What if a federal carbon-free power mandate forces coal and gas to retire?
A binding 100% carbon-free mandate forcing deadline coal/gas retirements tightens dispatchable supply and is inflationary for power; the inflation-expectations and rates legs are directionally right, but tagging it to european_energy/EUR is a US-policy mismatch. Rhymes with accelerated EU/UK coal phase-outs that lifted power and carbon prices. Transmission: higher US wholesale power, pressure on energy-intensive industry. Forward angle: removing firm MW into rising data-center load is the real squeeze — long gas peakers and nuclear, not the euro.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A binding federal 100% carbon-free power mandate forces accelerated coal and gas retirements on a fixed deadline. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Inflation surprise ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.