David Fenton

The gas turbine is the miracle machine that will save our climate. Yes, I know, it's a fossil fuel. Boo, hiss, “he's behind you!” etc. But bear with me. Methane gas is one of the cleanest fossil fuels out there, emitting far less carbon dioxide per Megawatt-hour than coal, oil or wood and with none of the particulates and complex toxic byproducts that those villains gift to the locals. So if you're going to replace the dirty stuff, you could do worse than burn gas. And gas turbines are far more of a standard product than bespoke and tricky nuclear power; even the aristocrat of the breed, the combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT). This is a dual loop power generator that takes the waste heat energy of a methane-burning gas turbine and uses it to boil water and rev up a steam turbine for a second swing at things. CCGTs are among the most efficient machines humanity has ever created, with thermal efficiencies of 60%-64%, and even up to 68% for the best of the best. That's basically wizardry. Furthermore they've been an enormous environmental gift to the world, despite their mucky fossil-fuel credentials. The advanced economies of the West have spent much of the last few decades gently flattening, and then sharply reducing their gross carbon emissions, and much of that is thanks to the replacement of coal-fired heating and generation with gas. Is it perfect? Hardly, and the hard missile rain in the middle-East, and soaring gas prices, paints a very clear picture of what can go wrong. It's an unfortunate moral bargain that so much of civilization's fossil energy is inextricably bound-up with well armed authoritarian regimes. Is it pure chance, or is the resource curse a deadly reality? Hard to say. But gas-fired generation and the gas turbine that enables it deserves its place on the podium of power.

Several hundred demonstrators outside the New York Times to protest Kristof column

NEW: xAI appears to have added more than 500 MW (!) of unpermitted gas turbines to its Colossus 2 campus in a matter of weeks, according to internal emails between the company and regulators