Where Energy, Climate and the Economy Collide with Marketplace’s Caleigh Wells

Marketplace reporter Caleigh Wells discusses rising electricity demand, the economics driving solar and battery growth, data centers, grid resilience and why affordability may be changing the climate conversation.

For years, much of the public conversation around climate change focused on emissions, sustainability and what individuals could do to reduce their environmental impact.

Today, Caleigh Wells sees another issue increasingly driving that conversation: economics.

Wells, a business and climate reporter for Marketplace, joined Path to Zero host Tucker Perkins to discuss what she is seeing at the intersection of energy, climate and the economy. From rising electricity demand and the growth of data centers to solar, battery storage and new approaches to grid reliability, Wells says many of the biggest climate stories today ultimately lead back to energy.

“The way that consumers are interacting with climate change financially right now — gas prices, electric bills, whether their energy is coming from coal or solar affects what they are paying for it,” Wells said. “Energy has probably got to be the answer.”

Affordability Is Changing the Climate Conversation

Wells has spent years reporting on how climate change affects people’s everyday lives. Before returning to Marketplace, she worked at the Associated Press, where part of her reporting focused specifically on the climate choices individuals make.

That experience reinforced an important lesson: people don’t all enter the climate conversation through the same door.

Wells said messages about saving money can sometimes connect with audiences who might be less receptive to traditional environmental appeals.

She saw a similar pattern while reporting stories about individual climate choices. Readers and listeners showed particular interest in stories about choices that could reduce environmental impact while also saving money, such as lowering energy consumption or making cost-effective changes around the home.

For Wells, that doesn’t mean economics is the only motivation. Some consumers are willing to spend more on products or choices they believe are better for the environment. Others are looking for ways to take action because climate change itself worries them.

But affordability can provide common ground.

Businesses Are Now Using More Electricity Than Homes

One statistic from Wells’ recent reporting surprised Perkins: U.S. businesses are now consuming more electricity than homes.

Two trends are happening simultaneously.

Homes have become more efficient. Appliances, air conditioning, insulation and other improvements have helped flatten household electricity consumption.

Businesses, meanwhile, need more power — and Wells says data centers are a significant reason why.

“Lots of energy stories these days are coming back to data centers,” she said.

The Data Center Backlash Is Becoming Local

That debate is increasingly playing out in communities where data centers are being proposed.

Wells, who reports from Cleveland, said she is seeing political leaders from both parties in Ohio express concerns about new data center development.

“It seems to be a bipartisan concern about data centers,” Wells said, noting that she isn’t seeing many voters enthusiastically asking for a data center to come to their community.

The concerns include electricity costs, grid reliability, land and water use. At the same time, data center developers point to economic investment, tax revenue, technology infrastructure and efforts to develop their own power supplies and reduce water consumption.

That tension is likely to remain a major part of the energy conversation as AI continues to expand.

Economics Are Also Driving Solar and Battery Growth

While data centers are contributing to rapidly growing electricity demand, Wells has also been reporting on another trend: the continued expansion of solar power and battery storage despite major changes in federal energy policy.

She sees economic forces playing an important role.

“Supply and demand, I mean free market capitalism, desire for energy independence,” Wells said. “Policy shifts can really only do so much to stop some of those forces.”

A Different Approach to Reliability in Ann Arbor

Wells recently traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to report on a particularly interesting experiment in distributed energy.

Residents there voted to create a new clean-energy utility that supplements the traditional electric utility. The concept includes putting solar panels and batteries on participating homes and charging residents a monthly fee.

The economics are straightforward: if the monthly fee is lower than the amount a resident saves on electricity, the customer comes out ahead.

But Wells found that reliability may be just as important as savings.

Michigan has struggled with electric reliability, and some of the residents she met had just experienced a two-day outage.

The program was still extremely new when Wells visited, so she cautioned that it was too early to judge the results. But she found considerable enthusiasm and strong participation in the neighborhood she visited.

Discovering the Great Lakes Economy

Moving from Los Angeles to the Cleveland area has also introduced Wells to an economy she knew relatively little about before arriving: Great Lakes shipping.

She told Perkins she had understood that cities such as Cleveland and Chicago had ports but hadn’t appreciated the enormous scale of the industry or its role in moving commodities and materials from the industrial Midwest.

“I really didn’t have a sense of how giant the industry was,” Wells said.

Much of the traffic involves core industrial commodities rather than consumer products, which Wells believes may help explain why the industry receives relatively little attention from the broader public.

The subject also has a direct connection to Path to Zero. Perkins discussed ongoing work involving the conversion of a Great Lakes tugboat from diesel to propane, one example of efforts to explore lower-emission alternatives for marine transportation.