America is Being Forced to Burn More Coal. AI & Politics Did This

In May, the Department of Energy issued six emergency orders to keep coal plants that were supposed to be retired running through the summer. One in Pennsylvania. One in Maryland. And on May 18th, PJM — the grid operator serving 65 million people from Illinois to New Jersey — was authorized to cut power to data centers to prevent a wider blackout. Fifty-seven Philadelphia schools went virtual because their buildings couldn't handle the heat. None of this made national news. Mike and Neal break down why it happened, who's responsible, and why the official explanation doesn't quite hold up. The short version: we didn't build the transmission infrastructure we needed, we've been retiring generation faster than we're replacing it, and then AI showed up and nobody — not even the AI companies — was ready for what it would demand from the grid. Anthropic is reportedly paying over a billion dollars a month just to borrow data center capacity. The data centers are now a baseload power draw, and the grid wasn't built for that. They also get into the policy contradiction that's making all of this worse: the same administration issuing emergency coal orders is the one that killed offshore wind leases and blocked hundreds of onshore wind projects on national security grounds. Cheap, reliable electricity is a strategic asset for onshoring manufacturing and building chips. Coal is one of the most expensive ways to produce it. Mike lays out why this is a de facto tariff against American-made products. Plus: Neal explains why Australia is about to start giving away free electricity in the middle of the day and what it means for the energy transition globally; India's solar leapfrog and why it's more exciting than people realize; a carbon capture plant just came online in California's Kern County; and Mike's bad — Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted Tina Peters' sentence and then showed up to his own censure hearing with duct tape across his mouth. It's episode 50. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.