The hottest year on record won't speed up the transition
Why a record-hot year pushes grids toward firm power, not clean power.
The forecasts have firmed up. The World Meteorological Organization now puts the odds of El Niño this summer at 80 percent, and NOAA gives better than three in five for a “super” event by year’s end. A strong one usually delivers the hottest year in the record books.
The easy conclusion is that a record-hot year strengthens the climate case and moves low-carbon technology up the priority list. For the system I work in, that is the wrong call in the near term.
A strong El Niño suppresses rainfall across hydropower regions and raises cooling demand at the same time. The grid responds by leaning harder on whatever is firm and dispatchable, which today still means gas and, in many places, coal. El Niño is the warm phase of the Pacific temperature cycle that reorganizes weather across much of the planet, and its first-order effect on a stressed grid is to reprice resilience, not to accelerate clean power.
That is the surface of it. The full piece works through what a fast climate shock does to infrastructure that plans on a slow cadence, why AI data centers are unusually exposed when power, water, and heat converge on one site in the same season, and why the answer is sequence rather than ambition.
I argued in 2016 that power, not compute, would be the binding constraint on this industry. A super El Niño does not change that thesis. It stress-tests it in public.
Read the full argument here:
Alex Marshall