January 2026 was approximately 794 days long, and somehow, it’s now officially too late to say “Happy New Year” to anyone.

But, does that make it too late to file my predictions for 2026?

No.

Want to know why I think it’s not too late? Because if all our apps can ship their “wrapped” year end reports in the first week of December, then I can publish my predictions for the year almost halfway into Q1.

(Please don’t check my math on that.)

For those of you keeping score:

• My 2025 sustainability predictions
• A frank assessment of how accurate those predictions were

(Please don’t keep score.)

Here are six predictions for 2026, covering the overlapping territory of clean energy, electricity, sustainability, and AI.

ONE

There won’t be any major power outages due to capacity strains on the electrical grid, aside from those caused by natural disasters.

If you’ve seen a red-orange-yellow map around in recent weeks warning of blackout risk, I think we’re all looking at a somewhat alarmist view filtered through the lens of the high end of energy demand predictions, which, yes, follow the steep upward trajectory of data center electricity demand — much of which is strictly theoretical, in that the demand in the queue will not all materialize in reality.

What will keep happening, more hopefully, is the continued “electrification” of automobiles and HVAC systems. More EVs and heat pumps everywhere is good; if they’re powered by coal and natural gas, that’s a suboptimal outcome.

If we think of electrification as a secular change, happening at various rates in different parts of the U.S. and around the world, it’s easier to see that as a long-running process of change that requires a long-term investment in clean energy to support it. The AI data center boom is different. Is it temporary? I’m starting to develop a hypothesis…

TWO

The AI bubble is going to show signs of weakness this year, but don’t expect any major collapses yet.

As has been well documented, the biggest companies investing the most gargantuan sums of money in AI are mostly investing in each other, creating a lot of circular risk.

That doesn’t mean AI is worthless, or all bad, or all good.

If you’ve heard me talk about AI anytime during the past year, you know I’m more interested in data transparency around its energy, water, and carbon costs than I am in any sort of absolutist or deterministic view.

I think we’re going to see two important things happen around AI and energy this year:

One is that the companies spending time and effort to make AI more energy and water efficient are going to see real benefits in the market — not because anyone outside the sustainability space cares if it’s more efficient, but because it will help them get to market faster, get new data centers powered faster, lower costs, and eventually, make AI profitable, perhaps. And yes, the opposite is also true: Companies that throw retrofitted jet engines (and other more inefficient energy sources) at the problem behind the meter are going to spend more money, add more overhead, and generally have a bad time.

The second thing I think we’ll see in the AI space this year is more about what we won’t see: AGI isn’t coming, and the largest first movers who have been chasing it at great expense are going to chase it off a cliff. I don’t think this is the year they’ll stop chasing it, but the negative effect on their other products is going to feel more and more salient.

THREE

Batteries, batteries, batteries, batteries.
(And yes, other forms of energy storage.) Bring me all your hot rocks.

If 2025 was the year of irrationally sorting renewable energy technologies into unhappy buckets, batteries somehow survived, with key US federal incentives still in place, and lots of obvious need, demand, and markets for them, along with success stories from places like California, Texas, and South Australia, among others.

Those three places are apples, oranges, and kiwis when it comes to the markets, regulations, programs, and utilities involved, but the common theme is that pairing renewables with batteries solves for a large percentage of any calendar year’s peak load days.

I’m more excited about batteries than just about any other technology, and there’s an active and growing ecosystem of software companies buzzing around in those different markets and programs. There’s a huge need for standardization, and always the XKCDian risk of competing standards spawning a 14th standard, but we’ll get there. And if we don’t? It’s still a great outcome if homeowners leapfrog some of the potential centralization and monitoring provided by the grid and utilities, opting for solutions like balcony solar and plug-in home batteries.

As always, the most likely outcome is mixed, especially here in the U.S. where it’s just a really big country with too many municipalities to count, and certainly too many to wrangle into changing policy quick enough for our actions to have their maximum possible impact.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I want to see 100MWh batteries on every new data center campus instead of natural gas turbines, and smaller batteries replacing diesel generator backups; I want to see much, much smarter negotiating with providers of “critical” minerals for the batteries that should eventually replace fossil fuel peaker plants; and on every grid in North America within the next 24-36 months, I want to see batteries charged with clean energy during daytime wind and solar peaks, then discharged after sunset during evening peaks. This is a missing link in our energy ecosystem with a huge amount of potential. (All puns are intended.)

FOUR

Hyperscalers aren’t going to wait for all of these new energy technologies to build new data centers, but the best of them will continue to invest in clean energy.

What’s already changing, with the GHG Protocol Scope 2 revisions pushing the largest emitters to put new clean energy on the grid where they use it, to be available when they use it. This is a meaningful change that won’t go into full effect for a while, but if you’re watching, it’s already in play. (Ask me about the Scope 2 changes if you see me in person. I am fun at parties.)

I would always rather see these companies reduce their emissions, rather than throwing more energy at the problem, but where I live in Northern Virginia, literally in the middle of the largest current concentration of computing power in the world, it would be really great if we could lower the overall emissions of the PJM grid by adding more solar, wind, and batteries. The whole region will benefit from the clean energy investments the largest companies make, no matter who claims the credit for putting them on the grid.

FIVE

Speaking of my neighborhood, and yours, we shouldn’t expect local communities to stop fighting new data centers, high voltage lines, and substations anytime soon.

And that’s fine. But both the data center and clean energy industries could improve their storytelling and community engagement approaches to turn more NIMBYs into YIMBYs.

What I would like to see — and what would get me to show up to public meetings in support — are plans to require data centers to bring their own new clean energy. The words “new” and “clean” in that sentence are both of critical importance. Investing somewhere on the same grid is helpful; investing inside the state or utility in play is better. Investing in new clean energy that is available when you use electricity on the same grid is best of all.

Conveniently for us in Virginia, we have a new governor and matching legislative houses that are already moving policy with ideas like this somewhat baked in. That said, I continue to think the owners and tenants of data centers here in Loudoun County could do a much better job of storytelling on the topic of how much of our annual budget comes from the property taxes they pay.

There are negative narratives about data center development that don’t always apply where I live (again, this is the current highest concentration of data centers in the world), and there are probably good examples of policy that could be exported to other places wrestling to balance economic benefits with community impact.

And then there are the extremes — the actually illegal and irresponsible moves by at least one company last year — which are a symptom of the broader political illness and disregard for the law in the U.S. at the moment.

SIX

Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) will be the fastest growing grid technology this year. You’ll know what they are soon.

The great thing about adding lots of solar, batteries, EVs, heat pumps, and smart thermostats to the grid (all happening at personal, business, industrial, and grid scale) is that they don’t always need all the power they capture, store, or use, and they’re often connected via software, flaws in the Internet of Things aside.

VPPs are still relatively new, but successful experiments in places like California, progress on utility programs to pay customers for their excess capacity, and new legislation in places like Virginia are all accelerating. With all the constraints and disappeared incentives to put new renewables on the grid, now is the perfect moment for VPPs and the idea of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to take a healthy leap forward.

If your utility asks if you want to participate in some sort of VPP program, PLEASE SAY YES. And see what happens.

I’m glad I was optimistic. I mean, it would’ve been sad if I wasn’t? Then?

Let’s review my 2025 predictions, ever so delicately.

Prediction: “Corporate Sustainability Reporting just got real. In Europe. Mostly.
The EU’s CSRD rules are kicking off, and a big swath of EU-based companies and others that do enough business there now have to report their emissions.”

Outcome: Half-right. Although there have been many delays and some backsliding as to which companies need to submit CSRD reporting, it’s still happening. Add to that the persistent progression of the California climate disclosure laws, which have been subject to similar if less intense caveats, and it’s a good-enough outcome. Plus, large companies are disclosing their emissions anyway, whether they’re fully compliant with these laws yet or not.

Prediction: “Optimizing AI for energy efficiency has to be a focus for someone in 2025.”

Outcome: Three-quarters right? 2025 was a year of progress in AI energy and carbon reporting. It’s not standardized yet, but organizations like the Green Software Foundation have published specifications outlining how to properly measure (and perhaps disclose) this sort of data. [And, full disclosure, I was a contributor to some of the discussions and revisions to the linked spec.] Meanwhile, Google published more detail than just about anyone on improvements in Gemini’s energy efficiency, with data on carbon and water cost, too. It’s much better than the single parenthetical number OpenAI shared about ChatGPT.

Prediction: “We’ll see more cool (pun intended) approaches to making [data centers] more energy efficient in 2025, but we’ll also see demand to continue to require natural gas for a dirty fallback to renewable energy, not to mention diesel backup generators, which some data center operators might prefer we not mention.”

Outcome: Going to give myself an easy A for this one, 100% correct. I spent a serious amount of time in 2025 at data center and/or energy conferences, not to mention what seems like 1,263 hours of podcast listening and daily reading on this topic. I’ll have more to say about this in my 2026 predictions, assuming that’s the next post I write here!

Prediction: “Lots of companies won’t hit their 2025 climate goals, but that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone paying attention.”

Outcome: Correct, not a surprise, and not surprising given the way 2025 went that some large companies and other organizations walked back their public enthusiasm for their 2030 goals and beyond.

Prediction: “The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA” is a branding choice, but context is helpful) has been a huge success, and the majority of funding for climate tech it put in place can’t be undone.”

Outcome: 90% wrong. Ohhhhh, January 17th 2025 Ryan, you are not going to like what happens next. It was naïve of me to expect the Trump administration to respect the rule of law, as has been proven many times over in the past 51 weeks. Once we get past that legal and political raging maelstrom of grief, although I’m not sure we should, the outcome of batteries, other energy storage, and distributed approaches like Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are the clear non-fossil-fuel winners. A lot of things went wrong in this category, but some parts of the clean energy market (and economy, and community) are buzzing. We know renewables and cheaper, and they work; now is a good time to work on other infrastructure to make them easier and more efficient.

2026 Predictions? Sure, this wasn’t that painful, I’ll do it again soon.

Starting Tuesday, I’m the Advocacy Lead for Electricity Maps. I’ll be focused on building partnerships, relationships, and business, mostly in the United States.

Electricity Maps is leading data-driven decarbonization by providing an enterprise-grade API to customers including Google, Samsung, and Cisco, with information about the carbon intensity and mix of energy sources available at any particular time, anywhere in the world.

You can use the free Electricity Maps app on web or mobile to see what the average emissions factors are — and where your electricity comes from — right now. Go ahead. I’ll wait. It won’t take you long…

…pretty cool, right?

Early in my pivot to sustainability, or at least, early in the more intense phase which began when I left Automattic six months ago, I learned about Electricity Maps from… somewhere. Was the Building Green Software book the first place I saw it? I seem to remember looking at the map on my phone in the car at the 14-year-old’s soccer practice one night last fall… 

And then one night in January, at the first climate meetup I ever attended, I was talking about the mix of energy sources in one particular state, and then I pulled my phone out of my pocket and used Electricity Maps to illustrate my conversation with someone (then) working for the US Department of Energy.

I wrote Olivier Corradi from Electricity Maps the next morning to tell him the story.

//

If you’ve known me long enough, and certainly if we ever worked together in the news business, you know I love a good map. As far back as my second semester of grad school, I mentioned ChicagoCrime.org on my blog, and spent a fair amount of time somewhere around early 2011 writing product requirements for a news map at Gannett that would’ve mashed up crime, real estate, cars for sale, job listings — every local data source we had with a geographic location attached.

That last idea never made it into development, but you can see why I would find it compelling to use a tool that translates dynamic readings of the current (or past, or forecasted) blend of wind, solar, gas, nuclear, coal, and other sources of electricity into useful, actionable insights for businesses to plug into their own applications. 

The opportunity to work with Olivier and the team at Electricity Maps comes at the perfect moment when I find myself deeply curious — and learning as fast as I can — about the intersection of data centers, renewable energy, AI, and how to scale software to use cloud computing most efficiently, so we can reduce the carbon footprint of the internet, doing our part to fight climate change.

And that’s the next right thing for me…

More about Electricity Maps

• TechCrunch
• Green Software Foundation
• Environment Variables Podcast
• Watch a recent Electricity Maps webinar
• Contribute data on GitHub

It’s the next right thing for me to do.

More on that soon.

Sorry. That might’ve been traumatic for parents, and especially for parents of twins or other multiples, and, to be fair, for my fellow Americans. And just about everyone else. Bit of a month!

Living in Northern Virginia, we have a front-row seat to the ongoing destruction of the U.S. Federal government, though in multiple ways, it feels a lot like having a front-row seat at a Gallagher show. Which is to say, we know too many people and institutions whose jobs and roles now bear some resemblance to smudges of smashed watermelons, and the idiot with the hammer is cackling madly and pulling the next prop out of his trunk while the rest of us try to wrench the protective plastic sheeting in front of our face, always just a little too late.

Sorry! I’ll ease up on the metaphors. 

Here’s what the chaos has meant for my job search: Thousands of highly qualified climate and sustainability experts are now on the job market.

This is a little disruptive from my perspective, but I am rooting for all of them – and all of us, by extension, like, for all of humanity – but it has helped me stay laser-focused on where my expertise and experience can be most useful.

And that’s going well.

I am multiple interviews deep with multiple companies right now. I am looking forward to telling you all more about what happens next, and soon.

Focusing on those conversations has meant I’ve kept a lower public profile this month, but I did just publish a post about moving my personal website again, if you’re into deep cuts about cruft removal from WordPress databases and image URL manipulation via regular expressions. I know some of you are into that sort of thing.

Candidate-Market Fit

The still-accurate short version of what I’m looking for in a new full-time role…

I’m seeking a remote role as a Senior IC in a Sales, Partnerships, or other go-to-market function at a startup or growing B2B software company in the climate technology space, with an emphasis on data, renewable energy, and compliance.

By The Numbers

• 3 meetings with people like you: This is a much lower number than in previous months, which I’ll take as a good sign that I’ve moved on from networking to getting work done. Both are important.
• 4 Job Search Council meetings with my Never Search Alone group, plus a few extra calls for interview practice, coaching, and questioning each other to help prep for calls. And another colleague from our group accepted a full-time job offer this month!
• 4 webinars: I have been signing up for more of these than I attend, but a highlight was a Green Web Foundation workshop on some approaches to Digital Carbon Estimates.
• 6 job interviews: Like I said in the intro, things are happening. All of the companies I’m talking with now are squarely in the area I want to be working in, and the types of jobs I want to be doing. Stay tuned.
• 2 job applications: This number is down to nearly nothing thanks in large part to the ongoing interview processes I’m in now, and in some other part as I keep my focus narrow to account for the aforementioned now unemployed thousands of former Dept. of Energy, EPA, NSF, NOAA, NWS, and other climate experts on the market. Focus is helpful!
• 1 car totaled: RIP 2007 Prius. 
• 1 car purchased: Welcome, 2017 Prius.

Previously: January 2025, A month that happened

This website has moved! I mean, it’s still at the same URL, so you probably haven’t noticed much, but since I left Automattic, I’ve been managing a rolling migration as I move all my personal and professional and family business and various other websites off WordPress-dot-com hosting, away from Jetpack, and as much as possible, to run healthy, performant, and secure WordPress sites using open source software and paid hosting from other providers.

Thanks to generous policies related to using paid plans from Automattic while I worked there (as long as I supported the sites myself), I have a few more things to migrate or otherwise turn off for other sites, but ryansholin.com is now hosted at Hostinger. (That’s not an affiliate link, and this isn’t an endorsement or advertisement, I’m just stating facts.) So far, it’s been fine.

Every low-cost WordPress host is similar in many ways; the differences are at the edges of support, documentation, dashboards, migrations, file access, and notably, uptime. Hostinger’s obviously AI bot-driven support chat has been… KINDA GREAT. Especially compared to another low-cost host I tried using for a different site at one point last year, which… was bad. The AI was much, much better than the humans at taking my issues at face value and troubleshooting them in a logical way. Of course, I know a human being had to write the docs first, or the bot wouldn’t have much to go on, but if you have a choice in 2025, I can tell you I had a solid experience with Hostinger.

At minimum, the AI chat makes for a better rubber duck.

What problems could I have with my 20-year-old WordPress website that I’ve moved among at least four hosts that I can think of offhand, along with migrations from Blogger and an increasingly dated import of thousands of Delicious bookmarks before that product died? Plenty!

Images were the most damaged bit of stuff, and they had been for a while. Somewhere along the way, two things happened to all the images on this website:

1. During some iteration where I used the Jetpack Image CDN, some Jetpack image URLs were hardcoded into posts in my database. I don’t remember the sequence of events that did that, or quite how I solved it. Useful bug report, I know.
2. During a prior migration, quite possibly when I moved from Webfaction to WordPress-dot-com, lots of my image file names were appended with a random five-character preface. So instead of something like fishbowl-005.jpg which would’ve been referenced in the Media Libary, posts, and the database, every image URL for a certain span of time was something like x878j-fishbowl-005.jpg which broke lots of images used in posts and pages. No, I don’t know how that happened, though I fixed it in the end by running some regex script to remove the first six characters of every image filename in certain folders before I uploaded them to the new site on the last (successful) attempt. Then I used a plugin to scan the Uploads folders and properly index the images in the database and Media Library with their original URLs.

WordPress, am I right?!

Because I know how to party, I’m thinking about building a list of broken external links and removing many of those old Delicious bookmark posts, but until I get to that, I’ve written a pleasant little plugin to add a pleasant little warning to any posts older than five years:

Does what it says on the tin.

Speaking of context and cautious optimism, I’ve also been experimenting with some of the carbon emissions plugins for WordPress that let you (and site visitors) know what the estimated emissions are for any given post or page. You might spot a mention of it at the bottom of this post (if you’re reading this in your email inbox, or (gasp) a feed reader, you’ll obvi need to click through). It might say there’s not enough data yet, but if enough of you look at the website and click around, it might start showing some data. We’ll see.

One More Thing

If you’re reading this in your inbox because you previously subscribed to get updates by email, I am either pleasantly surprised, or I have been diligently whittling away at an email template and formatting this post as a campaign. I don’t love the available free solutions to replace the “Subscribe By Email” features from WordPress-dot-com and/or Jetpack. If things went wrong with this email, or it was a surprise you don’t remember signing up for, or you have read this far and are in a mood to manage your preferences, hopefully there are some links below this paragraph to do that sort of thing.

Highlights

Predictions: I published my 2025 sustainability predictions on LinkedIn, my personal blog, and Overt Impact. Spoiler: I published the last of them on Friday January 17, and a couple of them started aging poorly after the new U.S. president was sworn in on Monday January 20. Publishing a bunch of LinkedIn posts is of course the best way to see what resonates, gets shared, gets engagement, and gets a little attention.

More publications: I put together a list of the sustainable web measurement and data tools I’m using, considering, or researching.

In Real Life: I went to a real live in-person happy hour that kicked off planning for the 2025 DC Climate Week (which is in late April / early May). I wrote about it on LinkedIn. It was great, terrifying, intimidating, welcoming, comforting, etc. It was an opportunity, and I’m glad I took it.

Volunteering: I joined the W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group as an Invited Expert. Which is apparently something one can do. My main contribution will be editing the Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems section on a small task force.

By the numbers

13 calls with colleagues, friends, neighbors, climate tech founders, and online acquaintances who I’ve crossed paths with at conferences and webinars and newsrooms and happy hours over a remarkable number of years.

4 Job Search Council meetings with my Never Search Alone group.

9 webinars. Sometimes when I do these I’m learning something new (e.g. Electrical grid software companies using AI to help route and track renewable energy!), and sometimes I’m listening to how one of my target companies pitches and frames their product.

2 job interviews. Even when the hiring process doesn’t go beyond a call or two, I’m learning so much about different corners of climate tech, data centers, renewable energy, and lots of other topics when I research companies, markets, and technologies to prep for interviews. 

Remarkably few full days of school for my teenagers, thanks to snow, ice, holidays, and the polar vortex. Seriously, I think they had two full days of school and a couple delayed starts. Not a banner month for structured learning on their part.

19 job applications, almost double the December number. 18 were climate-related; I allowed myself one additional application where I think sustainability could be part of the role.

Reading

• Finished: A Questlove book I’ve been in the middle of for months.
• Continued: Making good progress on The Grid, up to the 1970s and 1980s now, learning about regulation, monopolies and monopsonies, deregulation, and misguided early attempts at wind turbines in California.
• Started: The Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, which somehow counts as a guilty pleasure?

Listening and Learning

• The Founders podcast continues to be a rich deposit of history and insights. Inspired by The Grid, I’ve been binging the Thomas Edison-adjacent episodes and the cautionary tale of Samuel Insull.
• Really happy for Doechii. Start with her Tiny Desk if you want to ease into it, or just if you need some joy today and don’t mind a little spicy language.

What’s Next?

Interview prep! These things come in pairs, and I have two exciting conversations coming up soon.

Previously: December 2024, an account of the ongoing campaign

I wrapped them all up in one post over at Overt Impact, and you should at least click that link to feast your eyes on the not-subtle Hitchhiker’s Guide reference in the obviously AI-generated image that illustrates the piece, which I won’t reproduce here in full.

What I will do here is provide a summary of that professional sounding post with a slightly warmer, more personal series of takes below. I promise I wrote this myself. Mostly.

1. Corporate Sustainability Reporting just got real. In Europe. Mostly.
   The EU’s CSRD rules are kicking off, and a big swath of EU-based companies and others that do enough business there now have to report their emissions. The catch? There’s not much in the way of a standard way to do it, so good luck finding, reading, and comparing those reports. Still, it’s a solid first step, and someone out there will figure out how to make sense of all this data. (I might try? Or help someone try? What’s important is that we try to try.)
   
2. AI is an energy-guzzling minivan on the highway to the next climate disaster, but get in fellow travelers, we’re going optimizing.
   AI isn’t a fad. Please don’t be that person. This isn’t like NFTs, I promise. But it uses a metric heck-ton of electricity. Optimizing AI for energy efficiency has to be a focus for someone in 2025. (Again, possibly me.)
   
3. Data Centers are booming, and they, too, are thirsty as heck for electricity, and matching up supply and demand is hectic.
   Thanks to the AI non-fad we just discussed, and all the demand for data storage and processing that would exist anyway, rest assured data centers will continue to outnumber elementary schools in my neighborhood by a solid margin. We’ll see more cool (pun intended) approaches to making them more energy efficient in 2025, but we’ll also see demand to continue to require natural gas for a dirty fallback to renewable energy, not to mention diesel backup generators, which some data center operators might prefer we not mention.
   
4. Most companies that made commitments to interim carbon emissions goals in 2025 on their way to 2030 on their way to 2050 are going to be making this face:
   Lots of companies won’t hit their 2025 climate goals, but that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone paying attention. Everyone is looking at 2030 as the big milestone year, which is conveniently in the future, and give us a chance to make up some ground. Hopefully it’s an opportunity to gain momentum.
   
5. The Biden administration locked in lots of climate funding on the way out the door, which is good. Unfunding technology is not the way Trump will set the US and the rest of the world back on climate change.
   The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA” is a branding choice, but context is helpful) has been a huge success, and the majority of funding for climate tech it put in place can’t be undone. Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election, apparently, so we shouldn’t expect the federal government to lift a finger in favor of further corporate sustainability disclosure regulations, and we can expect (again) existing environmental regulations to go lightly enforced. As my AI friends keep trying to tell me every time I ask for a summary of this issue, “it’s a mixed bag.”

Thanks for reading, this was fun to work on, and if you follow me on LinkedIn and BlueSky and whatnot, thanks for your patience as you’ve been seeing this in like six different forms all week, and I’m not quite done with it yet.

All that and a bag of (GPU) chips below…

• After I finished my first read of Building Green Software, I completed a Green Software for Practitioners certification from the Linux Foundation and Green Software Foundation. 
• To share my latest thinking about current Digital Carbon Footprint tools and how I would carry out deeper audits, I took some time to write this second Overt Impact post about “What we talk about when we talk about the sustainable web.”
• 10 calls or in-person meetings with former colleagues, friends, green software advocates, and other online acquaintances.
• 3 Job Search Council meetings with my team from Never Search Alone, plus 3 more optional calls to help folks (like me) catch up on some things. 
• 7 webinars or networking calls, mostly about climate, with some AI mixed in. Learning about current use cases for AI in product management from people like Tal Raviv has been a fun way to experiment with new tools and approaches to thinking out loud at work.
• 2 calls with climate recruiters. I sent out some friendly questions to some climate tech recruiters, and had brief conversations with a couple of them. The best advice from these calls was to find the hiring managers I want to meet and go where they network (online or in person). I’m working on it.
• 1 soccer game, 2 high school holiday concerts, several college acceptance letters, and scattered soccer and swimming practices. The 14-year-old’s soccer club (well, the parent club in Italy) turned 125, so his team played a friendly scrimmage single-game Cup including a trophy and medals for the winner… in a 45°F December evening rainstorm. The 17-year-old got into her first choice school, among others, and will make it Instagram-official once she sees what the financial aid offer from her second choice looks like, just in case.
• 1 blog post here, the November activity roundup, plus the post on the Overt Impact site, and some odds and ends on LinkedIn.
• 10 job applications, down 33% from November. For the first time, 100% of these applications were climate-related! 
• 2 job interviews scheduled for January. More on this when there’s news, but I have a pair of calls coming up next week for interesting roles that are squarely in my area of interest.

What’s next for me:

• Sustainability predictions for 2025, anyone? Expect medium-warm takes and record hot temperatures.
• More reading and learning, focused on the electrical grid, data centers, and Marginal Abatement Cost Curves. Because I know how to party.

An ask for you:

Do you know anyone else who pivoted to sustainability from some mix of tech or media? Connect us, if they’re willing and interested!

Previously: November 2024, milestones and activities

Selected milestones and activities during November 2024, by the numbers:

• I registered an LLC for my consulting business, built a new website and email newsletter for it using Ghost, announced it on November 6, and have fielded lots of positive feedback and encouragement on the idea. (Thanks!)
• 11 calls or in-person meetings with former colleagues, friends, and in some cases, folks with active consulting businesses who gave me great advice on starting my own.
• 3 Job Search Council meetings with my team from Never Search Alone. It’s been fulfilling to have some collaborators and a community where I can give help and ask for help, too.
• 9 webinars or networking calls, mostly about climate, with some AI mixed in, too. Did I watch a livestream of a local Green Software meetup taking place in Brighton, England? Yes. Yes, I did. It was excellent.
• 2 calls with people looking for jobs at companies where I have connections, plus some DMs and other related messaging.
• 3 calls with web development agencies that could become sources or destinations of referrals for my consulting business.
• 2 calls with career coaches – one of these was probably the most important 30 minutes I spent on video with someone this month, with a climate career transition coach who more or less told me to stop hedging my bets and commit.
• 1 soccer game, 1 cross country banquet, 1 football game bake sale, and a handful of soccer and swimming practices. Winter is going to be a little quieter in this category, but there will be some busy moments with pre-season high school morning workouts and club evening practices happening on the same day of the week.
• 4 blog posts on my personal site, including a riff on some grad-school-level frameworks to apply to thinking about AI, plus the posts on the Overt Impact site, and a few LinkedIn posts that were short versions of those.
• 15 job applications, up 25% from October. 5 were already rejected. 5 others are climate-related, an increase from last month. Ideally, 100% of these applications should be climate-related.
• More podcasts, with Founders and Acquired being new favorites, including 3+ hours on IKEA for road trip listening on the way to Thanksgiving in Asheville.

What’s next for me:
Finishing some reading, taking a Green Software Practitioner course to see how much I’ve learned, and continuing to get familiar with the wide range of open-source green software projects out there.

A question for you: 
What’s the best book you read this year? I just started Dilla Time, Braiding Sweetgrass, and The Grid. 

(Email is a fine way to answer, unless you want to leave a public comment on this post or the LinkedIn version.)

Previously: October 2024, by the numbers