“Anybody who's telling you a number with two significant digits is definitely making up the second. And the first one should probably be taken as a magnitude indicator rather than a faithful prediction of the future. We don't know the future.”
Volts · Climate & Energy · October 2026
Asked what the permitting bill would do to emissions, Palkin said he is confident of the sign (down) but not the size. He pointed out that energy models missed the big shocks of the past decade, from data-center load growth to the collapse in wind and solar costs.
Transcript
…digit. And meanwhile, like we don't even know about large macroscopic seismic shocks that seem to occur within the energy sector like every three to five years at this point. Like five years ago, we had no idea that data centers were going to totally change the economics of the power sector. I
mean, Iran. Iran. I mean, fracking stuff happens.
Yeah. The cost declines in wind and solar. Like none of these things were in the mainstream models, let alone 10, let alone 100 years, you know, before they happened. And yet they have all been the things that have determined the trajectory we are on. And so I think we should ask, like, what are the things that enable us to be successful under a number of scenarios rather than like just what is our central scenario? I do think the central scenario looks good, but I think that like whether or not the data center load growth persists, having a robustly built out transmission grid and having the ability to build at more than 3% of total deployment of wind, solar, and geothermal on federal land when that federal land is 21% of the lower 48 land mass is like a good thing if you care about the deployment of those technologies and like a number of other structural factors. It's not that I think there are no trade-offs. It's not that I think there are no individual titles of the bill that asymmetrically point in a different…
I sort of feel about modeling the way I feel about issue polling, which is like, sure, go ahead and use it to make your case and get what you want, but like, don't get too high on your own supply. And I think maybe to return to your sort of original kind of six considerations, I think. We can be…
I agree with you. When I'm at my best, I try to believe that everybody who is objecting is objecting in the same good faith that I am. And I think 99.9% of the time, I think that assumption is either true or you should operate as if it's true because it's very close to true. Like, I think people…
Yeah, things are not going well under the status quo. We are not under a trajectory we want to lock in here. Again, like a lot of people are saying, well, we don't need to do this. We can just mess with state and local permitting and we can use executive authority. I think a lot of people are…
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