economically responsible and sustainable.”

Related reliability concerns surfaced as blackouts revealed lapses in power supply across the state.

Writing for the advocacy organization Oil Change International, David Turnbull observed, “This may mark the first time that a sitting governor in California has recognized the need to embark upon a managed decline of fossil fuel supply in the state.”

“It is significant because typically this is one of those third-rail issues, kind of a hot potato that governors don’t even want to touch at all — including Jerry Brown, to a large extent, who really focused much more on the demand side of fuel consumption in the state,” said Berkeley Law’s Elkind.

California's revised budget included $1.5 million for a Transition to a Carbon-Neutral Economy report, which is being prepared by University of California researchers for the California Environmental Protection Agency. In an email, a CalEPA spokesperson said the report is due by the end of this year.

Winding down oil and gas production
Since the release of the revised budget last May, Newsom has taken initial steps to increase oversight of the oil and gas industry. In July 2019, he fired the state’s top oil and gas regulator for issuing too many permits to hydraulically fracture, or frack, wells.

Later in the year, he appointed new leadership to oversee oil and gas regulation in the state, and he signed a package of bills that placed constraints on fossil fuel production. The next month, Newsom halted the approval of new fracking operations until pending permits could be reviewed by a panel of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) did not resume issuing fracking permit approvals until April of this year.

Not all steps have been in the same direction. This month Newsom dropped a proposal to add dozens of analysts, engineers and geologists at CalGEM, citing COVID-related economic pressure. The move would have increased regulatory oversight on fossil fuel producers and was opposed by the state's oil industry.

Ultimately, more durable measures to wind down fossil fuel supply and demand will require new legislation, even as regulators weigh whether the state needs more power plants to maintain reliability.

A 2019 bill by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), AB 345, would have codified the minimum 2,500-foot setback for new oil and gas wells. However, before the final vote in the Assembly, the bill’s buffer requirement was dropped and replaced with a requirement for CalGEM “to consider a setback distance of 2,500 feet.” The bill passed the Assembly in January over "no" votes from several moderate Democrats; it now awaits action in the Senate.

A bill previously introduced by Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), AB 1745, didn’t even make it that far. Ting’s bill would have required that all new passenger cars registered in the state after January 1, 2040, be zero-emission vehicles (ZEV). The bill died in committee without a vote in April 2018.

But the backing of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), one of the world's most powerful air-quality regulators, could change the political conversation. In March, CARB chair Mary Nichols said she now supports consideration of California establishing a 100 percent zero-emission vehicle sales target by 2030, as policymakers also consider a revamp of electricity rates to clean the grid.

“In the past, I’ve been skeptical about whether that would do more harm than good in terms of the backlash by dealers and others against something that sounded so un-California like,” Nichols said during an online event. “But as time has gone on, I’ve become more convinced that we need to send the longer-term signal about where we’re headed.”

Another complicating factor for California’s political leaders is the lack of a willing federal partner — at least in the short term — in winding down oil and gas production, amid warnings about a looming electricity shortage that could pressure the grid.

Under the Trump administration, the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 15 million acres of federal land in California, has pushed to open more than 1 million acres of public and private land across eight counties in Central California to fracking. In January 2020, California filed a federal lawsuit to block the move.

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Canada Net-Zero Grid Lessons highlight Europe's energy transition risks: Germany's power prices, wind and solar variability, nuclear phaseout, grid reliability, storage, market design, policy reforms, and distributed energy resources for resilient decarbonization.

Key Points

Lessons stress an all-of-the-above mix, robust market design, storage, and nuclear to ensure reliability, affordability.

✅ Diversify: nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, storage for reliability.

✅ Reform markets and grid planning for integration and flexibility.

✅ Build fast: streamline permitting, invest in transmission and DERs.

Europe is currently suffering the consequences of an uncoordinated rush to carbon-free electricity that experts warn could hit Canada as well unless urgent action is taken.

Power prices in Germany, for example, hit a record 91 euros ($135 CAD) per megawatt-hour earlier this month. That is more than triple what electricity costs in Ontario, where greening the grid could require massive investment, even during periods of peak demand.

Experts blame the price spikes in large part on a chaotic transition to a specific set of renewable electricity sources - wind and solar - at the expense of other carbon-free supplies such as nuclear power. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, plans to close its last remaining nuclear power plant next year despite warnings that renewables are not being added to the German grid quickly enough to replace that lost supply.

As Canada prepares to transition its own electricity grid to 100 per cent net-zero supplies by 2035, with provinces like Ontario planning new wind and solar procurement, experts say the European power crisis offers lessons this country must heed in order to avoid a similar fate.

'A CAUTIONARY TALE'
“Some countries have rushed their transition without thinking about what people need and when they need it,” said Chris Bentley, managing director of Ryerson University’s Legal Innovation Zone who also served as Ontario’s Minister of Energy from 2011 to 2013, in an interview. “Germany has experienced a little bit of this issue recently when the wind wasn’t blowing.”

Wind power usually provides between 20 and 30 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs, but the below-average breeze across much of continental Europe in recent months has pushed that figure down.

“There is a cautionary tale from the experience in Europe,” said Francis Bradley, chief executive officer of the Canadian Electricity Association, in an interview. “There was also a cautionary tale from what took place this past winter in Texas,” he added, referring to widespread power failures in Texas spawned by a lack of backup power supplies during an unusually cold winter that led to many deaths.

The first lesson Canada must learn from those cautionary tales, Bradley said, “is the need to pursue an all-of-the-above approach.”

“It is absolutely essential that every opportunity and every potential technology for low-carbon or no-carbon electricity needs to be pursued and needs to be pursued to the fullest,” he said.

The more important lesson for Canada, according to Binnu Jeyakumar, is about the need for a more holistic, nuanced approach to our own net-zero transition.

“It is very easy to have runaway narratives that just pinpoint the blame on one or two issues, but the lesson here isn’t really about the reliability of renewables as there are failures that occur across all sources of electricity supply,” said Jeyakumar, director of clean energy for the Pembina Institute, in an interview. 

“The takeaway for us is that we need to get better at learning how to integrate an increasingly diverse electricity grid,” she said. “It is not necessarily the technologies themselves, it is about how we do grid planning, how are our markets structured and are we adapting them to the trends that are evolving in the electricity and energy sectors.”
 

'ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS' CHALLENGE IS 'ALMOST MIND-BENDING'
Canada already gets the vast majority of its electricity from emission-free sources. Hydro provides roughly 60 per cent of our power, nuclear contributes another 15 per cent and renewables such as wind and solar contribute roughly seven per cent more, according to federal government data.

Tempting as it might be to view the remaining 18 per cent of Canadian electricity that is supplied by oil, natural gas and coal as a small enough proportion that it should be relatively easy to replace, with some analyses warning that scrapping coal abruptly can be costly for consumers, the reality is much more difficult.

“It is the law of diminishing returns or the 80-20 rule where the first 80 per cent is easy but the last 20 per cent is hard,” Bradley explained. “We already have an electricity sector that is 80 per cent GHG-free, so getting rid of that last 20 per cent is the really difficult part because the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.”

Key to successfully decarbonizing Canada’s power grid will be the recognition that electricity demand is constantly growing, a point reinforced by a recent power challenges report that underscores the scale. That means Canada needs to build out enough emission-free power sources to replace existing fossil fuel-based supplies while also ensuring adequate supplies for future demand.

“It is one thing to say that by 2035 we are going to have a decarbonized electricity system, but the challenge really is the amount of additional electricity that we are going to need between now and 2035,” said John Gorman, chief executive officer of the Canadian Nuclear Association, which has argued that nuclear is key to climate goals in Canada, and former CEO of the Canadian Solar Industries Association, in an interview. “It is absolutely enormous, I mean, it is almost mind-bending.”

Canada will need to triple the amount of electricity produced nationwide by 2050, according to a report from SNC-Lavalin published earlier this year, and provinces such as Ontario face a shortfall over the next few years, Gorman said. Gorman said that will require adding between five and seven gigawatts of new installed capacity to Canada’s electricity grid every year from 2021 through 2050 or more than twice the amount of new power supply Canada brings online annually right now.

For perspective, consider Ontario’s Bruce Power nuclear facility. It took 27 years to bring that plant to its current 6.4 gigawatt (GW) capacity, but meeting Canada’s decarbonization goals will require adding roughly the equivalent capacity of Bruce Power every year for the next three decades.

“The task of creating enough electricity in the coming years is truly enormous and governments have not really wrapped their heads around that yet,” Gorman said. “For those of us in the energy sector, it is the type of thing that can keep you up at night.”

GOVERNMENT POLICY 'HELD HOSTAGE' BY 'DINOSAURS'
The Pembina Institute’s Jeyakumar agreed “the last mile is often the most difficult” and will require “a concerted effort both at the federal level and the provincial level.”

Governments will “need to be able to support innovation and solutions such as non-wires alternatives,” she said. “Instead of building a massive new transmission line or beefing up an old one, you could put a storage facility at the end of an existing line. Distributed energy resources provide those kinds of non-wires alternatives and they are already cost-effective and competitive with oil and gas.”

For Glen Murray, who served as Ontario’s minister of infrastructure and transportation from early 2013 to mid-2014 before assuming the environment and climate change portfolio until his resignation in mid-2017, that is a key lesson governments have yet to learn.

“We are moving away from a centralized distribution model to distributed systems where individual buildings and homes and communities will supply their own electricity needs,” said Murray, who currently works for an urban planning software company in Winnipeg, in an interview. “Yet both the federal and provincial governments are assuming that we are going to continue to have large, centralized generation of power, but that is simply not going to be the case.”

“Government policy is not focused on driving that because they are held hostage by their own hydro utilities and the big gas companies,” Murray said. “They are controlling the agenda even though they are the dinosaurs.”

Referencing the SNC-Lavalin report, Gorman noted as many as 45 small, modular nuclear reactors as well as 20 conventional nuclear power plants will be required in the coming decades, with jurisdictions like Ontario exploring new large-scale nuclear as part of that mix: “And that is in the context of also maximizing all the other emission-free electricity sources we have available as well from wind to solar to hydro and marine renewables,” Gorman said, echoing the “all-of-the-above” mindset of the Canadian Electricity Association.

There are, however, “fundamental rules of the market and the regulatory system that make it an uneven playing field for these new technologies to compete,” said Jeyakumar, agreeing with Murray’s concerns. “These are all solvable problems but we need to work on them now.”
 

'2035 IS TOMORROW'
According to Bentley, the former Ontario energy minister-turned academic, “the government's role is to match the aspiration with the means to achieve that aspiration.”

“We have spent far more time as governments talking about the goals and the high-level promises [of a net-zero electricity grid by 2035] without spending as much time as we need to in order to recognize what a massive transformation this will mean,” Bentley said. “It is easy to talk about the end-goal, but how do you get there?”

The Canadian Electricity Assocation’s Bradley agreed “there are still a lot of outstanding questions about how we are going to turn those aspirations into actual policies. The 2035 goal is going to be very difficult to achieve in the absence of seeing exactly what the policies are that are going to move us in that direction.”

“It can take a decade to go through the processes of consultations and planning and then building and getting online,” Bradley said. “Particularly when you’re talking about big electricity projects, 2035 is tomorrow.”

Jeyakumar said “we cannot afford to wait any longer” for policies to be put in place as the decisions governments make today “will then lock us in for the next 30 or 40 years into specific technologies.”

“We need to consider it like saving for retirement,” said Gorman of the Canadian Nuclear Association. “Every year that you don’t contribute to your retirement savings just pushes your retirement one more year into the future.”

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IAEA Nuclear Reactor Simulators enable virtual nuclear power plant training on IPWR/PWR systems, load-following operations, baseload dynamics, and turbine coupling, supporting advanced reactor education, flexible grid integration, and low-carbon electricity skills development during remote learning.

Key Points

IAEA Nuclear Reactor Simulators are tools for training on reactor operations, safety, and flexible power management.

✅ Simulates IPWR/PWR systems with real-time parameter visualization.

✅ Practices load-following, baseload, and grid flexibility scenarios.

✅ Supports remote training on safety, controls, and turbine coupling.

Students and professionals in the nuclear field are making use of learning opportunities during lockdown made necessary by the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on IAEA low-carbon electricity lessons for the future.

Requests to use the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) basic principle nuclear reactor simulators have risen sharply in recent weeks, IAEA said on 1 May, as India takes steps to get nuclear back on track. New users will have the opportunity to learn more about operating them.

“This suite of nuclear power plant simulators is part of the IAEA education and training programmes on technology development of advanced reactors worldwide. [It] can be accessed upon request by interested parties from around the world,” said Stefano Monti, head of the IAEA’s Nuclear Power Technology Development Section.

Simulators include several features to help users understand fundamental concepts behind the behaviour of nuclear plants and their reactors. They also provide an overview of how various plant systems and components work to power turbines and produce low-carbon electricity, while illustrating roles beyond electricity as well.

In the integral pressurised water reactor (IPWR) simulator, for instance, a type of advanced nuclear power design, users can navigate through several screens, each containing information allowing them to adjust certain variables. One provides a summary of reactor parameters such as primary pressure, flow and temperature. Another view lays out the status of the reactor core.

The “Systems” screen provides a visual overview of how the plant’s main systems, including the reactor and turbines, work together. On the “Controls” screen, users can adjust values which affect reactor performance and power output.

This simulator provides insight into how the IPWR works, and also allows users to see how the changes they make to plant variables alter the plant’s operation. Operators can also perform manoeuvres similar to those that would take place in the course of real plant operations e.g. in load following mode.

“Currently, most nuclear plants operate in ‘baseload’ mode, continually generating electricity at their maximum capacity. However, there is a trend of countries, aligned with green industrial revolution strategies, moving toward hybrid energy systems which incorporate nuclear together with a diverse mix of renewable energy sources. A greater need for flexible operations is emerging, and many advanced power plants offer standard features for load following,” said Gerardo Martinez-Guridi, an IAEA nuclear engineer who specialises in water-cooled reactor technology.

Prospective nuclear engineers need to understand the dynamics of the consequences of reducing a reactor’s power output, for example, especially in the context of next-generation nuclear systems and emerging grids, and simulators can help students visualise these processes, he noted.

“Many reactor variables change when the power output is adjusted, and it is useful to see how this occurs in real-time,” said Chirayu Batra, an IAEA nuclear engineer, who will lead the webinar on 12 May.

“Users will know that the operation is complete once the various parameters have stabilised at their new values.”

Observing and comparing the parameter changes helps users know what to expect during a real power manoeuvre, he added.

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U.S. Energy Transition Delays stem from grid bottlenecks, permitting red tape, solar tariff uncertainty, supply-chain shocks, and scarce affordable EVs, risking deeper fossil fuel lock-in despite climate targets for renewables, transmission expansion, and decarbonization.

Key Points

Delays driven by grid limits, permitting, and supply shocks that slow renewables, transmission, EVs, and decarbonization.

✅ Grid interconnection and transmission backlogs stall renewables

✅ Tariff probes and supply chains disrupt utility-scale solar

✅ Permitting, policy gaps, and EV costs sustain fossil fuel use

Big solar projects are facing major delays. Plans to adapt the grid to clean energy are confronting mountains of red tape. Affordable electric vehicles are in short supply.

The United States is struggling to squeeze opportunity out of an energy crisis that should have been a catalyst for cleaner, domestically produced power. After decades of putting the climate on the back burner, the country is finding itself unprepared to seize the moment and at risk of emerging from the crisis even more reliant on fossil fuels.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint
The problem is not entirely unique to the United States. Across the globe, climate leaders are warning that energy shortages including coal and nuclear disruptions prompted by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and high gas prices driven by inflation threaten to make the energy transition an afterthought — potentially thwarting efforts to keep global temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“The energy crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine has seen a perilous doubling down on fossil fuels by the major economies,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said at a conference in Vienna on Tuesday, according to prepared remarks. He warned governments and investors that a failure to immediately and more aggressively embrace clean energy could be disastrous for the planet.

U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry suggested that nations are falling prey to a flawed logic that fossil fuels will help them weather this period of instability, undermining U.S. national security and climate goals, which has seen gas prices climb to a record-high national average of $5 per gallon. “You have this new revisionism suggesting that we have to be pumping oil like crazy, and we have to be moving into long-term [fossil fuel] infrastructure building,” he said at the Time100 Summit in New York this month. “We have to push back.”

Climate envoy John F. Kerry attends the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles on June 8. Kerry has criticized the tendency to turn toward fossil fuels in times of uncertainty. (Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images)
In the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China — the hurdles go beyond the supply-chain crisis and sanctions linked to the war in Ukraine. The country’s lofty goals for all carbon pollution to be gone from the electricity sector by 2035 and for half the cars sold to be electric by 2030 are jeopardized by years of neglect of the electrical grid, regulatory hurdles that have set projects back years, and failures by Congress and policymakers to plan ahead.
The challenges are further compounded by plans to build costly new infrastructure for drilling and exporting natural gas that will make it even harder to transition away from the fossil fuel.

“We are running into structural challenges preventing consumers and businesses from going cleaner, even at this time of high oil and gas prices,” said Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser in the Clinton administration who now works on strategy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank. “It is a little alarming that even now, Congress is barely talking about clean energy.”

Consumers are eager for more wind and solar. Companies looking to go carbon-neutral are facing growing waitlists for access to green energy, and a Pew Research Center poll in late January found that two-thirds of Americans want the United States to prioritize alternative energy over fossil fuel production.

But lawmakers have balked for more than a decade at making most of the fundamental economic and policy changes such as a clean electricity standard that experts widely agree are crucial to an orderly and accelerated energy transition. The United States does not have a tax on carbon, nor a national cap-and-trade program that would reorient markets toward lowering emissions. The unraveling in Congress of President Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan has added to the head winds that green-energy developers face, even as climate law results remain mixed.

Vice President Harris tours electric school buses at Meridian High School in Falls Church, Va., on May 20. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
“There is literally nothing pushing this forward in the U.S. beyond the tax code and some state laws,” said Heather Zichal, a former White House climate adviser who is now the chief executive of the American Clean Power Association.

The effects of the U.S. government’s halting approach are being felt by solar-panel installers, who saw the number of projects in the most recent quarter fall to the lowest level since the pandemic began. There was 24 percent less solar installed in the first quarter of 2022 than in the same quarter of 2021.

The holdup largely stems from a Commerce Department investigation into alleged tariff-dodging by Chinese manufacturers. Faced with the potential for steep retroactive penalties, hundreds of industrial-scale solar projects were frozen in early April. Weak federal policies to encourage investment in solar manufacturing left American companies ill-equipped to fill the void.

“We shut down multiple projects and had to lay off dozens of people,” said George Hershman, chief executive of SOLV Energy, which specializes in large solar installations. SOLV, like dozens of other solar companies, is now scrambling to reassemble those projects after the administration announced a pause of the tariffs.

Meanwhile, adding clean electricity to the aging power grid has become an increasingly complicated undertaking, given the failure to plan for adequate transmission lines and long delays connecting viable wind and solar projects to the electricity network.

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Bitcoin Energy Consumption drives debate on blockchain mining, proof-of-work, carbon footprint, and emissions, with CCAF estimates in terawatt hours highlighting electricity demand, fossil fuel reliance, and sustainability concerns for data centers and cryptocurrency networks.

Key Points

Electricity used by Bitcoin proof-of-work mining, often fossil-fueled, estimated by CCAF in terawatt hours.

✅ CCAF: 40-445 TWh, central estimate ~130 TWh

✅ ~66% of mining electricity sourced from fossil fuels

✅ Proof-of-work increases hash rate, energy, and emissions

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) studies the burgeoning business of cryptocurrencies.

It calculates that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 annualised terawatt hours (TWh), with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours.

The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin, as countries like New Zealand's electricity future are debated to balance demand.

And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources, with the U.S. grid not 100% renewable underscoring broader energy mix challenges worldwide.

The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels, and some regions are weighing curbs like Russia's proposed mining ban amid electricity deficits.

Huge computing power - and therefore energy use - is built into the way the blockchain technology that underpins the cryptocurrency has been designed.

It relies on a vast decentralised network of computers.

These are the so-called Bitcoin "miners" who enable new Bitcoins to be created, but also independently verify and record every transaction made in the currency.

In fact, the Bitcoins are the reward miners get for maintaining this record accurately.

It works like a lottery that runs every 10 minutes, explains Gina Pieters, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a research fellow with the CCAF team.

Data processing centres around the world, including hotspots such as Iceland's mining strain, race to compile and submit this record of transactions in a way that is acceptable to the system.

They also have to guess a random number.

The first to submit the record and the correct number wins the prize - this becomes the next block in the blockchain.

Estimates for bitcoin's electricity consumption
At the moment, they are rewarded with six-and-a-quarter Bitcoins, valued at about $50,000 each.

As soon as one lottery is over, a new number is generated, and the whole process starts again.

The higher the price, says Prof Pieters, the more miners want to get into the game, and utilities like BC Hydro suspending new crypto connections highlight grid pressures.

"They want to get that revenue," she tells me, "and that's what's going to encourage them to introduce more and more powerful machines in order to guess this random number, and therefore you will see an increase in energy consumption," she says.

And there is another factor that drives Bitcoin's increasing energy consumption.

The software ensures it always takes 10 minutes for the puzzle to be solved, so if the number of miners is increasing, the puzzle gets harder and the more computing power needs to be thrown at it.

Bitcoin is therefore actually designed to encourage increased computing effort.

The idea is that the more computers that compete to maintain the blockchain, the safer it becomes, because anyone who might want to try and undermine the currency must control and operate at least as much computing power as the rest of the miners put together.

What this means is that, as Bitcoin gets more valuable, the computing effort expended on creating and maintaining it - and therefore the energy consumed - inevitably increases.

We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency.

They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second - that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering.

And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin.

All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work.

"They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy, and clean energy's 'dirty secret' complicates substitution."

The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues.

"If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity."

"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh, even as some argue cheap abundant electricity is getting closer to reality today. "For Bitcoin."

He says it also limits the number of transactions the system can process to about five per second.

This doesn't make for a useful currency, he argues.

Rising price of bitcoin graphic
And that view is echoed by many eminent figures in finance and economics.

The two essential features of a successful currency are that it is an effective form of exchange and a stable store of value, says Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

He says Bitcoin is neither.

"The fact is, it's not really used much in the legal economy now. Yes, one rich person sells it to another, but that's not a final use. And without that it really doesn't have a long-term future."

What he is saying is that Bitcoin exists almost exclusively as a vehicle for speculation.

So, I want to know: is the bubble about to burst?

"That's my guess," says Prof Rogoff and pauses.

"But I really couldn't tell you when."

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DOE Environmental Management Funding Boost seeks $7.25B to accelerate nuclear cleanup, upgrade Savannah River Site infrastructure, create jobs, and support small businesses, echoing ARRA 2009 results and expediting DOE EM waste remediation nationwide.

Key Points

A proposed $7.25B stimulus for DOE's EM to accelerate nuclear cleanup, modernize infrastructure, and create jobs.

✅ $7.25B one-time stimulus for DOE EM cleanup and infrastructure.

✅ Targets Savannah River Site; supports jobs and small businesses.

✅ Builds on ARRA 2009; accelerates nuclear waste remediation.

A bloc of local governments and nuclear industry, nuclear innovation efforts, labor and community groups are pressing Congress to provide a one-time multibillion-dollar boost to the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management, the remediation-focused Savannah River Site landlord.

The organizations and officials -- including Citizens For Nuclear Technology Awareness Executive Director Jim Marra and Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization President and CEO Rick McLeod -- sent a letter Friday to U.S. House and Senate leadership "strongly" supporting a $7.25 billion funding injection, even as ACORE challenges coal and nuclear subsidies in separate regulatory proceedings, arguing it "will help reignite the national economy," help revive small businesses and create thousands of new jobs despite the novel coronavirus crisis.

More than 30 million Americans have filed unemployment claims in the past two months, with additional clean energy job losses reported, too. Hundreds of thousands of claims have been filed in South Carolina since mid-March, compounding issues like unpaid utility bills in neighboring states.

The requested money could, too, speed Environmental Management's nuclear waste cleanup missions and be used to fix ailing infrastructure and strengthen energy security for rural communities nationwide -- some of which dates back to the Cold War -- at sites across the country. That's a "rare" opportunity, reads the letter, which prominently features the Energy Communities Alliance logo and its chairman's signature.

Similar funding programs, like what was done with the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and recent clean energy funding initiatives, have been successful.

At the time, amid a staggering economic downturn nationwide, Environmental Management contractors "hired over 20,000 new workers," putting them "to work to reduce the overall cleanup complex footprint by 688 square miles while strengthening local economies," the Friday letter reads.

The Energy Department's cleanup office estimates the $6 billion investment years ago reduced its environmental liability by $13 billion, according to a 2012 report.

Such a leap forward, the coalition believes, is repeatable, a view reflected in current plans to revitalize coal communities with clean energy projects across the country.

"We are confident that DOE can successfully manage increased funding and leverage it for future economic development as it has in the past," the letter states. It continues: "We take pride in working together to support jobs and development of infrastructure and work that make our country stronger and assists us to recover from the impacts of COVID-19."

As of Monday afternoon, 8,942 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, have been logged in South Carolina. Aiken County is home to 155 of those cases.

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