Shift Key with Robinson Meyer

Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has blocked renewable energy development and attacked climate change policy, prioritized fossil fuels and encouraged nuclear energy, and started a war that led to a global oil and gas supply shock.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has been the face of much of that policy agenda. For this episode of Shift Key, he joined Rob for a live conversation at our Heatmap House event, part of New York Climate Week. He answered questions about the Trump administration’s war on wind, a ban on diesel fuel exports, and how China has been able to buttress global oil supplies since the spring.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Chris Wright Doesn’t Think We’ll Have a Diesel Export Ban
Trump Keeps Wind Farms Waiting Despite Court Ruling
Trump’s War Against Wind Energy: A Timeline
Previously on Shift Key: How China Saved the World From Trump’s Energy Crisis
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This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the past few years, something surprising has happened in American energy policy: States and utilities have started trying to build new nuclear plants.
A new kind of company — the nuclear developer — is now trying to handle those projects. The most prominent by far is The Nuclear Company, a startup that has hired many of the same people who built the new Vogtle plant in Georgia. On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Jonathan Webb, the CEO of the Nuclear Company. They discuss the company’s goal of building “fleet-scale” nuclear, why Jonathan believes nuclear is poised for a revival, and what has changed since the company began.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Previously on Shift Key: The Lesson Nuclear Companies Should Take From the Dot-Com Boom
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This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

America has some of the world’s best data about its own internal energy, industrial economy, and carbon emissions. That’s thanks to a federal agency called the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which painstakingly collects and updates the data every week.
But EIA data can be hard to access — and even harder to share and understand. A new project aims to change that. U.S. Energy Data takes federal energy data and repackages it, helping amateurs and experts understand the power grid, liquid fuels, and more. It is now the easiest way to make and share charts with federal energy data.
On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and writer who advised and prototyped US Energy Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the World and Clearing the Air, as well as a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and the deputy editor at Our World in Data. Rob and Hannah discuss how the platform came together, what makes it such a valuable resource, and what we can learn from it about the state of the energy transition.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
U.S. Energy Data
Previously on Shift Key: Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures joined us to discuss permitting reform
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This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As we catch up from summer vacation, we’re bringing you a favorite from the Shift Key archive. We’ll be back in your feed with more fresh episodes starting next week.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This was the start of Shift Key Summer School, a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, Rob and former Shift Key co-host Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Decarbonize Your Life
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This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Verse’s software platform Aria helps data centers connect to the grid faster and optimize power operations in real time. Learn more at verse.inc.
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The United States is staring down a natural gas buildout of gigantic proportions.
Amazon wants to build what would be the country’s largest power plant in Texas — and run it entirely on natural gas. Not to be outdone, OpenAI is plotting an even larger power plant in Ohio that, if built, would become the world’s largest gas power facility. How should we think about this boom — and about the AI and technology companies behind it, who remain some of the world’s biggest buyers of clean energy?
On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Emily Pontecorvo, a Heatmap founding staff writer. They discuss what Emily learned identifying the country’s 10 biggest gas projects, what surprised her most, and what this means for the country’s climate trajectory — and Big Tech’s corporate net-zero goals.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
The U.S. Is Building Natural Gas Power Twice as Fast as China
Emily on Amazon’s Gigawatt Ranch
Rob on OpenAI and the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus
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This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
Verse's software platform Aria helps data centers connect to the grid faster and optimize power operations in real time. Learn more at verse.inc.
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.