Congress plays tug-of-war with the IRA while utilities brace for heat, blackouts, and phantom load. The feds say the grid might make it through summer—if everything goes right. (It won’t.) And utilities are finally admitting what insiders have whispered for months: most proposed data centers aren’t real.

Congress Spars Over Clean Energy Tax Cuts

The House is deep into budget markup, and the Inflation Reduction Act is once again in the crosshairs. GOP lawmakers are trying to accelerate the phaseout of IRA tax credits, while Democrats warn it could derail projects already underway and hit Republican districts hardest—many of which are now quietly addicted to clean energy jobs and tax credit dollars.

Even Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Republican from nuclear-heavy upstate New York, threw shade on gutting 45U, the production credit for existing nukes.

The GOP playbook: Strip down the IRA by reclassifying timelines, tightening eligibility, and shifting credit from “construction start” to “placed in service”—a poison pill in a grid interconnection landscape where lead times now run 3–6 years.

Historical note: This isn’t the first time Congress has tried to claw back energy incentives midstream. The 2011 wind PTC fight created a boom-bust cycle that hollowed out parts of the domestic turbine supply chain. Same pattern, different players.

Summer Grid Forecast: Hope, Heat, and Hand-Wringing

NERC and FERC both issued summer reliability reports this week. The headline? “We’ll probably make it—unless anything happens.”

NERC forecasts a 10 GW increase in peak demand this summer, driven by AI, electrification, and old-fashioned heat. Inverter-based resources (IBRs) like solar and batteries are helping, but they’re also a risk. IBRs can trip offline in a disturbance—especially when under-modeled or poorly integrated.

Regions at risk: MISO (thanks to 1.5 GW in fossil retirements), ERCOT (ramping shortfalls), New England (tight reserve margins), and the Southwest (heat + variability = volatility).

Meanwhile, FERC took a sharper tone: aging dispatchable plants are retiring faster than firm replacements can come online. AI is pouring kerosene on demand curves. And the country faces 40–60% odds of a hotter-than-normal summer in almost every region.

Translation: The grid will survive the summer, but not without casualties. Maybe your power bill. Maybe your weekend plans.

Extra context: California ISO, ISO-NE, and PJM have each quietly issued internal risk assessments hinting at the same thing: resource adequacy isn’t the same as reliability.

The Data Center Boom Is Full of Ghosts

An industry finally admits what everyone else suspected: most proposed data centers won’t be built.

Experts estimate the grid is now processing five to ten times more interconnection requests than there are real data centers. It’s load speculation, often fueled by LLCs and NDAs that shield developers and inflate planning models.

Why it matters:

• Utilities waste scarce resources studying vaporware.

• Interconnection queues clog.

• Overbuilding becomes a real risk.

• Planning errors multiply.

Microsoft has already dumped up to 2 GW in reservations. Developers hedge their bets across multiple sites, then ghost before construction. Even savvy operators like Xcel and Dominion admit they’re over-forecasting by necessity.

Fixes? Some utilities are adding rate classes, requiring deposits, or tying contracts to actual load served. But there’s no national framework yet—and the developers are still playing them off each other like stadium-hungry NFL owners.

Sound familiar? It’s a rerun of the stadium subsidy era, just with more fiber optics and less tailgating.

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Conversation Starters

• Sustainability Times – Hydrogen from Human Waste: Adelaide scientists say pee-powered electrolysis slashes energy use by 27%. Gross? Sure. But cheaper than gray hydrogen—and less explosive than Congress.

• Bloomberg – South Korea Quietly Wins the Nuclear Comeback: While U.S. projects stall in permitting hell, Seoul builds fast and ships faster. Expect Doosan and KEPCO to keep racking up contracts in the vacuum.

• Financial Times – Denmark Eyes Nuclear After 40-Year Ban: A blackout in April broke the spell. Copenhagen is reconsidering SMRs to backstop its wind-heavy grid. If Denmark turns, expect other holdouts to follow.

Good Bet, Bad Bet

Good Bet: Doosan Enerbility (034020.KQ)
South Korea’s nuclear export champion is having a moment. With Denmark considering ending its 40-year nuclear ban and SMRs gaining traction in Europe and Africa, Doosan—already building reactors in the UAE and working with U.S. partners like NuScale—has global momentum. As U.S. federal uncertainty grows, international players with proven supply chains are a smart hedge.

Bad Bet: Sunnova (NOVA)
With Congress poised to kill credit transferability and grid stress rising, rooftop solar isn’t where you want to be. Sunnova’s residential financing model depends on federal incentives and low friction capital. Both are vanishing. Summer grid instability could hurt confidence in distributed energy just as financing dries up. They may survive—but not thrive—in the coming reset.

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