Checks and Balances Project

Non-partisan watchdog holding gov't officials, lobbyists & corp managers accountable to the public. Send us tips:

[Solar and Storage Industry @SEIA]

Williamsville, Illinois. Population: 1,425

After one year of solar, the village's public library has saved $4,000, going back into programming for library patrons.

https://t.co/9fEo1mQ2lX

[Noah Gordon @noah_gordon_]

If the clean energy transition proceeds like any other technological transition, it will indeed have failed. Only the demise of the old saves the climate.
A false beat in a good Liebreich piece.

[Pew Research Center @pewresearch]

Majorities of Americans say the federal government is doing too little on aspects of environmental protection.

[Robert D. Bullard @DrBobBullard]

#Solar to overtake coal on #Texas grid for the first time ever this year | Grist https://t.co/Y4becfLuQm

[Dave Jones @CleanPowerDave]

I knew the US imports a lot of its battery cells to make battery systems.

I did NOT know just how QUICKLY that is about to change... these numbers are huge🤯

[David Roberts @drvolts]

Today on Volts: clean electrification is the most dynamic, hopeful sector of the economy, but when it comes to politics, it's a 98-lb weakling, a junior partner in trade groups dominated by fossil gas. Today's pod is about a new effort to change that. This is a spicy one!

[Ben Inskeep @Ben_Inskeep]

🚨Big scandal brewing in Indiana after the State admitted it doled out a shocking $655 million 💰💰💰 in data center sales tax exemption subsidies in 2025.

It previously had claimed it had given less than $1 million in subsidies in 2025.

[Jigar Shah @JigarShahDC]

Well done. All data centers should want to rise to a high level of engagement with the Utility, State, and community.

https://t.co/Its3NYo4IP

[Nicolas Fulghum @nicolasfulghum]

Sunny Poland☀️🇵🇱 set a new all-time monthly high for solar in April of 2.7 TWh (+22% over April 2025)

The highest solar generation is usually observed in May-August, so there might be more records to come.

[Ember @ember_energy]

Australia added enough battery capacity to shift 53% of new solar generation in 2025 beyond daytime 🔋

🗣️ "Batteries...help reduce bills for everyone, not just those with batteries," says 🇦🇺's Climate Change and Energy Minister citing Ember's #GER2026

https://t.co/rX0CWiySi3

[Checks and Balances Project @CandBP]

Growth in solar power is exploding, and the politicians who are beholden to fossil fuel interests are making you pay more for electricity.

[Ember @ember_energy]

Global solar power output grew by 30% in 2025 and overtook wind for the first time on record 📈

A decade ago, wind power generated three times more electricity than solar.

https://t.co/oJZTWTdmTq

[Brendon Slotterback @bslotterback]

Just got my @DuquesneLight bill. Since May of '25, no distribution charges have changed. The cost of supply alone has increased 30% in one year (now 11 cents/kWh). Supply is 80-95% gas, coal and nuclear. It would sure be great to have more free fuel in @pjminterconnect!

[Mark Z. Jacobson @mzjacobson]

And California is killing it with 52 straight and 118 of 142 (83%) days in 2026 with WindWaterSolar meeting >100% of demand on its main grid for an average of 4.8 hours/day among all 148 days.

WWS has met 55.4% of all demand this year.

Gas is down 61%, batteries up 328%, solar up 58% in '26 v '23.

[Checks and Balances Project @CandBP]

No one stole any money in Watergate. This is like 100 Watergates in one.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

This is a THEFT far worse than Watergate. There is no other word for it. They are stealing $1.78 BILLION dollars to pay Trump‘s allies, despite knowing that these people are not legally entitled to any money and be laughed out of court if they filed a lawsuit for money damages.

[Checks and Balances Project @CandBP]

It won’t be long in the future before people look back to today and wonder why the United States is behind the world in renewable development and paying so much more for electricity.

[Mark Z. Jacobson @mzjacobson]

Yet another record on the CAISO grid.

82.8% of 24-hour demand met by in-state WWS on Sun May 17.

Gas down 61.2% in '26 v '23 and down 31.1% v '25

48 straight and 114 of 138 days in 2026 with >100% WWS for part of the day

[Jordan - The EV Guy @JordanEVGuy]

Wind turbines are recycled, it’s not 2014 anymore.

One of the internet’s favourite anti-renewable myths is “you can’t recycle wind turbines.”

That argument is years out of date, yet the loons still try and use it as some sort of “got ya” to make themselves feel better.

Modern wind turbines are largely recyclable already.

Steel, copper, aluminium and concrete from turbines are routinely recovered and reused.

Even the blades, which used to be the difficult part, are now being recycled into cement, construction materials, playground equipment and industrial products.

Companies are also developing fully recyclable blades, with newer designs already entering the market.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels are burned once and gone forever. Oil spills, air pollution and billions of tonnes of CO2 don’t exactly get “recycled.”

No energy source is impact free, but pretending wind turbines just get dumped in landfill forever simply isn’t true anymore.

Technology moves on.

The myths just haven’t caught up.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

Trump looting almost $2 billion from the government coffers to pay his supporters is one of the largest scandals in US history.

But our press is so beaten down and the public has become so fatigued by his constant criminality that it's barely a news story.

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

The US Department of Energy just mapped every data center in America.

This is what the AI power grid looks like.

The dots are data centers.
Yellow = operating.
Orange = under construction.
White = planned.

The lines are high-voltage transmission 735kV, 500kV, 345kV the arteries that move electrons from generators to compute loads.

Look at the density along the East Coast, Northern Virginia to the Carolinas.
Then look at Texas.
Then Northern California.

The largest circles on this map represent facilities demanding over 5,000 MW of power.

Single campuses pulling more electricity than mid-sized cities.

Northern Virginia is so dense the dots overlap.

Data centers cluster on transmission corridors.
Not because land is cheap because power is available.

When the line is full, the next data center goes somewhere else.

The grid is the bottleneck.

Every orange dot is a power purchase agreement being negotiated right now.

Every white dot is a utility commission filing, a gas plant approval, a pipeline capacity booking.

The $66.8 bn NextEra-Dominion deal, Meta's 10 new gas plants in Louisiana, the Alaska LNG FID push they all trace back to maps that look like this.

AI infrastructure is built in substations, on transmission corridors, and at the end of gas pipelines.

Link in the comments, to see my stocks 👇

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

PJM needs more storage, Virginia passed a law mandating more storage be procured. Who builds a lot of battery storage? NextEra. Who's Virginia's biggest utility? Dominion.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Last year, China added as much energy to its grid as Germany has in total.