What Does Amazon Want With Nuclear? – Heatmap

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The tech giant’s $650 million deal with Talen Energy has a lot to unpack.
When Talen Energy, which owns a 90% interest in the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Northeastern Pennsylvania, announced it was selling a data center site adjacent to its power plant to Amazon Web Services, it raised some eyebrows in the energy world. The surprise was not because a large tech company made a big deal with a carbon-free power provider, or even that a tech company made a deal to buy power generated by a nuclear power plant. It was because Amazon was making this deal.
Amazon is a massive buyer of renewable power — it claims to be the world’s largest and says it’s responsible for 28 gigawatts of clean energy capacity — signing contracts with new wind and solar projects all over the world.
But a divide has opened up among tech giants when it comes to energy, with Amazon on one side and Alphabet and Microsoft on the other. The difference hinges on how much it matters where and when the new carbon-free power a company buys in order to match its electricity use.
What’s odd about the Talen deal is that it fits awkwardly into either approach, especially Amazon’s. Amazon does not count nuclear towards its renewable power goals, and in any case, it’s not a “new” source of carbon-free power. Instead, it allows Amazon to siphon somewhere between 480 and 960 megawatts of capacity from the 2,500 megawatt plant.

“Amazon needs power, they’re getting it at cheap rates. They don’t even want to talk about it like a climate thing,” Mark Nelson, the founder of Radiant Energy Group, told me.
In the past decade or so, technology companies have gone on a clean-power buying spree, funding new wind and solar projects all over the world. But there has been a divergence in what is thought to be the best way to go about it.
In 2019, Amazon announced a goal to add enough renewable power to the grid to match its own emissions by 2030 (since moved up to 2025) and to reach net zero by 2040.
Google has been 100% renewable in terms of buying clean power in the same amounts that it consumes since 2017. So in 2020, it set a new goal: to “run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030.” This would mean not just matching total renewable purchases with total emissions, as Amazon is seeking to do, but also trying to get every hour of data center operation “matched” with an hour of renewable generation on the same grid.
Microsoft has a similar goal, and as a result, both companies have shown much more interest in nuclear power of late than is typical in the technology world.
“A huge bottleneck for growth for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook is access to constant electricity,” Nelson told me. Nuclear is a carbon-free electricity resource that can run at a steady output 24 hours a day, whereas wind and solar are both inherently variable.
Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation to supply power to data centers in Virginia and hired an official from the Tennessee Valley Authority to be its director of nuclear and energy innovations, while Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Sam Altman, the head of Microsoft-backed OpenAI have both invested in nuclear startups, as has Google.

Amazon’s approach — which it shares with several other large companies, including Meta — is not to match 24 hours of its operations with clean power bought locally, but rather to develop and purchase new wind and solar at the same scale of the power it consumes, especially in areas with dirty grids, thus matching the emissions from its consumption with the emissions reductions of new renewables projects. While a 24/7 matching approach may be naturally complementary with nuclear power, Amazon’s strategy doesn’t require it.
“We believe a focus on emissions is the fastest, most cost-effective and scalable way to leverage corporate clean energy procurement to help decarbonize global power grids at the fastest pace,” an Amazon spokesperson told me. “This includes procuring renewable energy in locations and countries that still rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their grids, and where energy projects can have the biggest impact on carbon reduction.”
Contracting out new renewable energy projects can have more bang for your buck in dirty grids, according to proponents of the Amazon philosophy, known as carbon matching. The hypothesis is that a renewable project in a fossil fuel-heavy grid will displace more dirty power than one that’s located near a datacenter in an already relatively clean grid like California or Washington State.
Princeton researchers who examined the carbon matching (Amazon) and temporal matching (Google and Microsoft) strategies argued that the carbon matching approach does not necessarily lead to more renewables — or less fossil fuels — on the grid than would have occurred in the absence of the tech companies, and thus does not actually greatly lower emissions. The temporal approach, on the other hand, can meaningfully displace fossil fuel power that would otherwise have to be on the grid to meet demand.
Nuclear advocates are clear-eyed that this deal won’t cause a new generating unit to sprout up out of the Susquehanna Valley. But they still see it as the kind of deal that can help ensure nuclear plants’ continued survival. Amazon’s $650 million buys it a 10-year agreement to purchase power from the plant, as well as “additional revenue from AWS related to sales of carbon-free energy to the grid,” which an Amazon spokesperson explained as a reference to the deal “ensur[ing] that the nuclear plant has stable revenues to continue generating clean power to the grid for the foreseeable future.”

Nelson, a passionate advocate for nuclear power, lamented the mass shutdown of nuclear power plants in the 2010s thanks to cheap natural gas knocking them out of power markets that didn’t value reliability or carbon-free energy. But now, he says, things are different.
“Now nuclear is getting valued for its climate properties, reliability, and low cost. We’re seeing nuclear plants cash in,” Nelson told me. “Long term PPAs with cold hard cash help me sleep better at night.”
Matthew Zeitlin
Matthew is a correspondent at Heatmap. Previously he was an economics reporter at Grid, where he covered macroeconomics and energy, and a business reporter at BuzzFeed News, where he covered finance. He has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, Barron's, and New York Magazine. Read More
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Whether that will matter in November is another story.
As President Joe Biden prepares to run for re-election, one fact has eluded much notice: His climate change policies are pretty popular.
In an exclusive Heatmap poll of 1,000 Americans conducted by Benenson Strategy Group late last year, most respondents backed the core ideas behind Biden’s climate policies. They expressed the most support of ideas meant to beef up the country’s manufacturing economy and build more renewable electricity.
Nearly 90% of Americans, for instance, support encouraging domestic manufacturing. They also support using tax incentives to make homes more energy efficient (85%), funding research into carbon dioxide removal (81%), investing in public transit (80%), and implementing policies that address environmental injustices (78%).
That is despite the overwhelming public disappointment in Biden. Biden’s approval rating has fallen to 37%, an all-time low of his presidency, despite his boisterous State of the Union performance. At first glance, Biden’s climate policy might seem to pose a paradox: It’s really popular (at least facially), but nobody has seemed to notice. That may persist through the November election. But it will not be able to last for too long after that.
The least popular policies are those that Biden has pursued only when he has bipartisan support — or that he has not pursued at all. Making it easier to build new fossil fuel pipelines, for instance, is supported by 62% of Americans, less than almost any other policy aimed at increasing the country’s energy supply. A slight majority of Americans support making it easier to build new nuclear power plants.

At first I doubted the veracity of these results — some of Biden’s policies are, after all, putting up autocrat-like ratings. A carbon tax is polling 52 points above water.
But these results largely match other polling. Surveys reliably find that about two-thirds of Americans would support some kind of carbon tax. Last year, for instance, 68%of Americans backed “requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax,” according to a Yale poll. These numbers have been remarkably stable over time. As much as 67% of Americans backed a carbon tax in 2019, according to a poll from the University of Chicago and the Associated Press-NORC Center on Public Affairs Research.
If these numbers surprise you, you’re not alone. Most Americans underestimate public support for pro-climate policies. (Or at least, they underestimate what polling finds about Americans’ support for climate policies.)
The rub is that public support descends to more Earthly levels once you start asking about concrete costs. Those who say they support a carbon tax when told it will be imposed on fossil fuel companies, for instance, may change their minds after fossil fuel companies pass that tax along as higher prices. Another University of Chicago poll found that most Americans were okay paying a monthly fee of $1 to fight climate change. When asked if they’d pay $40 a month, support fell to 23%.
One of the more ironic aspects of Biden’s success is how rapidly commentators have forgotten that climate change policy used to be seen as uniquely difficult to legislate in the United States. In 1993, and then again in 2010, the House of Representatives passed bills that would have helped fight climate change. Each time, the Senate blocked the legislation. The Senate also effectively blocked the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the first international climate treaty, in the 1990s.

Through the decades, Congress passed energy bills meant to expand the energy supply in an all-of-the-above way and changed the tax code to let people and companies save money by building solar or wind energy. But these policies expired every few years, and they failed to amount to a unified climate strategy.
Other countries with other forms of government — China, the United Kingdom, the European Union member states — didn’t have this problem. (Which doesn’t mean that they’ve been perfect on climate change.) America’s failure to pass climate policy became a singular indictment of its bicameral system.
Why was it so hard to pass climate policy? The short answer is that for years, climate advocates focused on one particular policy — carbon pricing — as a cure-all solution to climate change. And while carbon pricing is backed up by economic theory, environmentalists and economists struggled to generate the kind of durable, veto-proof support that legislation needs to pass in today’s environment.
By design, carbon pricing raises the cost of energy — meaning that opponents can paint it as a measure meant to increase the cost of living. That didn’t work for voters in the persistently sluggish economy of the 2010s, and it split Democrats’ coalition — of college-educated liberals and lower-income workers — in half. (It also struggled to deal with the political mise en scene. Washington’s interest in climate policy has usually peaked during moments of high energy prices, but the past decade’s fracking boom kept a lid on oil and natural gas prices.)
But climate advocates also struggled for years against more political-economic obstacles. As the political scientist Matto Mildenberger documented, climate proposals have historically invited pro-business groups and labor unions to team up and fight a common enemy. Because climate policy targeted entire industries at once — and because these industries were, naturally, especially sensitive to wholesale energy prices — environmentalists had to take on labor and management at the same time.
It didn’t help that many of the industries concerned had a special claim to Democrats’ sensibilities. Until recently, many of the sectors most affected by climate policy were unionized at a higher rate than the average. Even today, more than 20% of utility workers belong to a union, for example, as compared to 6% of workers in the private sector. These rates were even higher in the recent past. About 16% of automaking workers are represented by unions today, but union membership stood at 60% within living memory. Even in 2010, about one in 10 American workers in the mining, quarrying, and fossil-fuel extraction industries were represented by a union, which was also above the national rate at the time.

Democrats dealt with these problems by abandoning most broad-scale attempts to tax fossil fuels. During the Trump administration, progressives chose to focus instead on using industrial policy and regulations to rein in carbon-intensive sectors — instead of raising the cost of fossil fuels, perhaps a climate law could lower the cost of clean alternatives. And instead of raising energy prices — thereby annoying voters and discouraging high-profile industries — perhaps policy could lower them. Hence the Inflation Reduction Act.
This approach succeeded! And yet many of the IRA’s policies have struggled to attract public attention. Even though the IRA is Biden’s signature legislative achievement — comparable to President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — Biden has largely avoided the specific backlash that greeted that law. Obamacare was about 10 points underwater in 2010, even as Obama himself was about as popular as he was unpopular. Biden, by contrast, is incredibly disliked — he is now 17 points underwater, a nadir for his presidency — yet the IRA’s core ideas remain well-liked.
That is politically inconvenient for Biden and it raises difficult long-term questions for progressives. Biden and Democrats have seemingly given voters what they want — and it’s not clear that the voters care.
But for the would-be Grover Cleveland to Biden's Benjamin Harrison, it might be more of a problem. If elected, Trump has promised to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. His rhetoric on climate change hasn’t really changed since the 2016 election, when he argued that it was “job-killing.” Meanwhile, he hates electric vehicles, claiming that “they don’t go far, they cost too much, and they’re all going to be made in China.”
Yet it’s the electric vehicles made in America that are going to get him. If Trump repeals the IRA’s subsidies, then domestic manufacturing will suffer. The EV industry has created roughly 70,000 jobs over the past three years, and many of those roles are in electorally decisive states, including Georgia and Michigan. Trump has promised to act as a “Day One dictator,” but even then, he will still be at least partly constrained by the desires and interests of the local and state-level Republicans who support him — and they will need those jobs and investment to continue.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that these policies will produce political support. In Texas, an explosion of renewable construction has led not to surging public support for clean energy, but to a state-led “war” on wind and solar. (That said, renewables don’t generate local jobs and economic activity in the same long-term way that factories do.) Yet these policies don’t ever have to be popular to be durable — in part because voters won’t organize around them until they’re threatened. Biden’s climate policies — no matter how popular — will probably never win him reelection. But they could very well protect his legacy long after he’s gone.
Nepal’s rhino conservation efforts have been, if anything, too successful.
Ganesh Paudel packs a wad of chewing tobacco as he talks about the rhinoceros attack. “When the rhino charged, we were in a boat,” he tells me. “The rhino was sitting in the water, then it hit me and broke my knee, broke the hand of another guide and gored a tourist” — he points — “through an eye.”
As we chat, another rhino wades in a stream just a short way away. Paudel works as a nature guide, but we’re not in nature today — we’re standing under a bridge that connects to a busy highway in Chitwan, a district of about a million people situated on the outskirts of Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. A school bus passes and a few locals stop their scooters to whip out phones and film. But most keep moving without looking twice.
Rhinos once roamed from Pakistan to Bangladesh, but their numbers plummeted in the 20th century. Many cultures throughout Asia believe rhino horns have medicinal properties, making the creatures they’re attached to vulnerable to poaching. Rajas and royals prized rhinos as trophy kills. Farmers, also, retaliated with violence against rhinos that pillaged their crops. By 1970 there were just 95 rhinos in the national park, a wilderness bigger than New York City.

Eventually, however, the government realized that wildlife protection attracts dollars. For decades now, the United States Agency for International Development and non-governmental organizations like the World Wildlife Fund have supported Nepal’s efforts to boost conservation and lessen human wildlife conflict. Between 2011 and 2020 alone, $57 million of USAID funding went to programs aimed at protecting biodiversity here. Soldiers now patrol the park to stifle poaching.
But while the rhino population has rebounded to nearly 700 in Chitwan, the animals themselves are hardly thriving. As temperatures rise, there's been less rain during monsoon season. Warming temperatures have fueled invasive species like American creeper vines that have taken over rhino habitat and grow three inches daily. Climate change has also dried up staple rhino foods like elephant grass and aquatic plants. Now, there are too many rhinos and not enough forest, which forces the animals out of the park and into the city. (The same goes for tigers.)
The particular rhino wading near us is named Meghauli. Each morning, like clockwork, he comes out of the forest and into town. Meghauli is a bona fide social media star. When he thuds down the road traffic stops and a parade of hypnotized Nepalis and foreigners snap selfies and touch his leathery hide.
Meghauli was hand-raised by park staff after he was found alone, wounded from a tiger attack. Fed on 18 liters of buffalo milk a day, he grew big and strong — and also lost his fear of humans. Four years later he was released, but he kept returning because it’s easier to find food in town than in the increasingly dry and crowded jungle.
Rhinos are everywhere in the populated regions around the park — wading in streams, but also painted in murals, memorialized in hotel names, and depicted in statues. The uncomfortable truth is that the rhinos’ plight has also created a lucrative tourist opportunity. Rajendra Dhami, who runs a tea shop in front of Meghauli’s main crossing point, a shallow river with basking crocodiles and waiting tourists, tells me the rhinos have become a big attraction. “People come to see rhinos since we have them,” he says. “That means more money for us.”

A pair of young Brits and an Indian family of nine are currently gathered, waiting for Meghauli, but Dhami insists that for the most part, it doesn’t matter which rhino shows up. “We have lots of problems in Nepal,” he tells me, “but we share with wildlife.”
It’s true visitors often choose hotels and shops near wildlife. But a recent 20-year study found that nature-based tourism rarely impacts locals, in part because hotel bookings are often made online with fancy tour operators who act as middlemen and skim off revenue much the same way food delivery sites take from restaurants. Meanwhile, just six of the 93 hotels here are owned or managed by indigenous people, according to the Regional Hotel Association Chitwan. For most Nepalis, especially in poor indigenous communities who rely on farming here, rhinos running around is bad for bottom lines — and bellies.
“Cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes, rhinos like it all very much” says Narayan Rijal, who has worked as a park guide for 15 years. ”That’s the problem.”
But people, also, are hungry. Many here are in such need of food that they’re invading rhino habitat to find fruits, honey, and meat. Impoverished communities illegally enter the park to gather firewood, a cycle that increases deforestation, shrinks habitat, and risks deadly rhino, elephant, and tiger attacks.
Tulsi Magar, a guide at the local Sanctuary hotel, says many attacks are because farmers are so desperate to protect their own food that they stand their ground and light fires to try and scare off hungry rhinos. When Magar was 12, he also fought this way, sleeping in a shed and narrowly avoiding losing his life to protect the family’s radish harvest.
“It didn’t work,’ he remembers. “The rhinos won.”
Soldiers try their best to manage the rhinos, trailing them as they leave the park to forage in farmers’ fields. Once they reach town, soldiers often have to hit them with sticks or their rifle butts to get them to return to the forest.

“They‘re not small animals,” an assistant warden says as a rooster crows outside his office. “We try to push rhinos back into the core area. With Meghauli no need for stick, we just push. We do our best.”
Meghauli has a lookalike named Madi, another rescue. Unlike Meghauli, Madi is angry, park staff say, asking me to avoid using their names for fear of speaking openly. “Madi even charged a few taxis by the airport,” they admit. “He’s very aggressive.”
Rhinos have killed 55 people since 1998, including a 2019 attack on safari-going tourists. Last year alone, rhinos killed five. “They’re more dangerous than tigers,” notes Isswari Chapagain who has climbed trees to avoid charges.
Rhinos aren’t just a threat to locals, he says. They’re also a threat to each other. Wild rhinos go nuts and attack orphans like Meghauli and Madi if they smell people on them — another reason they keep coming back to town.
As the park has become famous and rhinos have rebounded, human activities like road expansion have been linked to a string of strange deaths: 165 rhinos killed from falling into roadside ditches and septic tanks, shocks from electric fences, disease (likely from proximity to livestock), and at least six killed by poachers. In 2022 alone, 36 rhinos died from territorial fights, which are also connected to warming temperatures and habitat loss. Construction on Chitwan’s three main rivers changes their flow, shrinks space, increases food competition and pushes rhinos into fields.
Rhinos are protected even if they attack or leave the park boundaries, but people aren’t. If they’re attacked in the park, Nepalis can claim government compensation (although guides cannot). If they’re at home protecting their farms and a rhino mauls them, they get nothing, another reason researchers accuse the government of continuing to prioritize wildlife over people.
Back under the bridge, I watch Meghauli blow bubbles under the water, just like a kid.
When he rises, I see his massive body in full for the first time. He seems gentle but it wouldn’t take much — a jerk of his head or a kick from a leg — for him to kill someone. He exits the water and trudges up the riverbank, then pauses to scan the highway. He faces me and sniffs the air, then turns toward a potato field. It’s lunchtime.
On hydrogen R&D, Shell’s emissions, and giant redwoods
Current conditions: New wildfires are spreading along Chile’s Pacific Coast • Flooding has killed more than 60 people in Afghanistan over the last three weeks • It will be 70 degrees Fahrenheit today in Indianapolis, Indiana, where signs of spring have emerged 14 days early.
The Department of Energy announced yesterday a $750 million injection into 52 hydrogen research and development projects aimed at bringing down the price of clean hydrogen and making it a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Most of the money will go toward electrolyzers, the devices that use electricity to split hydrogen from oxygen. Being able to produce more of these devices for less money – by improving the supply chains and automating manufacturing, for example – will help bring down the overall cost of clean hydrogen. The funding will also help support fuel cell production, as well as research into “recovery, recycling, and reuse of clean hydrogen materials and components.” This is the first distribution of the $1.5 billion that’s been carved out from the bipartisan infrastructure law for clean hydrogen. The Biden administration has also allotted $7 billion in federal funds to build seven hydrogen hubs across the country, and these new R&D projects will “support the long-term viability” of these hubs, the DOE said.

Oil giant Shell is watering down its commitment to scale back carbon emissions in the next few years. The company pledged in 2021 to reduce its “net carbon intensity” by 20% by 2030, but has adjusted that to between 15% and 20%, according to its latest energy transition strategy update. The goal of a 45% reduction by 2035 has been scrapped entirely. Net carbon intensity is a bit of a confusing term. Shell defines it as “emissions associated with each unit of energy we sell.” The Financial Times calls it “an accounting treatment that allows Shell to offset the carbon produced by its oil and gas business against its growing sales of lower-carbon products.”

“The change reflects Shell’s move away from supplying renewable power to homes,” wrote Laura Hurst at Bloomberg. Shell also said it aims to “reduce customer emissions” – or Scope 3 emissions – from its oil products by 15% to 20% by 2030. How? By “reducing sales of oil products, such as petrol and diesel, as we support customers as they move to electric mobility and lower-carbon fuels, including natural gas, LNG and biofuels.” The company claims it can still get to net-zero emissions by 2050.
The European Commission is suing Greece for failing to manage flood risk. Under the European Green Deal, all EU member states are required to comply with water rules that help ensure, among other things, good management of river basins to help prepare for floods. The commission said that “Greece has so far not reviewed, adopted nor reported its river basin management plans,” and it is therefore referring the country to the EU’s high court. Greece isn’t the only country under pressure: The commission has also sued Bulgaria, Cyprus, Spain, Ireland, Malta, Portugal, and Slovakia for their own reporting failures. But the lawsuit against Greece comes five months after the country experienced historic floods in its Thessaly plain, “devastating crops and livestock and raising questions about the Mediterranean country's ability to deal with an increasingly erratic climate,” explainedReuters.

As the race to cut planet-warming methane emissions ramps up, new data is revealing the true scope of the problem. A new study published yesterday in the journal Nature suggests fossil fuel operations in the U.S. may be emitting three times as much methane as previously thought. Energy production is the third largest source of methane emissions because the gas often leaks from oil wells and gas processing plants. But this new study – which examined 1 million measurements from aerial surveys over six major oil- and gas-producing regions in the U.S. – suggests we’ve been underestimating the size of these leaks, making projects like the MethaneSAT even more important. Yesterday the International Energy Agency said methane emissions from the energy sector were still at record highs last year.
Most people associate giant sequoias with the forests of California, but new research finds the trees are far more plentiful in Britain. The giant redwood was introduced to the UK in 1853 and has since thrived. There are an estimated 500,000 sequoias in the UK, compared with 80,000 in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, according to a report by Britain's academy of sciences, the Royal Society. While wildfire and drought threaten California’s redwoods, “in the UK our climate is more temperate, wetter, and so it is actually likely better suited to these trees in the long run,” said Dr Mathias Disney from University College London, one of the authors of the study.
To estimate the UK trees’ biomass, the researchers used laser scanning to measure the height of 97 trees from three locations. Here they are, ranked by size:
Royal Society
The job board for the Biden administration’s American Climate Corps will officially open next month. As Grist reported, most of the positions are not expected to require experience.
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