Geothermal energy ⚡️, halloween 🎃, and solved murders 🔎

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

With a 2-0 lead, the Milwaukee Brewers head down to Tampa Bay to take on the Rays tonight in Game 3 of the World Series. Both are seeking their first title. Ahead of that, it’s worth looking at how they got here. The Brewers beat the Padres 3-1 in the National League Division Series then swept the Dodgers 4-0 in the Championship Series while the Rays swept the Yankees 3-0 in the American League Division Series then beat the Guardians 4-2 in the Championship Series.

The Dodgers and Yankees are two of the most storied teams in MLB history and come from major markets that expect nothing but greatness. Anything less than a World Series is a bust for those franchises. And they spend a payroll that backs it up - $339 million and $308 million, respectively. Those are the 2^nd and 3^rd highest in the league (we won’t even mention the Mets). Meanwhile, the Rays and Brewers have the 3^rd and 12^th lowest payrolls in the league, respectively. Combined, they spent $242 million on players this year, nearly $100 million less than the Dodgers. In fact, the Dodgers are on track to owe more than $180 million in luxury tax (for exceeding the soft spending limit), enough to cover the Brewers’ payroll with plenty left over.

To be fair, money usually does win. Eight of the last ten champions were top-10 spenders, and this is the first Series since 1991 with two bottom-half payroll teams. It’s fitting, though, that Moneyball turned 15 this year. The biographical movie follows Brad Pitt as Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane and Jonah Hill as his assistant, who use data-driven analysis to assemble a competitive baseball team on a tiny budget, upending traditional scouting.

Right now, we’re a pretty small-market newsletter. A few hundred readers, four friends, and not much of a budget. Meanwhile, we’re competing with institutionally backed newsletters with years of experience and, in some cases, millions of subscribers. We can’t outspend anyone, but Moneyball wasn’t just about spending less. It was about finding what everyone else undervalued. That’s our bet too: that the good news in the world is overlooked but worth noticing.

On that note, this week we’re bringing you three stories about getting more out of what was already there. Heat was always underground, but a new company found a different way to reach it. Halloween is moving into parking lots to bring neighborhoods closer together. And now, detectives finally have time to go back to unsolved cases.

With gratitude,

The 3GT Crew

Electricity consumption has become a hot-button topic as data centers crop up around the world to support the development and use of AI models, raising fears that local power bills will climb in the process. Unfortunately, there’s no sign of consumption slowing down as Berkeley Lab projects that data centers’ share of energy use could triple from 2023 to 2028. So, people are trying to solve the other side of the equation: generating more electricity. In the US, natural gas makes 41% of electricity, followed by nuclear (18%), coal (17%) and wind (11%). Geothermal is all the way down at the bottom with roughly 0.3%.

Zooming out: while heat is abundant in Earth’s core, historically, we’ve only been able to tap into that heat through natural reservoirs that carry it closer to the surface. Conventional geothermal needs heat near the surface plus underground water to carry it up and rock cracked enough for the water to flow. That happens primarily at volcanic and tectonic hotspots, and geothermal energy today is highly concentrated in areas like Iceland and The Geysers in Northern California.

However, in September, Fervo Energy launched commercial operations for the first-ever geothermal plant that doesn’t rely on a natural reservoir and can operate at the scale of traditional utilities. In southern Utah, Cape Station brings in its own water to make cracks. Crews drill into hot, dry granite, then pump water down at high pressure to crack the rock. Then, they drill a second well alongside the first and pump cold water down it. That water warms up as it seeps through the cracks and comes up the other well hot enough to spin turbines. The same water cycles back down, over and over.

The nitty gritty: right now, the station runs one “block,” which generates 33 megawatts, enough to power roughly 33,000 homes. And it’s already doing just that for California, where state rules require utilities to buy 24/7 clean power. Phase 1 involves producing 100 megawatts across three blocks (expected by the end of the year). Phase 2 will be 400 megawatts by 2028. Cape Station’s expected peak is 4.3 gigawatts, about two Hoover Dams’ worth of power.

Earlier in September, Fervo agreed to sell nearly 400 megawatts to Google for a planned data center in Utah, which Fervo says adds power without raising costs for existing customers. Right now, Phase 1 of Cape Station costs $7,000 per kilowatt to build, while Phase 2 is projected at $5,500 (vs. just $2,157 for an average natural gas-fired plant). However, once finished, the plant never buys fuel, so it can compete with gas on pricing for consumers even without tax credits, per Utah’s largest utility. Department of Energy thinks next-generation plants like Fervo’s could grow geothermal’s share about 20 times by 2050.

Halloween is coming up this weekend. Costumes are getting their final touches and candy bowls are getting filled. But something has been different in recent years. Anyone who’s handed out candy has likely noticed fewer knocks at their door and a bowl that takes longer to empty. It feels like not as many kids are trick-or-treating. Is the one night a year that brings a neighborhood together going extinct? Not quite. Nearly 75% of Americans plan to celebrate Halloween this year, up from 69% a decade ago. The difference is that some traded door-knocking for pumpkin patches, parking lot trunk-or-treating, and other community celebrations.

Stepping back: trunk-or-treat began in church parking lots. Over time, it caught on as a way to get kids out of the street and away from traffic. Post-pandemic, trick-or-treating never got back to original levels as families went searching for new traditions. A parking lot also comes with a predictable start and end point. Now, many are run by parks departments, with police, sheriff’s offices, nonprofits and volunteers handing out candy from their trunks. Instead of porches spread across neighborhoods, the whole town shows up in one place.

In Caribou, Maine, the parks-and-rec trunk-or-treat turns seven this year. Last year drew 38 decorated trunks and 1,000 kids lined up to participate. The organizer, Gary Marquis, came dressed as Colonel Sanders and told the local press that after record participation from the town, they’d probably have to add another parking lot for next year. Meanwhile in Thorntown, Indiana, the Dulls have opened their farm as a public pumpkin patch every fall for the last 12 years. Their 20-day season now draws 80,000 visitors and outsells their four weeks of Christmas trees.

Big picture: with Halloween on a Saturday this year for the first time since 2015 (2020 doesn’t count), expect a full day of events and parties before the night of trick-or-treating starts. Towns like Havelock, North Carolina, are lining up two food trucks and more than 300 pounds of candy (thousands of fun-size bars) to make sure they won’t run out. Across the country, Halloween is moving beyond the house and bringing towns together as one neighborhood.

In 2022, after the worst murder years since the ‘90s, the New Orleans homicide unit was sitting on roughly 16 cases per person, a high-water mark coming out of the pandemic. Now, most carry three or four – a new one every three months rather than every three weeks. Lt. Andrew Waldron explained that with only so many hours in the day, detectives had to triage cases. Waldron even left his own family’s Christmas to visit a victim’s family, hoping for a tip. Fewer cases means better resources for each one and no more picking which victim gets attention.

Big picture: FBI data revealed the 2025 homicide rate tied 1955 and 1956 for the lowest on record. Through the first half of 2026, homicides are down almost 20% further in 30 large cities, and the Council on Criminal Justice expects the full year to set new historic lows. Yet the national headline most people remember is that unsolved killings hit a record high post-pandemic. A few years ago, whether a killing got solved was close to a coin flip. And like New Orleans, departments nationwide now have fewer cases per detective, and clearance rates (the share of killings closed by an arrest) are climbing: 69% in 2025, the highest this century.

In 2025, Los Angeles saw its fewest homicides in 60 years and cleared more than two-thirds of them in the same year. Counting clearances from older cases, its rate topped 100% meaning more cases closed than new killings. With murders down, the LAPD turned to solving older cases and providing closure to families who’d been waiting. The Murder Accountability Project estimates more than a quarter-million killings since 1980 with no one charged. For the first time in years, detectives have time to work on them.