Thursday Night Links

• Our modern Midas-in-Reverse hopes his hagiography one day describes the great ‘labor’ of his shepherding the nation through an historic crossroads, a transition between eras. It’s why he styles his iconography around kitschy parallels to the Gilded Age, Belle Epoque, Fin de Siecle, etc.; and he’s not altogether wrong in intuiting the fundamental ethos of our times, a transitional period of wayward decadence preceding something terrible—a time of calamitous revolutions and world wars. But wherein lies the difference is Trump believes himself to be providentially appointed to steer the country clear of the pitfalls associated with such ‘ending epochs’ and into a golden era of manifest abundance. Unfortunately, he appears blind to the coming realities: things are only getting worse, the very logies and chintzy veneers of the artifice he imagines will herald this ‘greatness’ in the offing instead betray the disintegration happening all around us. And to top it all off, there is little of substance beneath the gilding and cheap plaster. In an unprecedented display of “will to power”, Trump is attempting to manifest his ‘Golden Age’ merely by shouting it from the rooftops. Instead of carrying out real policies of reconstruction and transformation, fixing jobs, inflation, and all the actual underpinnings of a healthy state, he instead chooses to erect presumptive monuments to hopes and wishes and would-be accomplishments. [The Kitschification of America]
• Governor Greg Abbott today announced the eighth Texas Energy Fund (TxEF) loan for 860 megawatts (MW) of new, reliable power in Ward County, enough electricity to power approximately 215,000 Texas homes. Vistra is building the project, which consists of two new natural gas units at its Permian Basin Power Plant, more than tripling the site’s current capacity. [Office of the Texas Governor]
• GE Vernova’s gas turbine backlog reached 100 GW in the first quarter, up sharply from 83 GW at the end of 2025. Parks said the company shipped 25 gas turbines in the quarter, a 32% increase from the first quarter of 2025, with pricing rising faster than the inflation rate. [Utility Dive]
• The In-ERCOT Generation Loan Program provides low-interest loans to qualifying companies for the construction of new or expansion of existing dispatchable electric generating facilities in the ERCOT power region. Qualifying projects must add at least 100 megawatts (MW) of new dispatchable generation capacity to the ERCOT grid. Loan amounts may not exceed 60% of total project costs. PUCT rule 16 TAC §25.510 establishes program rules, eligibility requirements, loan terms, evaluation criteria, and the application process. The PUCT evaluated applications based on the applicant's experience and strength of financing, as well as the proposed project's technical and financial attributes, location, speed to market, and generation resource type, among other factors. The program provides 20-year loans at a fixed 3% interest rate. Amortization schedules vary with each agreement. This program is capped at financing no more than 10,000 MW of new generation. [Public Utility Commission of Texas]
• In late May a gas explosion at a mine in Shanxi killed 82 people, the worst Chinese mining accident since 2009. Inspectors then shut more than a hundred mines. Shanxi makes about a quarter of China’s coal, so this was big. The interesting part is that the mines did not fully reopen. Before the accident they were running above their official capacity, over a hundred and ten percent. After, the safety crackdown pushed them down to seventy or eighty. One trader thought the lasting loss could be twenty to thirty million tonnes even after restarts. And it hit the good coal hardest, the exact grades you cannot get from Mongolia or Russia. [Cannibal Stocks]