Every year, Heatmap asks dozens of climate scientists, officials, and business leaders the same set of questions. It’s an act of temperature-taking we call our Insiders Survey — and our 2026 edition is live now.
In this week’s Shift Key episode, Rob puts Jesse through the survey wringer. What is the most exciting climate tech company? Are data centers slowing down decarbonization? And will a country attempt the global deployment of solar radiation management within the next decade? It’s a fun one! Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Next question — you have to pick one, and then you’ll get a free response section. Do you think AI and data centers energy needs are significantly slowing down decarbonization, yes or no?
Jesse Jenkins: Significantly. Yeah, I guess significantly would … yes, I think so. I think in general, the challenge we have with decarbonization is we have to add new, clean supplies of energy faster than demand growth. And so, in order to make progress on existing emissions, you have to exceed the demand growth, meet all of that growth with clean resources, and then start to drive down emissions.
If you look at what we’ve talked about — are China’s emissions peaking, or global emissions peaking? I mean, that really is a game. It’s a race between how fast we can add clean supply and how fast demand for energy’s growing. And so in the power sector in particular, an area where we’ve made the most progress in recent years in cutting emissions, now having a large, and rapid growth in electricity demand for a whole new sector of the economy — and one that doesn’t directly contribute to decarbonization, like, say, in contrast to electric vehicles or electrifying heating —certainly makes things harder. It just makes that you have to run that race even faster.
I would say in the U.S. context in particular, in a combination of the Trump policy environment, we are not keeping pace, right? We are not going to be able to both meet the large demand growth and eat into the substantial remaining emissions that we have from coal and gas in our power sector. And in particular, I think we’re going to see a lot more coal generation over the next decade than we would’ve otherwise without both AI and without the repeal of the Biden-era EPA regulations, which were going to really drive the entire coal fleet into a moment of truth, right? Are they gonna retrofit for carbon capture? Are they going to retire? Was basically their option, by 2035.
And so without that, we still have on the order of 150 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants in the United States, and many of those were on the way out, and I think they’re getting a second lease on life because of the fact that demand for energy and particularly capacity are growing so rapidly that a lot of them are now saying, Hey, you know what, we can actually make quite a bit of money if we stick around for another 5, 10, 15 years. So yeah, I’d say that’s significantly harder.
That isn’t an indictment to say we shouldn’t do AI. It’s happening. It’s valuable, and we need to meet as much, if not all of that growth with clean energy. But then we still have to try to go faster, and that’s the key.
Mentioned:
This year’s Heatmap Insiders Survey
Last year’s Heatmap Insiders Survey
The best PDF Jesse read this year: Flexible Data Centers: A Faster, More Affordable Path to Power
The best PDF Rob read this year: George Marshall’s Guide to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Heatmap Pro brings all of our research, reporting, and insights down to the local level. The software platform tracks all local opposition to clean energy and data centers, forecasts community sentiment, and guides data-driven engagement campaigns. Book a demo today to see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
